by Peter Gatien
My mind buzzed. What would be cool? What would be cooler than cool? I’d always been haunted by one of my earliest childhood memories, when I encountered a neighbor’s black cat, its back arched, fangs bared, spitting evilly. It was one of my first interactions with an animal, and it left a terrifying impression. That memory came back to me, and I couldn’t help wondering what a cat might look like, roaming around underneath a glass dance floor.
Not a housecat, of course, but how about a very big, very scary cat? The more I thought about it, the more I set my heart on finding a panther for hire. A sleek, long-clawed, dangerous-looking panther. There had to be one in some zoo or wildlife sanctuary that I could borrow.
In America, you can get anything you want for a price. The owner of a private menagerie had a panther that had been trotted out for show at basketball games, car-dealership openings, and similar events. We would build an enclosure below the dance floor deep enough so the panther could move freely.
As we underwent renovations, I started to talk up the idea. I hired a New York publicity firm for the Atlanta opening. The effect was electric. Every inch of newspaper coverage, every mention on the five o’clock news programs included my plans for a disco panther. I gotta see this was the universal reaction.
Not every response was positive. The Georgia chapter of the ASPCA got wind of the plan and took me to court to prevent it. I immediately transformed back into the trembling kid from Cornwall, terrified of authority. I worried I might be arrested and given the heave-ho back to my native country. With a measure of fear and loathing, I hired a lawyer and showed up to face off with the ASPCA.
Through the real-estate broker who showed me the Harlequin, I met a lawyer named Jay Block, an elegant Southern squire who knew the judge from previous legal cases. As we headed into the courtroom, Jay asked if I was worried.
“I can’t lose,” I responded, putting on a brash face.
“What do you mean, you can’t lose?” he asked. “It could go either way.”
“It’s about publicity, Jay,” I responded, coming off as the know-it-all adult I was desperately trying to be. “If the judge rules in our favor, I get to keep the cat, and there’s obvious publicity value to that. But if the ruling goes against us, that’s free publicity, too.”
Jay shook his head, an old-school attorney gaining insight into the topsy-turvy realm of nightlife. He already thought I was a little crazy to open Limelight. A giant disco would never succeed in Atlanta, he predicted. The city was too traditional, too set in its ways.
Whatever he thought about our chances of success, Jay was in top form arguing my case. He pointed out that the panther in question would have a familiar handler nearby at all times, and that it had already been shown at dozens of events.
“It’s accustomed to the public eye, Your Honor,” Jay said, keeping his tone even. “That’s how the animal makes its living.” The more strident voices came from the other side, with the ASPCA lawyers predicting the big cat’s death by heart attack.
“Well . . .” The judge began his decision on whether to grant an injunction. “I used to have an old hound dog.” He spoke in a grits-thick Southern drawl.
“That old boy, well, we lived near some railroad tracks, and he would raise a darn howl to beat the band every time the B&O freight went by and blew its whistle. He’d a-rooo like it’d be the death of him. But just a tick of the clock later he’d be all settled down to his noonday nap, sweet as sugar.”
The judge slammed his gavel down and denied the ASPCA’s request for an injunction. He’d let the club open with the animal in place, he announced, and have someone monitor the situation after the first night.
So I got to keep my big cat, and more than that, I had found myself a steadfast friend, mentor, and advocate in the person of Jay Block. I could have lost to the ASPCA, and the entire episode would still have been worth it because of Jay’s influence on my life from that time forward.
When we had our grand opening, a full-size panther roamed beneath the glass dance floor, my childhood nightmare come to life. There didn’t need to be any deep psychological strategy here, as though I were caging my youthful fears in order to tame them. Sometimes a panther is just a friggin’ cool panther.
In hindsight, I realize the panther wasn’t such a great idea. In terms of publicity, yes, it served a function extremely well. But my empathy for animals has developed a lot in the decades since. Back then, I considered the big cat to be a showbiz professional. I was paying a fee for a booking, and the creature duly put on a show. Today, I cringe at the whole concept, but the animal was neither spooked nor overly impressed by the whole herd of human bipeds thundering above it. The cool cat spent most of the time under the glass fast asleep.
Either by the disco panther or simply because Atlanta lacked nightlife, the hook had been well set. Outside the club, the line to get into the most talked-about new venue in town stretched for blocks down Piedmont Road. An overwhelming sense of excitement mixed with the homegrown scent of magnolia blossoms. Atlanta saw itself as a burgeoning metropolis, and the demand for big-city-style nightlife didn’t disappoint. The club had over five thousand entries that first night.
I had another smash hit on my hands. When Jay Block showed up on opening night, I tried to keep the “told you so” smirk off my face. He was delighted to be proven wrong about a big disco in his hidebound hometown.
Due to the splashy opening and the efforts of the New York PR firm, Limelight didn’t remain just a local phenomenon. It became a national one. I had sent invites to several tastemakers, people I thought of as “lead horses,” whom the rest of the herd would follow. These were celebrities I knew from the Miami club, such as Grace Jones, and a few new ones, like Tina Turner and Rod Stewart. But the camera flashes flared brightest for the lead stallion of them all, the Pittsburgh-born son of Slovakian immigrants, Andrew Warhola, better known as Andy Warhol.
