Shermane Billingsley, guardian of the Stork Club’s legacy, dies at age 78

“As a child I lived in a number of apartments, a mansion and our farm in Pound Ridge, but the place I called home was the Stork Club,” she wrote in a revised edition of “The Stork Club Cookbook and Bar Book”, written with Ken Bloom and published in 2022. “This is where I went after school to drink a Coca-Cola, do my homework and sit with my dad. It was where we celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, to our family table Whatever the occasion, we were there.”

She befriended Bert Lahr’s daughters, Gary Cooper and Jack Benny. She met Cary Grant with her friends when he visited a friend backstage on Broadway. (“We were a bunch of 14-year-olds,” she later said, “and we thought we were going to die!”)

Shermane attended the all-girls Spence School on the Upper East Side (she cringed when she was driven there and was finally allowed to take a public bus), learned ballroom dancing, and was enrolled by her father at nearby Finch College so he could teach her to hold. from wandering like her wayward sisters. She later transferred to Connecticut College in New London but did not graduate.

Mrs. Billingsley was in her early twenties when the Stork Club closed. Her father was tapped. She dropped out of college to save money, her cousin Robert Billingsley said in an interview.

In 1965, she married Princeton graduate Craig Drill, a former naval officer and investment consultant, and they eventually moved to Ridgewood, NJ. After that marriage ended in divorce, she married Timothy J. Wheeler, who worked at National Review magazine. He died in 2007.

In addition to her son Austin, from her first marriage, she is survived by another son from that marriage, Clifford Billingsley Drill; two grandsons; and a stepbrother, Robert Rodenberg.

Did she ever give up trying to revive the club?

“The club was like a living memory to her,” Austin Drill said by email, “and she hoped others would remember it too.”

“Even in her last months of life,” he added, “she talked to filmmakers, restorers, publishers, historians, etc. about the legacy of the Stork Club and how best to keep the spirit alive. So no, she gave never up.