Stork Club

The film opens with Hitchcock himself addressing the audience, emphasising the truthfulness of the story, which sets the tone for the unfolding drama.

Manny, a bassist at the Stork Club in New York City, is a man of modest means, struggling to make ends meet.

His life takes a drastic turn when he attempts to borrow, against his wife Roses, played by Vera Miles, life insurance policy to cover her dental bills.

This innocent act leads to his wrongful arrest, as he is misidentified by several eyewitnesses as the perpetrator of multiple holdups in the area.

In Miami, in Las Vegas, the theaters give in.

In October of that year, she is refused service at the Stork Club in New York, one of the most famous restaurants in the country, and she makes it a public fight.

The NAACP declares the twentieth of May, nineteen fifty-one, Josephine Baker Day, and a hundred thousand people line the streets of Harlem for her.

She does not win every battle.

The Stork Club fight costs her bookings.

The FBI opens a file.

But she has found the thing she will do with her fame, and she does it for the rest of her life.

There is a well-known photograph of her sitting on the back steps of the kitchen in the rain, wrapped in a blanket, refusing to leave.

[gentle music] Wow.

And at 9:00, we were sitting at The Stork Club bar right on schedule.

Rick, when are you gonna ask for a table?

Honey, the drinks come fast here.

He's finding it hard to explain about his past doings in North Africa, and at the same time, he's finding it just as hard to explain his wife's interest in the local playboy, nightclub owner Loren Oliver."

Yeah.

"He got so mad at the Stork Club..." Oh, I was there.

I was there.

That was really a queer night.

We started out at the Stork Club.

Sherm Billingsley had gotten wind of the aardvark and had a special room reserved with a wall knocked out for the elephant Ruben.

The men were practically fawning all over the Schwartz Valkyries, who calmly broke champagne bottles over their heads and continued to stay by their erstwhile pal, the aardvark.

The second one soon will be.

Ah, the Stork Club, in Manhattan, New York, say 1945.

It's on 353rd Street, the heart of the city.

Owned by a former bootlegger, turned legitimate club owner, after prohibition's repeal.

You only have a couple of clubs that you can be at in February or March of 1940.

And one of those, my personal favorite for where Lois and George Jessel were probably introduced to each other, is The Stork Club, which was a favorite of Hollywood elites, politicians, and the wealthy playboys of America.

The Stork was started by Sherman Billingsley, a bootlegger who used his liquor money to start a real estate business in New York City.

Shortly after getting started, he was approached by two mobsters, who've remained unnamed, who offered him the chance to open up The Stork Club as a front for them.

Billingsley agreed to go along with it.

Other gangsters would come along over the years that had much bigger names, but this is how it started.

The Stork Club was a popular favorite of the scene that you would expect.

In its later years, it would become a regular haunt of Frank Sinatra, who was already well in the pocket of the mob by the time he started coming around.

She met him.

She was a hat-check girl at the Stork Club, and, and my dad happened to meet her, and he was married at the time to, uh, his first wife, and he fell in love with her, and at that time, I don't...

You probably know this, but he couldn't get a divorce because divorce in the mob back then was not allowed.

So they wouldn't allow him to divorce his first wife.