Chapter 5: Gloria Lenihan

The Matriarch and Her 12-Inch Rule

Gloria Lenihan
1904-1994

In the 1950s, when Cleveland ranked as the country’s seventh largest metropolis, the city’s downtown district buzzed with theatergoers on Playhouse Square, music aficianados on Short Vincent and clubhoppers everywhere in between. The city’s LGBT population was no exception. On the southwest corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, gay men treated the two-story Cadillac Lounge as their personal playground in the midst of dozens of straight clubs that lined Cleveland’s busiest thoroughfares. “We used to refer to it as ‘General Motors,’” Len Barnhart said as he chuckled at the memory. “But it was a very chic bar. During the day, it was straight. In the evening, it was gay. And everything was very proper. You had to wear a shirt and a tie and a jacket to get in there.”

The club’s policies came courtesy of its matronly owner, Gloria Lenihan, who demanded decorum and civility in the first-ever openly gay nightclub in Cleveland history. When she wasn’t policing her patrons, she held court on her favorite stool to keep an eye on the cash register, as retired professor Bill Fairchild remembered her. “In Europe, the owner sits at the far end of the bar to watch what the bartender is doing,” he said. “She was the same. That was her style.”

Born in the spring of 1904 on Cleveland’s East Side, Estelle Gloria Stefanski was the elder child and only daughter of Polish-Catholic immigrants Anton and Anna Rutkowsky Stefanski, who arrived in Cleveland in 1896. Her father worked as a pipe fitter on the railroads while her mother stayed home with her and her brother, Henry (“Hank”), who was four years younger than she.

The Stefanski family maintained a relatively quiet, blue-collar lifestyle until 1918, when Anton converted the storefront below their second-floor home into a soda fountain at 16101 Arcade Ave. in the heart of the Collinwood district. The next year, he expanded his operation to include chocolates and penny candies. But he ditched his confectionary business in 1922 and opened a shot-and-a-beer saloon in the same spot. The neighborhood tavern gave his daughter her first glimpse at the kind of living that selling alcohol could provide.

Gloria still lived at home until she was nearly 30 years old. She helped her parents with their $50 monthly rent by working at the "Plain Dealer," for which she sold advertising space and subscriptions over the telephone until 1932. She also Anglicized her surname to Stevens, which was common among young adults with European-born parents. Her first and only beau, Charlie, then came into the picture.

Four years older than Gloria, Charles L. Linehan was the middle of three children born to James, a machinist, and his wife, Minnie. The family lived at 298 Starkweather Ave. in the Tremont neighborhood, where, in the early ‘20s, James also modified his surname by juxtaposing the i and the e in “Linehan” to create “Lenihan.” Neighbors assumed the family was of Irish descent, but James’ ancestry actually was rooted in England.

Charlie’s entrepreneurial spirit emerged in 1925, when he teamed with two buddies, Jerome Shaffrank and Bernard Schulist, to pool together money and build a nondescript, 8,387-square-foot commercial structure at the corner of Clifton Avenue (now Clifton Boulevard) and West 117th Street on the Cleveland-Lakewood border. Its original eight storefronts housed such small businesses as Lillian Rudolph’s beauty parlor, Martha Ferguson’s gift shop and Harry Mahr’s hardware store for which the trio of businessmen collected between $20 and $200 rental fees from each tenant every month. Over the next 80 years, other occupants ranged from Lakewood Floral and the Kluck Brothers’ restaurant to a Charter One bank branch and Twist Social Club. Roger Haker’s bowling alley also would be added to the mix on the south side of the building in 1941, only to be razed 24 years later.

In 1932, Charlie -- who had just divorced his first wife, Marie -- was renting an apartment at 1406 W. Clifton Blvd. in Lakewood. One of his neighbors was Gloria’s brother, Hank, who was a collections manager for the Guardian Fidelity auto-financing agency. He introduced Gloria to Charlie, and the couple dated for two years before tying the knot in 1934. Apartment number 7 in the Lewis Villa, a modest brick building at 13386 Madison Ave. in Lakewood, became their first marital home.

