American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  † P.J. Clarke’s is still located at 915 Third Avenue.

  † Jack Warner was head of Warner Bros. Studios and son of the founder.

  † In Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy, Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek describe negotiations to get Hendrix to play at Salvation differently. “Knowing Jimi was a regular in the club, [Bobby Wood’s] associates suggested Jimi perform the opening night. Jimi didn’t want to do it.” The authors claim that Hendrix only changed his mind after a bizarre incident in which a mafioso arrived at his temporary house in upstate New York and began firing a gun at a tree outside his window. I asked Jon about this story and he said, “Andy and me used to shoot guns off all the time just playing around. It’s possible we went up there and did that, but I don’t remember needing to shoot a gun to make Jimi Hendrix play for us. He liked Salvation because he could get drugs there.”

  ‡ Pierce was profiled in Albert Goldman’s Disco, a history of nightclubs in New York, published by Hawthorn Books in 1978. In it Goldman writes, “Bradley’s stock-in-trade was his great personal charm. It was said that when a mobster would come into one of his clubs and start waving around his gun, Bradley would take the piece out of the hood’s hand, make him laugh, and end up with the killer kissing him.”

  ‡ Coquelin is credited with being the originator of the disco in the United States. His Le Club was modeled after the Whiskey au Go-Go in Cannes.

  ‡ When they launched Salvation actress Faye Dunaway, who was very close with Schatzberg, served on the board of directors.

  § Schatzberg was a top fashion photographer of the 1960s. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan used his photos for their album covers. In the 1970s Schatzberg became a leading film director, known for his gritty, realist style, starting with Panic in Needle Park. That film, written by Joan Didion, launched the career of Al Pacino. Ondine’s was a club that blended deejays with live music at 308 East 59th Street. Michael Butler was heir to a Chicago industrial fortune, theater producer, and confidant of John F. Kennedy, who at one point made him a special adviser on the Middle East.

  16

  J.R.: After Salvation we took over Directoire.* Andy and I put up $100,000 of our own money to redecorate it, and Bradley went to town.

  BRADLEY: Directoire was named after the Directoire period of France, and the club was all about that style.† When we redesigned Directoire, we didn’t change the theme but we made it fresh. I brought in Jackie Kennedy’s designer, Oleg Cassini, to supervise the redesign, and, of course, he made it even more fabulous.

  J.R.: When Bradley introduced me to Oleg Cassini, I had my doubts about this little half-a-fag Frenchman. He cost us a lot of money. But his work was top-notch. They put in big fly chairs, with cushions all around. Bradley always liked cushions for people to lie on. It was very tasteful. There was no club like it. Even the bouncers we got were celebrities. We had Ray Robinson, Jr., whose father, Sugar Ray Robinson, was one of the greatest boxers of all time, and Richard Roundtree* working the door. Backing them up were my guys.

  Petey, when he was not in prison, always worked as a bouncer for me, and so did Jack Buccino. With his desire to be in show business, Jack loved working the nightclubs, but he was always a problem. At Directoire, Jack nearly shot a customer. Jack was checking the ID on a kid, and Jack’s own gun fell out of his pocket and fired when it hit the ground. The bullet went straight up and into Jack’s leg. Petey and my other guys all took their guns out to shoot the kid. They didn’t realize Jack got shot by his own gun. But doped up as Jack was, he had the presence of mind to say, “It was my gun. He didn’t shoot me.”

  Poor Bradley. He came out to everybody screaming, my guys with their guns out, and Jack on the ground with blood pouring out of his body. Bradley was beside himself.

  WHEN WE had parties at the clubs, Andy and I started spiking the punch with LSD. We’d have the old mustache Italians show up, and we thought it was hilarious to get them high on acid and lose their minds without knowing what was up. At one of these parties at Directoire, we dumped handfuls of LSD blotter paper into the punch.

  “This is going to be the funniest shit ever,” Andy said.

