Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm boogie down Josh, and there's Disco Stu Chuck and it's just the two of us because Diana Ross Jerry is not here right now.
Yeah, this is what I'm surprised we didn't tackle shortly after our disco episode as like a two parter.
It is a little surprising, isn't it. But I hadn't heard of Studio fifty four until you pick this, so I don't know how that would have been.
That's funny.
I'm just kidding. I've heard of it. I'm cool, man, I'm hip, even though I guess I was one year old to three years old when it was open, so as it was going on, I wasn't aware of it. But later in life I kind of developed an awareness of it. What do you think about all that?
I mean, I would have been six years old to nine, so I probably could have gotten into Studio four.
I was gonna say the same thing. There's some shocking revelations about this stuff that anybody who knows about Studio fifty four is probably like, yeah, and that's just how it was. And on the outside, it's it's just nuts. It was just such a they called it like the disco sodom and Gomorrah. It was just a complete bach and all of like just drugs and sex and like in the club, and it was just absolutely nuts. But as you read about it, it's it's just the same
themes over and over again. People had sex in the club, everybody was doing coke in the club, everybody was on quayludes, and Mick Jagger's wife Bianca was on a horse once and it just kept getting like it all was just kind of melded together, and I kind of felt like by the time I was done researching this, I get Studio fifty four.
Yeah, there's a documentary on Netflix that's okay called Studio fifty four. Yes, from filmmaker Matt I guess tiern Hour. There was a very bad movie about Studio fifty four, like a movie movie with Mike Myers in playing Steve Rebel.
I thought that was the documentary. I was gonna say, Steve Rubell is like the spinning image of Mike Myers.
But now I got youa no, Mike, it turns out Mike Rebell or I'm sorry Steve Rebell, Mike Myers, Young Billy, Joel, and Alex Edelman all sort of are the same person.
Oh that's interesting.
They all look alike. But it's interesting. When I was watching the documentary, Emily was floating through the room here and there, and people were just like, oh my god, and we would just do this and this and this and this, and she finally wandered through and just went these people sound like idiots.
Yeah it is. It's just basically another example of an apologies, like this is a pretty blanket statement, but the boomer generation being like, we did this and had so much fun and it's the coolest thing that could ever possibly happen.
Yeah. Think, And it's sort of like it reeked of a documentary on like the you know, the what was that ill fated Doomed Island Music Festival fire Festival. Yeah, it was kind of like that where she was just like, these people are idiots, Like how long can you just sit around and talk about doing cocaine every night and dancing until the sun came up?
Yeah? But the thing is, and Olivia helps us with this, and I think she kind of captured it. The reason it seems like that studio fifty four is still just so prominent in just the general cultural consciousness, especially in America. Is because it was short lived. It ended at its peak, so it didn't stick around long enough to like really
like become passe. And in the very short, like bursting lifespan that it had less than three years, like thirty three months, I think it was just it was the coolest of the cool And when you all that together, that's how fifty years later, people like us are doing a podcast on it still. You know what I mean about a club a club. That's why we're doing a podcast one of eight thousand disco clubs that were open
between nineteen seventy four and nineteen seventy six alone. That's how important this club was to that scene.
Yeah, I mean, it's on one hand, there's a couple of ways to look at it. It was it was a symbol of something more than probably anything. Was the symbol of that era, of that excess and decadence and everything.
And on one hand, like my brain goes, yeah, but you know what, this is great because it was these nightclubs were havens for minorities and for gay people, for that community to get together in a safe place where they could be themselves, because like you literally, like the documentary even says like, if you were a transgender person, you were taking your life in your hands walking down the street. Some nights, you know, you get just assaulted.
You can still get assaulted for that, but especially back then. So part of my brain goes there, and part of it, of it goes to like kind of what Emily said, just like what a vapid material, just sort of scene based on how you looked and who you knew, and part of it part of it was like, oh wow, what a cool time, and then part of me was like, geez, what an awful group of people.
Yeah, yeah, okay, good. I'm glad that we pretty much arrived at the same place. And also I find it comforting that I'm following the long standing trend of agreeing with Emily.
Yeah. Well, as we get older, I think I tend to look at things a little more with like and I like that, rather than just like, yeah, man, what a cool party that was?
Exactly for sure, but let's talk about what a cool party that was.
Yeah. I guess we should get to the building first, because it was a historied building. It was located at two fifty four West fifty fourth Street. It was originally an opera house in the nineteen twenties and then in the nineteen forties, kind of through the fifties and into the sixties and seventies, it was a CBS studio. They had a sixty four thousand dollars Question and Captain Kangaroo and What's My Line? And it was called Studio fifty two.
Weirdly at the time, it's so square. But they all eventually moved their operations to Los Angeles with the CBS studios there in Central Hollywood, and it sat there empty in nineteen seventy seven. So the guys that noticed that studio was sitting empty or this large theater, I guess were two guys named Steve Rebell and Ian Schrager, who were Brooklyn guys from sort of working class to middle class Jewish families who met each other at college at Syracuse.
Yeah, apparently they became like friends for life. Ian Trigger said that after they met and became friends, he thinks that he and Steve Rubell spoke every day for the rest of Steve Rubell's life. And Ian Schrager also put it that because they were from Brooklyn. They had something to prove, especially you know, going to Syracuse with probably some wealthier kids and then coming from working class families.
I'm not gonna say they had a chip on their shoulder, but they were like, they were hustlers, they were ambitious. They were going to make a life for themselves rather than you know, just end up joining their dad's firms because their dads didn't have a firm. One was a postman and the other one was named Max the Jew
who ran illegal gambling operations. So that kind of drive, and then also just the creativity that those two guys had together, and then also like just the connection that they had, Like this was a genuine partnership that came that this came out of it was it just kind of I think inserted a little electricity that otherwise wouldn't have been there. Yeah.
So after they graduated, Ian Schrager went to law school at Saint John's and started practicing. Along the early seventies, Rebel got into the steakhouse business and was apparently opening steakhouses a little too quickly because he overextended himself. Did you see the one ad for one of his restaurants.
No, they were called steak lofts, right, Like.
Well, this one was at least steak loft make love to your stomach. And in the subheading it said all entrees include soup, salad, bar, baked potato, and shrimp.
Wow.
Not a bad deal.
Yeah, no, that is a pretty good deal. I'm kind of hungry for it now.
But he had these steakhouses. He got into a little financial trouble and his old palse stepped in to help keep creditors at bay as his attorney. And then by this point though in the early seventies, they were already sort of co owners and two different discos, one in Queen's and one in Boston.
Yeah, the one in Queen's is the more important one. They actually gave up their share in the one in Boston so that they could get full ownership of the Queen's one called in Chana Garden. And it was kind of like the original template for what would become Studio fifty four. They would throw like theme parties where everybody would dress up and they would decorate it along with the theme. Like it was way more than just some club. And it's like, look at the mirrors on the wall
in the disco, ball up there like this was. There was theatrics to it too. And so the other big thing that happened at in Channa Garden is that they met a man named Jack Douchey or Dushy. Let's go with Dushy.
Oh, I thought it was dhe is it?
Oh? Do you s a g y do? Shee? Is definitely a pronunciation of that. So you say douche Huh?
I thought it was, but I actually can't remember now from the documentary that I watched three hours ago.
Well, let's agree it's definitely not Douchey. Okay. His name was Jack d and he owned a store in Brooklyn, I think a discount store, and was fairly wealthy. And he threw either depending on who you ask, his daughter's bot mitzvah or his son's bar mitzvah at in Channa Garden and I guess like the cut of Steve and Ian's jib, and went into business with them as a silent partner, and he gave them the influx of cash that they needed to start Studio fifty four.
Yeah, it was about a half a million bucks. It was kind of a crazy idea at the time, even though disco techs were big. West fifty fourth Street at this time was really I guess the best way to say it is sleazy.
Is it in your town square.
Yeah, I mean that's all sort of in that theater district. But at the time it was just it was dirty, it was dangerous. People thought like, if you're trying to open a high end disco tech like, this is not the part of town where you want to be doing that. They did it anyway.
Wow. Yeah. They formed a company called Broadway Catering Corporation, which will make a little more sense in a little while, and they leased that building at two fifty four West fifty fourth Street and they got to work on turning it into a club. They did it in six weeks. They went from nothing to ready for people to come in six weeks without a construction license, I.
Think, yeah, And they just kind of got to work. It was, you know, sort of a time where you could just get away with stuff until you didn't kind of under the table style, and that's what they did. You said they started with nothing, but not quite because the theater was it was an old theater, so they had a stage and they had a perscenium arch, and
they had a lighting rigging system. Yeah, that was there from the TV days and because they sort of got not blocked, but their rivals in the other discotheques were basically saying like, hey, don't go work for the guys. Yeah, if you're a designer or you know someone who would
help them open it. And so they went very smartly to Broadway and got people who worked in the theater to come in and they were like, this place has got all the bones and this lighting rig's already set up, Like this is not going to be too hard.
No, they had a lot to work with, in other words, so they hired one guy, a guy named Richard Long, who actually was the sole veteran of the club scene of like like setting up clubs. He had set up the sound systems for most of the gay discos in New York, so he knew what he was doing, and that certainly came in handy because, I mean, one of the main things of Studio fifty four was the music, right like in the dancing to the music. So to have a pro creating the sound system was a big one.
And then you also cannot overlook the role that Carmen Delecio did. She was a pr sorceress. I saw her described as and her role essentially was to basically go around to New York's glitterati and talk about how awesome this club is going to be. And it worked very well.
Yeah, for sure. There were other PR people that worked with them that literally got paid for placing story, placing stories in the newspaper, Like you get five hundred dollars if there's a picture of Liza Benelli and Truman Capoti going into Studio fifty four in the New York Post, and you get this much if it's in this magazine. And that was, you know, it was a pretty smart
way to do it. It was incentivizing these PR people to get the you know, the biggest stars of the time very publicly through usually the front door, but sometimes they would slip in through the stage door.
Right. There was also just a little bit more about the club, right, I see that it had eighty five foot ceilings. Is that right?
Oh? Yeah, it was super super tall.
That's like a nine story building inside. Yeah, okay, well I just want to make sure because my brain starts to boggle, like thirty feet up.
Well, I mean those big the old theaters in New York were huge and vast yeah, and still are okay, So like, that's what you got to remember is this was a performance theater turned into a nightclub.
Right, I got that. I still don't think I've ever been in a theater that was eighty five feet up to the ceiling.
Maybe you should go to Carnegie Hall, my friend.
I'm a bad judge of height and distance and all that too, But so I guess it makes sense then that it could hold a capacity of two thousand people because when they ran out of room on the floor, they just start stacking them on top of one another.
On that eleven thousand square foot dance floor. And you know, while there was a scene happening anyway, a lot of it was really about the dancing. There. There was a mezzanine lounge on the second story, a second story bar, and a balcony that kind of looked down upon the whole thing where you could go up and drink and do mountains of cocaine and have public sex.
What how cool? Are you serious?
It all sounds gross to me.
I mean it was gross. At one point they retrofitted the second floor balcony, like the I guess, the whole area around it with like wash off rubber coating. Gross. It is gross. The whole thing's gross. Yes, and it was fairly gross. But I saw it. I saw it described as this. These people were living in the age after the invention of the pill, before the onset of aids, so they could just have public sex and do mounds of cocaine and take tons of kuludes with virtually no consequences whatsoever, the.
Good old days, I guess.
So you want to take a break.
Should we take a break?
Oh?
Look at us. Yeah, let's do that, and we'll talk about opening night right after this.
Okay, chuck. So it's opening night six weeks after they started construction on Tuesday, April twenty sixth, nineteen seventy seven, aka the most important date in the history of humanity. According to some of the people who were there, that hype that Carmen Delecio had been building up was really paying off. Apparently there was an hour's long wait already, and it was so long that Frank Sinatra and Warren Batty were like, this is taking too long. I'm out
of here. That's how long the wait was, Warren Baby.
Yeah, they I mean the pre hype was there in full because well because of the pr push for one, but also because they were selling memberships before it opened. They had eighteen thousand people apply to get a membership card. So here's how it worked. If you just showed up and you were lucky enough to get in and had to pay the cover I think they landed on like ten bucks, even though I saw everything from seven to fourteen.
Ten bucks is around close to fifty bucks a day, So it wasn't cheap to get in for a cover charge. But if you bought a membership card for between seventy five and one hundred and fifty, you were guaranteed. And that's in scare quotes, because nothing was really guaranteed as far as entry goes there, but you were supposedly guaranteed entry, but you had to pay with a three dollars reduction in charge. Eighteen thousand people apply for that card and only three thousand got it pre opening.
Wow. Pretty nuts.
Yeah.
So this one of the other legends or stories about opening night is that wait was so long that they just basically broke out into a party on the sidewalk outside of the club, thanks in large part to a doctor who came by with a bunch of quay ludes. Apparently coayludes went for like ten cents a pop and everybody had them at all times. And I was looking up what it was like to take ludes, as they were called, and apparently there's not really any drug you
can compare it to today. They were their own thing, and they were a sedative, but they also had all sorts of other weird effects. Like I saw it described like you'd sit on a couch and you weren't sitting on the couch. You were melting into the couch. But then at the same time you were also super randy and it made sex amazing, and you were just relaxed and like ready to go along with whatever. And everybody
loved ludes and they were super plentiful. So when this doctor came along and handed out ludes, the pre party broke out.
Yeah, the quaalan thing is weird because there were people in the documentary saying like nobody was ever on a downer in that place and it was all uppers, and so I don't know, it's just very strange. Maybe it went well with cocaine and alcohol.
I get that impression for sure.
All Right, So people are showing up. You mentioned you mentioned Brookshields, right, No, okay, Well Brookshields was there. She was eleven years old. That's my opening joke there. And she was taken there by Robin Leach, who would later go on to host Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
I used to do a great Robin Leach, let's hear it. No, in retrospect it wasn't great at all, but at the time I thought it was pretty great. I also did a good Bartles and James impression. And then my other one was Larry of Larry, Daryl and Darryl from Newhart.
You did a bart You did it impression of a bottled drink of the.
Remember the two guys who were like the spokesmen who were supposedly Bartles and James.
And you did both.
No, one of them didn't speak. The other one, okay, the shorter, more roton one with classes he spoke. I have no recollection of what he sounded like, but I would do those impressions.
I love it. So you did what was the first one, Robin Leech, Robin Leech. The last one, uh, Larry of, Larry, Caryl and Darryl from Newhart. And then the actor who played a commercial spokesperson.
For Bartle's and James for bartle Wine Coolers.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, it was a of a of a moment, a specific moment in history.
Yeah. I mean I was doing Life, Wolfman, Jack and John Travolta back then, so I was also at the time.
I got a John Travolta, I've heard your Travolta.
Let's hear it?
Why you so wee it? Yeah, there you go, And it's not actually John Travolta. I'm doing Dana Carrey doing John Travolta.
Dana Carvey day in a Carvey Okay, that's Ordrew Garrett show. All right. So we mentioned that they were called the Broadway Catering Corporation and that would make sense later and that moment comes right now everybody. Because they didn't have a liquor license, permanent liquor license that is, so every day, if you're like a catering company in New York or I guess a lot of other towns, you can get a temporary, like one day liquor permit to do your
catered event. And they did that every single day for a year.
Yeah, I guess pretty smart. Based on the name of Broadway Catering Corporation. They'd be like, oh, okay, here's your catering license to go cater this party at two fifty four West fifty fourth Street. Yeah. And the fact that they did it every day. Whose job was it to go by and get that permit every single day? That's just so crazy. Then I saw one time apparently the whatever agency issued those got wise to it and they
denied them once. So at least one night there was nothing but fruit juice and sodas, but guests were invited to drink as much of it as they liked for free.
Oh so just just mountains of drugs and then fruit juice and soda.
Yeah, so it was healthy all right.
The Monday after it opened. I think they were usually closed on Mondays, but they would have special parties on the Mondays, which became a very big thing there, like renting the place out for like a you know, fifty to two one hundred thousand dollars party, which at the time is I mean, it's a lot of money now, but back then I was a ton of money.
Yeah.
But Halston fashion designer Halston through Bianca Jaggar Jaggar a thirtieth birthday party there the Monday after it first opened, and they were like basically kind of putting it together up until the minute that the doors opened.
Is it true that he approached them on the Monday that he wanted the party to be held.
I mean, that's the legend. I don't know. I didn't verify it.
So this was a really important deal that it was very smart of them to take his money and throw this party. This was the one where Bianca Jagger rode a white horse around I guess in a circle essentially in the club and then I'm sure somebody gave the
horse some cocaine and everybody thought it was hilarious. But the reason that this was so important, by the way, was because the coverage of this party was it just went everywhere, and this was like where the people who hadn't yet heard of Studio fifty four heard of it. So Halston helped put this thing on the map with that party.
Yeah, for sure. And just five six seven years ago, Bianca Jagger very forcefully wanted to make it clear that she did not ride a horse around Studio fifty four because she's a big animal rights activist now and she really wanted that cleared up, So we would be remiss if we didn't say that that's a folk tale that she claims she sat on it for like two seconds and then got off of it, And she makes a distinction between that and riding a horse around a nightclubs.
But there was definitely a horse at her birthday party at Studio fifty four.
Yes, there are photos and she admits it.
So one of the other things, too, is you said like some of these parties would cost fifty to one hundred thousand dollars. I saw like even on non like party nights like that were like reserved private parties, they would often spend tens to up to one hundred thousand dollars just on like the themes and decorations and stuff, just for a regular night at Studio fifty four. Like they were just pouring money into this and they were
getting even more out. I would be really interested to know what their return on investment was, because they just they put so much money into this place, and they seem to have made buckets of it, so much so that as we'll see, they would keep the cash and garbage back sometimes around the club.
Yeah, I mean that's not because there was so much of it. It was because they didn't want the bank and the irs to find out about it.
Yeah, but I think if you have enough to fill a garbage bag, by definition, that's a lot, you know.
Oh no, I wouldn't say it was a ton of money. I'm just saying it was all in an effort to obfuscate. But gotcha, we're spoiling the story.
Oh sorry, Sorry, So.
Rebel was he was the guy who was, I guess, sort of the host of the whole thing. He loved being out there, He loved hobnobbing with people. It was his biggest sort of dream in life to be a part of that crowd. Yeah, where Schrager was kind of like he was a guy behind the scenes. Seemed like, I mean, they were both smart guys, but he was definitely more of the brains behind the operation that would go there for a little while then go home to his family.
I saw a picture of the two together. You can definitely tell Rubel's ready to party. He's wearing his famous padded coat, like his kind of down coat that he wore because he could hide tons and tons of coke in it. And then Ian Srigger is dressed like Ron Burgundy, I should say Ron Burgundy dress dressed like Ian Schrager. I guess really, but I mean just that same foggy London town gentleman look with like the blazer and the
turtle net. Yeah and all that. He looks cool for sure, but he also looks like, yeah, I can see him going home early.
Yeah. Well, and the good thing about the documentary is he's still with us, and it was sort of the first time he had talked much about it because he's again just sort of famously averse to attention, but he's he's one of the main, you know, interviewees in the dock.
So yeah. So you said that Rubel was the host so much so that sometimes he would stand out front and say who could come in and who couldn't. And he was doing that because he put it that he was casting a play, so like the characters that he would pick out would all kind of come together and gel in a certain way inside to make the greatest possible party from the greatest mix of people. And one of the really important things about that is you didn't have to be famous to get in to Studio fifty four.
You could just be a cool disco club kid who had a cool look and was clearly a cool kid, and you could get in like just from being you essentially and not having any connections whatsoever.
Yeah, I mean that was ninety percent of the crowd. Where just people. Because in a room of two thousand people, let's say ten to twelve celebrities getting all the attention, that's a lot of other regular folks out there. But they still had to get in. In order to get in, they had to pass whatever sort of secret test. Rebel and the other door people, I think the head doorman
same was Mark Bennicky. He was nineteen years old, which is crazy head doorman, right, Yeah, but he was a good looking guy and he had never done anything like that, and they were like, well, you're handsome, so you should be able to judge other people on their looks. Rebel famously said a year ago, I wouldn't have even let myself in. And this is another one of those things where of two minds, Like on one hand, he was like, you don't have to have money to get in. You
can be gay, straight, black, white, hispanic. Like, he didn't judge people on that, and so I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. But he's like, I'm really just judging you on how you look, yeah, and if you seem to be cool.
Yeah. He said that it couldn't be too gay, it couldn't be too straight. It needed to be very, very very bisexual. Yeah, so that was a big part of the mix too. But yeah, it was like who would get along with who, And then the dorman kind of developed their own shorthand too, Like if you looked like you were like a midnight cowboy type and you might go beat up some of the gay patrons inside, you weren't getting past the dorman. That was a big one
right there. Like you said, it was a safe place for gay and trans people, and that started at the door. And also one of the other things too was Mark Bennicky again nineteen years old, the head dormant. He was the highest paid staff member, in part, I guess entirely so that he wouldn't take bribes to let people in at the door.
Which I'm sure he never did.
Well, the thing is is, I was thinking about that. I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, Kit, you would be like I love this money and I want some more, so I'm going to take some bribes. But then you think about if he's making enough money that he would not want to lose that job. Then it would keep him honest in and of itself, I think, not just like he doesn't need the money, you know what I mean? Yeah, So wait a minute, Wait a minute. What was funny about that? Did I just explain the obvious? Is that
what I was doing? No?
I think it's funny that you sat around and thought about whether or not he would take money or not because he had enough money.
Well, I was just looking for any flaws in that plan, and I actually found it was fairly fool proof. So I appreciated it. Wanted to spotlight it here on stuff I should know.
So Henry Winkler didn't get in. Some of the Kennedy kids didn't get in. There were a lot of people who didn't get in that were even famous, because you know, Henry Winkler was the Fonds, but he wasn't some cool guy in real life. They didn't want him in there.
No, No, he wasn't super cool. Supposedly super nice, but also not super cool. Two other guys didn't get in, now Rogers and Bernard Edwards, who at the time they were in the group chic like the freak say Chic, and that song in particular was actually inspired by Studio fifty four.
Right, Yeah, supposedly when they didn't get in because Grace Jones did not leave their name on the list, they wrote that song, but it was sort of awe freak out.
It was a f off, right, And then they're like, guys, you can make so much more money with the song if you just changed that to freak and they're like, oh, okay, So they did, and it became like, I'm sure they that song inside Studio fifty four all the time. Because one of the things that's worth mentioning too is as cool as this place was, like you would hear essentially all the same disco hits that you would hear on
the radio. It was just again an eleven thousand square foot dance floor with tons of cocaine on it.
Yeah, if they did have some criteria as far as like not necessarily the person at the on the street that they would look in, which one commentator from the time described as it was like the damned looking into paradise, Like all these people on the street like trying to look through the blacked out doors when they would open. But they had a list of like you know what kinds of designations people had. There were the No Goods, which they designated as GN on the sheet instead of MNG.
They had regular guests who were pay guests who could get in but they had to pay the whatever ten bucks. They had the comps list, who were the freebies, and then the nfus, which were the no f ups. And by that they mean like, you can't screw this one up. They're very important. You have to get them in and get them straight to Steve Rebel.
Yeah, did you see how or who was on the GN list? Then? Like who did you have to tick off? Or what did you have to do to have your name like on a list that you were not allowed in the studio fifty four no matter what. Like that wasn't just some schmo, like this is somebody who was specifically targeted to not be allowed.
In maybe Famous Squares or Narcs competition or something.
Winkler. Yeah, So there was also a just kind of a general rule like if somebody showed up looking like disco stew or just like a cartoonish version of a cool disco person, they probably weren't going to make it in either. And there was a story where I think Mark Binecki was not going to let this one dude in because he looked exactly like that. And then Steve Reubell was like, no, he can, he can come in. It's very gibb from the be G.
Yeah, looking the park. They used to say polyester melts under the lights. So Rebel would chide people and say go home and put on a cotton shirt. And then one guy, and this is from a nineteen seventy eight New York Times piece, said the dormant told me to go home and read Freud's essay on rejection.
Wow. Wow, that's pretty great. Yeah, so there was like a lot of desperation to get in, Like you said, the Damned looking in on Paradise. Some people were like, I'm not going to be the damned any longer. I'm going to use this gun I have under my coat to make the doorman let me in. I did not see that that was successful. I don't see how it would be. It wouldn't be like, oh, you've got a gun on me, Sure, go ahead, go in with your gun.
I don't know how that played out, but that's just kind of like the little thumbnail anecdotes that are completely surrounding Studio fifty four. There were some other ones too, right.
Yeah, there were reports of people climbing down ropes from other buildings into the courtyard that had secret maps of the subway system, supposedly to get him in there. And then, and this is confirmed, that was a gentleman who was dressed in a tuxedo tried to sneak through an air vent and was discovered dead.
Isn't that nuts? They didn't know that there was somebody in there until they started to smell the de composition. Yeah, so that there's apparently I didn't see it. A Netflix special on Halston, the designer who figures Big into.
This does a show.
Yeah, yeah, and I guess that made it into it too. But they changed the man to a woman for some reason.
Yeah, who played Halston in that? I meant to look that up.
Tommy Lee Jones. I think, oh, oh wow, do you want to take a break.
Yeah, we'll take our second break and we'll be back with Act three. All right. So I don't know if we mentioned it, Yeah, I think I did that. It was closed on Monday. It was open Tuesday through Sunday from they opened at ten pm, they closed at six am ish or whenever the party was over.
Really, those are basically the times that I'm asleep.
Yeah, one thousand percent. Yeah, I mean I may sleep until seven.
Here and there.
Yeah, but the days of staying out all night are long in my past.
Yeah, I'm so Henry Winkler.
Yeah, I mean it was fun a little bit back in the day.
But oh yeah, do that like when you didn't feel like just total, but like the next day after, you know, So, yeah, it used to be fun for sure.
Speaking of total, But if you want to see a picture of Tennessee Williams looking really out of his mind, there's a fun picture of Tennessee Williams in his studio fifty four couch oh on back that. Yeah, he's bloodshot eyes. He looks like he's, you know, been through it.
So yeah, there's a there was a it was a murderer's row. Who's who of seventy's famous cool people who were there? Apparently divine, the very famous would it was divine trans or was divine considered a cross stutter? Is that just what they called divine back in the day before we called people trains?
I mean, I think Divine went by the tag of drag queen back then. Probably, but I'm not I'm not really sure about these days.
Okay, Divine still with this, I don't think so. I don't think you can live that fast and hard and still be around this many years later.
Yeah, that'd probably be a good episode, actually.
Divine for sure. Yeah. For those of you who don't know who Divin, she was a star almost amused to John Waters and was in a bunch of John Waters movies and I think eight Dog Poop in one of them.
Uh, yeah, that was in Pink Flamingos. Yeah, Pink Flamingos, I think.
Yeah, But yeah, we'll do an episode on Divine, even though we just gave away the twist, right. Andy Warhol was a big one there. In fact, he brought his whole factory crew and loved Studio fifty four so much that he basically was like he's sicked the entire staff of Interview magazine on it, and started basically covering Studio fifty four relentlessly in his magazine.
Yeah, and I saw that the sort of the heartbeat of that crowd, like the real regulars, because you know Mick Jagger and you know Elton John and Robert de Niro, Like everyone who was anyone would pop in there, but like the heartbeat of the regulars were Liza Minelli, Halston, Beyond Jagger, and Andy Warhol. And I think Truman Capoti was like the fifth. Yeah, he's that for someome.
He seems to have been about as regular as any of them. Grace Jones was a big one too. Oh yeah, I don't know if she was super into that circle. She seems to have been kind of a lone wolf in a lot of ways. But one of the dormens said that she arrived naked so many times it became boring. I can totally see that.
Yeah, she just sort of it's like, all right, Grace, right, maybe put on clothes, that would be the thing.
There was also a woman named Disco Sally Right who just was a legend. She was. She also appeared in that Halston document or not documentary, but that Halston mini series. But they I think they kind of didn't do her justice from what I read. Oh really, yeah, so what about her?
She was a well I think she was an attorney or former attorney and a widow who just like this lady loved to dance, and in the documentary they were like At first, the doorman Benicky was like, no, man, wait, this isn't it's going to be like a what do you call it, like a gimmick if we start letting people like this in, And he said. Rebel was adamant and just said no, she's exactly who you want in this place.
Yeah, I think we left out a really key thing. She was seventy seven and looked like nineteen seventy seventy seven, so she looked like one hundred and ten. She did, and she would dance all night. She was she was called disco Sally for a reason, Like she would get there and she would just start dancing for hours, and apparently she would stop to go pee and to do some coke, and then we'd get right back out on
the dance floor. And she became, actually from her stint at Studio fifty four, a fixture on the New York night life scene for a long time to come.
Yeah. I bet it kept her young and alive and also killed her somehow at the same time.
