#Sinatra, Trump and other tales from NYC’s ’21’ Club

The ‘21’ Club has spent the last 90 years as a magnet for the rich, louche, beautiful and powerful. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton both stashed bottles of pricey wine in the West 52nd Street restaurant’s cellar (and some are said to still be there). Ernest Hemingway made love to a girlfriend of gangster Legs Diamond on a kitchen staircase. (Luckily, Legs was gunned down before he could seek his promised retribution.) Novelist John O’Hara routinely got blind-drunk and was liable to throw punches at anyone within proximity, while a sad and solo-dining Jackie Gleason insisted on swapping his pool cue from “The Hustler” (which remains on display) for a model train encased behind the bar.

Novelist Jay McInerney wed socialite Anne Hearst there in 2006, with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani officiating. Recalling the meal afterward, McInerney told The Post, “Prince Edward stopped by the table to say hello. In retrospect, it was quite a lunch.”

For the last 30 or so years, McInerney has enjoyed an annual boozy Christmas lunch at ‘21’ with publishing-world cronies — but no longer. Last week, The Post reported that the restaurant, New York’s last remaining eatery that once served as a Prohibition-era speakeasy, is closed indefinitely and may shut down for good in March. “I find it incredibly tragic,” McInerney said, acknowledging that the real sadness is for suddenly unemployed workers there. “It is a loss to New York. There is so much history ensconced in that place.”

Back in the 1960s when ‘21’ reigned as the city’s It destination for food and booze — where men were made to wear jackets, slacks on women were verboten and unescorted ladies were not allowed to drink at the bar — agent Swifty Lazar smashed a water glass into the head of Otto Preminger during a lunchtime dust-up over the movie rights to “In Cold Blood.” Preminger required stitches and pressed charges; the 5-foot-3 Lazar was arrested in his office.

Then there was the eccentric artist Salvador Dalí. He was allowed to flout health department rules and bring in his ocelot, Babou. “A man named Captain Moore, I think, came with Mr. Dalí to look after this wild animal, so to speak,” said Bruce Snyder, who managed ‘21’ from 1969 until 2005 and was famous for his dapper French cuffs and Bergdorf Goodman suits. “We had a place where Babou would get tied up. My only regret is that I never asked Mr. Dalí to sign a book for me.”

Of course, that would have broken a sacred tenet of ‘21’ that Snyder himself helped to maintain: “It was a safe haven. When you ate there, nobody got near you or asked for autographs,” he said, recalling the time a young teenager approached Nancy Reagan. Snyder took the girl aside and scolded her. “I think I made her cry,” he told The Post.

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That tight-lipped policy helped attract security-conscious high-flyers such as Robert De Niro, Jackie Kennedy and her son John Jr., and a century’s worth of presidents. Donald Trump — whose father Fred routinely took the family to ‘21’ for Sunday-night dinners — has a long history of ordering well-done hamburgers and Diet Cokes at ‘21′ and even chose it to celebrate his 2016 election win.

The Donald somehow convinced management to allow TV cameras into the restaurant to film a dinner scene for the first season of “The Apprentice.” Referring to Omarosa Manigault Newman and her crew, Diana Biederman, the former publicist of ‘21,’ told The Post, “The number of times they ran into the loo, for whatever reason, was a tad disruptive.”

No stranger to star turns, ‘21’ recently served as a scene-setter in Sofia Coppola’s love letter to Manhattan, “On the Rocks.” Over the years, ‘21’ has also turned up in films such as “Sweet Smell of Success,” “All About Eve” and “Wall Street”— in which Charlie Sheen’s hapless Bud Fox eats the restaurant’s classic steak tartare soon after Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko admonished, “Lunch is for wimps.” In 1954, Marilyn Monroe turned heads while drinking at the bar during a press party for “The Seven Year Itch.”

Underscoring the fact that nobody went to ‘21’ for the food, Carol Channing used to bring her own dinner — carried in by her husband — and Trump’s former fixer, the attorney Roy Cohn, demanded that the kitchen serve him off-menu tuna salad for lunch made with fish from the can.

“We kept a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise in the kitchen,” Snyder told The Post, adding that Cohn was not the only one who required déclassé ingredients. “Frank Sinatra liked these red cherry peppers that came in a jar at the supermarket. We left [them] in the refrigerator for him. He enjoyed drinking Sambuca Originale, which was not the best sambuca. You couldn’t find it in the Manhattan liquor stores. So we had to bring it in from New Jersey.”

Apparently, the Chairman got whatever he wanted at ‘21’: “Mr. Sinatra handed out money like crazy. I once held the door as he exited. He tipped me 20 bucks and I said I couldn’t take it. I was management. He said, ‘Take it!’ I took it. You did what he said.”

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It really did feel like a bit of a club — with a few dozen iron lawn jockeys standing guard outside 21 West 52nd St. They were donated by restaurant regulars in the 1930s, many of whom owned race-horse stables, in a tradition said to be started by the sportsman J. Blan van Urk.

Inside, items donated by the boldface names who dined there hung from the ceiling. They included a baseball bat signed by Willie Mays and a smashed tennis racquet from John McEnroe. On one memorable night, as reported in Page Six, Monica Lewinsky unwittingly sat beneath the model replica of Air Force One that came courtesy of Bill Clinton. Remembering that staffers scurried to provide an “extra wide chair for [broadly haunched oil mogul] Marvin Davis,” McInerney described ‘21’ as “an amazing diorama of a certain class of New Yorker.”

Not bad for a restaurant that began as a Greenwich Village speakeasy called the Red Head, moved up to West 49th Street as the Puncheon Club (it got pushed out to make room for Rockefeller Center) and relocated to 21 West 52nd St. in 1930, in the midst of Prohibition. Originally known as Jack and Charlie’s ‘21,’ the place was named for owners Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns. Ensuring that their restaurant would not be evicted to make room for another new construction project, the partners bought the building where ‘21’ remains situated — at least for the time being.

Kriendler and Berns also made sure that their customers could enjoy the then-illegal liquor they loved. Despite being politically connected — NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker was a regular in the early 1930s and once closed off the street when word came that a raid was in the offing — the owners took additional precautions.

“Liquor was on a shelf that could collapse with the push of a button; that was in case the Feds came,” said Snyder. “Bottles would then go down a stone chute with spikes on it. Glass shattered and liquor sank into a pile of sand at the bottom. The evidence was destroyed.”

Later, in 1962, just as Cuban cigars were about to be deemed contraband in the US, Kriendler and Burns bought 750,000 Havana stogies, stashed them in a warehouse humidor on West 52nd Street and made the smokes available to their best customers.

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Post-Prohibition, ‘21’ became known for its top-shelf cocktails — the gin-driven Southside was supposedly created there — and its so-called “secret cellar” (a leftover from Prohibition), long ranked among the best wine repositories in the United States.

It stands behind a brick door that is said to weigh some 2,500 pounds and is opened by sticking a thin wire through one of several pockmarked holes in front.

According to Kriendler’s memoir, “’21’: Everyday Was New Year’s Eve,” the cellar’s rarities have included an 1804 Madeira and a bottle of Château Margaux that dates back to 1870. The most expensive bottle of wine is said to be a $22,000 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

The original owners eventually sold ’21’ in the 1980s, and today it is owned by luxury hospitality company Belmond Ltd., which says the restaurant cannot survive in its “current form.”

With high-priced imbibing currently on hold at ‘21,’ McInerney and his gang — who include publishing pals Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin, along with former ‘SNL’ segment producer James Signorelli — have done the sensible thing.

“We’re suspending our lunch this year,” said the author. Then his voice turned hopeful as he echoed a Christmas wish of many a New Yorker: “Maybe ‘21’ will reopen in 2021 and we’ll be there next Christmas.”