94 Minutes With...Ian Schrager

Forty years after founding Studio 54, hes finally ready tocome clean about what went down there. (But not about Roy Cohn.)

- Carl Swanson

OVER THE YEARS, I was hoping to forget it,” says Ian Schrager in his Brooklyn rasp, between bites of chopped salad and across-thetable reaches to touch my arm. He’s talking about Studio 54, the mythic discotheque he opened with an irrepressible college buddy named Steve Rubell in 1977. The two of them ran the club for 30 manically publicized months, before being busted for failing to pay taxes on all the money they skimmed off all the money they made there and going to jail for 13 months. “I was always embarrassed by it.”

But Rubell has been dead for almost 30 years now—like so many people who worked for and danced at Studio 54, of aids—while Schrager is a pashalike 72 and has done quite nicely for himself. (So nicely that President Obama pardoned him.) He’s finally willing, even eager, to look back on the disco that made him famous and infamous and honed the theatrical tastemaking skills that propelled his career as a hotelier and condo developer. Besides, he’s been noticing that “there were a lot of revisionists out there about Studio 54, taking credit, saying this and that,” Schrager says. (That campy Ryan Phillippe movie 54? “Exploitative.”) “And I had just read something about Berry Gordy saying, ‘If the hunter doesn’t tell the story, the lion will.’ ”

He’d proposed that we meet at Frankie & Johnnie’s, a “steaks and chops” joint on West 45th Street, founded in 1926, where he and Rubell used to eat. He’d not realized that it lost its lease in 2015 and moved a block away to a big, blandly upmarket graytoned space. It still has the chopped salad with anchovies that Schrager remembers. He asks the waiter if it’s okay if he orders just that and nothing else and then for a clean water glass.