“He loved how deliciously vivid
everything felt now that he was in The
Show: the music more harmonious,
the food more savoury, the breeze
more refreshing, even the bark under
his fingertips more crisp and
satisfying. In so many ways, it felt as
though things couldn’t possibly get
any beter. Then the cops showed up.”
It’s one thing suffering from a bipolar
disorder, but it’s another to suffer from
“The Truman Show delusion”,
a condition in which you believe you
are the star of your own TV show and
reality is constructed fiction. But try
adding to that, as Kevin Hall did, the
fact you are an Olympic and America’s
Cup sailor and also, from time to time,
on TV for real? No wonder the poor guy
got confused. In her new book, The
Kevin Show, former New York Times
reporter Mary Pilon does an excellent
job of describing Hall’s experiences
and inhabiting his condition, which
oten occurred at deeply inopportune
moments such as the one above, when
he jumped from a tree hoping to
convince a terrified passerby to play
Ophelia in what he thought was a new
Shakespearean plotline, or when
helping recover the body of his Artemis
team-mate, Andrew Simpson, who died
in 2013 on a practice sail in San
Francisco Bay. (Hall convinced himself
the death was staged.) All
extraordinary, but no laughing mater.
—
The Kevin Show (Bloomsbury) is
published on 13 JuneQuote
of the
month
Mary Pilon on
Olympic sailor and
‘The Truman Show
delusion’ sufferer,
Kevin Hallyou might not know, and director
Mat Tyrnauer’s engrossing new
documentary reveals, is that it was
a nightlife legend that was founded
on glamour and greed, yes, but
also on a very rare kind of friendship.
Both born in Brooklyn, Rubell and
Schrager met when they became fraternity
brothers at Syracuse University, where
Schrager studied law and Rubell finance
(from what happened later, it seems they
may not have had too firm a grasp of
either). Having cut their teeth puting on
elaborate bar mitzvahs, they decided to
try their luck with a venture in Manhatan
in a disused TV studio. Thanks to an
impressive level of research and chutzpah,
in 1977 they opened what would become
— and has in fact remained — the most
famous nightclub in the world.
Tyrnauer’s film, with its pulsing disco
soundtrack and deeply knowledgeable
talking heads — everyone from the club’s
feared doorman Marc Benecke to Schragerhimself — gives a vivid sense of just how
fun a night at 54 must have been (if you
could get in, of course) with all the models,
eccentrics, celebrities and stimulants
floating around; as one interviewee
has it, “the amount of drugs was profound”.
It also suggests why, in the wake of
Watergate and Vietnam, and before the
Aids epidemic, its existence was possible,
perhaps even necessary.
But more affecting still is the portrait of
Schrager and Rubell’s friendship, and what
occurred when the ordure hit the fan.
Which it did, in epic quantities, and largely
brought on themselves; if you don’t know
the story we won’t spoil it here, other than
to say that narcotics, fraud and prison all
played a part. And yet through it all, the
introverted Schrager and the larger-than-
life Rubell, who died in 1989 from Aids-
related complications, managed to sustain
a friendship that was steadfast.
—
Studio 54 is out on 15 JuneCulture67Adam Schull
Night people:
Liza Minnelli,
Bianca Jagger,
Andy Warhol and
Halston hold court
at Studio 54, 1978