Seeing Steve and Ian sitting in jail was bizarre. Up until now, it seemed that the two of them had always gotten what they wanted. A lot of this power came from their partnership. They were very different people. Steve was outgoing, gregarious, the life of the party, the guy who drew all sorts of different people together. His energy and enthusiasm were infectious and you couldn’t help but get swept up by it. Ian, on the other hand, was straight, introverted, calculating, controlling, and plotting—in many ways, a typical lawyer. But something happened when Steve and Ian teamed up that was quite extraordinary. It was as though one was the yin to the other’s yang. It was almost as if they became one person. No matter the issue at hand, the two held the same position and attacked it together with such strength that whatever or whomever stood in their way didn’t stand a chance.
At least, until they took on the Feds, that is. I wondered how they had let it get so far out of control. But later, after running Studio 54 for a while, I would understand.
With Roy presiding over the meeting, it was to the point and all business. “We’ll help you from here,” exclaimed Steve.
“Don’t worry about the liquor license,” said Roy.
Ian wasn’t as enthusiastic, due to his own situation, but he chimed in to agree with Roy and Steve. “My contacts are your contacts,” he assured me.
They were convinced that Studio would reopen and be successful because they could continue to advise me via a pay phone from jail. (I had agreed to bring them rolls of dimes for the telephone whenever I visited.) And it was true, and to their credit most of their closest celebrity friends remained loyal to them. Diana Ross, Bianca, Andy, Calvin, Halston, and Liza—the whole crew supported them. Their unfortunate circumstances seemed inconsequential to their crowd. Steve and Ian were Teflon-coated.
Several weeks later, this time on an official visiting day, we signed the papers prepared by Bobby Tannenhauser in their prison cell. Since there were rules against doing business in prison, we had to stuff the signed papers in our jackets on the way out. That was the easy part. Getting the liquor license was another story, and it turned out that Roy was no help whatsoever.
In retrospect, I don’t believe I made the best deal I could have. Whenever I visited them in jail, I was met with yellow legal notepads that had pages of deal points scribbled out by two guys with nothing but time on their hands and the benefit of knowing the intricacies of exactly how the money was made and the expenses it took to make it. The truth is I wanted to own Studio 54 so badly that I overlooked Steve and Ian’s influence on my attorney, a buddy from their days at Syracuse, and the effect that Steve’s thousand-watt charm, the driving force behind all of their joint successes, was having on me. I succumbed to it. I liked him and felt sorry for the both of them sitting in jail. Bobby seemed to hold them in awe, accepting without question most of the representations about potential cash flow (there were no financial statements presented) when drafting the agreement.
The reality is that I was thoroughly seduced by the idea of controlling the world’s most important nightclub, and I proceeded headlong and recklessly toward that end.
Chapter Three:
Hooked on Clubs
What drove me to such lengths that I was willing to impersonate a criminal attorney in order to bypass a security guard to enter a federal prison? Studio 54! I would have done almost anything to cut the deal that would lock me in as the new owner. At the time, it seemed like an adventure, a mythological journey wherein I would claim my rightful throne by executing a series of daring deeds. But at a deeper level, from the time I was a child growing up first in the Fort Tryon Park area of Manhattan and then in Great Neck, Long Island, the Golden Fleece of my dreams had been owning grand nightclubs.
When I was young, my parents would go dancing at some of the major clubs of the day, like The Latin Quarter and The Stork Club. One night, they took my younger brother, Alan, and me to their favorite club, The Copacabana, in Manhattan. I was mesmerized. I took it all in, relishing every moment. It was the 1950s and Harry Belafonte, whom my parents had met a few years earlier when he was appearing at a friend’s resort hotel in New Hampshire, performed that night. It was a glamorous scene featuring a crowd of well-dressed people, delicious food, and a big orchestra featuring The Copa Girls, who wore tiny panties, sparkly sequins, and fluffy feathers. To me, a ten-year-old, the girls were practically naked, and the scene made an indelible impression on me. In the 1940s, the era before television became popular, nightclub owners were considered to be celebrities because of the big-name acts that performed in their clubs like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Page, Diahann Carroll, and Milton Berle. Barbara Walters talks about her friends being envious when she was growing up because her father was Lou Walters, who owned the famous Latin Quarter nightclubs in New York, Miami, and Boston.
