The Last Party
Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
A riveting memoir of disco-era nightlife and the outrageous goings-on behind the doors of New York City’s most famous and exclusive nightclub
In the disco days and nights of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, the place to be was Studio 54. Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and Bianca Jagger were among the nightly assortment of A-list celebrity regulars consorting with New York’s young, wild, and beautiful. Studio 54 was a place where almost nothing was taboo, from nonstop dancing and drinking beneath the coke-dusted neon moon to drugs and sex in the infamous unisex restrooms to the outrageous money-skimming activities taking place in the office of the studio’s flamboyant co-owner Steve Rubell.
Author Anthony Haden-Guest was there on opening night in 1977 and over the next decade spent many late nights and early mornings basking in the strobe-lit wonder. But The Last Party is much more than a fascinating account of the scandals, celebrities, crimes, and extreme excesses encouraged within the notorious Manhattan nightspot. Haden-Guest brings an entire era of big-city glitz and unapologetic hedonism to breathtaking life, recalling a vibrant New York night world at once exhilarating and dangerous before the terrible, sobering dawn of the age of AIDS.
“A vivid portrait of ’70s nightlife.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Who better to take us behind the velvet rope of that ’70s mecca of disco and substance abuse? . . . An assiduous mix of memoir and reportage.” —Newsweek
“One of the forty greatest rock and roll books of all time.” —Blender
Anthony Haden-Guest is a reporter, cartoonist, and sporadic performer. He was born in Paris, grew up in London, and has spent lengths of time in Rome, San Francisco, and Los Angeles but is now long settled in New York. He won a New York Emmy Award for writing and narrating a program about the coming of Eurotrash to Manhattan.
Haden-Guest’s books include Bad Dreams, True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. His collections of cartoons and rhymes are The Chronicles of Now and In The Mean Time. He is now working on an animated movie, a further book on the art world, and a memoir. Indeed he would very much like to hear from anybody with memories of his activities at any period—not necessarily flattering ones, but that would be nice—to contribute to this last project.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Studio 54 was the quintessential midtown Manhattan nightspot of the 1970s and early '80s, where the gay and straight worlds intersected; where celebs and wannabes crowded in to disco, drug and who knows what else; in front of which people waited for hours in hopes of being admitted (two women arrived naked on horseback as Lady Godivas; the horses were let in, but the women weren't). Haden-Guest, a regular writer for New York magazine and Vanity Fair, reports on his beloved "Nightworld"--the life of New York clubs--with an enthusiasm that assumes we all were swept away by disco-mania. The most compelling part of this chronicle concerns the rise and fall of Steve Rubell, the boy from Queens, and the club he created that drew the rich and famous from all over the globe. Rubell and his partner, Ian Schrager, were eventually sentenced to three years in jail for tax evasion. Haden-Guest, who's prone to exaggeration, calls their trial the media culture's version of "Moscow's Show Trials of the Stalin era." Some readers will find the gossip, name-dropping and dirt-dishing delicious; others will wonder what all the fuss is about. This will be of most interest, darling, to followers of Liz, Liza, Bianca and Roy Frowick, aka Halston. Photos not seen by PW.
