Before disco, it was soul music that people danced to; it was funk . . . soul music and funk . . . a saucy, languid Latin swing coming up over the horizon, a place where Miles Davis had taken jazz falling from the sky . . . that’s how it was for me. There were clubs where there was music and dancing to all kinds of music . . . and it all came together, in one room, on one floor, under lights that flashed for life, and became disco. It became Let’s go to the disco, and in the disco there were DJs making music as much as playing it.
Before it was called disco, there were simply dance spaces, party rooms in downtown warehouses and borrowed places over the bridges and through the tunnels out of Manhattan. Lots of places where music you could dance to would be played, creating a demand for a certain sort of venue playing a certain sort of music. The combination of the venue and the music meant that the music that emerged from the meeting of the place and the sound was both the name of the venue and the music—you went to the disco to dance to disco. And you need a DJ to play the records, to choose the range and sequence of the music. The DJ had started to take over the role occupied by the jukebox in the mid-’60s. Disco was the place, it was the music, and it was the DJ and the dancers and then very quickly, it stood for the disco image.
The fact that I made disco music was an accident really. When I made my first records, I didn’t think of them as being disco. I made them in France, and the word discothéque is a French word, but it did not have the same meaning that it was beginning to have in New York. I didn’t characterize them as anything. They were simply songs, with a little bit of soul and rhythm, echoes of singing in church, a sense of something showy whipped up by being in Paris with all the fashion, around the people making it happen.
The first single I released, “I Need a Man,” sounds a little churchy in its original state—it could be gospel, and wherever the best disco goes, it never loses that ecstatic feel, that the music that became disco came from soul and funk and therefore gospel. Most of the words had been written by an anonymous, hardworking session guy called Paul Slade. He was in Paris writing English words for French singers who wanted to sing in English. Stephan had put the call out for some words to this track we had, and we chose Slade’s because he had followed best the brief we had given him. I helped out with the words, but I didn’t know that I was meant to take credit, in order to get paid. I learned that lesson very quickly.
After I recorded “I Need a Man,” Stephan in Paris made contact with a New York couple he had heard of called Sy and Eileen Berlin. They were in the clothing business but were going into music, and they became his backers in America. They had the money, and they had formed a management company with the publicist John Carmen, looking after acts like Double Exposure, who released the first-ever commercial 12-inch single, and the salsoul group First Choice.
I remember they once commissioned an eight-foot-tall replica in gold leaf of King Tut’s head for First Choice to take on tour as a prop. That’s the kind of promoters they were—old-style theater and film show business adapting to the new disco era and permanently on the lookout for new talent. (Eileen was the first to manage a young Tom Cruise in the early 1980s.) At first they didn’t have a solo act, and they were looking for something like me. It all clicked.
John Carmen came with Sy and Eileen and he started doing my publicity, propelling my driven, rampageous behavior out into the world whether I was ready or not, where it would become how people got to know me and make their mind up about what I was like. The number one P.R. man in New York in the ’70s, Carmen was a publicity magician and made me famous in New York, like he did later for the likes of Donald Trump. Sy and Eileen were super independent, operating a small family-run fashion business. They were starting out in the music business, and they were very much not corporate. That’s what I liked about them. They were a little like Euro Planning in Paris—more the underdogs, small, determined to make a splash. They were very enthusiastic about me, but they had a very different vision for me.
Their limited plan was for me to start with disco, which was then fast becoming the trend, and then move to singing in Hilton hotels in long glittery ball gowns before getting to Vegas. To me, them asking me to do this was a little like my mother asking me to marry a preacher. Disco in this plan as the new hot thing was the place to start. Doors could open quicker because the rules weren’t quite in place; something was forming that you could find ways into. Its home was in New York, inside a very few hectic, inbred square miles.
Sy and Eileen worked closely with a lot of disco acts like the Village People and Bobby Orlando and were in touch with record producer Tom Moulton, who worked out of Sigma Sound in Philadelphia. He had developed the 12-inch disco mix format, which involved extending the rhythmical parts of a track to make the song longer, and better to dance to, because there were no vocals. He made the accidental discovery when a song meant for a 7-inch was instead cut onto 12-inch vinyl, leading him to understand how dynamic and physical this made it sound. Longer and louder. Perfect.
He came up with the idea of the disco break from watching how people dance to music in the clubs, and seeing that their favorite parts to dance to were the instrumental sequences and the extended jamming parts of jazz-funk tracks. They hated it when a record changed and the vibe was ruined. In those dancing situations, music had to flow. This was a very new idea, and before disco became the bad, kitsch disco, a very important moment in the development not only of dance music but of pop music in general and, later, even rock.
Then again, perhaps there were these long instrumental sections so that the DJs could have a toilet break. Eight minutes of music, enough time to make it to the toilet and back. What happened in the toilet that was not necessarily about going to the toilet might then have influenced the kind of relentless mixes that the DJs favored.
Tom would spend days editing tapes together, segueing the instrumental passages into one seamless rhythm, for the gay clubs on Fire Island, where he said he saw white people dance to black music for the first time. These white people were gays, responding to the thrust and thrill of the music. That was the key in a way—the bringing together of two outside appetites into one singular sound, radical new power being generated by society’s frustrated outcasts. Then there was the realization that the sound of a record was different for the radio than for the clubs. It all sounds obvious now, but back then it was all brand-new. His thinking helped revolutionize dancing—people would dance for hours on end without a break, working up a sweat.
It was the stark beat, enhanced, and embellished—a little like the way the artist Richard Bernstein exaggerated and emphasized the look of fame and adjusted the color and shape of a face. Richard did the artwork for one of the original “I Need a Man” covers. Sy and Eileen knew Richard, as he had worked on the album cover for their band Black Soul. It was part of the whole thing clicking into place. I had some photos from Paris that Antonio had taken, and these were the ones Richard treated in the way he treated Andy Warhol’s Interview covers. Around that time we also used some photographs that the wonderful, incredibly modest Bill Cunningham took of me making my way around the streets of New York, long before anyone knew who I was. That’s when I was a model working hard to get jobs, as anonymous as anyone. For decades, he pedaled on his bike throughout New York, snapping what people were wearing as they went about their business. He has been fascinated by the clothes that New Yorkers wore since the 1950s. Born in 1929, a few months after Andy Warhol, he was the opposite of Andy, even though he was just as much about and of New York. He didn’t care about celebrity, or fashion, and wasn’t even that bothered about faces. People being people delighted him—the upper class or the avant-garde—and the idea that being yourself in New York was something special. Accidentally or intentionally, he consistently anticipated new clothing trends, so fashion editors loved and trusted him, and he was uniquely embedded in daily New York life, so the New York Times used his photographs as social commentary. I walked around New York a lot, so he took hundreds of photographs of me, just passing him while he was hunting the everyday remarkable. Fifty-Seventh Street was his favorite location, near where I lived. He once said that there, on Fifth Avenue, you could wait and eventually see the whole world pass by. I’m as excited to be part of Bill’s New York as I am to be a part of Andy’s.
Richard did all the great star covers for Interview, which chronicled the comings and goings of the heated-up in-crowd that orbited around Warhol’s Factory between Max’s Kansas City in the late ’60s and Studio 54 in the late ’70s. The covers were supersize, the colors saturated. He was Warhol’s favorite local artist and would treat celebrity photographs by airbrushing them and retouching them with pastel and pencil scrawls and shadows. It gave the faces a glamorous big-time dreamtime edge as though they were all inhabiting New York embedded in a Hollywood fantasy. Richard was a link between old Hollywood glamour and the more subversive, nebulous glamour of the new underground art scene.
If you knew Richard and you knew Andy, you were right at the epicenter of a hard-working fairy-tale New York that consisted of people like Viva, Candy Darling, Calvin Klein, Halston, Divine, Roman Polanski, Diane von Furstenberg, Robert Mapplethorpe. If you knew how to get in to where it was all happening, everyone seemed to be in the same place on the same trip. Richard was one of those whose job was to capture the trip, and be a major part of it. To be of the scene, you had to be intimately connected with it.
Andy was taking the already exotic and making it even more so, to make sure that there was no doubt that the subjects were worthy of attention. He was fascinated by fame, as an artist but also as a fan. Andy always wanted the famous to look as perfectly impossibly perfect as they could be, which required Richard to build them up into these glorious panels of color. He would treat the newcomers the same, those that were about to be famous or notorious, giving them this instant, colorized glow of fame, with a subtle hint of something brittle, because the clock was ticking. Fame only lasted so long, according to Andy. I had been treated by Richard for Andy Warhol’s Interview number 24, which showed Andy taking my photograph with me wearing a Santa Claus hat. Richard also designed the cover of my first album, produced by Tom Moulton.
