Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
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Of course, frameworks are inescapable in journalism or writing screenplays: All knowledge must be processed according to some ground rules. If that’s all “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” was, it would be merely another event in the long history of Britons misinterpreting American popular culture and making a fortune out of it. However, the story was a bold-faced lie. “My story was a fraud,” Cohn finally admitted two decades later. “I’d only recently arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brooklyn street life, I hardly knew the place. As for Vincent, my story’s hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Sixties, a one-time king of the Goldhawk Road.”52
Unsurprisingly, for a movie whose origins are so contested, Saturday Night Fever generated a wide range of interpretations. “In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta decides that the only way that he can transcend his boring life is to become the best dancer in the city,” wrote journalist Jon Savage. “To achieve this individuality, however, he has to negate his own personality: the dancing steps required of a Disco champion are so formulaic that to excel he must become an automaton. This was the true blankness to which Punks never came close. The hedonism propagated by Disco was more immediately subversive of established morality.”53 On the other hand, historian Peter Carroll stated that “Saturday Night Fever reinforced a conservative message of conformity, expensive dress, and self-discipline. Only by embracing these traditional American values could the youthful ethnic hero, played by John Travolta, hope to attain the upward mobility implied in leaving his working-class origins in Brooklyn for a new life in Mahattan.”54 Still further, Chic’s Nile Rodgers proclaims, “I just think Saturday Night Fever is genius. It’s about a very racist kind of community, and he just deals with it in such a simplistic, wonderful way. He doesn’t change and become an intellectual. He changes and becomes an open-minded human being by saying something like, ‘That’s what it’s all about: Because my father gets dumped on, he gets home and dumps on my mother, then she’s gotta dump on me, then we gotta dump on the Spics because we gotta dump on somebody, and then they dump on the blacks,’ or whatever. It was just a very simplistic but accurate way of saying that racism exists and unfairness exists: ‘How could you give the trophy to us when we’re not nearly on the level of the Puerto Ricans, but you just gave it to me because I’m a homeboy, I’m like you, I’m white, I’m Italian, I’m from the neighborhood, but these Puerto Rican guys come in and venture into our community and are better than we are and we can’t acknowledge the fact that they’re better.’ And that was so powerful. Very few people go home with that message, but that’s the message of the film. That’s what the movie was all about. In New York, we used to call these Italian guys ‘hitters,’ so this hitter becomes an open-minded, broad-thinking human being who has contradictions in his world and in his life, but through music and dance he’s transformed. It’s easy to say it’s superfluous because it’s disco, but that’s just not true. Those songs are powerful; they tell the story. When they use ‘More Than a Woman’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’ and ‘Disco Inferno,’ that’s serious stuff. That’s just as relevant and as valid—and I know people don’t like to hear stuff like this—as when the Sex Pistols are delivering a message or when Pink Floyd is delivering a message or when the Beatles are delivering a message. This is politically, socially relevant stuff, and it’s just a reflection of the times.”55
Despite its perfidious heart, Saturday Night Fever nailed one of disco’s most perplexing conundrums. While Cohn’s story was a fake, the truth was that disco was spreading like wildfire in the white ethnic communities of New York’s outer boroughs. These were the children and younger brothers of the construction workers who had only a few years earlier gone on a rampage against most of disco’s main constituents during the Hard Hat Riots. Now Staten Islander Tony Pagano was telling Ed McCormack, “What my old man doesn’t understand is that you don’t have to be a fag to be into this scene … My old man doesn’t understand that dancing is not a tight-assed, uptight sex role scene. It’s just a way of communicating with people you might not have anything to say to if you sat down to talk.”56
“Broadly speaking, the typical New York discotheque DJ is young (between 18 and 30), Italian, and gay,” journalist Vince Aletti declared in 1975. “The prime variable is ‘Italian,’ because there are a large number of black and Latin DJs; ‘gay’ is less variable, but here it’s more a description of sensibility than sexual preference.”57 Remarkably, almost all of the important early disco DJs were of Italian extraction: Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Michael Cappello, Steve D’Aquisto, Tom Savarese, Bobby DJ Guttadaro, Frankie Strivelli, and Hippopotamus’s Richard Pampianelli. For whatever reason, Italian Americans have played a significant role in America’s dance music culture from the teen-pop dance crazes that came out of the Philadelphia hit machines in the early ’60s (Frankie Avalon, Fabian, etc.) through the disco and freestyle scenes of the ’70s and ’80s to the House and Techno records from New York’s Tommy Musto, Frankie Bones, and Joey Beltram. While Italian Americans mostly from Brooklyn largely created disco from scratch, the two men most responsible for putting disco over the top in every sense of the phrase were Jews from Queens.
