by Grace Jones
What went on was in some way a harbinger of the haywire shamelessness of reality TV—minor celebrities fighting among minor celebrities to avoid losing their fame, demented role-playing, the not famous doing whatever it took to get some attention, the truly famous and aloof and immune watching it all as a kind of sport for their amusement.
It was really a place where you had these big, spectacularly designed parties, as though every night was an opening night. There really would be a naked black man leading a naked woman on a white pony through a curtain of gold streamers, pagan-style events with real circus animals; Armani welcomed with a drag queen ballet; cakes in the shape of Elizabeth Taylor presented by a marching army of decorated Rockettes. Carmen popped out of a cake at her own party, something I am very fond of doing to this day. Crowds would gather outside to get in, and if you were gorgeous enough, more than famous enough—although gorgeous and famous was the golden key—you would pass the door policy. Some would be desperate to do whatever it took to get from the outside to the inside, and then if they managed that, to get from the outer circle into the inner circle.
For the actual, original opening night Carmen sent out five thousand invitations promising a special gift. So many people turned up that legend has it that Cher, Woody Allen, and Warren Beatty couldn’t even get in. They say Frank Sinatra didn’t even bother to get out of his limo once he saw the chaos around the door as people fought to get inside.
Once you found yourself inside, 54 was a kind of heaven or a kind of hell, or both, of highness—the highness of drugs, of groomed, glistening noise punching out of massive speakers, of flash dancing, of close, thrilling association with the famous and infamous, or explicit displays of public affection. As you partied, in the sense of blowing your brains out, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Village People, Sylvester, Chic—and I—sang their songs. Andy Warhol said that when it was really fun, you expected someone to be murdered.
What went wrong was that Ian and Steve didn’t follow the New York rules as decided upon by the establishment. There would be more people outside than inside. It would be packed outside, and you would go inside and there would be all this space. And this made getting in even more of a priority among those people who were really never going to get in, because their faces or styles didn’t fit. I think they turned away top people, because Ian and Steve didn’t give a shit who you were. They knew how to achieve the right balance of people, the mixing of the famous and the unknown. They had an instinct about who would not fit in. They knew the kind of people they wanted to let in who would be part of this “personality salad,” and they knew who to turn away to avoid wrecking the flavor. And you never knew why you weren’t allowed in; you were simply turned away, thinking, I’m good-looking, I’ve got money, I’ve got a new tux. Never enough. It wasn’t about that. If you weren’t clearly bringing something to the party, some kind of personality that couldn’t be missed, then you were never going to get in.
And in the end, those who couldn’t get in, who felt they were missing out, decided to exact revenge. Some very important people or their sons could not get in. You think you have power? they said. We’ll show you power.
I think the powers that be were definitely alerted to the place by those who were rejected, either because they couldn’t get in or because they were sacked by the club for some misdemeanor or another. There was no way such a place dedicated to the most extreme form of pleasure could continue to exist without upsetting those on the outside. It was such an unreal place, and eventually it clashed with reality.
After the peak, the heyday of 54, which marked the end of the underground and the beginning of what decades later, deformed by democratization, became structured reality TV, Big Brother, The Bachelor, and the party island of Ibiza, you would come out of a club and it would be surrounded by cops and paparazzi, all of them looking—hoping—for problems. A problem is a story. That’s their currency. People have fun, and their pleasure causes a problem for those in charge, for those without access. So they seek out problems, ways to slow down the pace and subdue the provocateurs.
They started to target the clubs, through drugs, and taxes, and slimy tabloid outrage, because they wanted New York to be like it is now. Cleaned up, in their eyes. Under control. Much of the energy of the pop-culture celebrity music world as it is now evolved during those few years inside a very small area of Manhattan, but just as the pleasure-seeking wildness of Studio 54 was gutted, the energy that exploded out of the counterculture, and a belief in progressive change, has been domesticated.
It was the essence of dramatic transformation for performer and watcher. Fantasy made real. Really, it was a kind of showcase for the idea of disco—you’d go and do drugs, drink, mix with the famous, be the famous, and there would be people dancing, but in a much more planned way than in the clubs where disco was born, and in spots like the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and later the Saint, where the more curious music lovers would go.
Those clubs were the music connoisseur’s revenge after the excess of 54—more creative places where new hybrids of sound became new genres. Max’s was erased as a central place to hang out once the disco scene emerged, at least for the discriminating followers of fashion, or those more interested in the instant hit of a great night out. Punk and then new wave, disco, early electro—they were all in different rooms and places back then; the dots weren’t yet joined up, the tunnels between rooms and scenes not yet dug.
The dancers at 54 were increasingly hired to do the dancing, for free drinks and whatever, rather than the club being a place where people danced for real. Naked musclemen painted silver on horses covered with glitter seagulls dusted with white powder became more important than mere music. Studio 54 was an illusion, really, a very smart setup, the disco night out exaggerated into this absurd sensationalism—it was where the reality of disco was treated and distorted in the way Andy and company treated fame, art, shopping, and media. Disco as disco was destined to have fifteen minutes, which seemed to go by a lot quicker because the cocaine there was always the best; the vodka and quaaludes were the icing on the coke, and then next there was the hangover: You’d be in a really bad mood, flagging from your sins, and sometimes you’d feel like death.
