Inside Studio 54 Read online

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  Cover Photography by Peter Gould

  Set in Minion Pro

  epub isbn: 9781947856004

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Fleischman, Mark, author. | Chatman, Denise, author. | Fleischman, Mimi, author.

  Title: Inside Studio 54 / Mark Fleischman ; with Denise Chatman and Mimi Fleischman.

  Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Vireo Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA:

  Rare Bird Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572579

  Subjects: LCSH Fleischman, Mark . | Studio 54 (Nightclub). | Nightclubs—New York (State)—New York. | Nightlife—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Popular culture—New York (State)—New York. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous

  Classification: LCC F128.52 F55 2017 | DDC 792.7/09747/1—dc23

  Contents

  Introduction:

  The Studio 54 Effect

  Chapter One:

  Behind the Velvet Rope

  Chapter Two:

  The Raid on Studio 54

  Chapter Three:

  Hooked on Clubs

  Chapter Four:

  The Candy Store

  Chapter Five:

  I’ll Take Manhattan

  Chapter Six:

  Reefer Madness

  Chapter Seven:

  Adventures in Paradise

  Chapter Eight:

  Studio 54 Hits

  the Virgin Isle Hotel

  Chapter Nine:

  Battle for the Liquor License

  Chapter Ten:

  The Lights Go On at Studio 54

  Chapter Eleven:

  Cocaine and Quaaludes

  Chapter Twelve:

  Bombs Away

  Chapter Thirteen:

  It’s All About the Guest List

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Hook Up the Promoters

  Chapter Fifteen:

  Studio 54…a Way of Life

  Chapter Sixteen:

  A Cast of Characters

  Chapter Seventeen:

  Bono and Bowie on Elvis

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Disco to Dance Club

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Walk on the Wild Side

  Chapter Twenty:

  Roy Cohn Brings the Feds

  to My Door

  Chapter Twenty-One:

  Studio 54 Magazine

  Chapter Twenty-Two:

  Scandal Hits Studio 54

  Chapter Twenty-Three:

  It’s Raining Men

  Chapter Twenty-Four:

  My Ride Gets Wilder

  Chapter Twenty-Five:

  The Dawn Patrol

  Chapter Twenty-Six:

  Return to Paradise

  Chapter Twenty-Seven:

  Angel Dust Meets the Whippets

  Chapter Twenty-Eight:

  The Betty Ford Effect

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  My Place in the Sun

  Chapter Thirty:

  Laurie and Hilary

  Chapter Thirty-One:

  Tatou

  Chapter Thirty-Two:

  Tatou in La La Land

  Chapter Thirty-Three:

  Rodney Fires Up Tatou

  Chapter Thirty-Four:

  The Next Episode

  Chapter Thirty-Five:

  The Studio 54 Effect

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction:

  The Studio 54 Effect

  I’ve had a thing for clubs since childhood. Social clubs, officers’ clubs, nightclubs, and supper clubs—I love them all. It started the night my parents took me to The Copacabana for the first time. I was ten years old and it colored my world forever. Looking back, everything that has happened in my life from that point onward propelled me on a trajectory toward Studio 54.

  I became the owner of Studio 54 in 1980 and from the very first night we opened, in 1981, I was swept up in a world of celebrities, drugs, power, and sex. I was the ringleader for nearly four years and I became intoxicated with the scene—bodies gyrating on the dance floor, sex in the balcony, and anything goes in the Ladies’ Lounge and Rubber Room. Every night, celebrities and stunning women made their way through the crowd, up the stairs to my office to sip champagne and share lines of cocaine using my golden straw or rolled up one-hundred-dollar bills. Nighttime can make you feel somehow protected, operating under a cloak of darkness. It alters your perception of right and wrong, sane and insane, in an arena far more cutthroat than the corporate world I had known before.

  I was the guy in control, the owner—the host of the party. It was my duty, my job, to make sure everyone had a good time. It was a responsibility, a heady feeling, one that I gave myself over to wholeheartedly. The legendary New York City nightclub was at the “center of a strange bit of American history that touched a powerful nerve in our culture.”1 It was an exclusive world where anything could happen. New Yorkers and visitors alike were desperate to get inside and be a part of it. Studio 54 was part of a journey that I was meant to take and one that nearly killed me.

  After a long battle with the State Liquor Authority, I reopened Studio 54 in September of 1981. That night, ten thousand people stormed the main entrance in a near riot and the police were forced to close the block to traffic. Celebrities like Mary Tyler Moore and others were unintentionally turned away while Ryan O’Neal, John Belushi, and Jack Nicholson managed to slip in through the back door.

  Did I think about how this might impact my life or how it could change me and nearly destroy me? If I did, I don’t remember. Nothing would have stopped me. I fell under the influence of Studio 54, along with many others, from owners, managers, competitors, bartenders, and DJs to lawyers, patrons, and friends.

