By Myles Ludwig
Yesterday’s auction of ephemera from Studio 54 at Palm Beach Modern Auctions on Bunker Road was a Proustian picture of my past refracted through a disco mirror ball.
I walked into the auction house and was immediately confronted with a rogue’s gallery of black-and-white happy-snaps of ghosts fixed to the wall. There was a laughing ex-girlfriend who had overdosed, sadly; there were AIDs-drugs victims like co-owner Steve Rubell and Halston; death-by-misadventure JFK Jr.; died-on-the-operating- table Andy Warhol; the dead drunk Truman Capote; a pre-white Michael Jackson; a still-whole Farah Fawcett; smart-ass David Susskind; bi-modal Leonard Bernstein; Elizabeth Taylor; Christina Onassis; Liza Minelli and Cher … wait a minute, they’re still alive.
Some others were still alive, but some are long forgotten ― who remembers Leon Spinks? It was eerie. I was very glad there was no grip-and-grin shot of me up there for sale to the highest bidder. Facebook is problematic enough. I recognized a lot of other friends who are still kicking, but my favorite picture had a solitary, contemplative Frank Sinatra in a white sport coat and toupee chewing on one end of a pair of glasses. I could hear him saying: “Who are these people and what the hell is this all about?”
It was about elitism. Those were wild days in New York and the tone, the zeitgeist of the town was set by the creative elite in the fashion business and the media rather than by Wall Street. In fact, in those days, a hedge fund manager was considered a lower form of life, somebody who went to ex-Yippie Jerry Rubin’s happy-hour networking parties, hunting for prospects.
I had actually been there before the place opened. I was designing a magazine at the time, a “real people” competitor to People, long before there was such a thing as a reality star and a Kardashian could’ve have been something you ordered for an appetizer in an Armenian restaurant. Rubell had invited us to tour the construction site to gin up some advance publicity. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first of many, many naughty nights I would spend there.
Studio was a descendant of the dance-and-Quaalude traveling loft parties of the early ’70s (which were themselves, descended from Harlem rent parties where the best jazz and jive in town was found). Rubell and his partner Ian Schrager made it a clubhouse for wicked and Stevie filled it like a maitre d’ impressed with his own importance. Schrager, who was Norma Kamali’s boyfriend at the time, stayed low-key behind the scenes, though both guys went to jail for income tax evasion. They had stashed garbage bags of skimmed cash in the ceiling of the cellar where other wicked things went on, just as they did in the balcony.
Later, there was competition from Xenon, owned by Howard Stein who also owned Au Bar in Palm Beach, the Kennedy clubhouse. Once I brought a crowd over to Xenon for an after-party ― after the party I threw at the Rockefeller Plaza skating rink I rented to celebrate the publication of my Olympics magazine. I had worked on that project for two years, but never went to the games at Lake Placid. Instead, on the day they opened, I flew down to Guadeloupe with my girlfriend, who was appropriately nicknamed Spike.
The auction room was packed with people, on the phone and on the Internet who were scarfing up the snaps for a lot of money, a lot more than their scanned $3.99 copies would ultimately bring on eBay. Even Warhol’s intentionally blurry Polaroids were going for nose-bleed prices, as if they too couldn’t be copied. I stayed for a while, then started to feel uncomfortable with this cannibalization of my past by people who Steve would never have allowed into Studio, no matter how much they bid or begged.
The irony that a mirrored disco ball is the grand prize on Dancing with the Stars does not escape me.
Myles Ludwig is a former magazine editor living in Lake Worth.