The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife

by Peter Gatien

  Because we were such a motley crew, I was forced to devote a lot of time to settling disputes from the clash of strong personalities in my employ: tiffs and friction between promoters and door personnel, bartenders and busboys, security people and everyone else. It was by no means a gathering of saints. But we managed to make a community of it, a family that was, like a lot of families, somewhat dysfunctional. I would gaze out at members of my workforce and muse about their long-term life prospects. Talented as these people might’ve been in their own rights, I didn’t think there were many other businesses where they stood to thrive the way they did with me.

  And how odd were the people who worked for me, really, or how motley? Spend enough time with anyone and the tattoos, piercings, drag, and outrageous hairstyles fade into insignificance. Conversely, spend time in the straight world and the people there begin to seem deeply weird. Rudy Giuliani once hired a straight-arrow police chief, Bernard Kerik, who wound up a convicted felon. Through the right lens, there’s a lot of motley out there in the mainstream. In court I once heard a US prosecutor declare club-goers “disgusting” because of their “freakish” appearances. My attorney replied quickly and accurately that my people were not disgusting, merely different.

  It’s only the ignorant who consider the nightlife underbelly to be populated with degenerates, freaks, and losers. The thing straitlaced critics fail to understand is that those “freaks” are exactly the kind of people who make New York City the blazing cultural capital that it is. I’ve seen what the daylight world has to offer by way of human character, via my history of collisions with the political and judicial realms. From that perspective, I can testify with utter certainty that, as a class and by a long shot, the people who worked in my clubs were more decent and honorable than half the politicians I’ve encountered.

  Mixing a gay crowd with a straight crowd made for the best dynamic out on the dance floor, so we never balked at hiring an openly gay crew. In the summer of 1984, when New York Limelight was just hitting its stride a half year after it opened, Stonewall was only fifteen years in the past. Mixed crowds of queer and straight remained a novelty to many. Nightlife has always been a realm of social experimentation, where taboos are trampled and segregated groups become integrated. The logic held that part of the reason people take the trouble to leave their homes for the nightlife is to see what kinds of other people have done the same. People-watching was what made the straight-gay interchange so powerful. Straights watched the gays, who watched the straights watching them. Both elements acted out a bit more, flew their flair flags a little higher, and displayed their moves to better effect. The result was a live-wire energy.

  Atlanta had proved the importance of attracting a queer clientele in many different ways, one of which was the proliferation of Sunday-afternoon tea dances, which had evolved out of the Fire Island gay community in the late 1960s. Unbelievable as it might seem today, in the sixties there were still laws on the books preventing serving alcohol to homosexuals, and against same-sex couples dancing. Serving tea instead of beer skirted the first issue, and the newly common practice of dancing apart got around the other. At Atlanta Limelight I was astonished to see tea dances draw huge crowds of two or three thousand people. The packed dance floors at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon stuck with me.

  More than the patronage, the queer subculture’s vibe was one that I intrinsically tapped into. Energy, exuberance, insouciance. A brazen “I’m still here” attitude that pushed back at all the small-minded bigots out there. Above all, happiness. It was a feeling of being released from constraints. Although my parents, aunts, and uncles might not have appreciated the comparison, for me, the joyful letting go on the dance floor struck the same note as those Cornwall holiday parties.

  Two years and four months before I opened New York Limelight, on July 3, 1981, the New York Times ran a small article buried on page twenty. Not a lot of people noticed it. I surely didn’t, caught up as I was in running the Atlanta club. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” read the tiny, single-column headline. It was the first hint in the mainstream press that something very bad was happening in the queer community.

  The rare cancer was Kaposi’s Sarcoma, an opportunistic disease that took advantage of human immune systems weakened by HIV. Soon Kaposi’s became not so rare and all too common. In the middle of the 1980s, while I was busily trying to build my club in New York, the plague hit the city with the force of a tsunami. Death cut down whole swaths of nightlife culture and sought out many of the people who worked for me.

