by Lorna Luft
I had badly underestimated the dedication of Studio regulars. When we finally walked in at about midnight, there were huge numbers of people on the dance floor, a massive disco frenzy in the middle of a blizzard. We joined them and were having the time of our lives when sometime later Alan suddenly said, “You know, we’re going to have a big, big problem. We have no way to get home.” By then it was past three in the morning, and we knew we were in trouble. Alan thought a minute and said, “There’s only one thing to do. We’ve got to find somebody with their own limo. We’ll never be able to hire anything.” We started looking around the room, and a few minutes later I spotted Huntington Hartford, of the good old A&P chain, surrounded by a crowd of young girls.
Perfect! He was richer than Croesus, definitely limo material, and I’d met him years before with my mother. So I marched right over to him and said, “Huntington! How are you?” He was quite elderly by then, and seemed pretty loaded, but he remembered me, and when I asked him for a lift home, he said, “Absolutely.” I motioned to Jake and the Lazares, and we all stuck to him like glue until it was time to go. When he got ready to leave about an hour later, we raced along behind him saying, “Oh, thank you, thank you. This is so nice of you to take us home.” And it was. We’d have been in a fine fix without him. We all piled into the limo behind him, and the minute the driver pulled away, Huntington passed out on the seat next to me. He did so suddenly, and so unexpectedly, that I thought he was dead. “Oh, God,” I thought, “one of the richest guys in America, and he dies on the seat next to me.” I could already see the headline in the New York Post: “Huntington Hartford Found Dead with Hookers” (me and Jake, of course). The next day, when I found out Huntington was still alive, we all heaved a huge sigh of relief. It had turned out to be one of the funniest nights of my life.
After a week of this craziness, there was no question of returning to live in London. We spent every night of our vacation at Studio 54, and when the vacation was over, we returned to England only long enough to pack our things and put the flat up for sale. There was nothing for us in England anymore. Within weeks we were back in New York to stay, first with my old friend Jody, and soon in an apartment of our own. Paul Vigrass, who was still planning to form a new rock group with Jake, was right behind us. He and his wife and kids came over from England, too, and moved into an apartment in our building. I was back in New York to stay.
For me, New York became synonymous with Studio 54. I spent every spare moment there. Liza and I often met at the Studio, but we didn’t really spend much time together. We had different circles of friends. The people at the Studio were remarkable, fascinating to me for their sheer variety. Anthony Hayden-Guest’s book The Last Party captures the mood at the Studio pretty well. Many of the people who went there were famous. The clothes designer Halston was there almost every night, usually with my sister. We were nodding acquaintances, but I never really got to know him. God knows, he was talented, very talented, but not very approachable. If you were famous, Halston was your friend. If you weren’t famous, he wasn’t particularly interested in getting to know you. He wasn’t nasty, just uninterested. Liza was famous. I wasn’t. It was as simple as that. Having a famous sister and mother entitled me to a speaking acquaintance, but that was pretty much it. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t going to hold his aloofness against him. He was a snob, but a gifted one. Andy Warhol, on the other hand, became my friend.
Andy and I had met years earlier, when I’d done a cover for his Interview magazine, and we were soon friendly. I had been asked to do the cover and a four-page photo spread inside. I was excited and honored to be asked to pose, especially since the photographer was the great Francesco Scavullo. I went for the photo session and had a great day. He took some of the most beautiful pictures of me I’ve ever had taken. The cover, however, didn’t come out until months later. I found out then that the old editor didn’t want to use me for the cover, but Francesco, bless his heart, saved the photos and had the new editor put me on the cover. I’ll always be thankful to him for what he did.
Andy and I became friends in part because he loved the stories about old Hollywood and the people I’d grown up with. I became very fond of Andy; he was kind to me, and generous to a fault. One of my favorite pieces is a portrait of myself that Liza commissioned from him. The portrait hangs in my house to this day. He was a kind man, and so was Bob Colacello, who worked for him.
