The High Society Columnists Who Helped Build Studio 54… Then Died In Obscurity With Nothing – HT
On the evening of February 21st, 2008, a man named Baird Jones was found dead in his East Village apartment on East 8th Street at 10:30 in the evening. He was 53 years old. The NYPD confirmed there was no criminality and no suspicious circumstances. An autopsy was inconclusive and the cause of death was later attributed to cardiac arrest from an enlarged heart.
His apartment walls were covered floor to ceiling with framed artwork from celebrities and artists he had known across four decades. Pieces from Paul McCartney, Gloria Vanderbilt, John F. Kennedy Jr., and dozens of others. A collection he valued at $500,000 and that represented the only tangible evidence of a career spent at the center of the most consequential nightlife scene in American history.
He had attended Groton and Columbia, held two master’s degrees and a law degree, was the son of the man who invented People magazine, and had spent 30 years promoting parties, feeding gossip items to the most read columns in New York, and helping build the mythology of a nightclub that became the most famous in the world.
The New York Times published his obituary under the headline, “Man departs a life lived on the fringes of fame.” A title that managed in eight words to contain both a description and a verdict. In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace the rise of Studio 54, the most glamorous nightclub in American history, >> [music] >> and the parallel stories of the gossip columnists, party promoters, and society writers who manufactured its mystique, populated its rooms, documented its every night, >> [music] >> and then, when the music stopped,
discovered that the people who built the dream rarely get to live in it on equal terms with the people who own it. A failing city and a former opera house. To understand what happened to the people who built Studio 54’s legend, you first have to understand the specific conditions that made the club possible.
Because without those conditions, there was no legend to build and no people to get crushed building it. The stories behind cultural phenomena like Studio 54, the fortunes they generated and the careers they consumed, receive extended treatment in our free Substack newsletter, >> [music] >> where the personal and financial wreckage too complex for documentary format reveals what these legendary scenes actually cost the people who created them.
The Studio 54 saga belongs in that company. New York City in 1977 was, by most objective measures, a failing city. The mid-1970s fiscal crisis had nearly bankrupted the municipal government, producing the famous 1975 Daily News headline, “Ford to city, drop dead.” when President Ford refused federal bailout funds.
Crime rates were catastrophic and the police force had been gutted by budget cuts. The summer of 1977 brought a 25-hour blackout in July that triggered citywide looting, arson, and riots across 31 neighborhoods. 1,616 stores were damaged. Over a thousand fires were set and 3,776 people were arrested in the largest mass arrest in the city’s history to that point.
Simultaneously, the Son of Sam murders were terrorizing the outer boroughs. Into this context of genuine civic despair, Studio 54 inserted itself as pure, unapologetic escapism, a place where, as Nile Rodgers of Chic later summarized, it was not about saving the world, but about getting yourself a mate and having fun and forgetting the rest of the world.
The building itself was a former opera house built in 1927, the Gallo Opera House that had become a CBS television and radio studio from 1942, used for programs including Captain Kangaroo. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who had met as students from middle-class Brooklyn Jewish families at Syracuse University, had been operating a discotheque called the Enchanted Garden in a former country club in Queens since 1974, finding genuine success there despite Manhattan’s reflexive disdain for anything that originated across the bridge.
But Queens was never the goal. It was a proving ground. When the former opera house on West 54th Street became available, it was a Peruvian-Chilean party promoter named Carmen D’Alessio who first suggested they buy it after the original deal collapsed when members of the Gambino crime family expressed interest and the previous investors lost their nerve.
The conversion from empty opera house to the most famous nightclub in the world required $700,000, significant construction, a team of Broadway theatrical lighting designers, and six weeks. Neither Rubell nor Schrager could have done it without an army of writers, publicists, and society insiders who understood how the perception of exclusivity worked and who would spend the next 33 months manufacturing that perception at a pace and scale that no nightclub had ever attempted.
Carmen’s list. The social machinery behind Studio 54’s opening night is the part of the story that most accounts pass over quickly, attributing the club’s celebrity draw to Rubell and Schrager’s charm. The truth is more interesting. Carmen D’Alessio had come to New York in 1965 to work as a United Nations interpreter, moved to Rome for a public relations position at Yves Saint Laurent before joining Valentino, and upon returning to New York in 1975, >> [music] >> had reinvented herself as an independent party promoter, accumulating social
capital the way other people accumulate real estate. Andy Warhol described what she had built with characteristic precision. “Carmen has a list. Her list is worth a fortune. She has the names spelled correctly, the addresses for summer, winter, city, and country, and the phone numbers with area codes of everyone beautiful, young, and loaded.
