Nothing So Pretty

Abovestairs in his elegant Manhattan saloon, the Stork Club, ex-bootlegger Sherman Billingsley moves with exquisite aplomb. He is the Ward McAllister of cafe society. He dispenses a magnum of champagne to a favorite here, a fleeting, boyish smile to an attractive decolletage there. And he gives mad, mad gifts to the charmed inner circle of his customers.

Belowstairs, among the kitchen mechanics, he is the very devil of a fellow, too. There he rations out three beers and a jigger of whiskey twice a day to the cooks and dishwashers. And there, some say, he also goes in for union-busting and Bowery billingsgate. Last week, Local 89 of the A.F.L.'s Chefs, Cooks, Pastry Cooks and Assistants Union had Billingsley up before the state labor relations board. The charge: that by alternate wheedling and bullying he had committed an unfair labor practice and caused the local to lose a bargaining election last May.

A Skunk. Sherm was no stranger to the labor board. Back in 1937, nine of his waiters told the board that he had bounced them for joining a union; 2 1/2 years later, the state court of appeals bounced them back to Billingsley, told him to cough up back pay. Four of last week's six witnesses had been fired, a fifth had quit, the sixth had been suspended.

Head Kitchenman Manuel Avala testified that, after he had joined the union, Billingsley had him shadowed, hissed at him one day: "You are the skunk of the earth." Modest Manuel added: "I can't tell any of the other things he said. Only on the Bowery is such language used."

An ex-dishwasher named Jose Nozario said that one day before the election he and other kitchen help were summoned upstairs for drinks, cigarettes and neckties--just like Sherm's customers. Said Jose: "I sat entranced. I never saw anything so pretty." Sherm advised them to vote against the union. They did. The day after the election, he gave them $100 apiece, and $500 to the head pot-wrestler.

Jose Mercado said he got the $500--and $600 more just before he was to testify at the hearing. He had instructions, he said, to tell the board he worked against the union of his own volition. Billingsley promptly suspended him. Just as promptly, Manhattan's District Attorney Frank Hogan called for minutes of the hearing to "determine whether there was subornation of perjury."

A Garter. At week's end, Sherm was waiting to fight back, just as though he didn't have a couple of other legal brawls on his hands. In the U.S. district court in New York, he was being sued for $100,000 by one Raymond Pillois of Paris, who thought that would be a reasonable fee for getting Billingsley an exclusive contract as American agent for a French perfume. In Baltimore, for a change, Sherm was suing. Once more in his career he was trying to get someone to stop using the name Stork Club on a gin mill other than his own.

This time it was blonde Bettye Mills's Stork Club, located on a lurid strip of honky-tonks known as The Block. Bettye not only serves drinks, she has strippers for entertainment. And for free she tosses the mob her garter every night. Such goings-on, Sherm felt, would "impair and cause severe damage" to his reputation.

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