by Peter Gatien
Atlanta Limelight rose to the level of a cultural phenomenon, as much as anything can be a phenomenon in the America that exists outside the confines of NYC and LA. For a quick minute we were known as “The Studio 54 of the South.” On almost a weekly basis we’d land in Page Six or get a line or two in the syndicated columns of gossip doyennes Liz Smith and Cindy Adams.
Andy Warhol’s presence in the club always helped. After he showed up at the opening, he returned every month or so, a gnomic, sphinxlike presence in public, but personable and friendly one-on-one. What outsiders often don’t get about Andy is how funny he was, as ahead-of-their-time, whip-smart people often are. He could make everybody laugh.
“Well, I do like chest hair,” he commented once during a conversation about actor Burt Reynolds, who also frequented Limelight. Reynolds was then notorious for his Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold, where he posed nude on a bearskin rug, a stroke of genius by editor Helen Gurley Brown. “Burt doesn’t need a toupee down there,” Andy added, and the whole table of his sycophants laughed hysterically. Reynolds was a favorite target of Warhol, who once asked the man’s paramour, Lorna Luft, what Burt was like in bed. Luft politely refused to answer. Warhol’s wit was biting, but he brought the club together, and his jibes were more warm and playful than mean spirited.
Whenever a celebrity or wannabe celebrity hit Atlanta, they showed up at Limelight. Madonna, Tom Cruise, Ali MacGraw, Isaac Hayes, Ann-Margret, Debbie Harry, Eartha Kitt, and Farrah Fawcett all cycled through. When actor David Hasselhoff showed up, he was not yet Baywatch hot, but he was popular in the South because of his supercar-crime-fighter TV show, Knight Rider. At the club he always went around accompanied by a trio of female “bodyguards”—more body than guards, if you know what I mean.
The biggest media clusterfuck exploded when Anita Bryant came out—in the most literal sense. The peppy, up-with-people orange-juice spokeswoman was then the public face of homophobia, a high-profile, ardently conservative, overtly religious voice raised against the various kinds of excess on nightly display on Limelight’s dance floor. She was white bread through and through, originally a singer of middle-of-the-road, easy-listening, Lawrence Welk–style music.
I could never understand how this cardboard cutout had become popular, but she was widely admired by self-proclaimed “decency” advocates, once headlining a rally condemning Doors singer Jim Morrison after he’d dropped his leather pantaloons at a concert. Bryant also acted as the public face of a bogus “Save Our Children” crusade aimed at killing a civil-rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida, one that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.
This was the paragon of virtue who showed up at Limelight for an afternoon tea dance in the summer of 1981. She had made a strange choice for a dance partner in Russ McGraw, an evangelist who was well known as a gay activist. Bryant’s presence sent a buzz through the club. My house photographer, Guy D’Alema, snapped a photo of the odd couple out on the dance floor, and it was a shot seen round the world, on the front pages of tabloids the country over.
In the end, it turned out that hypocrisy didn’t pay. Bryant’s sponsors, the Florida orange-juice-industry group, were confronted with a boycott. Screwdriver cocktails were suddenly off the menu at every club in the country with a queer clientele, including Limelight. Facing declining sales, the group fired Bryant, who wound up going bankrupt. In a final indignity, she found herself shunned by the very moral-decency people she had courted, when she committed the high crime of divorcing her evangelist husband. I took no joy in her downfall, seeing her as a pawn in a game played by opportunistic politicians.
Whether the boldface name in question was an albino trendsetter in a bad wig or a fear-mongering Christian orange-juice shill, I rejected the role of star-fucker. I often didn’t even glad-hand the celebrities who came into my club. I never joined them in those mythical VIP cabanas that lined the back walls at Atlanta Limelight, where activity went on behind the closed tent flaps that would have raised the hair on Anita Bryant’s perfectly coiffed head.
I had a business to run, thank you very much. I got a lot more enjoyment from—and was much more deeply influenced by—the noncelebrity friends I hung out with in Atlanta. As far as I was concerned, they were the trendsetters, the ones pushing artistic limits, unfettered by the influence of public opinion. They were a lot more interesting than any face in a gossip column could possibly be. And they were the ones who kept me one step in front of the next trend.
