Lifestyle
Ghosts of New York’s Glamorous Past Haunt an Empty Pub

There’s an previous Irish pub in Manhattan’s monetary district, Jim Brady’s, that closed initially of the pandemic and has been sitting empty ever since. The stockbrokers and building employees who as soon as drank there now stroll previous with indifference.
However peer by the sooty home windows and also you’ll see a relic of glamorous midcentury New York — a mahogany bar adorned with floral carvings that’s mentioned to have belonged to the Stork Membership, a fabled nightspot whose clients included Grace Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe and members of the Roosevelt and Kennedy households.
Those that made it previous the gold-chained entrance stepped into a spot the place the cult of recent American celeb was arguably born. From Desk 50, the journalist Walter Winchell gathered supplies for his nationally syndicated gossip column and radio present, guaranteeing that Stork Membership’s legend loomed massive.
The mahogany bar at Jim Brady’s, which improbably ended up there within the Nineteen Seventies, now collects mud in obscurity.
“It’s nonetheless in there, the unique Stork Membership bar,” Paul Quinn, the previous proprietor of Jim Brady’s, mentioned in an interview. “I used to be there when the pub opened, and it turned recognized to our regulars that we had a bit of New York historical past.
“The bar had been in storage for years,” he continued, “and the founders of Jim Brady’s bought it and introduced it down piece by piece.”
Mr. Quinn, who began working at Jim Brady’s as a bartender virtually 50 years in the past, mentioned he would have taken the bar with him when his tavern went out of enterprise, however his lease stipulated that the fixtures needed to stay on the premises.
“I took satisfaction in caring for all of it these years,” he mentioned. “As soon as a person known as me and requested, ‘Is it true?’ I instructed him, ‘Yeah, it’s.’ So he got here down to have a look at it. He touched the wooden and felt the bar. I might inform it meant so much to him. He’d gone to the Stork way back.”
Right now the Stork Membership’s lore is of curiosity primarily to New York historical past buffs, however throughout its reign, what occurred within the Cub Room — its windowless inside sanctum — riveted the American public.
Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco mingled on the Stork Membership simply earlier than information of their engagement circulated the globe. Ernest Hemingway obtained right into a brawl there with the warden of Sing Sing. John F. Kennedy introduced dates there — Jacqueline Bouvier and, later, Marilyn Monroe.
The fantasia was orchestrated by the membership’s proprietor, Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger from rural Oklahoma who reinvented himself as a nightlife impresario. He wore gold cuff hyperlinks and watches, uttered regionalisms like “golly” in dialog with stars and used secret hand indicators to telegraph messages to his employees that ranged from “Convey a bottle of Champagne” to “Not Vital Individuals.”
“I’ve seen moms steal their daughters’ boyfriends and marry them,” Mr. Billingsley wrote in an unpublished memoir. “I’ve seen women steal their sisters’ boyfriends and marry them. In a single case the loser went insane. I do know one father that was aware of his son’s spouse. These had been all high-society of us.”
Based in 1929, and closed in 1965, the Stork Membership’s three successive Midtown Manhattan addresses rode out the Nice Despair, World Battle II, the arrival of Elvis and the beginning of the Vietnam Battle.
Its first iteration was a speakeasy that Mr. Billingsley operated with mobsters earlier than it was smashed up and shut down by federal brokers imposing Prohibition legal guidelines. Its second location had the beginnings of his opulent imaginative and prescient, drawing followers like Winchell and the underworld boss Frank Costello. This iteration survived previous Prohibition’s finish in 1933, main Mr. Billingsley to maneuver the Stork Membership to its ultimate and most famed tackle, 3 East 53rd Avenue.
The primary location is now a Greek restaurant, the second is an workplace constructing, and the third was demolished to make method for the pocket-size Paley Park.
The bar that ended up at Jim Brady’s is alleged to have come from an early Stork Membership location. For many years, it was admired largely by its happy-hour regulars. A duplicate of a classic Stork Membership menu — that includes dishes like inexperienced turtle soup for $1.50 and stuffed Cornish hen à la Walter Winchell for $5.75 — sat close to the Jim Brady’s money register.
The bar’s presence at Jim Brady’s was famous in articles revealed in Time Out and Shecky’s Bar, Membership & Lounge Information that had been displayed in its window. It was additionally talked about in New York historical past books like William B. Helmreich’s “The Manhattan No one Is aware of.” A monetary district strolling tour would cease in to gawk on the bar on weekends. Nonetheless taped to a wall contained in the pub is an previous flier with an image of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe consuming on the nightspot. It notes: “Do you know that Jim Brady’s is house to the World Well-known Stork Membership Bar?”
Mr. Billingsley’s final residing little one, Shermane, 77, has been a custodian of the Stork Membership’s legacy since her father died in 1966, and he or she visited Jim Brady’s way back to see the bar for herself. “The story about this bar ending up at this pub was at all times circulating, so I went down to have a look, and what I noticed felt proper to me,” she recalled. “I sat down for dinner in a sales space and remained nameless till I left. Then I instructed them who I used to be.”
Reminiscing about her visits to the Stork Membership as a youngster, she mentioned: “It was one thing I can’t actually examine to a different place right this moment. It had glamour and an mental fervor to it. I’d sit with my dad and he would possibly say, ‘Shermane, I would like you to satisfy Jackie Gleason.’ Or it was Cary Grant. Or Yul Brynner or one of many Hearsts.”
Earlier this month, Ms. Billingsley visited Jim Brady’s once more with a reporter from The New York Instances, and he or she introduced alongside her youthful son and a cousin, who as soon as danced as a youngster at her father’s membership. A petite and chic lady, Ms. Billingsley arrived carrying sun shades, Chanel ballet flats and a gold ring given to her by her father that depicts the membership’s mascot, a stork with a monocle and a high hat.
Learning the bar, she thought-about a decorative carving that learn, “J.B.” The founders of Jim Brady’s had been instructed after they acquired the bar that the initials had been a dedication to Mr. Billingsley’s daughter, Jacqueline.