The atmosphere inside starts to take you over
Music and fantasy
I’m just inside the door at 54
Faces in the crowd
Fashions are too chic
Music playing loud at 54.
—Bob McGilpin, “54”
At Studio 54, waiting at the door
Can’t get in, just can’t win.
—Dennis Parker, “New York By Night”
In November 1977, New York Times journalist Anna Quindlen described a typical Saturday night on the block of West Fifty-fourth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue as club owner Steve Rubell was performing the nightworld rite of social engineering that he called “tossing a salad.” “[H]undreds crowd the street, whining the name of Mr. Rubell,” she wrote. “With index fingers raised in a gesture of reluctant supplication usually reserved for cab drivers on rainy nights and waiters in over-priced French restaurants, they repeat over and over again, ‘Steven … Steve…’ while staff members, resembling well-groomed guard dogs, push the overanxious back and a huge man named Big George stands by, a huge disincentive to violence.”58 The throng was desperate to be anointed with Rubell’s decree of grace and be allowed past the fabled velvet ropes into the world’s most famous pleasure dome where there was a possibility that they might snort coke off of Truman Capote’s monocle or watch someone pleasure the wife of the prime minister of Canada. “‘I’ll let in anyone who looks like they’ll make things fun,’ [Rubell] says, standing behind the ropes and ignoring the repeated sound of his own name. ‘We like some guys with guys because it makes the dance floor hot, you know? There are certain people who come that we know are good. But I’ll tell you something—I wouldn’t let my best friend in if he looked like an East Side singles guy.’”59 This Shangri-la, of course, was Studio 54.
Discotheques started off as places where the elite could hide themselves from the rest of the world and confront on their own terms the youth culture of rock and roll that would help destroy their olde worlde. But as the discotheque concept was translated into a language that long-suffering New Yorkers could understand, the discotheque became more egalitarian and less stuffy, and people actually danced. It was only a matter of time, though, before the world of privilege would have its revenge on the hoi polloi. It came in the shape of the most famous discotheque of ’em all, and from two men who would have even excluded themselves from the club.60
Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were two fairly small-time restaurant owners from deepest, darkest Brooklyn who dreamed of the big time and were desperate to escape what they saw as their lowly origins. In other words, they were quintessential bridge and tunnelers out for revenge on the world that excluded them—except that the only revenge they ever exacted was on
the world that they came from. Their first entry into New York’s nightworld was the Enchanted Garden, a discotheque housed in an eleven-room mansion situated on city-owned land bordering the golf course in Douglaston, Queens (an area often disparagingly referred to as “the gateway to Great Neck”), which opened in 1975. The club was popular for its theme nights (“Island of Paradise” with a luau, hula dancers, palm trees, and fire dancers; “Arabian Nights” with llamas, camels, and a snake charmer) and its “love-nest room,” which had couches the size of beds and a gazebo filled with stuffed birds—“installed after $4,000 worth of live ones died from the constantly changing temperatures.”61 Aside from the fact that the club was about as far east as you could go in New York City without actually setting foot in suburban Long Island, the Enchanted Garden had the further drawback of being directly below the flight path into JFK International Airport. Nevertheless, the Enchanted Garden attracted a fair bit of notoriety and, in Paul Casella, it had one of the finest DJs in the city. However, it wasn’t only the 747s passing over the club that were giving Rubell and Schrager headaches. The wannabe suburbanites of Douglaston hated the club and launched a sustained campaign aimed at shutting it down. Eventually, the city’s Parks Department decided to threaten Rubell and Schrager with eviction, and the duo were soon searching around for a place in Manhattan itself.
