‘I had more fun at Studio 54 than in any other nightclub in the world,” says designer Diane Von Furstenberg. “I would have dinner with my children, put on my cowboy boots, take my Mercedes, park in the garage next door, go in for a couple of hours, find someone, and leave.”
“I loved getting out of a cab and seeing those long lines of people who couldn’t get in,” says Brigid Berlin, one of Andy Warhol’s Factory workers. “And I’d just walk in, and it felt so good—all those people staring and waving and taking pictures of everyone who got in, thinking if you got in you must be somebody. The place did have a feeling of family. It was like going to another Factory, because you’d see everyone from the office—Fred Hughes, Catherine Guinness, Chris Makos—every night, all night. Andy would be ensconced on a couch with Bianca and Halston. If you missed a night, Andy would say, ‘You missed the best night.’ And if he hadn’t been there, he’d be on the phone the first thing in the morning, wanting to know who was there.”
“I used to go with Tina Chow,” says photographer David Seidner. “I remember the birthday party for Michael Chow there. They re-created Peking, and people were carried about on palanquins—it was really over the top. It was wild. Anything went. And I went there with all kinds of people, from clones to socialites. It existed in a time when it was hip to be glamorous. You could go in jeans or in black-tie, and if you were in black-tie you could still pick up cute boys in jeans. It wasn’t only a gay place. But it was definitely a pickup place. More often than not, you’d leave 54 accompanied.”
“One night I was standing by the bar,” says former Details columnist Beauregard Houston-Montgomery, “chatting with Way Bandy and Harry King, who were the hottest hair and makeup people in the world then—they did the Cosmo covers with Scavullo. And all of a sudden the three of us stopped gabbing and stared straight ahead, because there was General Moshe Dayan, with his eye patch, talking to Gina Lollabrigida.”
“It felt like you were going to a new place every night,” says Kevin Haley, then a model, now a Hollywood decorator. “And you were, because they changed it all the time for the parties. Remember the Dolly Parton party? It was like a little farm with bales of hay and live farm animals—pigs and goats and sheep. And the Halloween party: as you came up the ramp in the foyer, you looked through little windows into little booths with midgets doing things. The one that sticks out in my head had a midget family eating a formal dinner. It was like a nonstop party. There didn’t seem to be any guilt in those days. Decadence was a positive thing. Cocaine was a positive thing. It had no side effects. Or so we thought.”
“O. J. Simpson made a pass at me at Studio 54,” says Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski, a star beauty of the 70s. “A really big play. I used to go to dance, but then all these men would chase after you because you were dancing. So I’d go home in Halston’s limousine. I’d duck down so they couldn’t see me, but they’d run after the car anyway! Oh, God, we had such good times. Remember the fountain that was a block away, in front of one of those big new office buildings on Seventh Avenue? We used to go swimming there after 54—we’d just flip off our shoes and dive in.”
Next year, two decades will have elapsed since Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager—“two P. T. Barnum types from Brooklyn,” as a veteran New York scene-maker put it—opened Studio 54 in a former CBS television studio on West 54th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and began their delirious reign as the absolute monarchs of Manhattan nightlife. And yet those who regularly made it past the legendary velvet rope recall their nights there with an immediacy that makes that carefree, faraway time seem like yesterday. “We were the generation who happened to be young between the Pill and AIDS,” notes Von Furstenberg with a sigh. “And we really knew how to have fun.”
“In my mind, I remember it as a 10-to-15-year period,” says Hollywood talent manager Sandy Gallin, who frequently flew from Los Angeles to New York to go to Studio 54. “In reality it only lasted two or three years.” It was 33 months, to be exact, between the tumultuous opening-night party on April 26, 1977, and the tumultuous farewell party for Rubell and Schrager on February 2, 1980, two nights before they were to be incarcerated for income-tax evasion. “The life of 54 was cut abruptly short,” says Whit Stillman, the director of Metropolitan and Barcelona. “At the height of it, it was suddenly over.”
Stillman, whose first date with his future wife was at Studio 54, is currently writing the script for his next film, The Last Days of Disco, much of which will be set in “a fictional club very much like 54.” Sandy Gallin’s Sandollar Productions and producer John Davis also have a Studio 54 movie in development. Next spring, NDR Television, the PBS of Germany, will air The Last Dance, a feature-length documentary produced and co-directed by Al Corley, who was a doorman at 54 before starring in Dynasty. And writer Anthony Haden-Guest is working on a book about the disco era, titled The Last Party, to be published in time for the 20th anniversary of Studio 54’s opening.