The Lenihans immediately launched into a whirlwind of business success that started with a restaurant at 15622 Madison Ave., just a few blocks from their apartment. By 1942, their roster of commercial acquisitions included Lenihan’s Grill at 6501 Detroit Ave. on Cleveland’s West Side and the fabled Otto Moser’s restaurant at 2044 E. Fourth St. downtown, across from the old Cleveland Opera House. Charlie also took over ownership of the Pickwick Tavern in the same Clifton Avenue building that he helped finance in 1925. All told, the couple was said to have owned as many as 37 nightclubs and eateries throughout their lives.

Their banner year came in 1943. Gloria branched off on her own and opened the Cadillac at 2016 E. Ninth St. There, the glamorous Lana Turner and a teetotaling Mae West were said to have stopped in on separate occasions when each of the actresses was performing on stage at Playhouse Square.

The Lenihans also dabbled in the real-estate game, buying parcels of land and rental properties as if they were playing a game of Monopoly. Their purchases included a lot on Clark Avenue near Fulton Road, a Mediterranean-style villa on Edgewater Drive and a ranch home on Avalon Drive in Rocky River. They eventually added a lakefront retreat in Avon Lake to their portfolio.

In early October, the couple finally bought a home for themselves: a three-story mini-manse of dark brown cedar and tan stucco at 11502 Edgewater Dr. at the corner of Harborview Ave. Built in 1928 on a quarter-acre lot, the 3,903-square-foot Tudor Colonial featured four bedrooms, three bathrooms and two fireplaces. The view from the top of the grand staircase with gumwood banister provided a glimpse of the dining room, an attached sun porch and adjoining library. The kitchen was adorned with maple cabinets, a double oven and an island in the center of it. In early 2010, the house was put on the market for $550,000.

But life wasn’t always idyllic; Charlie and Gloria faced their share of legal tangles. In June of 1942, the Ohio State Board of Liquor Control suspended Charlie’s permit at the Pickwick for 10 days for illegally selling booze on Sundays. The board also lodged gambling charges against Otto Moser’s in 1946, but it subsequently dropped the allegations because the evidence was, at best, flimsy. And in January of 1947, appellate Judge Joy Seth Hurd ordered Charlie to change the name of the Pickwick after a Superior Avenue restaurant with the same handle sued for name exclusivity. The court then slapped $100 fines on both Charlie and Gloria for contempt of court six months later because the bar still bore the Pickwick name. The couple reluctantly rechristened the club the Pickwood Café.

There were even attempts to rob Charlie of his burgeoning wealth. On a frigid January 25, 1948, he parked his car in his driveway minutes after he closed the Pickwood for the night. As he slammed the car door shut, two thugs tried to jump him for the $300 in his wallet. He wrenched himself free from his attackers before he reached into his overcoat for the .38-caliber revolver he had carried for protection for the past 15 years.

Gloria, who was awakened by the commotion, called the police while Charlie fired three shots as he chased the wannabe robbers south to the corner of West 110th Street and Lake Avenue. He eventually lost sight of them. But the cops determined that he probably didn’t pump a slug or two into either of the heavies because they couldn’t find any blood spots in the snow.

Despite the occasional brush with violence, the Lenihans’ businesses were booming, especially Gloria’s gay nightspot. Every evening, she parked her Rolls-Royce in the back of the club. A short, heavy-set woman with legs that patrons described as tree stumps, she hobbled inside, where she implemented her “12-inch rule” in which no two men could sit or stand less than a foot away from each other. She then perched herself on her appointed stool at the end of the bar, kept tabs on the bartenders’ service and listened to pianist Harry Mott, who ended his set each night with a rendition of “God Bless America.”

Gloria also was notorious for her strict dress code. Shirts had to be pressed. Trousers had to be creased. And no man gained entrance without a necktie. The code worried Richard Swanson, who returned to Cleveland from his Army stint in Germany one night in 1962 and asked a taxi driver at Hopkins International Airport to drop him off at a gay bar. Standing at the door of the Cadillac, he was still wearing his Army greens. “So I asked Gloria, ‘Is it okay if I’m in uniform?’” Swanson remembered. “She said, ‘That’s fine. You can stay.’ And she would introduce me to the nicest guys. ‘He’s got money,’ she would say. She was always as nice as she could be to me.”

In 1959, the Lenihans sold their home to build a smaller, more contemporary bungalow down the street at 10403 Edgewater Dr., across from their villa rental. Throughout construction, they lived in their Avon Lake rental, where Charlie unexpectedly collapsed and died of a massive heart attack on April 14, 1963. He was 63 years old.