“She was the primary daughter,” Ms. Billingsley mentioned. “She was extremely essential to him. This isn’t stunning to me.”
Then she grew somber.
“I used to be there when the Stork Membership closed,” she mentioned. “Everybody mentioned it was the unions that brought about its demise. However it was James Dean. It was black boots and denims. It was the arrival of the brand new world.”
By the late Nineteen Fifties, the Stork Membership started to erode into irrelevance. A number of incidents hastened its decline.
Mr. Billingsley’s vociferous anti-union stance led to a bitter yearslong strike and the lack of longtime employees members. The rising recognition of TV was luring even probably the most social of socialites to remain in and watch “I Love Lucy” and “Gunsmoke” slightly than exit in town. And a flashy new period of gambling-based nightlife was taking off in Las Vegas, Miami and Havana.
The membership’s unraveling will also be traced to an October evening in 1951, when the Black singer, dancer and activist Josephine Baker mentioned she skilled discrimination there.
Ms. Baker, who rose to stardom within the music halls and cabarets of Paris, went in that night with buddies and sat down at a desk within the Cub Room. After ordering, Ms. Baker mentioned, she and her eating companions had been ignored for an hour. She was finally knowledgeable that the kitchen was out of the steak and crab cocktails she had requested for.
Ms. Baker headed to a cellphone sales space to report the indignity to her lawyer and a deputy police commissioner. As she settled again into her seat, the membership realized of those calls, and a waiter rushed out her steak. Ms. Baker refused to eat it.
The incident dominated the town’s headlines for days. The N.A.A.C.P. picketed the membership, and protesters carried indicators studying “Well-known Nite Spot Only a White Spot.” Ms. Baker sparred within the press with Mr. Winchell, accusing him of not coming to her help within the Cub Room. He retaliated by exposing rumors of her communist sympathies to the F.B.I., ensuing within the cancellation of her upcoming reveals, the revocation of her visa and her return to France.
Within the aftermath, among the Stork Membership’s patrons started distancing themselves from the membership, and it staggered towards the last decade of revolutionary change forward. By the top, it was selling itself with a hamburger and fries deal for $1.99, and the stay band was changed by a sound system. A 12 months to the day that his membership closed, Mr. Billingsley died of a coronary heart assault.
“By the point it closed, it wasn’t the well-known Stork Membership anymore,” mentioned Ralph Blumenthal, a former Instances reporter and the creator of “Stork Membership: America’s Most Well-known Nightspot and the Misplaced World of Café Society.” “However it was additionally the top of an entire period. It wasn’t simply the Stork, it was locations like El Morocco and the Colony. The way in which folks needed to exit had modified.”
“It’s an attention-grabbing indisputable fact that items of New York have a life after loss of life,” he mentioned of the bar at Jim Brady’s. “A bar encapsulates the Stork Membership’s historical past, in a method, as a result of the whole lot that occurred there occurred across the alcohol.”
The pub’s founders purchased the Stork Membership bar at an public sale within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, after it had been languishing in storage for years, in response to 5 former Jim Brady’s workers and associates. These Irish restaurateurs — Desmond Crofton, Terry O’Neill and Gerry Toner — ran an empire of Manhattan pubs that included the Abbey Tavern and the Inexperienced Derby.
When opening Jim Brady’s, they enlisted two different founding enterprise companions: one other restaurateur, Roy Barnard, and the famous Dublin-born balladeer Michael Jesse Owens, who carried out tunes like “Whiskey in a Jar” beside the relic at evening.
“We had been proud to have the Stork bar,” mentioned Mr. Owens, who, at age 87, is the group’s final residing member. “However to a whole lot of us Irish, it was additionally only a bar. Nonetheless, it’s a pity to listen to it’s simply amassing mud now.”
At Jim Brady’s, the traditional bar turned a gathering spot for a special New York. Peter O’Toole nursed pints of Guinness there, and the newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin drank on the bar as soon as as he killed time ready to be contacted by David Berkowitz, the assassin generally known as Son of Sam.
Because the many years handed, and Jim Brady’s turned a monetary district establishment, the previous bar serviced Tremendous Bowl events and rowdy brunches. After the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, a wall of tribute to regulars who died throughout them was put in close to it.
In 2020, when the pandemic seized New York, Jim Brady’s closed due to a hire hike that Mr. Quinn mentioned he couldn’t afford. The pub’s ultimate night of service was on St. Patrick’s Day. Its employees gave out corned beef to longtime clients after which gathered for a drink by the bar earlier than hitting out the lights. Earlier this 12 months, briefly, the vacated tavern noticed life once more when it was used as a Covid-19 testing middle. Guests had swabs shoved up their nostrils beside a hunk of wooden that was round in the course of the polio epidemic.
“I thought-about it an honor to serve drinks on it,” mentioned Joe O’Dea, a former Jim Brady’s bartender. “I don’t know if I’ve some profound thought on it nonetheless being in there, although. Perhaps it teaches you to not be sentimental about issues in New York.”
“I ponder what’s going to grow to be of it now,” Mr. Quinn mentioned final week, peering by his previous pub’s home windows. “It’ll most likely find yourself in some dumpster truck.”
Because it occurs, the bar’s destiny could also be at hand.
A.M. Property, the actual property group that represents the constructing that housed Jim Brady’s, 75 Maiden Lane, is a family-run firm that owns two different workplace buildings within the monetary district. Its president, Paul Wasserman, mentioned in an interview that an elementary college is taken with leasing the area.
“It may not be round for much longer,” he mentioned. “I don’t suppose a faculty could have a lot use for a bar.”
“I didn’t know the bar was from the Stork Membership, and I’m of the technology that is aware of what the Stork Membership as soon as was,” Mr. Wasserman continued. “Nonetheless, I’m not nostalgic about this bar in any form or type. Time marches on in New York. The one fixed right here is change.”
“Right now is not any completely different,” he added. “And tomorrow received’t be both.”