I was a child hooked on nightclubs and the men who ruled over them. And then I saw two films that forever sealed my fate. The first was Casablanca. I became enthralled with the character of Rick, the owner of Rick’s Café, an upscale club and gambling spot in exotic Morocco. He was irresistible to women and had a thing for white dinner jackets. The other film, New Orleans, starring Arturo de Córdova, was about a dapper nightclub owner named Nick who was a magnet for beautiful women and a promoter of a new musical sound called the blues. I was blown away by Nick’s charisma, love of music, and the talent of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday.
We moved to Great Neck, Long Island, when I was eight or nine, by which time my father, Martin Fleischman, a wiry, good-looking man with startling blue eyes, had become fairly wealthy running modestly priced hotels in the New York area. He had a European accent and a dictatorial manner and I rejected his authority, and perhaps all authority in general, through much of my youth. He insisted I go to Hebrew school at age twelve to prepare for my bar mitzvah, for which he staged a major dinner at New York’s Essex House, but afterward I stubbornly refused to go to synagogue. On the other hand, my mother, Sylvia Zausner Fleischman, could do no wrong. She was beautiful, smart, and loving. She graduated from Hunter College, spoke five languages, and I adored her.
When I turned sixteen, my father insisted I get a job if I wanted my own car. When he was only fifteen, he was sailing to America alone about to invent his own destiny. While many of my teenage friends in Great Neck were given Corvettes, I had to work to buy a souped-up 1951 used Ford convertible. I got a job as a soda jerk and was soon promoted to short-order cook. Earning that promotion felt good and I enjoyed short-order cooking, but I never told my father that.
By the time I was seventeen, I’d venture into Harlem along with some friends to dance at the hot spot Smalls Paradise on Seventh Avenue near 135th Street. It was a risk because I was driving illegally, having only a junior driver’s license, and Harlem was considered dangerous for white boys, but I got away with it. While most kids my age were still dancing to swing, I was moving around the raised platform at Smalls, dancing with my date to the music of Muddy Waters, Etta James, B. B. King, and Big Joe Turner. It was my first taste of what I later realized was tribal-style dancing. I was so turned on by the sensuality of the R&B music and the all-out seductiveness of the beautiful black women on the dance floor. It was hot—the music, the sweat, the gyrating bodies. Everyone around me on the dance floor was feeling it. Early on I fell in love with the blues and R&B, listening to my favorite radio shows Symphony Sid in the City and Alan Freed on what was then called WJZ. My every experience at Smalls was unforgettable, and I would go on to spend my life believing in the joy and power of music and dance.
Over the years, people have asked me how I had the balls to hang out in Harlem as a teenager. That’s when I tell them about Cornelia and how lucky I was to have had her in my life. In the mid-1940s when we lived in Washington Heights, my brother Alan and I had only one babysitter. Her name was Cornelia and we were crazy about her. She was a heavyset black woman who looked like Mammy in the film G
one with the Wind. Cornelia would occasionally take Alan and me to her home in Harlem when my parents were gone for the day. Back then, Harlem had a completely different vibe. I remember the streets being clean with nice brownstones and polished stoops. I got to know and like Cornelia’s boyfriend, a big, friendly, dapper black man named Mr. Smith, who wore zoot suits and spats and had a big black car with white sidewalls. I thought he was very cool and the two of them felt like family to me. To me, everyone in Harlem seemed happy.
