Chapter 1 - Inside Studio 54 - The Real Story of Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll

Written by Mark Fleischman, with Denise Chatman and Mimi Fleischman Introduction and Chapter 1 "I've had a thing for clubs since childhood. Social clubs, officers' clubs, nightclubs, and supper clubs—I love them all. It started the night my parents took me to The Copacabana for the first time. I was ten years old and it colored my world forever. Looking back, everything that has happened in my life from that point onward propelled me on a trajectory toward Studio 54. I became the owner of Studio 54 in 1980 and from the very first night we opened, in 1981, I was swept up in a world of celebrities, drugs, power, and sex. I was the ringleader for nearly four years and I became intoxicated with the scene—bodies gyrating on the dance floor, sex in the balcony, and anything goes in the Ladies' Lounge and Rubber Room. Every night, celebrities and stunning women made their way through the crowd, up the stairs to my office to sip champagne and share lines of cocaine using my golden straw or rolled up one-hundred-dollar bills. Nighttime can make you feel somehow protected, operating under a cloak of darkness. It alters your perception of right and wrong, sane and insane, in an arena far more cutthroat than the corporate world I had known before."