It was all part of the same sense of making entertainment for a world craving pleasure and escape larger, bolder, and brasher, and more energetically enchanting. The unsettling growing chaos of the threatening, corrupt, and paranoid world out there, all the political scandals and indefinite wars and crises, needed to be kept at bay. Presidents and governments were cracking up; people needed to look after themselves, and create their own new rules and customs.
Richard remixed images of the famous to make the stars more obviously famous looking, from a wonderful fantasy that must never end, and Tom was remixing dance music to make it more obviously about the fantasy of dance, to ensure the rhythm never had to stop. Songs that were three minutes long would now go on longer, and longer, so that the spell would not be broken. The bits that were part of making the song longer started to become more sophisticated, and started to become the best part.
Tom Moulton was given my early tracks that were recorded in Paris, “I Need a Man” with an instrumental mix on the B-side, and then “Sorry” and “That’s the Trouble,” that we put out as a double A-side, because I didn’t want one of them to be a mere B-side. A B-side was seen as a throwaway. I said, “Why am I going to record something you chuck away? It will be a double A, like the battery. High energy.” I could never understand some of these stupid rules.
I wrote “Trouble” with a French-Greek writer, Pierre Papadiamandis, who created great, effervescent French-style melodies. He’d written something for a Johnny Hallyday album. That was my first collaboration in music. He couldn’t speak English, so he had no idea what I was singing about, and he went by sound rather than sense when we recorded me. My accent was alien anyway, an alien English, and this embellished the alien. I was singing English like I was making it up as a language as I went along. The record went out in New York on a small label attached to Berlin/Carmen management, Beam Junction, which had released Black Soul.
Even then I had made up my mind that I was not going to do the music unless I had some control over it, enough to keep my interest. There was enough going on around me that I was not yet in control of, certainly in terms of writing songs, and choosing material, at least that part I was in control of. You have to start somewhere.
Tom mixed those first three songs to sound more New York and pulsating than they had been in France, and that was definitely toward the coalescing sound of disco, which is a little mathematical, very organized in its own way, to achieve control in the clubs, to create the right mood and movement—and in the end, it still comes out of the church.
Disco in its purest sense means that you will come out of a place having gone into euphoria, feeling that you have rejoiced. That’s the sense the disc jockey in the clubs was helping crowds achieve, and Tom took it into the recording studio. Mixing the music to completely control your emotions, bringing you up, taking you down, slowing you down, speeding you up, making you soft, making you hard. A great groundbreaking 1970s 12-inch mix was the sound of an erection—of one shape becoming another. It was obvious that such an idea would come from the gay clubs. Tom was really one of the first, if not the first, to take that new idea of manipulating rhythm and pace of the club onto a record that in turn would be played in the clubs.
He had already started work on giving “La Vie en Rose” a disco boost, but he hadn’t done it specifically for me. He made a backing track without knowing who was going to sing it, and I was there at the right time, with the right image. He was very sure of himself and his instincts at the time, and because he was clearly the master of this new form he’d helped define, I went along with it all. He was the expert and someone to learn from. I would push myself as hard as I could in order to give him what he wanted. You can hear my determination on the track—the determination that was lifting me into singing, if not necessarily as a singer.
The disco producers were very much the kind of producers who created the track without the singer, and added them at the end. Tom mixed the first three tracks in New York while I was in Paris, and the next thing I hear is that I have a dance hit. I hadn’t even heard what he had done. I didn’t meet Tom until I went over to New York after the song was a club hit. Sy and Eileen had called me over to do some promotion, singing the three songs I had in the underground clubs.
I had a little crush on Tom, because he was very good-looking, a former model. He was also another demanding, complicated man. As usual I had no idea he was gay. It must have been the man in me, tangled up inside, that always fell for gays, and also for something I didn’t have that I wanted to know about. I was living in Paris, so I didn’t know much about him.
I would go out to Sigma in Philly to record with him. I think Tom was always a little irritated when I would act a little, as he saw it, precious. Singing there meant overcoming quite a lot of nerves, first of all about whether I could sing and secondly about how it sounded. Tom was very like Gamble and Huff in the studio. No nonsense, the vocals merely a part of the overall effect, and he would expect the vocals to come as easily as the playing of a rhythm. The drummer or the drums didn’t need to rest a while before they performed, or need a special drink, so he didn’t understand why I did.
I needed to be pampered a little before I sang, even if by myself. Tom thought that was very self-indulgent, but then he underestimated what it takes to deliver a certain kind of performance in the recording studio, one that was done inside pretty much an empty room but that would come across as a great moment and last for a long time. He was one of those producers who like to tinker, and the human element, the actual soul, was not something he wanted to waste too much time on. I think the thing he respected the most about me was my absolute determination to succeed. He thought of me not as a singer but rather as a personality bringing presence to the record. Part of the packaging. Years later, in interviews about that time, Tom would say how annoyed he was that I came across as confused. He said that I was always asking him to come into the vocal booth to help me with the singing. He thought it was silly and pathetic. What he never realized was that this was because I thought he was so hot. It was the only way I could think of to get him to stand close to me. I wasn’t so ditzy, apart from the fact I didn’t appreciate that there was no way he would ever be interested in me. I wasn’t quite man enough for him.
When I heard Tom’s mixes I thought my voice sounded really fast. He had sped me up to fit his slick, swinging version of the track. Also, when I did the vocals originally I had a fever, and I was still very shy singing in a studio in front of people. I did the vocals under a table, hidden from sight. Maybe I should have danced on the table. When I heard it, I could tell I had a cold. He treated my voice a little, but not enough to disguise that. It sounded very different from what we had done in Paris. Guy Cuevas, the DJ at Club Sept in Paris, would play it because we became good friends, but I always felt he was not really sure about it.
I was certain that I wasn’t going to do any more music in Paris. There was something inauthentic when the French tried to do American or English pop. London was the nearest place where I felt the music scene would work for me, but I didn’t go at the time. I think I was put off by the IRA bombings there, which made me think London was a war zone, and by a feeling that somehow London would be too gloomy for me.
Going back to New York once the record was a club hit meant I was going to a place that suited my desire to take my music more seriously, rather than as something on the side. I told the head of Euro Planning to give all my bookings to my friend Toukie Smith. She was the sister of the first major black fashion designer, Willi Smith. Toukie had always wanted to be a model, but her body was the wrong shape for her to get much work in America. Toukie had the big tits that Helmut Newton complained I didn’t have.
She had come out to Japan to be part of Issey’s Twelve Black Girls show. Issey loved her look, and while we were part of the show we became very close. I said she should come back to Paris with me, and because I was now concentrating on the music, I thought she could have my work in Paris. When I traveled to New York for a few weeks I said she could move into the apartment I shared with my boyfriend at the time, Jeanyves. I trusted them both, and at the time she was going out with an illustrator and artist called Jean-Paul Goude. He had become the art director at Esquire magazine at the end of the 1960s, and was still there in the mid-’70s.
He was in the Factory orbit, and worked with Richard Bernstein, knew Andy Warhol, and also the writer Glenn O’Brien, who had edited Interview between 1971 and 1974 before leaving under a cloud of bad feeling. He had hired Richard in 1972. Later Glenn would host a New York public access TV show called TV Party, decades ahead of its time, and edit Madonna’s Sex book.
I had a fling with Glenn not long after the orgasm eruption with my hair stylist Andre. This was where the Factory world could get a little soap opera, and often inbred. He was very shy, nicely intense, and dry. I liked shy people. I liked talking with him; it was more a mental relationship with Glenn than with Andre. I like both sides. The physical orgasm, the mental orgasm. Glenn and I shared mental orgasms. He had a great, very sophisticated and stimulating mind. He could keep your interest, and you would learn something after you talked with him. I like a mind that takes you into unexpected places. He was very much the opposite of Andre, which is probably why I went there after that macho disaster. No more lover-man, something a little more insightful and intellectually uplifting. At least for a while. I guess these were always the two sorts of men I was attracted to—the man of action, or the man of philosophy. If possible, the man who was both. The action body meets the mind in action.
What Andre did to my hair, Glenn did to my sense of being able to see things in a different light. His friend Jean-Paul had seen me perform “La Vie en Rose” for the Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—he saw me before I saw him, put it that way. He saw me in my new natural habitat. Richard had taken him because he had designed my show, dressing me up as a multicolored luminescent chandelier in a tribute to the artist Erté.
Jean-Paul became more than intrigued with me and how I looked and what I might be like in bed. He would probe Glenn about what kind of men I liked, and what turned me on; he was creating a fantasy about me even before we met. He saw me sing “I Need a Man” in front of a gay audience at a club with a bare torso and a prom dress. There was nothing pretty about it, nothing obvious, it was dramatically exhibitionistic, and there was a tangle of signals in terms of who was what and who was entertaining who. He was instantly captivated. I don’t think he fancied my looks. He fancied my spirit.