  No old wiseguys came like we expected, but Ed Sullivan did.† He came in looking like he did on TV, like a corpse in a suit. First thing he did was take a cup of LSD punch from the bowl. Andy and I followed him while he walked around, talking with the models and singers hoping to get on his TV show. He held the cup the whole time, without taking a drink. Andy and I were going nuts watching him. Finally Sullivan remembered he was thirsty and drank the cup.

  Andy and I continued following him around, watching him like he was a science experiment. He was known to be very against drugs,* and we wanted to see the effect LSD could have on Mr. Clean. He walked around chatting like normal. Then his face got a wild look. He grabbed at something in the air that didn’t exist and began holding the walls with his hands.

  Andy and I always stocked our parties with whores. We sent a whore girl over to Ed Sullivan to ask what he was feeling. He went paranoid on her. He yelled, “Who are you?”

  She smiled at him and calmed him down. Sullivan lost his paranoia. He stepped closer and put his hand on her tit. He started twisting it like a doorknob. Andy and I got a brainstorm. What if we could get Sullivan to take his clothes off and fuck the whore in a back room? If we got it on film, we could blackmail him. I told the girl to take Sullivan into the back. Andy and I asked around for a camera. But who had a camera in a discotheque? There were no security cameras back then. We sent a guy out to find one.

  Andy and I peeked through the door to the back room on Sullivan and the whore. She took her tits out of her shirt so he could play with them better, but when she tried to get him undressed, he freaked. He went into the corner and started crying.

  Andy and I got worried. We couldn’t have Ed Sullivan lose his mind in our club. We sent for Sullivan’s driver and brought him into the back room. We told him, “We don’t know what happened to your boss, but he attacked a girl in there. You’ve got to get him out of here.”

  The driver said, “Mr. Sullivan has never acted like this in his life.”

  We hustled him out a side door, and a few days later I called his driver to find out how he was doing. “Mr. Sullivan has been locked up in his apartment for three days,” he said.

  Andy and I did not think this was good news. What if we had destroyed Ed Sullivan’s brain? This could be a scandal. It could bring heat into our club. Sullivan’s driver told me a doctor had seen Mr. Sullivan in his home. I got the doctor’s name from him and called my uncle Sam to see if he knew a way to get to this guy. My uncle didn’t even ask why. Two hours later he called back. He had a guy I should take with me to talk to the doctor. He explained that if I took my uncle’s guy, the doctor would talk to me.

  The next morning I met my uncle’s guy. He was a very tall man. His face was all pockmarked and scarred. Maybe he was somebody the doctor malpracticed on. Whoever he was, when we called on the doctor at the office, he saw us right away.

  I’m wearing my platform boots and velvet pants with a gun in the waistband. Next to me is this scarred freak. The doctor looked from him to me, took a deep breath, and asked how he could help.

  I said I wanted to know how Ed Sullivan was doing.

  The doctor told me Ed Sullivan had called him and told him he had been drugged. When he went to his house, he found Mr. Sullivan barricaded in his bedroom.

  “My God, is he all right now?” I asked.

  “He’s thinking about filing a complaint with the police. He thinks he was drugged at a nightclub.”

  “Did you run any tests to make sure Mr. Sullivan’s cock is all right?” I asked.

  “What are you saying?” the doctor asked.

  “Mr. Sullivan attacked a girl. He got her alone, and she was screaming her guts out. We had to pull him off of her,” I said.

  “Does the girl want anything from Mr. Sullivan?” the doctor asked.

&nbs
p; “This girl would rather everybody forget about the whole thing,” I said.

  The doctor promised me he would explain the situation to Ed Sullivan. Two days later he called me and said, “I talked to Mr. Sullivan. He’s much better now, and he’d rather forget the whole incident.”

  A week later my uncle Joe tells me to meet him at La Luna in Little Italy.* He had heard from my uncle Sam about my seeing Ed Sullivan’s doctor. When I sat down in the restaurant, he said, “What the fuck is this shit about?”

  I told him we’d drugged Ed Sullivan as part of a plan to blackmail him. I didn’t say that we’d originally done it just for kicks. When I got to the part about the whore trying to take Ed Sullivan’s dick out and him going bananas, my uncle slammed his drink on the table. “You fucking young kids, you’ve got to do every fucking thing in the world. Stick to your business. Leave Ed Sullivan alone. I watch his show.”