” Rubell first spotted D’Alessio at Infinity, then New York’s most famous nightclub, where she was dancing shirtless on the shoulders of a young Givenchy model. He recognized immediately that she was the person who could translate Enchanted Garden from a Queens success into a Manhattan one. D’Alessio had little initial interest in Queens, but Rubell was persistent, engineering a series of lunches and dinners through mutual contacts until he convinced her to host a single themed party at Enchanted Garden called Thousand and One Nights, for which she
ordered waiters dressed as sultans, live camels, and live elephants, invited Manhattan’s biggest names from Calvin Klein to the drag performer Divine, and commanded a reportedly enormous salary that Rubell and Schrager accepted without negotiation. The party earned a Newsweek cover story, a nightclub party in Queens making the cover of Newsweek, and the Peruvian princess of Manhattan’s social life had proved that disco could be front-page news.
When Studio 54 was being planned, D’Alessio negotiated a flat salary plus a share of door income for every party she organized and began assembling the guest list that would define opening night. Assisted by Calvin Klein and Andy Warhol, she compiled a list of over 8,000 names and sent out 5,000 invitations, each accompanied by a personal surprise gift designed to tantalize the recipient.
The result was chaos of the best possible kind. By 11:00 on the night of April 26th, 1977, thousands of people had packed around the club’s entrance, causing complete mayhem on West 54th Street. Frank Sinatra was stuck in his limousine, unable to reach the door. Someone in the crowd was distributing Quaaludes from a double magnum bottle of pills.
A CNN reporter covering what she expected to be an ordinary nightclub opening said afterward, “We thought we were just covering the opening of a discotheque and all of us knew that night that we were not at the opening of a discotheque, but the opening of something historical that was going to change the way people lived or played.
Sodom and Gomorrah met the high street that night.” One week later, Bianca Jagger’s birthday party, organized by Halston, produced what may be the most famous nightclub photograph ever taken. >> [music] >> Jagger riding a white horse across the dance floor surrounded by balloons. Rubell shared the image with the press and it went around the world overnight.
Carmen D’Alessio said decades later, “That photograph went viral when viral was not even a word.” The machine beyond opening night. Studio 54’s ongoing mystique depended on an unusually sophisticated symbiotic relationship between its owners and the gossip press of the era. Rubell understood that celebrities needed Studio 54 as much as Studio 54 needed celebrities, specifically because they needed a place where they could transgress without the consequences that normally follow transgression.
His solution was a media arrangement as carefully engineered as the lighting rigs Schrager had commissioned from Broadway designers. Paparazzi were permitted to photograph freely at the door and outside, generating the arrival shots, the door rejections, and the velvet rope negotiations that fed the tabloids every morning with publicity no advertising budget could replicate.
Inside, photography required the subject’s consent, creating a genuine sanctuary that celebrities trusted. The exterior photographs were the advertisement. The protected interior was the product. Columnists understood perfectly that their access to Studio 54, and therefore their access to the celebrities who made their columns worth reading, was entirely contingent on cooperation.
They wrote about it. It rewarded them with access. Access generated more material, and the arrangement was self-perpetuating, but required constant maintenance by the journalists and publicists who were inside every night feeding the machine. Rubell even systematized the celebrity recruitment side of the operation, paying promoters $250 for a major celebrity and $150 for a minor one, turning the entire nightlife press and party promotion industry into a paid extension of Studio 54’s marketing operation. They were, in effect,
employees of the club without employee protections, benefits, or equity, and the distinction between being employed by an institution and being exploited by one is the distinction that would determine everything that happened to these people when the music stopped. The arrangement generated extraordinary revenue.
Studio 54 produced an estimated $7 million in its first year of operation alone. The cash was so abundant that Rubell and Schrager were stuffing it into garbage bags in the ceiling of the basement and into safe deposit boxes, skimming revenue off the top before it reached the books in quantities so vast they could not figure out what to do with it.
In December of 1978, the IRS raided the club and found the cash. Both founders were arrested for evading $366,000 in corporate taxes. They were sentenced to 3 and 1/2 years each, fined $20,000 each, and ultimately served 13 months before receiving reduced sentences for cooperating with federal investigators on other nightclub investigations.
The woman whose Rolodex and imagination had generated that 7 million in first-year revenue was collecting her salary and her door percentages, which were real money, but bore no relationship to the equity value she had helped create. The columnists and promoters who had fed the machine every night received nothing at all when the machine was seized, because access is not equity and presence is not ownership, and the velvet rope does not distinguish between those who helped build the door and those who simply happened to walk
through it. Baird Jones and the golden ticket. Of all the figures who inhabited the Studio 54 universe and then fell through its cracks, Baird Campbell Jones is the most instructive case. A man whose entire life was consumed by the culture he helped sustain, and who died with nothing to show for three decades of cultural labor except the artwork on his walls.
Jones was not some underprivileged outsider who stumbled into nightlife from nowhere. His father, Cranston E. Jones, was a writer and editor at Time and People magazines for 38 years, a culture writer for Time, and as his obituary noted, the man who came up with the idea for People magazine, a figure embedded in exactly the kind of mid-century American institutional prestige that his son would ultimately prove unable or unwilling to reproduce.
Baird attended the Buckley School and then the Groton School, two of the most elite private preparatory schools in the country, institutions that exist specifically to manufacture the next generation of American establishment figures. He proceeded to Columbia University and NYU, accumulating an undergraduate degree, two master’s degrees, and a law degree.
By every standard of the American meritocracy, Baird Jones had been handed a golden ticket and a map. He folded the map, set fire to the ticket, and became a creature of the night. The family home on Fifth Avenue, where Baird lived for much of his early life, contained a collection of celebrity art assembled by his father, pieces by Miles Davis, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Nina Simone, and others.
And Baird would later use mock exhibitions of this collection as the anchor for the weekly parties through which he established his reputation in the 1980s. The art was not capital in any conventional sense. It was social currency, a reason to put on a show and a reason for people to come. He was a teenager in the 1970s when he first began making inroads into Manhattan’s social circuit, befriending members of Andy Warhol’s circle and absorbing the ethos of a downtown world where creative audacity mattered more
than institutional credentials. By his early 20s, he was one of New York’s first dedicated club promoters, a figure who understood instinctively the economics of desire that nightclubs depend on, the carefully calibrated mix of aspiration, exclusivity, and genuine surprise that keeps a party from becoming merely a room with music in it.
His signature innovation was the permanent pass, a recurring invitation system that over three decades of operation would bring more than 1 million people to his parties at Studio 54, the Underground, Webster Hall, and dozens of other venues. He was personally friendly with Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the painter Mark Kostabi, figures at the absolute center of the East Village art explosion that ran parallel to Studio 54’s celebrity disco world.
He also authored two books, Mark Kostabi and the East Village scene, a curated photographic and critical document of the movement he had helped promote, and sexual humor, published by the Philosophical Library in 1987, a title whose book party invitations are now sold as collectibles through specialist art dealers, a small piece of historical irony given how little their creator died with.
In 1974, at approximately 19 years old, he was already organizing singles parties at the Waldorf-Astoria, and the trajectory from the Waldorf to Webster Hall, from the most prestigious ballroom in Manhattan to a nightclub door in the East Village, measured the distance that 30 years of nightlife labor had carried him, which was, in geographic and financial terms, downward.
The invisible archivist, Baird Jones, occupied a profoundly uneasy structural position in the media world he had made his home. He was not a celebrated figure himself, but what journalists call a stringer, a person who generates the raw material from which bigger names build their reputations. He had perfected a peculiar and lucrative, but inherently fragile, occupation.
He was one of New York’s most reliable sources of tabloid fodder, a man who could be relied upon to show up at any opening, any party, any gallery show or film premiere, tape recorder in hand, and extract from its attendees the items, the gossip, the scandalous adjacencies that kept the city’s most read columns alive.
He contributed prolifically to Richard Johnson at Page Six, Cindy Adams at the New York Post, George Rush and Joanna Molloy at the Daily News, and Ben Widdicombe’s Gatecrasher column at Gawker. He had a byline at the East Village Eye and served as a staffer at the Rush and Molloy column. Each publication used him regularly.
