Customer Reviews

The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, And The Culture Of The Night

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is an excellent in-depth analysis of the New York City Nightworld from the disco-elite 1970s into the Club-Kids of the 1990s. The title might mislead readers into thinking this is "The Studio 54 story." This book does not focus solely on the rise and fall of Studio 54. Anthony Haden-Guest focuses on the rise and fall of the entire NYC nightclub scene, with Studio 54's Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager taking center stage.

If you are looking for a book that mainly emphasizes the celebrities, the glitz, and wild parties in Studio 54, this book may not be your cup of tea. These topics are covered, but the book emphasizes the chaotic, competitive ---and often cutthroat--- business nature of nightclubs. In doing so, Haden-Guest does a great and even job of illustrating Nightworld's sharp businessmen, the starry-eyed dreamers, the junkies, the megalomaniacs, the doormen, and the party-goers. You read the frightening ups & downs of the business players, and their mad scrambles to try and duplicate the success of Studio 54. And often, some of these key players are all the abovementioned items rolled up into one.

I was surprised to read just how unstable the nightclub business was during this "Boom" period. There was no club that matched Studio 54's once-in-a-century money making machine. But even its best competitors found numerous obstacles in running a successful night-scene, and very few lasted more than two years. You will read about the fickle Nightworld party-goers, how they tired quickly of even the hottest parties, eventually abandoning the hot club in hopes of a newer, hotter nightspot.

It is equally astounding to see how many would be entrepreneurs sought funding to duplicate Studio 54's achievements; some well equipped, others incompetent. There are the brief triumphs of Maurice Brahms, the drive of Arthur Weinstein, the mixed success of Scotty Taylor, and the sad story of Uva Hardin, the volatile dreamer that never even got a club off the ground.

You do meet the charismatic characters that inhabited Studio 54 and the surrounding clubs, including Bianca Jagger, drug runner Tom Sullivan, Mark Benecke (probably the only guy who became famous for being a club doorman), club goer Tinkerbelle, Carmen D'Alessio, legendary attorney Roy Cohn, Rudolf and His Club Kids, and Halston. The author does not merely tell you the cool stories about their doings, he illustrates how they shaped Nightworld and/or how Nightworld shaped (and sometime damaged) them.

Haden-Guest paces the story of Rubell and Schrager's unexpected success very well. Their financial boom was so intense and happened so fast that both men failed to see the potential fallout. Like many club owners, they skimmed money, only Rubell and Schrager skimmed mountains more than the average club owner, and practically egged on the IRS to investigate them. The out of control egos, the delusion of being untouchable, is all too evident in this tale. The author also illustrates the irony in Studio 54's downfall, how if Rubell and Schrager reeled in their egos just a little bit, there is a chance the Saga of Studio 54 would be an ongoing success story today.

If I could point to the one thing that I enjoyed most about The Last Party, it would be the treatment of Steve Rubell. I have seen numerous articles and documentaries of the nightclub phenomenon that paints Rubell as an eccentric visionary, a maverick, a madman? and not much else. Haden-Guest does show us the manic & drugging Rubell, but we get a keen look at the soul behind the "human perpetual-motion machine." Especially moving was that after numerous whirlwind career ups-&-downs and "Hello & G'bye" sexual encounters, Rubell, in the last years of his life, found love with Bill Hamilton.

If you are looking for a book on the glitz of Studio 54, a good source is the VH1 Behind the Music documentary aired around 1996-97. If you want an insightful look into the complex and unpredictable nature of the Nightworld phenomenon, this is the book for you.

To disagree with some of the other readers' commments, I found the politics of the nightclub owners to be more interesting than reading about the gossip of any celebrity that passed through (Studio 54, Xenon, Palladium, The World, Area, Limelight, etc.). Mr. Haden-Guest does a good job of creating the atmosphere of how a club functions, wins and loses.

