(FORTUNE Magazine) – AROUND THE U.S. private clubs are booming as they have not boomed in ages. Not that long ago even as prestigious a club as New York's Knickerbocker had to recruit new members. But waiting lists now range from one or two years, up to 33 at the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. A man who languished 15 years on the Bohemian's doorstep now sighs happily, ''Every time I walk in the door, I say to myself, 'It was worth it.' '' Though clubs' resurgence is a national phenomenon, the physical evidence of it is especially obvious in Manhattan, where new clubhouses are being created for the first time in living memory. One, fashioned from an old midtown structure by Cornell's alumni, opened late last year. Another, similarly created by Penn, should go on line late in 1991. Both report that rosters are filling fast. What's the deal here? Are clubs giving away a complimentary horsehair sofa with each membership? They don't have to. Clubs provide intrinsic value. As more of them drop racial, ethnic, or sexual barriers to entry, membership can be seen for what it is -- a terrific buy -- rather than as a political liability or ethical dilemma. To be sure, the precise benefits of a club can be a bit ethereal. Is getting the right membership essential to your assault on the corporate Everest, the vital move that will guarantee you're present when the megadeals are hatched? Short answer: Don't count on it. Longer answer: It's possible but unlikely, and on consideration maybe you don't want your club to be a launch pad into executive orbit. Before going further, let's clarify our terms: We aren't talking here about country clubs. Country clubs are nice, too, in their way, and are enjoying their own spurt of popularity, thanks to the renaissance of golf. But the clubs we propose to discuss view golf as a wanton display of vitality. These clubs don't just lack greens; they lack all external signs of life, vegetable or otherwise. Sited downtown, hidden away behind nondescript facades, their beauties lie entirely within: deep armchairs, coffered ceilings, chicken potpies, match strikers, unopened sets of Scott's Waverly novels, fires in July, puddings, whist tournaments, nude swimming, and martinis. We mean, in short, real clubs -- city clubs. Antidiscrimination suits have bulldozed in the doors of all but the most recalcitrant, making membership available to all -- theoretically. The New York Athletic Club began admitting women only last July, making it the last domino to fall in a chain of formerly all-male New York City clubs, including the University and the Union League, and the Century Association. The scene of male-female conflict has switched now to San Francisco, where City Hall is torturing the male-only Olympic Club with hot irons. Some of the club's facilities sit on city land. Supervisors are threatening to yank the lease. THESE FIGHTS are winding down, though. Across the country, WASP males have pretty much capitulated, and a backlog of eligible women, blacks, Jews, and other minorities stands on clubdom's doorstep. Yet enfranchisement has come so recently that few have crossed the threshold. The majority wait outside, peering uncertainly into the gloom. What will they discover when they enter? Are clubs, as popularly believed, high temples of dealmaking? Or are they merely holding tanks for the indigestible cream of society: its swells, dimwits, and trust funders? Let us part the tattered drapes of clubdom, you and I, and go exploring. If, along the way, you see something that you like, by all means get yourself on that club's waiting list now. Why the hurry? Undergraduate fraternities and sororities came roaring back to life ten years ago, and legions of young joiners are entering their prime club-seeking years (35 to 45). Beat the rush. Clubdom has a pecking order, even a cosmology, as suggested by this comment from psychiatrist and social commentator Willard Gaylin: ''Any jerk can get into the Princeton Club.'' That's not strictly true. What Dr. Gaylin means is that the vast majority of clubs -- including most university and special- interest clubs (those for card players, actors, engineers, chemists, explorers, etc.) -- are more accessible than you might think. Somewhere below (sometimes well below) clubdom's apex is the business club, such as the Kansas City Club or the Rainier Club, where commerce is encouraged and openly conducted. At or around the pinnacle: the purely social club, such as Chicago's Tavern Club or New Orleans's Boston Club, where openly doing business is a gaffe, if not a violation of the rules. It turns out that business clubs hold scant appeal for ambitious business people. To the contrary, for men and women of accomplishment, it is social clubs that present an alluring -- and dangerous -- challenge. Lost in all the talk about discrimination is the fact that social clubs can be as selective as they want -- whimsical, even -- when it comes to picking members. They can send an applicant packing for reasons unrelated to race, sex, or religion. An applicant may smell bad. He may wear funny shoes. Members may just not like the cut of his jib. This means that at this exalted level of clubdom, accomplishment -- elsewhere the passkey of American life -- counts for zip. Or at least it doesn't carry sufficient weight by itself to guarantee getting in. Think how exciting this must be to a jaded university president or industrialist! Called before the admissions committee of a top-tier club, he or she stands figuratively naked, stripped of epaulets and other trappings of authority. Nobody gives a damn that the candidate cured cancer or made $1 billion. Overnight, he is flung back into childhood, where only playground rules apply: The other kids either like you or they don't. And if they don't, you're out: blackballed. The granddaddy of such clubs, called simply The Club, was founded in London in the early 1760s by a group that included Samuel Johnson. James Boswell also joined. Edward Gibbon tried to get in but was blackballed. Why? Johnson scholar Walter Jackson Bate says it was because Gibbon ''had a fat face'' and was too ''sarcastic'' in conversation. Gibbon eventually had himself reproposed and somehow managed to be elected, along with Adam Smith. Clearly, anybody with a quill pen could now get in. Boswell wrote, ''Smith, too, is now a member of our Club. It has lost its select merit.'' The iron whim of social clubs still holds sway at Boston's Somerset, where member Parkman Shaw recalls an embarrassing incident: The chairman of a Boston financial institution believed himself, by virtue of his office, a