  My involvement with Studio 54 began years earlier, on the night I walked into its main room for the very first time. The heavy bass and the collective energy of so many bodies dancing as one drew me in. The crowd was hot and beautiful. Next to the dance floor, on a long silver banquette, several stars relaxed together passing around a joint as if at their own private party. I envied the original owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, for creating this pleasure palace. When I heard about them getting in trouble and then losing their liquor license, I made my move. My visits with Steve and Ian, at two different federal prisons, were orchestrated by their pit bull of an attorney, Roy Cohn, who was famous in his own right.

  Articles have been written about Studio 54, but the “behind the scenes” story has never been told—the 1998 film, 54, didn’t come close. Mike Myers did an incredible job of playing Steve Rubell, but Ian Schrager was never mentioned. The film revolved around the life of a fictional bartender from New Jersey and had little to do with the
story behind the club itself. I was invited to the premiere of 54, and at the after-party, I asked Miramax Films’ Harvey Weinstein why the film hadn’t told a more accurate story. He answered, “I just couldn’t do it to my friend Ian.” In 2012, Ian gave an interview on Sirius 54 radio claiming, “The drug thing got blown way out of proportion and it’s kind of unfair. There were no more drugs going on at Studio 54 than there were going on at Yankee Stadium.” The truth is, drugs were celebrated at Studio 54 from the very first night Steve and Ian opened the doors. A ten-foot-high neon prop known as the “Man in the Moon” dropped down from the ceiling, dominating the dance floor, scooping spoonfulls of cocaine up his nose throughout the evening. The beautiful Christmas gifts of cocaine in Ian’s possession during the raid at Studio 54 and the stories of basement parties all belie Ian’s assertion.

  Nicholas Pileggi’s article “Panic Hits Studio 54” (The Village Voice, June 12, 1978) documented the widespread use of drugs at Studio 54.

  Before opening Studio 54, Steve was unknown and his partner Ian was just another guy practicing real estate law. After the Studio 54 effect took hold of Steve, he changed. Columnist Liz Smith summed it up: “Steve went crazy.” Maybe it was all the Quaaludes and cocaine or some of the other stuff he was doing, but something caused a major lapse in judgment when he bragged to New York magazine, in the article written by Dan Dorfman, that he and Ian were “making more money than the Mafia.”

  The New York magazine article put Studio 54 on the radar screen of the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Division. They took one look at Studio 54’s tax return for 1977 and discovered they had paid a paltry $7,000. Game over. The Feds raided Studio 54 and it became clear that Steve and Ian were going down.

  The effect of the raid on Studio 54 plagued Ian for years, but he was able to move on and create a stellar career as an hotelier. Steve wasn’t as fortunate. The Studio 54 effect destroyed him, leading to his untimely death at age forty-five. It almost destroyed me as well. I didn’t want the party to ever end. I could have headed home at four or five each morning when we closed the doors to the club, but I didn’t. Night after night I’d jump in my limo and hit the after-hours clubs, or I’d remain at Studio 54 and hang out with a crowd of VIP regulars, actors, and an assortment of hangers-on looking for cocaine. With complimentary drinks flowing and an exotic assortment of drugs to please my guests, we’d sit around my office sharing our personal stories. Then, around 9:00 a.m. or so, rubbing our eyes, we’d walk out of the dark, cavernous space into the bright morning light. And while other people rushed up and down Broadway on their way to work at the start of a brand new day, we headed home from the night before.

  I didn’t realize it at first, but by the beginning of my third year at Studio 54 my body had become addicted to the drugs that supported a lifestyle of very little sleep and working day and night. I was swallowing Quaaludes and Valium each morning so I could calm down from all the cocaine I had snorted the night before and fall asleep. When I woke up each afternoon, I was so slow and groggy from all the Valium that my body demanded more and more coke to wake up. I enjoyed doing lines of coke with all the new and exciting people I was meeting, but while most of them did coke occasionally, I was doing it every single night. After three years my body was no longer cooperating; it was demanding much more to get high. I justified some of the fucked up things I did by telling myself that it was up to me to lead the party—be a good host, show everyone how to have a good time at Studio 54. It was my job—or so I told myself.

  There are many stories of how Studio 54 changed people, and I will get to many of them in an effort to explain how people can be driven to altered states, often self-destructively, by the beat of infectious music, pulsating lights, and a generous assortment of sex, drugs, and alcohol. For eons, people have found release in music and dance. There is a rich tradition in African tribes and aboriginal cultures of getting swept up in the mind-numbing religious fervor of music and tribal dance, sometimes enhanced by hallucinogens. I have witnessed the different aspects of tribal dancing and its effect on people in my travels to Brazil and Haiti and how it influenced people at Studio 54.

  It’s not difficult to imagine how the primal feeling of so many bodies moving in unison and dancing as one became a part of people’s lives—it became a ritual. Studio 54 sucked people in, luring them back night after night, affecting their personalities and emboldening them to do things they might not otherwise have done. It became a way of life to some: that was the power of Studio 54. This is my story of the incredible highs, the debilitating lows, the consequences I suffered, and the many people I got to know and care about over those years.

  Let the party begin.