  The night would never be the same again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  New York, London, and Chicago

  In the ominous year of 1984, at the height of Reaganism and after years as a common-law couple, Adrienne Norman and I married. My young daughters adored her. Jen and Mandy were living in Cornwall with their mother, Sheila, attending the same kind of schools I had gone to three decades previous.

  I didn’t have anything against Cornwall, but I felt a burning need to provide them with the kind of education they could receive in Manhattan, both in school and out. A bunch of doors would be open for them in New York City, so I pushed hard for them to make the transfer. I never wanted my kids to feel like I had growing up, shy and provincial and ill prepared for the journey of life.

  I arranged the move with Sheila and set up a home in New York City that had ample room for the girls. Adrienne became pregnant and we had a child of our own, my third daughter, Hunter. Adrienne was superb at creating a warm home life and getting the trains to run on time, so to speak—clothing, feeding, and loving the children while making it all look effortless. But while I was trying to pull together the varied strands of my domestic life, New York Limelight had me spending fewer and fewer hours at home.

  Working hard and banking enormous paychecks, I maintained the common breadwinner’s fallacy of believing that making money was all there was to being a husband and father. After all, everything I did, I was doing for my family. I didn’t understand why I should be home for evening dinners, birthdays, or putting the kids to sleep with bedtime stories. As far as I was concerned, a great provider made for a great dad. Period.

  Because I was so totally focused on business, I had become something of an emotional loner. Adrienne and I loved each other, Sheila remained cordial, and I had three beautiful, rambunctious daughters. But I didn’t spend enough quality time with them. Many nights, I came home to sleep and that was all. My children suffered, though I rationalized that they hadn’t even noticed their dad’s absences. I saw myself as a ringmaster, coming home from the circus. It wasn’t easy to slip back into the realm of school activities, sibling rivalry, and domestic togetherness.

  Even at work, shyness and arrogance proved to be two sides of the same coin, and I used my natural standoffishness as a defense against the countless people who wanted a piece of me. I like to think I’m openhearted, but more and more during this period, favor seekers began to approach me with fear in their eyes. I prided myself on being a self-made man, needing no one. I told my door people that whoever tried to drop my name to gain entry was almost certainly lying.

  “If they come to you saying they’re a friend of mine, just tell them that I don’t have any friends.” A group that virtually acted as our house band, Fun Lovin’ Criminals, used to boast they had “more friends than Peter Gatien,” but they were being sarcastic, since every other person bellying up to the bar in my clubs proclaimed themselves blood brothers to me.

  I never once took on partners. A nightclub owner without partners is practically unheard of, tantamount to being a solo trapeze artist. Other nightlife entrepreneurs—Eric Goode, formerly of Area, for example, or Ian Schrager of Studio 54, among others—were always shocked at my lack of associates. In such turbulent skies, they believed that flying without a copilot was difficult and, at times, dangerous.

  They did it their way and I did it mine.

  Given its history and reputation, the w
orld of Manhattan nightlife could conceivably have sent crews of wise guys to muscle in on my business. Organized crime had long been a presence in the city’s late-night scene. Vito Genovese, among other mob bosses, used to control a vast percentage of nightclubs throughout the city. At an early meeting with a real-estate broker for Limelight, I brashly stated an imperative: “If I’m going to have any issues with the mob, you guys should tell me right now.”

  “I’ll tell you what you do,” the real-estate agent spoke up. “Get this guy Angelo Ponte’s firm as your commercial sanitation service, and I guarantee that you won’t have any problems.”

  “Angelo Ponte?” That was the name of the gent from New York who had bought my Hallandale townhouse in Florida when I moved out—but I didn’t believe it could be the same person. There had to be a million guys with that name.

  Turned out it was indeed the same Ponte. He remembered me, and I hired his trash-hauling business right away. If I’d known who he was when I was haggling with him over furnishings in the townhouse, I would have offered him a better deal. In fact, I might have given him the couches, curtains, and chairs outright. But in all the years I worked with Ponte, his people couldn’t have been nicer—never overcharging, never strong-arming, never abusing the relationship. When the Pontes came to my club, they stood on line, paid for entry like everyone else, and never asked for special favors.