I was not his physical type at all, really. Bountiful Toukie was, and he liked to make sculptures of her, making her even more voluptuous and proud, but I was too skinny and boisterous. He wasn’t my type, either—intellectually he was, but I liked pretty boys. The models. Jeanyves in Paris was like a throwback to the Three Musketeers, suave and dashing. I’m not sure how it worked, but while Toukie was in Paris, she and Jean-Paul started to split up.
She didn’t tell me. I thought we were really good friends, although I did a lot of the talking, and she did a lot of the listening. So she never told me what was going on. She knew all my secrets, but she told me nothing. She would just go mmm-hmm as I chatted. But they broke up. Jean-Paul said I indirectly contributed to the breakup by helping her model in Paris and letting her stay in my apartment.
Clubs were everywhere in New York, out of sight but there for those who knew where they were, and the first time I sang in public it was Halloween, perfect for me, in New York at the Gallery on West Twenty-Second Street. Twenty-two-year-old Nicky Siano had opened the Gallery in 1972, having consciously designed it as a glowing, throbbing dance palace, and his inventive disc jockeying made it one of the great clubs. His approach to DJing was that of a collagist, cutting up tracks, layering sound effects, suddenly switching the flow, catching you out, lifting you up, weaving a hundred tracks into one so you couldn’t hear the join; he was the essence of the idea of the DJ as an improvising composer and dedicated showman. He would say, “When the crowd gets off, I get off,” and he wanted to make them scream.
John Carmen had been nagging him to put me on at the Gallery. Nicky said later that when he finally met me at Sy and Eileen’s, after I made sure I made quite an entrance wearing an extravagant headdress, legs and arms akimbo, he was entranced because I was so exotic. He invited me to perform at his club.
The Gallery had a very small stage—really just a part of the floor—as was usual in those early underground clubs, and the audience was crammed into a tiny room. It reminded me of a couple of the drag and strip clubs I used to go to in Paris with Antonio, where it was so full it seemed like there were bodies on bodies, some of them so close they were penetrating each other, lubricated by their own sweat. The stage was so small you couldn’t have a band, so you would use playback, like I had seen at the drag clubs in Paris. I also thought that unless you could get a band to play the music as great as on the record, there was no point. The music was beginning to be made electronically—machines were increasingly being used, especially to generate rhythms—so it seemed wrong to have a band and try to reproduce it. These drag shows proved to me that you would not miss the band as long as you put together a show. The show was important for this sort of music, not musicians playing live. There was no room anyway.
I was criticized, because people thought I was miming. This was a real no-no. I would go out of my way to make sure the audience knew I was singing live—I would talk in the middle of a song, I would ad lib, I would throw in something different, to make it obvious I was live, and the rest, the playback, it didn’t matter as long as I was for real. It was inexpensive, too, not to have the band.
I had my three songs. That was the extent of my repertoire. They would play the extended Tom Moulton instrumental mixes as an introduction to make the show longer, and to build up tension. I wore my Darth Vader Miyake; that was my uniform, mystery in layers, so you could take a layer off, and then another layer, eventually stripping down to a skintight bodysuit. I came with my fashion feel and the whole Issey sensibility, the theater I had learned from Japan, the stillness and bareness, and went for it like a bat out of hell. I was aggressive about the minimalism.
I had learned that stillness was a better way for me to appear. I wasn’t so great a dancer that I was going to wow people with movement. I never try to do what I know I am not the best at. I couldn’t dance but I knew how to walk and how to freeze. I had done a whole season of Parisian catwalk and Twelve Black Girls in Japan. I also used anything around the stage as the stage, so I wasn’t hemmed in. I would crawl all over the place, hiss at people, bark in their faces, and pretend to slap people sitting near me. No one had seen anything like that. Rumors shot around the city—You have to see this girl, it’s outrageous, disco that cuts into you, show business that threatens you. She’s as mad as hungry tigers.
An actress, Tara Tyson, who later became branded a Manhattan socialite after she married the Greek shipping magnate and technology pioneer M. Michael Kulukundis, came along to one of the shows to see what the fuss was about. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. She had small parts in TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, and had appeared in off-Broadway productions with titles like “Foreplay” and “Porno Stars at Home.” Andy photographed her, and she was also a favorite of the beauty-loving superstar photographer Francesco Scavullo, who was responsible for the classic Cosmopolitan cover look. Usually, this was the glamorized very white all-American look, but there was a photograph of the black model Naomi Sims on the cover in 1973. It didn’t break any new ground, but it was an interesting moment that suggested another possible world.
After Tara married, she gave up acting because her husband did not like her working—the thing I always said I would never do. I once found her at a party locked into her bathroom giving an exclusive one-woman performance for the likes of Al Pacino and Christopher Walken. They were entranced. She had a lot to give, even though her husband didn’t want her to. She was a dynamo. She once got in a fight with legendary restaurant hostess Elaine Kaufman at her literary clubhouse, Elaine’s. Elaine scratched Tara’s face, punched Tara’s date, the costume designer Jacques Bellini, in the face, and then kicked them out, claiming Tara had bumped into her with a cigarette and set her dress on fire. “Not my face,” Tara shrieked as Elaine scratched her. “I thought she was a transvestite,” Elaine said in her defense. Tara was my kind of girl, from my kind of New York, and she loved the way I tore up the stage.
I would have dry-ice fog rolling around the stage, at about waist height, to appear out of and sink into like an animal on the prowl. Because there was no real stage, I had a chair as a prop. Very French cabaret. Leg up! That’s all you need. When the stage is tiny, or nonexistent, ask for a chair, and stick your leg up. Voilà—theater. One spotlight on your face. That’s all you need to generate mystery.
Nicky then went out after me dressed, somewhere between accurately and madly, as Diana Ross, as if the whole thing was about having a tongue in your cheek. That made me think! It was like in Paris—you can learn a lot about performing in a small, dark space by watching drag queens stretch credibility. I was working on my routine, building up the parts. A little bit of Kabuki stillness, a warrior slash of drag debauchery, a dash of black humor, shoulders out of a gothic fantasy, a load of tease. And repeat. Perfect.
Nicky was one of the first real DJs-as-stars, turning the process of playing records into a flamboyant performance. The decks and the booth were a kind of stage, and he was one of the first to make the idea of mixing records together an art. He was a big influence on Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, who was a light man at the Gallery. Nicky later became a resident DJ at 54, before he was sacked after four months for—so they said—excessive drug taking. Some say it was because he played the whole of “Trans-Europe Express” by Kraftwerk, all seven minutes. A bit of both I think—too druggy and extreme, and too interested in less obvious music. Fifty-Four quickly became more about the hyped-up theater and horseplay than about new music; the creation of wild, limitless fun was becoming a very serious moneymaking business.
I think at its best in that New York period when it was being invented as something radical and noisy, disco was some of the greatest music ever. It had conviction and was as much about resistance as it was about escape; it was being invented by very creative and driven people. It drew variously from soul, funk, gospel, pop, rock, jazz, and musicals, and the breaks and segues introduced a very innovative approach to musical structure.
Obviously because of what it became, how it turned very fast into a novelty, it seems ridiculous to point out that in those years before 54 it was actually an experimental enterprise. Disco was damned and there was the anti-disco movement, and for decades before the retro-disco of Daft Punk and company there was a phrase “dead as disco,” but you went to those clubs to feel great, and those early disc jockeys were setting in motion a lot of the ideas that traveled through house and hip-hop and the freer versions of disco into the twenty-first century.
You have to separate the commercialized style of disco from the underground places where the ideas first appeared. Disco got a terrible reputation, like it was anti-music, but its beginnings were in many ways more radicalized, inclusive, and open-minded than rock. It was as much an assault on the corniness and narrow-mindedness of rock as punk. Where it ended up was the fault of the white, straight music business, which drained it of all its blackness and gayness, its rawness and volatility, its original contagious, transgressive abandon.
Those early New York club DJs were astonishing in the way they manipulated sound and emotion. The excellence and detail they put into spinning records was breathtaking. They were the originals, and their spirit is at the heart of the success of dance music as an international phenomenon. It took time, really, for that idea of the DJ as superstar to take hold, and once disco went from being a subcultural phenomenon with no real faces or identifiable personalities into the mainstream, it didn’t work, because it didn’t really have an identity. By the time it made it into the mainstream, the formula had been reduced to a very banal 4/4 rhythm, lacking muscle and erotic accuracy; the scintillating cut-up technique had been smoothed away, and the kinds of personalities who tended to front the tracks were usually quite middle-of-the-road or gimmicky. This was before Madonna took her version of the New York club scene around the world—she softened the edges, toned down the drama, moistened the excess, sheathed the flirtation, but in the outside pop world, it still seemed pretty racy.
