Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (34 page)

And what an extraordinary dream Studio 54 proffered. As the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker was announcing that “the standard of living for the average American has got to decline,”
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Studio 54 was boldly and defiantly declaring the exact opposite. Studio 54 was excess as triumphalism, glitz for glitz’s sake: Why have one set when you can change it every other week? More than anyone else, Rubell and Schrager understood disco’s perverse economic imperative—you need to spend money in order to make money. The club’s design was largely overseen by D’Alessio, and the work was carried out by theater professionals and environmental lighting engineers rather than nightclub experts, giving it a dazzle and pop baroqueness that nightworld’s mostly functional spaces could only dream of. The first thing you saw as you entered Studio 54’s hallowed doors and its burgundy-carpeted lobby was a 1950s camera boom left over from the old days—this was disco as showbiz, after all. Hovering over the dance floor was a wooden rendering of the man in the moon; at midnight, it would be lowered toward the crowd as a coke spoon shoveled flake into its nose while a string of lights fired up from its nostril to its eye. On the opposite side of the parqueted floor was a metal Aztec sun god that would spew smoke from the sides of its face. The dance floor was broken up by columns of multicolored lights that would flash throughout the night. There was a waterfall at the back of the dance floor, confetti guns that shot brightly colored paper over the club at peak times, and lavish flower arrangements throughout the club. The bartenders and busboys (including, in 1978, a twenty-one-year-old Alec Baldwin) all wore gray satin gym shorts and sleeveless T-shirts. D’Alessio was also responsible for booking the parties, and it was largely her fashion and celebrity contacts that made the guest list glitter with the same intensity as the club’s interior. It was more than just the design and the A-list roster, though, that made Studio 54 special. The club’s sound system was designed by disco’s preeminent soundman, Richard Long, and Rubell and Schrager managed to lure Paul Casella’s former spinning partner at Hollywood, Ritchie Kaczor, to the new club. Kaczor (who by 1979 was earning $50,000 a year and was the world’s best-paid DJ) was generally acknowledged as one of the best beat mixers around, and his technical skills initially gave Studio 54 cachet among New York’s clubbing cognoscenti, which was only reinforced when Rubell hired Nicky Siano as his alternate.

However, Rubell and Schrager were never particularly precious about the music; they simply wanted someone to play what effectively was background music that kept people dancing but wouldn’t get in the way of the “scene.” And if that someone had a great reputation, so much the better. Their vision was Le Jardin dressed to the nines, Infinity to the nth degree. When Kaczor dropped the needle on C.J. & Co.’s “Devil’s Gun” on the evening of Tuesday, April 26, 1977, they achieved it tenfold. The nondescript block on the fringes of the theater district that had been largely left to the prostitutes and pimps prowling the area was suddenly overrun with limos and paparazzi. Cher, Brooke Shields, Donald Trump, Margaux Hemingway, and Bianca Jagger all showed up, but the chaos was so great that not only could neither Mick Jagger nor Frank Sinatra get inside, but even Carmen D’Alessio had trouble getting into her own party. The thousands of lesser luminaries stranded on the wrong side of the velvet ropes decided that they didn’t need Rubell or Schrager’s blessing to have their own party and promptly reenacted Sodom and Gomorrah by having an orgy on West Fifty-fourth Street.

Despite all the hoopla, the next few days at Studio 54 were dead, and Rubell and Schrager were getting anxious. That would all change on May 2, when the club held a birthday party for Bianca Jagger. The club—which was filled with white balloons and on one wall featured a light bulb display that spelled out “BIANCA” in huge letters—was fairly empty, with Mick Jagger gaily cavorting with Halston and Liza Minnelli (who had already become Studio regulars). As soon as Siano dropped the needle on the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” Bianca Jagger rode in on a white horse that Rubell had hired for the occasion led by a naked man “wearing” a body-painted tuxedo. The handful of paparazzi who had bothered to turn up went berserk, and the photo of Bianca on the white horse became one of the iconic images of the disco era. The photos appeared in the tabloid press across the world, and in a flash Studio 54’s reputation was sealed. It had suddenly become the most talked-about disco in the world, the home of the outrageous, the place where everyone wanted to go, the center of the glitterball universe.