Why so much fuss over a short-lived nightclub? Like James Dean in the 50s and the Beatles in the 60s, Studio 54 so embodied its time that it couldn’t last long. The whole world, it seemed, came together on that strobe-lit dance floor in a way that seems inconceivable in this age of plague, political correctness, moral righteousness, and social fragmentation. Uptown and downtown, L.A. and D.C., London, Paris, Rome, and Rio, society queens and drag queens, athletes and artists, debutantes and hipsters, Mayor Beame and Roy Cohn, Diana Vreeland and Miz Lillian—they all were there.
“When Steve and Ian started Studio 54, I think they thought they’d just have one of the big discotheques in town,” says music mogul Ahmet Ertegün, who has seen it all, from El Morocco and the Stork Club to the Peppermint Lounge, Arthur, the Dom, Le Club, Régine’s, Xenon, Area, and Nell’s. “I don’t think they ever imagined it would end up as the greatest club of all time.”
‘The idea was,” Ian Schrager says, “I was going to build it and Steve was going to get to conquer Manhattan.” Schrager is now 49, married to former New York City Ballet dancer Rita Norona, and the father of a baby girl. He is sitting behind a matte-black desk in his stylishly utilitarian office in the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street, headquarters of Ian Schrager Hotels, Inc. A few days earlier, WWD anointed his recently opened Delano in Miami Beach “Studio 54 with sun” and listed the luminaries seen lounging by its Philippe Starck-designed pool—Calvin and Kelly Klein, David Geffen, Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Victor Alfaro, Rupert Everett, Brian and Anne McNally. A few days later, he will fly to L.A., where Starck is redoing Schrager’s latest and largest acquisition, the Mondrian, on the Sunset Strip.
Schrager and Rubell opened their first New York hotel, Morgans, in 1984, three years after they got out of jail. The Royalton followed in 1988. In between, they launched the quintessential 80s club, the Palladium. The Paramount was under construction when Rubell died, at age 45, of liver ailments probably caused by AIDS, in 1989.
Rubell and Schrager met in 1964 at Syracuse University. Rubell was a senior history major, in charge of seating the most important campus social events, the Saturday-afternoon football games. Schrager was a freshman economics major, and would go on to be elected president of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, to which they both belonged. “We were dating the same girl,” he recalls. “And from the way we went about competing for her, we came to respect and like each other. And the friendship just got closer and closer and closer. I would say that from the end of 1964 until Steve died in 1989 I spoke to him every single day. A lot of people who went to Syracuse were from Westchester and the Five Towns of Long Island, and Steve and I were both from Brooklyn—we grew up within walking distance of each other in East Flatbush. So we had the same middle-class background and values.”
Rubell’s father was a postal worker, his mother a high-school Latin teacher; their fathers were both poor rabbis who had fled the pogroms in Russia. Rubell went to Syracuse on a partial tennis scholarship, worked in the student cafeteria, and delivered pizzas for $9 a night. He and Schrager were at Syracuse together for three years, because Rubell stayed on to get a master’s in finance. Schrager, who was also from a struggling Jewish family, worked as a dishwasher, busboy, and waiter at a local restaurant. During his junior year, his father died, casting a shadow on the family reputation when a Florida newspaper ran an obituary linking him to illicit gambling interests, and leaving his son with a distraught mother who would die a few years later, a divorced and mentally unstable sister, a niece with cystic fibrosis, and a brother in junior high. After graduating from Syracuse in 1968, Schrager earned a law degree from St. John’s University in Queens in 1971, practiced business law at a Manhattan firm for three years, and then went out on his own in 1974. His first client: Steve Rubell.
Rubell had left Syracuse in 1967, served in an intelligence unit of the army reserves, and spent a year in the back office of a Wall Street brokerage house, where he became so bored that he talked his father into cashing in a $15,000 war bond and letting him open a sirloin-and-salad restaurant in Rockville Centre, Long Island. By 1974 he owned 13 Steak Lofts in New York, Connecticut, and Florida, as well as part interest in two discotheques—15 Landsdowne in Boston and the Enchanted Garden in Douglaston, Queens—with club operator John Addison. One night Rubell took his new lawyer to Le Jardin, the jewel of Addison’s booming disco empire. Located in the tarted-up basement of a seedy Times Square hotel, Le Jardin, as Brad Gooch has written, “was the first gay disco to transcend itself.”
