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Photo: Bettmann/Corbis		1930-1959: The Glamour Years The Stork Club in 1933 Café society takes a bow. And another. And another. In every photograph taken at The Stork is an ashtray. It was a shrewd branding device, making it impossible to forget where these beautiful, powerful, eminent people were having their fun. The Stork was started as a speakeasy in 1929 by a brash bootlegger named Sherman Billingsley, who’d once done a stint at Leavenworth for liquor smuggling. But with the repeal of Prohibition, Billingsley faced down Dutch Schultz and accelerated out of the Jazz Age, helped by a new band of powerful partners—the press. Billingsley was a born publicist. When William Randolph Hearst Jr. threw a party for 200 at the Stork, Billingsley picked up the tab—“We’ll never read anything bad about us in the Hearst papers,” he said. And no one with a face or a name (except Garbo) could stay away. Serious people could be silly at the Stork (witness J. Edgar Hoover in party hat—Hoover and his boyfriend, Clyde Tolson, double-dated with Billingsley and his mistress, Ethel Merman), and frivolous people could become serious. Vaudeville refugee Walter Winchell leveraged his table at the Stork and his telegraphic writing style into national power. At the Stork, celebrity became a business. And it never looked so good. Pictured: A birthday for Jean Kennedy (standing) at the Stork in 1956 attracted Jacqueline Kennedy, Pat Lawford, Ethel Kennedy, and Eunice Shriver.