  * * *

  1By columnist Liz Smith

  Chapter One:

  Behind the Velvet Rope

  The first and only time I went to Studio 54 without being on the guest list was in 1977. I had met Steve Rubell once and I figured, “How difficult could it be to get in?” The truth is, most people who stood waiting outside never got in. The door host Marc Benecke already knew the crowd Steve was going for on any given night—and if you had it, he knew it the minute he laid eyes on you.

  When my chauffeured black Cadillac stopped at Fifty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, Fred, my driver, asked if we wanted to walk the rest of the way. We stopped talking, looked out the window, and there it was—a long line of taxis ahead of us interspersed with a few town cars, some limos, and a mass of people crowding the sidewalk shoulder to shoulder in front of the famous Studio 54 marquee. Daunted by the size of the crowd, we almost turned and left, but we didn’t. I wanted to dance and so did my date, Michelle, a willowy blonde with long hair and a couple of inches on me with her heels on. We walked down the long block between Broadway and Eighth, pushing ourselves forward as the mob of hopeful partiers got thicker. Some people stood patiently, while others shouted and waved, “Marc, over here” or, “Marc, Marc, it’s me.”

  I’d never seen anything like it before. I couldn’t take my eyes off of this Marc guy. Wearing a jacket and a crisp white Brooks Brothers–type shirt, he was good-looking in a preppy kind of way. His face remained neutral—a smile here, a nod there. I was fascinated by how he scanned the crowd but avoided eye contact. He was completely in control of the front door. He was surrounded by a tough-looking group of guys—with sideburns and baseball jackets—that I reasoned were there to protect him.

  The crowd was a mixture of the absurd and the sublime. Two people off to my right were dressed like beachcombers, putting lotion on each other and carrying metal detectors, even though it was cold and close to midnight. Another costumed group could have been waiting for the curtain to go up at a Puccini opera back in the 1800s. Limos dispatched people I assumed to be A-listers. I noticed that some of them were immediately granted entry, while others joined the mob. It was a throng of the beautiful and the not-so-beautiful, gay, straight, young, not-so-young, blue-jeaned, and spandexed souls throbbing with a mutual desire—admission. Two heavyset guys in matching gold lamé suits, black shoes, Ray Bans, and black hats, carrying black briefcases—very Blues Brothers—shimmied and moved nonstop to a beat. I could tell by the way they moved that they were really good dancers. It was a wild mash-up of characters, like a scene out of Central Casting at a Hollywood film studio. All-American beauties and their beaus passed joints to stunning models speaking Italian, French, and German. Sequins, satin, feathers, leather, Levis, long legs, hot legs, tweeds, cashmeres, mink, emeralds, diamonds, gold, and silver. Perfume, cigarettes, cologne, and marijuana permeated the late-night air. The anticipation was making me crazy.

  Marc would point to a couple, then signal the tall security guys to help bring them forward through the crowd to the velvet rope. Each time this happened the crowd would immediately look in the direction of the action and try to figure out who the people were and why they had been chosen. Were they famous? How were they dressed? Why them?
It was a character study just watching it all.

  After thirty minutes it was no longer entertaining and I was ready to leave, but Michelle pleaded with me to wait just a few minutes more, so I focused on a guy wearing only chicken feathers and a jock-strap selling Quaaludes. A crowd had formed behind us but we hadn’t moved any closer to the red velvet rope. Behind me, several drag queens were shouting, “Marc, it’s me, darling! It’s me, Marc!” I was bending down to tie my shoelace when Michelle said, “Oh my God, he’s pointing at us. Stand up, stand up, let’s go.” I stood up and all eyes were focused on us. The security guys went into action. Another security man nodded and shouted, “Move aside please—move aside and let them through.” Suddenly we were important. The crowd turned to see who was gaining entrance. People were staring and glaring. Checking us out from head to toe. Who were we, and why did Marc pick us? I felt like a much-in-demand celebrity. It was magic and there it was—the red velvet rope. “Let them through please, stand back, people—please, stand back.” All these people were in my face and then I saw Marc and heard, “Good evening.” He smiled—it was wild and exhilarating. The big burly security guard opened the door and I again heard, “Enjoy your evening.” I turned to acknowledge him but he was gone and the door closed behind us.

  We were in. I could hear Gloria Gaynor singing “Never Can Say Goodbye.” We were bathed in a warm golden glow from the low-lit crystal chandeliers above. There were mirrors everywhere, teasing me with a floor-to-ceiling reflection of me and the woman I was hoping to make crazy love to later that night. I felt wild and ready for anything. We walked the wide carpeted hallway, the music getting louder and louder. I gladly paid the forty-dollar-entrance fee for the two of us. Everyone we passed, happy and good-looking, wished us a good evening. It was a different world from outside on Fifty-Fourth Street. The girls in the coat check were smiling and relaxed. Pretty faces, long hair, short hair, dancing, and twirling, “Enjoy your evening.” We turned around and WOW—there it was—the main room.

  “Let’s dance.”

  Chapter Two: