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

by Peter Gatien

  Hot off the opening, Chicago Limelight was going strong, drawing crowds of thousands per night. The performance art, dancing, atmosphere, and opportunity for release were enough to keep the club full and consistent. Things got an even more fiery boost that fall, when Tina Turner presided over a massive party that brought out the town’s royalty. A local TV reporter, Oprah Winfrey, covered the action. Chicago Limelight started to become a recognized stopover for visiting celebrities, and we hosted people like Frank Zappa, Duran Duran, Kevin Bacon, local porn queen Seka, and the band Chicago.

  The mirror doesn’t lie, but the person looking into it might. A family man? Who was I kidding? In reality, my home life was slipping away from me. I wasn’t starstruck, exactly, and didn’t really give a damn about celebrities, but I was seduced by the undeniable exhilaration of putting together another smash success. Seeing that line in front of one of my clubs was like a drug, and I had become addicted to it.

  “What shall it profit a man,” the Book of Matthew asks, “if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” To that famous biblical question, I might have provided a nonbiblical response. Looking around at the life I had built, I felt that, after all, at least such a man has the whole world.

  Chicago might have been my new baby, but New York Limelight remained my true love. After a week in the Midwest, I slipped back into Manhattan as into a warm bath. Sixth Avenue was my street, and the former church on the corner of Twentieth and Sixth was the house that Peter built. And my family was in the city—both families, in fact: Adrienne and the girls, and Brian MacGuigan and the motley crew at Limelight. New York City was the place where I didn’t have to choose between them.

  Of course I had to go and upset the applecart. I spent a year running the New York and Chicago Limelights before ambition once again took hold of me. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted more, wanted to outdo myself. The next frontier, I reasoned, was to expand internationally. I decided I would open a Limelight in London. Manhattan was home, but I had seen too many of my friends fall to AIDS, and nightlife in the city had a death-haunted feeling to it.

  Developing a rotating schedule for myself, I spent a week in Chicago making sure the club was running smoothly, a week in London scouting locations, and two weeks in New York with my family, while alternately overseeing the club. It was a punishing itinerary, representing a measure of my ambition but also the streak of congenital restlessness that ran through my soul.

  I didn’t really have a great sense of how to be an engaged father. I’d fly into New York believing I was playing the part of Successful Dad perfectly, just by putting in an appearance. Then I’d jet off again to monitor my other ventures, returning home on the rebound exhausted and spent, barely able to marvel at the upscale lifestyle I provided for my family. Adrienne ran the household with an almost unlimited budget. The kids attended elite Manhattan schools. Around this time Madonna was assuring everyone that we were living in a material world, and in that sense, my daughters thrived as material girls.

  I told myself that the Gatien residence in New York was at least different from the one I’d grown up in, with my father figure who came home every night and sat silently, present but miles away. I myself was often literally miles away, and where was the harm? To me, that was just the job description: make the money, give the most of your time and the best of your creativity to your career, and while at home, stay pretty much out of the way so your wife can handle things on the domestic front. The logic wasn’t sound, but it was deeply ingrained in my personality.

  I acted as though I were on a mission. Blow up NYC. Demolish Chicago. Conquer the UK. I was too consumed to ask myself what could possibly be enough. What would finally satisfy me? Moon Base Limelight in the Sea of Tranquility?

  It turned out that in London, as in New York City, fairy-tale castles weren’t that hard to find, provided you had the right real-estate agent—or “estate agent,” as they called them over there. Soon enough my search for a venue zeroed in on a former church in the heart of Covent Garden, on the far eastern edges of London’s West End. I hoped history would repeat itself and what had worked so well in New York would work in London, too.

  For the first century or so, the 1888 Welsh Chapel had served as a haven for the kind of stuffy English snobs that I’d known in my youth. All too happy to tweak the nose of the British Establishment, I took the building over, purchasing it outright, shelling out a million pounds during a period in the market when the pound and the dollar were trading virtually even.

  On August 2, 1986, London Limelight opened its doors. Yes, indeed, I had gotten the opening-night dance down, step by step: identify an enchanted palace; find talented artists to create an alluring, surprising environment; make sure Andy Warhol is on hand to give his blessing; and voilà!—lines of eager patrons that snaked around the block. Jodie Foster and Rod Stewart showed up for our debut bash, along with members of the bands Wham! and Spandau Ballet. Boy George practically moved in. Rocker Bob Geldof’s bachelor party, thrown just a few weeks after we opened, really cemented the club’s reputation. Geldof was hotter than a pistol from mounting the Band Aid benefit and the Live Aid concert. It seemed that all of London showed up to fête the soon-to-be-groom.

  Now I had three Limelights in operation, with the Chicago franchise six time zones away from the London one. Though it wasn’t quite the case of the sun never setting on my empire, I found it comforting that at any given time of the day, someone, somewhere, was likely dancing in one of my clubs.

  But alongside that thought was the frustration of not really knowing what was happening in venues where I didn’t have an actual day-to-day presence. I could visit the Limelights in Chicago or London, get the entry numbers, and check the bar receipts, but that didn’t give me a total picture. What was the mood on the dance floor? Were people having a good time? Were they staying until the end of the night or just dropping in and moving on?

  I once was told that Nathan Handwerker, founder of the iconic Coney Island hot dog stand, used to visit his place at odd hours wearing a disguise, just so he could see what staffers were up to when he wasn’t around. I’ve heard of other bosses who employ similar strategies. All business owners, and especially those of us in the hospitality industry, are control freaks—or they should be if they want their ventures to flourish. A boss needs to project an all-seeing, all-knowing aura, almost to the point of becoming Orwell’s Big Brother.

  Delegating authority is a sound and very necessary management practice. None of my clubs would have existed at all if I had to run them solo. But nothing beats daily, nightly, hands-on involvement. I saw my function as the ghost in the machine. Staffers had to know that at any moment I might suddenly magically appear, in a poof of black smoke and a clatter of cloven hooves. Well, in Chicago and London, the control freak in me freaked out. I could never be sure if the clubs were being run right or if the staff were merely putting on a show whenever I came by.

  As I said, New York City felt more and more like home to me. In the mid-’80s, nightlife—life itself, really—had darkened and flattened out because of the AIDS crisis. Only a few years later, at the dawn of the ’90s, the panic had lessened somewhat. By then everyone knew that no one contracted HIV from casual social interactions at nightclubs, and that the disease was commuted through behaviors like sharing needles or having unprotected sex.

  At New York Limelight, I could feel the pulse of nightlife begin to quicken again. The former mix of queer and straight started to return in full force. It was as if the ship had been hit by a giant tsunami, almost got swamped, but now held a steady course.

  My ambition didn’t begin and end with the nightlife, and owning clubs often sent me on random trajectories that I never would have embarked upon otherwise. My first foray into theater and film production, for example, happened because of Limelight, almost by mistake. Chazz Palminteri worked security at the New York club for five years in the mid-’80s. I liked the guy a lot. He was smart, fast talking, and
good looking, an ultimate tough urban kid who at times served as my personal trainer. We got to know each other pretty well. He could be lethally funny and was always a great storyteller, especially with tales of his upbringing in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx.

  As with a healthy percentage of other employees on Limelight’s payroll, Chazz had another life as a starving actor. Because he worked for me and got paid well, he never actually went without food, but he was an actor who auditioned constantly and couldn’t seem to catch a break. Following the path of many misguided souls before him, Chazz decided it would be easier to starve for roles in sunny California than in snowy New York.

  “Wish me luck, Peter,” he said one afternoon in the late 1980s. “I’m moving to LA. I’ve got the names of a few agents and I’m going to give it my best shot.”

  Chazz had once been fired as a doorman at a nightclub for failing to recognize the uber-agent Swifty Lazar when he showed up for entry. That incident didn’t engender a lot of optimism. I refrained from pointing out the odds against making it in Hollywood. We gave Chazz a raucous bon-voyage party at Limelight. I got news of him every once in a while, most of it secondhand and not a lot of it good.

  “The guy’s out there living on tuna fish and peanut butter,” Barry Rhoerson, an assistant manager and one of Chazz’s friends, reported. “We’ve got to get him back here! Tell him we still have a job for him!”

  “He’s a big boy,” I said, trying to stay out of it. Chazz had this little dramatic piece, an autobiographical one-man show he had been developing forever, which he called The Bronx Play. He was always talking about it, and he wanted to get it produced in LA.

  Chazz called one day with a proposition. “Peter, I know you’ve always wanted to produce theater.”

  I had to think. Had I really always wanted to produce theater? Did I ever mention that to Chazz? I didn’t think so, but I let it pass.

  “I’ve got this great play,” he went on. “You know Dan Lauria, the guy from The Wonder Years?”

  I didn’t know Lauria or, for that matter, the TV show The Wonder Years. I figured that information wouldn’t stop Chazz, so I remained noncommittal.

  “Dan Lauria will go halves on producing my play, and I figured you for the other half. Can you send me six thousand dollars?”

  I hemmed and hawed a little but eventually said I would back the play. As I said, I liked the guy, and six thousand was not a huge amount for me at the time. I figured Chazz needed the help. I certainly didn’t expect a return.

  Two weeks later, I got another call. “The play’s really terrific, and we want to keep it up and running,” Chazz told me. “Can you send me another six thousand?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound, I figured. Two weeks passed, another call, another six. This went on five times in total, until I had $30,000 invested in a play I had never seen.

  “You should go out there,” Barry Rhoerson told me. He had gone to LA and seen a performance of the retitled A Bronx Tale. “It’s actually pretty good.”