If I was a ghost, I was a pale one, with a complexion that rivaled Warhol’s. Adrienne Norman, my constant companion in those days, had skin that was a beautiful shade of olive brown, a heritage of her Lebanese background. At times our appearances in public reminded us that, although Atlanta billed itself as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” we were still in the Deep South. Several times people thought it was their duty to tell us that race-mixing was not OK.
Most Atlantans were much too cool to care. The city floated like a tolerant, happily diverse island in a redneck sea. Drive thirty miles out of town and it was Deliverance country. I had a foreman overseeing construction at the club who proudly displayed his Ku Klux Klan medallion to me. There were parts of American culture, I was learning, that Leave It to Beaver hadn’t highlighted.
But other Southerners proved a great deal more evolved. Jay Block, who’d become my go-to lawyer after he fended off the ASPCA in the panther case, was raised in Thibodaux, Louisiana, former site of one of the largest slave plantations in the state. He had an openhearted, supremely unbigoted soul.
Much more than that, Jay opened up my provincial mind to the possibilities of the wider world. I remember him once taking me out to La Côte Basque, an upscale “ladies who lunch”–style restaurant on the Upper East Side in New York City. Jay ordered a $200 Bordeaux without blinking an eye. At that point in time, I was still a TGI Fridays kind of guy, and I’d clawed my way up to that chain restaurant from the even more limited dining options in Cornwall. My idea of wine was a four-buck bottle of Blue Nun. After my lunch with Jay, I immediately embarked on a crash course in wine appreciation.
Jay really modeled everything I liked about the South. He was smart and personable, cultured but laid back. He worked hard and he also knew how to relax. Once, when the kids were visiting from Cornwall and he took us all sailing, we got pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The ticket didn’t ruffle a single hair on Jay’s head. We continued on our way, went out in the boat, and enjoyed ourselves as if the whole incident never occurred.
This was astonishing to me. If anything like that would have happened to my father, he would have turned around, gone home, and remained mired in a bitter funk. I recall my mother once getting a three-dollar parking ticket that put a dark cloud over the whole household for days.
Enjoy yourself. There’s a rich tapestry of life out there. Don’t flinch, don’t duck, don’t shy away. Those were the lessons Jay Block taught me. He helped guide my nightclub empire as it expanded, a constant steadying hand on the tiller.
I tried to take those lessons into both my professional and personal life. I endeavored to surround myself with people I trusted, and not worry about the small stuff. Adrienne was wonderful with my two kids when they spent holidays and one weekend a month with us. Truthfully, they spent the time with Adrienne, not me, since I worked eighty-hour weeks during that period.
Adrienne didn’t normally accompany me to the club. I was of the opinion that if I were a bricklayer, say, my significant other would probably not visit me on the job. I was at Limelight to work, so I thought it was inappropriate to have Adrienne hanging around the club once our relationship became serious. She was just fine with that arrangement. Nightlife had never been her passion.
I assembled a second family of sorts, a core of dedicated staffers around me, a collection of misfits, geniuses, and misfit geniuses. I came to think of them as a street crew, tight knit, loyal, fiercely fun loving.
The crew was headed up by jack-
of-all-trades Brian MacGuigan. With my heart in my throat, I once watched as Brian balanced a 150-pound klieg light on his shoulder while climbing a teetering A-frame-style ladder. Witnessing him take apart an amplifier component and put it back together with a pair of tweezers was a thing of beauty. He could do anything, and accomplished it all with humor and bonhomie.
Over and over again I’ve heard this or that former staffer describe their gig at Limelight as “the best time of my life.” My employees were usually on their way to some other career, some other goal. I wasn’t hiring Harvard graduates. They were artists, actors, musicians, architects of castles in the air. But for the period we spent together, we engaged in a gigantic co-conspiracy to build this club, to orchestrate this experience, to pull everyone together and have as much fun doing it as we possibly could. One of the byproducts of a cocreator mentality was having a fucking good time.