After Great Neck High School, my education toward becoming a club owner continued at Cornell University where I attended the School of Hotel Administration and joined a fraternity, Phi Sigma Delta. It turned out to be a great place for me because it was a party house. In my sophomore year I was elected social chairman; that was the beginning of my appreciation for being a party host and getting high on booze. I was finally able to overcome my social immaturity, which had persisted throughout high school and into my early college social scene. I was born in February and so my mother had the choice of starting me in kindergarten a year early as a four-and-a-half-year-old, or a year later as a five-and-a-half-year-old. She chose to start me earlier and as the youngest and smallest I was always trying to keep up.
At the fraternity parties, I hired popular Dixieland bands to play on the main floor for dancing, while in the basement I played Sinatra records with the lights dimmed low for making out. I made the punch, which I spiked with plenty of alcohol, handled the décor, and all the other little details. I had an affinity for the role, which I enjoyed immensely. The next year, our fraternity parties became really hot when word spread across campus in 1958 that we had great rock-and-roll music that I introduced, reminiscent of Small’s Paradise in Harlem. I found the band Bobby and the Counts, and we were dancing to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis cover songs. It was infectious and the dance floor was packed. I was elected social chairman for my junior and senior years as well. Although it required real effort, it had social benefits and honed my hosting skills.
To avoid being drafted into the Army after college, I went to US Navy Officer Candidate School, which was both jarring and enlightening. There I learned navigation, seamanship, gunnery, and how to make a quarter bounce on my tightly made bed during daily morning inspections. I was one of three Jews in a class of several hundred officer candidates. My new circle of comrades was far different from my life in Great Neck and my predominately Jewish fraternity at Cornell. Although, even at Cornell, I had a brush with anti-Semitism as a freshman in the form of a group of guys who called themselves “The White Citizens’ Council.” I was an easy target because I wasn’t very serious about my studies and goofed around a lot, so they chose to blame me for the flood caused by someone flushing all the urinals simultaneously in the freshman dorm. They dragged me out of my room and seemed ready to beat the shit out of me but I somehow used humor to defuse the situation. I got the message: I was the right color, but the wrong religion. I’m not sure what lessons I may have learned from that experience but I got along well and was considered a good naval officer in a totally Gentile environment.
In 1962 as a Lieutenant JG (junior grade) in the US Navy, my first assignment was to run the officers’ club and Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ) at Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, the site where the Hindenburg burned. My participation was part of a special program for Cornell Hotel School graduates; and I was really happy about this because by that time the Army was already building up forces in Southeast Asia. I immediately set out to do the best job with it as possible, changing the club into a popular watering hole for the officers and their ladies. I threw great parties, hired fun bands, produced interesting menus featuring my version of comfort food, organized happy hours with great hors d’oeuvres, and presented personally chiseled ice carvings of navy eagles as buffet centerpieces. These innovations increased the receipts, which, together with implementing the inventory controls that I had learned at Cornell, lowered the food and beverage costs, making the club profitable within a few months. I also developed a sense of how to become a leader of a diverse group of people including black and Filipino stewards’ mates, wave receptionists, and local “redneck” civilians who bartended.
As the Club Officer, I found myself drinking more and earlier in the day. Five days a week the club opened at noon, and like clockwork there would be a line of navy pilots lined up by 11:45 a.m. waiting for the bar to open. Lakehurst had become a testing facility for new jet fighters as well as an anti-Russian submarine airbase, and no one blamed the pilots for having a few stiff ones. I was drinking with commanders, captains, and occasionally admirals. If I was standing at the bar talking to someone, my glass would be refilled without question by one of the bartenders, and I rarely declined when a fellow officer said, “Mark, have a drink with me.” The bartenders wanted to keep me happy. When they poured my shots, they were bigger; when they poured my drinks, they were stronger; and my glass was never empty. This practice would continue throughout my career as a hotel, restaurant, and club owner.
