The Last Party

Anthony Haden-Guest's journalism has appeared in New York, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.

Packed with stars, models, socialites, and everyone else who could sneak past the fabled velvet ropes, Studio 54 defined disco and launched the celebrity-driven culture of today. Noted writer Haden-Guest takes readers behind the scenes and tells the whole story -- the glory days, the drugs, the deaths, and the corruption.There was a place where virtually all the themes and energies of the '70s -- disco, the cult of celebrity, the coke and the quaaludes, the glam and the glitter, the pre-AIDS sexual abandon, the emergence of gay culture, uninhibited women, and the general air of debauchery -- were played out with maximum flamboyance.It was a place that epitomized an era and exemplified the zeitgeist. No one is better suited to chronicle the Studio 54 story than Anthony Haden-Guest. He has re-created the scene and rendered the action in vivid detail from his personal experiences with the key players: the owners, bartenders, and bouncers; the celebrities and the dealers; the divas, DJs and doormen; even the prosecutor who busted the owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager for tax evasion. "The Last Party" is more than a biography of one place. It also tells the story of Nightworld, a realm spawned by Studio 54, comprising past and present clubs. Nightlords, and Nightpeople, their doings and their secrets, which are still unfolding.