by Peter Gatien
From seven to nine each evening I tried to make it home for a stretch, hoping to remind my children that their father was a real living, breathing, physical presence. Family life required a whole different style of juggling. I had to head back to the clubs for the shank of the evening, playing the boss again from nine p.m. to four a.m. Patrons could party all night and never catch a glimpse of me. I usually made only occasional forays to the door to survey the crowd out front waiting “on line,” as they say in New York (in the rest of the country, of course, it’s “in line”).
The reason I was known for rarely being out front at my clubs was that I needed to be in my office doing business, planning future events, figuring out what was needed where and when. Keeping all the plates spinning and all the spot fires doused took up the bulk of my time. I stopped only a few times a night to take a breath, watching from a balcony or mezzanine as thousands of people cut loose.
Then there were what Jack Kerouac referred to as “urgencies false and otherwise,” events and circumstances nobody could possibly anticipate. For reasons known only to him, Tupac Shakur once appeared outside Palladium and began to shoot up the club’s marquee. We had to get the mercurial rap star bundled off and away from the scene before the cops showed. That incident happened around the same time that Johnny Depp came into Club USA to research his role for Donnie Brasco, bringing along a crew of street guys who were helping him get in character. True to form, his mob people and my security personnel got into a brawl over entry into the VIP room.
At Limelight, we once put up what the New York Times labeled “the oddest double bill of 1990 or 1991.” Cab Calloway opened the 1990 New Year’s Eve celebration at Limelight, and the other act on the bill that night, performance artist Laurie Anderson, was slightly abashed at having to follow the outrageous Hi-De-Ho Man onstage. “What they have in common,” stated the Times, “is that they both look spiffy in white suits.”
Prince often came out to my clubs, and His Purple Majesty fell head over platform heels for a bartender by the name of Raven who worked for me. Depending on the night, she would be assigned to any one of my four clubs. When the Purple One arrived at Limelight looking for her, we’d have to immediately send a car to Palladium, Tunnel, or wherever she was, to bring Raven back.
Then there was the time a young male club-goer, probably seeking some kind of boasting rights, approached Mike Tyson in Tunnel’s main room, took a beer out of the heavyweight champ’s hand, and deliberately slopped the liquid all over the man’s shoes. The outrageous move instantly snapped my security people into high alert, and nearby spectators froze, expecting a fight. But luckily, Tyson laughed his high-pitched giggle and strolled away. My staff and I had to be on our toes, ready to deal with whatever the night brought us, and no two nights were exactly the same.
A few of those nights beg to be erased from memory. There was a bathroom off the hallway near the Limelight VIP room with a sliding glass door, and as I passed by one night, a hand reached out and a voice called, “Have a paper square, mate?” I went to the supply closet and returned with a roll of toilet paper, handing it in to my longtime idol Mick Jagger, sitting regally unembarrassed atop the porcelain throne.
Nightclubs in New York City usually have the staying power of rainbows. It’s hard to believe, but the classic Rubell-and-Schrager Studio 54 scene endured only from spring 1977 until the infamous IRS raid on December 14, 1978—twenty months total. Danceteria, the World, and Area all survived for limited periods. I managed to put together a run that lasted for eighteen years.
For the better part of two decades, at least, my party never ended. Truth be told, I have to believe that if it weren’t for a certain New York City mayor and his wrecking-ball policies, my clubs would still be up and running. We would continually transform them as we always did, evolving our approach to fit the times and the trends, but they would still be packing them in.
I thought I was immune. I believed the dark side of nightlife would never touch me. And for a long time, it didn’t. All around me, the culture of illicit drugs took a toll, on the young and foolish, on the rich and famous, on nearly every human society in the world. But from the point when I began refusing shots at the Aardvark, through Limelights in Miami—where I had to ask what was happening the first time I saw a patron snort cocaine—and Atlanta, all the way up to the expansions into Chicago and London, I could have served as a poster boy for abstinence.