Schrager says, “That was the place that had the biggest impact on Steve and me. You could absolutely cut the electricity in the air. For lack of a better term, it was like a Sodom and Gomorrah. There was frenzy on the dance floor, the music was reverberating around the room, they had lighting effects, and it was like—boy!—overwhelming. Sex in the bathroom—all of that was going on. And no matter how hard John Addison tried to keep straight people out, he couldn’t. . . . I remember seeing Bianca Jagger there—the first time I ever saw her. She was so beautiful. The Rolling Stones had a party there during their 1975 tour. If Mick Jagger came to your club, that was all you needed. Or Andy Warhol. When Andy Warhol went to a club, it was like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.”
Later that year Maurice Brahms, a cousin of Addison’s, opened Infinity, a huge dance hall on lower Broadway, and hired Peruvian P.R. sorceress Carmen d’Alessio to host monthly parties. D’Alessio had worked in Italy for the couturier Valentino, and was sought after by club owners for her mailing list of rich young Europeans, who had been flocking to New York in ever greater numbers since J. Paul Getty III was kidnapped from a Rome disco in 1973. “I did a party called Carmen’s Carnival in February 1976,” d’Alessio says. “And Steve and Ian spotted me for the first time—on top of the shoulders of Sterling St. Jacques, this gorgeous six-foot-something black male model, dancing away in one of my beautiful Giorgio Sant’Angelo white outfits. So of course they wanted me for the Enchanted Garden.” Rubell and Schrager had formed a partnership to take control of the Queens club—a converted 11-room mansion set in the middle of a municipal golf course—from Addison, in exchange for Rubell’s shares in the Boston club. “We started with a Thousand and One Nights party,” d’Alessio continues. “We had elephants and camels. The waiters were dressed up as Arabs. It was a production. And we ended up on the cover of Newsweek. ”
Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth, who was Newsweek’s entertainment editor then, says, “I was assigned to write a cover story on disco culture, and I asked my assistant, Betsy Carter, who is now editor of New Woman, to check out this club in Queens we’d heard had these great theme parties. Steve Rubell came to pick her up in a limousine, with his mother and father in the backseat. He told her, ‘Betsy, this is the most exciting night of my life since my Bar Mitzvah.’”
America was indeed in the throes of discomania by 1976. According to Newsweek, some 8,000 dance palaces had opened across the country in the previous two years. Barry White, Donna Summer, and Gloria Gaynor ruled the radio. After Vietnam, Watergate, and a deep, lingering recession, Americans, it seemed, just wanted to go out and boogie. In New York, where the financial situation was so bad that the city had defaulted on its bonds in 1975, the hunger for fun was all the more insatiable. Leading the rush to the clubs was a coterie of fashion designers, photographers, and illustrators, including Halston, Fernando Sanchez, Francesco Scavullo, Bill King, Ara Gallant, and Antonio Lopez, and the glamour girls who swirled around them—Paloma Picasso, Anjelica Huston, Jerry Hall, Pat Cleveland, Appollonia von Ravenstein, Barbara Allen, Lauren Hutton, Janice Dickenson, Iman. Andy Warhol and his crew from Interview magazine, of which I was editor, were very much part of this group. Transatlantic visits from Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino, with their starry entourages—Loulou de la Falaise, Pierre Bergé, Marisa Berenson, Helmut Berger, Florinda Bolkan, Marina Cicogna, Giancarlo Giammetti—meant nightly dinners at Pearl’s and Elaine’s, followed by dancing into the small hours. In 1976 this crowd usually could be found at Hurrah, a throbbing, mirrored playroom on West 62nd Street run by Arthur Weinstein, a former Le Jardin waiter who dated Jessica Lange. So could Carmen d’Alessio, introducing Steve Rubell around the room.
Among the Hurrah regulars was the Swedish male model Uva Harden, who was married to the actress Barbara Carrera (“the other Nicaraguan,” as pals of her rival, Bianca Jagger, called her). Harden had plans to open a club of his own, in a boarded-up building at 254 West 54th Street, which, for some odd reason, had been called Studio 52 when CBS used it to tape What’s My Line? and The $64,000 Question. Harden had lined up Frank Lloyd, the head of the Marlborough Gallery, as his backer, and asked Carmen d’Alessio to work with them. But Marlborough lost a court case to the heirs of the Mark Rothko estate, and, as d’Alessio explains, “Frank Lloyd eloped to the Bahamas and we were left with the project. Uva told me, ‘We need backers!’ So I said to Steve and Ian, ‘What about coming to the Big Apple once and for all?’ They came, they saw the space, they loved it.”