They were introduced by club promoter Carmen D’Alessio to a consortium trying to buy an old theater/television studio at 254 West 54th Street in order to turn it into a nightclub. Rubell and Schrager loved the space, and when that group lost most of its financing, Rubell and Schrager outmaneuvered the remaining member (paying him off with a finder’s fee of $1,000) and took over the project that was already called Studio 54. The project was unprecedented in terms of both scale and symbolism. Studio 54 dwarfed Infinity not only in size and money lavished on its design but also in ambition. Previously, discotheques had recolonized the dead spaces left by deindustrialization and recession; they breathed new life into abandoned warehouses and decrepit hotels. But Studio 54 was a bold display of disco’s ascendancy over New York’s most famous entertainment industries: Broadway and television. With the opening of Studio 54, the discotheque had established itself definitively as New York’s principal manufacturer of dreams. Disco had become theater.
And what an extraordinary dream Studio 54 proffered. As the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker was announcing that “the standard of living for the average American has got to decline,”62 Studio 54 was boldly and defiantly declaring the exact opposite. Studio 54 was excess as triumphalism, glitz for glitz’s sake: Why have one set when you can change it every other week? More than anyone else, Rubell and Schrager understood disco’s perverse economic imperative—you need to spend money in order to make money. The club’s design was largely overseen by D’Alessio, and the work was carried out by theater professionals and environmental lighting engineers rather than nightclub experts, giving it a dazzle and pop baroqueness that nightworld’s mostly functional spaces could only dream of. The first thing you saw as you entered Studio 54’s hallowed doors and its burgundy-carpeted lobby was a 1950s camera boom left over from the old days—this was disco as showbiz, after all. Hovering over the dance floor was a wooden rendering of the man in the moon; at midnight, it would be lowered toward the crowd as a coke spoon shoveled flake into its nose while a string of lights fired up from its nostril to its eye. On the opposite side of the parqueted floor was a metal Aztec sun god that would spew smoke from the sides of its face. The dance floor was broken up by columns of multicolored lights that would flash throughout the night. There was a waterfall at the back of the dance floor, confetti guns that shot brightly colored paper over the club at peak times, and lavish flower arrangements throughout the club. The bartenders and busboys (including, in 1978, a twenty-one-year-old Alec Baldwin) all wore gray satin gym shorts and sleeveless T-shirts. D’Alessio was also responsible for booking the parties, and it was largely her fashion and celebrity contacts that made the guest list glitter with the same intensity as the club’s interior. It was more than just the design and the A-list roster, though, that made Studio 54 special. The club’s sound system was designed by disco’s preeminent soundman, Richard Long, and Rubell and Schrager managed to lure Paul Casella’s former spinning partner at Hollywood, Ritchie Kaczor, to the new club. Kaczor (who by 1979 was earning $50,000 a year and was the world’s best-paid DJ) was generally acknowledged as one of the best beat mixers around, and his technical skills initially gave Studio 54 cachet among New York’s clubbing cognoscenti, which was only reinforced when Rubell hired Nicky Siano as his alternate.
However, Rubell and Schrager were never particularly precious about the music; they simply wanted someone to play what effectively was background music that kept people dancing but wouldn’t get in the way of the “scene.” And if that someone had a great reputation, so much the better. Their vision was Le Jardin dressed to the nines, Infinity to the nth degree. When Kaczor dropped the needle on C.J. & Co.’s “Devil’s Gun” on the evening of Tuesday, April 26, 1977, they achieved it tenfold. The nondescript block on the fringes of the theater district that had been largely left to the prostitutes and pimps prowling the area was suddenly overrun with limos and paparazzi. Cher, Brooke Shields, Donald Trump, Margaux Hemingway, and Bianca Jagger all showed up, but the chaos was so great that not only could neither Mick Jagger nor Frank Sinatra get inside, but even Carmen D’Alessio had trouble getting into her own party. The thousands of lesser luminaries stranded on the wrong side of the velvet ropes decided that they didn’t need Rubell or Schrager’s blessing to have their own party and promptly reenacted Sodom and Gomorrah by having an orgy on West Fifty-fourth Street.