Gloria slipped into deep mourning, her most faithful customers said. Rumors circulated that, for more than 30 years, she pinned Charlie’s suits, shirts and pairs of pants on a clothesline in the living room of her newly built home as a memorial to her late husband. Despite the loss of her husband, she reigned with an iron fist over the nightclub empire that she and Charlie built.

With her brother, Hank, as the manager of the Pickwood, Gloria commandeered the Cadillac until the fall of 1970, when she applied for a liquor license to move the club around the corner to 104 Prospect Ave. Her request to the state of Ohio proposed that she would relocate the bar next to the vacant Richman Brothers department store, in which a group of Italian nuns from the Daughters of St. Paul order planned to run a first-floor religious bookstore and chapel while they lived on the second floor.

Gloria’s application didn’t sit well with then-31st Ward Councilman Gerald McFaul, who would later serve as Cuyahoga County’s sheriff from 1977 until he resigned in disgrace over charges of corruption in early 2009. His protests helped block her petition. And she twice slammed down the telephone when a "Cleveland Press" reporter called to question her about McFaul’s disapproval. “I am looking ahead,” he told the newspaper at the time. “The nuns have spent a great sum of money on this project already. I’m not a Puritan, but I can’t have a bar next to a religious center. Common sense tells me another bar on Prospect would not be good for Cleveland.”

Gloria didn’t fight the challenge. She shuttered the Cadillac for good by the end of the year, putting an end to its 27-year run as Cleveland’s premier gay bar. But she was a far cry from going out of business since many of her regular patrons followed her to the Pickwood.

Remarkably smaller than the glitzy Cadillac, the Pickwood was actually two bars in one: a wood-paneled, European-style pub on one side of a dividing wall and an Art Deco-influenced piano lounge on the other. After 67-year-old Hank died on July 14, 1975, Gloria took over the responsibility of opening the pub during the day to a predominantly older, blue-collar clientele. At five o’clock sharp, she would order the bartender to ring out the cash register and announce that it was time for all the customers to move to the other side. That way, she could stay in the pub by herself and count the day’s take while she nursed an occasional stinger made with brandy and peppermint schnapps.

Not that many patrons minded the happy-hour move. The lounge was stunningly decorated, with black leather-padded booths, a black baby-grand piano and a priceless, vintage-1923 etching by Cleveland-born modernist painter August Biehle. The 5-foot-by-10-foot artwork attracted its fair share of attention because it depicted two nude women -- one standing, the other lying on the ground -- eating grapes beneath a waterfall.

After Gloria finished tallying the pub’s daily receipts, customers often found her sitting in a booth at the back of the lounge until closing time at 2:30 in the morning. Keeping with her ritual, she cast an eagle eye on the bartenders to make sure the club was running efficiently. “She had this ownership mentality, a mine personality,” said John Duhn, an interior-house painter who patronized the club in the early ‘80s. “You would hear her say to the bartender, ‘You made that drink too strong. You’re costing me money.’ She was that cheap. Her focus was cash, and she knew everything about anybody in that damn bar.”

Misbehaving barflies didn’t escape Gloria’s wrath, either. When she was forced to maneuver with a cane because of the osteoporosis that hunched her back, she turned the walking stick into a weapon when she saw someone break her foot-long rule. “If she started to see someone getting frisky, that cane came down on the bar,” remembered Bill Barry, a bail bondsman who frequented the club during Gloria’s last days of ownership. “She’d say, ‘This is not that kind of bar. This is a gentlemen’s bar.’”

She also could get feisty if anybody tinkered with her property. Take the time handyman Dave Masters and a buddy tried to pound out Broadway show tunes on the piano in the lounge. As Gloria sat in her booth, she glared at the duet until she couldn’t stand the music anymore. She then squeezed herself out of her seat and, with the cane to steady herself, walked over to the pair. “She said, “If I wanted you play my piano, I would have hired you,” Masters said. “I never went back.”

In the ‘80s, Patrick Anderson walked into Gloria’s life. The retired first-district police captain called himself “the prosecutor,” who protected her from customers who wanted to take advantage of her. On the other hand, some patrons called him “a weasel who wormed his way in and cleaned her out,” Duhn said. Perhaps. But in 1987, the 83-year-old Gloria -- riddled with cancer for which she had to wear a colostomy bag -- sold the club to Anderson, who renamed the bar North Coast Cabaret and catered to a straight crowd until he put the business on the market in 1992 and retired to Las Vegas, where he later died. “Gloria loved him,” insisted longtime customer Jimmy Roncalli, whose claim to fame was being the cousin of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli a.k.a. Pope John XXIII. “Pat told me himself that he got money from her. She was good in some ways. She wasn’t evil.”