Rubell and Schrager paid Harden a finder’s fee and found a new backer: Jack Dushey, a Brooklyn discount-store owner who had had his son’s Bar Mitzvah at the Enchanted Garden. Rubell, Schrager, and Dushey each took a one-third interest in the Broadway Catering Corporation, which they formed to lease the building. Dushey put up almost $500,000 in cash for the six-week crash construction job which transformed Studio 52 into Studio 54. Schrager, who supervised the design, says, “Everyone who worked on Studio 54 had never worked on a nightclub before, except for the sound guy. That guaranteed a fresh approach. The architects, Ron Dowd and Scott Bromley, had done the WPA restaurant in SoHo. The lighting was by Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz, who had done the Broadway show Chicago. It was their idea to take advantage of the theatrical rigs we had so we could have moving and changing scenery. The sound was by Richard Long, who did most of the gay discos in town. We had huge bass speakers on the floor so you could actually feel the music, and tweeter arrays hanging from the ceiling. The idea was to constantly assault the senses. For our logo, we went to the graphic designer of Time magazine, Gil Lesser, who had done the award-winning poster for Equus. He did our opening-night invitation too, which was a big poster of the logo, inviting you to the ‘premiere’ of Studio 54—‘dress spectacular.’”
Claudia Cohen, then a “Page Six” reporter for the New York Post, recalls checking the club out shortly before its opening: “It was a total construction site. It did not look like a place that was going to open in 8 to 10 days. All of a sudden this life force—Steve Rubell—burst into the room. ‘Hiya, hiya, how ya doin’? Let me show you the place.’ I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, opening a nightclub in that location. But I was so impressed by his confidence that I left my doubts about its success out of what I wrote. Steve gave me a ride back to the newspaper. He told me his entire life story all the way down to South Street. So I went to the opening. It was like The Day of the Locust. But I got in, and it was done in time, and it was fabulous.”
So many people turned out for the opening, which was hosted by Fiorucci, the trendy Italian emporium on East 59th Street known for its skintight, neon-colored disco fashions, that Carmen d’Alessio, who organized it, “had to be catapulted over the crowd. My mother, who came from Lima, had to be thrown in. Lester Persky told me that he came with Jack Nicholson and they couldn’t get in. It was mass, mass confusion.”
“I remember Steve calling me that next morning,” Ian Schrager says. “And we couldn’t believe it: there was a picture of Cher at the opening on the front page of the New York Post. I remember it like it was today. Cher was wearing a T-shirt with suspenders, a pair of jeans, and a straw hat. The front page. The whole page. No nightclub up to then had done that.
“That was the end of April, and then Bianca’s party was in May. Joe Eula, the fashion illustrator, called us and asked if we would open on a Monday night—we were dark Mondays, like the theater—for a special party Halston wanted to give for Bianca’s birthday. He only had about 150 people. The best people, from Baryshnikov to Jacqueline Bisset.” Around midnight, from behind a curtain at the rear of the dance floor, Sterling St. Jacques emerged, his body glistening with silver glitter. He was leading a white pony bearing a silvered Lady Godiva. Flashes went off as Bianca took Godiva’s place on the pony. Her picture put Studio 54 on front pages all over the world. Mick Jagger was at the party, of course. So was Andy Warhol.
One of the many wonders of Studio 54 was the space itself. Remarkably, it never felt overcrowded, even when it was full to its capacity of 2,000 people. A long, wide, dark entrance hall, its carpeted floor inclining upward, led to the big round bar, with plenty of room around it to cluster and circulate. Beyond that was the 11,000-square-foot dance floor with its 85-foot-high ceiling. A staircase off the entrance hall led to the plush mezzanine lounge, a second bar, and the broad, curving balcony with its rising rows of maroon velvet theater seats, from which you could watch the dancers below or, higher up, hide out. “Every nook and cranny was turned into a party room,” says 54 busboy Richard Notar, who is now the general manager of the restaurant Nobu in Tribeca. “Even the room where the guys who cleaned up kept their brooms had a sofa in it. You wouldn’t believe the things those guys used to find: jewels, pills, money, cashmere scarves, a camera with an ounce of coke in it.”