Some of the most interesting people at the Studio weren’t famous at all, at least not until they started going there. Bob Petty was one of them. He was a bartender at the Studio who used to dance and make drinks at the same time, kind of like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. He could mix anything you wanted and never miss a beat. And then there were the Studio freaks, the ones who became famous for just being bizarre. There was Rollerena, the male stockbroker who showed up dressed like Cinderella on roller skates every night. There was Disco Sally, a woman in her late seventies who became a disco queen in sneakers. Some people even showed up in see-through clothing or “dressed” only in body paint. For Bianca Jagger’s birthday, Bianca herself showed up as Lady Godiva, wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, mounted on a white horse and led by a naked man.
What made these characters even more bizarre is that they often had alternate identities as conservative businessmen and businesswomen during the day. My friend Nikki Haskell, who achieved considerable fame of her own at Studio 54, summed it up nicely. She said, “You’d go to Studio 54 one night, and the next day you would get into an elevator on Wall Street. In front of you would stand a guy in a three-piece, pinstripe suit, looking very conservative and dignified. As you waited for the elevator to reach your floor, you’d look at the back of his head and notice tiny remnants of glitter, still embedded in his hair. And you knew where he’d been the night before.”
One of the positive aspects of the Studio was that gay couples were mixed in with the straight people. Gays had always had to hide in public places, but at Studio 54 the gay couples didn’t get a second glance. For the first time in a mixed crowd, they could just relax and be themselves.
Out of all the wild nights at Studio 54, Halloween was the best. On Halloween, they would pull out all the stops. That first Halloween, Jake and I celebrated the anniversary of my meeting the Lazares. Of course, Alan had to dress up in his mask as the mad doctor again, the way he had the night I met him. We went to dinner at the restaurant Elaine’s and then over to the Studio for the big party at midnight. It was astounding. The people there were outrageous on any given night, but Halloween gave people the opportunity to really get into costume. I’ve seen some pretty strange Halloweens on Santa Monica Boulevard, but Studio 54 made Halloween in Hollywood look like a PTA meeting. The street outside the club was mobbed with people in bizarre costumes. One guy arrived in a real ambulance, siren screaming, and climbed out bandaged head to toe like a mummy. Two people came dressed like drugs—giant Quaaludes. One couple showed up having dinner, literally having dinner. They had chairs and a table set with a lighted candelabra and a full meal. I didn’t bother to dress up; I have to wear costumes for a living, so I just doused myself with glitter and went dripping sparkles.
When we walked into the Studio that night, the foyer was lined with little sets designed by Ian Schrager, one of the owners of the club with Steve Rubell. Some of the sets were curtained, and when you opened the curtain, there would be a very realistic werewolf or something equally scary waiting to jump out at you. The most original was a scene labeled “a little dinner.” It was a table with a group of midgets sitting around it, eating. “Munchkin leftovers,” I thought to myself. My mother would have loved it. Inside, the dance floor was dark, covered with cobwebs and special effects designed to scare you to death. The money they would spend there on Halloween. It was unbelievable.
In many ways Ian Schrager was the driving force behind Studio 54, but Steve Rubell was the one with all the visibility. Ian would design the parties, but he’d usually disappear before the evening rea
lly got started, turning the club over to Steve to run for the evening. Steve was a great host, the ultimate life of the party, but there was one problem: Steve had a massive Quaalude habit. By eleven P.M. he’d have taken two Quaaludes and still be relatively coherent, but by the end of the night, he’d be so stoned he would be drooling. He’d walk around chewing on Quaaludes, seven or eight in an evening. He had to have two people with him all the time to keep him from falling down and to get him home at the end of the night. At one point he actually got a red wagon for his “helpers” to pull him around in, when he got too stoned to walk. It was insane; there was Steve, sitting in his little red wagon, popping pills and refusing to leave. It should have scared me; it would have scared most people, much less me, who’d spent all those terrifying nights with my mother when she’d overdosed. But it didn’t scare me. Because I was stoned, too.