Despite all the hoopla, the next few days at Studio 54 were dead, and Rubell and Schrager were getting anxious. That would all change on May 2, when the club held a birthday party for Bianca Jagger. The club—which was filled with white balloons and on one wall featured a light bulb display that spelled out “BIANCA” in huge letters—was fairly empty, with Mick Jagger gaily cavorting with Halston and Liza Minnelli (who had already become Studio regulars). As soon as Siano dropped the needle on the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” Bianca Jagger rode in on a white horse that Rubell had hired for the occasion led by a naked man “wearing” a body-painted tuxedo. The handful of paparazzi who had bothered to turn up went berserk, and the photo of Bianca on the white horse became one of the iconic images of the disco era. The photos appeared in the tabloid press across the world, and in a flash Studio 54’s reputation was sealed. It had suddenly become the most talked-about disco in the world, the home of the outrageous, the place where everyone wanted to go, the center of the glitterball universe.
While Quindlen observed that, “Unlike the elegant La Folie, where the clientele sometimes seems moneyed and staid, or Hurrah’s, where they seem merely idiosyncratic, or Regine’s, whose ubiquitous celebrities and selectivity have given the impression of dancing right out of the common man’s market, Studio 54 combines public figures with the wealthy and the unusual and throws in a good measure of the average to set them all off,”63 Studio 54 was nevertheless the celebrity hotspot to end all celebrity hotspots. Rubell, in particular, was enamored of the new crowd he suddenly found himself traveling in, and with cloying enthusiasm somewhere between stalker and tireless self-publicist, he ceaselessly courted celebrities. Rubell set up the notorious downstairs VIP room, where anything and everything was readliy available; he made sure that celebs had a ready supply of their drugs of choice and ensured that alcohol was available to them even when Studio’s liquor license was revoked; he would change the club’s decor if a favored patron had a whim for a special party. Of course, nightclubs have always treated special customers well and bent over backward in order to accommodate celebrities, but there was something qualitatively different about Rubell’s relentless pursuit of the famous, something bordering on blind worship. As Studio 54 historian Anthony Had
en-Guest wrote, “It was the preliminary tremor of a social upheaval that would prove much more enduring than the populist revolution of the sixties: the coming of the Celebrity Culture.”64 Three years earlier People magazine had been launched as a mainstream, nonconfrontational version of supermarket tabloid tittle-tattle; Liz Smith’s influential gossip column in the Daily News began in 1976; and Andy Warhol’s Interview had been masquerading celebrity worship as art since 1969: This was the beginning of a ravenous, insatiable press desperate for stories to sell papers and magazines in a world oversaturated with media. Of course, gossip had been a part of journalism ever since Daniel Defoe started writing his column in The Review in 1704, but this was the beginning of gossip and celebrity running on its own momentum, the beginning of being famous just for being famous. For the previous 270 years, gossip had been principally about the social set and its “events,” with the odd mention of film stars, but paralleling the course of nightclub history, gossip had become focused almost exclusively on the popocracy, and the Studio crowd fit the bill perfectly: Liza, Bianca, Halston, Andy, Truman—people whose best work was well behind them and were now just simply names. The antiestablishment hellions of the 1960s were now safely ensconced as members of a new aristocracy.
With such a unique environment, Studio 54 wasn’t merely a playground for established celebs; it had the power to create its own: the septuagenarian dance floor diva Disco Sally and Rollerena, by day a Wall Street employee, by night a cross-dressing roller queen who skated around the floor in a wedding dress that sported a button reading, “How Dare You Presume I’m Heterosexual.” Inevitably, even Studio’s doorman, Marc Benecke, became a minor celebrity in his own right, starring in a short-lived Broadway production (Benecke’s stand-in, Al Corley, became a star years later when he joined the cast of Dynasty). Of course, Rubell, a combination of genial host and overeager puppy, became the biggest star of all. The constant media attention went to his head, and very quickly his doorway judgments on who was to be let into his kingdom became something a bit more pernicious than merely “tossing a salad.” Rubell acted with the hauteur of a member of the nobility, either completely ignoring or lashing out at the crowd with cynical comments. But disco (at least not this version) was never really about celebrity; it was about the comforting anonymity of belonging to a community, the freedom of having a shared identity that could now be shouted across a crowded dance floor. Nevertheless, the opulent fantasyscapes of places like Studio 54 were playgrounds of sexuality and identity. As journalist Sally Helgesen wrote of René, a makeup artist at the quintessential disco boutique Fiorucci, “René is only 21, but he says he’s been going to discos four nights a week for eight years, before the straight crowd picked up on the scene. He likes only the fanciest places, where he can wear the most outrageous costumes and live out whatever fantasy might strike him on a particular evening.”65