Studio 54 founder pens book about club’s dark side
While Ian Schrager — the Studio 54 co-founder-turned-high-end hotelier — plans a Rizzoli coffee-table book on his iconic disco, another of the club’s owners has written a behind-the-scenes memoir of its sex-and-drugs dark side. “My book is the true story about Studio 54,” says Mark Fleischman, who bought the club from Schrager and Steve Rubell in 1981 when the original duo served time for tax evasion. “Steve died in 1989 and Ian appears to be sanitizing what occurred,” Fleischman contends. “From my point of view, Studio 54 was the epicenter of the drug culture in New York.”
Fleischman relaunched the club and “threw myself into it wholeheartedly, entertaining the biggest stars of the world with Champagne and cocaine,” including John Belushi, Andy Warhol, Keith Richards, Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve. “My best friend was Rick James.” VIPs gathered in Fleischman’s office, where there was so much white powder, he hired a staffer whose specialty was chopping “perfect” lines. “There were so many people at a long desk, you needed 30 or 40 lines of coke,” said Fleischman. “That takes a lot of time. You don’t want to make them uneven. I had a staffer — a very pretty girl” lining up the blow and Champagne.
On the sex front, “the ongoing ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ scene was so hot that Alec Baldwin, who worked as a busboy back in the day … said he finally had to quit because seeing the sexual interplay night after night left him perpetually horny.” (A Baldwin pal denies that happened.) Fleischman said Michael Jackson used the DJ booth to dance away from the crowd, and Halston used it to do drugs out of sight.
At 5 a.m., a group dubbed “the Dawn Patrol,” including Dodi Fayed, Williams and Reeve, would hop in a limo provided by Fleischman and head to after-hours clubs in the Meatpacking District for “dancing till noon.” But “after selling Studio 54, I crashed.” In 1986, Fleischman headed to Betty Ford, which didn’t work for him. He says he then went to a spa and wellness center, Rancho La Puerta, in Mexico, which changed his life and where he still regularly visits. He opened more clubs and restaurants, and today owns Bar Method exercise studios in LA.
