Anthony Haden-Guest
The Last Party
Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night
William Morrow, 404 pp., $ 25
The Last Party is a group biography of the 1970s New York hot spot called Studio 54 and the innumerable clubs that followed it. Like most biographies nowadays, The Last Party exceeds the needs and interest of the general reader. Its author, Anthony Haden-Guest, contends that Studio 54’s heyday was a watershed in the history of American celebrity — a time when famous people flocked to the same set of dark, noisy, public rooms to see and be seen in every state of intoxication.
He dubs the velvet-rope culture he is describing “Nightworld,” a place ruled by “Nightlords” (big N) and inhabited by “nightpeople” (small n). He offers us a portrait, not merely of a “fabulous” club life, but of a significant phenomenon. “Change is swift in Nightworld, and not always subtle, ” he writes. “Changes in Nightworld, frivolous in themselves, can indicate changes in the whole culture, as much as the twitches and tweaks of tectonic plates may predict the rise and fall of the landmass.”
Haden-Guest recounts Studio 54’s rise and fall with the minute detail and suspense usually accorded a world-historical event. But while the silvery bookjacket promises celebs galore (“Diana Ross . . . Mick Jagger . . . Cher”), Haden-Guest in fact tells the story of the clubowners and their hangers-on, whom he calls the “shock troops” of Nightworld.
Alas, the book’s central characters — like Studio 54 owners Ian Shrager and the late Steve Rubell — prove a surprisingly dreary bunch, the sort of people who would be turned away from New York hot spots if they didn’t run them. The people they let in are not much more interesting. The Last Party is peppered with hundreds of names of would-be glitterati whom no one has ever heard of (Joe la Placa, Ulla-Maia Kirimaki, Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski). Someone named Sally Randall is recalled as “one of the most famous young women in New York.” Really? Famous to whom? The Last Party, like the very clubs it celebrates, seeks to expand the embrace of celebrity to include every habitue of “the culture of the night.”
The photographs accompanying Haden-Guest’s text are in some ways the most revealing part of the book; they show the Sodom and Gomorrah-meets-Weimar- meets-Vegas atmosphere of Studio 54 and its descendants better than words can. Bianca Jagger on horseback, led by a naked man in a painted tux. Midgets at table in formal attire. Vladimir Horowitz, who seems to be square dancing. Grace Jones in a bodystocking. Baryshnikov and Mick Jagger lounging bleary- eyed. A jockstrapped man enacting something or other with a chair. Liza Minnelli, Liz Taylor, Halston, Betty Ford, and Martha Graham squished into a banquette.
This amusing gallery hardly illustrates Haden-Guest’s dubious central claim that the decadence of Studio 54 was an innocent joy-in-excess somehow different from the decadence of its 1980s successors. “Studio 54 had been . . . the culmination of some very 1960s notions of freedom, openness, giddy display, hope. Sex was good for you and more sex was better, and, as for drugs, well, cocaine . . . was believed to be a nonaddictive pick-me-up. . . . [But] the innocence was gone. The new Nightworld was more knowing, and this was one of the legacies of Studio 54.”
Haden-Guest argues that Nightworld and by extension the “whole culture” became “more bizarre and more extreme” in the wake of Studio 54. He gives chilling accounts of the drug world within Nightworld — especially cocaine and heroin, but also Ecstasy and Ketamine (a tranquilizer for horses). He describes New York’s hardest-core gay sex clubs, circa 1985, in scenes straight from Hieronymus Bosch. After Studio 54, he contends, “Nightworld seemed at once hectic and sullen, Gothic, not rococo, and suffused with a stormlight.”
It is difficult to tell how disinterested an observer Haden-Guest really is, as he was something of a “nightperson” himself. His reportage is frequently interrupted by reminders that he was always on the guest lists and in the VIP rooms. Despite his sobering observations of the underside of Nightworld, his true lament is for the decline of the club scene. Starstudded no longer, it has been marginalized by the juvenile antics of the super-tawdry “Club Kids.”
While we probably are more inured to the bizarre today (Dennis Rodman in the NBA), Haden-Guest’s distinction between an “innocent,” somehow “rococo” Studio 54 and its “Gothic” progeny is bizarre in itself. The hedonistic culture of Nightworld — with its compulsive sex and drugs and its freakshow aesthetic — was Gothic all the while.
Molly Magid Hoagland is a writer living in New York.
