The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  We moved into a North Miami Beach rental, but she felt lonely and isolated in Florida. To be honest, her hometown was the only place on earth where Sheila seemed to be truly comfortable.

  To satisfy my wife’s Ontario longing, I purchased the best house in Cornwall that I could lay my hands on. But at the same time I also bought a three-bedroom townhouse on the canal in Hallandale for $120,000. The two homes symbolized my split-personality life. I had one foot in the past and one in the present. Sheila and the kids spent time at the Hallandale townhouse, but the scene wasn’t exactly domestic. She retreated to her hometown nest during the week, flying back down with Jen and Mandy only on weekends.

  For myself, Canada was fast receding in the rearview. I unloaded the Aardvark, and the new owners installed a restaurant and tried to keep the club going, but it died the good death a few years later. I went back to Cornwall often enough at first, but less and less as time passed.

  Instead, I focused on realizing my vision in Florida. Right away, I brought on board a lighting-and-sound designer from Montreal, Paul Sciotte. His business was growing as fast as mine was. He had done lighting installations in Montreal and Quebec clubs that were impressive for their day—strobes, spinning mirror wheels, “meteor chasers,” trippy stuff like that.

  Exploiting a program designed to support small businesses, we convinced the Canadian government to grant a million-dollar loan to Paul’s Montreal-based company. In the interest of stimulating the national economy, and not caring that the loan would actually be used to remodel a club in America, Ottawa handed us the money, amortized over five years at over $16,000 a month. I put most of the million into lighting and sound, creating the most up-to-date nightclub infrastructure anywhere in the South.

  Paul brought along a friend of his, Brian MacGuigan, who would eventually go on to become my indispensable right-hand man. With a few former Rum Bottoms employees who proved to be great finds, our team was coming together. Bob Lombardi was an employee who had been wasted at the seedy club, revolutionizing the art of deejaying with the use of “carts,” or tape cartridges, instead of vinyl discs. He could set up a set list for a whole night on just a few cassettes. Long before it became the standard for EDM, or electronic dance music, Lombardi was experimenting with the beats-per-minute approach to programming music.

  My operations manager was also a Rum Bottoms alum. Functioning as operations chief but without the formal title, Fred Levin put his nose diligently to the grindstone without any pressure from me, logging as many hours at the club as I did. I took care of the music and ambience, while Fred handled pretty much everything else. He was the kind of superdedicated employee who appeared to have no life at all outside of work.

  I have a bedrock-basic business principle: I know what I don’t know, meaning I’m aware of my own limitations, so I have to find employees who can fill in the gaps. I don’t have time to be good at everything. That rule had served me well at Aardvark, and I applied it even more rigorously in Florida while creating the new, much-larger club. I kept my staff small and employed that core crew to optimum effect.

  Everything seemed to be falling into place. I had the basic box of the old Rum Bottoms buffed up and refurbished, with state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems installed courtesy of the Canadian government. I also put in a killer dance floor fabricated out of brushed steel. The only thing left was to come up with a name. By that time, I had more or less abandoned the whims of youth, along with the idea of naming a club after a cartoon character, so Aardvark was out of the question.

  The fundamental principle that I had taken away from the disco conference kept coming back to me: In disco, the customer is the show. In the theater world and in cabaret, there’s something called a solo spot or a follow spot, a tight spotlight that tracks a single performer around the stage. I wanted the dancers who came to my club to have that feeling, that the focus was all on them. Paul Sciotte understood the concept immediately, and the lighting arrays he installed had the capability to single out people on the floor. It seemed like a huge selling point, and I wanted to telegraph it with the name. I considered calling the club “Spotlight” but it sounded generic, too literal.

  But what about Limelight?

  The word limelight had nothing to do with the citrus fruit, but rather referred to limestone—or, more specifically, calcium oxide, which was used in the lighting technology that had been invented in the 1830s. The phrase “in the limelight” meant being the center of attention. It was perfect, evoking visions of club-goers busting out their signature moves on the dance floor.

