You Had to Get Past TWO VELVET ROPES

ONE WINTER NIGHT in 1993, when I was 29 and still finding my way, a man I’d been seeing tried to impress me, I think, by taking me to Café Tabac. Of course, I’d heard of it. The gossip columns were full of items about the glamorous shenanigans going on nightly at the funky-looking little bistro on East 9th Street, opened the previous year by Roy Liebenthal, a soulfully handsome 28-year-old model, and his business partner,

Ernest Santaniello. Madonna, Bono, and the so-called Trinity—naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington—were showing up on a regular basis. “It was like lightning striking the gold pot and the gold pipes burst open and all the gold coins spill out. That’s what it was,” the journalist George Wayne has said.

My eyes growing wide as Lucy’s at the Brown Derby, I saw Robert De Niro come in wearing a leather duster and go upstairs with Harvey Keitel and some women in furs. Then Jim Jarmusch arrived, followed by Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, and Iggy Pop, like some Reservoir Dogs–inspired fever dream. Then I saw the Trinity lope in and climb the stairs, all laughing and smiling as if being that beautiful was even more fun than it seemed.

And there was Debi Mazar. Oh my God, I thought, does this mean Madonna’s coming?

I resolved in the middle of dinner that I had to somehow get up those stairs and into the inner sanctum, which had its own velvet rope, followed by a curtain, then another velvet rope. My date had only enough clout to score us a table downstairs—no small feat, but suddenly it wasn’t enough. So I told this guy (an older British journalist who resembled the avuncular actor Stephen Fry, ascot and all) that I was going to the ladies’ room.

And then—quickly working out that it wasn’t my youth or cuteness that would gain me entry but knowing someone up in the exclusive room—i told the doorman at the stairs that I was Jarmusch’s cousin and on my way to meet him. Both ropes (and the curtain) magically opened. (I guess it must have seemed impossible that anyone would make up a story that ridiculous?)

The rest of that night stays in my mind like glossy stills shot by some great nightlife photographer. I remember looking around and thinking,