The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night

412 Pages·2015·2.79 MB·English

by  Haden-Guest

EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!
The Last Party
Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night
Anthony Haden-Guest
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION, 2014
INTRODUCTION, 2009
PROLOGUE
Act I: Nights on Fire
1 Take Your Partners
2 Manhattan à la Mode
3 The German Model, the Israeli Playboy, the Peruvian Party Girl & the New
York Businessman
4 Studio 54, Where Are You?
5 Hell on the Door, Stairways to Paradise
6 Club Wars
7 Discomania
8 Club Wars Heat Up
9 The Other
10 Addicted to the Night
11 Imperial Visions
12 The Bust
13 Disco Sucks!
14 Club Fed
BETWEEN THE ACTS: I
Goblin Market
Act II: Nightclubbing
15 The Shunning
16 Après Disco
17 Wild & Free
18 Eurotrash Epiphanies
19 Uptown, Downtown
20 Hearts of Darkness
21 “Death of Downtown”
BETWEEN THE ACTS: II
Masquerade
Act III: Nightfall
22 Kamikaze Kids
23 Rehearsal for the End of the World
24 Beyond the Velvet Cord
25 The Last Nightlord
26 The Dark Side of the Mirror
FINALE
All Tomorrow’s Parties
Cast List
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Now the night comes—
and it is wise to obey the night
Homer, The Iliad, VII
INTRODUCTION, 2014
Few experiences can be more tiresome than hearing a mature person whining
about the good old days. Will this be so with Studio 54 and that whole
microclimate of excess it conjured into being? One of the ways you can tell that
a phenomenon that seemed as transient as a gleam in the eye, a curl of the lip, an
itch in the groin has become embedded in a culture is when it generates nostalgia
among a demographic that hadn’t even been born when the whole thing was
popping. So it is with Studio 54. And further confirmation that such a
phenomenon has become a keeper is when blasts from that past blow in with
increasing frequency. As, indeed, they now do.
There were compelling reasons for the eruption of Nightworld, as I call it.
You’ll find them in this book. But quite other reasons account for what has
befallen it since, and I’ll lay them out here and now. For one, there has been the
increasingly ungenerous, indeed fearful conservatism-with-a-small-minded-C of
our period, and this was characterized in Manhattan during the Giuliani
administration by a general hostility toward nightlife and its sociosexual high
jinks. Also, local community boards became increasingly muscular, and the
thorny process of getting a liquor license—Would you want an after hours next
door? Honest answer, please!—has been another powerful factor.
That is nuts-and-bolts–y stuff, though, and could be fixed by pols more alert
to the importance of a thriving nightlife both to the economy of New York and
to its persona, its allure. But there have been further enormous changes in the
social envelope, which do not affect New York alone but cities worldwide, and
these are seemingly irreversible. They include such familiar bugaboos of our
time as an ever-uglier celebrity culture, developments in surveillance
technology, the wealth gap, and the waning appetite for face-to-face human
relations in an online-connected world. It’s game over! Fun gone!
I may be exaggerating here, but let’s first take the celebrity culture. There was
always some darkness within it—assassins have stalked the famous since time
began—but innocent idolatry used to be the norm. Color that celebrity culture
pink and gold. Indeed, this was so until comparatively recently. Think of the
moist delirium of Beatlemania. Compare the vision of the Kennedys’ Camelot
with the general opinion of our rulers in DC today. Or consider Andy Warhol’s
pop portraits. True, he chose his subjects for newsy reasons, sometimes morbidly
so, picking Elizabeth Taylor because she was sick and Marilyn Monroe after her
tabloid-esque death. Nor is it coincidental that these have been among his most
durable images—when did you last see Warhol’s Troy Donahue?—but he
doesn’t allow shadows to creep across faces, which makes them look at once
seductive and impervious. Their images are constructs, and depend on longing,
conditioned by a big helping of ignorance because, as Mark Twain put it in
another context, “distance lends enchantment to the view.” That blissful