But one must know that this book revolves around the Manhattan club scene from the 1970s to the 1990s. And, while half of the book is about Studio 54, the other is taken up by the stories of those owners and clubs that followed. I found it interesting, but I can understand it if another may not.

My only complaints are: I bought this book last June (1998), just after it was published; it was the first printing and it contained a number of copy editing errors. More pictures of Studio 54 should have been included too.

In sum, I do not think there is a more detailed account of Studio 54 in print anywhere -- and that is where the value of this book comes in.

I was completely mesmerized as I read Guest's book on the Studio 54 scene. As a 24 year old graduate student and clubber familiar only to the Hollywood scene of the last 6 years, I am keenly aware that a lot went on before my time that was thrilling and cutting edge. As I read about all of the pretension and attitude of the many clubgoers and promoters, I laughed, recognizing with familiarity, the highs from wearing outrageous and eye-catching clothes, dancing deliriously into the early hours of the morning, the status of guest-lists and drink tickets, and finally the feelings of being transfixed to a dream world where consequences and sanity don't exist. The book provided me with insight into a time when AIDS wasn't heard of and drugs were taken liberally without abandon. The climate of today's club scene has its occassional magic, but for the most part, it is watered down and drab. I have been able to enjoy the dark theatrics of the gothic scene and the reckless glitter rock scene at Cherry in West Hollywood on Friday nights. Reading about Studio 54 brought back the feelings of delight and awe that I experienced when I attended my first gothic club at the age of 18. It's something new and involves uncharted territory for those of us that weren't old enough to experience disco as it was happening. Having interviewed over 100 clubbers for a book I am currently trying to publish, I appreciated the insights into the minds of personalities of the scene 20 years ago. While responsibility and ugly reality is a more common denominator today, the thing that never seems to change is the tenacity and commitment of the night people to pursue glitter dreams and thrive on those highs that nightclubs can deliver. The vignette's and quotes are so interesting that I could envision myself actually reading the book a second time.

Readers hoping to understand Studio 54, the rise and fall of the disco phenomena, and the evolution of the New York club scene will be disappointed. The book lacks clarity, continuity between the players and clubs, and depth of analysis and explanations.

First, readers who want a Studio 54 story will be disappointed. Only about one-third of the book covers Studio 54. (For a much better explanation, see VH1's "Behind the Music" which did a 90-minute show on Studio 54.) While the story of this nightclub is told in disjointed segments with some interesting anecdotes, coverage of the celebrities and their stories is sparse, the role of the founders is incompletely explained, and the rise and fall of the club's fortune with Disco lacks analysis. The story is interesting, but incomplete. You will not have all of your questions answered.

After the Studio 54 story, the book then goes into a story loop of: some semi-legitimate person opens a hip new club without all of the necessary paperwork, the club rocks for a while and attracts the latest NY scene, the club gets stale, and then goes out of business two years later. Repeat cycle. With the maze of players, it's easy to get confused with who's who and what they did.

I was a teenager. Nice Cuban girl from a good family with all the proper trimmings...Catholic school background, steady boyfriend, no drugs, no clubs. But heaven sent me a message via a bunch of decadent friends that would cross my path in those days (call it fate/destiny, whatever) and all that changed....somehow I ended up on the other side of that rope and inside the heart and soul of my newfound addiction, Studio 54. 15 years later, I discovered this book existed and several dozen friends past and present managed to get word to me that "our" story was out there. Anthony Haden-Guest....thank you! Heaven knows you can only truly understand the phenomenon put together by Ian and Steven if you had the pleasure of visiting their disco playground....I'm sort of glad I wasn't 35 years old in those days....because if only 'I knew then, what I know today"....!!! This book is at my fingertips whenever I want to go out to a "real" club. Sans the hangovers!! (I bet those who've given this book a bad review never got in to Studio in the first place!! hahaha!!)

