1946 The Stock Club Bar Book by Lucius Beebe

in ·themselves are a vast industry and preposterous salaries are paid quite ordinary newspaper reporters whose almost sole concern is with the inmates of the town's various plush and chromium cocktail zoos. Magazine and newspaper columns are regularly devoted to the business of food and drink on a truly heroic scale. It is probably the only m-etropolis since Imperial Rome where who eats what and with whom is top column news to millions. The last four decades of NewYork's night life have been blaz– ingly illuminated with names awash with gustatory and social glamour. Its saloons and cafes have become a glittering tradition and the mere names, De~onico, Sherry, Ritz, Bustanoby, Rector and Shanley, have become synonymous with sumptuous doings and monster skirmishes among the wine cards. In the current generation, when uninhibited public dining has raised the salaries of wine stewards far beyond those of United States senators and when the doings of glamourous society characters have been glorified in a manner to pale the chronicles of Belshazzar, the ranking name of all is that of the Stork Club. To millions and millions of people all over the world the Stork symbolizes and epitomizes the de luxe upholstery of quintessentially urban existence. It means fame; it means wealth; it means an elegant way of life among celebrated folk. The Stork is so much of a news institution that it has long since done away with the services of a regular press agent, and news editors and reporters of the NewYork scene regard it much as they regard the Metropolitan Opera or the Circus. The Stork is the dream of suburbia, a shrine of sophistica– tion in the minds of countless thousands who have never seen it, the fabric and pattern of legend. It supplies copy daily to scores of newspaper paragraphers; cinema spectacles have been built around its premises. It used to he a classic newspaper axiom that a dogfight in Main Street was worth more play than a war in Europe. A fist-

viii: Stork Club Bar Book