Giving it the old college lie

UNTIL recently, Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager couldn’t bring himself to tell his tell his daughters that he had been locked up for massive tax evasion while running the iconic club — and thought quickly when they nearly found out.

After a screening of the new documentary “Studio 54,” about the legendary disco, Schrager said on Thursday, “One time it was on TV, and they said I had gone to jail.”

He said to his daughters, Sophia and Ava, “Oh, no, Yale. I went to Yale.”

Schrager actually graduated from Syracuse University.

He said he still hasn’t told his youngest son, Louis, 8. His daughters are both now in their twenties.

During a Q&A at his Public hotel, Schrager also said that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t pick infamous attorney Roy Cohn — who defended him and his Studio 54 partner, Steve Rubell, in the criminal case that ended in January 1980 — to represent him.

Schrager called working with Cohn “a double-edged sword” and said he and Rubell were “ultimately hurt by it when we were about to get sentenced.”

“Roy had been co-counsel with the judge [in our case] on the Rosenberg trial,” Schrager said during a panel with “Studio 54” director Matt Tyrnauer and Tribeca Film Festival cofounder Jane Rosenthal. “So Roy put an item in the gossip columns saying Roy knew the judge, so we weren’t going to get a heavy sentence. Well, the judge showed Roy.”

Schrager served 14 months in prison and paid a $20,000 fine.

At the disco-themed after-parties — one on the hotel’s roof and the other in its basement nightclub, A Club Called Rhonda — were Schrager, Ansel Elgort, Bob Colacello, Maggie Q, Helena Christensen, Patricia Field, Timo Weiland, Pari Dust, Sandra Bernhard and the original Studio 54 doorman, Marc Benecke.