The most interesting soul I encountered in the entire quarter century that I owned clubs was Tony Pelligrino. I’d met Tony when he casually dropped by the club one afternoon, saying he had been in Limelight the night before and liked the vibe. After he mentioned that he had mustered out of the US Marine Corps with the rank of major, I immediately hired him as an assistant security manager.
“Honorably discharged as a major—that’s pretty good, isn’t it?” he asked rhetorically. “Especially for someone whose uncle was Carlo Gambino?” The New York Mafia kingpin allegedly didn’t want his nephew to be involved with organized crime, so Tony went another way.
That was pretty typical of my Atlanta crew. Some energetic, talented person would come to the club and feel like they wanted to be a part of it. That’s not to say every person who showed up to party and tried to flip that into a paycheck was the next employee of the month. I could usually suss out during a ten-minute interview who had ideas and talent. Those were the people I wanted. It was my job to figure out what they were best at and then fit that skill to the proper role.
The real job of running a nightclub is done during the day. I always thought my job of club owner resembled a theater director who casts the parts, works like a dog in rehearsals, but then leaves and never returns once opening night happens. By then, the director’s job is done, because the cast and crew know what to do. If I took care of my business completely and correctly during the day, the nights should have taken care of themselves. But most of the time I didn’t really manage to clear out before closing. I always wanted to stick around to see the show.
Since I was protective of my productivity in the afternoons, I didn’t suffer fools coming around and eating up my time. Tony was an exception who schmoozed his way inside. He was a really pleasant guy—a little older than the rest of my immediate Limelight circle, who were mostly in their twenties. I hired Tony on a whim, simply because I liked him. With his military background, I thought he’d do well working with the security crew.
We had a small office in the back of the club, and Tony installed himself there. The next day I ducked my head in and saw he had covered one of the walls with pictures of himself—Tony posed with Richard Nixon, Tony next to Henry Kissinger, Tony palling around with different generals and other military brass. That was my first whiff that this whimsical hire I’d made might turn out to be something other than an average, everyday employee.
For a military-theme party we threw at the club, the former Major Pelligrino showed up in full dress whites, complete with medals and commendation ribbons—not exactly the kind of getup you could rent at a local Halloween costume store. Tony made up for his air of mystery with a pronounced ability to produce results. One afternoon, he squired Jen, Mandy, and me around Six Flags amusement park. I watched, spellbound, as Tony absolutely crushed it at the shooting gallery, winning so many huge stuffed animals that the carny finally told him to get lost.
I began to wonder about the guy’s background. To this day, I’m still relatively in the dark about Tony Pelligrino. Who was he? CIA? Black ops? A fabricator of his personal mythology? I couldn’t tell you, and no else could, either. In the end, apart from being an enjoyable storyteller and friend, I know only what he represented to me. He was our fixer.
If you wanted something, anything at all, Tony could get it for you. To me, it felt like magic. If I wanted a suit, Tony would get me a great suit. If I asked for theater tickets, I’d wind up fourth row center. If I had wanted a swimming pool, a crew would have shown up with a backhoe and been digging up the yard the next day.
“Hey, Tony, can you get me a good deal on a limo?” I asked him once.
Two days later he showed up with a sleek $30,000 limousine for a bargain-basement price of $16,000, brand-spanking new, legit papers, fully stocked bar, all the bells and whistles. By virtue of that particular accomplishment, he became my driver.
Somehow the guy had special clearances, or possessed some sort of super ID card. In those days I flew into Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport from Canada two or three times a month after visits with my family. Picking me up, Tony would pull right out onto the tarmac beside the plane. No terminal hassle, no baggage claim, no security checkpoints. Fuhgeddaboudit! He’d just slap a blue bubble atop the car and we would speed through all the bullshit like I was fucking POTUS. I was approaching thirty years old, still a young punk. I thought the whole business was hilarious.
