New Line Cinema had some early success distributing films like Reefer Madness, which hit college campuses in the late 1960s and was enormously popular, and then again with John Waters’ cult classics, Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, starring the one and only Divine. The first film we produced was Stunts, a mystery thriller about a stuntman who dies while involved in the making of a film. I was instrumental in raising the funds for the film once NBC bought it as a future Movie of the Week.
In May of 1978, we took Stunts to the Cannes Film Festival to sell the foreign rights, cash out, and pay off our loans. We didn’t have the money to throw parties or line the Croisette with giant posters to attract foreign buyers, but with so many reporters and photographers looking for a story, a scene from the movie—in which Robert Forster’s character runs out of a burning house just before it explodes—triggered an idea. I found a local stuntman whose handler referred to him as a “torchman.” We got the word out to all the foreign buyers and press to meet us on the beach in front of the Carlton Hotel to see a major happening. The torchman’s handler poured gasoline on him then lit him up as dozens of cameras were flashing while the human ball of fire ran toward the sea for dear life. When the local police realized I had orchestrated the stunt, they threatened to throw me in jail not for almost killing a man but for setting a fire on the beach without a permit. Go figure. The following day, there was a huge color picture of this fiery scene on the front page of the major newspaper, Nice Matin, garnering us all the attention we needed. Mission accomplished.
New Line Cinema hosted a preview of Stunts in New York, and when the credits rolled at the beginning of the film and my name was not included, I was extremely disappointed. As a contributing partner, I should have received a screen credit, and with Laurie sitting next to me I was embarrassed by the slight. But that experience reinforced to me the fact that although Bob Shaye referred to me as a partner, New Line was Bob’s company and I was the second banana—a position I wasn’t accustomed to playing. I explored other opportunities and decided to pursue the Virgin Isle Hotel in St. Thomas.
Chapter Seven:
Adventures in Paradise
Acquiring the former Virgin Isle Hilton in 1978 turned out to be a significant step on my path to becoming the owner of Studio 54. I went down to the Islands to look at what the broker at Helmsley Spear Realty touted as the deal of a lifetime. The hotel had been closed for four years after two local, well-publicized tragedies. The first was the Fountain Valley Massacre in which locals machine-gunned to death a number of white residents at the Rockefeller’s Golf Course. The second was the crash of an American Airlines jet into the side of a mountain at the St. Thomas airport due to a too-short runway. Tourism and hotel occupancy rates had plummeted.
I flew to the island and a reclusive caretaker with a talkative pet macaw on his shoulder showed me around the hotel and grounds. Even after the bird tried to take a bite out of my hand, I saw the property’s potential—it was impossible not to. The beauty of the turquoise waters surrounding the island, with its quaint, formerly Danish town and lush tropical atmosphere, called to me. The hotel property—an impressive 230-room structure set in lush gardens atop a ridge overlooking the harbor of St. Thomas, designed by Morris Lapidus, architect of the Fontainebleau in Miami—could be bought for half of what it cost to build twenty years earlier.
My buddy, Harvard Law graduate Eric Rosenfeld (the one who didn’t want his knees broken by my Candy Store partners), was specializing in tax shelters at the time. His law firm jumped at the opportunity to raise the $2.5 million needed and, by the fall of 1978, my brother Alan and I became the principal owner operators of the new Virgin Isle Hotel. With the hotel closed for so many years, there were many maintenance issues to overcome and only ninety days until the winter season began. We remodeled and upgraded the guest rooms, kitchen, plumbing, air conditioning, electric, water, and waste lines as best we could in such a short time. Within three months we were able to reopen the guest rooms, The Terrace Bar, the hotel’s beautiful art deco dining room overlooking Charlotte Amalie harbor, and Lindy’s, a deli-style coffee shop serving pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake. We worked the phones incessantly, drummed up some publicity and invited friends and a few VIPs for that first Christmas week.