None of them could have been called his column. His obituary described him as someone who did much to create the world of Page Six, Gawker, and other venues of Proustian fluffiness, a backhanded tribute that captured something real. He had helped pioneer the ecosystem of celebrity-adjacent gossip journalism that those outlets later commodified into publishing enterprises.
But by the time the enterprises were built, Jones was still doing it from the ground floor, attending parties, taping conversations, phoning in items, while the institutional machinery above him captured the value he was generating. The range of his promotional concepts was genuinely inventive, and in several cases nationally notorious.
Dwarf-tossing events featuring actor Michael Anderson, who would later appear in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a boxing-themed party pitting Keith Haring against Mark Kostabi, billed as two contenders for the downtown heavyweight crown, and an exhibition at the Tunnel nightclub in 1988 under the banner of his book Sexual Humor that united Basquiat, Haring, Kostabi, Kenny Scharf, and other East Village artists in a format that foreshadowed the art world nightlife fusion that would dominate downtown New York for the next decade.
He is embedded in the historical record of Studio 54 in an unexpected way that perfectly illustrates his position as invisible archivist of the scene. When Anthony Haden-Guest was researching The Last Party, the definitive account of Studio 54, it was Baird Jones who provided the source for perhaps the most chilling piece of Studio 54 lore, the story of a man who, desperate to get inside, climbed into an air vent and was found dead, still in black tie.
“This guy got stuck in a vent trying to get in,” Jones told Haden-Guest. “It smelled like a cat had died. He was in black tie.” The anecdote has since been adapted into the Netflix Halston series and cited in countless Studio 54 retrospectives, but Baird Jones, the man who preserved it, is rarely named as the source.
And the person who remembered the story, told it, and placed it in the historical record, received no credit, while the person who published it did. That dynamic was the story of Baird Jones’ entire professional life. The descent. Despite his elite education, his decades of industry contacts, and his genuine contributions to New York nightlife culture, Jones spent his final years working as an art curator at Webster Hall for what several people who knew him described as near subsistence wages.
He was known for eccentric dress, a seersucker suit worn over pajamas, which he justified with the explanation that it was just faster to get dressed that way. He carried a tape recorder everywhere, a habit that dated to his earliest days as a gossip stringer, but that in later years seemed less like professional equipment, and more like the physical manifestation of a man who still believed [music] that the next conversation might produce the item that would finally matter.
His apartment walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with the framed artwork from celebrities and artists he had known across four decades. And in this sense, he had perfectly replicated the disposition of his father’s Fifth Avenue home, where celebrity art had provided the social currency for parties.
The difference was that his father had real estate and institutional employment as a foundation, and Baird had only the art, which was not for sale because it was the proof of his life, the only document of the relationships that had defined 30 years of work, existing as a testament to access rather than as liquid financial security.
The paid death notice published in The New York Times read simply, “Baird Jones, 53, died last week at home of natural Lively and irreverent, he blazed a swath through New York nightlife for 30 years. He will be missed.” His memorial at the Plumm nightclub on West 14th Street, the kind of venue he had spent his career promoting, was attended by Lindsay Lohan and a scattering of the nightlife world he had served for three decades.
A second memorial was held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on March [music] 8th, 2008. The tabloids that had relied on his items for years gave him a paragraph or two. He occupies barely a footnote in the standard histories of Studio 54. Ben Widdicombe, who had used Jones’ items regularly at Gawker, was the first to report his death online, breaking the news before police had formally confirmed it, a last accidental tribute to the gossip journalism apparatus he had spent a lifetime feeding.
The people whose parties he promoted, whose names he put in columns, whose openings he attended for 30 years, went on. He did not. Everything Baird Jones built rested entirely on access and relationships, on his physical presence in rooms with famous people, on the continued relevance of the gossip columns he fed, on the continued appetite of the nightlife ecosystem he served.
He was, in the terminology that the digital age would later formalize, an aggregator and a node in a social network, enormously valuable to the system while the system was running, and worth almost nothing the moment the system changed or the node was removed. The problem was structural from the beginning and worsened with every passing year.
