The Lock on the Barroom Door

Late on a Recent evening a slightly crocked citizen stood in bemused wonderment on Chicago's glittering Rush Street. One by one and in groups, on foot and in Cadillacs, Mark IIs and T-birds, elegant folk were converging on a carved wooden door near where the lush was standing. Each newcomer produced a key from his pocket and used it to gain entry, and each time the door swung open a bedlam of gay noise and the flare of gaslight flowed out into the stilly night. "Sounds like fun," said the drunk, to no one in particular and wove his way to the door. He tried it, but it didn't budge. Back at the curb again, he scanned the building from which the enticing din issued, saw only a plain wooden facade with no sign in neon, paint, or lights which would indicate that this was a bar or nightclub. "Musht be a private party," the man said. "Think I'll crash it." Again he assailed the door.

A doorman appeared beside him. "Can't get in without a key," he said.

"Ah?" said the citizen — and with the peculiar logic of the inebriated, "Guess we'll have to use your key, then. Lesh go in."

"But I haven't got a key, either," said the doorman.

"You work here, don't you?"

"I do that," the doorman said, "but I can't get in. You see, I'm not a member."

"Member of what," asked the drunk, "the royal family?"

"No," said the doorman and then, with some pride, "This is the Gaslight!"

Like many another such den of joy and gladness operated nowadays by a canny avant garde amongst saloon keepers, the Gaslight is dedicated to the proposition that the surest way to lure a free-spending crowd of imbibers is to go through the motions of locking them out. This may be an odd way to do business, but key clubs from San Diego to Boston are busy proving that outsiders looking in will move heaven and earth to become insiders looking out, and pay heavily for the privilege.

Technically, key clubs are private clubs. Only members are privileged to convoy guests inside to sup of the contemporary mixture of Scotch-and-Social Status. And how do you become a member? The best way is to be somebody. Or you can know somebody. Lacking these qualifications, you couldn't afford the prices anyway, and your frolic is the corner bar.

The current renaissance of key clubs (also known as bottle clubs, after-hours clubs or just plain clubs) seems to date from about four years ago, at a time when the liquid staff of life was being nationally neglected. In bars across the land, the only jingle came from ice-against-ice in the drinks of bored bartenders. It was on one of those bleak nights that a boniface, seated in the shadow of a silent cash register, said to his joint's lone customer, "If business doesn't pick up, I'm going to have to put a lock on the door."

The customer, a thoughtful type, mulled this over, then brightened and said. "That might be a good idea."

Several months and a few adventures later, this perspicacious customer brought a grand new vista to the joys of alcoholism. He opened a saloon of his own, just off Chicago's advertising district on the gaudy Near North Side, called it the Gaslight Club and furnished it in the mode of the high-button shoes and bustle era. But this was just window dressing. The Gaslight's gimmick was the lock on the door. Its owner had locked up for business, first taking pains to slip several hundred two-pronged keys into the hands of the town's noted free-spenders. When word got out that there was a private club on Rush Street and an influential citizen might just barely have a chance of wangling a key of his very own, the Gaslight was off and running. Now, three years and 3,800 members later, the club is in the pleasant position of being able to turn down more customers than it accepts.

The first-timer at the Gaslight comes upon a scene of raucous delight in the mode of the Gibson Girl era. His smile may become a retrospective leer when he spots the statue of Theodora, the original life-size marble bathing girl from Chicago's old Everleigh Club, the most gilded house of wickedness in the city's history. A Gaslight Club brochure asks members to esteem Theodora: "Possibly your grandfather, too, patted her for luck on his way upstairs."

Virtually all of the Gaslight's accoutrements, like Theodora, pre-date the turn of the century: the thick carpeting, the mauve-and-gold ceiling frieze; the gas-styled chandeliers; the marble-topped tables; the painting of a classic redhead, reclining nude and beguiling as she did 75 years ago in the bar in the bonanza town of Leadville, Colorado.

The new member is apt to find the scantily dressed waitresses just as palatable as the fine booze served at the Gaslight, for they look as though they had been interrupted very early in a dressing session at a Champs Élysées salon. The waitresses are used to fanny-patting, bust-staring, leg pinching — all are taken in stride until a certain point, at which the key holder becomes an ex-key holder. The ultimate social error at the Gaslight is the pat or pinch aimed at the waitress carrying a loaded tray and thus unable to protect herself. This is automatic grounds for expulsion.

