RedHanded - ShortHand: Studio 54

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Party favours full of drugs, a hose-down rubber sex balcony, and Bianca Jagger on a real horse. It’s often said that the brightest flames burn for the shortest time – and by god did Studio 54 burn bright. Under the helm of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, 254 West 54th was the single coolest place on the planet – and set the blueprint for exclusive nightclubs to this day. Bowie, Warhol, the Jaggers, and every other celebrity you could think of felt lucky to set foot on its gigantic dance floor. But what comes up, must come down, and it only took three years for the greatest club on earth to come unstuck. This is the story of sex, drugs, and disco – the rise and fall of Studio 54.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello, hello. Hello in disco. I don't know what that is. Me either. Nope, my brains let me down. Thanks, Brain. Okay. If you are ever in New York City

and you have done all of the Times Square and Saxiff Avenue that you can handle, you can take the subway. Or the bus if you must. To 57th Street and 7th Avenue Station and you will be a block and a half from a whole other kind of history. 254 West 54th Street is now home to the cabaret club, comedy club, blah-b-blah, 54 below, which is a great name. It is now a comedy cabaret club, but if those walls could talk, you would need to be hosed down.

Every orifice would need to be sprayed. Because that building was once the most culturally impactful nightclub of all time, the totality of the disco era. Studio 54. The plot is haunted by the ghosts of the most beautiful, glamorous, desperately cool, fashionistas of the 70s. And if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the four on the floor baselines of yore. Okay, Brain, thank you for that one. I take it back. When it comes to cool, Studio 54 has never been beaten.

No bar, no club, no theatre, no cabaret, no flackery, no flash. No art installation, no nothing, has ever come close. And I really think when you are trying to come up with a concept, everyone wants it to be cool. But if you're running nightclubs, you need cool more than anything else. And Studio 54 did it better. Deep in the theatre district, 254 West 54th Street, started its life as the Gallo Opera House. In 1930, it was transformed into the New York Theatre and very briefly a nightclub. And then back to a theatre again, until 1942, when it was snapped up by CBS.

The TV network made the old opera house the set of network big hitters, like the Johnny Carson show, for decades, all the way up until 1972, when the sound stage fell silent for the first time. And when it did, Hoteliers, Steve Rubel and Ian Schrager were waiting in the wings. This dynamic entrepreneur duo met at the University of Syracuse. They did everything together, including opening nightclubs.

But Steve and Ian knew that they hadn't come close to realizing their full potential yet. The 70s was a magical time, not just because of all the CIA-funded hallucinogens floating around, because of loads of other stuff as well.

I'd never actually thought about it in this succinct a way. The 70s is bang in the middle between the invention and wide circulation of the contraceptive pill and the AIDS crisis on the other side. So there is a solid bit where you could just fuck, no consequence. And we've never going to get it back. It was the only time where living fast and loose didn't have consequence.

Or at least way less consequence than it previously had. For the first and last time in human history, pregnancy was no longer a threat to the female experience and no one could even conceive of the so-called gay cancer that was just around the corner. And that would claim the lives of so many a Studio 54 guest. But we've got years of revelry to Gorge on and it all started with the studio's founders.

Steve Rubell was the original poster person. He knew everyone who was anyone. He was the king of every social scene he laid his eyes on. Steve Rabel is like, So him and Ian, Steve is gay, Ian's straight. But it's also very much a time where people just don't talk about things like that. But there's a really good documentary about it on YouTube. And the way people describe Steve Rabel is like, even at university,

if you wanted to go on a date with a girl, you ask Steve because he literally just knew anyone. He's this magnetic person who everybody liked, everybody wanted to be around. And he was just very, very good at understanding, taking over and then running social scenes. and his business partner, Ian Schrager, was an ice-cold operator, who could sniff out the next big thing and make thousands of it before it even hit the gossip columns. Both of them were native New Yorkers, with a very successful club running in Queens.

The pair set their sights on Manhattan for their next project. So they snapped up the building that CBS had left behind. Ian Schrager had spotted a niche in the market. New York City had a problem. Also, at this time in history, Manhattan is really dangerous and cheap and full of artists. People hadn't been priced out of New York yet. People had been priced out of Manhattan yet. But the problem was this.

Gay clubs had the best music. Therefore, they attracted the best dancers. All of the most beautiful women in the city, the models, the actresses, they all go to the gay clubs with the glam squads from their shoots. They're not going to the straight bars to stand awkwardly and watch sport. but straight men desperate to meet models and they're in the wrong bars and going to a gay bar back then social suicide

they're not doing that either so Ian and Steve decided that what New York City needed to solve this problem was a bisexual disco by 1976 there were over 8,000 dance clubs in the US but they weren't cool like it's kind of like I was listening to the radio the other day and they were talking about how for the first time

children are listening to the music that their parents listen to again. It's like kind of come back round again that kids are listening to Springsteen, you know? And they were talking about Abba and they were like, yeah, of course we're all like Abba was very successful, but Abba was never cool. So before Studio 54, there are disco clubs,

there are dance clubs, but like they're not attracting like the top tier coolest people. Which is what you want. According to Ian Schreger, when you have a club, It is supposed to be cool. It's supposed to be subversive to the status quo, a little bit arrogant, underground. We thought that was the way to present it. A bit subversive and risque.

That is what a nightclub is about. And he is not wrong. But Ian and Steve didn't want it to be too gay either. They knew that if it gets too straight, then there's not enough energy in the room. If it gets too gay, there's no glamour. We want bisexual, very, very, very bisexual. And they had no time to waste. So the CBS set was transformed into a disco in just six weeks with $400,000

and a crack squad of NYC's design stars, including Gill Lesser, most famous for his award-winning design of the Equus poster. Thus, they, sure. It really is quite star-study. Even from the moment. But New York was just full of those people back there. Because they could all afford to fucking live there. And they don't have a building permit.

When they start doing this build, they're like, ah, we'll figure it out. And no one catches up with them. So once the fit up was complete, the space featured 85-foot high ceilings. Wow. It's an opera house. It's an enormous building.

And also a 5,400 square foot dance floor, strobe lights, flames, tinfoil strips, neon lights, and most famously of all, an animated sculpture depicting the man in the moon complete, with personal cocaine spoon. Yeah. And there was, of course, also the famous sex balcony that was covered in rubber,

so it could be easily hosed down after a night of revelry and bodily excretions. So with the build out of the way, Ian and Steve hired a fleet of muscular busboys and bartenders, kitted them out in hot pants and trainers, and Studio 54 was ready to fling open its talks to the public. People who used to work there claim the balcony as a rumor. I don't believe them.

Right from the first night, the buzz surrounding Studio 54 was enormous. So many people showed up for the opening night that all security staff had to be sent onto the street outside to control the crowd. And every perfect party after that was even more electric than the one before. Nile Rogers, the literal poster boy of disco from Sheik,

called Studio 54, the most magical club that ever existed. The cue was enormous every night. from bankers to street performers, all desperate to get in, like the damned looking into paradise. That's not mine, I stole it from the documentary, but it's a good way of describing it. Inside Studio 54, everyone was a star, not just a person,

provided you could actually get in. Like any hype's nightclub, the studio's door policy was as mysterious as it was strict, famously called a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor. There's lots of interview footage of stuff. Steve Rubell going on talk shows and talking about, because the key is to keep it secret, like Birkine, like you're never going to tell anyone what the thing is, like it's everyone, keep everyone guessing, but they were like, what we really didn't want is polyester shirts. So we would say that they melted under the lights and that's why you couldn't come in if you were

wearing one, but obviously it just cancels out an entire group of lower income people. If you were lucky enough to get past the doorman, who was not only good looking, he was paid more than anyone else, so he wouldn't take bribes. People still tried. People were just like shoving cocaine in his pocket. But he's like, he's the king of the door. And if you made it past him, his name's Steve Benicki, I think. The last days of Rome were waiting for you on the inside. Steve Rabel would walk through his club wearing a massive coat filled with cash and drugs that he would hand out to anyone he liked the look on. The basement was full of mattresses populated by anonymous sex and competitions in which a trip to St. Barts was a

to the patron who could do the most disgusting thing for the longest or farthest. But to keep the hype moving was no easy job. To create a fever dream of splendor and excess is one thing, but to keep that ball rolling is something else altogether. Management would regularly drop $100,000 in decorations for a single night, changing themes regularly. The mechanical bridge that moved back and forth, covered with naked people, provided another trippy edge.

