Sherman Billingsley, let it be said at the outset, is an astute and determined businessman as well as being very much of a perfectionist. He has been in the saloon, night club, and restaurant business since long before many of his competitors were even waiter-captains dreaming of zinc bars and their own intimate, but oh-so-solvent and conservative, following, and he will probably be running a Stork Club when many of them have retired to roadhouses up the Hudson or in New Jersey or to farms in Dutchess County. He has survived prohibition, the organized assaults of unions, the blackmail of racketeers, and even the determination of some of his paying customers to make the Stork into a sort of athletic club and source of personal publicity.
But above everything else, Billingsley has always had style, an air, and a grand manner that have made the Stork more exclusive to the suburban mind than the Union League, of which it never heard anyway, and kept the Cub Room an infinitely desirable premises for the best names that made news without giving offense to less photogenic cash customers around the premises. No other New York glamour spot has contrived to do this neat trick year after year with no least falling off of prestige. Only Billingsley has contrived it. There have been other glamour night clubs where, a few years ago, the titles and tailcoats were so thick that the photographers every evening had a choice between grand dukes and film stars, debutantes and playboys with real thousand-dollar bills to burn, but they are, without exception, with the snows of yesteryear.
There have been scores of articles written in national periodicals to explain the permanence and continued supremacy of Billingsley, and this department doesn't purpose to cap the experts, but it seems as though some clue to why Billingsley is here today and will not be gone tomorrow lies in his conduct of the Stork during the current minor depression which has overtaken the night life of New York. Be it in the record that things are not, as this is being written, in any vertigo of excitement among the bright spots, although by the time it gets into print the chances are the red plush ropes will have to be re-inforced with barbed wire and the customers repelled with wedges of flying waiters.
A slump in business is regarded by Billingsley as a wonderful opportunity of acting fancier than he would ever consider in fat years and, while other entrepreneurs are cutting their staffs, raising prices, sneaking in cheaper help, and looking around for ways of gypping the customer even more outrageously than usual, Billingsley is opening up glad new vistas of hospitality, plying the patrons with flattery and gifts as never before, and spending money on improving everything like a drunken sailor.
It makes the saloon keepers up and down the street grind their canines, but in the face of a pretty generally admitted falling off of business during the early fall, did your smart Uncle Sherman meet the crisis by introducing one-tenth-of-an-ounce bar glasses and picking the pockets of what customers were left as they passed through his foyer? Not Billingsley. He increased the size of every cocktail and highball glass on the bar so that the Martini mugs are now the size of champagne coupes and the Old Fashioned pails resemble goldfish bowls, and he filled them right to the brim with top-notch liquor at the old established price. Customers who had formerly found three of the Stork's highballs enough for a mild glow were suddenly delighted and staggered to discover that on the strength of two their wit had increased to Chauncey Depew proportions and were scampering around the premises like characters in Up in Mabel's Room.
While many other restaurants upped their already astronomical prices in the face of diminishing customers, the Stork's menu remained static, and there was no abating the quality of the chow, the size of the portions, or the grace of the service.
In the Cub Room, where the names that make news are traditionally sandwiched in between the more fashionable Hearst executives and stylish columnists of the town, two orchids bloomed where one had blushed before. The dollar stogies with which Billingsley delights to supply his guests who have the sense to smoke them came not in twos and threes but in bundles. Perfume for the favored fair came in quantities which required them to arrive with new and more capacious reticules, and champagne that in times of easy money had arrived with the blessings of the management in mere quarts was wheeled down the aisles in magnums, while the regulars rubbed little dabs of Bollinger and Clicquot in their hair and moustaches for added fragrance.
A slight falling off in the luxury business assumes, in the Stork Club, the aspects and proportions of bonanza times. As one old-timer around the boulevards remarked to the reporter, he hadn't seen so much truffled pheasant being consumed, Scotch grouse dismembered, and cherries Jubilee threatening the premises with instant holocaust since the early years of the depression of the thirties when, as now, the Stork was living amidst princely pageantries while its rivals were putting up the shutters. There's nothing that brings out the magnificence in Billingsley like the rumor of lean times and, boy, does it pay off!
The urgency and persuasiveness that things Victorian have achieved in the general imagination and public taste must be a matter of interest to every-one concerned with letters, the theater, fashions, decorations, architecture, and antiquities generally and their influence on the immediate present. The last several years have witnessed in America such a reversion to Victorianism expressed through so many mediums that it would seem to be a good deal more than a fad which might manifest itself in a momentary style of women's dress or a fugitive fashion in novels. The vogue is universal; it embraces almost all forms of artistic and creative expression, and it has been of considerable duration. No single whim or momentary popular success could account for its dimensions, and the obvious explanation is that people everywhere are sorry they ever got out of the Victorian way of life and habit of thinking and damn well wish they could, in some degree, recapture them.
As a result, the triple-decker romantic novel with a period background, one of the best recognized of all hallmarks of Victorian taste, is available by the score, and no publisher will contemplate a spring or fall list without one. Victorian styles in women's clothes manifest themselves to whatever degree the style arbiters in the field feel it is safe to leave themselves open to their absurdities, and the hoop skirt, bustle, tippet, and such extremes may be achieved any moment. Muffs, puffed sleeves, pancake and sailor hats, and, of course, long skirts are a modern constant after years in the discard. Victorian houses, where they can be found in good neighborhood and states of repair, are seldom even advertised, so great is the demand, and Victorian furniture of all sorts and all decades from the incredible curlicues and cumbersome pieces of the forties to the beautiful adaptations known as modern Victorian are the best movers in any decorating shop from Boston to San Francisco.