Such occupational hazards are counterbalanced by occasional $10 and $20 tips. Bigger tips are welcomed, except when they come with an implicit message. Nor are all the messages implicit. One hippy blonde once was slipped a $100 bill by a conventioneer. Later she discovered a note rolled up in it — his hotel and room number. The highest unsealed bid to date was a blunt verbal offer of $500, but easily the most complicated was a proposition from an even half dozen investors. They offered their favorite tray-slinging nymph $300 a week to park her black-mesh stockings in a nearby cooperative apartment. "Can you imagine?" she demands, indignant. "Six of them! They know I only work five nights a week."

Another heavy cross toted by the waitresses is the synthetic spirit of camaraderie foisted upon them by some members, who seek to accomplish over the long pull what the more blatant wolves seek to gain instanter with their folding money. Says one waitress: "They figure they're members of a private club and we're all jolly good fellows together and why don't we get acquainted and tell dirty jokes and take it from there."

She remembers the night a trio of members-come-lately introduced her to a silent little man with a bland expressionless face. "Charley here is the man who did the research on Dr. Kinsey's book," said one of the neophytes. "I bet Charley knows more about sex than anybody in the world."

"Yes," said a second member of the group. "Say something sexy, Charley."

"OK," drawled Charley. "Chapter 11." To the accompaniment of a quartet of laughter, Charley reached out and whacked the waitress across the derriére. A few minutes later, the club had three less members.

Complications like these have not kept the Gaslight from maintaining a long waiting list of applicants for jobs as waitresses. High standards have produced a rare type of waitress—in addition to having gently curving legs and the bustlines of Madame Pompadour, the Gaslight's ten girls have, among them, a master's degree in chemistry, a music degree from Juilliard School, and assorted other intellectual and artistic qualifications. They also have incomes ranging from $150 to $300 a week, depending on whether the internal revenue agent is within earshot. The flow of gold is in tips; the salary is only $1 a week.

Mastermind of the Gaslight, who parlayed the glum boniface's complaint — "I'm going to have to put a lock on the door" — into a $300,000 annual business, is Burton Browne, an advertising agency head by trade. He has little to contemplate today except the counting of money, so he reminisces about his grand design.

Shortly after he'd heard the bar owner's complaint, Browne had faced the tired old problem of how to entertain a visiting client. A picture had formed in his mind of a luxurious and lusty saloon specifically tailored for entertaining men. Browne opened the place — in his own office. But it was hardly luxurious: "In fact," says Browne, between sips of 25-year-old Scotch, "it was just 10 feet wide and 15 feet long." Browne called his private dive the Sundown Room, and distributed book matches advertising "The largest free Martini in the city." Soon his cubicle was overrun with his clients and their clients. It occurred to Browne that a lot of people needed a Sundown Room, but a big Sundown Room.

In the spring of 1953, he called together 15 friends and business associates, including two other advertising men, the publishers of two technical magazines, a manufacturer's representative, two lawyers and a 22-year-old one-time movie actress-turned-account-executive who had started adult life as a nun. The investors constituted themselves "the secret 16" and began to compile lists of their moneyed friends. To each, they sent a key and a note: "Here is your key to the most exclusive bar in the world. You cannot enter without your key! ..." The letter included a skilled soft-sell (written by the advertising brains of the syndicate) extolling the club's decor and the quality of its alcohol. On October 27, 1953, the club's birth date, the door was keyed open with a frequency that foretold success. Just six months later, on April 27, a flag was hoisted outside depicting a birthday cake while a loud party roared inside. "Anybody can celebrate a regular birthday," Browne explained. "We celebrate ours in the middle of the year." And spurred to new flights of fancy by the success' of the premature birthday, the Gaslight now celebrates Christmas and New Year's in August (at which time giant candy canes grace its plain front). Since that early birthday, too, more flags have been added to the club's collection: the French tricolor honors the Gaslight's French vermouth; the British flag pays homage to its House of Lords gin; a white cocktail glass superimposed on a field of blue honors that merriest of drinks, the Martini. And on days bearing no special significance, the Jolly Roger is flown before the club: "It stands for the piracy of the owners," says an embittered, keyless Gaslight competitor. "It's always flying, on the flagpole or in their hearts."

Titillated by such lighthearted pageantry, impressed by the idea of owning a special key, prospective members have ganged up on Browne and his cohorts over the brief years since opening day, quickly shooting the membership up to the present 3,800. New members still are admitted, Browne explains coyly, "but only to maintain the delicate balance between the conviviality of a big crowd and the comfort of a small one." Nominations must be made by members and passed upon by "the secret 16." Highly influencial applicants find themselves in possession of the two-pronged key as fast as the mails will carry it; lowly influential applicants may wait weeks, months, or forever.