  Who knew my uncle Joe’s favorite program was The Ed Sullivan Show?

  MY UNCLE was right about sticking to the business. Between Directoire and Salvation, Andy and I were making good money. We went to Bradley and Bobby Wood and said, “Let’s go get another club.” And that’s what we did. We turned The Envoy East restaurant on 44th Street into a club. We opened a place called the Boathouse in midtown and Salvation Two near Central Park West. We took over another place called the Church, which was an actual church. We named it Sanctuary.† We took cuts of other clubs up and down Manhattan.

  Everybody came to our clubs—Mick Jagger, Teddy Kennedy, Johnny Carson. I met people I never imagined existed, like that freak artist Andy Warhol, who used to come to our clubs all the time. He tried to get Andy to pose as a model. I gave Andy a lot of shit for that because Warhol was obviously very gay for him. Bruce Lee was one of the nicest people I met in our clubs. He wasn’t famous yet, and he was small, but you could see from the way he carried himself that he was in phenomenal condition. I used to joke that I was going to fight him. I’m glad I never fought Bruce Lee. After I saw his movies, I realized I probably couldn’t have taken that guy with a baseball bat. Another man I found interesting in our clubs was John Cassavetes.* He’d ask a lot of questions about how Andy and I ran the clubs, what we did for fun. Even though he was in the movies, he did not put on airs.

  None of these people would have given me the time of day if it weren’t for Bradley Pierce. If we didn’t have Bradley, we’d have been out of business in a week. As much as he was into peace and love, Bradley was shrewd. One of his tricks was getting certain girls to follow him—a group of fashion models who went wherever he told them to go. He would tell them, “Come to this club for a week or two and drink your brains out.” If a club was dying a little, he’d send his army of models, and it would get hot again.

  Bradley had other tricks, too. He told us, “Always keep a line of people outside on the street. I don’t care if the club is empty inside. I want people outside dying to get in.”

  No matter how much LSD he took, Bradley knew his business better than anybody.

  ONCE WE were in the club world, in the summer we did what everybody else did. We left the city. Everybody went to the Hamptons or Fire Island. Andy and I rented houses in both places at different times, but on Fire Island we found an incredible old farmhouse on the water that we got for nothing because the owner was a degenerate gambler who owed my uncle. I bought my first nice boat, a Donzi† that we used for water-skiing. Both Andy and I had dogs, and they wouldn’t let you take dogs on the ferry to the island, so we’d hire a helicopter or a seaplane.

  The seaplanes picked us up by the East River. One time Andy and I got in the plane wacked out on PCP. The thing that fascinated me about flying over New York was the bridges. That day we got up in the air, and I told Andy, “I’m going to force this motherfucker to fly our plane under a bridge.”

  Andy laughed. “He ain’t gonna do it, Jon.”

  “Oh, I’m going to make him do it.”

  “What do you mean you’re going to ‘make him do it’?”

  I pulled my piece out. “Andy, I’m going to put this up that pilot’s ass if he don’t do it.”

  “Don’t do that to the pilot, Jon. He’s flying us.”

  But I’m tripping hard. Everything is becoming out of proportion in my mind. I’m going crazy because I want to fly under a bridge. My dog, a beautiful Doberman named Brady, could feel my aggression.

  Brady gets uptight and lunges at the pilot.

  The pilot screams, “Control your dog.”

  I say, “Look, man. I communicate with my dog. My dog wants to fly under the bridges. He’s scared to go over the bridges at this point in time.”

  Andy starts laughing his ass off. He takes his gun out, aims it at the pilot, and says, “Do what the dog says.”

  This poor pilot. He flies under every bridge for us.

  The next week when we called his company for another plane, the owner apologized for the pilot. “He should not have argued with you,” he said.

  This man knew who we were. I was barely twenty-one, and Andy and I lived like kings—if you can imagine kings who smoke PCP every day.

  * The original Directoire was on 48th Street between Third and Lexington.