Once in retirement, Gloria remained reclusive in her Edgewater Drive home. However, her aches and ailments became so profound that she needed round-the-clock care at St. Augustine Manor at 7901 Detroit Ave., where she died on Wednesday, June 22, 1994. Her memorial service was held three days later at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church on Detroit Avenue, where the Reverend Albert Veigas celebrated mass and praised Gloria for being a devout Catholic who made lasting financial contributions to the church. To the paltry attendance of 12 mourners, the service turned into a gigglefest because of Veigas’ thick Indian accent. “We didn’t understand a fucking thing he was saying,” said Roncalli, who sat in a pew “with two old drag queens and a bunch of nuns.” “Was he talking about Gloria or should we be singing ‘Gloria?’”

Forget about the singing. Gloria would have been crying in her casket if she knew about the relatively paltry sum of money she would leave to her heirs. After all the money she made in decades of owning successful nightclubs and restaurants and amassing an impressive list of real-estate holdings, the numbers spoke for themselves when Brecksville attorney William J. Day filed her will in Cuyahoga County Probate Court on August 8. It showed that someone had cleaned out most of her estate without leaving a paper trail.

Originally drafted on April 29, 1988, Gloria’s will named Anderson as its executor. It then allocated an off-the-top $10,000 bequeath to her longtime friend and Cleveland native Kenneth Ray Booth, an apartment-building manager who basked in his retirement in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. Finally, it divided the remainder of the estate into three parts: 40 percent to Gloria’s only niece, Mary Kate Stevens Sarles of Somerville, New Jersey; 30 percent to her sister-in-law, Catherine Stevens of Parma; and the last 30 percent to Anderson, who listed the Avon Lake house where Charlie died as his address. He also would profit from 500 shares each of common stock in Gloria’s North Coast and Reid Manor corporations, the entities that governed her bar and property-rental businesses. But by the time of her death, nobody bothered to update the will, and the stocks had no value since neither company no longer existed.

There were other glitches. On August 10, two days after the court filing, the 76-year-old Booth died at a medical center in Hollywood, Florida. A flurry of legal paperwork followed to transfer his $10,000 share to his nephews and nieces. Then, on January 27, 1995, Anderson announced, without explanation, that he was relinquishing his 30 percent share, giving up his rights as executor, and nominating Catherine Stevens as the estate’s administratrix.

Nearly a year passed before the truth emerged about Gloria’s near destitution. Her two most valuable assets consisted of $29,651.38 in her personal Society Bank checking account and 675 shares of Intercontinental Bank stock worth $18,812.13. Her only other holdings included 26 shares of stock worth $738 in the Cleveland-based greeting card giant, American Greetings; an undisclosed number of shares of Phoenix Investments stock that amounted to $380.09; and 540 worthless shares of stock in Carner Bank of Miami, which ultimately went bankrupt by 1994. Bottom line: The grand total of her estate amounted to a measly $49,581.60, a small fraction of the millions of dollars that flowed in and out of her hands throughout her business life.

Before the court disbursed any money to the beneficiaries, Gloria’s final expenses had to be paid. They included nearly $3,700 in medical bills from St. Augustine, Lakewood Hospital and a multitude of physicians. Her funeral cost $3,900, from a $1,272 coffin to $60 for tent rental at the burial service and $50 for a church organist. After the legal fees were paid, the estate was left with $31,002.31. Sarles collected $11,551.27, Stevens pocketed $9,451.04, and Booth’s family received the promised $10,000.

Years after Gloria’s death, even her most devoted customers chuckled about her final resting place at a Rocky River cemetery. That’s because the section in which she was buried bore the same name as a euphemism for low-income housing. “It’s kind of ironic and funny at the same time,” Roncolli said. “For all the money that women made in her lifetime that she would end up in Section 8.”

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Gloria Lenihan was buried in Section 8, Lot 188, Plot 4 at Lakewood Park Cemetery, 22025 Detroit Rd. in Rocky River. She was 90 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser