The inside story of Studio 54, Manhattan's most legendary club ever (2024)

There are two useful political bookends to the continued significance of the legend of Studio 54 from the opening and closure of the most famous nightclub in the world. When the doors of Studio flung open during the infamous early summer of 1977, the socialite Nikki Haskell was among the first to approach the velvet rope. She was double-dating that night. On her arm was a man whose name is now forgotten to history. Accompanying them was the future president of the USA, Donald Trump, with his then-bride, Ivana.

In Studio’s dying days, after its short lifespan – the space ignited then burned out with the speed, efficiency and sparkle of a Catherine wheel – scandal had begun to accrue around the former midtown opera house, and not just concerning the freewheeling accountancy practices of its owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. Margaret Trudeau, deep into the dreamy haze of a Quaalude hit, slumped back on a banquette in Studio’s secret room downstairs, under the stage. She was an early victim of what is now euphemistically known as ‘the upshot’. The Canadian prime minister’s wife was papped knickerless. The shot became the hottest news item shared across Canadian news media the following day. Pierre Trudeau lost his seat shortly thereafter. Three decades later, his son Justin occupies it.

That the twin leaders, the giants of North American politics, should have intimate connections to Studio 54 should come as little surprise. ‘Everybody who came to New York went there,’ says Ian Schrager now, sitting in his Lower Manhattan office suite, the central hub of operations from which he conjures ever-more delightful environments in which the mundane business of life can be lent his tasteful fairy dust. ‘I mean, it was a phenomenon.’ Schrager has just opened the latest of his hotels, Public, on the Lower East Side. Patti Smith played at the ribbon-snipping party. A rooftop terrace bar looking wide out onto the East River, Brooklyn and beyond carries with it some of the vista of his past and present. To many, Schrager is the unofficial king of New York.

Over his left shoulder sits the Studio 54 logo, the letters picked out in lacquered gold. By ‘everyone’ coming to Studio, he means ‘everyone good’, a claim that bears close scrutiny. The discotheque rode a new celebrity wave hard and fast, its politics a secondary afterthought to the amoral bacchanalia housed within. Parties were thrown for Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Thelma Houston once ‘ummed’ and ‘aahed’ her way through the delicious introduction to “Don’t Leave Me This Way” in crimped silver lamé from the balcony. Michael Jackson still sported his Afro there. For the Warhol coterie, Studio was an elite variant of the working men’s club. In its final hours, Diana Ross bid farewell to Rubell and Schrager from the Studio DJ booth before the NYPD intervened to cut short the Dionysian excess by dishing them out a couple of jail sentences for tax evasion.

In the intervening four decades since, Studio 54 has become the subject of every art director’s glamour mood board. When boys who read nu-disco blogs hear the opening strains of “Love Hangover”, “Relight My Fire” or “Was That All It Was”, it is their imaginary Studio 54 valve that those propulsive basslines first tickle. When a stylist slips into a kaftan, it is to the back stairwell of Studio their sartorial choice transports them. I once heard the NYC Downlow, Glastonbury’s triumphant disco space, described as ‘Studio 54 in a cow field’. When you want to designate a particular brand of louche elegance on a night-time scene, Studio 54 is the natural first port of comparative call.

In it Rubell and Schrager, a pair of old friends with a Brooklyn complex, had temporarily restructured Manhattan in the spirit of interwar Berlin, setting the theatre of the twilight to a disco beat. ‘The best thing that happened to me,’ says Schrager, ‘was being raised in Brooklyn. Everybody was hungry, everybody was upwardly mobile. Your parents wanted you to live better lives than they had lived. In Brooklyn, everybody had an ambition and everybody had something to prove. You know, I wasn’t declawed, as I would’ve been if I’d grown up in a suburb.’

On its 40th birthday, Ian Schrager has begun for the first time to look back in detail at the legacy of Studio 54. As he glided past 70 last year, he has reached a satisfying point in his story. He has a wife, Tania, and a seven-year-old son, as well as two daughters from a previous marriage, and two step-daughters with Tania. Schrager is living something of his domestic life in reverse. Now a hugely successful hotelier, he has a string of successful global concerns that have bucked the populist hospitality trend. His hotels, like his nightclub, have been much imitated, never bettered. ‘I’ve been in one of my hotels and heard someone say, “This is the hotel from hell,”’ he says, without a care. ‘Well, whatever. The strength of the hotel is that it’s not generic and it’s not for everyone.’

In 2017, Ian Schrager has started to think about Studio again for several distinct reasons. ‘Primarily, because in my life there were two seminal cultural events,’ he notes. ‘There was Woodstock and there was Studio 54.’ He checks himself a moment. ‘Not to be pretentious, of course there were lots more important things. But cultural, you know?’ During his professional training at St John’s University School Of Law, New York, in the late Sixties, Schrager studied Woodstock. ‘Here’s a society of 400,000 people where there’s no laws, no police force. How did they get along? Maybe you don’t need laws?’ It planted a seed in him. He took the idea and ran with it at lightning pace during Studio 54’s nonpareil ownership of the night.

‘What I’ve noticed over the past five or ten years,’ he continues, ‘is that people don’t talk about Woodstock any more. But they are increasingly talking about Studio 54. So it made me curious. Why is that? What’s the reason for that? There were people who weren’t even born yet who want to know what it was like to be a part of that.’ He began alighting upon answers. ‘I thought that it’s maybe the idea of us trying to achieve an absolute dream, with no repercussions, with no illnesses. Studio was the closest that you could ever get to achieving that and feel protected. I think that’s the part that’s so attractive, the absolute freedom that Studio represented.’

There was a more specific, practical trigger for all this philosophical re-evaluation. Earlier this year, as Obama handed the reins of his White House tenure over to Trump, the departing leader of the free world solidified his reputation as the Disco President – remember, he had already declared Frankie Knuckles Day in his native Chicago – by adding Schrager to a list of professional pardons for crimes and misdemeanours past. The tax evasion conviction that hurt Schrager personally for so long and saw him and Rubell incarcerated for a year was no more. ‘So it doesn’t sting as much as it did.’

Before, the conviction mattered. ‘I didn’t want to be seen to be somebody who was exploiting something where I committed a crime. I wanted nothing to do with it.’ His silence on the subject until now has only cemented the legend of Studio 54. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I deal with a high calibre of person and high calibre of institutions and sometimes it comes up. So it’s embarrassing for me.’ Often, it would make dealings with the press uncomfortable. ‘Sometimes they write about it and sometimes they don’t,’ he says. ‘And it would be upsetting for me. Sometimes I would have to ask the writer, please don’t write about it and sometimes they wouldn’t and sometimes they would. But now I’ve got to the point where I’ve realised that it’s a part of my history and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve brought closure to it.’

The Obama pardon mattered to Schrager, a lot. ‘It was a big thing for me. And I didn’t need it for anything, other than personal reasons. It didn’t prevent me from doing anything in business. But I wanted it for my family and for myself. It helped bring closure to the whole thing. We were young.’ Now he can allow himself to start adjudicating the reasons why he did the things he did when he was the nightclub king of the universe.

Schrager says his time in prison taught him several key instructions for life. ‘You can’t appreciate the highs unless you’ve gone through the lows. I learned that the most important thing is not to lose your enthusiasm for life. If you lose that, you’ve lost everything. We didn’t have any money, I couldn’t be a lawyer, I didn’t know what we were going to do but I was still wide-eyed.

I was still hungry and enthusiastic and curious.’ Prison is often not the experience you think it might be. ‘That process is not just about going away. We lost everything. Couldn’t get a bank account, couldn’t get a credit card, couldn’t get a driver’s licence, but that enthusiasm and imagination got me through it.’ Nobody could rob Ian Schrager of his aesthetic. ‘If I had lost that, I really would’ve lost everything.’

At the beginning of September, a book of classic imagery divined from within Studio 54’s four walls was released, effortlessly sorting out the early Christmas present shopping list. It is full of familiar faces that have grown in stature and legend the further New York and the night moves from its old, utopian ideal of freedom. There may be more to come. After seeing the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met in 2011 and the Rolling Stones exhibition in New York at the end of last year, he has begun thinking about the possibilities of a Studio exhibition, which may or may not not turn into a nightclub.

Ian Schrager productions, his nightclubs, hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants are often the closest its patrons ever get to tasting the tantalising magic of the night at its starkest. You can touch sex in the air. ‘People will always say that I brought the nightlife into the hotel world,’ he avers. ‘It wasn’t so much that. It was that I was trying to create an elevated experience. The idea of going to the coolest bar in town or to go eat in the coolest restaurant in town which could be right downstairs in the lobby. It seemed like an obviously good idea. That was it.’

Yet still there is something of the night about him. There are reasons he’s never opened an art gallery. ‘Because an art gallery is not accessible,’ he says. ‘An art gallery is a little precious.’ He likes democracies based on taste, not financial cachet and certainly not on being told what not to do. ‘You can’t touch this, you can’t touch that.’ You can’t make noise in an art gallery. ‘Right? So that’s why I think art in public spaces is important. You don’t have to be rich. When art is not in a museum you can enjoy it in the closest way that rich people do when they own art.’

For all his instruction on sophistication and excess, there is something remarkably egalitarian about Ian Schrager. He has never opened a private members’ bar either. He always understood that the shop-floor staff at Fiorucci were just as important clients at Studio 54 as Liza Minnelli and Elton John. When Nick Jones presented him the business model of the rollout of Soho House, the Englishman baffled the New Yorker. Schrager has always lived by the old Groucho Marx maxim, of wanting most to go to the places that would never have you as a member. ‘If you don’t get it, then you shouldn’t be here,’ he says of his business endeavours. ‘That doesn’t mean that you’re of a low status; just that it’s not for everyone and that’s the point of it. When it is for everybody then it has to be dumbed down, by definition.’

Amazingly, Schrager is not much of a fan of the word ‘glamour’. ‘I think glamour is a little more superficial and that sophistication really has a gravitas to it,’ he says, ‘I probably learned in the nightclub business that you don’t really have any discernible product. It’s just elements that are brought together to create a magic, an alchemy. When that is well done, when that is sophisticated, it attracts a certain kind of person. That is always the person that I’m after. Young, old, rich or poor, it doesn’t matter. I’m always after that person.’

Schrager first met Steve Rubell when he was a freshman at Syracuse University. ‘I remember I was having a fun wrestling match with a tall basketball player and he was trying to rip my underwear off or something and of course I wouldn’t give up. I think that made an impression on Steve.’ I’ll bet it did. ‘So we became friends.’ Their first endeavour into nightlife was The Enchanted Garden club in Queens. For their Manhattan entrée, they picked the disused theatre on W 54th Street with six weeks to get it up and running. ‘I remember seeing the space. It was big and I was afraid of it. That business is a momentum business and it doesn’t stay static. That was my first impression.’ Schrager says its success was about timing and positioning. ‘First of all, the whole idea of the Pill, which came into being maybe ten years earlier, had really hit. People were experimenting a lot more than they’d ever done before. And it was acceptable.’ Schrager and Rubell understood exactly the times they were living in. ‘The gay population finally began to emerge. And in New York, by the way, they were setting the tone for the first time ever.’

The economics of the city played into its devotion to the night. ‘New York wasn’t dominated by only rich people, which it is now. It was a little bit more bohemian, maybe because of the demographics or maybe because people didn’t have anything to lose. So everyone was willing to give it a shot.’ Narcotics whizzed the night forward at a newly kinetic speed. ‘It was the emergence of drugs at, again, a full state. And it was the golden era of music.’ The two were acutely intertwined. ‘So all those things were happening and Studio happened to be the right time at the right place to ride that cultural wind.’

Development of the space was quick, but not without problems. ‘The second impression is, when you were doing nightclubs at that time, there was one person who did lighting, one person who did sound and when other people in the business saw that Steve and I were going into it, they told everybody not to work with us.’ They turned away from nightlife people and approached the big guns. Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz, technically peerless Tony-winning film and theatre lighting designers, came aboard. ‘That started my ammunition of working with really talented people.’ He continues to. Marantz has designed some of the lighting for Public. ‘It’s such an ethereal discipline,’ Schrager says of lighting. ‘It gives them a taste level that goes way beyond their job.’ They are quite literally creating atmosphere. ‘Same with flower people.

I was also very friendly with the flower man.’ The mercurial Robert Isabell is another name that accrued global significance at Studio 54, where stars were etched into the fixtures and fittings.

Legend always had it that the brains and brawn behind Studio 54 were a Pet Shop Boys/Soft Cell type operation, with Schrager forever cast in the Chris Lowe/Dave Ball role, silent and unsmiling, making the magic happen away from centre stage. In the flesh, he is comfortable, warm and no-nonsense, clear and unpretentious.

Some of the notion that Schrager was backroom boy and Rubell shop-front face was true, he says. ‘It wasn’t mutually exclusive. It never is. I had a sphere of influence, which was on the creation and Steve had a sphere of influence, which was on the people. But it wasn’t just that. Steve wasn’t just a host. He was an incredibly bright, astute guy, obviously. So I think on the surface, Steve had a job and I had a job. But underneath, we both wanted the same thing. We wanted to blow people away and do something flamboyant. We were willing to break the rules. We wanted the cool people to love it. And we were both afraid of failure.’

