Party animals
HOAGLAND, MOLLY MAGID
Party Animals Was Studio 54 Really So Innocent? By Molly Magid Hoagland The Last Party is a group biography of the 1970s New York hot spot called Studio 54 and the innumerable clubs that followed...
...Despite his sobering observations of the underside of Nightworld, his true lament is for the decline of the club scene...
...Its author, Anthony Haden-Guest, contends that Studio 54's heyday was a watershed in the history of American Molly Magid Hoagland is a writer living in New York...
...The people they let in are not much more interesting...
...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...
...The hedonistic culture of Nightworld—with its compulsive sex and drugs and its freak-show aesthetic—was Gothic all the while...
...After Studio 54, he contends, "Nightworld seemed at once hectic and sullen, Gothic, not rococo, and suffused with a stormlight...
...Someone named Sally Randall is recalled as "one of the most famous young women in New York...
...But] the innocence was gone...
...Sex was good for you and more sex was better, and, as for drugs, well, cocaine ...was believed to be a non-addictive pick-me-up...
...Midgets at table in formal attire...
...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...
...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...
...Grace Jones in a body-stocking...
...Famous to whom...
...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...
...Bianca Jagger on horseback, led by a naked man in a painted tux...
...Liza Minnelli, Liz Taylor, Halston, Betty Ford, and Martha Graham squished into a banquette...
...Like most biographies nowadays, The Last Partyexceeds the needs and interest of the general reader...
...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...
...He describes New York's hardest-core gay sex clubs, circa 1985, in scenes straight from Hieronymus Bosch...
...Vladimir Horowitz, who seems to be square dancing...
...It is difficult to tell how disinterested an observer Haden-Guest really is, as he was something of a "night-person" himself...
...Change is swift in Nightworld, and not always subtle," he writes...
...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...
...A jock-strapped man enacting something or other with a chair...
...Star-studded no longer, it has been marginalized by the juvenile antics of the super-tawdry "Club Kids...
...He offers us a portrait, not merely of a "fabulous" club life, but of a significant phenomenon...
...By Molly Magid Hoagland The Last Party is a group biography of the 1970s New York hot spot called Studio 54 and the innumerable clubs that followed it...
...Studio 54 had been . . . the culmination of some very 1960s notions of freedom, openness, giddy display, hope...
...they show the Sodom and Gomorrah-meets-Weimar-meets-Vegas atmosphere of Studio 54 and its descendants better than words can...
...He gives chilling accounts of the drug world within Night-world—especially cocaine and heroin, but also Ecstasy and Ketamine (a tran-quilizer for horses...
...He dubs the velvet-rope culture he is describing "Night-world," a place ruled by "Nightlords" (big N) and inhabited by "nightpeople" (small n...
...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...
...Haden-Guest argues that Nightworld and by extension the "whole culture" became "more bizarre and more extreme" in the wake of Studio 54...
...The new Nightworld was more knowing, and this was one of the legacies of Studio 54...
...Haden-Guest recounts Studio 54's rise and fall with the minute detail and suspense usually accorded a world-historical event...
...Baryshnikov and Mick Jag-ger lounging bleary-eyed...
...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...
...His reportage is frequently interrupted by reminders that he was always on the guest lists and in the VIP rooms...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 39
