“It will be called Studio 54. It’s in the old CBS studio where The $64,000 Question used to take place. Before that it was an opera house. You walk in under this big marquee. Then you walk into this enormous hall with very, very high ceilings and Art Deco mirrors and crystal chandeliers and then into this enormous, enormous room where there are like eighty-five-foot ceilings—it’s like five stories. The dance floor is 11,000 square feet. Then upstairs is a balcony with a seating arrangement like a theater. I would say the opening night will be more like going to a premiere than going to a discotheque. I’m very excited about it because I think it could help change a little bit the lifestyle of New York.”

That last line turned out to be the most prophetic understatement of the Disco Decade. It was from my interview with Carmen d’Alessio, a Peruvian-born party promoter who knew “everyone young, beautiful, and loaded” in the jet-set triangle formed by Rome, Rio, and Manhattan. She had been hired to launch Studio 54 by its owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who were not yet familiar with the ins and outs of the international social scene, though they learned very, very fast. Carmen’s interview ran in our April 1977 issue, just in time for Studio 54’s opening—which was more like a riot than a premiere. It marked the beginning of an intense symbiotic relationship between the magazine and the club, each feeding the other’s glamour, elitism, and cachet. It was as if Pravda had found its Kremlin, or the Vatican its L’Osservatore Romano.

Six months later, in our October 1977 issue, I interviewed Steve Rubell, who was already the undisputed king of the New York night. I told him that I was continually amazed by the “Man in the Moon” prop that dropped from the ceiling over the dance floor several times a night and—in a blatant celebration of what many of the club’s denizens were doing in the bathrooms and balcony—stuck a spoonful of twinkling lights up its nose, setting off electronic fireworks in its head. “Next we’re doing a popper,” said Steve, “with a cerebrum, a cerebellum, and all the parts of the brain. And the popper is going to shoot up the nose, which will light up the brain, and then the whole thing is going to explode. Every night it’s going to explode—right on the dance floor.”

I liked Steve. We hit it off immediately on the tour he gave me a few weeks before the West 54th Street club opened. He told me that he had started out with a steak restaurant in Rockville Centre, where my parents lived. From there, he and Ian Schrager, his roommate at Syracuse University, built a chain of twelve Steak Lofts in New York, Connecticut, and Florida. Then came a partnership with John Addison, the man behind Le Jardin, in a Boston disco, 15 Landsdowne Street. In 1975, Steve and Ian opened the Enchanted Garden in an abandoned country club on a city golf course in Queens. It became so popular that the traffic jams led local residents to get the city to close it down.

After I introduced Steve to Andy—who waited until the 54 bandwagon got rolling before he jumped on—a new element of friction entered our relationship, mainly because Andy repeated everything Steve said about me at four in the morning, and everything I said about Steve at four in the morning, and threw in some things neither of us said about each other just for the hell of it. It worked: Steve was soon closer to Andy than to me.

In some ways, Steve was a lot like Andy. He couldn’t help playing both ends against the middle. He also couldn’t help gossiping about the love lives of his star friends, though his scoops were usually accurate and he certainly wasn’t the wallflower at the orgy or a lonely voyeur. Steve wasn’t sneaky like Andy; he was almost too open. But like Andy he was always forgiven his indiscretions. It was simply impossible to resist his infectious enthusiasm for having fun and his almost innocent adoration of glamour and style. Like Andy, he made the stars feel more like stars. “After Bianca’s birthday party,” he told me in that interview, “we went back to her house and she and Halston made breakfast. Oh, it was fabulous. It was one of the most fabulous moments of my life.”

Bianca’s birthday bash, in May 1977, had been the first in a long line of ever more elaborate private parties at Studio 54. Steve controlled the guest lists and press coverage for these exclusive—and raucous—affairs, but it was Ian Schrager who created their dramatic and original themes, from the invitations to the busboys’ brief uniforms. Ian had a theater designer’s flair for whipping up a magical atmosphere overnight out of nothing more than lights and shadows, scrims and curtains, tinsel, confetti, and a few well-chosen props.

