What does a 76-year-old know about clubbing? If it’s Ian Schrager, then quite a lot, actually. He talks about his new ‘micro club’, the wild old days — and his stint in jail.
For someone who has made a profession from being a creature of the night, Ian Schrager is surprisingly punctilious. “I’m so sorry I’m late!” he says in his gravelly Noo Yawk drawl as he pops up on Zoom. He has a very good reason for being a mere six minutes behind schedule, though, as his new club opened last night. Schrager arrived at 10pm, “which is when I used to go to work at Studio, but is when I usually go to sleep these days. Then I didn’t get home until 3am. The nightclub business consumes people — not that many people survive it because you live your life in reverse.”
This is no ordinary club — it is something Schrager has called a “micro club”, on the rooftop of the Public hotel (also owned by him) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, with jaw-dropping views over the city. As the name — MicroClub on the Roof — suggests, it’s much smaller than most clubs. “At Studio we might have had 4000 people, but this fits a few hundred,” Schrager says. “It’s smaller and more intimate, but it’s still packed, it’s still electric. It was mayhem last night.”
It is also an “immersive experience” — Schrager has pulled in the creative producer Polina Zakh (who has worked on productions for Drake and Cardi B) and lighting by Paul Marantz (who also did the spectacular lights at Studio 54). For the lighting, “I was very much inspired by the Apple commercial with Harry Styles,” Schrager says (hyper-cultural, he plucks his visual references from myriad places). Crucially, there are no phones. “People say with cellphones and cameras you can’t achieve the same sense of abandonment that we achieved at Studio 54. So don’t allow cellphones in! It’s about hanging loose because that is what night-time fun is all about. Then you go back to your life the next day. It’s the same goal [as Studio 54]. I don’t think that’s changed since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Even at 76, what Schrager says is hip is still on the money. After all, this is the man who not only cofounded the legendarily louche discotheque Studio 54, but who then went on to invent the boutique hotel as well as “lobby socialising” (ie making a hotel the sceniest place in town). Having originally trained as a lawyer, the Brooklyn-born Schrager was just 30 when he opened Studio 54 with his college friend Steve Rubell. This was in 1977 at the height of disco fever, and despite neither of them knowing that much about the nightclub business — “someone with $25,000 could set up a nightclub, it’s not like that any more” — it was a hit from the start. “The first night it was so crowded we were worried they’d break the doors down,” he recalls. “One of the papers had commented that it would never work. At around 5 or 6am I got home, then I got a phone call from Steve. We were on the front page of the New York Post with a picture of Cher. To get on the front page of a daily newspaper here in New York City was just . . . we had arrived!”
The club was housed in a former theatre, and artists were brought in to create dramatic backdrops for a famously debauched crowd. As well as tales of drug-taking — not exactly discouraged by the huge moon and cocaine spoon sculpture that hung over the dancefloor — casual sex was rife in the balconies and in the basements, where mattresses were laid down. The crowd was also unusually diverse for the time, with all races and sexual inclinations welcomed. And then there were the A-listers — this was the beginning of the age of the mega-celebrity, and Studio 54 attracted everyone: David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Liza Minnelli, Mick Jagger, Bianca Jagger on her white horse. To give you an idea of its out-and-out fabulousness, a typical night might have seen the Rockettes performing for Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday (she watched from a float covered in gardenias), before the actress was given a huge cake in an image of herself.
Schrager and Rubell complemented each other perfectly. Schrager was the business brains, often leaving the club early — he famously never danced there (“I don’t ski very much but I know a good skier when I see one … I’m the right person to run a nightclub, even though I won’t dance at them,” he says now). Rubell, on the other hand, was much more extrovert, a friend to the great and the good and, crucially, in charge of the club’s famous velvet rope (he once boasted he’d turned away more than a thousand people in one night). “Our admissions policy had nothing to do with social standing, with wealth,” Schrager says. “Instead it was all about attracting the right crowd.” For him, a good night is all about the crowd. “You want to have great people, young and old, people who are connected with each other through their sensibilities, people who are in the know.” So does he think he would have got into Studio 54? “No!”
Despite its strict door policy, people would fly from all over the world hoping to get in. “Making other people happy was our business,” Schrager says. “Not the pursuit of money, it was the pursuit of excellence. It still is. And blowing people away with what you are doing.”
However, the pursuit of money was Studio 54′s downfall. After Rubell told a magazine that “only the mafia made more money”, the club was raided. In 1980 the pair were sent to prison, where they spent 13 months, for tax evasion. “The biggest thing that changed for me with jail was I thought the rules didn’t apply to us, that we were special. Now I think the rules apply to us. But I’m still so embarrassed [I went to jail]. That’s the intoxication that comes with success.”
During their time in prison Schrager and Rubell came up with the idea of the boutique hotel as a more stylish and in-the-know version of the bog-standard luxury hotel. Their first, Morgans, designed by the superstar French designer Andrée Putman, opened in 1984, followed by others in America. They were swimming in success again, making Schrager and Rubell their millions once more — the two even bought a house together in the Hamptons. But it all came to a juddering halt in 1989 when Rubell died of Aids. He was 45.
“I still think about him all the time,” says Schrager, looking sad. “Steve was my sounding board. He was like my instant survey, and I for him. So without him, well, I’m on my own. You like to be able to look at someone and say, what do you think about this? I don’t have that. We were great, great friends. When you’re lucky enough to have great success, it means you can share it with someone. I’ll never have another friend like that.”
Schrager carried on in the hotel business, selling a host of his early Noughties Philippe Starck-designed hits (such as the Sanderson and St Martins Lane, both in London and both A-list magnets) in 2005, then going on to partner with the Marriott group to open various Edition hotels around the world (many with destination nightclubs attached). He is now concentrating on his Public hotel — the concept here is to make luxury accessible to all (and successfully, if the glowing online reviews are anything to go by) —and plans to open more in the future. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential people in hospitality today — if not the most influential.
You sense none of this has been quite as fun without Rubell around, but at least Schrager seems blissfully happy with his second wife, Tania, a former ballet dancer, and their son, Louis, who is 12. He also has two daughters from his previous marriage. Bringing up his time in prison with them has proved tricky, though. His son doesn’t know. “The kid’s too young. It’s very hard to be a role model when you’ve been in jail.” His grown-up daughters now know but he hid it from them for years. “Someone was once talking about me going to jail,” he recalls, “and one of my daughters said, ‘Jail?’ And I said, ‘No, Yale!’ "
He still lives in New York and loves city life. “Will I live here until the day I die?” he muses. “Yes, I think so because there’s a kind of energy and diversity. Different ages, different races — that brings about energy. That’s when it becomes interesting.” And, of course, it goes without saying that he never plans to retire. “Because I love what I do. If you love what you do, why would you retire? Working is a means of expressing yourself. Right now I love my wife, I love my family and I love to work.”
Schrager’s professional life has been all about going on hunches, predicting the way social trends are blowing. “It’s very instinctive,” he says. “I think I am outside the box. And everybody else — well, mostly everybody else — is inside the box. Creative people outside the box then do something that resonates with people inside the box. It’s connecting the dots, as Steve Jobs always used to say. Connecting the dots with what is going on.”
So what’s his next hunch? “Austin, Texas, Portland, Charleston in South Carolina … and Mexico City. In my mind it has never achieved the level of London and Paris but it should.” What makes a city so special? “The architecture, the fashion, the art,” he replies. Taste, in other words — something Ian Schrager still has in spades.
Written by: Charlotte Williamson
© The Times of London