Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (43 page)

Studio 54 really was a studio—an old soundstage, to be exact. It was huge. The entrance was ornate, like an old theater, and when you went inside, you passed through a lobby and through the main doors into the studio itself. The panorama that greeted me as I walked in that first night took my breath away. The sheer size of the room was overwhelming, a massive space with several levels and
banquettes lining the walls. The main bar was on the first level, with hunky bartenders dressed in shorts and vests. The stage itself had been made into a gigantic dance floor, and it was filled with hordes of people. As they danced, neon columns would descend periodically from the ceiling to the dance floor. They were filled with flashing lights and had police sirens on the bottom. A few moments later the columns would disappear again into the darkness above. Upstairs was a balcony with a huge disco booth that ran parallel to it so the DJ could see the dance floor below. The balcony ran all around the dance floor, looking down on it. There were several bars up there and more banquettes, and of course, the restrooms.

In the basement under the dance floor, I would soon discover, was a “private room” where Steve Rubell would entertain his special guests with an assortment of their favorite designer drugs. The basement was the holy of holies; only the very rich and famous, and their relatives and friends, were admitted there.

The most astounding thing of all, though, was the special effects. A variety of flying set pieces had been mounted in the dark recesses of the catwalks above, and they would periodically sweep down from above. A sun and moon and stars would appear, accompanied by appropriate special effects. The most remarkable one was the moon. It was a big crescent moon with a man-in-the-moon face, and as it came sweeping down across the dance floor, a huge spoon would arc down to meet it from the other side of the room. As the two met in the center, the spoon would go up the moon’s nose, and the moon would appear to sniff. Every time it did, the ceiling would explode with white glitter, tons of it, raining down on the dance floor like a snowstorm. The moon was snorting coke. As I watched the spectacle in awe that first night, I thought, “What am I doing in England? This is the wildest thing I’ve ever seen.” It was like my first night in a club all over again, when I was only thirteen years old. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I never wanted to leave.

The next night was even more memorable. On our second
night back in New York, Mother Nature greeted us with the biggest blizzard of the year. At first I was disappointed because all that snow meant we’d never make it to the Studio, but Alan said we were going anyway. There was going to be a big party for Fabergé, and we weren’t going to miss it. I thought he’d lost his mind. “Nobody’s going out on a night like this,” I said. “They’ll cancel the party.”

But Alan just said, “They won’t cancel anything. This is New York, and nobody’s going to miss a party at Studio 54, snow or not.”

The problem was, how to get there? We bundled up and went out onto First Avenue, but it was deserted, a whiteout. Not a taxi in sight. We tramped around in the snow for a while looking for a taxi, knowing that even if we found one, it probably wouldn’t stop to pick us up. No cab driver would stop in that much snow. We were getting numb by the time we finally spotted a cab. Alan said, “I’m going to make that cab stop if I have to lie down in the street to do it.” And he proceeded to do just that. As the taxi approached, Alan walked out and actually lay down in the street in front of it, in the snow, forcing the cabbie to stop. The rest of us piled in the back of the taxi, and as soon as Alan climbed in next to us, we told the cabbie to take us to Studio 54. All the way over, I kept thinking we were going to an awful lot of trouble for nothing. Even if the Studio was open, nobody would be there. Not in this weather.

I had badly underestimated the dedication of Studio regulars. When we finally walked in at about midnight, there were huge numbers of people on the dance floor, a massive disco frenzy in the middle of a blizzard. We joined them and were having the time of our lives when sometime later Alan suddenly said, “You know, we’re going to have a big, big problem. We have no way to get home.” By then it was past three in the morning, and we knew we were in trouble. Alan thought a minute and said, “There’s only one thing to do. We’ve got to find somebody with their own limo. We’ll never be able to hire anything.” We started looking around the
room, and a few minutes later I spotted Huntington Hartford, of the good old A&P chain, surrounded by a crowd of young girls.