I invited Nile Rodgers of Chic there for New Year’s Eve in 1977. The original 54 was only open for about three years, so there were actually only two New Year’s Eve parties held there. This was the first one. He came along with Bernard Edwards, Chic’s guitar player. I wanted them to produce my next album—as always, I wanted to work with the best. It was very cold, and snowing; they were both dressed up in their most expensive dress suits, proud disco princes with their finger on the pleasure pulse heading into the center of the disco universe. What could possibly go wrong?
They hadn’t yet totally broken into the mainstream, but they were already very popular. Their names weren’t on the guest list. Apparently that was my fault. I’m certain I put their names on the list, but I think at that point it was so full they weren’t letting anyone else in, not even around the back, where the celebrities got in. Whoever you were, even the ghost of Elvis, you wouldn’t have been let in. Standing in the freezing cold, they said that I had invited them, but still the doorman wouldn’t let them in. He told them to fuck off. That “fuck off” rang in their ears. Their music would be playing inside but they couldn’t get in.
They went home, fancy dancing shoes ruined by the snow. They were so angry that inside half an hour they had jammed up a new song on guitar and bass about their experience, with this groove that was as hot as it was cold outside, which they called “Fuck Off” in honor of the doorman who had barred their entry.
The chorus went, “Aaaah, fuck off.” It sounded like a hit song but obviously needed a different chorus, so they changed it to, “Aaaah, freak out.” They called the song “Le Freak,” which was about a brilliant new dance craze that they couldn’t even see because they couldn’t get into the club, and it was number one in America for weeks.
A year later it was the first track on a Studio 54 compilation album that Casablanca released, and it became the biggest-selling Atlantic Records single of all time. Without the “fuck off,” without me forgetting to put their names on the guest list, there would never have been “Le Freak.”
* * *
Norma Kamali designed my costume for the performance Nile and Bernard never got to see. She was going out with Ian Schrager at the time, and he asked her to make something for me. There was always this fascination with what on earth people were going to wear next; eventually what Bianca Jagger or Liza Minnelli was going to wear next became more important than what song was going to be played next. Norma had learned a lot from visits to London in the 1960s and was known for turning ordinary clothes into something else completely—taking fleece sweatshirts and turning them into flamboyant dresses. She had designed that red bathing suit Farrah Fawcett wore in what became a very famous poster.
Norma had me wear a very revealing and clingy, shiny gold unitard over a sticky, shimmering bodysuit. It wasn’t my usual stark but vivacious Miyake look, the fantastic turned into costume, but I went along with it. She wouldn’t have been my choice, but she was with Ian, and Studio 54 was the capital of disco, so it made sense. It wasn’t a Disney princess look, but a glitter-coated Studio 54 superhero princess look, all sparkle and feathers, from shaved head to silvery knee-high boots. Later, for my birthday party in 1978, I dressed up as Nefertiti, Egypt’s most beautiful royal queen. (Picasso had described Josephine Baker as “the Nefertiti of now.”) I rode onstage on a Harley motorcycle with Divine and various naked musclemen as part of my entourage. This was a frenzied fantasy world I felt very at home in.
I met Marianne Faithfull that New Year’s Eve. She once said she never hung out at Studio 54, that she didn’t have the clothes or the desire. She was definitely there, though, unless I’m making it up. Maybe it was the only time she went. I remember it well, because that was the moment she introduced me to Cocoa Puffs: marijuana cigarettes laced with cocaine. I would call them Mariannes, because she was the first person I smoked them with.
I was in my dressing room, which was actually an office, with drab filing cabinets and a little, stained toilet next to it, nothing painted. They hadn’t worked that part out. They’d worked out the music and the lights and the mix of people, but backstage was very basic, like a soiled hospital waiting room.
There was something going on with the payment of my fee. I didn’t want to go on until I had been paid. First rule: cash, then I will do the show. No cash, no show. Sy and Eileen weren’t allowed upstairs. They were banned from coming up to tell me there was no money. It was a chaotic night in all sorts of ways. There was a snowstorm, and people were pissed off that they couldn’t get in, but . . . once we got the cash, it was a success, as far as the show-business illusion went! Then it was back to earth. It ended pretty badly in the real world.
I got all the shit. I felt used—they hadn’t let my friends in; my managers were trying to reach me to say they hadn’t been paid all the money; I never got to meet Nile and record with him at the exact moment Chic were hitting their stride—in fact, I didn’t work with him for nearly ten years. But then, he did get a big hit song out of it.
* * *
I was still living mostly in Paris, regularly going back and forth. The Concorde made life a lot easier, and I was the symbol of a Concorde crowd that had replaced the jet set. I flew on the Concorde so many times I knew the pilots. I knew their families. I could have flown the plane, except I would have wanted to do it naked, sprayed silver, in roller skates. I could split my time between Paris and New York without much trouble. The five-hour time difference gave me the chance to do a lot more in a day. It was like there were two of me spinning between cities.