It wasn’t a case of never once touching a drug, but I didn’t dive into it with the fervor and recklessness I witnessed all around me. I just never really developed the taste, and I steered clear of a habit. I saw the best minds of my generation embrace illicit substances as a lifestyle. Marijuana in the sixties became cocaine in the seventies became you-name-it in the eighties. Methamphetamine, Ecstasy, Special K, Rohypnol, psychedelic mushrooms, GHB, heroin—and drug cocktails featuring a mix of these and other ingredients—all showed up with increasing frequency in the clubs.
None of it touched me much. As a club owner, I understood two contradictory truths. For legal and practical reasons, I could not allow substance abuse to occur in any venue I owned. At the same time, there was simply no possible way to prevent a pill, a dosed slip of paper, or a tiny packet of powder from coming into a club. I could have my customers searched until the cows came home and I would still fall short.
I wasn’t about to strip-search patrons or bring in drug-sniffing German shepherds, because I had to maintain some sort of balance between the buzz and the buzzkill. The government, the entity that in its wisdom passes laws against use of illicit drugs, also controls a sprawling system of prisons and jails. Strip searches, body-cavity searches, and, yes, drug-sniffing German shepherds are among the anti-smuggling measures in place, and yet substance abuse in those very jails is notoriously common. If John Q. Law can’t keep his own house in order, how could I be expected to?
We did the best we could. We were as clean as nightclubs could be. Lee Coles and others in my security detail went undercover among club-goers, confronting and tossing out anyone openly dealing or buying drugs. We confiscated whole pharmacies of substances during searches at the door. But to claim a zero-tolerance policy would have been a joke, though I never felt that my clubs were more drug-drenched than Wall Street or Hollywood.
So the darkness lapped at my shores, and I wielded brooms, shovels, and buckets in a constant but not totally effective effort to sweep it back and keep it out. What I didn’t expect was exactly what happened—the darkness seeped its way into my own life.
I can’t pinpoint the precise time when recreational use started to degenerate into a drug habit that affected my family. I enjoyed good wine but usually stayed clear of hard liquor, and I always dabbled in the recreational stuff—a hit or two of acid, a joint here, a rail or two of coke there. But in the mid-1980s, the stress of running four clubs broke down my defenses. The pressure began to feel murderous. I’d tried freebase cocaine, found a relief valve, and began resorting to it with increasing frequency.
I maintained at least a façade of being in control. I carefully constructed a firewall between my substance abuse and my personal and professional lives. I did drugs discreetly, off club premises and out of sight of colleagues and family. When the strain of plate spinning got to be too much for me to bear, I rented a hotel room, stocked up on the Bolivian marching powder, and binged.
My drug sprees lasted for a day or two, and occurred about four or five times a year. I imported party girls and went completely off the rails. In my mind I made bullshit justifications, telling myself that I couldn’t afford the time off to relax with a Barbados vacation or a trip to the French Riviera. A thousand-dollar-a-night suite in Manhattan was my only option. I used to strip off my clothes and then insist everyone else get naked, too. We never descended into group sex, but the scene turned pretty raucous and decadent.
My schedule was hectic enough that my wife never questioned my disappearing for days at a time. I could keep the wild
time-outs a secret from my family, though inevitably the truth came out in a nightmarish way. My daughter Jen was just a teenager when she arrived unannounced at the hotel where I was holed up, knocking at the door. I panicked. I knew I couldn’t have Jen catch me at the best of my worst, wrecked and disheveled.
“Now’s not a good time,” I shouted through the closed door.
I could only imagine her greeting me, peering over my half-naked shoulder toward the other unclothed occupants of the suite. The door remained shut, the symbolic barrier between us in place. I retreated farther into the suite where I couldn’t hear my daughter’s pleas. I didn’t physically curl up into a fetal position, and I never became so ashamed that I called a halt to what I was doing. I simply fired up the base pipe and hopped aboard the oblivion express once again. On the morning after, I staggered out of bed, rinsed my sinuses out with saline, and reported for duty at my clubs.