Perfect! He was richer than Croesus, definitely limo material, and I’d met him years before with my mother. So I marched right over to him and said, “Huntington! How are you?” He was quite elderly by then, and seemed pretty loaded, but he remembered me, and when I asked him for a lift home, he said, “Absolutely.” I motioned to Jake and the Lazares, and we all stuck to him like glue until it was time to go. When he got ready to leave about an hour later, we raced along behind him saying, “Oh, thank you, thank you. This is so nice of you to take us home.” And it was. We’d have been in a fine fix without him. We all piled into the limo behind him, and the minute the driver pulled away, Huntington passed out on the seat next to me. He did so suddenly, and so unexpectedly, that I thought he was dead. “Oh, God,” I thought, “one of the richest guys in America, and he dies on the seat next to me.” I could already see the headline in the
New York Post:
“Huntington Hartford Found Dead with Hookers” (me and Jake, of course). The next day, when I found out Huntington was still alive, we all heaved a huge sigh of relief. It had turned out to be one of the funniest nights of my life.

After a week of this craziness, there was no question of returning to live in London. We spent every night of our vacation at Studio 54, and when the vacation was over, we returned to England only long enough to pack our things and put the flat up for sale. There was nothing for us in England anymore. Within weeks we were back in New York to stay, first with my old friend Jody, and soon in an apartment of our own. Paul Vigrass, who was still planning to form a new rock group with Jake, was right behind us. He and his wife and kids came over from England, too, and moved into an apartment in our building. I was back in New York to stay.

For me, New York became synonymous with Studio 54. I spent every spare moment there. Liza and I often met at the Studio, but we didn’t really spend much time together. We had different
circles of friends. The people at the Studio were remarkable, fascinating to me for their sheer variety. Anthony Hayden-Guest’s book
The Last Party
captures the mood at the Studio pretty well. Many of the people who went there were famous. The clothes designer Halston was there almost every night, usually with my sister. We were nodding acquaintances, but I never really got to know him. God knows, he was talented, very talented, but not very approachable. If you were famous, Halston was your friend. If you weren’t famous, he wasn’t particularly interested in getting to know you. He wasn’t nasty, just uninterested. Liza was famous. I wasn’t. It was as simple as that. Having a famous sister and mother entitled me to a speaking acquaintance, but that was pretty much it. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t going to hold his aloofness against him. He was a snob, but a gifted one. Andy Warhol, on the other hand, became my friend.

Andy and I had met years earlier, when I’d done a cover for his
Interview
magazine, and we were soon friendly. I had been asked to do the cover and a four-page photo spread inside. I was excited and honored to be asked to pose, especially since the photographer was the great Francesco Scavullo. I went for the photo session and had a great day. He took some of the most beautiful pictures of me I’ve ever had taken. The cover, however, didn’t come out until months later. I found out then that the old editor didn’t want to use me for the cover, but Francesco, bless his heart, saved the photos and had the new editor put me on the cover. I’ll always be thankful to him for what he did.

Andy and I became friends in part because he loved the stories about old Hollywood and the people I’d grown up with. I became very fond of Andy; he was kind to me, and generous to a fault. One of my favorite pieces is a portrait of myself that Liza commissioned from him. The portrait hangs in my house to this day. He was a kind man, and so was Bob Colacello, who worked for him.

Some of the most interesting people at the Studio weren’t famous at all, at least not until they started going there. Bob Petty
was one of them. He was a bartender at the Studio who used to dance and make drinks at the same time, kind of like Tom Cruise in
Cocktail.
He could mix anything you wanted and never miss a beat. And then there were the Studio freaks, the ones who became famous for just being bizarre. There was Rollerena, the male stockbroker who showed up dressed like Cinderella on roller skates every night. There was Disco Sally, a woman in her late seventies who became a disco queen in sneakers. Some people even showed up in see-through clothing or “dressed” only in body paint. For Bianca Jagger’s birthday, Bianca herself showed up as Lady Godiva, wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, mounted on a white horse and led by a naked man.

What made these characters even more bizarre is that they often had alternate identities as conservative businessmen and businesswomen during the day. My friend Nikki Haskell, who achieved considerable fame of her own at Studio 54, summed it up nicely. She said, “You’d go to Studio 54 one night, and the next day you would get into an elevator on Wall Street. In front of you would stand a guy in a three-piece, pinstripe suit, looking very conservative and dignified. As you waited for the elevator to reach your floor, you’d look at the back of his head and notice tiny remnants of glitter, still embedded in his hair. And you knew where he’d been the night before.”