  I tried to stay out of the figurative limelight, but the spectacular success of the real Limelight came with a higher public profile than I’d ever had before. Not all the press was favorable. My notices sounded a now-familiar theme, describing me as a remote, unknowable figure. “Isn’t the life of the party but knows how to throw one,” said the New York Times. “Gatien remained largely out of sight,” New York magazine reported, “a provincial money man who didn’t make the scene but made his fortune on it.” “A bit of a cold fish,” sniffed the Village Voice. I was “stony-faced,” stated freelancer Frank Owen, and “taciturn and awkward,” “old school,” “ungiving,” according to others.

  I had opened the biggest club in the greatest city in the world. I’d begun to think of myself as a real New Yorker, as belonging to and being in the middle of the cultural mix. But I didn’t like glad-handing, showboating, or grandstanding. I kept my head down and my nose to the grindstone. The press inflated the mystery and painted me as a slightly sinister character. The image played well in the gossip pages.

  I didn’t recognize my picture in the media, but the figure portrayed there would grow more real as time went on, a doppelganger that the press created and then recycled over and over again. I considered it pointless to attempt correcting it. Image became reality.

  Instead of battling the big-city press, I decided to invade Russia, so to speak, by embracing my Napoleonic empire-building ambitions. I wanted to capitalize on the New York club’s success by opening Limelight outposts in other cities. The AIDS plague was kicking the stuffing out of New York City. The mid-1980s was a time of incredible fear and uncertainty about the disease. No one was sure whether AIDS could be communicated by a kiss, by drinking from the same glass, or even by shaking hands. New York had become a sad and ruptured place.

  The memory of that period still chills me. The whole population was devastated, but the club-going population in the city turned especially frantic and terrified. New York and San Francisco represented twin ground zeros for the epidemic. Some Grim Reaper stalked the streets with his scythe, cutting down the young and careless. The ranks of people in the arts were decimated, including actors, writers, dancers, and musicians. These were my people, and I was losing numberless colleagues.

  A massive lid of grief and fear had slammed down on the nightlife, snuffing out much of the energy and exuberance. It’s difficult to have a good time when you’re living in fear. Limelight might have been doing the same numbers in 1986, ’87, and ’88 as when it opened in 1983, but the mood had changed. There was pretty much zero gay presence, and without it, the scene missed an essential element, like a glass of champagne gone warm and flat.

  I had already spent a few years looking for a place to land in Chicago, but the search had so far proved fruitless. I toured the downtown neighborhoods and trendy Lincoln Park, but nothing seemed quite right. I knew the town’s population could support a megaclub, and there was nothing—no existing nightlife quite like what I had in mind—in the whole metropolitan area.

  With notoriety from the buzz surrounding New York Limelight, I revived the effort to find a home in Chicago. On my visits, I started to notice a somewhat surly attitude on the part of the residents. As a middle child I understood the feeling of being overlooked and overshadowed. I wasn’t the first to detect a chip on the City of the Big Shoulders. Chicagoans accepted the “Second City” label, as if acknowledging the town’s status as an also-ran. When I visited, I saw posters with “NYC” printed in a circle with a slash through it. It reminded me of the funny title of a country-western song, “Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for LA.”

  I’ve always liked Chicago. The Upper Midwest feels almost Canadian, and, for better or worse, the place felt like home, a working-class town, the younger, rough-edged sibling of New York City. Plus I knew that, despite its boring insistence on being ordinary, Chicago was one of the most cheerfully corrupt places on earth. Any place with a guy like Al Capone in its history had to have an interesting dark side. I doubled down on the search, renting an apartment in one of Capone’s speakeasies so I’d have a place to stay on my extended visits.