It was so like, we also have to remember this as the age of the quailude but I think if you even manage to make it through a night at Studio 54 ingesting no drugs, it would be quite difficult for you to tell the difference because it is so mad. And also remember that at this time no photographs were actually allowed inside the club adding to the mystique. Apart from snaps are of course taken by the studio's own photographer who caught absolutely iconic shots filled with the brightest

and best, including Andy Warhol, Liza Manelli, Cher, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, Truman Capote, Divine, Bob Foss, Rick James, Elton John, Calvin Klein, Carl Largerfeld, Valentino, Yves Saint-Laurent, Grace Jones, Donna Summer, James Brown, Gloria Gaynor. So yes, the very bisexual list goes on and on and on. Studio 54 even had their own publicist who made sure that everyone in the world saw all of those celebrity shots. The only window the plebs had to the magic inside the club that they would never get into. I read that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, they were allowed in.

The rest of the Rolling Stones had to pay. For the 33 months that it was open, Studio 54 was the cutting edge of cool at the dawn of the age of celebrity. Michael Jackson was a big fan, famously saying that Studio 54 was where you come when you want to escape, when you dance here. You're just free. In the 70s, people were famous for having achieved something. It wasn't like it is now where you're famous for being famous. You were famous because you were good at something. And Studio 54 gave those elites a place to party in peace

whilst letting a few shipmunchers in to keep it dirty. It's a balance that no one had really done that before. Of course, there's always been members clubs and there's always been places where, like, people who think they're better than everyone else can go and, like, have a martini. but this was the first time the normal people who were allowed in had to be interesting in some way

and it's kind of like there's a lot of stuff on TikTok about how to get into Burghine not that that is something that interests me at all but someone made a very good point that's like what they're actually looking for is can you handle it inside or are you going to be weird like are you going to walk into this techno sex club

and be scared and want to go home and like cry on the phone or are you going to vibe And I think if anything can be defined as a door policy for Studio 54 is like, are you going to be a dick to the famous people? Or are you just going to be chill? And is that shirt cotton? Understood.

Holidays, as the Americans would say, naturally, big deal at the studio. Steve and Ian absolutely loved a crack at a theme. It's a good excuse. You know, they've got to keep things moving. Absolutely. Halloween was always the biggest night of the year, and the club was transformed into a haunted mansion with monsters jumping out at revelers throughout the night.

There were no clocks in Studio 54, obviously, it's a nightclub. But there was a lot of speculation about when the club would close on a particular night because you never knew when it was coming. Okay. Until people worked out that the till roll was changed halfway through the night. So people would like, hold on a minute, okay, we've got four hours left, boys. So it's really interesting stuff of people constantly trying to crack the code of like what made it so magic. and they never do.

To celebrate Thanksgiving in 1978, the bar staff and waiters all dressed up as pilgrims whilst they served guests, giant turkey legs, a night that was paid for entirely by Valentino. And apparently when Valentino said to Steve Rabel, well, why do I have to pay for this? And he just goes, well, America was discovered by an Italian. Ah!

And at all of these parties, but I would imagine particularly on the festive holidays, little bags of cocaine were tied up with birds, and passed out as party favours with celebrity names on them. And they were recorded in the company ledger. Fruits and flowers, everyone knows about that. Oh, so it's the 70s, cash. Cash is king.

It's so easy to hide this shit. So the most fabulous night of them all, however, that instigated the famous picture of Bianca Jagger clopping through the club on a real-life horse was Elizabeth Taylor's birthday. I would say out of all of the Studio 54 pictures. Yeah. Bianca on the horse is the most famous. Yeah.

The Radio City Music Hall Rockets put on a show. Muscular men in sequin thongs threw petals around and the birthday cake was a life-sized portrait of the Cleopatra star herself. Elizabeth Taylor, not you. Yeah. Understood. Your cake would be a lot smaller than Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor and all her mates and an army of gay porn stars

all danced a night away and had the night of their lives. Andy Warhol, well, was less impressed, later writing in his diaries that, quote, Liz looked like a belly button. Which is just like a peak insult. It's peak Andy Warhol as well. Like there's a really good, I think it's three-part series called The Warhol Diaries because his diaries were released sometime in the last 10 years. And he, I mean, such a fascinating person. But just never, because there were so. much homophobia at the time, never, ever, ever, ever talked about sex at all.