Somerset shoo-in. Oops. Says Shaw: ''On a number of occasions we've had to put these people down. The brazen quality of candidates is just amazing.'' WHILE BUSINESS is not done at the Somerset, fraternization among members necessarily takes place, and this may have consequences in the outside world. The uproariously funny story you told last night about four Catholics and a goat may incline your banker and fellow clubman to give you 15 more minutes than he would a total stranger to explain why you need a $100 million bridge loan. But that's it. No contracts are signed, and display of business papers of any kind is forbidden. The overthrow of governments is not planned. When | the international banking conspiracy meets, it meets elsewhere. Outsiders find this difficult to swallow, but at many top clubs it appears to be true. People join them to get away from business. Says Shaw: ''Outsiders think clubs are a hotbed of people moving ahead with their lives. But the Somerset appeals to profoundly downwardly mobile people -- people less powerful than their fathers.'' BUT DON'T MEMBERS of clubs enjoy great access to other, even higher-powered, members? Yes and no. Through the mechanism of clubs, the paper-box manufacturer's son is supposed to be able to rub elbows with a Rockefeller. (David Sr., for example, belongs to the Harvard, Century, Knickerbocker, Links, and University clubs in New York City.) But today the box boy could just as easily chat up a Rockefeller at the Cardio-Fitness Center in Manhattan, where David sometimes can be seen in his shorts. Almost anyone can join Cardio-Fitness. The difference is not access, but the quality of access. When a CEO meets a new person whom he knows to be a member of his club, he isn't likely to recoil in horror, since in a sense he has already invited that person to be present: He had the chance to blackball the young pup and didn't. No such invitation is presumed at an exercise facility. On the other hand, once you're in a club, you may not be really ''in.'' Certainly you're in the door. But once there, you may discover there are clubs within clubs. Nowhere is this more true than at the Bohemian Grove. Some 200 little camps, each with its own name, hold sway beneath the redwoods every summer. And each asks its campers to bed down by invitation only. Mandalay is at or near the social top. Drop in to borrow a cup of marshmallows and you'll probably get them, but Nicholas Brady and Tom Watson Jr. aren't likely to ask you to stay. Near the social bottom is Aviary, a camp for singers, who, as performing members, get a break on dues. Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred discovered clubs-within-clubs-within- clubs when she became the first female member of Los Angeles's Friars Club. Once in, she found herself less than completely welcome at the club's foulmouthed, testosterone-laden celebrity roasts. Despite some members' hostility, she asserted her right to see Arnold Schwarzenegger insulted. Then she tried to exercise her reciprocal membership privileges with the then still-male Friars Club of New York City. The Friars refused her entry. Henny Youngman came out the front door and heckled her. But Allred is not to be denied. After filing charges of sex discrimination, she gained access to the club. She still remembers her first lunch there: salmon. ''It tasted like victory,'' she says. But that wasn't her last course. Back in L.A., she found herself excluded from the Friars' gym. She again filed legal charges, and the club capitulated -- superficially. Allred told the locker room denizens to gird up their loins: She was coming. They ignored her. Exasperated, she announced that not only was she coming in, but she would be bringing a tape measure. That did it. The men cleared out. ''I was interested in naked justice,'' she insists, ''not naked men.'' (California advisory: Allred is drawing a bead on the Bohemian Club.) If clubs aren't the path to business nirvana, nor the door to instant intimacy with the celebrated, then why are people so eager to join them? Dr. Gaylin, whose practice runs mainly to club-conscious CEOs and top executives, views membership as an antidote to loneliness, whether the club is the Duquesne of Pittsburgh, home to CEOs Anthony O'Reilly of H.J. Heinz, Charles Corry of USX, Paul O'Neill of Alcoa, and many others, or the Bergin Hunt & Fish of Babylon, New York, home to alleged Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. Even the Greek diner at the corner, says Gaylin, is a club: The regulars draw satisfaction -- and part of their sense of identity -- from the fact the counterman already knows their wishes by heart.

REAL CLUBS, however, go Greek diners one giant step better and sell what Ralph Lauren only claims to. Implicit in Lauren's advertising is the promise that if you buy a regimental sock you will soon become acquainted with a distinguished older gentleman who wears a pencil-thin mustache and served with Monty in North Africa -- someone, say, who looks a lot like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (see box). This, of course, is bunk. Yet where Lauren fails, clubs deliver. Join one, and you get an entire style of life, shrink-wrapped. For a couple of thousand dollars a year -- less than what you'd spend to join some fitness centers -- you get all the pleasures of life at San Simeon. In winter, a fire blazes. In summer, the bar serves lemonade. There likely is a pool, gymnasium, library, dining room, lounge, masseur, barbershop, and a group of bedrooms -- not to mention a humidor. Has a button popped off your shirt? A kindly old retainer sews it on. A club's greatest attribute is its power to soothe. Have you been honked at by cars? Spat upon, shoved, or generally mistreated? Then step inside, out of the city: Here is peace and quiet. A perpetual twilight of orange and yellow lamps. The air fairly echoes with accommodating phrases: ''Of course, sir. Yes, sir. No problem. Will you have your usual?'' Deference is spoken here. How sound is clubdom's future? Very. If it depended solely on the appeal of high-ceilinged rooms, dimly lit libraries, and strongly mixed drinks, then the industry might be in for uncertain times. Tastes change. But clubdom stands on stronger legs. Tanning one's self in the warm glow of one's peers' approval is not likely to become onerous any time soon. Not only are clubs a tonic to the ego; they are a haircut and a shave as well. As one sociologist has said: ''These people could meet in a barn and be just as happy.''

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY ANDREW ERDMAN CAPTION: WHERE THE ELITE RETREAT