Why did disco become so hated? Some say it was because almost everyone started to go disco to chase the dollar. Everyone jumped on the glitter wagon, from the Muppets to Kiss. Rod Stewart took it to bed. Ethel Merman even did a disco album when she was seventy-one, first track “There’s No Business like Show Business!” Where could it go after Ethel Merman?
The funny thing is, the first critique of my voice on “I Need a Man,” where I was trying to be theatrical and a little Broadway, said that it was like a combination of Ethel Merman and David Bowie. Maybe more because of my androgynous look than because of how it really sounded. Being a man and a woman all tangled up. I sang so low people thought I was a transvestite—there were definite suspicions that I was not a girl.
On my first album, I was doing pounding disco versions of the classic Broadway songs—maybe that’s where they got the idea from for Ethel. I sowed the seeds of disco’s own destruction even as I helped disco become disco. I did “Send in the Clowns,” after all. It was Tom’s idea. I don’t know if it was a gay thing, but I was happy to sing them. I knew and loved these songs because of my theater training, and any good vocal coach gives you those songs to sing to understand technique.
“La Vie en Rose” was not disco. It’s not the formula. But in the early days of disco there was more variety of music that would be played, not least because there weren’t that many disco records in the beginning. It was like a throwback to that, when there were different sorts of tracks being mixed in with the more blatant dance records. What counted was the mood they created.
In the disco era it became the song to finish off the night, when the clubs would play something romantic before the lights went up, a last round of fantasy, to slowly come back down to earth. All around the world. It was a mainstream hit everywhere except America.
The first person to play “La Vie en Rose” on the radio was the great and natty New York City radio personality and DJ Frankie Crocker, who made a name for himself by playing an eclectic range of music, from Led Zeppelin to Barry White, salsa to Bob Marley, Streisand to Lee “Scratch” Perry, crossing genres and color lines, before the barriers came down. He was the first to play Donna Summer, and no one played Queen before he did. He called himself the Chief Rocker; Hollywood became his middle name because he was so flamboyant and an absolute expert at grabbing attention. He was also known as the black Elvis, at ease in Studio 54 or Harlem. He had a hatful of nicknames, was adept at changing identities to suit different settings, and was a template for the show-off star DJ, driving around in a powder-blue Rolls-Royce, wearing a suit of the same color.
There were, he would say, seven wonders in the world. But if there were eight, he was the eighth. You can hear early forms of rap in some of his suave, seductive patter, a direct inspiration to those New Yorkers who created hip-hop—I am going to put more dips in your hips, more cut in your strut, more glide in your stride. If you don’t dig it, you know you got a hole in your soul. Tall, tan, young, and fly. He’s featured on the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”
Frankie was responsible for defining WBLS, the early black progressive FM station in New York, becoming its program director in 1972. He was the kind of self-loving program director who would feature himself naked and smiling with groomed Afro and lover-man mustache on a huge billboard advertising the station—“If you want the best in New York, listen to Frankie.” It wasn’t just jive, though. He had a real belief in the power of music to change things.
He would play the disco just breaking out of the local clubs interspersed with classic R & B: Stevie Wonder, Aretha, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, and Isaac Hayes. He understood that a black audience wasn’t all the same, one single mass, but was a malleable collection of different tastes and desires. This was when DJs for black radio stations had a vital community role, as preachers, leaders, and reporters, communicating ideas, not merely playing music.
He was an idealistic show-business renegade, but he loved the ladies. Love Man was another of his names. On his show, which I appeared on a few times, he would pretend to take a bubble bath with a female guest, complete with sound effects. I had met him at the Hippopotamus Club, where my brother Chris worked, and he was a deadly charmer, with an eye for white girls. He liked that I worked in the modeling industry and could always introduce him to my friends. I loved his boasts—“Before me there were none, after me there shall be no more”—and took on board his method of making an entrance. Then again, I like to think I taught him a thing or two as well.
He would go out to find new records, not wait for them to be delivered to him. He was always on the hunt. By 1976, he was so powerful and black, having built up enough of a faithful following to have become mayor of the city, that there was an attempt to undermine him, with allegations that he took drugs and money to play certain records. He was convicted, but the decision was overturned.
This was when radio was central to the American cultural experience and the shaping of popular music, and being played by Frankie made a world of difference, because he was famous for breaking new acts at a time when black artists were barely making pop playlists.
I still had an apartment in Paris and I still had a boyfriend there. I had nowhere to live in New York. It was after “La Vie en Rose” that I moved back to New York. Sy and Eileen put me in a dinky New York hotel called the Wellington, and that’s where I lived until I found my first apartment. They advanced me the rent. They were really taking care of me—Tom Moulton always thought it was too much, and he hated how they fussed over me in the studio. I was in New York at the right time, especially if you consider that I was living in midtown when Studio 54 opened. Studio 54 wasn’t uptown and it wasn’t downtown. It was, geographically, midtown. In truth, it was its own town.
The underground, downtown clubs weren’t palaces of dreams like Studio 54. They didn’t look like cathedrals filled with beautiful people; there were no exotic corners and secret rooms. They were seedy. There was a lot of sweat. The floors were soaked with spilled drinks and body fluids. There were holes in the wall that led God knows where. People passed in the night and never met in the day. No cleaning ladies doing the bathrooms. Funky spaces. Quaaludes, mescaline, acid, pretty much pre-coke. No liquor license, so you’d smuggle your own in, or take a pill, a little something to lift or distort your spirits. A bit of confetti, a few balloons, flashing lights, to make it all seem pretty. You wouldn’t know what it was really like unless you stayed to the end, when the lights went up and you could see what a shitty hellhole it was. The lights go up, and the fantasy is spoiled. You need to keep the fantasy intact.
Disco was seriously dressing up soul and funk, going somewhere to be seen, where the beautiful people went—Halston, Calvin, Liza, Bianca, the whole fashion world finding a fantasy that supported the fantasy they were committed to. The underground clubs in that part of Manhattan, where the streets have no numbers, were where you went to hear newer, edgier music that wasn’t so much about fashion. They were places for the more serious social dancers. Those early underground places, like the Loft, the jewel of the private parties, came out of gay rights, hippie happenings, Afro-American rent parties in Harlem—before it all became so commercialized.
Studio 54, on West Fifty-Fourth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, became the disco of all discos, those places to be seen, fashion displays with music, possibly because it was inside a theater, an old opera house with ceilings almost a hundred feet high. It took about seven years for the idea of what became known as disco to go from a few needy, speeding downtown revelers getting together in a stark, unpublicized warehouse in the middle of nowhere for raucous worship of rhythm to it being the overpublicized center of the celebrity universe.
A private insiders’ party, a close, small community, became monstrously public. It was going from a place where it was really tricky to even find the door to get in to a place where those desperate to get inside would crowd around the roped-off entrance. So you knew exactly where the door was. This was where disco became more full-on, and ballooned into the outrageous and, ultimately, the camp. I suppose I arrived naked so many times it was partly my fault. But at the time, Studio 54 seemed like the place I had been heading for since I had left Jamaica—not the promised land, but some sort of grand playground where I could really forget about those whips and prayers. It would become a new place with rules and rituals to break free from, but for now, I was speaking in very different tongues.
There was Studio 54, and there was Max’s and the underground clubs. Two approaches to glamour, one for the fashion people, one for the more intellectual people. One was more political than the other, but I was comfortable in both places because they were both about difference, filled with different people, and I liked difference. They represented different ways of developing the spirit of the ’60s as one decade of change mutated into another, one into pure escapism, the other more experimental and almost academic in its pursuit of musical perfection. The two grooves coexisted within a few New York City blocks of each other. Punk and disco were becoming themselves at the same time within the same small area of Manhattan. It was a very small community, New York. The club scene, the art world, the music people, the fashion freaks, the energized, dislocated misfits, the gay spirit, different generations, various tribes with no name, all overlapping and interacting and spiraling off into new shapes.
Studio 54 appealed to my sense of outrage; the underground clubs appealed to my sense of exploration and adventure. It was the two sides of me—or two of the many sides—craving freedom. Fifty-Four offered a self-indulgent, excessive, even amoral form of freedom, and was a place where I could let it all hang out; the underground clubs satisfied the explorer in me seeking new discoveries. The key was learning how to balance these two sides—the irreverent me who’d turn up at a nightclub like I was the circus coming to town, and the me who was always interested in invention and innovation.