Exactly.
Yeah, well, put, I guess we could go over some of these parties we mentioned that they would, you know, throw these huge, huge private parties, and they did everything from throw a country western party for Dolly Parton with more live animals goats and sheep and pigs and stuff.
Yeah, god knows what happened to those sheep.
Yeah, I don't like the animal stuff in there, Like nothing good is happening to those animals.
No for sure, and you know, like probably some bad stuff is happening to him too, let alone to just being scared.
Yeah, yeah, don't take your goat to a cocaine disco.
That's a that's a not just a T shirt, that's an epitaph.
What else? Liz Taylor had a big birthday party there with the Rockets, among other things.
Yeap Valentino did. And then they they had like Halloween apparently was like the big night where just if you were a normal person and you had a really great costume, there was a good chance you were going to get in. The better of the costume, the better your chances. Yeah, And like one year they did Hieronymous theme, which would
have just been awesome. And I think that kind of shows like just kind of the coolness of the people involved, Like, yeah, you know, they didn't go with something trendy they went with like a really dark, bizarre, weird like Painter Hoheronymous Bosha's stuff is really cool And I didn't see what all they did with it, but from what I read about it, it seems like it was pretty bizarre. So pretty cool Halloween party if you ask me.
Yeah, New York has always fun to Halloween. Imagine in nineteen seventy eight and seventy nine. It's audio fifty four. It was crazy.
Yeah, you mean I walked all over New York once from basically Wall Street over to green Point and just spent the whole day doing that and it just had like such a totally different vibe than it normally does. It was cool, cool day. When was this, oh, twenty ten maybe something like that, because she went as a Snuggie.
I think, oh on Halloween, Okay, I got you.
Yeah Halloween, Halloween.
Yeah, I've had a couple of fun Halloween to New York back and when I was living in Jersey, that was the Bridge and Tunnel guy.
Yeah, that's what they called the basically anybody who wasn't famous.
Right, well, anybody from New Jersey gotcha. One of the outer boroughs got you because you came in via bridge in tunnel.
Oh, I get it. Now, what about the end? Because again, this thing was like a bright, shining meteoric star that lasted less than three years, and it went down hard too, Like it wasn't like, ah, this has been fun. Let's shut the thing down, like the government came in and said, you're gonna shut the thing down.
Essentially, Yeah, Steve bra Bell was very mouthe about how much money they were making. In the paper, he was quoted as saying, only the mafia does better. Not smart, to be sure, but at least according to the prosecutor and the documentary who prosecuted the case was like, it's not because Steve bra Bell was mouthy. He said, we had a confident informant on the inside that told us about the fact that they were skimming eighty percent of
the money. And this guy was like, you know, if they were like business is skim back then with this kind of business, like skim twenty percent, and they would have gotten away with it. He said, they got greedy and were literally skimming like eighty percent off the books and keeping very very very detailed records about their skimming. So it was all there, and they had an informant kind of tell them where everything was hidden and where
the books were. And I tried and tried to see if I could find anything about like who that might have been, and I came up completely empty.
It was heronymous Bosh, it might have been. So in nineteen seventy eight December nineteen seventy eight, the place got raided, apparently with thirty agents. That's a big raid. And I guess as they were searching the place, Schrager showed up was like, hey, what's going on everybody, And he was carrying with him their cooked books, or I guess the Uncooked book, which is even worse that in detail, meticulously
detailed all the money they were stealing. And one of the other things that it showed is that all the cocaine, because like they weren't selling cocaine necessarily. I'm sure like if you were a nobody who got in, they weren't just giving you free cocaine, you could buy it. But if you were like a celab or somebody they wanted to keep happy, they gave you as much free cocaine as you possibly wanted, and they would expense that all the cocaine they bought. They expensed it whenever they actually
did pay taxes. So all of this was basically being carried in by Schreeger and then as a little cherry on top, on top of the pile, there were five ounces of cocaine. So he walks in with thirty IRS agents raiding the place with that on him, and they're like, why don't you put that down and come over here.
Yeah, he disputes in the documentary that it was on him. He was like, this was stuff that they collected from around the club, but you know, the prosecutor said that he had it with him. So either way, lots of cocaine, lots of cash, lots of skimming off the top. They would change the cash register tape midway through the night to have another set of books that were on the
up and up. But they would eventually hire famous scumbag attorney Roy Kohane to come in and defend them, and he very poorly gave them the advice of like, hey, flip over a bunch of tables and stuff and make it look like worse than it is, and let's get these pictures out there. And that just bought more disdain and retribution from the state. Smarter the city.
I guess there was one little point that I thought was kind of sad. During this raid, the IRS agent supposedly found a room. There were a lot of like secret rooms, like VIP rooms, but this one was so secret and so vip that, according to Andy Warhol, Halston hadn't even been told about it, and when he found out about it, it hurt his feelings. And I'm with him.
