Word: storke
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...eras, like humans, have a moment when life finally leaves them, then an era died last week. Cafe society's birthplace and most famous watering spot, Manhattan's Stork Club, closed...
...Stork Club that General Douglas MacArthur was feted after his ticker-tape return from Korea, that Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier first revealed their engagement, and that Ernest Hemingway and Louis Untermeyer resorted to fisticuffs over some forgotten difference of literary opinion. For a quarter of a century, everyone who was not just an everyone dropped in. J. Edgar Hoover, Joan Crawford, Brenda Frazier, Rocky Marciano, Orson Welles, Helen Hayes, George Jean Nathan, Mary Martin, Tommy Manville, James Farley, Tallulah Bankhead, a freshman Congressman named Jack Kennedy-all came to be swept past the velvet rope...
Admitted, Established. A small-time bootlegger with three months at Leavenworth to his credit, Oklahoman Sherman Billingsley had spent Prohibition managing a few New York speakeasies, including one called the Stork Club. When Prohibition ended, Billingsley took the name, and in 1934 set up shop with the dispassionate intent of getting rich off the rich. The idea collided with a need. Once again there were people with money, some of it old, quite a bit of it new, some borrowed, and not too much of it blue-blooded. And many of them craved a place where they could be both...
...Stork's business was thinning. In 1960, Billingsley pathetically issued absolution to all the banished. They did not come back. Their successors may still be called cafe society by some, but they have definitely moved out of the cafes and are more often called the Jet Set. Their haunts now are more likely to be art openings, opera-house lobbies, fashion shows, charity balls or dinner parties of their own. Talent, cleverness and achievement provide their own entree, and the new Jet Set no longer needs Billingsley's imprimatur to distinguish the In people from...
When the door was locked last week, a sign announced, "Stork Club closed . . . will relocate." That seemed an empty promise. There was hardly anyone left who cared...