Before Studio 54 became notorious, it was the epitome of a certain kind of divergent identity shape-shifting, so there were the beautiful people, the poseurs, the fantasists, but there were also those with more cerebral urges. It was about the mix of people, all in one place. But the club’s logo, after all, was the moon snorting coke off a spoon. Nothing was hidden. It was right out there in the open. You can’t imagine America without drugs of one form or another, without its drugstores, rock stars, dealers, bored housewives, or bankers, and Studio 54 blew that notion up your nose so that you couldn’t miss it. Made it so obvious that the country was on drugs, or it wouldn’t make it through the day, that it became a problem.
Up high in the seats above the stalls, because this was a theater, you could disappear into the shadows and get up to whatever. Up above the balcony, there was the rubber room, with thick rubber walls that could be easily wiped down after all the powdery activity that went on. There was even something above the rubber room, beyond secretive, up where the gods of the club could engage in their chosen vice high up above the relentless dancers. It was a place of secrets and secretions, the in-crowd and inhalations, sucking and snorting. Everyone was in the grip of what seemed like an unlimited embrace.
Celebrities headed for the basement. Getting high low-down. Not even those who got inside the club could all make it into the basement. You’d stumble into half-hidden rooms filled with a few people who seemed to be sweating because of something they had just done, or were about to do.
The music was magical and the DJs were crowd-grabbing showmen. All the best DJs wanted to work there; the sound system was the very best, and they had their own special horseshoe-shaped booth to control things from. It all contributed to creating this special atmosphere, and at its best democratized pleasure: The anonymous drag queen could dance next to the international superstar and there was no difference. The lights were integral, so that as the music became more animated so did the lights. These were rave parties years before there was such a thing. Everyone got on famously.
One of my best girlfriends at the time, Carmen D’Alessio, was there at the beginning of Studio 54. We were very close and went dancing together all the time in those places for the few for whom the idea that dance music could have such spellbinding nighttime momentum was growing. The blend of space, light, and sound, the hot mass of bodies, the obscure but definite sense of occasion, and above all the music constantly released this feeling that anything was possible. You could dance on your own just for the hell of it. I would go all dressed up and come home with my designer clothes in tatters from all the activity and movement. Going out was a very physical thing.
I went to see the premises of Studio 54 with Carmen before it opened. She found the place, in the daytime, when you really had to use your imagination to realize what it could look like at night, with the lights, people, and noise knocking it into something else. “Look at this place,” she said. “It’s fantastic!” The first thing I did was check the acoustics—singing at the top of my voice—and because it was a theater and had been a TV studio, it sounded fantastic. Carmen knew what she was doing.
Andy called Carmen the number one jet-setter among all the jet-setters focusing on New York as the essential center of pleasure. He said she had the best list of everyone beautiful, young, and loaded. She was hired by 54’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, to promote the club when it opened in April 1977, but obviously she would say that she created the whole idea of the club.
Ian was very quiet, not seen around much, but he had tremendous energy and paid very close attention to every little detail. He was a fan of Walt Disney and wanted to create a fantasyland for adults, a Magic Kingdom for hard-core sensualists. Steve was louder, always seeming a little drunk. Always spitting quaaludes into my face when he spoke, but sweet and lovable and into his family. They were still in their twenties, and the whole thing ran away from them. Oddly, they also went to college in Syracuse, my adopted American base, their hometown, where within a few years I would be celebrated in the city’s equivalent of the Walk of Fame somewhere between Alec Baldwin and Lou Reed.
Steve and Ian wanted their club to reflect back and outdo the actual excess of the city, be a continual stream of big, juicy parties, and Carmen knew how to arrange that. She was a genius at event planning and turned the whole thing into a rampaging concept. She brought to bear a mix of the PR ingenuity she had learned from working for designers like Valentino, and the things she had learned from going to the clubs in New York about what made an almost dangerously great night out: erotic energy, and the classic New York melting-pot mixture of personalities and ambitions, where there would be gays, blacks, Latinos, whites, straights, transvestites, celebrities, nonentities. It’s like an acid trip without taking acid, where you are provoked to such an extent by all the metamorphosis going on around you that it seemed the dressed-up, turned-on people really did have horns growing out of their skulls; that there really were centaurs, angels, and devils; and that the music was the sound of sex, foreplay to orgasm, first kiss to the little death.
What went on was in some way a harbinger of the haywire shamelessness of reality TV—minor celebrities fighting among minor celebrities to avoid losing their fame, demented role-playing, the not famous doing whatever it took to get some attention, the truly famous and aloof and immune watching it all as a kind of sport for their amusement.
It was really a place where you had these big, spectacularly designed parties, as though every night was an opening night. There really would be a naked black man leading a naked woman on a white pony through a curtain of gold streamers, pagan-style events with real circus animals; Armani welcomed with a drag queen ballet; cakes in the shape of Elizabeth Taylor presented by a marching army of decorated Rockettes. Carmen popped out of a cake at her own party, something I am very fond of doing to this day. Crowds would gather outside to get in, and if you were gorgeous enough, more than famous enough—although gorgeous and famous was the golden key—you would pass the door policy. Some would be desperate to do whatever it took to get from the outside to the inside, and then if they managed that, to get from the outer circle into the inner circle.
For the actual, original opening night Carmen sent out five thousand invitations promising a special gift. So many people turned up that legend has it that Cher, Woody Allen, and Warren Beatty couldn’t even get in. They say Frank Sinatra didn’t even bother to get out of his limo once he saw the chaos around the door as people fought to get inside.
Once you found yourself inside, 54 was a kind of heaven or a kind of hell, or both, of highness—the highness of drugs, of groomed, glistening noise punching out of massive speakers, of flash dancing, of close, thrilling association with the famous and infamous, or explicit displays of public affection. As you partied, in the sense of blowing your brains out, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Village People, Sylvester, Chic—and I—sang their songs. Andy Warhol said that when it was really fun, you expected someone to be murdered.
What went wrong was that Ian and Steve didn’t follow the New York rules as decided upon by the establishment. There would be more people outside than inside. It would be packed outside, and you would go inside and there would be all this space. And this made getting in even more of a priority among those people who were really never going to get in, because their faces or styles didn’t fit. I think they turned away top people, because Ian and Steve didn’t give a shit who you were. They knew how to achieve the right balance of people, the mixing of the famous and the unknown. They had an instinct about who would not fit in. They knew the kind of people they wanted to let in who would be part of this “personality salad,” and they knew who to turn away to avoid wrecking the flavor. And you never knew why you weren’t allowed in; you were simply turned away, thinking, I’m good-looking, I’ve got money, I’ve got a new tux. Never enough. It wasn’t about that. If you weren’t clearly bringing something to the party, some kind of personality that couldn’t be missed, then you were never going to get in.
And in the end, those who couldn’t get in, who felt they were missing out, decided to exact revenge. Some very important people or their sons could not get in. You think you have power? they said. We’ll show you power.
I think the powers that be were definitely alerted to the place by those who were rejected, either because they couldn’t get in or because they were sacked by the club for some misdemeanor or another. There was no way such a place dedicated to the most extreme form of pleasure could continue to exist without upsetting those on the outside. It was such an unreal place, and eventually it clashed with reality.
After the peak, the heyday of 54, which marked the end of the underground and the beginning of what decades later, deformed by democratization, became structured reality TV, Big Brother, The Bachelor, and the party island of Ibiza, you would come out of a club and it would be surrounded by cops and paparazzi, all of them looking—hoping—for problems. A problem is a story. That’s their currency. People have fun, and their pleasure causes a problem for those in charge, for those without access. So they seek out problems, ways to slow down the pace and subdue the provocateurs.
They started to target the clubs, through drugs, and taxes, and slimy tabloid outrage, because they wanted New York to be like it is now. Cleaned up, in their eyes. Under control. Much of the energy of the pop-culture celebrity music world as it is now evolved during those few years inside a very small area of Manhattan, but just as the pleasure-seeking wildness of Studio 54 was gutted, the energy that exploded out of the counterculture, and a belief in progressive change, has been domesticated.
It was the essence of dramatic transformation for performer and watcher. Fantasy made real. Really, it was a kind of showcase for the idea of disco—you’d go and do drugs, drink, mix with the famous, be the famous, and there would be people dancing, but in a much more planned way than in the clubs where disco was born, and in spots like the Mudd Club, Danceteria, and later the Saint, where the more curious music lovers would go.
Those clubs were the music connoisseur’s revenge after the excess of 54—more creative places where new hybrids of sound became new genres. Max’s was erased as a central place to hang out once the disco scene emerged, at least for the discriminating followers of fashion, or those more interested in the instant hit of a great night out. Punk and then new wave, disco, early electro—they were all in different rooms and places back then; the dots weren’t yet joined up, the tunnels between rooms and scenes not yet dug.