Their audacious masterstroke was to hang from the ceiling an illustration of the man in the moon with a co*ke spoon held to his nostril. ‘We had six weeks to get the place ready and we called in four or five set designers and we asked them to make a presentation about what they would do. We wanted to fly things in and out, we wanted to have lighting effects and we wanted to change the environment. We wanted a stage with a proscenium arch.’

They brought in the design partnership, Aerographics, ‘who used a lot of airbrushing techniques. They came in with the most stylised set that we chose over much more established theatrical set designers.’ The man in the moon was hung. ‘You know what it says?’ asks Schrager. ‘It was the subversiveness, the arrogance, the danger of it. How dare you? We weren’t promoting drugs. It was just the arrogance of it all.’

Schrager’s favourite nights at Studio 54 were its Halloween parties. ‘They were the zenith, anything goes, do anything you wanted, the one night that almost anyone in a good costume could get in. They were so amazing, so creative. I remember one person coming in as a doctor but he had broomsticks with shoes on the end, like wheeling a patient.’ For the first, the entire entry passage of Studio had been rebuilt. ‘When you walked in, you walked over a fibreglass box with a fluorescent light and a lot of white mice running around all over the place. There were six doors when you walked down the corridor and when you opened up one door you might have four dwarfs sitting at a table with silverware that came out of a doll’s house, eating a Cornish hen. In another, you might find a guy sitting under a table with a tablecloth with a hole in the table and his head on a plate eating noodles coming out of his mouth. Each door represented a different thing. The thrill of it was thinking that people are just going to be blown away by this because it’s two minutes.’ He doesn’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the legendary Halloween parties at Studio were responsible for some of America’s incumbent fascination with the holiday.

At its peak, Studio 54 was about to franchise. A denim line was conceptualised. Outposts in LA, London and Tokyo were talked about. Then the police intervened. ‘What happened then could probably never be repeated. All of those circ*mstances are not present today. You could achieve a kind of freedom but it would be different. In the way a car is different today than it was then.’

Ian Schrager is not quite the man you expect him to be. Because he is an aesthete of the highest distinction, I had imagined him as someone a little removed, perhaps even snooty. He’s the opposite. Schrager has the impressive, straight-talking demeanour of a tough fellow smoking a cigar while chewing his way through a steak in a particularly testy episode of The Sopranos. He’s like Harvey Keitel performing an intensely physical reading of Ralph Lauren.

When I ask about the low lighting in his hotels, he says: ‘The reason the lights are dim is because people look better when it’s darker, when the lights are dim. There’s no intellectual doctrine.’ When we go through a fun little verbal ping-pong match of which zeitgeist New Yorkers may have gone to Studio 54 if they were in New York back in the day, you can almost see him ticking a guest list for Saturday night entry in 1979. Jay Z and Beyoncé? ‘Yes.’ Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow? ‘Good couple.’ Brad and Angelina? ‘Now there was a couple.’ Justin Bieber? He pauses for a beat. ‘There are cool young people out there now, but they’re on social media, they’re “the influencers”.’

His nose wrinkles a little for the first time in the conversation. Stacking up the stats on social media is not his way of working. He doesn’t like that catch-all idea of creating something for everyone. ‘I think there’s something corrupt about the whole thing. I don’t like it. The influencers, there’s something about it that’s so aggressive, they sell their posts and there’s something I don’t like about it.’ Kim Kardashian, he thinks, would not be a Studio 54 person. ‘Just when Studio opened,’ he says, warming to the subject, ‘that celebrity culture started to go into overdrive. People magazine came out.

Us magazine came out soon thereafter and there was this celebration of celebrities, until we wind up today with what is a complete perversion, where celebrities are celebrities even though they haven’t done anything and they need to figure out what to do. Back then you became a celebrity when you did something. You accomplished something. You wanted to do something. Now, no.’ He thinks the daughter of another hotel empire, Paris Hilton, was his tipping point for all this. ‘That was the beginning of the end.’

Schrager’s taste for elitism was not drawn from the vulgarity of money or social climbing; it was always about a more fundamental aspect of human curiosity. It was never just about reaching behind the velvet rope. ‘That wasn’t my motivating force,’ he says. ‘My motivating force was doing something that those people enjoyed. If you can get those people, if you get to the top of your game, if you can get the most sophisticated people, people in the zeitgeist, those in the know, people that are discerning, to really respond to what you’ve done, that group of people is what makes me work to this day.’