With this background, New York first-nighters would be surprised if, during a given theater season, they didn't insinuate themselves into their seats to watch the curtain go up on some scene, musical, historical, comical, tragical, laid either in the United States or England during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century and awash, therefore, with Victorian atmosphere of one decade or another. The trend started a number of years back with the very arche-type of Victorian plays, Victoria Regina, and the last couple of seasons have seen the period flower in such costume pieces in various categories of entertainment as Up in Central Park, Strange Bedfellows, Lady Windermere's Fan, The Heiress, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Earlier there were Life with Father, Charley's Aunt, Harriet, Bloomer Girl, Another Part of the Forest, I Remember Mama, and probably a number of others unserved by memory at the moment.
It has been a field day for stage designers and costumers whose properties have been plush and ormolu, antimacassars and Prince Albert coats, love seats, coal-oil student lamps, hansom carriages, frilly parasols, flowered waistcoats, and Anne of Austria coiffures. Professional Victorians like Cecil Beaton have romped happily through crystal and crinolines, and amateur Victorians like Dorothy Kilgallen, the nonstop columnist and feature writer, have indulged a fine fancy for stuffed canaries sous cloche, potted palms, and other theatrical properties purchased when they are no longer in requisition by Broadway producers. From the closing of Strange Bedfellows Miss Kilgallen salvaged a fine circular lounge with tufted cushions and a forest of rubber plants growing up out of the center, that had ornamented the stage set representing a Nob Hill senator's mansion in the San Francisco nineties. It is useless for this department to pretend that it, too, did not have its eye on this decorative triumph, but was inopportunely out of town when the show closed.
If anyone imagines that the Victorian party, so far as Broadway is concerned, is over, he has another think coming, for at least three nineteenth-century shows are opening out of town as this is being written, and heaven knows how many more in script form are in producers' offices or in process of writing. They are Life with Mother, Where's Charley?, a musical version of Charley's Aunt with Ray Bolger, and The Leading Lady, which promises to be a fine thing by Ruth Gordon and which concerns itself with the American theater scene in the nineties.
It's a brave era and no mistake among the purveyors of stage sets which include in their economy crystal lighting fixtures in the grand manner and period-design telephones for comedy scenes.
Every so often there raises its silly old head the controversy about the origin of the cocktail. You know, the barmaid stuck a feather in the glass or somebody remarked that it was hotter than a Mexican volcano named Xochtil. More instructive, this department believes, is the story of the rise to popularity of the short mixed drink and its achievement of social respectability. The fact of the matter is that the cocktail first achieved a widespread vogue as, of all things, an after-breakfast drink. So help us, the original cocktail hour was about ten in the morning during the sixties and seventies of the last century, when businessmen in downtown New York discovered they were not going to last until lunchtime and clapped on their square bowlers with the conventional excuse that they were just going across the street to chat with Jay Gould or around the corner to the Subtreasury on business. They made a beeline for the then functioning equivalent of Farrish's or Whyte's and, after hoisting two or three with friends, also absent from their desks on urgent matters of commerce or finance, were able to deal suitably with the morning mail.
In extreme cases of anguish and collapse, tycoons of the Commodore Vanderbilt era were known to stop their carriages on the way downtown, and New York's original “cocktail route” was not along upper Broadway, but at vantage points situated between Murray Hill and the financial district of Wall Street. Palsied sirs were forever signaling their coachmen to pull over or descending from the steam-drawn elevated cars for a quick one at Fourteenth Street, and the medicinal after-breakfast cocktail became as much of a downtown institution as Jim Fisk or the passing of an Eric dividend.
When, therefore, you get a firm grip on the bar for your first morning sour or clasp the initial brandy and soda with both hands in the interest of getting it intact to the human face, pause briefly and think of the heroic age when Martinis and Manhattans were conventionally hoisted before the breakfast spots were dry on the facing of the town's frock coats! Tell that to your broker when he tries to persuade you from the bar at the Recess Club after nothing more than a sissified sherry. Wall Street was populated with men in those days!
BOULEVARD BACKCHAT: Those who have missed the famous mouthwashes of Floris of London since the supply was cut off by the war, should by now be able to lay in a stock once more at Leslie's, the chemists, in East Fifty-third Street. Among those addicted to their use the stuff is practically as habit-forming as opium, and twice as expensive. … Sherry Wine and Spirits, New York's old established firm of purveyors, have moved to more spacious premises just across Madison Avenue from their former stand. … Although the prices of French champagnes and other wines in proportion have been reduced in some cases by as much as 20 per cent as a result of the devaluation of the franc, no luxury restaurant known to this department in New York has marked down a single item on its wine card. … The Chevaliers du Tastevin are shopping for a hotel which can serve their November dinner in the style they require, but the circumstance that they require solid gold service and other splendid flourishes pretty well limits the field to four New York hostels. They should be available to the legendary Palace in San Francisco, which has solid eighteen-carat service for one hundred guests… Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide (Doubleday) full of recipes from his bamboo bar in Oakland, is hailed on the dust jacket by Kenneth Roberts as “far and away the best bartender's guide ever written,” a powerful endorsement. … Pat Rafferty, dean of Plaza cab-rank jehus, is back on duty again at the age of seventy-eight after three years' absence occasioned by a fall from his box. “Drink six ounces of bourbon every morning before breakfast and smoke a pipe that will kill fleas on a down-wind dog and you'll live to be a hundred,” is his formula for longevity.