Happy Mondays
Leading life and happiness coach
AND so to the New York club Studio 54...in the 1970s I used to read a cool magazine called Nova. It was different – sassy, saucy something more real than Honey or 19, which were our go-to tomes of the times. I looked forward to this monthly shot of style and attitude with pictures from across the Pond, which was about as accessible as Xanadu back then.
Most of all I loved poring over the society pages – shots and scenes from Studio 54 that to a crazy mixed up mid-teens girl represented the epitome of wildness and style. I was like a little match girl, nose-pressed against a window on to a world of sensual delight.
A world of spandex, sequins and roller blades. Exotic dancers, artists and the literati. Andy Warhol. Paloma Picasso, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. Wild women and fabulous nobodies who had made it past the style police at the door and on the dance floor.
This was a world so far removed from the dismalness of the Middlesex suburbia I was living in, where life felt like a month of rain-sodden Sundays, where dreams curled up and died along with the faded net curtains.
I studied these pictures with a combination of wonderment, envy and a tickle of fear. How could I get a passport to the land of lotus eaters? Years later as the Universe would have it I got my Studio 54 fix via an afternoon spent, as a rookie reporter, interviewing the sublime Paloma Picasso, who was warm and generous about my curiosity as I asked about those heady hedonistic days. Recently I was again whisked to Studio 54 with my friend Valerie as co-owner and creator Ian Schrager was at the V&A reliving the legend. A bit deaf (club ears!), a slight paunch (hey, not one of us getting any younger) and with a Brooklyn accent; he cut a less than extraordinary figure.
He recalled what really happened on the night Bianca Jagger (pictured) rode a white stallion across the dance floor, his prison sentence (the taxman caught up with them) and his subsequent pardon by Barack Obama and how a strange “alchemy” had brought together this palace of wanton fun.
What a gift. A distinguished white-haired lady wearing Chanel sitting on the aisle in front of me rubbed her arthritic leg throughout the talk. As she rose and picked up her walking stick to go I inquired “did you ever go there?” and she smiled and nodded a sage “Oh yes”.
What some only dreamed about, she lived. Maybe even that sore knee was a proud trophy of nights well spent on that dance floor of lights and magical ever-afters.