Steve Rubell died on 25 July 1989. He had been diagnosed HIV positive and died of complications with AIDS. Like Keith Haring, he is one of those New Yorkers – one can only wonder what might’ve happened if they had lived a longer life. ‘Keith was another good soul,’ says Schrager when his name is mentioned.

In a sense, the reason Schrager took so long to domesticate is that he was, platonically at least, married to Rubell during their fertile creative partnership. ‘Yes. I used to have a PR that I would say, “this is a love affair” to. I’d say, “Don’t tell that to people because they’ll take it the wrong way.” I mean, I will never have another friend like that. Even when it came for the credit for Studio, Steve didn’t take anything from me. He got the credit, I got the credit, perfectly cool. People don’t understand that.’

Rubell’s death hit Schrager hard. ‘You know it was a profound loss because my life changed from one day to the next. When my father died, again my life changed from one day to the next. Of course I was so young then that I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under my feet. You become a different person. You change overnight. It changes you.’ He turns the question back. ‘You had someone go?’ He’s a good sort, Mr Schrager.

Without that first profound death of his father when he was 19 years of age, perhaps Studio 54 would never have happened. ‘That’s what made me shy, I think, you know? It took my youth. So it changes you, losing a parent dying young.’ He connects the two deaths. ‘It’s all on the same continuum. If Steve would’ve stayed alive we would’ve been more successful. Sure, he made some mistakes, but by myself I can sometimes get lost in focusing on a job. So I think Steve would’ve been successful on his own. I have been successful on my own. But together?’ He lets the thought rest a second. ‘My success is based strictly on the work, the product, period. Steve was a networker. We could’ve been the Marriott or the Hilton with the ideas we had, changed the industry. But I never had that ambition. Who knows what we would’ve done? Maybe we would’ve been the next Marriott.’ He wants to caveat this. ‘I don’t care about it now, by the way.’

Sometimes when he looks around the world, Ian Schrager can see the legacy of Studio 54 dotted around him. When he heard of all the irreligious hoopla going on at Berghain in Berlin, he asked a professional cohort to take him. ‘East Berlin, yes,’ he recalls. ‘I went to see what was going on. I was curious about it.’ He liked what he saw. ‘It reminded me of the Seventies in New York. I thought that was the only example I’ve seen that’s doing the same kind of thing that we were doing in Studio. They don’t let you take pictures or do any of that stuff. That’s clever.’

It brought to mind the ethos of his and Steve Rubell’s past. ‘I hadn’t thought about that kind of unadulterated, pure freedom and feeling protected by it since. So it’s different than 40 years ago but there’s a common denominator. It’s subversive. That kind of place was exactly what I wanted to feel, what I wanted to see for myself.’

There are some hospitality entrepreneurs in whom he sees a little of himself, too. He points out New York restaurateur Keith McNally and Parisian hotelier Jean-Louis Costes as favourites. ‘Those two brought something of themselves into what they did. The others? Some of them do it well and some of them do it not so well but they are derivative. That’s just my opinion.’ Sometimes, when he goes past James Jebbia’s Supreme store on Lafayette and sees the velvet rope and queues round the block on a retail unit, he will divine from the experience something of his old metre in a new guise. ‘I don’t know the person who did Supreme but I was blown away by it. That alchemy happens with them. They have security on the door!’

At 71 years old, Ian Schrager is just about beginning to think of a life without work. ‘Yes, I have time with my family now. I have balance. I work very, very hard when I work but then I stop and that’s it. I’m not a workaholic because I love spending time with my wife and my son.’

Underneath the bacchanalian escapades he brought to life, there is a people person at the heart of everything Ian Schrager has achieved. ‘When I did my first hotel, Morgans,’ he remembers, ‘and we had loose pillows and throws on the bed, people would say, “Hey, those pillows are going to wind up in the stadium and those throws are going to wind up in their suitcases.”’ Schrager’s faith in human nature, his belief in the power of aesthetics superseded all that. ‘No. People rise to the occasion. They rise to the level of what they’re in. I believe in that. I believe in a level of excellence. It’s why I have always done my job and what keeps me doing my job.’

Studio 54 by Ian Schrager, with foreword by Bob Colacello, is out now

Read More

Best nightclubs in London, tried and tested

Will the next Andy Warhol be a robot?

London's waning nightlife: is the party really over?