Lifestyle
4 confidence-boosting ways to overcome the fear of flirting in real life

Confidence coach Regina Bonds thinks that flirting in real life is a lost art.
“In this new world of dating, everybody’s behind a computer screen,” she says. “So many people don’t know how to put themselves out there.”
If talking to a cute stranger makes your palms sweat, but you’d like to meet someone without the help of a dating app, Bonds has advice. “Get out there and be confident,” she says.
Bonds, a certified life coach based in Atlanta, helps clients assert themselves in love and relationships. She shares four common fears people have when approaching a romantic interest in the wild — and how to overcome them.
The situation: You’re afraid they won’t like you.
The solution: Practice self-love.
“The first romance needs to be with you,” Bonds says. If you’re too nervous or afraid to talk to someone because you don’t think you’d be a good romantic partner, build up your self-esteem.
Try saying a positive mantra in front of the mirror that affirms your worth. “Tell yourself you’re the type of person someone would love to be around,” Bonds says.

Then, tell yourself some of the things you like about yourself and your body, even if that feels hard. Maybe it’s your freckles, your curves or your eyelashes. “That creates such a momentum when it comes to confidence,” Bonds says.
The situation: You want to show interest but don’t want to be creepy.
The solution: Start with eye contact.
It’s a simple and effective way to show interest, and it can help determine whether an approach is welcome, Bonds says.
Let’s say you’re in the freezer aisle of the supermarket and you see someone you like. Go ahead and make eye contact. If they look back at you and smile, that’s a promising sign, Bonds says. “You can walk over to them. That’s not creepy.”
However, if they look away when you try to make eye contact, that’s probably a signal to push your shopping cart in the other direction.
And if you do start talking to someone and they tell you they’re not interested, or their body language shows they’re uncomfortable, leave them be.