  So the old Rum Bottoms became the new Limelight. At the very least, I thought, the name change represented a step up. I thought we were finally ready to throw open the doors. I had my core team lined up—me, Fred, a part-time receptionist, and seven security people. Bartenders and barbacks could be rotated in and out.

  I figured that I could get away with a bare-bones security staff—essentially one security person per 280 people, give or take—because to say that the local police were in our pocket would be an understatement. I made it a priority to set up a friendly relationship with the Hallandale police force, getting to know them personally and offering them preferential treatment at the venue. I felt sure they would smooth over any problems and keep the lid tightly screwed down on the whole area.

  As it turned out, the local cops came cheap. In fact, they didn’t require grease at all, beyond the literal grease contained in the bar foods we offered them. To my northern eyes, they were all Southern good ol’ boys. When they came to the club as customers, in plain clothes, they humbly paid their own way in.

  But before I took over the lease and officially made the place my own, I received a slap-in-the-face introduction to another dominant feature of South Florida culture. The old Rum Bottoms owners had a couple of upcoming events already in place. The biggest was an awards night for the local queer community, modeled on the Oscars, handing out prizes for the best drag costume, best wigs, best shoes—an event that was half joke, half deadly serious.

  “Hey, it’s a big party,” one of the owners told me. “It always makes a lot of money.”

  He handed over the keys and I kept the party on the books. The crowd that evening wound up blowing the provincial mind of petit Pierre from Ontario.

  At that point I had only the vaguest notions about the queer community. In Cornwall, homosexuality was still padlocked in the closet. My mother and her generation couldn’t even bring themselves to believe that Liberace was gay—they kept waiting for him to meet the right woman. The way I grew up wasn’t really steeped in prejudice, but rather in a near total lack of experience with and understanding of queer culture.

  When I walked into the club that night, a raucous crowd of two thousand greeted me, wearing everything from fishnets, ball gowns, and feather boas to chaps. Most of the men were bare chested. The bouffant hairdos on the drag queens towered two feet tall. I thought I’d stepped into a Fellini film set crossed with a Mardi Gras carnival.

  I was shocked and couldn’t figure out how to act. I was thrilled to have the club packed, but I sequestered myself in my office for much of the night, just trying to puzzle out what I’d gotten myself into. South Florida in the seventies was the recognized winter refuge of every gay person in America. From the snowy north they came, and from small towns everywhere, places where, if they stayed, they would be mocked and tortured.

  When timid Peter Rabbit finally emerged from hiding and walked out among the partiers, I encountered crazed energy, pure happiness, and not a whiff of negativity or violence. The crowd was exuberant, the vibe was full of celebration and acceptance, and right at that moment I felt the ground shift beneath my unsophisticated feet. The awards night reemphasized a basic lesson in humanity for me: there is no “them,” only us. The people in the club were my people, dancing and partying and enjoying their lives. My new philosophy became Whatever floats your boat, God bless you—at least it works that way for you.


  I would soon learn that a flamboyant clientele didn’t even register on my list of worries. All during the run-up to the opening, I kept waiting for the mythic violent American dark side, the America of The Godfather and Mean Streets, to appear at my door. But things were pretty tame—no gangsters, no Mafia, no muscle. Between the constant police presence and the absence of the barroom brawls I’d had to ward against in Cornwall, Florida seemed to be a dream. The only thing we had to watch out for, I thought, was overindulgence and sloppy behavior.

  Late one night, when I had just taken the keys from Rum Bottoms, I told one of my security guys to eighty-six a customer who was drunk and acting up. That night Sergeant Shep, a thick-necked local cop, was posted outside the club.

  “Get rid of him,” I said, imagining the drunk customer would be escorted to the parking lot and sent on his way.

  Instead, my security guy, Nicky, a big bouncer with hands like catchers’ mitts, gave the troublemaker a stiff backhand slap. The drunk crumpled to the ground. I was appalled. The guy rose up screaming, appealing to Sgt. Shep.

