Michael Fesco’s Sunday night theme parties were off the hook—WILD.
Amyl nitrate, Quaaludes, pot, and sex…RULED!!
Photgraph by Andre Landers.
At a Sunday night party, if you ventured up to the second-floor balcony you might see two men making out and jerking each other off. Up in the Rubber Room, a man would be grinding to the beat while being penetrated from behind and a very good-looking older man would be getting sucked off by a very young beautiful boy. Over in a corner a man might face the wall, legs spread apart with his hands up against the wall and another very macho looking guy spits on his own cock then penetrates him. Nothing unusual. Men, beautiful young boys, dancing and loving and having a good time. The entertainment, usually arranged by Billy Smith, included Grace Jones, The Weather Girls, and Eartha Kitt, among others. Michael Fesco handpicked the hottest DJs to compliment his outrageously themed parties. Michael knew his crowd and his music. He would choose DJ Richie Rivera from The Anvil when he needed “down and dirty” for his “Black Parties” and DJ Howard Merritt or maybe Robbie Leslie when he wanted a lighter mood with buoyant disco for his “White Parties.” As Michael put it, “my crowd obeys the power of the beat.”
The coatroom could get wild, as told to me by Jayne Anne Harris: “Michael’s ‘Tea Dances’ at Studio were always jam-packed with fun and gorgeous gay boys there to dance the night away. In cold weather the coatroom was filled to the brim with identical brown leather bomber jackets with sheepskin collars. Euphoric boys would saunter up to the counter and say, ‘I can’t find my ticket,’ and because all the coats looked exactly alike, we’d respond, ‘Can you identify anything in your pockets?’ The answer was always the same, ‘poppers in one pocket and pot in the other.’ No help there, so we’d scan the coats, confused by the overwhelming sea of possibilities. One night while my sister Eloise was performing one of these ‘pain in the ass’ searches of coat pockets, a vial of liquid amyl nitrate fell out and broke all over the floor of the coatroom, permeating the air with pungent smelling fumes and sending us into a world of kaleidoscope colors. We were floating four feet off the ground for the rest of the night.”
To this day, after seventeen years, Michael’s “Sea Tea” is America’s only gay sailing Tea Dance which departs from Pier 40 in Manhattan and is still packed every Sunday from June until the end of September.
Chapter Sixteen:
A Cast of Characters
As Truman Capote liked to say, “Studio 54 was a character study.”
Allow me to introduce you to a few of my favorites.
Philippe de Montperreux was a pushy, thin, balding Algerian who reminded me of Peter Lorre in Casablanca. I met him early on, when he approached me in a shadowy corner at Studio, whispering in his thick French accent with a hand over his mouth, “Mark, I got ze best coke in New York.” Naturally, I tried it—and he was right. It usually was. He became a regular in my office and at the bar, but he was also a fixture at many of the private parties of celebrities including Calvin Klein, who also must have gone for “ze best coke in New York.” Nobody really knew who Philippe was or where he came from, but he was a character, and got along with most everyone, so that was good enough to make him (and his coke) a part of our crowd.
Recently, I had dinner with Rick Ferrari, a Hollywood agent and manager who frequented Studio as an underage companion of Bill Aucoin, manager of some top rock groups including KISS. He told me that Philippe continued on in his role as a druggie court jester for many years after Studio. I found Philippe to be most entertaining but some of our key employees—particularly the bar manager Skip Odek—couldn’t stand him because he was always telling the other bartenders, “Mark sez I can have free drinks.” I always made sure Philippe had drink tickets, but he didn’t like to use them. He preferred to order “on the house” and that didn’t fly with our accounting system at the bar.
Couri Hay was a fast-talking, flamboyantly gay gossip columnist writing for the National Enquirer. He was handsome, charming, and witty and always befriended important avant-garde people including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Michael Musto (The Village Voice), and Anthony Haden-Guest. He hosted a number of fabulous parties at Studio; some would begin at his funky but elegant townhouse off Central Park West, then continue onto the dance floor at Studio. It was great fun and he was always an animated and entertaining host. I often told Couri that if anything happened to me, he would be my chosen successor.
