Robert Rodenberg News Today

Robert Rodenberg, 63, of Dayton, passed away Wednesday, September 13, 2023, at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

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.”