  “Did you see that?” he shouted. “I got assaulted!”

  “I know what I saw,” Sgt. Shep responded mildly. “I know if you aren’t out of here in thirty seconds I’ll run you down to the station.”

  Welcome to South Florida. I concluded that I might have to establish some guidelines about removing unruly patrons from the club. No sucker punches allowed.

  The other events remaining on the Rum Bottoms books came off without a hitch. The renovations were in place. Now I needed to build a fan base for parties at Limelight. These were the days before invitations, guest lists, and promoters in charge of getting warm bodies into the club. I exploited other approaches.

  Announcing the debut of Florida Limelight would be the first and only time I ever bought ads on local radio. It was also the first and only time I used aerial banners—airplanes flying along the beaches, trailing massive ads for the venue. I now presided over the largest nightclub in South Florida, at thirty thousand square feet. Legal capacity was two thousand people, five times what my old club in Cornwall could handle. In a pinch I could squeeze in twenty-five hundred or even three thousand. Those numbers gave me the cash flow that enabled booking big acts.

  On the new club’s official opening night, I suffered an acute attack of insecurity. What was I thinking? This is America, this is the big leagues. Lucky that I kept my home base in Cornwall, I thought. Gauging my chances of success on a scale of one to ten, I gave myself a one. But as had happened at the Aardvark and even with the Pant Loft, there was a long line waiting when we threw open the doors. Somehow, via radio, airplane banners, or word of mouth, the news had gotten out. Limelight packed them in.

  But the line didn’t alleviate my anxiety. I was too busy to bask in my success. And, let’s face it, you can take the boy out of Cornwall, but there’s no way to totally eradicate Cornwall from the boy. Those first nights running a nightclub in Florida opened my eyes to a lot of things. Cocaine, for one. It was the first time I’d ever seen the stuff. We had a game room in the venue, and there was a guy in there chopping up white powder with a credit card on the glass top of a pinball machine.

  “What’s he up to in there?” I asked one of my security people, who shot me a look of pure pity, as if I were some kind of babe in the woods.

  Again, welcome to South Florida. Soon enough, Miami would be buried in the white powder, and snowbird—a Canadian who flew to Florida for the winter—would take on an entirely different meaning.

  Ninety-nine percent of success is being in the right place at the right time. I was the owner of a megaclub in South Florida the year John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever hit America like a Mack Truck in platform shoes. If disco had been headed for a slump, it now reconquered the world with a vengeance. All I had to do was ride the wave.

  Booking acts wasn’t exactly rocket science, but you had to have a gift. It took a lot of time, finessing, and research, getting a feel for what was going down before it happened. I simply relied on my instincts, somehow summoning the chutzpah to follow through on them. I kept telling myself that I was the guy who’d booked Rush before they broke big.

  Limelight’s liquor license allowed us to stay open until six a.m. In the booking contracts for the club, I specified two sets a night, the first at twelve thirty or one o’clock, and a second an hour or two later. I was always pushing to have the last show come on as late as possible, in order to keep the crowd beyond the first set. But that was a struggle, since most of the acts just wanted to get their appearances over with and head home. Regardless, we were packing them in and keeping them late.

  Our biggest break came when I booked Village People, four months in advance of their actual appearance at the club. Their Macho Man album hadn’t dropped yet when I signed them, but I knew that the cowboy/hardhat/cop/leather-man gimmick was great, simply because everyone likes dress-up. From the beginning, the act had perfect crossover appeal between the queer and straight worlds.

  Four months later, when Village People finally hit Limelight, “Macho Man” was in nonstop rotation on local radio, and I had the hottest act in the country. The song was so ubiquitous on the airwaves that I remember people asking me what the hell was going on. “What’s the secret—does your uncle own the radio station or something?”

  Lightning struck not twice, but again and again. The Trammps had appeared at Limelight in 1977, the week before Easter, when “Disco Inferno” was in such heavy rotation that it was being played every tenth song. Eventually I booked every top disco act with the exception of Donna Summer, who was too big for the venue. But we had Grace Jones, Two Tons O’ Fun, Sister Sledge, Gloria Gaynor.