Browne and his fellow desk-jockeys-turned-barkeeps are quick to admit that the idea of a key club is not completely original, although they do claim that they have heightened interest in this comparatively old art form and refined it here and there. One key club, known for some inexplicable reason as The Key Club preceded the Gaslight in Chicago, and some 15 others have followed. Among the more elegant are The Walton Walk, The Hucksters, The Nocturne, The Barclay, The Club Boyar, The Radio-TV Club. On a single recent weekend, three new key clubs locked up for business in Chicago. One of them, a successful restaurant, changed nothing except its door and its lock.

To New York City usually goes the credit for originating the basic idea, but there it was for a very practical purpose. So-called "bottle clubs" opened during the early days of the war to get around the city's 4:00 A.M. closing law. A "member" paid for his own bottle of liquor which supposedly was stored in a private locker. Early this year, Mayor Wagner's new police commissioner, a killjoy named Kennedy, raided the Golden Key on West 55th Street, bringing to an unhappy end the happy day of one of Gotham's best-known bottle clubs.

In Los Angeles, Swally's, behind a locked door in Boyle Heights, is a watering spot for brokers, lawyers and the City Hall crowd. Aldo's and the Barclay Kitchen in Hollywood turn away nobodies, as does a spring called The Key on The Pier at Santa Monica's Ocean Park. In the purer parts of local-option states like Oklahoma and Texas, key clubs have sprouted like cactus flowers wherever the demand from thirsty citizens existed. Even in soaking-wet cities like New Orleans, where the flow of liquor never ceases, there are key clubs for those who shun the masses in favor of private little spots where one's secretary and one's wife are not apt to be placed in unexpected juxtaposition.

Trend-exploiters as well as trend-starters, Browne and his band of beaming buccaneers are not unaware of this national demand for quasi-exclusiveness. Last month they opened a New York City version of the Gaslight on E. 56th Street. To avoid the long puritanical arm of Commissioner Kennedy, the New York Gaslight closes on the legal deadline, seeks to attract the selective drinker rather than the late one. The New York operation on its remunerative way, Browne has turned his gaze toward Paris. "What Paris needs," he explains, "is a real American joint." He is also casting covetous glances toward Milwaukee, Dallas, Houston, even Honolulu, where advertising clubs have asked him to set up Gaslights. Why do they come to fellow adman Browne? To Browne it's obvious: "They distrust professional saloon keepers. They understand the way an advertising man thinks and talks. In this business of keeping customers out you have to mean it. It's hard for the professionals to mean it."

Original thinker Browne, apparently en route to becoming history's first chain-store barkeep, means it. As a longtime advertising man, he knows a seller's market, and a solid gimmick, when he sees them.

The Gaslight Club captures the mood of the Gay Nineties in each of its handsome rooms, decorated with authentic turn-of-the-century furnishings. Membership is by invitation only and there is always a long waiting list for the keys that will open the Gaslight's locked door.

The waitresses at the Gaslight are as beautiful as showgirls and earn more money: tips bring them up to $15,000 a year. The pats and the propositions come often, but the girls know how to handle both. The costumes are abbreviated, but not nearly so much as those worn at a private club called the Chesterfield in Kansas City some years ago where, according to popular legend, the waitresses wore nothing whatever but pert little hats and shoes.

A Gaslight guest selects slices of cheese, ham and turkey for one of the mammoth sandwiches sold for 5¢ each; shrimps and crabmeat are also available. Only the finest liquors are served: 12-year-old Scotches and 7-year-old bourbons; there is no gin in the house but House of Lords. Shots are a brimming 1-1/2 ounces and all drinks, from beer to champagne, are $1.25 each. The bartenders are phenomenal at remembering the favorite drinks of members.

At left, waitress Anna Kirstein slips into her costume in the Gaslight dressing room, then joins the other Gaslight girls, who look more like members of a swank nightclub chorus than waitresses. Anna and the others wait on tables, work in checkroom and at "26" table, a legal Chicago dice game that permits customers to gamble for the price of drinks. Anna is studying voice and piano; her evening hours (4:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M.) permit plenty of time for daytime sports (swimming, bowling, skiing and skating) which she enjoys.

Above, Burton Browne flanked by his two managers, Walter Kellin (right) and Arthur Brown.

Above, Gaslighters gather 'round the piano to sing the club's song, "Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes"

below, nationally syndicated columnist Irv Kupcinet enjoys an evening out with daughter Cookie Kupcinet. Key clubs like the Gaslight are popular with celebrities, a good place to gather column items.