I can totally understand that he dropped so much cash there, and then don't forget that first birthday party that they hosted that he threw for Bianca Jagger put Studio fifty four on the map, and they didn't tell him about the most secret room. I feel bad for Halston.
He should have had all access.
Huh. Yeah, if anybody should have, sure, I mean even Liza, I don't know. Definitely Halston though. All right.
So Jack de the silent partner who invested to begin with, was indicted along with them in a grand jury in June of seventy nine. That did not stop the club. They were still upgrading it and building new things. That's when that white clean rubber came in. They pleaded guilty in seventy nine of November seventy nine to tax evasion,
with Jack de testifying against them. The two guys were sentenced to three and a half years, went to prison together thankfully, and paid a guy for a year of protection while they hold out their competition and turned state's evidence against them in forming on other discos and they're skimming. And they got out after but a year.
Yeah, never trust a disco owner.
Yeah. I think Schreeger felt bad about it. He was like, you know, my dad, he was in the gambling business and all this, but he was like Max the Jew was a stand up guy, and like he would he was gone, And I'm glad because he would have been ashamed of me for being a rat.
Yeah, I could see that.
Yeah.
So the last they closed down, you said the club kept going, but at least for this moment. It closed down on February fourth, nineteen eighty with a Cyinara party farewell party when yeah, I think that's what they call him when they sent Schreger and Rubel off to prison, So he just burned the place down, basically one more night and those two they each served a year. Did
you say that, I think yeah. And as after they got out, I guess they were in touch in prison, and they decided to get into the hotel business and they started the boutique hotel trend apparently in starting in nineteen eighty four with a hotel they opened as Morgan's.
Yeah, they sold the studio space to a god named Mark Fleischmann. He was a hotel guy, so they took over one of his hotels rebranded it as this new concept of boutique hotels. And that's what you know, Schreger did for a long time.
I feel like it's time for boutique hotels to be reinvented as something else, don't you.
Yeah, but what is it even just not part of a big chain or some of them are even parts of big chain.
No, they've become very formulaic. I mean, like funky art in the rooms that are supposed to kind of feel like your house but just remind you that you're not home. Sometimes there's record players, there's like like a super cool bar where people not staying at the hotel com usually
on the roof. And then there's the invariable restaurant, the house restaurant that is new American cuisine every single time, all of the same stuff on the menus and we're talking tic hotels in totally different cities with totally different owners, and everything's outfitted in like copper fixtures. You know what I'm talking about.
Oh, I totally know you're talking about.
Yeah, it's a formula now. I mean, it's been around for forty years. I think we need something new.
What's the new thing there is?
I've already I'm calling for it.
Oh okay, I gotcha. I thought you had an idea or something. I was like, man, let's talk after we hang up here.
No, I'm the kind of person right now who has no ideas, just criticism.
I got youa. So, they also opened a Pladium nightclub that was their last foray into the nightclub business, to sort of partially help finance their hotel aspirations. And very sadly, Steve re Bell died of complications from AIDS in nineteen eight eighty nine, and that left Ian Trigger alone and very sad because that was his bestie.
Yeah, it really was Ian Trigger just kind of he had this thing hanging over him, this felony conviction. Even when they opened the Palladium, they couldn't be owners on paper because they weren't allowed to hold a liquor license. And in twenty seventeen he was pardoned by President Obama and I think one of his last days for the text of Asian conviction, and that meant a lot to
Ian trigger. I read an interview with him from after that, and he seemed to like really appreciate that, and he seemed to have kind of been the kind of guy who maybe deserved a pardon all this time.
Later, Yeah, he's like, can does this mean I can stop paying protection to that guy from prison?
You got anything else?
I got nothing else?
Well, that means, of course everybody, since neither one of us have anything else. And it's time for listener mayl.
I'm going to call this cool email and addendum. Hey, guys, the episode on widowhood just popped up. You mentioned federal elected officials and how often the widow is appointed. And it's quite common in my state of Kentucky in the past for the widow of a sheriff who dies in office line of duty or not to be appointed to that office, mainly because the sheriff's personal estate is wrapped up in his office, so letting her finish out the term give some time to figure out if his tax
books balance. Wow, isn't that crazy. Yeah, if they don't, the estate will owe more to the county. There have been several notable widowed sheriffs or widow sheriffs in my state, one being the first documented one, Mary Roach, who served from twenty two to twenty seven after her husband was murdered in office and she was a real sheriff, went out with her deputies at work. Even The other was a woman named Sheriff Florence Thompson, who took over after
her husband died in thirty six. She oversaw the last public execution by hanging. Was apparently the first and probably last woman to be in the role of you to be in that role in the United States. Just three months after she took office.
I wonder if this is what the sitcom She's the Sheriff was based on.
Maybe that's by the way, from Sean Herron, attorney at Law Louisville.
Thanks a lot, Sean from Louisville. That was a great email. I definitely not heard that. Yeah, so thanks a lot. We love addendums and cool emails, especially when they're combined. And if you want to send us a cool email, you can send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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