The world he had entered as a teenager in the 1970s was being systematically replaced by a world in which the informal relationship-based access economy that had sustained him was being professionalized, corporatized, and rendered obsolete by digital media platforms that could generate the same gossip, the same buzz, and the same manufactured exclusivity without requiring a man in a seersucker suit to show up in person with a tape recorder.
The chronicler who lost everything. If Baird Jones is the figure who died with nothing, Anthony Haden-Guest is the figure who came closest to genuine literary and cultural greatness and still managed twice to lose everything. Haden-Guest was born in Paris on February 2nd, 1937, the illegitimate son of Peter Haden-Guest, a United Nations diplomat, and Elizabeth Wolpert.
And because he was born before his parents married, the barony his father later inherited as the fourth Baron Haden-Guest passed instead to his younger half-brother Christopher Guest, the filmmaker behind This Is Spinal Tap and Best in Show, whose wife is Jamie Lee Curtis, >> [music] >> making Anthony Haden-Guest Jamie Lee Curtis’ brother-in-law by a technicality of peerage law.
This biographical detail matters less for its celebrity agency than for what it reveals about his structural position in the class system, always near the aristocracy, never quite inside it, always at the edge of the established order, looking in from an angle that was neither fully insider nor fully outsider.
He arrived in New York in the late 1970s after New York magazine editor Clay Felker invited him to join the publication, the same Felker who had transformed American magazine journalism in the 1960s [music] alongside Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. He was present at Studio 54 on opening night in April of 1977, and over the following decade, he spent countless late nights inside >> [music] >> watching, reporting, and fully participating, simultaneously an observer and a subject of the world he was documenting.
He was named winner of Spy magazine’s Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon in both 1988 and 1989, an award that was a joke, but also an accurate description of his position in the city’s social ecosystem. His most significant contribution to the historical record is The Last Party, Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night, published in 1997, a book that the Kirkus Review acknowledged was written by a champion partygoer of more than 30 years >> [music] >> who, unlike some of his contemporaries whose memories were dulled by years of
hard living, seemed to actually recall many of his experiences. The novelist Tom Wolfe is said to have based the character of Peter Fallow, the dissolute British journalist in The Bonfire of the Vanities, partly on Haden-Guest, a comparison confirmed by the University of Kent’s British Cartoon Archive, and that is not entirely flattering since Fallow is a spectacular moral coward and freeloading drunk, but that confirms his cultural centrality in a period when being recognizable enough to become a fictional character was itself a form of
social capital. He contributed to Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, The Sunday Telegraph, Esquire, GQ, and The Financial Times, and won a New York Emmy Award in 1979 for writing and narrating a PBS documentary about wealthy European immigrants in Manhattan. He was also the original male voice on Cristina’s 1980 disco single Disco Clone, a detail that tells you everything about the intersection of nightlife, journalism, and cultural performance that defined [music] downtown New York at its peak.
What distinguished Haden-Guest from the other chroniclers of the era was that he possessed genuine literary talent, the kind of analytical intelligence and descriptive precision that could have sustained a career in any field of journalism. And he chose to apply that talent to the documentation of a world that most serious journalists regarded as beneath them.
The choice was, in its own way, as significant as any of the parties he attended, because by treating nightlife as a subject worthy of sustained intellectual attention rather than as a gossip beat to be covered from the sidelines, he gave Studio 54 and the disco era a historical legitimacy that they would not have possessed if the only people writing about them had been stringers and tabloid columnists.
His book is the reason that Studio 54 is studied in universities and discussed in cultural history seminars rather than dismissed as a footnote in the history of celebrity excess. And the fact that the man who gave the era its intellectual credibility has been, in the decades since, less celebrated than the men who stuffed cash into garbage bags in the basement is one of the more instructive details in the entire story.
Capote in Exile. No examination of the writers who intersected with Studio 54 and found only ruin is complete without Truman Capote. And his is arguably the most tragic story of all, because he had more to lose, lost it more completely, and documented his own decline with the particular lucidity of a man who understood exactly what was happening to him and was unable to stop it.
Capote had been, before Studio 54 existed, the defining high society chronicler of mid-century America, a man who had inserted himself through sheer force of personality and literary genius into the very highest social circles a 20th century American writer could inhabit. His swans, the most formidable socialite women in New York, treating him as their confessor, their wit, their confidant, and their ornament, sharing every detail of their extramarital affairs, their drug use, and their jealousies with a man they believed was
safe because he was gay, because he was brilliant, [music] and because they assumed the implicit covenant of their intimacy would protect them. At the height of his fame following In Cold Blood in 1965, his position in American culture was almost without precedent for a writer. Invited to every important table, photographed everywhere, a permanent fixture on television, the man who threw the party of the century at the Plaza Hotel in 1966, where 540 handpicked guests from Frank Sinatra to Tallulah Bankhead vied for inclusion.
He destroyed all of it with a single piece of journalism. In November of 1975, Esquire published La Côte Basque, one chapter from his long-promised novel Answered [music] Prayers, and the thin fictional disguises barely concealed the real identities of the women whose secrets he had spent two decades collecting.
Ann Woodward, a former showgirl whose husband’s death Capote’s story characterized as deliberate murder, was found dead in her Fifth Avenue apartment 3 days the issue reached newsstands, having consumed cyanide after receiving an advanced copy. Babe Paley, the swan Capote loved most, never spoke to him again and died of lung cancer in 1978 without reconciling.
Every door in Uptown New York closed to him virtually overnight. Exiled from the social world he had spent decades cultivating, Capote found an alternative home in the very different world of Studio 54, where Andy Warhol, with whom he shared a deep decades-long [music] friendship dating to the early 1950s when Warhol had staged his first solo exhibition using drawings based on Capote’s writing, served as a natural bridge.
When the Factory crowd made Studio 54 their own from 1977 onward, Capote moved with them, photographed at the club with Paloma Picasso in 1979, present at the reopening party in 1978, a regular in the VIP rooms beneath the main dance floor where cocaine and every other pharmaceutical excess were available without pretense.
But Studio 54 was not a replacement for what he had lost. It was a holding pattern, a place to be seen that charged no admission of the kind the Uptown world had demanded. And the man who had once been America’s most glamorous literary celebrity was now among the second tier of the fame hierarchy, attended by a television host’s ex-wife rather than the publisher of the Washington Post.
His most beloved friendships unrepaired, his masterpiece non-existent, his body being destroyed by the substances he used to replace the social world that had cast him out. He died on August 25th, 1984 at the Bel Air home of Joanne Carson, 1 month short of 60, and his housekeeper reported that in his final hours he was murmuring the title of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers.
Carmen without a monument. Carmen D’Alessio’s story cuts differently from the others because she is not dead and she is not entirely forgotten, but her case illuminates with particular clarity the structural unfairness that defined the relationship between Studio 54’s beneficiaries and the people who actually made it possible.
She had built a Rolodex of 8,000 names through years of tireless relationship building across the fashion industry, the art world, and the international social circuit, and it was this Rolodex and her willingness to deploy it on Rubell and Schrager’s behalf that populated opening night with the celebrity faces that launched the legend.
Her role did not end on opening night, which is where her contribution is usually left to end in the standard telling. She was the one who conceptualized and delivered the themed spectacular events that kept Studio 54 in the newspapers throughout its operating years. The parties that generated the photographs that filled the tabloids that kept the mystique alive.
She was described by multiple accounts as the brains behind Studio 54’s cultural concept, and the distinction between being the brains behind something and being credited as the brains behind something is the distinction that has defined her relationship to the club’s history for nearly five decades. The arrangement that saved her financially also ensured her historical erasure.
Her deal with Rubell and Schrager, a flat salary plus a share of door income for events she personally organized, meant she had no equity in the club itself. And when the IRS conducted its raid and both founders were arrested, her peripheral contractual status meant she was entirely outside the legal exposure.
She served not a single day, but the same peripheral status that protected her from prosecution protected her from any share of the proceeds, and the 7 million in first-year revenue that her social architecture had helped generate produced no lasting financial stake for the woman who had built the architecture.
D’Alessio has since been the subject of a documentary, Carmen: Life Is a Celebration in 2015, and appears in Matt Tyrnauer’s 2018 documentary Studio 54, but her contribution to the club’s founding remains in the general cultural memory almost entirely subsumed by the Rubell and Schrager narrative, the story of two ambitious men from Brooklyn who built the greatest nightclub in history, in which the Peruvian-Chilean woman with the 8,000-name Rolodex is a footnote if she appears at all.
She has said explicitly that when she watches the documentary, she sees only the other side of the founders’ story, meaning that her central role in assembling the celebrity clientele and conceiving the cultural identity remains unacknowledged in the standard version. Ian Schrager, discussing the 2018 documentary, invoked Berry Gordy’s autobiography, “If the hunter does not tell the story, the lion will.
” A point intended to correct people who had exaggerated their own contributions, but a point that cuts the other way with equal force, because the figures whose contributions are most obscured are precisely the ones who lacked the platform, the financial resources, or the sheer longevity required to tell their own stories.
The epidemic that erased the record. Any honest accounting of what happened to the people who built Studio 54’s golden age must confront the AIDS epidemic not as a tangential detail, but as perhaps the single most important structural fact about who survived to tell the story and who did not. The epidemic’s first documented cases appeared in 1980, the same year Studio 54 closed, and over the following decade it killed an extraordinary proportion of the people who had built the club’s creative and social infrastructure.
Steve Rubell died on July 25th, 1989 from AIDS-related complications at 45. Halston, whose fashion house had been as central to Studio 54’s visual identity as any lighting rig, died of AIDS-related complications in March of 1990. Roy Cohn, the attorney and political fixer who had been one of Studio 54’s most visible VIP figures and had personally used his connections to help the club survive its early regulatory challenges, died of AIDS in 1986, >> [music] >> publicly claiming almost to the end that it was liver cancer.
Freddie Mercury, a Studio 54 regular, died of AIDS in 1991. Countless photographers, designers, dancers, stylists, and writers who had populated those nights were dead before they turned 50. This matters for a specific and often overlooked reason. The people who died in the epidemic could not write their own stories.
They could not give the interviews, write the memoirs, or participate in the documentaries that shaped the historical record of Studio 54 and the disco era. The history that has been transmitted to subsequent generations was written almost entirely by the survivors, Schrager, D’Alessio, Hayden Guest, the journalists and socialites who were still alive to be interviewed in the 1990s and 2000s.
The gay men who had been the club’s cultural backbone, who had staffed its lighting and sound and wardrobe and back rooms, who had made the nights what they were, many of them vanished from the historical record along with their contributions. Bare Jones was not among the AIDS casualties. He was straight.
And whatever personal recklessness his lifestyle involved, it did not kill him at 30 or 35 or 40. He simply aged, aged out of relevance while maintaining his enthusiasm, continued promoting parties and feeding gossip items to columns that were themselves slowly dying, and was [music] found at 53 in a small apartment with celebrity art on every wall, dead of a probable cardiac arrest, while the city he had spent his life documenting completed its transformation into something that no longer needed him. The AIDS epidemic did far more than
kill individuals. It destroyed the continuity of a cultural community, the specific web of relationships, shared memories, creative collaborations, and institutional knowledge that had made the Studio 54 era possible. The club’s atmosphere had been built by a community of gay men whose [music] aesthetic sensibility, whose physical courage in an era of criminalized sexuality, and whose willingness to create spaces where the rules of conventional society were suspended had given disco and nightlife culture its distinctive energy and its
particular quality of liberation. When that community was decimated in the 1980s, the culture it had created was left in the hands of the survivors who were disproportionately the people who had profited from that culture rather than the people who had generated it. And the history of Studio 54, as it has been transmitted to subsequent generations, reflects this asymmetry at every level.
The exception that proves the rule. Liz Smith, the gossip columnist who covered Studio 54 throughout its peak years, is almost always cited as the exception that proves the rule about what happened to the journalists who built the scene’s mythology. She was syndicated in 60 to 70 newspapers at her height, appeared regularly on Fox, E, and WNBC, broke the story of Donald Trump’s separation from Ivana Trump, reportedly raised $37 million for literacy charities through her connections, and earned over $1 million a year at her peak.
She died in November of 2017 at 94, celebrated, remembered, and comfortable. But Smith had done several things that most of her peers had not. She had built institutional syndication income rather than depending on a single outlet, had cultivated a reputation for being relatively kind, which meant sources trusted her more, and her subjects did not destroy her when she needed them, and had translated access into television appearances, philanthropic work, and a public-facing identity that outlasted any single column.
