Blue Room, which sat another eighty. It was a pretty swank place, what
they used to call a "rug-joint" back in the '30s and '40s—a big, glitzy
operation with plenty of cracks to fall through, a place where you could
easily picture a young Burt Lancaster (just out of the joint), returning to
find a young Kirk Douglas (the club owner) counting the night's take in
one of the private banquettes. Dinner and dancing to swing music went
on from five to eleven, after which the smoke machines would start
belching chocolate-smelling fumes, the laser intellabeams would kick
into action, the mirror ball would begin turning, a DJ would take over,
and the Supper Club would become (for a while) the hottest dance club
in town.
Every night there was a different crowd with a different promoter:
Chicks with Dicks Night featured towering transvestites and pre-ops
tottering around on high heels to house and techno; Soul Kitchen
featured pre-disco '70s funk, with early blaxploitation films playing
silently on the big screen and 40-ouncers and chicken wings for sale;
Giant Step had acid jazz and fusion; Café Con Leche nights had salsa
nueva and Latin funk; Funkmaster Flex attracted a hip-hop crowd; Noel
Ashman attracted Eurotrash and the face-lifted, well-dressed crowd . . .
you never knew, there was every variety of nightlife madness as each
night people lined up down the street and around the corner onto Eighth
Avenue, waiting to get past our metal detectors and our thirteen burly
security goons so they could rip up our bathrooms, crowd around our
three bars, smoke weed, snort coke and copulate like bunnies in every
nook and cranny of our cavernous pleasure palace.
Jimmy brought me in as an overpaid garde-manger man—120 smacks a
night to plate salads and squirt whipped cream on desserts. But Jimmy
was not, at that time, an organizational mastermind. I am. Jimmy spent
much of his time roller-blading around the city schmoozing; he had a
second job, cooking for Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola; he was
secretly working out a deal for his triumphant return to the Hamptons;
and of course he was poking everything in a skirt. By the time he'd swing