  * An aspiring actor in the late 1960s, Roundtree found fame in 1971 playing Shaft in the film of the same name.

  * Sullivan banned the Doors from his show after Jim Morrison sang “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” from the song “Light My Fire.”

  * Not the same Luna restaurant in the Bronx below Jon’s parents’ apartment. La Luna was a classic Neapolitan eatery off Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy.

  * The actor, director, and screenwriter who died in 1989.

  † Directoire fashions rose out of the French Revolution and emphasized a classless informality that influenced the styles of the 1970s.

  † Ed Sullivan was host of The Ed Sullivan Show, which ran for twenty-three years on CBS and introduced America to such performers as Elvis and the Beatles.

  † Sanctuary, located in an old Baptist church on West 43rd Street, featured a mural with fornicating angels. It billed itself as the “most decadent discotheque in the history of the world.”

  † The Donzi was a premier small racing boat made by legendary boat racer and builder Don Aronow.

  17

  JUDY: Of course I went to Jon’s clubs. I loved to dance. Everybody loved Directoire. It was such a wonderful time to be in New York.

  When Jon first came back from Vietnam, I worried so much for him. He was so withdrawn. I was living in Boston then. I’d divorced my husband and was finishing my degree at Emerson College. I moved to New York a year later.

  What a difference that year made. Jon was so successful in the nightclub-management business. He was on top of the world. He had impeccable clothes. Everything was tailored. He wore custom boots and carried a cane. He had the craziest collection of canes.

  I got to know Jon’s friend Andy. They were inseparable. Andy was a very nice guy. I was not clueless. I knew Andy was not a nice, nice guy. Maybe he was a bad guy. But he was a nice bad guy. To me, he was a man of his word. I could look in Andy’s eyes and see he wasn’t all bad. He was a caring person. He was a genuine person. I believed he was a good influence on my brother.

  J.R.: Andy woke up every day with a new scheme. Andy had a guy in the main U.S. post office. When the credit card companies sent out new cards, they’d arrive in duffel bags at the post office. Every few weeks Andy’s mailman would steal a duffel bag of new credit cards and sell them to Andy. He’d roll up to my apartment in his Lincoln and yell, “Come on, Jon. Let’s go burn some cards.”

  We’d buy thousands of dollars of merchandise up and down Manhattan. We made money from the scheme, but we did it mostly for kicks.

  Any information we found, we’d figure out a way to use it.

  We had that maître d’ at Maxwell’s Plum who was a degenerate gambler. When he fell behind on his debts, he earned his way out by telling us wher
e they kept the safe at Maxwell’s Plum. We sent guys in to rob it.

  When I worked those two weeks at E. F. Hutton, I made friends with a stockbroker about my age. We met again after I was into the nightclubs. He had moved to Merrill Lynch and had an idea as to how to steal bearer bonds. This scheme was so big, I took it to my uncle Joe. He brought in a kid from another family, Vincent Pacelli,* who had done broker-firm rip-offs before. They stole a million in bearer bonds. Everybody made out, though later on that scheme ended up causing some problems for my uncle.†

  Every day Andy and I were like sharks looking for more people we could swallow.

  • • •

  ANDY AND I both loved dogs. He had a little bitch Doberman named Nicky, and she was best friends with my Doberman, Brady. We used to train our dogs together. You have to work to keep your dog aggressive. If the dog doesn’t bite somebody occasionally, the dog will get rusty.

  What we used to do with our dogs was not very nice, but I was not a nice person back then, and this is what we did: We would drive down to the Lower East Side. There was an area where all the bums would build fires in trash cans and stand around drinking. We’d pull up. I’d get out of the car with a twenty-dollar bill and say, “Hey, man. Here’s twenty.”

  “Twenty dollars?” The bum would be all happy.

  “In a few seconds you’re going to do me a favor,” I’d explain.

  Andy would let out one of our dogs from the car and yell, “Get him!”

  His dog or my dog would go after the bum. The dog would knock these bums to the ground and bite them all over. When the dog got his senses resharpened by attacking a person, we’d pull him off. If the bums were really bitten bad, I’d throw them an extra twenty.