Fabrice, the French king of the night, had come over to New York and seen what was going on at Studio 54, witnessed a world being created by the new, powerful, competitive young, obsessed by celebrity, experiencing reality through the mutating fantasy of fashion. He opened a new club in Paris, Le Palace, which was bigger, had more space for performance. He might have learned a little from what he saw at Studio 54, but really, it was in the spirit of his own Club Sept. Club Sept had been a tiny, more stylish anticipation of the fame-drenched, debauched grandness of Studio 54. He didn’t need to be told how to achieve the celebratory alchemy of Studio 54—he merely needed a bigger venue.
Fabrice removed the seats from an old music hall and installed a monstrous, spaceship-size strobe lighting rig that would swirl above the dancers and descend so low it was almost among them. I performed on the opening night of Le Palace. They were very late finishing the place; they were still banging, sawing, and hammering with hours to go before the opening. The place was absolutely packed, as if all of Paris had squeezed inside. It could hold thousands of people, but that still wasn’t enough. It was quite an occasion. The coke laid on was tinted pink.
I wore the costume I had worn at the New Year’s Eve party at Studio 54, not the complete works, only the body stocking, so I looked nude. It was so crowded that when I went onstage, the whole crowd was moving, but in different directions from row to row. It was like watching a field of corn being swirled around in a strong wind. They were hammered; they had taken whatever they could get their hands on.
I liked to break free of the stage sometimes, if I felt claustrophobic. There was a ladder I used to climb on, up to the boxes at the side of the stalls, so that I was a few feet above the audience. I loved to clamber about and didn’t think there would be a problem climbing over them on the ladder. I didn’t think about bodyguards or anything.
As soon as I got on the ladder, someone sprayed Mace into my eyes, and as I crawled up the ladder, my unitard was torn off me. It was mayhem. I had no clothes on, I couldn’t see anything, and I was supposed to sing “La Vie en Rose” as the last song. It was a song that belonged to Paris, and now it belonged to disco. To some extent I had been adopted by the Parisians, and it was a sign of Paris making it in the new New York, the one where Studio 54 was like a new nation, with Andy Warhol the minister of propaganda and Bill Cunningham like a shadow minister. No one was going to leave before they heard that! They were in such a state they would have burned the house down if they didn’t hear me sing it.
I stood next to the stage totally naked, eyes stinging, and watching from the side was Yves Saint Laurent, the center of the fashion universe, give or take his rival Lagerfeld, with his muse, Loulou de la Falaise, a very original dresser, a regular at Club Sept. Some say he might have been her muse, that she was the designing brains behind Yves Saint Laurent.
He had launched his Opium perfume the year before with an ad campaign featuring Jerry Hall in purple harem pants photographed by Helmut Newton; Opium seems quaint now, and smells pink-powdery, but it was pretty avant-garde and provocatively erotic at the time, like Yves was not only celebrating drug use but selling drugs, taking abandonment out of the writhing dark rooms of an elite club into the everyday department stores. It smelled like it should really have been called Cocaine, or Cum, which is what it smelled like when it smelled like the 1970s of Thin White Duke David Bowie and “I Feel Love,” or the warm musky breath of lovers in a blissful postcoital sleep with a fragrant hint of the pissoir and the dark, heavy smoke of a Gauloise.
I was an absolute shivering wretch, sticky with fury, not sure what to do next. The audience were beyond mad with frustrated energy. They were screaming for me to come back. Yves calmly took off his cummerbund and wrapped it around my bare breasts. Lou was wearing this gypsy scarf full of tassels, very typical of the flowing, colorful things she liked to wear, and he took that from her and bound it around my waist. Voilà. He gave me a very gentle shove, and there I was back on the stage, styled by Yves Saint Laurent, singing “La Vie en Rose” to an audience who didn’t want anything else to happen at that moment but complete and utter make-believe. I was dressed in make-believe, and sang a song about casting a magic spell, about being in
a world apart. Later, Yves gave me a little drawing of me in the outfit he had spontaneously created.
* * *
In their own way, Sy and Eileen were smart and shrewd. Music wasn’t their area, but they had enough energy and commitment to get things going. For a while, we were each as energetic and committed as the other, but they couldn’t see beyond disco, whereas even when I was known as the queen of disco, my restlessness kicked in, and I would wonder: What will I be next?
In a way, I outgrew them, or at least, I wanted to go in a very different direction from the one they had in mind for me. I had a battle with them, because I thought more radically, and they were safe to the point of cozy. They kept saying, “No, you need the long, satin gown—it will be perfect for you.” I wanted to run naked onstage! I’m a nudist! You’ve got to be kidding me, darling. I wanted more skin than clothes. I wasn’t sure exactly what direction I wanted to go in, because the more exciting things were in a constant state of flux, not yet named. Creative people were investigating further what could be done by playing a certain sequence of records in a club, how to make them fit together, and deliver new kinds of sensation.
I was still excited by the DJs in the smaller clubs who were breaking away from disco and generating other forms of dance music, because disco was becoming such a corporate monster. The ones who had helped invent disco were rebelling against disco, as much as any punks or rock ’n’ rollers.