Besides my duties running the officers’ club, I was assigned “Officer of the Day” (OD) duties one weekend per month. I was in charge of the entire base while the rest of the officers were on weekend leave. One of my duties as OD was to oversee the Shore Patrol, who served as military police. I was required to carry a pistol while in uniform when I was off the base. If we received a phone call from a local bar in town reporting a fight involving navy personnel, I would head over there with the Shore Patrol, who would break it up, and then haul the navy servicemen back to the base. We didn’t want our people arrested and put into the local jails; we’d rather bring them to our own brig to sober up so they could be reprimanded by their own company officers and be able to report for duty on Monday. One time, during my watch, we had to break up a fight involving a man who, unbeknownst to us, was mentally unstable, and we put him in the brig. Later that evening the petty officer in charge of the brig called me on the phone at the BOQ and in a frightened voice said, “Lieutenant Fleischman, you’ve got to come down here right away.” When I arrived at the brig, I was led to the prisoner. He had hanged himself with his belt. That is an image I will never forget. These experiences as the OD helped to train me to oversee the security guards every nightclub depends on. It’s a skill to use their brawn intelligently to keep a drinking scene under control.
Just before my scheduled release after four years of active duty, I signed a deal to take over the three-hundred-room Forest Hills Inn with financial help from my father, who had always planned on going into business with me. The Inn was a venerable hotel that looked like an English country manor, with a formal dining room and a wood-paneled bar. It was located in an upscale neighborhood in Queens, and it was in foreclosure. It stood adjacent to the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, which hosted the Nationals (now known as the US Open). I had grand plans for reviving the Inn, but there was a small complication: though I was scheduled to be discharged from the Navy in early 1965, with tensions mounting in Vietnam, President Johnson surprised us all and extended everyone’s tour of duty indefinitely. However, the deal was done, so along with my father and several investors, we took over the hotel.
I raced back and forth between the Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst in South Jersey and the Forest Hills Inn in New York, hoping there would be no consequences. I worked hard doing both jobs, managing to literally wear two hats for four or five months, until I finally received my honorable discharge from active duty later that year. It was on one of those trips to New York in 1963 that I heard on the radio that President Kennedy had been assassinated. He was my commander in chief and had offered such hope for the future. I was devastated. I pulled over to the side of the Garden State Parkway and broke down crying.
Renovating the Inn was a daunting task in and of itself, made harder by the fact that my father and I had very different ideas on how to go about it. My ideas were designed to cre
ate excitement, get us noticed, draw crowds, and keep them coming back for more, night after night. I believed that to make money you had to spend money, while my father thought that the only way to make money was to save money. His motto was, “The eyes of the boss keep the fat on the horse,” which is a fancy way of saying, “Squeeze every last dime out of every dollar.” He thought that my generation “had it too easy and that’s why we squandered money.” He used to say about himself, “Instead of Cornell, I learned the business at the school of hard knocks.”
Looking back, I realize we were both right and I should have compromised more, as our goals were essentially the same. Instead, I competed with him. He was tough, but he was kind and I loved him. I discovered later that my father helped my uncle Hy out financially without my mother knowing about it when her brother went through a bitter divorce from his second wife, who wanted to take as much money from him as she could. My father was a generous man and I wish I had appreciated him more during his lifetime.
Reviving the Inn involved more than just upgrading the food in the formal restaurant, the Windsor Room, and bringing in a new maître d’. I had to change the stuffy attitude of the staff as well. I went head-to-head with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Emplyees Union. Running a union operation was an education in and of itself after my experience in the navy, where everyone followed my every word. I hired some new personnel and transformed the outdated Tournament Grill into the Three Swans, an authentic English pub that became a successful neighborhood hangout. In addition to updating the food, I modernized the music for both listening and dancing.
At the Forest Hills Inn’s Grand Opening, we invited local VIPs and politicians—including Mayor John Lindsay—as well as members of the press. This was the first time I was savvy enough to work effectively with the media to generate publicity, thanks to my first publicist, Richard Auletta. The Grand Opening also marked the first time I would get some serious personal press of my own, including a story in the New York Daily News by Tom McMorrow with the clever headline “Inn-Presario Gives a Hypo to Famed Spot.” The telephone awoke me before 8:00 a.m. the day after the opening, and I groggily heard my mother’s cheerful voice as she proudly read me the entire article that began:
Inside Studio 54 Page 3