Le Club, referred to in the diary as Club Sept, is recorded as a Paris restaurant and social venue. Its surviving account is brief but consequential: during dinner, a disappointing model turnout gave way to an unexpected reunion and a conversation that brought news of Studio 54’s closure into the evening.

Setting and Visit

On April 5, 1980, the diary places Le Club in Paris. The party had visited Kim D’Estainville’s new shop near the Arc de Triomphe, where there were few people in town to approach about advertising, and then went to dinner at the club. The account supplies no description of Le Club’s rooms, design, or usual clientele, so its character emerges chiefly through the company gathered there and the news exchanged over dinner.

The Dinner and Its Social Scene

The party sat at a large table, expecting the presence of models to make for a lively evening. Instead, the models who remained in town seemed disappointing to the diarist, who observed that the more attractive ones had been invited elsewhere. After about an hour, photographer Francesco Scavullo and Sean Byrnes arrived. They were invited to join the table, turning an initially underwhelming dinner into a meeting shaped by conversation and social connections.

Scavullo relayed rumors he had heard about the diarist’s conduct at Studio 54. The diarist was surprised by the stories, regarded them as untrue, and tried to discover where the gossip had originated. The exchange makes Le Club more than a dining stop: in this account, it is a place where reputations circulate through overlapping social circles, even when the person at the center of the rumor disputes it.

News from Studio 54

At the same dinner, Scavullo reported that Studio 54 had shut down and that Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had sold it. The diarist noted that this was the first time the group had heard the news and marked it as the end of an era. Le Club’s significance in the diary rests on this juxtaposition: conversation about the afterlife of a famous New York nightclub arrived amid Parisian socializing, alongside the less welcome traffic of gossip.