“Why can’t we do a play like this?” Andy had said at Bianca’s party, as a naked black couple, their bodies washed in gold stardust, led a gold-harnessed white pony through a curtain of gold Mylar streamers onto the dance floor. Bianca, who just happened to be wearing white and gold too, had hopped onto the pony, much to the delight of the paparazzi, who almost outnumbered the one hundred guests invited by the host, Halston. As the disco version of “Happy Birthday” blasted from a phalanx of speakers, Mick had started dancing with Baryshnikov at the other end of the dance floor, and the paparazzi whirled around. I always wondered where Mick was when Bianca cooked breakfast for Halston and Steve later that night, and always thought that the party and the publicity it got Bianca were what really sent him flying into the arms of tall Jerry Hall.

Andy went to most of the private parties that followed that fall and winter and the next spring, and always moaned the next day about how we should be making “Broadway musicals just like that.”

By the time of Steve Rubell’s birthday party, in December 1977, the mob trying to get into Studio 54 was so large and out of control that the police had to close the street to traffic and the invited swells had to leave their limos on edgy Eighth Avenue and walk the last half block. “Take me with you! Take me with you!” people screamed when those of us with invitations wedged our way through the crush and the velvet rope slipped down for a second to let us in. That was the night of the first party within the party: only some of us received white cards with our invitations that let us behind a white curtain that divided the dance floor into an Out zone in front and an In zone in back—where Swifty Lazar and his wife, Mary, were doing the disco version of the hora with Marion Javits, Marina Cicogna, and Florinda Bolkan. It was also the night Sly Stallone made his first appearance at 54, surrounded by four muscular bodyguards, who were immediately surrounded by fourteen not-so-muscular body worshipers—and Andy, who was desperately trying to squeeze his Minox between the pecs and abs for pix of Rocky.

Andy wore his ruby bracelet, hidden under the cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt, to the Valentine’s Day “I Love New York” party hosted by Gilda Radner, Carrie Fisher, and Margaux Hemingway, three clients of P.R. man Bobby Zarem. It was packed with secretaries and office boys from movie and record companies, so Andy and I hung out in the deejay booth with Halston and the design assistant he’d imported from Paris, Princess Diane de Beauvau-Craon. That was Michael Jackson’s favorite perch when he turned up at 54. One night, Michael and Andy found themselves together in the booth—it was like the blind leading the blind, the shy meeting the shy, each waiting for the other to say something.

In March 1978, Elizabeth Taylor celebrated her birthday at Studio 54. In deference to the presence of a United States Senator—the guest of honor’s husband—Steve and Ian had attendants in the rest-rooms for the first and only time I can recall. I know because one of them held her hand up like a stop sign and told me, “No men in the ladies’ room,” when Margaret Trudeau, the un-first-lady-like Canadian First Lady, tried to take me in with her. Otherwise it was monkey business as usual at Studio 54. The highlight of the party came when the Rockettes—all forty-eight of them—wearing black leotards and holding sparklers, formed a circle around the birthday cake, a portrait in buttercream of the birthday girl. Halston led her to her cake and she made a wish and cut the first slice—right out of her left bazoom. The paparazzi flashed like lightning as she devoured her own frosted nipple, then waltzed with Halston while the Rockettes did high kicks all around them. Andy and Bianca were standing close by, smooching for the cameras. Margaret Trudeau was also smooching, a little more believably, with the handsome young mystery man she had stolen away from Catherine Guinness. His real name, I think, was Tom Sullivan, but we all called him by the title of the autobiographical documentary he was making, Cocaine Cowboy. Timothy Leary and Sylvia Miles, not smooching, were also pushing their ways into the picture. Only Senator Warner (Republican of Virginia), for some odd reason, seemed camera shy. It was the only time I can recall Diana Vreeland at Studio 54. In fact, I was holding her up on a banquette overlooking the dance floor, as she shimmied to the disco version of “Happy Birthday.”