The last weekend of every month, my daughters flew into Atlanta from Canada and stayed with me for a few days. At a time when gold was going for a thousand bucks an ounce, Tony would always greet them both with small gifts of gold—necklaces, charm bracelets, earrings. That was a sure way into a little girl’s heart, and Jen and Mandy loved him. One weekend in 1979, my parents came down. My dad had never been to an NHL game. Back then, the local team was called the Atlanta Flames (great ironic name in a town that was burned to the ground by Sherman!). Tony got Bernie and Lilianne ice-level seats, then took them back to the locker room afterward. They, too, fell in love with the guy.
Tony had a generous way with everyone, including me. He once presented me with a Girard-Perregaux watch. My Jay Block finishing-school lessons hadn’t been completed yet, so I would’ve had no clue what that watch meant if I hadn’t just read Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love, wherein a character gets killed over a Girard-Perregaux timepiece. I was pretty thrilled just with the association, but when I had the watch appraised at $17,000, I understood the true magnificence of his gift.
And, with all the gifting and driving and special favors, it’s astounding that Tony had time or energy left over to handle club security, too. One day a loser wise guy showed up at the club demanding an “envelope,” which was Mafia-speak for an extortion payment.
“Wait right there, will you?” Tony asked him. He jumped on the phone and launched into a blizzard of Italian. I understood not a word, but I watched the poor man’s face turn pale, then take on a sick shade of green. He turned on his heel and practically ran out the door without another word.
The insane thing was that Tony wasn’t doing any of this work for the paycheck. He was pretty much set in that department. “I’ve got my own Cadillac,” he used to say, dismissing my offers of bonuses or raises. He dressed well. He wasn’t a druggie and didn’t traffic in the stuff, either. He didn’t even drink at the club. He never shook me down for anything. He was ex-military, a covert-ops type of guy, but he wasn’t doing any gunrunning on the side. Tony Pelligrino simply liked being around the action at Limelight.
That was the kind of place we created. There was hard work to be done, and late nights, but we all mostly hung around for the action, for the thrill of experiencing what we created. Atlanta Limelight felt enchanted in a way that Miami had never quite achieved.
Life was pretty swell. Adrienne and I were solid as a couple; Atlanta was consistently packed. True to form, though, after a couple of years I felt myself becoming distracted. By the time the second or third Bare as You Dare theme night came around, I realized I was jaded. The secondary gratifications of living in Atl
anta—the houses, the cars, the travel—made for a life that I had never dreamed of living. But it still wasn’t good enough. My gaze strayed northward. Not back to Canada, nope, not that far. Just 746 miles north, to be exact.
The media had labeled Limelight the Studio 54 of the South. I found that infuriating. I didn’t want to be the Studio 54 of anything. That particular scene was over. I wanted to create a new nightlife experience, one that every other club would be measured against, and I wanted to do it in the cultural capital of the world.
CHAPTER SIX
I’ll Take Manhattan
The church, when I first walked into it in 1983, was an unholy mess. A thick layer of grime covered every surface. Leave a building abandoned for long enough, and dust and dirt take over. In the shuttered former house of worship on busy Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, each step I took was muffled by grit.
Beautiful old mahogany pews were scattered every which way in the main sanctuary. Everything was cobwebbed and silent. The plaster had come off the walls, and water damage warped the wooden floorboards. The stained-glass windows were among the only things that remained intact, and they looked out of place amid the filth, like flowers blooming in a garbage heap.
The church’s interior was a maze of hallways, chambers, and stairwells. As I passed through one empty room after another, rats sprinted away into darkened corners. Since I’d arrived in New York I’d been informed, several times, that more rats than people lived in the city—a five-to-one ratio, residents said, citing the statistic with a grim sort of glee. It turned out the truth was something like four-to-one the other way, but the myth felt pretty accurate.
Dirt, vermin, and all, I thought the former Church of the Holy Communion was magnificent. The 139-year-old edifice had been built in the Gothic revival style, a holdover in Manhattan’s modern Chelsea neighborhood, dominating the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street. Abandoned by a dwindling congregation in 1975, the place had been officially deconsecrated by its Episcopal overlords, and the vestments, collection plates, and Eucharist wafers packed up and taken away. The brick-and-mortar shell eventually sold to the highest bidder, a drug-rehab organization, Odyssey House. When Odyssey moved on, the splendid old rock pile had been left empty.