My family life was on the edge of imploding, and I was too selfish to realize it. I didn’t want to reckon with the mess I had made. I wanted only to look forward, to stay on the razor-sharp blade of the cutting edge.
The same year I opened New York Limelight, 1983, the longtime bureaucrat attorney Rudolph Giuliani jumped from one federal job to another, from associate attorney general of the US in Washington, DC, to US attorney for the Southern District of New York. Brooklyn-born Giuliani was a creature of Ronald Reagan, who as president made both appointments.
Rudy had started out as a political idealist, working for Bobby Kennedy’s doomed presidential campaign in the 1960s and voting for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential race. But eventually he came out of the closet as a craven opportunist, switching his voter registration to Republican a month after Reagan took office.
The newly minted Reagan man came from a famously corrupt family. Rudy’s bartender father was convicted of felony assault and robbery and did a stretch in Sing Sing prison, literally “up the river” from New York City. The elder Giuliani’s brother-in-law was a gambler and loan shark heavily involved in organized crime who, when in need of muscle, often employed his father-in-law, Rudy’s dad, the bartender-felon.
During the years when I was wandering around the globe opening up nightclubs, Giuliani was a very busy federal prosecutor in Manhattan, picking off four of the top five Mafia family bosses in the city. He missed nabbing one because before he got his chance, underboss John Gotti had the Gambino family godfather, Paul Castellano, murdered in front of Sparks Steak House, a few blocks away from Grand Central.
The crusading Giuliani was following the path to power of another New York gangbuster, Thomas Dewey—whose rise from the Brooklyn prosecutor’s office in the thirties, to busting racketeers, and finally to the New York governor’s mansion, was a perfect mirror career. Like Rudy, Dewey failed in his repeated attempts at the White House.
You have to wonder what Freud would have to say about Giuliani, a mobster’s son who made his bones going after mobsters. Or maybe Nietzsche is a better reference: “He who fights monsters should be careful, lest he becomes a monster.” Because that’s what Rudy would develop into: a monster who easily buried his father and his father’s brother-in-law in the scope of his corruption. Steal a little and they toss you into a cell at Sing Sing. Steal a lot and the president hires you as his attorney. With his wet mouth, hunched-over posture, and large, blocky head, Giuliani eventually turned into a cartoon character, or a fever dream out of a David Lynch movie.
But back when Rudy was making his first power moves as a US district attorney in New York, I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t think it mattered who the hell occupied the federal prosecutor’s chair, or, for that matter, who was in the mayor’s office or in the White House. Because I dealt with numerous neighborhood community boards, I was somewhat involved in local, street-level politics, but that was about it.
Donald Trump repeatedly showed up for parties and events at my clubs, and I always judged him as something of a clown. Because of my near-monopoly grip on the New York megaclub scene, the Times labeled me “the Donald Trump of the night”—a label I didn’t relish. But the comparison indicated that I was becoming establishment, at least as much as a nightlife entrepreneur could become part of the establishment.
I was too busy to pay much mind to what I was called. I’d branched out from clubs. I’d started Project X, a nightlife magazine. And in the wake of our success with A Bronx Tale, Dan Lauria and I formed a production company. We developed off-Broadway plays and also worked on feature films, including Faithful, a 1996 comedy directed by Paul Mazursky and starring Cher and Ryan O’Neal. Lauria and I branched out, and suddenly I had multiple film and theater production projects in development.
Such endeavors represented a place to park all those vast mountains of nightclub cash flowing into my coffers. There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino that takes place in the back rooms of Las Vegas, where the money piles up almost faster than it can be counted. That wasn’t exactly my situation, but the feeling was similar. During that period, 98 percent of my business was cash. No one laid a credit card on a bar tab back then. My weekly gross averaged a million-two. On weeks with holidays or three-day weekends, I took in double that amount.
I had to have eight cash-counting machines to tally it all. Monday mornings, the machines would be going full blast, totaling the weekend income from each of my four clubs—$300,000 from Limelight, $300,000 from Palladium, equal amounts or more from my other two clubs. It took hours to count it all.