The well-built young bartenders and busboys wore gym shorts and sneakers, and danced as they made and served drinks. “It was visceral entertainment,” says Schrager. “They were all part of the show.” According to Notar, they worked hard, “but it was so much fun. I’d jump in a limousine in my shorts and a leather jacket and go to P. J. Clarke’s and get 30 or 40 hamburgers to go—whatever it took to make the party. I played pinball with Chip Carter, the president’s son. We had these pinball machines from the Elton John party that we’d put in the basement. Once, Margaret Trudeau called me at my parents’ house at four in the morning. The prime minister’s wife! Vitas Gerulaitis, who had a beautiful banana-colored Rolls-Royce, drove me home to Queens a couple of times. Catherine Guinness went as me, in shorts and no shirt, when Halston had that drag party.”
The greatest wonder of all was Steve Rubell working the door. From 11:30 until 1, he would stand on a step stool above the crowd, choosing who would make it beyond the velvet rope, which they had put up originally to keep out the Eighth Avenue derelicts who were wandering into the foyer to warm up. “People got so pissed at the door policy because it smacked of elitism,” says Schrager, “but it had absolutely nothing to do with race, creed, color, or religion. It was just exercising the same discretion you’d use when you have a party in your home.”
“It’s like mixing a salad,” Rubell used to say, “or casting a play. If it gets too straight, then there’s not enough energy in the room. If it gets too gay, then there’s no glamour. We want it to be bisexual. Very, very, very bisexual.” An insider elaborates: “Steve had certain criteria. He wanted the most famous, glamorous, rich, beautiful, and interesting people. He used to joke, ‘If I wasn’t the owner, I wouldn’t be allowed in.’” Among those who were excluded, at one time or another, were Frank Sinatra, the president of Cyprus, the King of Saudi Arabia’s son, Roberta Flack, and several young Kennedys, who then defected to Xenon, 54’s competitor on West 43rd Street.
To a large degree, the door policy made Studio 54. “It created an exhilarating commonality,” says Paul Wilmot, now a Condé Nast vice president, then an executive at Halston Fragrances. “The feeling was: We’re all here together, and we’re all really cool because we’re here.”
Al Corley says, “You felt like it was a safe place to drop your guard. I could kiss a guy, I could kiss a girl—it’s O.K. by everybody in here, by guys in suits and guys in dresses, girls in shorts and ladies in gowns. It was about the fantasies of everyone in there. Studio 54 really was a theme park for adults.”
“Studio 54 was the great leveler,” adds Park Avenue hostess Nan Kempner. “And no matter how tired you were, you’d be there for five minutes and you’d feel really marvelous. The music got to you, and the fact that everybody seemed to be happy and jolly. Although I did have that unpleasant Truman Capote night there. He was all set to go bam, bam, bam in my face. This vile little man. A few nights later, Halston had a party in the Olympic Tower, and Truman came up to me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but when I get smashed, I look at you and see Jerry Zipkin.’ I said, “That’s the most unflattering thing anybody’s ever said to me.’” That was the closest thing to a barroom brawl at Studio 54, and I was the one who stopped the Tiny Terror from striking the Social X-ray, a heroic act for which Liz Smith called me “the Saint Francis of Assisi of the silly socialite set.”
At one, when Steve Rubell came into the club and played host, Ian Schrager usually went home to his girlfriend, in those days the designer Norma Kamali, after making sure that everything was running smoothly. Schrager was the introvert who made things work. He didn’t hang out with the stars. They got to know him when he planned parties for them. “I wanted to give a circus party for Valentino’s birthday,” says Valentino’s business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti. “Ian put it together in three days. We had a circus ring with sand, and mermaids on trapezes. Fellini gave us costumes from his film The Clowns. Valentino was the ringmaster, and Marina Schiano came as a palm reader with a parrot on her shoulder.”