Disco Sally was a sprightly thing in her late seventies who danced like a thirty-year-old, and was accompanied by a handsome young man named John on her arm. She was a retired Jewish lawyer who became a judge and suddenly went crazy due to the combination of cocaine and the Studio 54 Effect. But back in the day, she would dance nonstop—from midnight to 5:00 a.m. many nights a week, taking only bathroom and cocaine breaks. As New York magazine reported in 1991: “A tiny, seventy-seven-year-old lawyer named Sally Lippman was mourning the death of her husband when she happened upon the disco scene and changed her life. Dressed in tight pants and high-top sneakers, she became Disco Sally, a star at Studio 54 and Xenon who’d draw an audience of adoring fans as she got down on the dance floor.” Celebrities lined up to be her dance partner. She ultimately married John, going on a crazy Virgin Isle Hotel trip for their honeymoon.
Nikki Haskell was a stockbroker during the early 1970s. She was a well-dressed, good-looking professional club-goer who made the scene everywhere. She was born and raised in Beverly Hills and got her feet wet at all the hot clubs in LA in the early days, including The Daisy. She also became a regular at Studio 54 in 1977. I met her at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978 when she was just starting to shoot her entertainment news magazine show, which was on some obscure cable station in New York. She always seemed to be surrounded by lights and cameras, which helped her to create a scene, and she always managed to be at the “most important party” in any city she was living in. Nikki was smart, Jewish, and very aggressive; so much so that she ended up knowing and becoming best friends with numerous major celebrities, including Donald and Ivana Trump, Jeremy Irons, Billy Idol, and others. You could always tell who the most important person at the party was, because Nikki would be standing next to him or her whenever a photographer was taking a picture. Since the TV show wasn’t making any money, Nikki began creating events for extra cash, as she did for me on numerous occasions at Studio including a fabulous themed party for the premiere of Alan Carr’s remake of Where the Boys Are; it turned out to be much better than the movie.
We decorated the entrance hall of Studio to look like the beach in Fort Lauderdale. Michael O. and his crew brought in tons of sand—it was at least six inches deep—covering the entire floor area of the entry hall. Then, they built a huge wooden boardwalk for guests to walk over the sand. There were surfboards and boats, tanned bikini-clad girls and surfer boys mingling amongst the patrons. It was spectacular. At the parties Nikki hosted, she always saw to it that there were enough celebrities among “the shleppers,” as she referred to the less important people, to guarantee good press. She remained in my life, working together again, years later. Currently she is recreating her show to stream on Amazon.
George Paul Roselle was a flamboyantly gay French man and a great party promoter. He was attractive, in his fifties, slender, partially bald, and always beautifully dressed in French designer suits. George had impeccable taste and a great sense of humor. He was one of a kind. His specialty was creating parties and events around such illustrious women as Anne Eisenhower, the great-granddaughter of President/General Dwight D. Eisenhower; Ruth Warrick, former wife of Orson Welles and the costar of his American Film Classic, Citizen Kane; and Ann Miller. With guests like this, we made the social gossip columns of Eugenia Sheppard and Aileen Mehle (aka Suzy Knickerbocker). Somewhere along the way, George convinced me to hire him, on occasion, to host dinner parties for these celebrities at my penthouse, after which they’d make a short app
earance at Studio and garnered the desired press. Before any one of these events, I recall George literally flying around my apartment, placing rose petals here, white orchids there, and dropping goldfish in the water goblets on the dinner table. His unique touches worked and became another reason for the press to report four or five times a week on all the happenings at Studio 54. After watching me blow cocaine up my nose every night for several years and listening to me insist I wasn’t addicted and could stop immediately if I chose to, George Paul would give me that look of his with one eyebrow raised and quote actress Tallulah Bankhead: “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming. I should know, I’ve been using it for seventeen years.” Tragically, George Paul Roselle died a few years later of AIDS.
