High life
Frenzied
Takt
New York Imagine an airline hangar decorated by Salvador Dali, all nightmarish mauve, blue strobe lights flashing, crimson neon tubes blinking, punk-chic disco music blasting. Add people writhing in smart tuxes, Sassoon trims and Yves St Laurent evening !tresses. This is Studio 54, the most fashionable discotheque in New York. Just off 8th Avenue on 54th street, it is located only four blocks off the DMZ — where teenage hookers and their pimps ply their trade. The place began as a cinema and later served as a television studio. Today its structure remains unchanged. A large foyer, a great central room and a lofty amphitheatre. Muscular, half-naked bartenders rock to the music while serving drinks in the circular bar. Up above couples Watch the dancing, sway tp the music or Make love in the aisles. A mix of raw sensuality and of intensity pervades. Walking around the place is like reading a gossip Column when stoned.
There is Andy Warhol, a picture of con trived dishevelment, surrounded by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald types. Warhol never sPeaks, never drinks, just keeps watching. Ettanca Jagger pops some pills and goes into a frenzied dance with Halston, the designer. Ralston is a Dracula-like figure, elongated, Mysterious and aloof. Unlike Dracula, however, he prefers to sniff white things than suck the traditional red stuff from the tiecks of maidens. Over in the bar Walter Cronkite sips Diet-Rite Cola.
Given the fact that New Yorkers are the greatest snobs and social climbers in the World, Studio 54 and the attitude that goes With it is more than just a social fly-by-night Phenomenon. It has been described as a revolutionary gesture by the rich and the haves who have been pushed around by hip Minorities for too long. No more slumming in Harlem, tea-dances for the black panthers or mixing with the freaks. Wall Street, Park Avenue and the top echelons of the media have turned punk-chic and the blacks, the freaks and the crazies are outside looking in.
This is Studio 54's contribution to contemporary history. It has accomplished more in a year than thousands of shrinks at 200 dollars per hour have in a generation. The man who liberated New York society from its anxieties and constant social climbing is a twenty-eight-year-old Jewish boy from the Bronx, a Yale graduate called Steve RubeII. He began with hamburger stands, graduated to hamburger restaurants and then hit upon the idea of Studio 54. His thinking was simple. Instead of downmarketing for the rich, or up-marketing for the middle, why not down-market the product but up-market the people. In other words separate the ritzy from the rich and the trendy from the trendies.
The result was that he is now considered to be in New York what Mrs Vanderbilt was a generation ago. A social arbiter. A creator of society. But instead of having only 400 (that's all she could squeeze in for dinner) Rubell has one thousand. How does one make it inside? How does one qualify? There are no set rules for acceptance but a plethora of them for rejection. For example: two gold chains around one's neck, three-inch heels for men, platform shoes for women will make one as welcome as a pork chop at a kosher dinner. Double knits ditto. Out are fat executive types, no matter how rich and that includes all Arabs.
Social observers admit that it was about time. What was perversely cast as society until today in New York was a bunch of demented Protestants known as Wasps who posed as Englishmen by wiring their jaws together and trying to speak in what became known as Park Avenue lock-jaw. On which subject, Jackie Onassis, the undisputed queen of New York café society, tried at first to resist Steve Rubel!. When she saw that he was too strong she attempted to bowl him over. She failed on both counts. She now pays homage to him by attending regularly and never asking for special privileges.
It is not difficult to understand the Studio 54 philosophy and why it has caught on.
Lacking a language whose inflections can suggest precise points on the social spec trum and their attendant values, New Yorkers have always relied on nightclubs for identity. But nightclub owners have throughout the ages let them down by preferring South American and Italian gigolos (as during the 'Forties and 'Fifties) blacks and hippies (as in the 'Sixties) Greeks and Arabs in the early 'Seventies. Now all this has changed. And you don't even have to drink a lot to belong. Steve passes out quaaludes like kleenex in a 'flu epidemic and there is no charge.
The last time I spoke to him he voiced concern about England and the egalitarian society Benn and his kind are trying to impose. Unlike most Englishmen Rubell will not take this sitting down. He is opening a Studio 54 in London early in the spring, which, he predicts, will deal a body blow to socialism.
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