  Amid my constant trips to London and Chicago, I managed to fit in a flight to the West Coast. I was a little surprised to discover that what Chazz had worked up was, in fact, really very good. I agreed to produce the play off Broadway back in New York. When Robert De Niro saw that production, he loved the play enough to secure an option for a film version. With De Niro on board as star and director, Universal offered to back the movie, and I received a screen credit as executive producer. It was a massive, wholly unexpected thrill.

  In the process of realizing a dream only Chazz knew I’d had, I gained entry into the moviemaking business in Hollywood, an industry that was, at the time, riding a crest of sexiness and prestige. I took meetings with the heads of five major Hollywood studios. But as the late, great screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood (and which may very well apply to the world as a whole), “Nobody knows anything.” That seemed to hold true at the studios. If anyone knew a surefire way to identify a blockbuster, all anyone would make would be blockbusters, one after another.

  A Bronx Tale, when it finally made it to the screen, was a hit that kept on giving. I did all right with it. We got a million and a half dollars up front from Universal, out of which I recouped my investment in the play, by that time totaling $400,000. Chazz took $200,000 of the Universal money as an acting fee, and we split the rest. Without my participation, the property went on to see success in legit theater and, more recently, as a Broadway musical.

  All told, I must have taken in three or four hundred thousand in pure profit from A Bronx Tale. This should serve as a lesson to one and all: if anyone approaches you asking for money to invest in a play . . . run the other way, because stories like A Bronx Tale are one in a million. For me, the whole enterprise represented only a side hustle to my real gig of seeking out the next venue, the next splash, the next big thing.

  My mother’s extended family in 1945. My mother, Lilianne Henri, is second from left in the back row.

  My jubilant, warmhearted grandmother Francine Sanguin Henri, one of my favorite people in the world.

  My parents, Bernard and Lilianne Gatien, on their honeymoon in New York, March 1945.

  The Gatien family on a camping trip to Meacham Lake in the Adirondack Park, New York, where we almost froze to death.

  Here I am as a budding entrepreneur at the Pant Loft in 1971, with a couple of my first employees.

  The timeless Grace Jones rocks Miami Limelight, 1978. (Photo © Tina Paul, 1978)

  Miles of chrome and neon in the late ’70s at Atlanta Limelight. (Photo © Guy D’Alema)

  Auditioning a cougar in my office at Atlanta Limelight for the opening night role the infamous panther would ultimately earn.

  Andy Warhol cohosts the opening night party at Atlanta Limelight. His seal of approval would be invaluable. (Photo © Guy D’Alema)

  Queer evangelical Reverend Russ McGraw dancing with anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant at Atlanta Limelight, June 1982. The shot seen around the world. (Photo © Guy D’Alema)

  Billy Idol, Perri Lister, and guest, with house photographer “Miss Chickie,” in New York Limelight’s VIP room, 1987. (Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

  Madonna in the chapel at New York Limelight for the Amadeus premiere after-party, September 12, 1984. (Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)

  Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall at Nile Rodgers’s birthday party, September 19, 1984, New York Limelight. (Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

  Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston inside the chapel at New York Limelight. (Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)

  Nightlife queen Dianne Brill and Sting enjoying William Burroughs’s birthday party at New York Limelight. (Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)

  Superstar artist David Hockney and a Speedo-clad swimmer at New York Limelight for the book party celebrating his new monograph. (Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)

  Tina Turner letting loose at the Limelight after two nights of concerts in Chicago, 1985. (Fred Jewell/AP/Shutterstock)

  Rap royalty Snoop Dogg at Tunnel, 1994. (Photo © Steve Eichner)

  Big Candy and Mona, two of the women from our incredible security teams, at Tunnel.

  A regular night at Tunnel, with the growing crowd awaiting entry on Twenty-Seventh Street, 1993. (Photo © Steve Eichner)

  Selection of club flyers by Gregory Homs—one of the most talented designers who helped create the buzz for our nightly parties. (Courtesy Gregory Homs)

  (Courtesy Gregory Homs)

  (Courtesy Gregory Homs)

  A Palladium club-goer uses the pay phone in the room designed by artist Kenny Scharf, 1985. (LGI Stock/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

  Father and daughter. I’m standing with Jen Gatien at the opening-night party for Club USA, 1992. (Photo © Tina Paul, 1992)

  The invitation to the grand opening of Club USA, presented with Thierry Mugler. (Courtesy Gregory Homs)

  (Courtesy Gregory Homs)

 
The legendary Tupac Shakur at Club USA, 1994. (Photo © Steve Eichner)

  Main dance floor with mezzanine slide at Club USA, 1992. (Photo © Tina Paul, 1992)

  Left: Club flyer by Gregory Homs. (Courtesy Gregory Homs) Below: Club patrons in our “Ball Room” at Tunnel, 1994. (Photo © Steve Eichner)

  An early adaptation of a foam party—a feature that got a lot of play in the ’90s—New York Limelight, 1995. (Photo © Steve Eichner)

  Balloons and money drop at Club USA. I’ll always remember New York like this—one big, thrilling, raucous celebration. What an amazing ride. (Photo © Steve Eichner)