The dancers at 54 were increasingly hired to do the dancing, for free drinks and whatever, rather than the club being a place where people danced for real. Naked musclemen painted silver on horses covered with glitter seagulls dusted with white powder became more important than mere music. Studio 54 was an illusion, really, a very smart setup, the disco night out exaggerated into this absurd sensationalism—it was where the reality of disco was treated and distorted in the way Andy and company treated fame, art, shopping, and media. Disco as disco was destined to have fifteen minutes, which seemed to go by a lot quicker because the cocaine there was always the best; the vodka and quaaludes were the icing on the coke, and then next there was the hangover: You’d be in a really bad mood, flagging from your sins, and sometimes you’d feel like death.
I invited Nile Rodgers of Chic there for New Year’s Eve in 1977. The original 54 was only open for about three years, so there were actually only two New Year’s Eve parties held there. This was the first one. He came along with Bernard Edwards, Chic’s guitar player. I wanted them to produce my next album—as always, I wanted to work with the best. It was very cold, and snowing; they were both dressed up in their most expensive dress suits, proud disco princes with their finger on the pleasure pulse heading into the center of the disco universe. What could possibly go wrong?
They hadn’t yet totally broken into the mainstream, but they were already very popular. Their names weren’t on the guest list. Apparently that was my fault. I’m certain I put their names on the list, but I think at that point it was so full they weren’t letting anyone else in, not even around the back, where the celebrities got in. Whoever you were, even the ghost of Elvis, you wouldn’t have been let in. Standing in the freezing cold, they said that I had invited them, but still the doorman wouldn’t let them in. He told them to fuck off. That “fuck off” rang in their ears. Their music would be playing inside but they couldn’t get in.
They went home, fancy dancing shoes ruined by the snow. They were so angry that inside half an hour they had jammed up a new song on guitar and bass about their experience, with this groove that was as hot as it was cold outside, which they called “Fuck Off” in honor of the doorman who had barred their entry.
The chorus went, “Aaaah, fuck off.” It sounded like a hit song but obviously needed a different chorus, so they changed it to, “Aaaah, freak out.” They called the song “Le Freak,” which was about a brilliant new dance craze that they couldn’t even see because they couldn’t get into the club, and it was number one in America for weeks. A year later it was the first track on a Studio 54 compilation album that Casablanca released, and it became the biggest-selling Atlantic Records single of all time. Without the “fuck off,” without me forgetting to put their names on the guest list, there would never have been “Le Freak.”
Norma Kamali designed my costume for the performance Nile and Bernard never got to see. She was going out with Ian Schrager at the time, and he asked her to make something for me. There was always this fascination with what on earth people were going to wear next; eventually what Bianca Jagger or Liza Minnelli was going to wear next became more important than what song was going to be played next. Norma had learned a lot from visits to London in the 1960s and was known for turning ordinary clothes into something else completely—taking fleece sweatshirts and turning them into flamboyant dresses. She had designed that red bathing suit Farrah Fawcett wore in what became a very famous poster.
Norma had me wear a very revealing and clingy, shiny gold unitard over a sticky, shimmering bodysuit. It wasn’t my usual stark but vivacious Miyake look, the fantastic turned into costume, but I went along with it. She wouldn’t have been my choice, but she was with Ian, and Studio 54 was the capital of disco, so it made sense. It wasn’t a Disney princess look, but a glitter-coated Studio 54 superhero princess look, all sparkle and feathers, from shaved head to silvery knee-high boots. Later, for my birthday party in 1978, I dressed up as Nefertiti, Egypt’s most beautiful royal queen. (Picasso had described Josephine Baker as “the Nefertiti of now.”) I rode onstage on a Harley motorcycle with Divine and various naked musclemen as part of my entourage. This was a frenzied fantasy world I felt very at home in.
I met Marianne Faithfull that New Year’s Eve. She once said she never hung out at Studio 54, that she didn’t have the clothes or the desire. She was definitely there, though, unless I’m making it up. Maybe it was the only time she went. I remember it well, because that was the moment she introduced me to Cocoa Puffs: marijuana cigarettes laced with cocaine. I would call them Mariannes, because she was the first person I smoked them with.
I was in my dressing room, which was actually an office, with drab filing cabinets and a little, stained toilet next to it, nothing painted. They hadn’t worked that part out. They’d worked out the music and the lights and the mix of people, but backstage was very basic, like a soiled hospital waiting room.
There was something going on with the payment of my fee. I didn’t want to go on until I had been paid. First rule: cash, then I will do the show. No cash, no show. Sy and Eileen weren’t allowed upstairs. They were banned from coming up to tell me there was no money. It was a chaotic night in all sorts of ways. There was a snowstorm, and people were pissed off that they couldn’t get in, but . . . once we got the cash, it was a success, as far as the show-business illusion went! Then it was back to earth. It ended pretty badly in the real world.
I got all the shit. I felt used—they hadn’t let my friends in; my managers were trying to reach me to say they hadn’t been paid all the money; I never got to meet Nile and record with him at the exact moment Chic were hitting their stride—in fact, I didn’t work with him for nearly ten years. But then, he did get a big hit song out of it.
I was still living mostly in Paris, regularly going back and forth. The Concorde made life a lot easier, and I was the symbol of a Concorde crowd that had replaced the jet set. I flew on the Concorde so many times I knew the pilots. I knew their families. I could have flown the plane, except I would have wanted to do it naked, sprayed silver, in roller skates. I could split my time between Paris and New York without much trouble. The five-hour time difference gave me the chance to do a lot more in a day. It was like there were two of me spinning between cities.
Fabrice, the French king of the night, had come over to New York and seen what was going on at Studio 54, witnessed a world being created by the new, powerful, competitive young, obsessed by celebrity, experiencing reality through the mutating fantasy of fashion. He opened a new club in Paris, Le Palace, which was bigger, had more space for performance. He might have learned a little from what he saw at Studio 54, but really, it was in the spirit of his own Club Sept. Club Sept had been a tiny, more stylish anticipation of the fame-drenched, debauched grandness of Studio 54. He didn’t need to be told how to achieve the celebratory alchemy of Studio 54—he merely needed a bigger venue.
Fabrice removed the seats from an old music hall and installed a monstrous, spaceship-size strobe lighting rig that would swirl above the dancers and descend so low it was almost among them. I performed on the opening night of Le Palace. They were very late finishing the place; they were still banging, sawing, and hammering with hours to go before the opening. The place was absolutely packed, as if all of Paris had squeezed inside. It could hold thousands of people, but that still wasn’t enough. It was quite an occasion. The coke laid on was tinted pink.
I wore the costume I had worn at the New Year’s Eve party at Studio 54, not the complete works, only the body stocking, so I looked nude. It was so crowded that when I went onstage, the whole crowd was moving, but in different directions from row to row. It was like watching a field of corn being swirled around in a strong wind. They were hammered; they had taken whatever they could get their hands on.
I liked to break free of the stage sometimes, if I felt claustrophobic. There was a ladder I used to climb on, up to the boxes at the side of the stalls, so that I was a few feet above the audience. I loved to clamber about and didn’t think there would be a problem climbing over them on the ladder. I didn’t think about bodyguards or anything.
As soon as I got on the ladder, someone sprayed Mace into my eyes, and as I crawled up the ladder, my unitard was torn off me. It was mayhem. I had no clothes on, I couldn’t see anything, and I was supposed to sing “La Vie en Rose” as the last song. It was a song that belonged to Paris, and now it belonged to disco. To some extent I had been adopted by the Parisians, and it was a sign of Paris making it in the new New York, the one where Studio 54 was like a new nation, with Andy Warhol the minister of propaganda and Bill Cunningham like a shadow minister. No one was going to leave before they heard that! They were in such a state they would have burned the house down if they didn’t hear me sing it.
I stood next to the stage totally naked, eyes stinging, and watching from the side was Yves Saint Laurent, the center of the fashion universe, give or take his rival Lagerfeld, with his muse, Loulou de la Falaise, a very original dresser, a regular at Club Sept. Some say he might have been her muse, that she was the designing brains behind Yves Saint Laurent.
He had launched his Opium perfume the year before with an ad campaign featuring Jerry Hall in purple harem pants photographed by Helmut Newton; Opium seems quaint now, and smells pink-powdery, but it was pretty avant-garde and provocatively erotic at the time, like Yves was not only celebrating drug use but selling drugs, taking abandonment out of the writhing dark rooms of an elite club into the everyday department stores. It smelled like it should really have been called Cocaine, or Cum, which is what it smelled like when it smelled like the 1970s of Thin White Duke David Bowie and “I Feel Love,” or the warm musky breath of lovers in a blissful postcoital sleep with a fragrant hint of the pissoir and the dark, heavy smoke of a Gauloise.