In case of altercations, I always had security cameras installed at the front door of every club, but I never allowed them inside. I wanted to provide a sense of sanctuaries, away from the prying eyes of the outside world. Most of the people who worked for me were honest, but, as in any cash business, and especially while running a bar, the basic assumption is that there are those who will steal.
So while we never had an “eye in the sky,” I had to put systems in place to keep from being robbed blind. But we got jacked anyway, two times for over $100,000 each. The first time, I went down to the Tenth Precinct and filled out a report.
“We’ll check if there’s video,” the duty sergeant told me. I never heard from them. The second time we got jacked, I didn’t bother with a report. There were also several attempted robberies, botched by thieves who seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate the stupidity of the criminal class. The atmosphere around the clubs was such that I took out kidnapping insurance for myself and my family.
Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Did I have one eye closed, as Hova had said, or, as I like to think, one eye wide open? Whichever way you want to see it, something had to give during those fast and furious plate-spinning years. Some piece of pottery had to crash to the floor.
Predictably, what I lost was any semblance of a home life. The estrangement between Adrienne and me really began during the time I had Limelights in Chicago, London, and New York, while I was racking up the frequent-flyer miles trying to keep track of my far-flung empire. I recognized that my marriage was beyond saving. Adrienne and I had been living apart and finally legally separated in 1991.
Soon after that, I met Alessandra Koe, who worked the door at New York Limelight. We began dating, and Alessandra rose in the ranks of the company hierarchy. She demonstrated such tough-minded expertise that when the time came, I handed over the management reins of Palladium to her with perfect confidence. In 1993, we had a beautiful son together, Xander.
I remember a summer day in 1995, when Alessandra and I were coming out of one of my favorite haunts, Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant, Daniel. We strolled along Fifth Avenue toward our townhouse. Ever since Xander was born, my “lost weekend” binges had become a thing of the past. I felt healthy and more balanced than I’d ever been before. The sun was out and there was a slight breeze cooling us down. I had an incredible woman by my side.
As we walked I began to think of a book I had read when I was young, a rags-to-riches story that centered on the
glamorous world of Fifth Avenue. The title was lost to me, but the majority of what I’d read back then fell squarely into the enticing realm of trash fiction, so it was probably something from Jackie Collins or Jacqueline Susann. When I pored through those pages, the New York depicted in the novel had seemed like something from another planet. Yet there I was, part of the scene myself, with a home in the same neighborhood as Jackie O., eating at a world-class restaurant and feeling as though I belonged.
Against all expectations, I had reached a certain level of social respectability, of a kind not often accorded to nightclub owners. Disney, my squeaky-clean obsession, had asked me to develop a nightclub in a just-purchased Times Square property. Almost simultaneously, the committee handling the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics proposed that I design and operate its “Club Olympic” hospitality pavilion for athletes. Then CNN did a segment on me for its Pinnacle series, focusing on people at the tops of their fields. I was right up there alongside future billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Public Theater’s Joe Papp, and fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld.
Disney, CNN, and the Olympics. I couldn’t have asked for a better stamp of approval from society as a whole. The straight world, the Establishment, the people who lived their lives in the daylight had embraced me. An advertising campaign used to ask people at the peaks of their careers what they would do next, and I had the answer on the tip of my tongue: “I’m going to Disney World!”
I started playing a more active role in my family. We did, in fact, hit Disney World fairly often. In addition to a 10,000-square-foot Upper East Side townhouse, we had a weekend place in the Hamptons and a vacation home in Canada. I started to collect a fleet of luxury cars, indulging the kid who used to boast about his uncle’s Lincoln Continental. I had a Ferrari convertible, a pair of BMW 7 Series sedans, a Mercedes SL600, and a Lexus SUV at my disposal. My daughters were attending either private school or elite colleges: Jennifer at Columbia University, Amanda at USC, and Hunter in elementary grades at Trinity School. As a family or as a couple, we always traveled in first-class luxury.