One of the positive aspects of the Studio was that gay couples were mixed in with the straight people. Gays had always had to hide in public places, but at Studio 54 the gay couples didn’t get a second glance. For the first time in a mixed crowd, they could just relax and be themselves.

Out of all the wild nights at Studio 54, Halloween was the best. On Halloween, they would pull out all the stops. That first Halloween, Jake and I celebrated the anniversary of my meeting the Lazares. Of course, Alan had to dress up in his mask as the mad doctor again, the way he had the night I met him. We went to dinner at the restaurant Elaine’s and then over to the Studio for the
big party at midnight. It was astounding. The people there were outrageous on any given night, but Halloween gave people the opportunity to really get into costume. I’ve seen some pretty strange Halloweens on Santa Monica Boulevard, but Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting. The street outside the club was mobbed with people in bizarre costumes. One guy arrived in a real ambulance, siren screaming, and climbed out bandaged head to toe like a mummy. Two people came dressed like drugs—giant Quaaludes. One couple showed up having dinner, literally having dinner. They had chairs and a table set with a lighted candelabra and a full meal. I didn’t bother to dress up; I have to wear costumes for a living, so I just doused myself with glitter and went dripping sparkles.

When we walked into the Studio that night, the foyer was lined with little sets designed by Ian Schrager, one of the owners of the club with Steve Rubell. Some of the sets were curtained, and when you opened the curtain, there would be a very realistic werewolf or something equally scary waiting to jump out at you. The most original was a scene labeled “a little dinner.” It was a table with a group of midgets sitting around it, eating. “Munchkin leftovers,” I thought to myself. My mother would have loved it. Inside, the dance floor was dark, covered with cobwebs and special effects designed to scare you to death. The money they would spend there on Halloween. It was unbelievable.

In many ways Ian Schrager was the driving force behind Studio 54, but Steve Rubell was the one with all the visibility. Ian would design the parties, but he’d usually disappear before the evening really got started, turning the club over to Steve to run for the evening. Steve was a great host, the ultimate life of the party, but there was one problem: Steve had a massive Quaalude habit. By eleven P.M. he’d have taken two Quaaludes and still be relatively coherent, but by the end of the night, he’d be so stoned he would be drooling. He’d walk around chewing on Quaaludes, seven or eight in an evening. He had to have two people with him all the
time to keep him from falling down and to get him home at the end of the night. At one point he actually got a red wagon for his “helpers” to pull him around in, when he got too stoned to walk. It was insane; there was Steve, sitting in his little red wagon, popping pills and refusing to leave. It should have scared me; it would have scared most people, much less me, who’d spent all those terrifying nights with my mother when she’d overdosed. But it didn’t scare me. Because I was stoned, too.

It hadn’t taken long for me to slip back into my old habits once I started at Studio 54. The place really was drug central. People did drugs there openly in the late seventies, especially at the private parties, and I soon forgot all about the insights I’d found during those weeks at Bill Wyman’s house in the south of France. I was partying again, and this time at the biggest party of all. Something about the place made people throw caution to the winds and forget every restriction and inhibition they’d ever known. It was like Woodstock every night, with different drugs and without the mud.

Everyone at Studio 54 did drugs; it was as much a part of the experience as the music and dancing. Steve would invite the elite, which sometimes included me, to go down to the basement with him and enjoy his “private stock” of cocaine and other drugs of choice. Jake and I would go down with him, and sometimes my sister was there with Halston or another of her Studio friends. We’d all snort cocaine together, a regular family affair. By then I was drinking, too. Even though I thought I was allergic to alcohol, the truth was, I’d just never liked the taste. At the Studio, though, I invented a drink for myself and called it the Lorna Special. Bob Petty, the main bartender, would whip it up for me. It was a mixture of vodka, gin, orange juice, and champagne, all swirled together. One of them would knock you on your bum. Between the Lorna Specials and the trips to the basement, I was semiconscious most of the time. I cringe now when I see pictures of myself at the Studio in those days, staring blearily into the camera. I didn’t need a little red wagon to get around in, but it was close.