It hadn’t taken long for me to slip back into my old habits once I started at Studio 54. The place really was drug central. People did drugs there openly in the late seventies, especially at the private parties, and I soon forgot all about the insights I’d found during those weeks at Bill Wyman’s house in the south of France. I was partying again, and this time at the biggest party of all. Something about the place made people throw caution to the winds and forget every restriction and inhibition they’d ever known. It was like Woodstock every night, with different drugs and without the mud.
Everyone at Studio 54 did drugs; it was as much a part of the experience as the music and dancing. Steve would invite the elite, which sometimes included me, to go down to the basement with him and enjoy his “private stock” of cocaine and other drugs of choice. Jake and I would go down with him, and sometimes my sister was there with Halston or another of her Studio friends. We’d all snort cocaine together, a regular family affair. By then I was drinking, too. Even though I thought I was allergic to alcohol, the truth was, I’d just never liked the taste. At the Studio, though, I invented a drink for myself and called it the Lorna Special. Bob Petty, the main bartender, would whip it up for me. It was a mixture of vodka, gin, orange juice, and champagne, all swirled together. One of them would knock you on your bum. Between the Lorna Specials and the trips to the basement, I was semiconscious most of the time. I cringe now when I see pictures of myself at the Studio in those days, staring blearily into the camera. I didn’t need a little red wagon to get around in, but it was close.
Studio 54 really did change all of our lives. It changed our perception of what was normal behavior, and it created a new standard of nightlife that lingers even today. New York had been through a long drab period in the early seventies where people didn’t go out much, because there was no place special to go. Studio 54 changed all that. It was a social phenomenon that came to symbolize all that was unique to the early eighties. It was the ultimate disco, the place every club is compared to until this day. Studio 54 put New York back on the map. People flew in from all over the world just to go there. I still think of the Studio every time I hear my friend Paul Jabarra’s disco classic, “Last Dance.” We lived to be there; everyone would be on the phone the next day saying, “Did you see this? Did you hear about that?” It was insane, of course, and often dangerous, but there was a strange innocence about it, too. The eighties would teach us all hard lessons about the price that is paid for chemical addiction and sexual promiscuity, but in those days we hadn’t heard of AIDS and the term “drug abuse” wasn’t in our vocabulary. That would come soon enough, for me and for so many others.
It couldn’t last. It didn’t. Eventually Studio 54 collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. Political pressure began building as the conservative backlash went into full swing and Ronald Reagan’s moral majority elected him to office. The New York police had been willing to ignore celebrity excesses in favor of catching real criminals, but that came to an end when the Feds were called in to investigate Studio 54. They found everything. It turned out that Steve Rubell had been stuffing money into the ceiling of the Studio instead of paying taxes, and the Feds found a fortune stashed away, tax-free. They also found drugs, and they found Steve’s little black books with the records of who had been using what, complete with little “c’s” for “cocaine” next to our names. In short order, they shut the place down. The last party, as it came to be called, was over.
For me, the party would soon be over forever.
© Michael Jacobs
Joey, Liza, and me at the Directors Guild re-release of the restored version of A Star Is Born, July 1983.
CHAPTER 16
Wake-Up Call
For nearly ten years I had been living my life as if it were one long party. To say I hadn’t been taking my life very seriously is one of the great understatements. I don’t altogether know why. Maybe it’s because for so many years I was “little Lorna,” forced to go to bed while my mother and big sister had all the fun. Maybe it was that I spent my preteen and early teen years with adult responsibilities as caretaker of my mother and little brother instead of just going to the school dances like other girls my age. Maybe it was just the time and place I lived in. I don’t know. Probably it was a combination of factors. Whatever the reason, as my thirtieth birthday approached in 1982, Nature took me into her firm grip. It was time for me to clean up my act.
