NEW YORK Shermane Billingsley was barely 2 years old when Broadway gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen revealed that Shermane was bedridden with a fever of 104. Less than a year later, Walter Winchell reported that Shermane had vamped to an inquiring columnist, “I will break your heart someday with my big blue eyes!”
The nightspot her father opened as a Prohibition-era speakeasy endured as a Manhattan institution until 1965. For decades she was “the keeper of the flame.”
A bar from the Stork Club, once a gathering spot for Grace Kelly, Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, collects dust in a downtown tavern that went out of business.