  Limelight was an instant hit.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Atlanta

  In fall 1978, I found myself increasingly restless. The voice of reason spoke to me once again: Peter, what are you thinking? You have this fabulous club operating full tilt in one of the greatest nightlife markets in the world, in a state that draws more people than pretty much anywhere else—and you’re not happy? My response was to book myself on a flight to Houston so I could check out the potential for a club there.

  Part of the trouble was that I never really liked Florida. I missed the seasons. Other factors figured in. Narco violence was just beginning to rear its ugly head. Miami was a huge market, and that had a downside in increased traffic and crowding. A thousand people moved to Florida every frigging day. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they? But Fuck ’em, I thought. It was time for me to set my sights on a new horizon.

  Ever since opening, I routinely had patrons telling me how a club like Limelight would really blow up big in a place like (fill in the name of a midsize city here—Cleveland, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Houston, etc.). What none of them understood was the thing that made a club work was a pool of hip, creative people, the kind of scene-makers who could inject a little life into nightlife. Eager to mount a new venture, I was willing to chase down any lukewarm tip. I spent a week in Cleveland one night, as they say. Day or night, I couldn’t find a pulse.

  I flew to Houston. There was certainly a lot of money lying around waiting to be plucked up. America’s oil-and-gas industry was steadily pumping black gold from the ground and funneling it into the pockets of Houston plutocrats. But therein lay the problem. The whole town was full of fat cats in cowboy hats and bolo ties, and those were not the customers who would supercharge the kind of club I envisioned.

  A side trip to Dallas made a slightly better impression, but I still wasn’t convinced. There’s a Texas saying about poseurs being “all hat and no cattle,” and I couldn’t imagine either one, Stetsons nor livestock, on my dance floor. The queer population in the city seemed to be closeted or running scared, and if you don’t have a healthy percentage of gay people in a nightclub, it turns into a boring hetero meat market.

  A real-estate broker in Dallas took me around to potential properties. She showed me the Texas Theatre
, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after he murdered JFK.

  “This place has a real kind of historical value,” she said.

  The wrong kind, I thought, and I left the state without discovering any prospects.

  Then I had a casual conversation with a barback kid at the Florida club, who told me tales of the great nightlife scene in his hometown of Atlanta. At that point, I had such a hair-trigger sensibility that it didn’t matter where the input came from, a professional broker or a twenty-year-old bartender’s assistant. I was on the next plane to Georgia.

  In 1978, Atlanta was climbing out of a real-estate slump that had hit the town a few years earlier. The local economy was on the upswing, but there were still a lot of empty properties to choose from. It turned out the barback kid had lied. There was no real nightlife in Atlanta. The whole of downtown emptied out at six o’clock, with everyone retreating to outlying districts. Still, there was something about the place that held my interest.

  I found a failing dinner theater, the Harlequin, in the fashionable-but-sleepy Buckhead neighborhood of “uptown” Atlanta. It didn’t matter that the area was suburban, well beyond the city center, and altogether out of the way. Long before I ever saw the movie Field of Dreams, I had an attitude of “If you build it, they will come.” The interior of the abandoned Harlequin had a spooky Phantom of the Opera feel, with a greenroom that was still full of old show costumes. I applied my “buying the box” logic and, in this case, concluded that the box was large enough to suit my purposes.

  I thought the theater’s old orchestra pit would serve as a great sunken dance floor. Back then, every club owner had the same idea about how a disco should look, spun directly out of their Saturday Night Fever fantasies. In the movie, John Travolta struck his iconic poses on a glass dance floor, and the lighting underneath the glass had shown off the dancers to great effect. I found the aesthetic boring and already passé, and I sought to advance beyond the routine glass-and-lights formula. In place of the usual bank of spotlights, there had to be something else that I could put beneath the new Limelight’s dance floor.