Schrager told me that the parties were “promotional marketing tools. We solicited people; they didn’t solicit us. We spent anywhere from $2,500 up to $100,000 for the Halloween parties, which were my favorites.” Schrager also put together, with superflorist Renny Reynolds, extravaganzas on New Year’s Eve (the first one featured a performance by Grace Jones with a bevy of boys on leashes), Valentine’s Day (for one, 54 was turned into a garden complete with sod, flower beds, and picket fencing), and Oscar night (“I remember ordering a truckload of popcorn,” says Reynolds). Bianca Jagger’s 1978 birthday bash was a “baby party,” with ice-cream-cone vases, bowls of Cracker Jacks, and busboys in diapers. For Rubell’s birthday that December, Bianca popped out of the birthday cake and was nearly suffocated in a blizzard of plastic snow. The party Alana Hamilton gave for Mercedes heir Mick Flick featured a Mercedes wrapped in gold lamé. A brigade of Hell’s Angels on Harleys roared onto the dance floor for Carmen d’Alessio’s birthday party. Karl Lagerfeld had a candlelit 18th-century party with the busboys in court dress and powdered wigs and, just to twist things up, a live reggae concert at three in the morning. Armani lined the entrance hall with classical violinists in white tie; his twist was a performance by the transvestite Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo. The most amazing party of all was for Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday in 1978. The Rockettes performed and then presented the movie star, who was standing on a float of gardenias between Halston and her then husband, Senator John Warner of Virginia, with a cake that was a full-size portrait of her. As Taylor gamely cut a good-luck slice from the buttercream bosom, Warner fled the paparazzi.
On any given night at Studio 54, one could find Diana Ross, Fran Lebowitz, and Farrah Fawcett on the dance floor, John McEnroe, Ilie Nastase, and Cheryl Tiegs at the bar, Lynn Wyatt, São Schlumberger, and Kenny Jay Lane on a banquette, Barry Diller, Calvin Klein, and David Geffen against the back wall, Rod Stewart, Peter Frampton, and Ryan O’Neal up in the balcony, Peter Beard in the ladies’ room, Debbie Harry in the men’s room, and a teenage Michael Jackson in the D.J. booth, playing with the lights and sound. “It was so exciting I sometimes had to take a tranquilizer,” says Beauregard Houston-Montgomery. “You saw so many celebrities. The code was: You didn’t speak to them, but very often they spoke to you. I don’t think any stalkers got into 54. Steve Rubell was the stalker.”
“Steve would see his friends a mile away,” says a star who was a regular. “He would whisk you in, put a quaalude in your hand, give you a drink, and give you a bartender too. There was a great deal of sexual tension all the time. And there was sex going on—in the balcony, on the fire escapes, down in the basement.”
The basement of 54, a warren of storage areas connected by zigzagging passageways, has become infamous as a kind of orgiastic inner sanctum. As editor of Interview, which was often criticized as being the house organ of 54, I was the rare journalist allowed downstairs. While it was easy enough to buy a gram of cocaine there, mostly the in-crowd sat around talking the night away while busboys ran in and out with bottles of Stolichnaya. The basement’s high point occurred after the launch party of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium perfume, when the triumphant French designer entered one of the cyclone-fenced storage bins and was greeted by Halston, who grandly kissed him on both cheeks. “You have just witnessed one of the great moments in the history of fashion,” declared Truman Capote. “If you care about the history of fashion.”
The first time the basement was ever used was as a “rehearsal space” for Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, Halston, and Warhol, who were putting on “an act” for the first-anniversary party, in April 1978. “It was like Spanky and Our Gang—let’s do a show,” Schrager reminisces. “Except instead of Alfalfa and Spanky, it was Steve and me. That was the underlying spirit of 54. There was an innocence about it, a spontaneity. It got corrupted, unfortunately.”
Houston-Montgomery recalls a haunting scene: “It was five A.M. Steve, Halston, Bianca, and Elsa Peretti were still there. Steve grabbed Bianca to dance. He was falling all over her. Finally Elsa Peretti stood up and tangoed Bianca away, and a hunky bartender had to help Steve off the dance floor.”
“I would rather die than talk about Studio 54,” Bianca Jagger told me when I approached her about this story. “I wish it never existed.”
On December 14, 1978, some 30 I.R.S. agents entered Studio 54, apprehended Ian Schrager, and seized garbage bags full of cash from the basement, financial records hidden behind ceiling panels, and five ounces of cocaine. Rubell was also arrested that day. The club was thought to be taking in $70,000 a night, and the owners were accused of skimming $2.5 million. Schrager and Rubell were released the next morning on $50,000 bail each, worked out by their lawyer, Roy Cohn. On June 28, 1979, a grand jury indicted them and Jack Dushey on 12 counts, including fraud and tax evasion. They pleaded not guilty. And then Rubell made headlines by accusing President Carter’s White House chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, of using cocaine in the basement of 54 in April 1978.