“It really becomes more like pagan Rome every day,” I told her.

“I should hope so, Bob!” declared the Empress of Fashion, shaking her booty to the throbbing disco beat.

Just then, an avalanche of plastic snow fell from the sky—one of those well-timed Ian Schrager touches—and Lauren Bacall slipped on a flake and fell to the floor. “There goes Betty,” said Diana, as the paparazzi zoomed in for the kill.

One year after the opening, Andy was completely identified with Studio 54. The tabloids had taken to referring to “Halston-Liza-Bianca-Andy.” A suburban matron in a New Yorker cartoon asked her husband if that was one person. For the first anniversary party, Steve asked his favorite foursome to do “a little act, like a toast sorta.” (Pat suggested this might be the time to rush a joke disco tune of Andy’s onto vinyl: “Oh Gee, Oh Wow, Oh Really/It’s All Fred’s Fault, It’s All Bob’s Fault.”)

The night of the party, we literally had to fight our way to the front door—pandemonium is too mild a word for what was going on on West 54th Street. Barbara Allen and I headed straight for the basement, which was reached through a door behind the bar, a room full of freezers, and an unpainted cement staircase with an unpainted steel bannister. Steve and Ian had dressed up one of the cyclone-fenced storage bins by throwing some gold lamé cushions on the cement floor. It looked like a chic holding cell at a detention camp where all the prisoners of war were rich and famous: Truman Capote, Lester Persky, D.D. Ryan, Peter Allen, Lorna Luft, and, of course, Halston-Liza-Bianca-Andy. There were several models to keep the prisoners amused, and several dealers with names like Johnny C., Tommy C., Tony C., and Sarah C.—C did not stand for Castelli—to keep the models amused. Torture came in the form of the steady thump-thump of the dancers overhead. The song they played over and over that night was “Miss You,” by the Rolling Stones—Bianca believed it was written for her.

After a few rounds of Stolichnaya, served in plastic cups or straight from the passing bottle, H-L-B-A decided they had better rehearse their act. Andy insisted that Catherine Guinness and I go with him to the rehearsal hall, a nearby boiler room. It was as hopeless as trying to teach him his lines for The Driver’s Seat—he could never get beyond “Oh, uh.” As we emerged from the boiler room, we saw Jed coming toward us, but much to my surprise he turned around and scurried away in the opposite direction. Andy started wailing, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. You’ve got to go get him, Bob.”

He’d disappeared. And I got diverted until H-L-B-A’s act, which got a pretty unresponsive reaction from the crowd. Then Steve jumped up and shouted, “Open bar,” which got long and loud applause. Back in the basement with H-L-B-A, the models and dealers were still swigging and sniffing. Andy, of course, wouldn’t drink from the passing bottle, for fear of germs, nor would he sniff from the other passing bottle, for fear that someone would say he really did get Edie Sedgwick on drugs—that was what all the sneakiness and denial were really about. Instead, he slipped another Valium from his pocket and licked it off his palm, hoping no one in the chic little cell would notice. He soon left, worried about Jed.

The next morning he was jealous when I told him that he had missed what WWD dubbed “The Fashion Summit.” Around four in the morning, Yves Saint Laurent, looking glazed and dazed on the arm of Marina Schiano, walked through the cyclone-fence gate of our little cage, and gave Halston a really big kiss on each cheek, French-style. Marina had the same satisfied expression that Kissinger wore after getting Nixon together with Mao Tse-tung. Throughout Studio 54, from the basement to the bathrooms to the balcony, and the next day throughout the city, from Bloomingdale’s to Bergdorf’s to Barney’s, the message flashed like a telegram from the front: “YSL and H made up!”