Carmen D’Alessio was another one of our mainstays. I briefly described Carmen earlier when Steve and Ian introduced her to me in their Manhattan jail cell. However, Carmen was such an interesting and loveable character that she deserves further mention. She was a very good-looking Peruvian woman with a great body and dynamic personality. She was a pioneer as a party promoter and possessed an amazing ability to remember thousands of names. Carmen’s background was in fashion, having worked for Valentino and Yves St. Laurent. Somewhere along the way, she got to know every major designer in the world and started throwing parties for them at some of the early discos in Manhattan, long before Studio 54 opened. She was the person who originally told Steve and Ian to open in New York after hosting a party at their Queens nightclub, Enchanted Gardens. She also found the building for them at 254 West Fifty-Fourth Street, which would eventually become Studio 54.
Carmen was born into a wealthy family of attorneys in Peru, some of whom I’ve met and who know members of my father’s family in Lima. She speaks five languages, which landed Carmen her original job in New York at the United Nations. She met all the beautiful people in the world who like to party and enjoy the nightlife—from Europe and South America, to Miami and LA.
As Carmen did for Steve and Ian, she introduced me to key members of the fashion crowd as well as her European group of counts, countesses, dukes, duchesses, rich European businessmen—the Eurotrash set and assorted hangers-on who air-kissed, said “darling,” and made a party successful. They knew all the right people, spoke with foreign accents, wore expensive suits, checked the time on heirloom watches, carried designer handbags, and refused to pay for anything. They would say, “I am a VIP, I don’t pay.” In reality, some were shoe salesmen, pharmacists, dog walkers, waiters, and stock boys. The Dupont Twins were welcomed by all of New York society, especially by Andy Warhol who had a thing for twins regardless of lineage and welcomed them to his entourage. Truth is, they were the Laskos brothers, two high school kids from Fairfield County, Connecticut. On-demand fact checking was unheard of back then. Confirming a person’s title or lineage before adding them to a VIP guest list involved phone calls and research. But the twins were cool and everyone liked them.
Carmen did a great job—she knew most of the people personally on her various lists as she had been at this for a while. She was in her mid-forties and spoke with an elegant Spanish/Italian accent and could rattle off fifty foreign names of people who were on her guest list in one sentence. Carmen usually produced two major events per month at Studio 54. She had a card file with thousands of party people that she maintains to this day. Now in her early seventies, Carmen is still arranging some of New York’s chicest parties.
Fran Boyer was a valuable asset when she wanted to be. She was a good-looking former model and nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn who knew everyone in the fashion industry after working for Calvin Klein—and others—for years. Her problem was she liked coke too much—she was so thin, she looked like she had spent time in a concentration camp. Somewhere along the way she came into my life, and I gave her part-time work organizing fashion events with well-known models and designers. As time went by, and when she was straight enough to work, I increased her hours and she became an almost full-time assistant working by day out of my apartment. Fran was intuitive as a personal shopper, keeping my wardrobe stocked with fabulous comped Calvin Klein shirts. She’d go to Calvin’s warehouse and return with exactly what I wanted. She had great style. Whenever I saw her, usually the first thing out of her mouth was, “Do ya’ have any coke?” in her thick nasal Brooklyn accent. We spoke on the phone back in 2011, when I was in New York for the Sirius XM Studio 54 “One Night Only” Launch Party. She sounds exactly the same thirty years on.
Lynn Dubal, a very attractive and successful Seventh Avenue runway model, assisted Fran on some of the fashion shows at Studio. Lynn was a long-time favorite model of designer Tracey Mills and she had great connections. Lynn and Fran saved me tons of money in wardrobe expenses for all my assistants. They arranged to borrow “samples” from New York’s top designers, which wasn’t a hard sell to them given that beauties like my assistant Hilary Clark would parade around the main bar of Studio 54 at my side wearing their creations. Denise Chatman attended many formal music industry events in the name of Studio 54, dressed in formal designer gowns on loan from Tracy Mills, arranged by Lynn Dubal. It entailed a lot of work and talent, making the selections and arrangements, and for that I was beyond grateful. These days, Lynn can be found at one of New York’s favorite celebrity hangouts, Serendipity, home of the patented Frozen Hot Chocolate. Always at the center of fashion and entertainment, Lynn works alongside her good friend and Serendipity owner, Stephen Bruce. I laugh when I think of Lynn and Fran sending cocaine back and forth via messenger, hidden in Calvin Klein hosiery packages. “Girls just wanna have fun” was their motto—they had to make it through another work day before heading back to Studio and partying with the hottest boys in town.