Unfortunately, just as the guests were arriving for Christmas week, the shit hit the fan—literally. Before purchasing the property, we hired a well-regarded engineer from Florida who certified all the operating systems. However, the engineer did not anticipate hotel guests flushing toilets at the same time, causing many of the old pipes to give way, resulting in sewage draining all over the front desk and other parts of the lobby. We sued the engineer but it took years to settle the case with his insurance company.
In the meantime, we needed a beach club and restaurant to augment the hotel’s hillside location. As part of the original deal when we purchased the property, we leased with an option to buy five acres on beautiful Brewers Bay Beach, just ten minutes from the hotel. To keep the area safe, we cleared out all the Rastafarians living in the brush. Then I remembered how taken I was with L’Age d’Or (“the Age of Gold”), a restaurant in France specializing in wood-fire cooking, which New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye had introduced me to during the Cannes Film Festival. It was the perfect concept for our beachfront restaurant. It would be designed by a creative local architect, Peter Brill, who had recently completed the Bitter End, a marvelous indoor/outdoor restaurant and hotel on the nearby island of Virgin Gorda. Alan and I took a day trip to Virgin Gorda on our sailboat Gypsy Star and we fell in love with the design of the Bitter End, particularly after a bowl of mushroom soup made with “magic” mushrooms picked along the way from the island of Tortola.
We hired Peter and he designed a functional and attractive beach restaurant and bar featuring the wood-fire oven. We then found Culinary Institute graduate Steve Melina, a talented young chef from New York who had been working as a sous chef for noted restaurateur Alan Stillman at the Manhattan Ocean Club. We gave him the opportunity to be the head chef at our new restaurant, La Grillade, on Brewers Bay Beach, which we opened in early 1979 as the hotel’s second eatery. Every day we’d get fresh fish and lobster, as well as steaks and vegetables, and cook them over the wood fire. La Grillade was not only frequented for lunch on the beach by our hotel guests but also quickly became one of the most popular dinner restaurants on the island. It was one of the earliest restaurants in the US to use wood-fire cooking instead of Texas barbecue; although it was already popular in Europe, I expected the concept to develop further on the mainland.
Before long, we started to do well and made a real impact on the island. Alan became president of the Virgin Islands Hotel Association while I was having liaisons with an array of fabulous women. Cocaine was another island libation, since it was often transported through St. Thomas on the way from Colombia to the US. The island coke was clean and pure. Snorting coke was almost like having an orgasm, at least in the beginning. There was a quick burn and then an ecstatic rush to the brain, which could make you feel alert, powerful, and sexy.
With everything in place, we turned the hotel into a nightly party with Caribbean barbecues on the torch lit terrace that featured Calypso bands, steel drums, and Moko Jumbi stilt dancer Ali Paul, who became a good friend. He was also a local senator whose theme song was “have a paaarty, smoke a wattie.” One of my favorite groups who performed there was Otis and The Elevators: they always put everybody in a good mood playing R&B classics. There was fun entertainment at the Terrace Bar, emceed by a beautiful local girl and former Miss Virgin Islands, Lorraine Baa, who, to my dismay, always refused my advances.
When we first took over the hotel, I put an ad in The Village Voice looking for bartenders and waitresses to replace many of the locals on our staff, as they were not providing good, courteous service. Since this was a hotel in the Caribbean, offering a job including room and board during the frigid winter of 1978, I rece
ived an overwhelming number of responses from smart and attractive young ladies who wanted to replace some of the surly locals. I flew to New York and personally conducted most of the interviews. Once we chose the staff, they flew down to St. Thomas to start their new work life. One of my hires for the waitstaff position was Shelley Tupper, a hot brunette with a razor-sharp wit and a dynamite personality, but after three weeks it was obvious that the heavy dining room trays were proving to be too much for Shelley. So I took her out of food service, and she joined my Social Hostess Staff arranging beach and hotel activities for our guests. Then, I met three beautiful blonde Swedish girls who were visiting the island, Birgitta, Anika, and Inga, and hired all three as hotel concierges. From that point onward, one of my partners, Fred Kassner, co-owner of Liberty Travel, dubbed the hotel “Mark’s Country Club.”