ignorance is a goner.
Studio 54 didn’t change the celebrity culture all by itself, of course, but it gave
it a hefty shove in the direction in which it was already going. Just being a
featured regular at Studio 54 could generate so much attention that, like an old-
fashioned movie studio, the place functioned as a celebrity factory. Yes, Warhol
was already downtown famous and Liza Minelli a marquee name, but neither
had been regular tabloid fodder. Now, along with such fellow travelers as Bianca
Jagger, they became bolder-than-boldface names. And Halston was so boosted
by his Studio coverage that the rival couturier Calvin Klein saw to it that he got
his ration too.
The immediate agents of such a transformation were the paparazzi. There
were about a dozen regulars and they would usually work outside Studio’s velvet
cord. Indeed, you could say that it was at that velvet cord that the physical
distance between celebrities and their fan base began to dwindle. Elizabeth
Taylor, Michael Jackson, Sylvester Stallone, or B-list demiurges like O. J.
Simpson would arrive, allow their picture to be taken, and be swiftly whisked
through the acquiescent throng. Once inside, though, they would wander around
almost always unmolested, seat themselves, or get down on the dance floor
alongside the rest of the throng. Who would have tip-top tales to share in the
office the next day?
Such was the modus operandi of Studio 54. Tabloid hunger for coverage was
growing, but Studio’s VIP space, like those of Xenon, Danceteria, Area, and
their burgeoning rivals, was paparazzi free, and celeb ambushes in any such
privileged spaces—bathrooms, say—were a rarity because any shutterbug
caught snatching such shots would be cut from the photo-opportunity list lickety
split.
This indeed was the punishment meted out three times to Ron Galella, the
“prince of paparazzi,” by Steve Rubell. Galella, who was once described by
Warhol as his favorite photographer, would usually take up a vantage point
outside a club, a restaurant, or a private party at whichever entry or exit point his
targets would be most likely to use. One of his favorite shots, taken outside
Elaine’s, the piping-hot boîte uptown, shows a garbage pail lid, whizzing UFO-
like in his direction, propelled by the hefty throwing arm of Elaine Kaufman
herself. “She missed,” he says. “It hit a limousine.”
Another time Galella was zooming off in his Pontiac Firebird after Marlon
Brando, who was on his way to dinner with the talk-show host Dick Cavett.
Galella had taken a friend on the chase, an apprentice pap, Paul Schmalbach.
Their quarry stopped, parked, got out. Brando beckoned Galella. He walked over
and was sucker punched.
“Schmalbach didn’t get the picture,” Galella mourns. “He had his mouth open.
With surprise.”
Galella’s jaw was broken, and he had five teeth knocked out. He was stitched
up in Bellevue. “What is good about it is that his knuckles were infected with my
paparazzi germs,” he says. “And he was in hospital for three days recovering.
Someone got a picture of him coming out with the bandage.” The next time
Galella came within Marlon Brando’s range, Schmalbach did get the picture.
The actor is wearing a medallion and an expression of pained hauteur. Galella is
wearing a football helmet. This was a predictive image of the celebrity culture of
today, a domain of snitches, hackers, and stalkerazzi.
You can’t blame the paparazzi though. An appetite for the lowdown on the
high life was always there, it seems, if only in embryo. Robert Harrison’s
Confidential, a magazine founded in 1952, which feasted on the sexual
proclivities of movie stars, was avidly read all over Hollywood. It was an
anomaly in its time for its gleeful nastiness, though. The media accepted that
there were limits on tolerable dish. A Roosevelt cousin told me many years ago
how shocked he had been on a first meeting with the president to see just how
crippled he actually was. Such limits are goners too. The famous don’t get away
with much. Which has been poison to the essential recklessness that was so
much a part of Nightworld.
Surveillance technology plays into this too, and I can reference a precursor. In
the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Fellig, the Manhattan tabloid photographer, a.k.a.