It’s a modestly utilitarian object that you’d look at for a long time before the terms ‘high’ and ‘falutin’ came to mind. A round, black ceramic ashtray, five inches in diameter, circa 1950s. The reason that this unassuming receptacle for ground-out butts sold for nearly $24,000 at Bonhams in 2018 has everything to do with its provenance: imprinted three times in white raised lettering on its side is the legend ‘Stork Club’ — a name that, like Proust’s madeleine, conjures up a vanished world, in this case of New York café society, when the Stork ruled the roost as the world’s most soignée and storied night spot.
From its inception in the roaring twenties as a speakeasy for Jazz Age gangsters to its heyday in the 1950s, when the list of regulars giving those ashtrays heavy rotation included Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, J. Paul Getty, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Durante, the Stork was “New York’s New Yorkiest place”, in the words of the gossip columnist and club habitué Walter Winchell. Roosevelts partied there. Kennedys wooed there. Hearsts made deals there. Headwaiters reaped $20,000 tips. Damon Runyon embarked on a (never-finished) book that he called . There was a Stork Club cocktail (gin, Cointreau, orange and lime juice, a sophisticated sour), and a Stork Club movie, from 1945,