Chapter Eight:
Studio 54 Hits
the Virgin Isle Hotel
By early 1979, the Virgin Isle Hotel was strapped for cash because of the unanticipated repair costs and the loss of revenue from the damaged guest rooms that sat empty as a result of the plumbing disaster. Recognizing the popularity of disco music and dancing, I knew the hotel could generate more profit with a dance club, and I had just the building available. It stood across from the hotel’s front entrance porte-cochere and had a peaked roof that could house the needed sound, lights, and special effects. I contacted Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager about a potential franchise of Studio 54 in St. Thomas. A dance club would be a great amenity, and having a Studio 54 there would be a surefire way to promote the hotel.
Steve and Ian procrastinated for months deciding whether or not to give the Virgin Isle Hotel the Studio 54 franchise. Eventually, Ian visited St. Thomas, but they both continued to drag their feet. With no answer from Rubell and Schrager, I turned to Xenon. Like Studio 54, Xenon had once been a theater. Originally the prestigious Henry Miller Theater in the Broadway district on Forty-Third Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it had been operating as a porn house called Avon-at-the-Hudson when Howard Stein and Peppo Vanini bought it in 1978 and went head-to-head with Studio 54, which had opened a year earlier. I signed a contract with Howard and Peppo to open a Xenon in the Virgin Isle Hotel.
While I actively handled the day-to-day running of the Virgin Isle Hotel, I spent long weekends in the Islands and conducted the rest of my business during shortened work weeks in New York, using my office at New Line Cinema. During the summer of 1979, I spent a lot of mid-week evenings in Howard and Peppo’s offices at Xenon doing coke with their celebrity pals. Peppo was a tall, handsome nightclub impresario from Gstaad, Switzerland. Howard was a former rock promoter who had brought rockers David Bowie, The Who, and The Rolling Stones to the Westchester Theater right outside of the city. He was a handsome guy with dark, slicked-back hair, blue eyes, and a New York accent. He was always friendly, but you could see he had a tough side. His background was similar to Ian’s in that his father was known to be associated with the Mob. (However, unlike Ian’s father, who died of natural causes, word had it that Howard’s father’s headless body had been found floating in Jamaica Bay.) Howard and I finally signed an agreement providing for the opening of Xenon at the Virgin Isle Hotel, and as part of that arrangement Howard agreed to bring his club’s celebrities down to the hotel for publicity. Late that fall, we started the renovation of the unused building on what was to be the island’s new nightclub, Xenon.
Steve and Ian were serving time by then. It was that fall when I began negotiations with them to acquire their Studio 54 in New York. During one of these talks at Metropolitan Correctional Center, Steve suggested that it would make more sense to open the club in the Virgin Isle Hotel as Studio 54 since I was going to own the New York Studio 54, but I told him I had already signed a contract to open as Xenon. Unbeknownst to me, there was a fierce personal and professional rivalry between Howard Stein and Steve and Ian. It started when Steve torpedoed Xenon’s grand opening a few years earlier by hosting Andy Warhol’s birthday party at Studio 54 on the same evening, thereby forcing Xenon to compete for a smaller list of available celebrities as well as for ink in the nightclub pages the next day. Word leaked about my visit with Steve and Ian at the prison, and the next day Howard called and asked to meet me regarding an important matter.
Howard picked me up in his dark blue limousine and got right to the point: “Mark, I hear you’re talking to Steve and Ian about buying Studio 54 in New York.” Howard frowned. “I want to preface what I’m about to say by telling you that those two guys are evil and it would not be in your best interest to go through with any deal.”
I knew that Howard had the Virgin Isle Hotel deal in his mind, and I calmly said, “This is only a preliminary discussion and what I do with them in New York will in no way violate our contract in St. Thomas.”