Meanwhile, across town on Park Avenue and 59th Street, the Queen of the Night was not amused. Why weren’t exciting things like that happening in her club, Regine wondered, and why wasn’t the In crowd coming there anymore? She was at the height of her international expansion, with franchises from Rio to Deauville, but the formula was faltering in New York. First, she tried to go casual, by opening a bistro around the corner called Reginette, where ties were not required and dinner went for $30 instead of $100. She came to lunch at the Factory and asked for our help. Fred said we should do what we could, because she had always been so nice to us in Paris and Monte Carlo—and because she agreed to his suggestion to have her portrait done, in exchange for a $40,000 credit at her clubs. We gave a star-studded dinner at Reginette honoring our March 1978 covergirl, Margaret Trudeau, but after dessert the stars zoomed across town to 54, not around the corner to Regine’s.

Soon, Regine had another bright idea: “gay Fridays.” For the first “gay Friday” she flew in a planeload of samba-school transvestites from Rio. We all liked Regine personally, but she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn’t understand that everyone wanted to go to Studio 54 not because it was gay but because it broke down all the old-fashioned barriers between gay and straight, young and old, rich and poor. It was a place where you usually knew half the people and wanted to know the other half. “A tossed salad” is what Steve always said he wanted it to be and that’s what it was.

On any given night Liza danced with Lorna, who danced with her dentist, Dr. Alan Lazare, who danced with his wife, Arlene, who looked like, but did not dance like, Liza. Imee Marcos boogied with her bodyguards. Diane von Furstenberg led “Little Eddie,” who wasn’t little at all, but one of the strapping pretty boys in loose white T-shirts and tight black jeans whom all the movie producers and fashion designers and magazine editors fought over—then threw over for the next hot number from south Jersey or South Dakota or South America. Sometimes in the heat and the half light it was impossible to tell who was really dancing with whom. Jackie Bisset, Jackie Rogers, Roger Moore, Melba Moore, Mary McFadden, Maria Smith, Aerosmith, Rod Gilbert, Ron Duguay, Roy Cohn, Zipkin, Zarem, Zoli, the Flicks, the chicks, the tricks, the whole city, the whole country, the whole world seemed to be dancing together at Studio 54.

Except Andy. He stood on the sidelines, or sat in the balcony, groping the fake du Pont twins. Robert and Richard “du Pont” weren’t strapping or pretty or hot. They were pale and wispy blonds, fey, silly, creepy, a lot like Andy when he first came to New York. We knew they weren’t really du Pont heirs because we’d checked them out with Joanne du Pont, a portrait client who was not only born into the Delaware chemical dynasty, but had married a cousin as well—we called her Joanne “double du Pont.” Andy didn’t care. On the contrary, they being fakes only made him like them more. They often got into 54 by using his name or waiting outside for him to take them in. Almost everyone in our group avoided them, but Andy said he felt sorry for them. “They’re not really such bad kids, Bob,” he often told me. “You would like them if you got to know them. They have the best gossip.” It didn’t matter to Andy that their gossip was as dubious as their name, so long as they let him tape record it. They also let him fondle their crotches through their jeans, something Andy seemed unable to resist. It’s only now that I realize how lonely Andy would have been on the sidelines without the fake du Pont twins.

My favorite dancing partner was Truman Capote. Or, rather, I was his. It began at the Elizabeth Taylor birthday party, when D.D. Ryan asked him to dance and, much to my surprise, he replied, “I’ll only dance with Bob Colacello.” So he and I jitterbugged for half an hour together, with the paparazzi all around us, a new—and not unpleasant—experience for me. “You’re such a good dancer,” Truman told me, “ ’cause you can lead and follow.” He was trying to kiss me and telling me how much he liked me, and that my column was “on the verge of being really good writing,” and that I “could be the best writer, after little ol’ me, of course.” I assumed this sudden burst of affection had something to do with his lack of friends after the “La Côte Basque” debacle. He was wearing a brown felt fedora and drinking like a fish. “Wouldn’t it be great,” I thought, “if I could get Truman to write for Interview?”

