Gawker: studio 54

Anderson Cooper's Studio 54 Memories With Michael Jackson

The Cajun Boy — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:24:33 EDT

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Tonight was supposed to be Anderson Cooper's Big Fat Coming Out party (Allegedly!). Instead he's covering Michael Jackson's death for CNN, where he just shared a special memory—Partying at Studio 54 with Jacko when he was 10!

Cooper said that he went to Studio 54 with Jackson and a "bunch of people" when he was a 10 year-old child. He made no mention of whether or not his mother, octogenarian smut-peddler Gloria Vanderbilt, was one of those "bunch of people," so it's possible that Vanderbilt allowed Michael Jackson to take her 10 year-old son to what was New York City's most notorious den of drugs and sexual promiscuity without her.

I don't know whether I should feel jealous or outraged.

Studio 54 Show To Remind People Why They Hated Disco

Richard Lawson — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:24:00 EDT

Though previous efforts have either been big silly messes or soul-crushingly boring, Showtime has taken up the task of depicting New York's glittery, powdery, bewigged disco era. They've ordered a pilot for a series which begins in the months before Steve Rubell opened his legendary Studio 54 nightclub/cocaine & anonymous sex emporium.

"The show [Studio] is less about the history of Studio 54 than it is about New York in the late '70s, what people were going through, the political and social issues," says a writer for the show. We love the beguiling, melancholic Mad Men, with all of its picky period detailing of the beginning of the end of the American dream in the early 60's, so maybe the same could work for this strange bumble of time. Just get the obligatory Andy Warhol winky winky out of the way, and it could be fun. What we're most curious about? Who will play the DuPont twins?

[Observer]

When They Were Young

Nick Denton — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:21:26 EDT

Bob Colacello's party photographs from the 1970s—when the reporter edited Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and chronicled New York's social scene—are strangely poignant. To think that immortal Chelsea boy Calvin Klein (top) was once so debonair! Grizzled mogul Barry Diller (pictured with Diane von Furstenberg then and now) had such a seductively wicked smile. It's hard to imagine Vogue's André Leon Talley (pictured next to Studio 54's Steve Rubell and Warhol) as anything other than the imposing African cardinal he plays on the red carpet. And then one remembers that today's socialites will one day appear equally ludicrous to the generation that comes after them, evidence that they were ever young buried in Patrick McMullan's photo database.

'NY' Mag: AIDS Was Steve Rubell's Lying Karma

Joshua Stein — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:26:07 EDT

Studio 54, now a theater company, turns 30 this year. New York magazine sent aged historian Philip Nobile to kick around the entrails of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager's 70's hotspot. Have the intervening three decades yielded any insight? Why yes, they have!

Rubell's greatest crime went unpunished: a last-ditch snitch on Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter's White House chief of staff, for allegedly doing lines in the basement.... Karma caught up with Rubell. He succumbed to AIDS in 1989.

Ah, AIDS as karmic retribution for being a snitch. That was... neat.

Okay, what else? Only that partying for three decades makes you either dead or kooky, and perhaps both. Unless you're Ian Schrager, in which case you just get really really rich.

Some more "then and now "of the people that apparently didn't lie enough to get the AIDS:

—josh

Revisiting Studio 54 [NYM]