While Quindlen observed that, “Unlike the elegant La Folie, where the clientele sometimes seems moneyed and staid, or Hurrah’s, where they seem merely idiosyncratic, or Regine’s, whose ubiquitous celebrities and selectivity have given the impression of dancing right out of the common man’s market, Studio 54 combines public figures with the wealthy and the unusual and throws in a good measure of the average to set them all off,”
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Studio 54 was nevertheless the celebrity hotspot to end all celebrity hotspots. Rubell, in particular, was enamored of the new crowd he suddenly found himself traveling in, and with cloying enthusiasm somewhere between stalker and tireless self-publicist, he ceaselessly courted celebrities. Rubell set up the notorious downstairs VIP room, where anything and everything was readliy available; he made sure that celebs had a ready supply of their drugs of choice and ensured that alcohol was available to them even when Studio’s liquor license was revoked; he would change the club’s decor if a favored patron had a whim for a special party. Of course, nightclubs have always treated special customers well and bent over backward in order to accommodate celebrities, but there was something qualitatively different about Rubell’s relentless pursuit of the famous, something bordering on blind worship. As Studio 54 historian Anthony Haden-Guest wrote, “It was the preliminary tremor of a social upheaval that would prove much more enduring than the populist revolution of the sixties: the coming of the Celebrity Culture.”
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Three years earlier
People
magazine had been launched as a mainstream, nonconfrontational version of supermarket tabloid tittle-tattle; Liz Smith’s influential gossip column in the
Daily News
began in 1976; and Andy Warhol’s
Interview
had been masquerading celebrity worship as art since 1969: This was the beginning of a ravenous, insatiable press desperate for stories to sell papers and magazines in a world oversaturated with media. Of course, gossip had been a part of journalism ever since Daniel Defoe started writing his column in
The Review
in 1704, but this was the beginning of gossip and celebrity running on its own momentum, the beginning of being famous just for being famous. For the previous 270 years, gossip had been principally about the social set and its “events,” with the odd mention of film stars, but paralleling the course of nightclub history, gossip had become focused almost exclusively on the popocracy, and the Studio crowd fit the bill perfectly: Liza, Bianca, Halston, Andy, Truman—people whose best work was well behind them and were now just simply names. The antiestablishment hellions of the 1960s were now safely ensconced as members of a new aristocracy.

With such a unique environment, Studio 54 wasn’t merely a playground for established celebs; it had the power to create its own: the septuagenarian dance floor diva Disco Sally and Rollerena, by day a Wall Street employee, by night a cross-dressing roller queen who skated around the floor in a wedding dress that sported a button reading, “How Dare You Presume I’m Heterosexual.” Inevitably, even Studio’s doorman, Marc Benecke, became a minor celebrity in his own right, starring in a short-lived Broadway production (Benecke’s stand-in, Al Corley, became a star years later when he joined the cast of
Dynasty
). Of course, Rubell, a combination of genial host and overeager puppy, became the biggest star of all. The constant media attention went to his head, and very quickly his doorway judgments on who was to be let into his kingdom became something a bit more pernicious than merely “tossing a salad.” Rubell acted with the hauteur of a member of the nobility, either completely ignoring or lashing out at the crowd with cynical comments. But disco (at least not this version) was never really about celebrity; it was about the comforting anonymity of belonging to a community, the freedom of having a shared identity that could now be shouted across a crowded dance floor. Nevertheless, the opulent fantasyscapes of places like Studio 54 were playgrounds of sexuality and identity. As journalist Sally Helgesen wrote of René, a makeup artist at the quintessential disco boutique Fiorucci, “René is only 21, but he says he’s been going to discos four nights a week for eight years, before the straight crowd picked up on the scene. He likes only the fanciest places, where he can wear the most outrageous costumes and live out whatever fantasy might strike him on a particular evening.”
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However, it was impossible for anyone to reconcile disco’s liberationist aspects with the fact that these disco “revolutionaries” were partying with people like Imelda Marcos, Roy Cohn, and Betty Ford. It was easier just to run a picture of Margaret Trudeau, the scandalously young wife of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was photographed at Studio 54 sans underwear on May 22, 1979, the night before her husband lost a reelection bid. Maybe this was the conservative revolution that William Safire had predicted when he first saw the hustle in 1975. As Charles Kaiser wrote, “Everything about the ambience of Studio 54 made it the antithesis of the spirit of the sixties. There was certainly nothing democratic about it. Frank Rich remembered that ‘to be there as a peon, as I was on a few occasions, was to feel that the Continental Baths crowd had finally turned nasty toward the intruding straights and was determined to make them pay (with overpriced drinks and condescending treatment). Even as everyone was telling you that this was where the action was, you felt that the real action, not all of it appetizing, was somewhere in the dark periphery, out of view—and kept there, to make you feel left out.’”
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THE STORY OF “I WILL SURVIVE”