  At the time, nightlife in Chicago meant taverns, biker bars, and small music clubs. Underneath the crusty “fuck New York” attitude, I knew there was a hunger for excitement, a longing for a triumphant return to the days when the city was known for its Jazz Age glitter. The creative community had their faces pressed up against the shop window, looking on as people went wild in other cities, other venues. As far as I could tell there was not a single Chicago nightclub that charged a cover for entry. People in this city were going out to drink, not to dance.

  My job, as I saw it, was to wake the sleeping giant.

  I found the ideal shrieking alarm clock on the northern outskirts of downtown, in the River North neighborhood. The former Chicago Historical Society Building suited my purposes perfectly, a rock pile to outdo all other rock piles. The stone edifice had been built in 1892, at the height of the Gilded Age, just prior to the opening of the world’s fair featured in the book The Devil in the White City. I thought it would be outlandish to situate a nightclub in a grandiose historic building such as that, an irreverent flair akin to opening in a deconsecrated church in New York. I knew the nose-thumbing, in-your-face quality of the move would serve as a great publicity hook.

  The enormous building featured a forty-thousand-square-foot interior, which was plenty of room to indulge my wildest ideas. As with New York Limelight, the Historical Society Building had been originally designed for public assembly, so I wouldn’t have trouble with zoning or fire regulations. Playboy magazine had once planned to use the place as a venue for one of its clubs, but the deal had fallen through. Even though the long-abandoned interior of the building proved musty, dusty, and crusty, it was structurally sound and nowhere the wreck that the former Church of the Holy Communion had been.

  As soon as I walked into the place, I began to visualize how to make a great nightclub out of it. It cost me $3.5 million to buy the place and realize that vision. Just like New York, Chicago has a great creative community, and I hired local on top of bringing in veteran staffers I knew and trusted. After months of renovation and fine-tuning, I felt the anticipation rising in the town’s club-going population. The night we opened, the last day of July, 1985, three thousand people stood in line. The publicity splash from New York Limelight had washed up on Lake Michigan’s far shores. Three thousand!

  Chicago Limelight gave the city a shot of the exotic. The entrance led to a grand stairway and a corridor lined with immense glass cases—used in the past, I imagin
ed, to display historical artifacts such as Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat. We put performers in those glass cases: a Goth girl, a leather boy, body-painted models, elaborately costumed members of the “Family Plan” theater group. Essentially the entry hall served as a kind of human zoo, featuring anything my team and I could dream up, and the displays were constantly changed and refreshed, just like K. P.’s art installations in Atlanta. Patrons had to brave the gauntlet of these strange, alluring figures before they could even get into the club proper.

  In the Dome Room, a cavernous central space, we installed a rotating selection of art and photography displays. There was also a Cube Room, measuring a perfect forty-by-forty-by-forty, where murals were replaced every three months by guest luminaries like Mark Kostabi. The vibe was eclectic and sophisticated. Chicago ate it up. Scenes of raucous decadence played out against the club’s artsy backdrop. Club-goers in Chicago seemed to act out with a sense of grim determination, as opposed to the confident, cool-blooded voguing that was going on in New York.

  Andy Warhol made it to Chicago for our opening, which lent the new Limelight the stamp of approval from the start. The local scenesters were impressed. Andy showed up in his signature antifashion outfit, straight out of the L. L. Bean catalog, as well as eyeglasses with pale translucent frames and what had to be the most frightening fright wig in his whole collection. He appeared to be a visitor from another planet.

  “Oh, I like Chicago,” he murmured, a mild-mannered statement on the whole affair. He always reminded me of Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner in the movie Being There, whose banal, idiot-savant pronouncements such as “I like to watch” were interpreted as samples of deep wisdom.

  If anyone would have asked me during this frenetic expansion push, I would have claimed that I was just a simple family man. That’s how I saw myself. Yes, I might have spent less time with my three daughters than I had previously, and I mostly left Adrienne behind in New York while I worked furiously to make the new club a success, but, hey, I was busy. I still marked each kid’s birthday with a trip to Disney World, still supported their educations with entry into the best schools in Manhattan, and remained on fairly good terms with my ex, Jen and Mandy’s mother.