All of a sudden, the glad-handing Howard got tough and said in a menacing tone, “No way are you going to own Studio 54 when you have a contract with me for a Xenon.”
I repeated myself: “Anything I do with Steve and Ian will have no effect on our business dealings in St. Thomas. We were merely engaged in exploratory conversations about Studio 54 in New York. I fully intend to open the club in the islands as Xenon.”
I was hoping to calm him down, but Howard became even more agitated, and finally I just got out of the car when it stopped at a light and told him, “Nothing more is going to happen until you and I speak about this again.”
When Howard read an item in New York magazine, “Intelligencer,” the following Monday about my jailhouse negotiations with Steve and Ian (which may have been planted by their attorney Roy Cohn to produce these exact results), he exploded at me over the phone: “I am going to sue your ass, Fleischman!” Howard’s corporation was called “Sosueme”: the threat didn’t seem all that idle.
Again, I assured him, “Nothing is final in regards to Studio 54 New York.”
My reassurances did nothing to dissuade him from serving me with a lawsuit a few days later, hiring Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a major New York law firm, to represent him. He sought a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) not just for opening the Virgin Isle Hotel Studio 54, but any involvement in New York as well. Fortunately, the judge saw through such obvious vindictiveness, and the TRO for the New York club was rejected.
With such bad vibes between us, it was going to be difficult for me to open Xenon in St. Thomas while negotiating to buy Studio 54 in New York. Howard and I ended up settling. I agreed to pay him $50,000 over a period of time, and my brother Alan and I were free to open Studio 54 in St. Thomas. Now, Howard hated me as much as he hated Steve and Ian. Though it would be eighteen months before I reopened the doors to Studio 54 in New York, I had already made another enemy in the disco world in addition to Maurice Brahms of The Underground.
Out of work and with nothing else to do, key members of the Studio 54 staff in New York flew down to St. Thomas and worked for Alan and me. They were eager to escape the depressing scene in New York after Studio closed, and I was offering employment. This talented group, which had run Studio 54 for the past two and a half years, helped me open Studio 54 in the Virgin Isle Hotel, which became the hottest nightspot in the Caribbean.
Marc Benecke, Studio 54’s doorman in New York, was among the staff members who initially joined us in St. Thomas. Marc’s aloof style may have worked fine in New York, but it wasn’t long before we realized we would need a different type of doorman. Marc was white, while half of the population on St. Thomas was mixed and black, and it would prove impossible for him to play any “selection game” on that island without causing trouble. We hired a cool, local, light-skinned island cop to be our new doorman, and he worked for us during his off-duty hours. He knew the area, as well as all the popular people, and did a great job keeping the troublemakers out. We also hired Studio 54 New York’s night manager, Chris Williamson, to be the general manager. Together, with Studio 54 GM Michael Overington, we replicated
the excitement of the New York club in the Tropics, complete with Robert DaSilva’s light show, DJs Gary Holtzman, Richie Kaczor, and Leroy Washington playing on a booming sound system, and long lines of people waiting to get in.
In addition to opening Studio 54, the Virgin Isle Hotel staged other promotions as well. At one event, we invited disco icon Grace Jones to join us for Carnival. Tall and strikingly beautiful, Grace was not only a superstar, but was also from nearby Jamaica, and everyone was excited to have her on the island. At Carnival, there is always a big parade with floats created by churches, merchants, and other local entities moving down the main street of town. We entered a float, calling it “Disco at the Carnival.” We set up a great moving sound system on the hotel’s truck and played all the disco hits that were popular at the time. The theme songs for our float were Sister Sledge’s hit song “We Are Family” and the music of Grace Jones, including “Private Life” and “A Rolling Stone.” We had a generator on the truck to power the sound system, and we built a large wooden platform on the cab for Grace to dance on. the Virgin Isle Hotel float was decorated with green fabric and glitter. The incredible sound from the five-hundred-watt speakers could be heard for miles.
Inside Studio 54 Page 7