NIGHTCLUBS: Decor Meets the Law

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Dapper, boyish Sherman Billingsley, 44, seemed tired as he bowed over ladies' hands at cocktails. In the summer he likes to go to the Atlantic Beach Club at Long Beach, Long Island, to dabble in the surf and suntan himself for a hard winter in doors. But now he was losing his tan; all last week Billingsley had been kept from the beach by New York's hen-shaped May or LaGuardia. On the previous Saturday night the Mayor had sent four uninvited characters into the lush decor of Billingsley's famed blue-and-gold Stork Club, had taken it over in the name of the city.

Posters were tacked up announcing that the club would be sold for taxes on Monday. July 31.

In all his crackdowns on New York enterprises, battling Mayor LaGuardia had more or less left the nightclubs alone. Some time last spring he decided to correct this oversight. The Mayor put his city auditors to work on the nightclub books to see if they were making a profit on the city sales tax.

Satisfied that there was some cheating, the Mayor loosed his first attack against three clubs: tiny La Vie Parisienne (which seats 75 people, calls itself "the most intimate room in the city"), alleged to owe $13,693 in back city taxes; big, garish Copacabana (which The New Yorker recently described as "life in a boiler factory") allegedly owing $37,370; and the Stork Club, top playground of all, allegedly owing $181,029.

The Mayor claimed that the clubs padded the tax charges on guest checks. At the Stork, the check is usually placed face down on the table, with the total written on the back. Only an outlander who should not be at the Stork Club at all would turn the check over and tot up the bill. If he did, the city contends, he would find that the total had been padded. The club pays the correct tax, then keeps what's left, said the city, to cover "breakage." Mayor LaGuardia, who, unlike ex-Mayor Jimmy Walker, never goes to nightclubs, wanted to take over that extra money for the City. Billingsley, suave host at the club which draws the bottle-top of the bourgeoisie, could easily pay the Stork's $181,029.

But he thought this was a matter of principle; he would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. He got a court injunction to stop the threatened sale until his case is heard. Almost as important, the injunction also removed from the club the mustached custodian and his three men who kept their eyes fixed on the cash register, and were gen erally a deterrent to mirth and gaiety.

Trouble, Off & On. But Sherman Billingsley was still tired. He had to pore over thousands of checks and his books to see if he could get himself out of the jam mathematically. And the law loomed just outside the Stork's door.

Sherman Billingsley knew what trouble was; he had been in it, off & on, ever since he was a boy in Oklahoma.

Born in Enid, John Sherman Billings ley quit school after the fourth grade. At twelve he had his own soda-pop stand.

A year later he was selling bootleg liquor in his three brothers' chain of Oklahoma City drug stores (Oklahoma was dry).