Shelley Tupper always looked “hot” in the photographs taken of her attending to A-list celebrities at Studio. She had her own sense of style but Janice Dickinson and Billy Tootsie treated her like a play doll, styling her hair and dressing her up in clothes borrowed from top designers who were only too happy to loan Janice anything she wanted for Shelley Tupper at Studio 54. Janice Dickinson was the original “supermodel” and one of the highest paid models in the world during my reign at Studio. She graced the cover of Vogue thirty-seven times and the cover of ELLE seven issues in a row.
The following are excerpts from several staff meeting minutes to provide you with a view of Studio’s internal operations and to demonstrate what a pain in the ass the bartenders found Philippe de Montperreux to be.
STAFF MEETING—MINUTES FROM
January 24 and February 8, 1983
Skip’s quote of the day: “If Philippe ever comes to the bar and demands complimentary drinks and then refuses to pay or to use drink tickets and then hassles the bartender, I will personally call security and have him ejected from the club.”
The Penthouse (meaning Mark’s apartment) staff must try harder to keep Studio staff aware of changes, additions to schedules, etc. Improvement to communications can only help.
George Martin is taking parties of people downstairs to do you-know-what—no one should be allowed to park down there. It is simply a thoroughfare for those people that have keys. It is especially bad to be down there at 4:00 a.m. when the night manager is putting money in the safe. Please people, use your heads.
Conference room was destroyed Sunday night—the people who populate it on Sundays are animals—let’s get keys for the conference room.
All décor decisions should be checked out with Michael Overington first—don’t go directly to David Lees—he can’t make budget decisions. There is usually a concept being worked on for the week and ways to tie your party in with someone else’s. Remember a little bit does not go a long way in Studio—it’s often better to do nothing than a little something that gets totally lost in the room.
Michael Overington again reiterated that Shay is the key to scheduling. All new parties, changes, or confirmations should go through Shay. At the first sign of a part
y, fill out a party fact sheet roughly and distribute it immediately.
Chuck Garelick (Head of Security) requested that the Guest List be rewritten to double space between names—Beth Ann will take care of that.
Denise requested real wine glasses at the bars—all the managers violently disagreed—they take up too much room at the bar and in the kitchen.
Security at Cut Drop Parties seems to be a problem especially with the coat check at the back door entrance—the suggestion was to tape the scrim down so that people can’t get behind there.
Complaints that Sunday night security is lax and arrogant—seems to be because Chuck isn’t around—He says he’ll take care of it and it won’t happen again.
Day crew complains that night security and night crew are searching the furniture at the end of the night for “goodies”—David Miskett (night manager) says nonsense—the busboys beat everyone to it. Now I’ll tell you about my crew—my drug buddies. The first was Gustavo Novoa, the very talented artist from Chile. In 1977 he published Jungle Fables, a book of his paintings and poems on the theme of “vice and virtue” conveying a deep commitment to ecology, wildlife preservation, and a more humane world. He gave his creatures human characteristics and made them philosophical. I treasure the painting he gave me, one of his well-known animal reflection paintings of leopards, which has followed me for years and hangs behind my desk. His paintings have been collected by the First Families of Reagan and Bush, Prince Charles of England, Sylvester Stallone, and designers Valentino and Versace. Gustavo was happy, very charming, and always looking to have a good time. One late night, prowling in an abandoned building while getting high, he said, “I think of myself as a black panther in the body of a well-travelled painter.”
Inside Studio 54 Page 15