One night I got really high with a friend from the Studio; even for me, it was a lot of cocaine. So much cocaine, in fact, that I was violently ill the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. After vomiting for three or four days, it began to dawn on me that I really wasn’t having a whole lot of fun. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been having fun on cocaine for quite some time. For weeks I had followed a pattern of doing a line of coke, retching my stomach out, doing another line of coke, and so forth. For years I’d been able to drink, use, fall asleep, and start all over the next day with only a few unpleasant recovery hours at most. Now, though, it was taking me days to recover from a night out, and a night out doing what? Sitting in a basement with a bunch of fellow junkies. Every night for years I’d spent hours doing my hair and makeup and getting dressed up just to go sit in the basement at Studio 54 and get stoned. I’m a slow learner, but eventually I do get the point, and as I leaned over the toilet bowl one miserable morning, I said to myself, “What are you doing? Are you nuts? This is definitely not fun.”
I’d never been the lonely drug user who holed up alone with her drug; on the contrary, I used drugs as a social activity, a way to have fun with friends. Unfortunately, though, unlike some of my friends, I’d always been an all or nothing user. Other people could do a line or two of coke at a party and say, “That’s enough,” but I would keep on using until there was no more to be found. Once I started, I couldn’t quit. It was the same with the Lorna Specials I drank; I never drank just one. And to compound the problem, taking too much cocaine left me so high I’d have to take a sedative such as Quaalude to come down again. It was a vicious cycle, and I had to stop. My body was screaming in protest. So I did stop, just like that. I never touched another line of coke.
Physically, it was easy enough. Physically, I felt better the minute I quit. Luckily, cocaine isn’t addictive the way heroin is, and it doesn’t have the long half-life in your fat cells that were such a problem with the medications my mother took. So physically I did just fine. It was the psychological adjustment that was tough. I really wanted the coke, and I knew that if someone put it within my reach, I’d take it. The only way I knew to handle the craving was to avoid the stuff, which meant simply not being around it. I continued going to Studio 54 when it reopened for a while under new management, but now I limited my activities to the dance floor. No more trips to the basement to share the goodies people had with them. I might still have a Lorna Special at the bar on occasion, but that was easier; I could limit my alcohol intake easily once I no longer needed to balance the cocaine. As for my drug-using friends, I avoided going out with them to places where people would be using, and if they arrived at my house to
socialize in the evening with their pockets full of drugs, I’d say, “Sorry, gotta go!” and get out of there as fast as I could. Avoid temptation became my new motto. I’d finally learned my limits.
Sick of the club circuit, I turned to summer stock to jump-start my career once more. Summer stock is bread and butter for American actors who need work. Revivals of old plays, especially musicals, are its primary stock-in-trade. Casts filled with former stars and talented second-stringers tour the countryside in the summertime, bringing well-staged professional productions to cities and towns all over America. It’s exhausting but fun, and I enjoyed being back onstage, doing what I do best. In 1979 I’d done Grease in summer stock with Barry Williams of The Brady Bunch and Gary Sandy, former star of the popular TV series WKRP in Cincinnati. Two years later, in 1981, I did the national tour of They’re Playing Our Song. I enjoyed the work, I needed it, and the continual touring made it easier for me to stay away from the dangers of the old Studio crowd.
I even quit smoking that year. I’d never been a heavy smoker, but still, nicotine was just one more stimulant in my body. That little light dawned during a performance of Grease one summer in Ohio. I had this tiny little dance number, and at the end I was wheezing so hard I could barely breathe. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. From a couple of hops I’m huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf. I have to quit smoking.” And I did. It wasn’t very hard. I’d rarely smoked unless I was high, so once I quit getting high, I lost the desire for cigarettes. It was a good thing, too, since I was later diagnosed with asthma and told smoking could be dangerous for me. Once the cigarettes went, I was completely free of chemicals for the first time since I was a teenager. It’s a wonder my body, not to mention my friends, didn’t die from the shock. I’d like to say that getting sober was a moment of profound revelation for me, but it wasn’t. It was really more of a practical necessity. The revelations would come, but not yet.
