The Last Party - by Anthony Haden-Guest (Paperback)

About the Book

Packed with stars, models, socialites, and everyone else who could sneak past the fabled velvet ropes, Studio 54 defined disco and launched the celebrity-driven culture of today. Noted writer Haden-Guest takes readers behind the scenes and tells the whole story--the glory days, the drugs, the deaths, and the corruption. 32-pp photo insert.

Book Synopsis

Packed with stars, models, socialites, and everyone else who could sneak past the fabled velvet ropes, Studio 54 defined disco and launched the celebrity-driven culture of today. Noted writer Haden-Guest takes readers behind the scenes and tells the whole story -- the glory days, the drugs, the deaths, and the corruption.There was a place where virtually all the themes and energies of the '70s -- disco, the cult of celebrity, the coke and the quaaludes, the glam and the glitter, the pre-AIDS sexual abandon, the emergence of gay culture, uninhibited women, and the general air of debauchery -- were played out with maximum flamboyance.

It was a place that epitomized an era and exemplified the zeitgeist. No one is better suited to chronicle the Studio 54 story than Anthony Haden-Guest. He has re-created the scene and rendered the action in vivid detail from his personal experiences with the key players: the owners, bartenders, and bouncers; the celebrities and the dealers; the divas, DJs and doormen; even the prosecutor who busted the owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager for tax evasion. "The Last Party" is more than a biography of one place. It also tells the story of Nightworld, a realm spawned by Studio 54, comprising past and present clubs. Nightlords, and Nightpeople, their doings and their secrets, which are still unfolding.

From the Back Cover

Studio 54 was the icon of excess--a place where Andy, Mick, Bianca, and Elton lounged in the VIP section while patrons did drugs in the fabled unisex bathroom, and wannabes waiting for hours outside hoped to catch the eye of the nineteen-year-old doorman who was, for a brief moment, the ultimate gatekeeper of cool.

The Last Party is the story not just of Studio 54 but of the whole Nightworld, vividly recalled by a writer and reveler who was there on opening night and on many, many nights thereafter. Anthony Haden-Guest takes us past the velvet rope, down onto the pounding dance floor, up into the polymorphously perverse balcony, and into owner Steve Rubell's office, where millions of dollars were surreptitiously skimmed from the golden goose. Vibrant, shocking, nonstop, and revealing, The Last Party is as packed with sparkle, scandal, and celebrity as Studio 54 itself.

Review Quotes

"Who better to take us behind the velvet rope of that '70s mecca of disco and substance abuse? . . . Haden-Guest's notorious excesses might seem unseemly or pointless if he weren't able to collate them into such perceptive pop chronicles. The Last Party is an assiduous mix of memoir and reportage" - Newsweek

"A fascinating account of Studio 54's hedonistic glory." - New York Observer

"Elegant . . . a vivid portrait of '70s nightlife" - Wall Street Journal