Studio 54 will always be remembered for cocaine in the back room with Liza, Andy, and Halston, but it wasn’t merely about excess and decadence. On occasion, it was actually about the music, and none more important than the night in 1978 when Ritchie Kaczor decided to play (with a little encouragement from Polydor A&R man Rick Stevens) the B side of Gloria Gaynor’s most recent single, a cover of Clout’s “Substitute.” When he played it, nearly everyone left the dance floor, but Kaczor persisted, and within a few more spins “I Will Survive” was the biggest record at Studio. The buzz was such that soon every disco in New York was playing it, and the record company rereleased the single with “I Will Survive” as the A side. It eventually went to #1 in just about every country in the world. Its association with Studio 54 may have been why it initially became a dance floor hit, but the record had everything a great disco record is supposed to have: full-throated gospel release complemented by the surging bass line, dramatic strings, hissing hi-hats, and a hint of Broadway razzmatazz. Although Gaynor was crowned the “Queen of Disco” after dance floor favorites like “Honey Bee,” “Never Can Say Goodbye,” and “Casanova Brown,” “I Will Survive” was one of those exceedingly rare records that are more like forces of nature than pop hits. While the song has become something of a feminist anthem, Gaynor says that “When I sang ‘I Will Survive’ I was relating it to my recovery from spine surgery [after a fall while performing on stage in 1978]. And because the word was going around after my accident that the ‘Queen of Disco is dead,’ one of my main thoughts was that my career would survive! And in a funny way it was also, for me, to do with surviving the death of my mother. I know for most people the song is about abusive relationships and women asserting their independence of men and all that sort of thing and of course I have suffered in that way myself, but for some reason I was never thinking of that when I sang it.”
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The real action at Studio 54 was money, and it was in the dark periphery, out of view, tucked into Hefty bags hidden in the walls, in crawlspaces, and in between plumbing pipes. At 9:30 a.m. on December 14, 1978, acting on a tip from a disgruntled employee, officers of the IRS and the Organized Crime Strike Force raided Studio 54 and found the Hefty bags, which contained almost $1 million in cash. Not content with hobnobbing with the rich and famous, Rubell and Schrager were taking their money—skimming $5 million a year, 80 percent of the club’s gross by one estimate. The authorities also found evidence that Rubell and Schrager were paying off Mob loansharker Sam Jacobson, but instead of agreeing to the plea bargain deal offered to them if they turned over evidence on Jacobson, Rubell and Schrager said that they had information on narcotics use by White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan. Ironically, the case against Jacobson collapsed, but by turning on the federal government, Rubell and Schrager doomed themselves to face the full force of the law on their income tax evasion charges. On January 18, 1980, they were each sentenced to three and a half years, fined $20,000, and received the opprobrium of the judge, who criticized their “tremendous arrogance.”
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Despite his protestations that he was “sorry,” at his farewell party in March, Rubell serenaded his well-wishers with an out-of-tune rendition of “My Way.”

*   *   *

Unwilling to be pushed aside by the outer borough interlopers, Maurice Brahms and John Addison decided to join forces on a club called New York New York. Located at 33 West 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, the club was designed by Angelo Donghia, who created a space of cool white and gray elegance, with color provided by red lacquer tabletops and palm trees both real and neon. The club opened a few weeks after Studio 54 and was conceived of as its high-class rival; or, as one employee put it, the club’s “motif was clean taste.”
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Where Studio 54 merely occupied an old television studio, New York New York was “‘the primetime slickly produced television variety show special’ of discos.”
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The nightspot’s opening night on May 18, 1977, was every bit the success that Studio’s launch was, with throngs of celebrities both inside and left out in the cold. “In the middle of a number someone, somewhere, pushes a button and a cloud of smoke, scented with Fabergé perfume, rises to the waists of the assembled dancers,” Anna Quindlen wrote of her visit to the club.
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Unfortunately, this “fog” was as humid as its name implied, and it took the creases out of men’s trousers. More successful was New York New York’s light show: minnows of magenta, blue, white, and green light that darted around the club; a curtain of tiny beads of light that hung over the dance floor and reflected in the mirrors to create the club’s vaunted “infinity effect.” Like most variety show specials, however, New York New York’s magic wore off almost immediately. Perhaps it was because Brahms and Addison were already established presences in Manhattan’s nightworld and felt that they didn’t need to bend over backward for celebrities the way Rubell and Schrager did, or maybe it was that the overly conceptualized interior was too bright, too out in the open to allow the rich and famous to get up to nefarious activities the way they could in the relative darkness of Studio 54, or maybe it was that Studio really did have that je ne sais quoi that made it truly special. Whatever the reason, New York New York became the place that people who couldn’t get into Studio 54 went to instead. “A great many of the men wear sport coats with shirts open at the collar and medallions hanging in the resulting hairy V’s,” Anna Quindlen wrote. “They outnumber the women substantially.”
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As if becoming the bridge and tunnelers’ favorite nightspot wasn’t enough of an indignity, New York New York failed to get the after-party for Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name, and Liza Minnelli, one of the movie’s stars, spent the night at Studio 54 much to Brahms and Addison’s chagrin and the delight of the tabloids’ gossip pages.