There's so many interviews with him where he's just like, why would I bother? When actually, you know, he's in love with like his long-term boyfriend and it's all this like hidden life. It's really, really interesting. And he took a lot of the photos at Studio 54 as well. So yeah, inside the studio, you didn't have to be famous to be a start. Normal people made names for themselves as well. Most famously, a 77-year-old retired lawyer who would tear.

up the dance floor, multiple nights a week, only stopping for cocaine and Lou Breaks, and she was affectionately dubbed Disco Sally. She discovered disco after her husband died, and it gave her a totally new lease of life. And Disco Sally drew in an audience all of her own. People were just as desperate to catch a glimpse of Disco Sally as they were, Liza Minnelli. People were so desperate to get into Studio 54, they would climb the building next door and abseil into the courtyard. One black tie-clad man died in the air vent trying to wiggle his way in.

People were even selling maps showing how to make it into the club through the tunnels stemming from the subway system. Studio 54 was a phenomenon that is hard to quantify, and like all legends that last forever, it came at exactly the right time. Ian Schrager had learned in the hotel world, to make magic, you have to create a visceral experience and bend the rules. and that's the reason he let the bankers in, not just the celebrities. And the studio never had a VIP area, but it did invent the red velvet nightclub rope inspired by cinema crowd control

that had never happened before. And as I said at the start, like the 70s, is this specific window of time where, if you were going to party. And that's additionally because the Vietnam War had just sort of petered out and the civil rights movement was ongoing, but most of it was over.

So New York was ready to party after years of protest and upheaval. Interesting people were everywhere, making new genres of everything. Punk, hip-hop, pop-art, all came out of New York at this time. It was exciting. It was an exciting place to be,

exciting city to live in, full of artists, and Studio 54 put them all in the same room, dancing on the same mechanical stage. On top of being the coolest place on the planet, Ian and Steve were making money hand over fist. And naturally, everyone hated them for it.

The evil eye loomed large over Studio 54. After a while, everyone started to have it in for Steve and Ian. Pride before a fall, too close to the sun. Yeah. How many more have you got? Yeah. And the dynamic duo really didn't help themselves by being the poster boys for everything that was wrong with the economy.

Steve told New York magazine that, quote, only the mafia does better than Studio 54. Shut up. up Steve. Yeah, because that gave the IRS the key that they had been waiting for. The studio was raided in December 1978. The books were seized, along with a secret set of actual books kept in the ceiling, and a whole load of quailudes Steve had been saving for a rainy day.

And also just like $600,000 had been lying around in binbacks. In the like secret books that literally they are hiding in the ceiling. When they're taking cash out for themselves, they skim about $2 million. They write skim in the letter. Brilliant. I saw an interview with the IRS agent and he was like, if you're going to skim, skim a couple of hundred here. And don't write it down.

That's the point of skimming. Steve and Ian were skimming all over the place. They were skimminging millions. And they probably would have got away with it if Steve had managed to not show off. Oh, if it wasn't for those pesky brags. Mm-hmm. in the almost three years up to the raid,

Studio 54 didn't actually have a liquor license. Only a series of temporary catering permits, which obviously put them under more scrutiny. They literally just like, well, we'll just get a daily catering permit forever. And then it all sort of got like forgotten about. But then eventually they're like, you're a club, you're in the news every day. We know you're a nightclub.

You have to stop doing this. It's like if you go to an event and they haven't got a liquor license here and they're just like, it's a tombola. Do you want to buy a raffle ticket? Oh, you win a drink? What drink do you want? Exactly. It's exactly like that.

I think they did have to reopen for a while with no booze. But because everyone's taking so many drugs, it doesn't matter. Yeah, they just like got big jugs of water. They're like to have this handful of quailudes instead. Anyway, while all of this is going on, the IRS are on their tail and they can't serve any booze. It's all getting a bit embarrassing. Steve Rabel tries to move the heat elsewhere. how and why he thought this would work is beyond me.

He told the press, I think he went on a TV television interview, and he said that he had evidence that the White House chief of staff, Hamilton, Jordan. Jordan, they say it weird. It's spelt Jordan, but like, whatever, you know who I mean. Steve Rabel said he had evidence of him doing a bunch of Coke at Studio 54. Obviously, that means they're coming after you, Steve. Why would you do that?