“Ultimately, Steve became completely mad with his power,” says a close friend. “He lost his mind. He thought he was above the law. The drugs—the quaaludes—had a lot to do with it. He was completely out of touch with reality.”
Meanwhile, as Roy Cohn negotiated a plea bargain, the party at Studio 54 went on and on and on. That September, Rubell and Schrager unveiled a million-dollar expansion, including a third floor with a lavish new bar and a moving bridge which swept above the dance floor. In November, after Dushey turned state’s evidence against them, Rubell and Schrager pleaded guilty to two counts of corporate and personal income-tax evasion, and in January 1980 they were sentenced to three and a half years. Liza Minnelli sang “New York, New York” at their farewell party. After serving one year—six months in “the Tombs” in Manhattan and six months in a minimum-security prison in Alabama—they provided information leading to the conviction of four other New York club owners, including Maurice Brahms, and were paroled to New York’s Phoenix House.
“So we had an enforced interlude in our lives,” says Schrager. “Thank God we were together and were able to keep our zest for life. Steve was like the mayor of jail, the same way he was the mayor of Studio 54. It was there that we decided we wanted to go into the hotel business. Because we suffered something most people don’t when they make a mistake like we did: we couldn’t go back into the business we knew. We didn’t have anything when we got out. I remember Calvin Klein offering to give us a blank check, which of course we didn’t take.”
While they were in prison, Studio 54 was bought by hotel owner Mark Fleischman, who ran it with Carmen d’Alessio, Schrager’s right hand Michael Overington, and Marc Benecke, the doorman Rubell had trained, who later went on to run Bar One in West Hollywood. But it was never quite the same, even after their release, when they helped Fleischman on events such as Marci Klein’s sweet-16 party. It closed in 1983. Rubell and Schrager took over Fleischman’s Executive Hotel on Madison Avenue at 38th Street in exchange for notes he owed them. They hired Andrée Putman, the avant-garde Parisian designer, to turn it into Morgans, New York’s first boutique hotel, and held casting calls for doormen and bellhops. Bianca Jagger moved into a penthouse suite, and across the hall, Rubell told friends, Cher’s visitors included Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. Morgans turned a profit in its first year, with a 96 percent occupancy rate.
The $10 million Palladium opened in 1985, but Rubell and Schrager were high-paid consultants rather than owners, because as convicted felons they couldn’t get a liquor license. They were now much more focused on the hotel business. They bought a rambling mansion on the ocean in Southampton and began dating two employees of Carolina Herrera’s. Schrager became engaged to Herrera’s head of public relations, Deborah Hughes, and Rubell started living with Bill Hamilton, Herrera’s design associate.
“Steve had never had a long-term relationship before,” says Hamilton. “But then, he never expected to live long. Somebody who goes at his pace, and created something that big, well, your body and mind just can’t do it for a long time. He always told me he’d rather do what he wanted and live less than do nothing and live to 75.”
I visited Hamilton in the West 55th Street apartment he shared with Rubell, who had rented it in the mid-70s. “This was Steve’s room, which was completely black then,” he said, showing me the bedroom, which is now blue and white and airy. “Even the windows were painted black. Because he’d get home at six in the morning, and the only time he could sleep was during the day. The bathroom was covered in gold foil, and the kitchen was all mirrors—the ceiling, the floor, everything.”
In the living room, which was once littered with props from Studio 54 parties, Hamilton pointed to a pair of mahogany bookshelves on either side of the white brick fireplace. “I’m going to show you something,” he said. He proceeded to pull the bookshelves away from the walls, which are covered in red fabric, and then pry the walls themselves open to reveal more shelving set into what had once been window frames. On the right side were stacks of accounting ledgers, going back to Rubell’s Steak Lofts and the Enchanted Garden, and piles of yellowed press clippings about Studio 54. The shelves on the left were empty.
“This is where Steve said he used to keep the money,” Hamilton explained. “He told me that one day he invited Andy Warhol over and put a big pile of cash on the coffee table and left him alone for a couple of hours to play with it. Because he knew how happy that would make Andy.”
Or as the late King of Disco’s nephew, Jason Rubell, who owns the Greenview Hotel in Miami Beach, put it, “Steve made you feel so good, always. His high came off of you. He felt good if you felt good.”