I was an absolute shivering wretch, sticky with fury, not sure what to do next. The audience were beyond mad with frustrated energy. They were screaming for me to come back. Yves calmly took off his cummerbund and wrapped it around my bare breasts. Lou was wearing this gypsy scarf full of tassels, very typical of the flowing, colorful things she liked to wear, and he took that from her and bound it around my waist. Voilà. He gave me a very gentle shove, and there I was back on the stage, styled by Yves Saint Laurent, singing “La Vie en Rose” to an audience who didn’t want anything else to happen at that moment but complete and utter make-believe. I was dressed in make-believe, and sang a song about casting a magic spell, about being in a world apart. Later, Yves gave me a little drawing of me in the outfit he had spontaneously created.
In their own way, Sy and Eileen were smart and shrewd. Music wasn’t their area, but they had enough energy and commitment to get things going. For a while, we were each as energetic and committed as the other, but they couldn’t see beyond disco, whereas even when I was known as the queen of disco, my restlessness kicked in, and I would wonder: What will I be next?
In a way, I outgrew them, or at least, I wanted to go in a very different direction from the one they had in mind for me. I had a battle with them, because I thought more radically, and they were safe to the point of cozy. They kept saying, “No, you need the long, satin gown—it will be perfect for you.” I wanted to run naked onstage! I’m a nudist! You’ve got to be kidding me, darling. I wanted more skin than clothes. I wasn’t sure exactly what direction I wanted to go in, because the more exciting things were in a constant state of flux, not yet named. Creative people were investigating further what could be done by playing a certain sequence of records in a club, how to make them fit together, and deliver new kinds of sensation.
I was still excited by the DJs in the smaller clubs who were breaking away from disco and generating other forms of dance music, because disco was becoming such a corporate monster. The ones who had helped invent disco were rebelling against disco, as much as any punks or rock ’n’ rollers.
Imagine that the club music of New York didn’t get labeled disco, and carried on as these DJs experimented with embellishing the ritual of playing records and creating and breaking communal tension. That was what interested me. I definitely had one foot in the 54 world, but not really for the music—more for the theater of the place, the combination of people craving spontaneous excitement. Musically, I was going with the flow along with the DJs who were resisting disco as a trend, as a headline, a dead end.
My shows were getting attention; “Trouble” was my second dance hit, and I was refining my stage show so that it was more than exciting and a long way from what Gloria or Donna or Sister Sledge would be doing. I was determined not to perform like other singers. This was one of the reasons I originally didn’t want to go into the music business. There seemed to be a lot of bad taste in the way the female singers were expected to perform. It seemed fabricated. It was not connected to the fast-forward vitality of fashion. I don’t know why. Singers seemed as removed from what was happening in fashion as sports stars. There was no coordination between the two worlds, no individuality—certainly not in America. It was either bad taste in fashion, a tackiness in how pop singers looked, or a looking down on the fashion world, as though it was not important, and never could be. Moving between the two worlds meant that I could see how progressive Issey and Kenzo were, and how that could make dramatic music presentation something surprising and new.
I wanted to combine what was happening in new fashion with new music. I thought that was what it was meant to be about, to make the music presentation seem more magical. It was more apparent in Britain—Twiggy did actually look like a pop star, and treated modeling as a type of performance. But America didn’t have that; they were always behind the Brits when it came to trends and looks. A female entertainer was expected to look very square and wear blandly glittery clothes that could have come from the 1950s, or to not care at all, and be very punk. I thought more like a punk than a disco queen, but I didn’t want to dress like a punk. Ultimately, I didn’t want to walk in anyone’s shadow.
Sy and Eileen created the momentum for what happened next by signing their Beam Junction label to a licensing deal with Island Records. Island was owned and run by Chris Blackwell, and he had made it one of the great independent labels. He was raised in Jamaica, and his mother, Blanche, descended from Portuguese Sephardic Jews, dates 1765 as their arrival on the island, where they began working as merchants. He came from colonial aristocracy, but he always felt that the British “had fucked up everything.”
Jamaica is why Chris’s label, formed in 1959, was called Island, and he had his first international hit in 1963 with a tremendous Jamaican record, “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie Small. It still has enough cockeyed modern—and very female—energy to sound great today. The guitarist and arranger was Ernest Ranglin, who had played on the first album Island released in 1959, Lance Haywood at the Half Moon Hotel, Montego Bay. (Chris taught water-skiing at the hotel.) It was an album of jazz played by the blind Lance Haywood from Bermuda, and one of only two Island releases recorded, at the Federal Record Studios in Kingston, and released only in Jamaica.
In the early ’70s, Chris had worked hard in tricky circumstances to help Bob Marley and the Wailers take reggae, catchy but political and abrasive, to soft-rock ears, off the island, and establish it globally. He’d had huge success with Cat Stevens, Free, and Traffic. (It’s interesting to note that perhaps his three biggest signings, Cat, U2, and Bob Marley, all had a very religious dynamic, and there’s a tempestuous religious dimension hidden, or right out there, in much of my music.) I knew very little about him, and for a while, as I had the disco hits and made my first three albums, I never got to meet him. He was somewhere in the background, which is where he likes to be, making an impact by moving things around from afar.
I came from the fashion world, and Chris was not involved in that. He knew nothing about it and didn’t really care. Beam Junction was simply one label among many that Island distributed, and he had no direct contact with it. He wasn’t a disco kind of guy, and when it came to yet another actress/model who wanted to break into the music business, he said he would have had his fashion blinkers on.
People around him at the label were saying, She’s Jamaican, she’s different, you have to meet her! He’d seen a photograph of me in New York magazine accompanying an article about me by Nik Cohn, the writer of the story that became the film Saturday Night Fever, and he loved the look of it. The photograph was actually the first thing that I did with Jean-Paul Goude. Nik had seen me do my three songs at a small club, freaked out at the sweat, flesh, and fearlessness, and he gave an amazing description of what I did. It was my first appearance in a serious magazine, profiled by one of the greatest ever writers about pop music.
He was friendly with Jean-Paul and asked him to do the illustration for the article. That was where the photo of me naked and shining with one leg in the air came from—Jean-Paul wanting to reflect in his way what it was I was doing, and what Nik had seen: this brutal, animalistic energy that was part disco, part theater of cruelty, two lucid ways of representing an appetite for life. It was a visual description of an impossible original beast, only possibly from this planet, a voracious she-centaur emerging from an unknown abyss and confronting people’s fears. Perhaps in this image you can see Jean-Paul falling for me, and turning it into a visual love letter.
I thought it was beautiful and, of course, I would eventually realize that as much as it was about me, it was also about Jean-Paul. He had trained as a ballet dancer, and it’s a ballet stance in a challenging, Africanesque way, so he tangled us both up, edited between us, collaged our desires and dreams together. There was an erotic mingling of the two of us, one life penetrating the other. From this very first image, this was going on. No building up to it. Suddenly, there it was. A blueprint for our relationship. Something impossible made possible.
I was thrilled. It looked right to me and how I felt: athletic, artistic, and alien. It obscured and revealed my origins. It was like no other image I had ever seen. Often with photographers and the way you are styled, you could really be anybody. This image could only be me. It was a long, long way from where Sy and Eileen saw me; this was Vegas on acid. This was show business and performance as a super trip. It also represented me outside time, outside my age. It didn’t tie me to a period, the ’70s, or the ’60s, or a vision of the ’80s. It belonged in all those decades, because it was telling my story—where I had come from, where I was then, and where I was going, in one image at the same time. I loved that, because that was how I thought about age and time. I didn’t want you to look at me and think of an age, whether I was young or old for my age. I wanted you to simply see energy.
I saw in it the shedding of skin, flimsy disco sheen being ripped back to reveal something poised on the verge of striking, like a snake, with the upper-body strength of a galley slave. It was the opening up of a brand-new me, totally secure in my darkness, which was merely an abstract shade, not political, and it was me almost with my savage insides on show. It was hard to work out what I was thinking, but I was obviously thinking something.
I didn’t like wearing clothes in the house; I liked to walk around naked. Jean-Paul had gotten that. This was where I was the most comfortable. I didn’t need to wrap myself up. All of me on show, and that all of me on show then boosted to the max. It wasn’t nudity to shock, or titillate, or sell something—or maybe obliquely all that; it was nudity as something natural but placed inside a danger zone.
Jean-Paul’s photo-elaboration of me put me inside my very own fantasy, connected to Jamaica, and New York, and Paris, and performance, and worship, and hallucination, but ultimately in a world of my own. The picture became like the ground zero of how every solo female singer since wants to be when she tries to be a little edgy, potentially a bundle of headline-making trouble. Once Jean-Paul had created that image, it became more and more apparent that the music I made should reflect it, be the soundtrack to that suggestive, analytical perversion of me.