Truman had been pursuing me, for some reason, for some time. Two months earlier, in January 1978, Andy and I had been interviewing Lucie Arnaz at Quo Vadis. Truman was lunching at a corner table with a man who looked like a lawyer. He was much slimmer than when we had last seen him, when the Esquire bombshell hit, in late 1975, having spent a large part of the two years in various hospitals and clinics, drying out. He was wearing a conservative gray suit with a black shirt and black tie, an outfit that made him look like a cross between an elegant country squire and a Mafioso. I always noted what Truman wore, because he obviously thought about it and it indicated his state of mind. As we walked by his table on our way out, he piped up, in that squeaky insinuating voice of his, “Hi, Andy. And how are you, Mr. Colacello?”

Two nights later, I ran into Truman at Studio 54. He was wearing a black suit with a black knit shirt buttoned at the collar, and looked almost priestly. He was sitting near the bar, sipping Perrier. He motioned for me to sit beside him, and started in with the compliments. “You really did an exceptional job editing the Scavullo book,” he said, referring to Scavullo’s Men, for which I’d taped and shaped most of the interviews. “Mine wasn’t that great when I did it,” he said, “but when I read it, it sounded really great, and that was thanks to you.” Interview was “getting better and better.” “OUT” was his “favorite thing.” I should “write a book real soon.” The next day, when I repeated Truman’s compliments to Andy, he asked me if Truman had started drinking again.

A month later, at the end of February, when I ran into him at Studio 54, Truman was drinking again. He was wearing a brown suit with a peach shirt and an orange tie, and trying to nurse a vodka and orange juice. “I can stop whenever I want,” Truman said, ordering another screwdriver. “It’s because of these marvelous downs the doctor gave me that control the terrifying floating anxiety I have that makes me drink too much.” He took a bottle out of his pocket and announced, “I have twenty-eight left.” Then he changed the subject: “And how are you, my precious? I’m still reading ‘OUT’ faithfully. I know everything you do and everyone you see. You should call me up and come over to see the way I’m redecorating my place at the UN Plaza. I have a feeling you’ll really like it.”

A week later, we were dancing together at the Elizabeth Taylor party, and a week after that we were dancing together at Halston’s big ball for Liza’s birthday at his new Olympic Tower headquarters. “Truman really likes you, Bob,” said Andy. He made it sound like a death in the family. Perhaps it was just too hard for him to watch one of his kids being pursued by the idol he’d been pursuing since 1949.

When I went to see him about a week later, Truman was dancing in the hall outside his apartment and making little devil’s horns behind his ears with his fingers. For a second, I thought that Andy had been right, that he was going to pounce on me. We were meeting to discuss the Oscar-night party at Studio 54 that Polaroid wanted him to co-host with Andy. “You’re going to have to pay the price now,” Andy had insisted. “And you can’t say no, because Polaroid’s giving us a lot of ads to get Truman to do the party.” I pointed out that Truman had introduced us to his new infatuation, Bob MacBride, at the Halston party. “That was just to make you jealous, Bob” was Andy’s comeback. When I said that Truman only liked middle-aged men, Andy, of course, told me that I “could” look middle-aged, and perhaps, at the rate I was going, I did.

Truman’s apartment was on the twenty-first floor facing the United Nations Park and the East River. “Great view, isn’t it?” he said, before I could. There was an L-shaped living-room-dining-room, a small kitchen off the entrance, and two bedrooms, which he didn’t show me. It looked like a grandmother’s apartment, but emptier. That is, it lacked the clutter of a grandmother’s apartment, but every piece of furniture and every object was like something a grandmother would have. There were Victorian settees and club chairs covered in old needlepoint rugs, and needlepoint pillows, and his famous collection of glass paperweights that “snow” when you turn them upside down. “Well, let’s go right to lunch,” he said. He took me to La Petite Marmite, in the Beekman Hotel, right across the street from the UN Plaza.