She was genuinely exceptional. For a figure like Baird Jones, the structural problem was acute from the beginning >> [music] >> and worsened with every passing decade. He was not a credentialed journalist with a stable institutional home, but a promoter and stringer, the lowest and most precarious rung in the journalistic hierarchy, entirely dependent on access and relationships for every dollar he generated.
When Studio 54 closed in 1980, he moved to other clubs, and when those clubs closed or faded, he moved to others. But each transition took him further from the center of cultural relevance in a city that was systematically gentrifying and professionalizing in ways that made his informal access economy less and less viable.
By the time he died in 2008, >> [music] >> he was curating events at Webster Hall for wages that bore no relationship to the cultural history he had been part of. A man who had watched Warhol work and been photographed with Basquiat now working the door of a nightclub in the East Village while the neighborhood around him became an outdoor shopping mall.
The structural economics of the access economy in which all these figures worked had a fundamental flaw. The social capital it created was non-transferable and non-storable. A gossip columnist in the 1970s and ’80s had influence, the ability to make or break reputations, to determine which clubs would be crowded and which would fail, but that influence was tied entirely to their continued employment by a specific outlet, their continued physical access to the scene, and the continued existence of the scene itself.
The moment a columnist’s column ended or the scene dissolved or the media was disrupted by new technology, their value evaporated with a speed that no other profession quite matches, and the people who had traded their youth and their talent and their Groton educations for 30 years of access discovered that access, however thrilling while it lasted, is the most perishable commodity in the American economy.
Strobe lights going dark. Studio 54 lasted 33 months, from April 26th, 1977 to February 2nd, 1980, and the fame of its founders has lasted nearly 50 years and will continue. Ian Schrager received a full presidential pardon from Barack Obama in 2017 and today runs a global boutique hotel empire built on the same theatrical instincts that once made Studio 54 the center of the known social universe.
Industry insiders calling him the Steve Jobs of the hotel business and Marriott International chairman Bill Marriott calling him one of the most creative forces in the hotel industry. Steve Rubell’s legend, sealed by his early death, has grown with every passing decade. The people who gave those 33 months their particular electricity, who made the phone calls, wrote the columns, fed the gossip, promoted the parties, built the mystique, took Truman Capote in when the rest of the world had expelled him, mostly just faded.
Baird Jones, the Groton and Columbia graduate with the law degree and the famous father, spent 30 years promoting parties for a city that consumed everything he had and gave him a small East Village apartment and an inconclusive autopsy in return. Anthony Haden-Guest wrote the definitive book on Studio 54, was present on its opening night, watched [music] from inside as it defined an era, and was recognized as a fictional character in the most celebrated novel of the 1980s.
Truman Capote was the most celebrated social chronicler in America. Through the most famous private party in American history, found exile in Studio 54’s VIP rooms after the uptown world expelled him, and died at 59 without finishing his final work, the book that was going to be his vindication, murmuring its title as the last thing anyone heard him say.
Carmen D’Alessio built the Rolodex and the vision that made opening night possible, organized the spectacular events that sustained the club’s mystique through its operating years, and has spent nearly five decades being a footnote in a story she had as much claim to as anyone who profited from it. The broader lesson is one that recurs relentlessly across the history of nightlife, fashion, and celebrity culture.
The people who built the dream rarely get [music] to live in it on the same terms as the people who own it. The photographers, writers, gossip feeders, publicists, and party promoters who sustained the mythology of glamour inhabit a world that is, underneath its glitter, as precarious and unprotected as any other informal labor market. Access is not equity.
Presence is not ownership. The people who actually held equity in Studio 54, who counted the cash in the basement, who served their 13 months and emerged to build hotel empires and received presidential pardons, were the ones with the resources and the incentives to shape the narrative. The people who built the atmosphere, the mystique, the column inches, the celebrity relationships, and the cultural identity received what the nightlife economy always gives the people who enable it rather than own it.
Access while it lasted and memories afterward, which is the specific currency that nightlife has always paid in lieu of equity, and which has the particular quality of being worth everything to the person who holds them and nothing to anyone else. Studio 54 lasted 33 months. The strobe lights went dark on West 54th Street.
The people who had built the atmosphere moved on to other clubs, other columns, [music] other decades, and the music stopped one venue at a time until the only thing left was the story. And the story belonged to whoever had the resources to tell it.