Among a certain sector of the population, and certainly in the opinion of the fashion and society beau monde, Andy Warhol’s presence at the Limelight meant that I had arrived. In fact, Andy had agreed to cosponsor the event. The invitation to the club opening read “Peter Gatien and Andy Warhol invite you . . .” His presence ensured the opening would be covered by the must-read gossip column, New York Post’s Page Six.
Ever since I’d entered the nightclub business, I’d had to remind myself of the fact that patrons never came out to see me. I put a lot of energy into making a product, creating an environment. Gratified as I was by the acclaim that I received personally, I realized no one was showing up to hang out with Peter.
Some club owners took a different approach. It was the era of Studio 54 and Steve Rubell, who became his own kind of celebrity by throwing himself into partying with his patrons. The media labeled me “the anti-Rubell,” which was not exactly a compliment. To journalists and cultural commentators, I was “stiff,” “aloof,” “holier-than-thou.” As Mick Jagger once noted, if you don’t do interviews, if you don’t willingly self-promote and play along with the fame game, then the press derides you as arrogant.
Yes, I was an elusive presence, on my way to earning the nickname “the Ghost” from my staffers, mainly because I tended to behave like one. Popping up here and there throughout the evening, I would vanish back in my office almost before anyone noticed me. Busy running my clubs, I kept my private life carefully veiled, shielding my persona behind my eye-patch façade. Which was probably a good idea, since in the personal sphere my life had been crumbling for some time.
If you’d like to know the story of my first marriage, check out Bruce Springsteen’s song “The River.” It tells a story about life in a small factory town much like Cornwall, where “they bring you up to do like your daddy done,” and a sad relationship between high-school sweethearts who married too young.
That was Sheila and me. We got hitched when we were teenagers, before we had figured out the direction our lives would take, how we wanted to live, where we’d set d
own roots. We had an enormous amount of change and transformation ahead of us. As with all too many young marriages, we didn’t have the tools to make it.
Running clubs meant that I consistently kept late-night hours. The moment when the real fissure cracked open was when I had an affair during my Aardvark days. To my young, unenlightened male mind, I considered it meaningless. But Sheila found a letter that had evidence of my dalliance. She never really trusted me again. In her eyes, I’d broken our partnership. In retrospect, it was a fair conclusion for her not to trust me. My priorities had shifted. My real love, from Miami onward, was Limelight, nightlife, or what Billy Strayhorn once labeled the lush life. How could the domestic sphere compete with the energy, exuberance, and endless possibilities of that?
My rival, when it came to Sheila, was Cornwall. In this world, there are those who strive to leave their hometowns and those who don’t. One choice isn’t better than the other; they’re just two separate desires. The small villages of the world probably owe a debt of gratitude to New York, London, Paris, and all the other great metropolises, for siphoning off the troublemakers and keeping the backwoods sleepy and peaceful.
It was clear to me, from the moment I flew to New York, that my life would happen outside Cornwall. When Sheila and I got married, I’m sure she assumed we would set up a life in our hometown and live near her family. The point is, we simply didn’t talk about our diverging goals, because they weren’t fully formed yet. To me, our future had seemed so open, so limitless. To her, our future had boundaries set by community and family.
My brash attempt to transfer my family from Canada to South Florida never really happened. By the time I opened the second Limelight in Atlanta, my marriage was over. Sheila and I had been living apart for some time. In 1978, we divorced. I had started a relationship with a bright, simpatico woman named Adrienne Norman, and she moved with me to Atlanta.
Almost as soon as I left, the Florida Limelight became a bridge that literally burned behind me. I should have seen the fire coming. I had sold the club in September and it became a smoking ruin three months later. According to the terms of the deal, I kept the deed to the building and leased the place to new owners for $900,000. They paid $300,000 down. Newbie businessman that I was, I hadn’t spelled out terms as to liability in case of fire. Soon after the ink was dry, the former Rum Bottoms burned to the ground.
When the place went up in flames, the insurance company labeled it arson and refused to pay damages. The new owners managed to lose the case in court, and I saw over a half million dollars in equity vanish like smoke. Still possessing the deed to the property, I managed to sell the land later for $550,000. So in the end I didn’t take too much of a bath, but the entire fire and its aftermath represented a pesky distraction.
Luckily, I was really coming into my own with the Atlanta club. A smash opening was one thing, but keeping the momentum going on a consistent basis was another. From the start we got top-notch media exposure, but what really had patrons coming back for more were the creative strides we made. I became obsessed with continually refreshing the club environment. A credo came together in my mind, defined by the phrase “Clubs create culture.” I began to repeat that phrase to my employees.
What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? was my constant inner refrain. After a single appearance, I retired the panther. I remember giving the beast its walking papers as it sprawled, purring, atop the desk in my Limelight office, the handler by its side. It really was a tame pussycat. I mentally thanked the magnificent animal for generating such a huge opening-night buzz.