When I realized what Jean-Paul wanted to do—strip me back to take me forward, bend me out of shape—I said to Nik and Jean-Paul, “I am not going to show this to my managers, but please go ahead and do it. Just don’t tell them, whatever you do.” I had to perform all sorts of maneuvers to get that butt-naked picture published. There was no way I wanted the sweet, trusting Berlins to know, or they would have asked for it to be scrapped. That was not their image of me.
For me, it was a real sighting of how I saw myself: unreal, untamed, utterly dramatic. I managed to get it into the magazine without them knowing what it was going to look like—I was used to keeping things from my parents, and this was the same thing. I had to make sure they didn’t know that I was up to something fabulously naughty.
The article was very powerful and unforgiving—Nik lovingly talked about me farting and drinking from the bottle, and I was thinking, Yes, yes, yes, I don’t want to be anyone’s example, this is who I am. I do not want to be the girl you feel safe taking home to meet your mother. Anything but Sy and Eileen’s Virgin at Vegas in a nice pretty dress! How boring is that. I would rather sing in church with my mother than go down that road.
Nik described me as the ultimate beast—a troublemaker out to disrupt harmony. He tore down all the soft, shiny glamour they were trying to drape around me. He ripped it apart and portrayed me as this hungry, horny, mannish animal, warts and all. Thoughts and all. I loved it. This to me was glamour—not the maintenance of ordinary glamour, but something that was unknown, even occult, examining the idea of glamour based on its original meaning. Witchcraft.
When the magazine came out and Sy and Eileen saw it they were totally furious. I suppose I knew the picture, and the article that went with it, would really shock them. It was my way of taking control, which some would say was not nice, considering all they had done for me. “It is so disgusting,” they said. “You broke wind, you drank wine from the bottle, how could you!” They felt they had treated me like family. I had stayed at their place. They had advanced me rent. Their son had a crush on me, and we might even have gotten up to something if they didn’t think of me so much as a daughter. They were lovely to me, and they worked hard on my behalf.
The problem was I was not a Vegas act. I remember seeing Diahann Carroll and Diana Ross in the old lady wigs and high heels doing Vegas, and it’s really hard—no one listens, you might as well have a robot onstage. No one pays attention, and I need the attention.
We fought. We really fought. I got so frustrated being pushed in their direction. I was drinking a milk shake at some rehearsal and I was getting so angry with their cabaret vision that I poured it all over Sy’s head. It was so childish, but I was like a child. I wanted things to be the way I wanted them to be. I felt I was being forced, and then I ended up sneaking behind their backs.
It was the start of the parting of the ways between me and the Berlins. We were fighting so much. I loved them and we had a great relationship, but I could see the divorce coming. They were not going to be flexible. And I needed to be with people who understood where I wanted to be. I always need to be excited with what it is I am doing. As soon as I am not excited, I pull back, I give up. I will even sabotage it! To this day, if there is something I do not want to do and it is not exciting me, I will not do it.
Chris didn’t know me from the modeling, or from the Studio 54 world, and in fact, those things didn’t interest him. Chris was not someone you necessarily got to meet even if you were signed to his label. I think in the end, he thought, Well, she is from Jamaica, and she’s making some noise; maybe I should check her out. He loved the picture in New York magazine because, he said, I didn’t look like just another model, I looked like a creature. Sy and Eileen were happy to sell their contract with me to Island. Chris had called them Ma and Pa Kettle, and they were very different from the kind of rock managers and industry manipulators Island usually worked with. The Berlins recovered their investment and then some. And the sale meant that Chris and I could start working together.
Chris and I finally met at the opulent Russian Tea Room in New York on Fifty-Seventh Street. You pay the rent as soon as you walk in there. I don’t remember much about the meeting. I was living at the Wellington Hotel around the corner, and he had his offices inside the nearby Carnegie Hall alongside the dancers’ rehearsal rooms.
I don’t remember what we talked about. I only know that I don’t talk about what I don’t know, and I don’t ask questions, and Chris doesn’t give a lot away. I suppose we talked about Jamaica, and living in Paris, and what I wanted to do next. The Russian Tea Room is very loud, so I guess we carefully circled each other.
I remember that he never seemed to wear shoes—he’s in sandals all year round even when it is cold. But despite wearing little but shapeless T-shirts and faded shorts, he is one of the most truly glamorous people I have ever known. You can tell he used to hang out with Noël Coward and Errol Flynn when he was young in Jamaica—the most glamorous thing he said he ever saw was Flynn dressed for cocktails, clutching a long, slender cigarette holder and carrying a groomed dachshund under his arm—and he spent a few months hanging out with the notoriously intimidating Miles Davis in New York. They would swim together at a health club near Central Park. Because of his experiences in Jamaica, Chris was completely comfortable in the company of blacks, but for Miles it was something very unusual coming across a young white boy so at ease with him.
Chris and I got along really great, and he seemed impressed that I knew what I wanted to do with my music and image. I think he could tell that, like him, I was absolutely committed to being in control of my own destiny. Such ambition and determination surprised him, coming from someone he thought was going to be a pushy, superficial Jamaican model.
I was definitely determined. If I still lacked focus, I didn’t lack self-belief. I didn’t want to be babysat. I wanted to be in control, and I certainly didn’t agree with Sy and Eileen’s vision of me in Vegas, a kind of cut-price Diana Ross. I need that to be clear, right away. I was definitely a reigning disco queen, one of the glitter-ball dynasty alongside the likes of Sylvester and Donna Summer, but I wanted to progress, not get stuck being part of something that was becoming a laughingstock. I knew that Chris could help me change. He likes to build things, make things happen, put people together who he thinks will fit and see what unfolds. He stays in the background, watching how things play out.
I was very demure that day. I made sure it wasn’t one of my crazy days. I didn’t want Chris to think that the rumors he might have heard of my wildness were anything more than show-business hype. I wanted him to see the determined, professional side, and not the unruly disco barbarian.
I know that I was the wildest party animal ever. I pushed myself to the limit and started from there. I had no limits. If you asked me to do something, I would do it. Dare me. There was nothing I wouldn’t try. “Whatever it takes” was my catchphrase. Experiencing life itself was the point: to propel myself out of my comfort zone, to feel alive, to take revenge on reality. I was the ultimate specialist in pursuing insatiable appetites and shameless lusts, even at the risk of disaster.
I was always in control, though. I might have lost control a couple of times, but if I had been totally out of control I would have died. I wasn’t going to do anything that threatened my life, even though I came close. I didn’t want to die, but if you take risks, you can come close. I took risks, I had no fear, I drove as fast as I could, but not because I was being self-destructive. In a way, it was the opposite. Speeding to the limit was a form of self-preservation.
I was all over the place, taking naughtiness to a whole new level, in the press, on TV, in jail, at the most explosive parties, with friends, lovers, and fellow fantasists who ended up dying all around me. But still, built into me was this button—when pressed, the button would save me. I don’t know if I was in charge of this button, or if someone somewhere praying for me was in charge of it. I would abandon myself, like when I took the super pill. I would return, though, I would recover. Others stayed out there, in a lovely but remote place. Because of the church thing there were a lot of prayers keeping me alive, however underground I went, however far out I went.
I was split between Beverly of Church Jamaica and Grace of Club America. Getting rid of Bev was the most important thing. I landed in America as Bev, and then set about becoming Grace. With a vengeance. But Bev has not totally gone, even now. That’s why I still say that prayers protected me. There is still Bev the believer, and there always was, whatever I got up to, however much I chased experience, however much I lavished myself with pleasure and adventure. In the middle of this, Beverly still believed that whatever I did, I would be saved. Grace relied on Bev to protect her from destruction. It was sex, drugs, and the Holy Ghost.
I received the Holy Ghost when I was baptized at eight as Beverly, and it penetrated so deep into my being it never disappeared. I don’t know if that was discipline or faith, but subconsciously I thought, Whatever happens to me, whatever I do, I will be safe. I was desperate to escape the church, to escape the punishment, this most uncomfortable of upbringings, but even as I fled, there were still inside me the remains of faith. They’re still there. I know where I am going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace.
Faith, however perverted, was hammered into me with such force that nothing could eradicate it, not even being the sybaritic Grace Jones bare-skinned in Studio 54 lathered in foam and coke, tongued and flailed by drag queens, total strangers and horny hedonists, entertaining the creeps, weirdos, strays, and lionized, living the un-American dream. Deep down, Bev believed. And either because Bev believed or because the church and my family believed in Bev, no harm came to me. Nothing could stop me. There was always something happening next. There was always love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, bliss, money, success, identity, art, parties, common things, and gossip.