Not sure how to engage with a cutie at the coffee shop? Pay them a compliment.
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The situation: You want to strike up a conversation but have no idea what to say.
The solution: Pay them a compliment.
You’re pretty sure that cutie you always see at the coffee shop is interested in you too. Now what?
Don’t worry about being the first person to make a move. When it comes to dating, there are no rules, Bonds says.

Say something nice about their eyes, their outfit or their coffee order. Or, if you’re feeling cheeky, try a pickup line like, “I haven’t seen a smile like that all summer long,” Bonds says. “That can open the door to an amazing conversation.”
If your banter is holding up the coffee line, go ahead and grab those digits. It doesn’t have to be awkward, Bonds says. “I would say something as gentle as, ‘I’m really enjoying this, but I have to go. Would you like to exchange information?’ “
The situation: They didn’t call you back.
The solution: Be proud of putting yourself out there.
You made a bold move at a bar last weekend and asked someone for their number. You felt like you both connected. But it’s been a few days and they haven’t reached out.
“If they don’t call you, that’s OK,” Bonds says. Don’t let it affect your self-worth. “What someone else thinks of you [should not] be what you think of you.”
Remember that you took a risk and tried something scary. “Be thankful for the experience. Whoever’s meant for you will find you,” Bonds says.
The producer of this episode is Margaret Cirino. This story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Lifestyle
Richemont Sales Up 6%, Defying Deepening Luxury Downturn

Lifestyle
How did Condé Nast go from dominance to decline? A new book explains

In Empire of the Elite, Michael Grynbaum tracks Condé Nast’s decades of cultural dominance up through its decline today. Above, Vogue magazines at a newsstand during VOGUE World: New York in 2022.
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Sean Zanni/Getty Images for Vogue
In June, Anna Wintour announced she was stepping away from her editor-in-chief role at Vogue — a position she’d held for nearly 40 years. The decision came as a surprise — and indicated a major moment of transition and succession in the magazine world.
“People no longer read print magazines the way they used to,” says New York Times correspondent Michael Grynbaum. “And Vogue, it still is a global brand — it still has recognition around the world. But now there are thousands of influencers and social media channels where people get ideas about dressing and glamor and clothing and taste.”

In a new book, Grynbaum explores how Condé Nast publications were the arbiters of taste for decades in the U.S. “They were the tastemakers, they were the gatekeepers,” Grynbaum says. He says Condé Nast today is a husk of its former self — thanks in part to shifting tastes, and social media, which has provided a platform for celebrities and influencers.
Grynbaum’s new book is called Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. He says he was curious about how “one of the great cultural institutions of 20th century America … such a powerful group of cultural tastemakers could so miss the changes in our culture and end up in this attenuated state that they’re in today.”
Interview highlights

On Condé Nast as the tastemaker
Condé Nast was … a group of self-appointed experts who worked in an office building in Manhattan, and they were the arbiters. … Here’s the movie you should be watching this month; Here’s a book you should be thinking about; Here’s a new celebrity that you should be tracking. This was a one-way street. Condé Nast was kind of built on this idea of authority. …
That was the presiding philosophy of the company going back to its founding in 1909. … Vogue magazine was created by a New York society set to essentially say: Here are the rules for being an elite person in New York City, an elite in America at the turn of the 20th century. And that really infused these magazines right up until, I would argue, the last 10, 15 years.
On the company’s longtime focus on luxury and consumption
The company’s history kind of goes back to the Gilded Age, which is when there first was an American leisure class, when there was a new group of Americans who were socially mobile, upwardly mobile, who had disposable income for the first time and were looking to find ways to express themselves through clothing, through interior decorating. So the company has a long history of appealing to this kind of upper middle brow audience. In the 1980s, this was the Gordon Gekko Wall Street era … a time when people were celebrating materialism, were celebrating consumption.