If this book has taught Haden-Guest anything about writing, it has taught him the mastery of hyperbole. Being a club-goer for many years, I was eager to read his account of how the psychology of the A-list had developed. And without his realizing it, it wasn't the story itself that was nearly as revealing as Haden-Guest's embellishing descriptions of the events and people that created the scene. The elitism of certain clubs like Studio 54 plays upon the insecurities of those who are dying to get in. I had to ask, "What kind of person would spend all night in the cold just to spend a fortune getting into a club where everyone was drugged or drunk out of their minds, having seedy sex in seedier dark corners. Or struggling to look indifferent, as they position themselves in front of reporters' cameras?" The fact is, those who made the scene just weren't very interesting people. They were dulled by their wealth, or fame, or drugs, but this author still bought into the myth of these people's fabricated importance. And isn't that perhaps, the whole purpose of a club scene? Where people can reinvent themselves? What this author couldn't acknowledge is that the reinvention expires as soon as the clubsters walked out the door at the end of the night. It must have been difficult to write about fundamentally uninteresting people, but I can't imagine that it was more difficult that reading about it. His overly-exaggerated depictions of those who "counted" were tiresome, and at times, insulting as he was unable to gasp any sort of objectivity. If this book was written honestly and rationally, it wouldn't have been longer than the first paragraph. If I were the editor of this book, I would have distilled the entire thing into one sentence: "We came, we made money, we left."

Summing up the quality of this book, and it contents, just can't be done. What I can do is shed a minute amount of light on this and the 1970's disco scene. Yes I am only 19, but from the information provided in "The Last Party," I feel like the the Elite 54, like Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager at Studio 54, twenty some years ago. Steve was so smart, he partied like no other and still managed to open up the most legendary club in history. Ian, was the quiet guy, the man who did the behind the scenes work. Only those two men could take a dungy old basement of a production studio and turn it into a commodity filled status room. If you lived during the 70's and thought '54' was just your Dad's age, then more than likely you were a pastor at the local First Church Of God. Studio 54 was about as holy and unholy as a place ever existed. It was the first stomping grounds for the strange; it was the trendy, the vogue, a melting pot like no other. As Steve referred to it as "Mixing The Salad." 54 was not just a disco; it was a place for everyone and everything. read this and you'll know what I mean! Bravo Anthony Haden-Guest!

I agree wholeheartedly with all the previous reviewers except the woman from Jersey who claims that whoever negatively reviews this book probably never got into Studio--you didn't even review the book.

Future buyers: read the other reviews--they are dead-on, and my thoughts exactly.

Candid club photos are essential to a tell-tale book of this nature, and the photos therein aren't that qualified at all. I've seen rarer ones on random websites. Most pictures look like they were taken in the same day with the same roll of film. Absurd for all the variety this scene contained!

The text does indeed drag and talk more about the neighboring clubs--which is educational, but looming more and more offtopic--than the pure, raw history of Studio & it's inhabitants.

What i particularly disliked was the author leaves out the full scoop on good gossipy tidbits, yet mentions them repeatedly.

Moreover, this book had numorous typographical errors. A few sentences throughout lack their full words.

Read this book for all the info you can acquire if you are a serious studio-phile like myself..but don't stop there. Get Andy Warhol's Diaries and people in relation to him bio's that will disclose more about the goods of the place.

I was there and this book IS 54 ! The bathrooms upstairs had alot of stories to tell as did the catwalk over the dance floor, I wish they got further into the "dirt" , The Basement also had alot more to tell, should have gone deeper! A good read for those of us that wish we could go back to a time when we were "young & dumb"...The medical word was that "Cocaine was NOT addictive" and Quaaludes were a sleeping pill..... What a great place , lots of fun..needed more PICTURES !

Although this book is well-written overall and entertaining in spots, it's suprisingly unsatisfying. The author provides us with plenty of detail on, for instance, how Studio 54 came into existence, but far less detail on the "culture of the night." At times it reads like a Harvard Business School case. The Studio 54 regulars claim they were to stoned at the time to remember much, maybe Haden-Guest had to rely on the accountants' recollections for this book