He takes a lot of drugs in his defense, so maybe he thought it would be a good idea. I also believe there had been very, very recently a change in the law where government officials could now come after you for personal slights against them. I don't think they could before because they're like public figures, but something, oh, it was a change after Watergate. Oh, okay. Something had happened. A tiny little change in the sketch.

Anyway, so nothing really happens with the Hamilton-Georgon-A-Ca-Cuartisan. but everyone is looking at them, including the big boys on Capitol Hill. So in the end, Stephen Ian realized that they were never going to beat the tax evasion charges, and they were both sentenced to three and a half years in prison. And no one was sad to see them go. The night before Stephen Ian self-surrendered, they obviously threw an absolutely massive rager at Studio 54 as a send-off in February 19. and they called it the end of modern day Gamora.

Diana Ross got so wankered that she tried to sing over the crowd from the DJ booth and Steve serenaded the room with his rendition of I did it my way. Nice. His way had landed them both in federal prison where they didn't actually do their time. They ratted out other club owners instead and they were released back into the wild after just a few months. But they had to sell Studio 54. Ian Shrager's really interesting. His dad, it's a big time gangster, people called Max the Jew.

And he, in the documentary, is obviously, if your dad is a gangster, you're going to be quite guarded about it. Doesn't really talk about it. The only time he brings up his dad is when he says, I ratted on other club owners, and that's why I got out. And my dad would have been so angry because you do your time like a man. And I think if his dad hadn't have been dead, I don't think he would have done it. But so it's a very interesting, he, apart from the enormous amount of criminal activity, he did skimming all of this money. He isn't in anywhere near sort of mafia style stuff like his dad was.

And I think he felt very strongly about not doing that. But obviously when you grew up in that environment, I think it definitely added his sort of like steelyness. Anyway, they were out, but they lost the studio. And the building became a gig venue, which hosted the early days of Madonna Duran Duran Duran the Culture Club and Wham, but it was just not the same. Ian and Steve got right back to it though and they opened another club which they called the Palladium and that wasn't the same either.

And they make a really good point is that like in the documentary when they get out of prison they don't have to go back to it because now they've got something to lose. Going back after something like Studio 54 is really brave to like go back to the same business. Yeah. Can you live up to the hype? No. Disco was dead. They were only inside for a few months but when they got out nobody was looking for the opulence of Studio 54. in the midst of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.

And that's why people hated them so much as well because everything's wonderful in Studio 54. It's all over the news and the minds are getting shut and everyone's losing their jobs everywhere else in the country. So that's why nobody was that bothered when they went down. And also they didn't get in. Ian did go on to invent the concept of the boutique hotel though.

I know. And he was pardoned by Barack Obama in 2017. Steve sadly died of AIDS in 1989. He didn't live to see the redemption of the club that put him in prison or witness it hailed as the touchstone of the disco era. Yeah, it is sad that, like, because he really doesn't live that long after he gets out of prison. But him and Ian lived together.

And Ian, like, when Steve died, it wasn't publicised that he died from AIDS because nobody was really doing that then. And Ian just said, like, it was like husband and wife we did. everything together. And I'm so sad that he didn't get to see it come full circle, like the redemption of it. He never saw it. And the plot, 254 West 54th Street? Well, it stood empty until 1998, when the roundabout theatre company transformed it into the Kit Kat Club for their production of Cabaret, starring Neil Patrick Harris. Boo! Hate that guy! Terrible man, look it up. As Ian Schrager

himself said, no one knows what? what the definition of magic is. But we all know it when we walk into a place and it has that electricity in the air. And when you walked into Studio 54, you felt it. When he was asked if it was all worth it, Ian Trager said it certainly was,

but that he would never do it again. And he was right. Because no one else has ever come close. No. I think like all phenomenally, like perfect things, they all have to get cut off before they die. They have to be taken down in their prime. Otherwise, everyone lives to get bored of it.

Exactly. There you go. Disco stew? Back away. Not today, Disco lady. I'm so angry that it has taken me the whole episode to come up with that. You got it in. Thanks, Brain.

Good job. Disco, Brain. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Goodbye.