On the glamorous lifestyle of editors in Condé Nast’s heyday
I call them influencers before influencers. The idea was that the editor-in-chief, their entire life should be a top-to-bottom marketing campaign for their magazine and for Condé Nast, the company. … If you were editor-in-chief of a Condé Nast magazine, you had a full-time black town car on demand, usually with a driver that would take you out to any event you needed to go, wait for you on the sidewalk, pick you up, bring you home. You would fly first class to Europe or anywhere you need to go for travel. A lot of people had wardrobe allowances. If you were at the fashion magazines, I talked to editors who would come in with a $40,000 annual clothing allowance, and that was considered modest by Condé Nast standards back then. … To wear out at events, to meet with advertisers, to be out at fashion shows, to essentially wear the flag of Condé Nast, to project this idea that we were the best of the best, and you better listen to what we have to say.
On Condé Nast’s razor thin margins
All of the spending to outsiders seemed irrational and made no sense. … There was an internal logic to it, which is that Condé Nast was kind of predicated on a myth. And the entire organization for many years, it was built around propagating this idea that they were untouchable, that there was a mystique to everyone in this charmed company. And that’s what made readers want to subscribe to own a piece of that fantasy land. And it made the advertisers from luxury brands want to buy pages in these magazines, because they felt that they could make their products part of the fantasy. …Their profits were so razor thin. I mean, they were just barely in the black. And this is back when magazines were a hugely lucrative and profitable business. Condé Nast, they just spent. They spent on photo shoots. They felt that waste was an important part of creativity. That was one of the guiding maxims within the company.
On Anna Wintour putting celebrities on the cover of Vogue
Back in the ’80s, fashion was a very small, insular world. It really wasn’t part of our popular culture. Anna Wintour, when she took over Vogue, she started putting celebrities on the cover of the magazine. And I mean, that’s so common now. I didn’t even realize there was a time when that wasn’t true. …

Anna Wintour put Madonna on an early cover of her magazine, which a lot of the traditionalists actually were furious about. Because at the time, Madonna was seen as this controversial and sort of vulgar character. And Anna said that she’s one of the biggest celebrities of the world, and we’re going to dress her in a way that we felt was appropriate to Vogue magazine. And it was a huge, huge seller.
And that starts a period where celebrities start to really fill the pages of Vogue. And at the same time, fashion itself becomes celebrated. Fashion itself becomes, it gets up there with music and film, and it’s one of the, I guess, the popular arts that we follow. So that rise of fashion paralleled Anna’s own rise in prominence. It was kind of a mutually beneficial phenomenon.
On the way GQ, under editor Art Cooper, changed men’s style in the ’80s and ’90s
I talked to a lot of editors who worked back then — they were almost tricking straight men into reading a magazine about clothing and about grooming. So they would have bikini models and sex columns and sorts of things you might find in Playboy or another magazine like that. And in between, there’d be these literary articles about a double-breasted versus a single-breasted suit and what the best kind of socks you could wear to a party or a wedding. And it was like a system of sneaking in menswear into a straight man’s magazine. And it really took off, it was a phenomenon. It had a huge readership. That was a pretty major sea change in the way that men thought about clothes. … It was the start of “metrosexuality.” … Nowadays, think about the menswear influencers that we see on TikTok and Instagram. Think about athletes, the basketball stars who show off their brand new Thom Browne suits when they’re walking to the locker room. So I really trace a lot of that change to what happened at GQ under Condé Nast.
On what Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, called “the mix”
The high-low blend is so absorbed into our media today that it’s almost hard to believe it didn’t exist back then. … Back in the early ’80s when there were only so many magazines and newspapers that we consumed, most of them were very specifically focused. And so you might get Time magazine to find out what happened in the news that week. You might read the Atlantic Monthly for something more literary. …

Tina Brown … created this blend where you would have a smart political profile about Gary Hart, who was trying to be the vice presidential candidate in 1984, and then a beautiful Annie Leibovitz photograph spread of, say, Daryl Hannah, and then a short story by Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal. And this was really unlike anything that was in the market back then. Readers hadn’t really experienced something like this. The fact that she blended high and low, popular culture, high culture, politics, celebrity, true crime. … It was all there in this beautifully packaged pulp and ink product that arrived through your mail slot once a month — and that was the zeitgeist.
On The New Yorker succeeding with the paywall model

It’s kind of an amazing turnaround because The New Yorker was starting to lose money when Condé Nast bought it. … The Newhouse family, which still controls Condé Nast, I really think they see The New Yorker as an heirloom. And I think they take very seriously their role as the stewards of it. [Editor] David Remnick encouraged the family to invest in an online website, and they introduced a paywall, a subscription service fairly early on compared to other magazines. … It really is a success story that is now one of the Condé magazines that, at least as of a few years ago, was turning a profit. I like to think of this as a nice sign about the enduring power of the written word, that great writing, great editing still has an audience, a devoted audience that’s willing to pay for it.
Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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