I was hoping we’d talk about literature, since he thought I was such a good writer, but he wanted to talk about love. “Now, tell me all about your love affair that just ended.” I was stunned, and asked him how he knew about it. He said Andy had told him “with a certain degree of glee in his voice. But whatever you do, don’t listen to Andy. He’ll always give you bad advice, because he wants you all to himself.” I said that my job required too much going out and traveling to keep up a steady relationship, and that love was too hard anyway.

“You’re falling for Andy’s line,” he insisted, “and he’s wrong. He’s all wrong. Life isn’t worth living without love. That’s the reason I became an alcoholic and had to be institutionalized—because of an affair breaking up. If your affair is really over, it’ll take at least two years to return to normal, take it from me.” He brought up Bob MacBride and said he liked him because he was so intelligent “and not in my business. He does all the most advanced computer experiments for IBM and Westinghouse. I can’t live with anyone who competes with me. That was the problem with this person who drove me crazy. He wanted to be a writer, and he started putting my work down. Well, first of all, nobody can compete with me. I know I’m the best at what I do.”

He also told me about his long-term relationship with Jack Dunphy, though he didn’t tell me his name that day. He was also a writer, he said, “but he’s really sweet. He lives in my house in Water Mill in the summer and he lives in my house in Switzerland in the winter. He likes to ski, and I hate to ski, so I never go there. After five years of the mountains, they were just crowding in on me. I can’t take it. But we’ve been together for years, even though we don’t have sex anymore. I know Andy doesn’t think that’s possible—that you can still love someone you don’t have sex with—but that’s Andy’s problem: He doesn’t know the first thing about love. He can’t even spell the word.”

I thought it was the right moment to bring up the party. “Wouldn’t you like to give a really big ball at Studio 54? The Polaroid corporation would finance the whole thing.” Truman loved the idea, and said he’d invite the same people he invited to his Black and White Ball, “with a few crossed off, of course.” But when I explained that it had to be on Oscar night, which was less than two weeks way, he said that he was on deadline for the next installment of Answered Prayers in Esquire, and that we should give the party and use his name on the invitation.

I said that Polaroid thought there should be a hostess as well, to complement Andy and him, perhaps Gloria Swanson. “I don’t want my name on an invitation with an old bag like Gloria Swanson,” he snapped. I clinched the deal by telling him that Polaroid would give him one of their new instant movie cameras. He said he wanted it before the party, to give to Bob MacBride. Like every celebrity I’ve ever met, Truman couldn’t resist a freebie. He chuckled as he hugged me goodbye and then admonished me in a very loud voice as I flagged down a taxi, and pedestrians did double-takes, “Don’t listen to Andy! He doesn’t know anything about love!”

The Polaroid party was not exactly a success. The invitations got messed up by the computer. All sorts of VIPs got upset about not getting invited. By the time our friends and clients got theirs, they had already accepted other Oscar-watching parties around town. And every nut and groupie in New York was heading for 54. “This is the worst party you ever gave, Bob,” said Andy when I got there. “And all the people you hate are winning Oscars.” Polaroid fought with Steve over his $30,000 bill for the party. Steve and I fought about it too. Jed, Jay, and Tom fought with Fred, Vincent, and me because we wouldn’t let Andy do a party the following week at Hurrah (for which Jay and Tom were now doing P.R.). And we lost the previously agreed-on sale of yet another Farah Diba portrait to an Iranian oilman who had a contretemps with the 54 doorman.

The only one pleased by the party was Truman, who was now calling 54 “Cinquanta-Quattro,” and who acted like it was his biggest social triumph since the Black and White Ball. But then he was drinking so much again, and taking so many pills and so much cocaine, that he lost all perspective. “New York is entering its greatest period since 1963,” he announced. “I mean, I want to stay up every night all night because everything is so interesting. It’s a whole new period of love. Everybody is getting together with everybody again. And I really do think that it all came together at my party at Cinquanta-Quattro. Haw haw haw haw.”