My crew proved to be a collection of construction wizards, taking only a single day to install a large saltwater pool in place of the panther cage. I hired a troupe of topless mermaids to float alluringly below the dance floor, but their shifts had to be limited or they would turn into total prunes.
Out with the . . . In with the . . . I wound up stocking the tank with sand sharks, and, surprisingly, liked them even better than the mermaids. Somehow, the movement of the creatures seemed to match the pulse of the music above them. Patrons used to pull up and stand stock still on the dance floor, mesmerized by the show below their feet. Meanwhile, the ASPCA didn’t raise objection, their jurisdiction evidently limited to big cats and other species higher on the evolutionary ladder than sand sharks.
The house DJs pumped music through the club’s monster 100,000-watt audio system, leaning heavily on European disco. I felt dance music from the continent was a little more advanced than the American brand, with groups such as ABBA and Arabesque breaking into the mainstream. What came to be called Euro disco was busy giving birth to house, space disco, and techno. That sound eventually morphed into EDM, the winner and still champion of the current nightlife world.
Homegrown artists contributed their fair share of tracks, too, especially the women. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Chic’s “Le Freak,” Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” were all topping the charts. Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album dropped in 1979, and we played the shit out of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.”
The late seventies was the absolute greatest period to own a club—pre–herpes contagion, pre–AIDS plague, when the DEA’s War on Drugs hadn’t yet reached the heights of madness it saw in the 1980s. People were doing coke back then, but nobody lost their minds, their jobs, their souls to the stuff. In that era, the drug’s reputation was more playful than evil. I blasted the Atlanta club two or three times a night with confetti that fell from the ceiling and looked like snow, a wink-wink-heh-heh reference to cocaine.
On weekends, along Piedmont Road, there was an hour or hour-and-a-half wait to enter. A grocery store next door came to be known as “Disco Kroger,” because so many tricked-out, platform-shoe-shod club-goers ducked out of our place and into the grocery for beverages. Before we opened, the neighborhood of Buckhead had been a tad stuffy, snooty, and upscale, with a lot of ostentatious mansions lining the residential streets. The conservative matrons of Buckhead didn’t know what hit them. Not through any pronounced intent, we contributed to the neighborhood’s transformation into the hipper high-rise shopping mecca it is today.
Atlanta Limelight was large enough, and the money flowed freely enough, that, for the first time in my career, I could really allow my imagination full rein. We did crazy-ass shit, lowering dancers from the ceiling to the dance floor in chains, setting up cabana tents in place of VIP rooms, throwing monthly events when we would perform a complete, multithousand-dollar makeover on the whole club to bring the décor into line with an established theme.
Right out of the box, the most successful theme night was Bare as You Dare. The Cornwall boy in me was shocked at how enthusiastically Atlanta embraced the concept. The city might have been located in the American Bible Belt, but that belt unbuckled pretty damned quickly. I saw more skin on Bare as You Dare nights than I would have in a strip club. Atlantans loved letting it all hang out.
From the street-level entrance to the club, a grand stairway led down to the dance floor, but in the anteroom or foyer at the top of the stairs I had art installations that changed every week. People could walk in and think they were entering an entirely new club. I paid K. P. Hendry, an employee who had experience as an artist and set designer, $5,000 a month to curate the space. In the spirit of “knowing what I don’t know,” I let her do whatever she wanted with the top-of-the-stairs minigallery.
K. P. was a wonder. She produced tableaus that were by turns funny, surreal, and disturbing: strange disco automatons called Glitter Bots, glamour-girl marionettes, a “white trash” panorama, plus seasonal stuff like a food fight between pilgrims for Thanksgiving and a Christmas set off The Nutcracker. All of it was sexy and impeccably stylish, and it served well as a calling card for the club.
Down on the dance floor, we showcased a troupe of dancers that I recruited from our regulars, terming them “exciters.” My staff insisted on calling them “twinkies,” telling t
hem the term was short for “twinkletoes,” but I suspected that it referred to the soft Hostess snack cakes. Whatever term they went by, they functioned as club kids before club kids existed, showing up every weekend, dressed to the nines and fiercely loyal to the place. In exchange for me waiving the nominal door charge, they essentially provided free entertainment, dancing atop six-foot-tall speakers on either side of the floor, or prancing along a black-and-white keyboard-style platform we had installed against one wall.
The exciters were as much of a draw as the music and the atmosphere. Human beings are a gregarious species. Even though no one readily admits it, the mundane reason anyone comes out to a club is for people-watching. The dancers atop the speakers were eye candy. One male dancer, Arturo, always stood out, wearing an all-leather outfit festooned with every buckle, snap, and chain known to man. Speaker dancing is actually a difficult feat, busting interesting moves within a space the size of a small kitchen table.
No one had ever before brought queer and straight crowds together in a city that was one of the capitals of the Deep South. No one in the whole state dressed like some of the gay patrons who came into Limelight. My experience in Miami allowed me to reinvent and integrate nightlife in Atlanta. Once I did, the two camps stared across the segregated divide at each other and decided they liked what they saw—or at least weren’t threatened by it. Atlanta came out, in both senses of the phrase, at a new nightclub in what was once fusty old Buckhead.