Richard Johnson

Richard Johnson

Celebrity News

Original Studio 54 tell-all revealed club’s trashier side

Ian Schrager may be writing the last word on Studio 54 with his coffee table tome for Rizzoli (as I reported earlier this week), but Steven Gaines had the first word with his book, “The Club,” published in 1980.

The roman à clef was a collaboration with a Studio 54 bartender, Robert Jon Cohen — a 21-year-old from Miami who had sex with many of his famous customers and later died of AIDS.

“Cohen had affairs with Steve Rubell and Halston, and also had sex with women,” Gaines told me.

Andy Warhol, who obtained an advance copy of the trashterpiece, wrote in his diaries that some of the names in “The Club” were so similar to the real names that “I don’t know how they are going to get away with it.”

Halston was called Ellison. Calvin (Klein) was Alvin. Liza (Minnelli) with a “z” was Jacky with a “y.”

Tom Snyder interviews Steve Rubell, co-owner of Studio 54, in front of the club’s infamous “Man In the Moon With a Cocaine Spoon.”Getty Images

Gaines was threatened with $20 million in libel lawsuits, but no one sued. “Nobody was going to get on the stand and testify that they had never done cocaine or had sex in the basement,” Gaines said.

Readers also recognized characters based on Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bianca Jagger and Martin Scorsese.

“It was so transparent it was like a pane of glass,” Gaines said. “Everyone said, ‘You’ll never write in this town again.’”

Gaines moved to Laguna Beach, Calif., where he penned the Beatles bestseller, “The Love You Make.”