Steve Rubell

Steve Rubell appears in Andy Warhol’s diaries as both a practical operator of nightlife and a performer of his own celebrity. At Studio 54 and later around Palladium, he controlled access, gathered famous and aspiring guests, and turned parties into carefully staged spectacles. His life in these entries is also marked by reversal: arrest, a guilty plea and prison, followed by a return to club-making. Across those changes, the diaries record the pull of his company, his appetite for recognition, and the strain between a public persona and the consequences of his business.

The impresario and his social world

Rubell’s influence is shown first through the doors he could open. After dinner with friends, Andy and a group of ten walked to Studio 54, where Rubell was delighted to see them and let the whole group enter without charge. He remembered that Andy had casually proposed marriage to him weeks earlier, a remark Andy had not expected him to retain. The exchange suggests both Rubell’s attentiveness to social gestures and the ease with which joking intimacy circulated in his circle.

His club authority could also be conspicuous in small, practical ways. He spoke of a $30,000 Mercedes as his chief pleasure, particularly the freedom to park wherever he wanted and spend money on parking tickets. He described keeping money in shoeboxes and proposed going to discos together so he could recruit young men to work at Studio 54. These details present an operator thinking about the club’s labor and social reach even while treating money and access as elements of personal style.

Rubell’s public image was already a subject of press attention. An article in New York reported that he had $25 million and characterized his fingernails as dirty; Andy disputed the description of his nails. The same article included Rubell calling Nan Kempner a name that prompted the editor Joe Armstrong to report that Kempner had called the magazine to ask what the word meant. The episode captures the club figure entering print as a source of wealth, provocation, and social gossip, while Andy’s correction of one detail shows how closely such portrayals were watched.

Parties, intimacy, and the cultivated persona

The diaries place Rubell at the center of a world where a party’s staging could be as memorable as its guest list. At a Studio 54 party for Valentino, waiters dressed as Pilgrims served turkey, and the entrance was decorated like the front of a boat. Rubell explained the theme to Valentino through a story about an Italian discovering America. Andy lost sight of Halston, then found him eating a turkey leg; Halston urged Andy to eat some too. Andy found the idea of eating meat from a discotheque unappealing, but later saw Rubell eating the turkey as well. The scene makes Rubell’s taste for theatrical contrivance tangible without separating it from the convivial work of keeping guests involved.

Food became a more pointed social performance at Halston’s home. After reports that Rubell had not eaten for three days, Halston cooked steak, french fries, and salad himself. Andy noticed that this was unusual: people at Halston’s dinners generally did not eat, but this time everyone did because Rubell supposedly needed nourishment. The diary treats the explanation with amused skepticism, wondering who had decided that Rubell had to eat, while recording how his condition reorganized the evening around him.

Rubell could be generous and exuberant, but the diaries also show Andy observing his effort to become memorable. During a visit around the time of Madonna’s wedding, Andy judged that Rubell seemed to be trying to act like a character. He repeatedly emphasized his preferences for ketchup and Coca-Cola, ordered food and let it sit, and made a point of waiting for ice to melt before sucking it out. He linked that habit to childhood memories of his father buying him ices. Andy’s account keeps the behavior specific: the remembered childhood detail gives the repeated routine a personal origin, while Andy’s interpretation frames it as an adult performance designed to leave an impression.

Rubell’s social life also included casual flirtation and exchanges that Andy recorded as comedy rather than commitment. At dinner, Andy suggested that Jade marry Rubell; she answered that he would not be faithful, and Rubell asked whether she would be faithful to him. Her answer left the question open. At the wedding, Rubell appeared impaired to Andy, who thought Madonna might have pushed him away and later saw him become sick in the car. The entry places this episode amid a crowded celebration under a tent, with Andy also watching the young actors and the carefully fashioned image of a new Hollywood generation.

Arrest, sentence, and imprisonment

The diaries register Rubell’s legal troubles as an abrupt change in the social landscape around Studio 54. Andy first heard that Rubell had been taken to jail after a fight with photographers. The entry also preserves a hurtful story from a driver who had once driven Rubell home: while Rubell was on Quaaludes, the driver made a remark about Rubell liking his parents, and Rubell replied that he liked the driver, not the parents. The incident offers a glimpse of how Rubell’s intoxicated bluntness could wound someone close to him, even as the larger news of his arrest was not yet public.

At a later visit to Studio 54, Rubell told Andy he expected to be sentenced to two months in jail. He said he had made a deal with the government: the drug charges had been dropped, and he had pleaded guilty to income tax evasion. He asked Andy and the others to visit him. The expected short sentence did not describe the eventual outcome. On another occasion, Rubell’s sentencing was postponed amid a dispute over whether he would testify that Hamilton Jordan had used cocaine at Studio 54. Halston pointed out that Rubell had already said so on television; Rubell distinguished that from giving the same testimony under oath. The diary records the exchange as a clash between public disclosure and formal testimony, not as a resolution of the underlying allegation.

Before the sentence, Rubell held a farewell party at Studio 54. The club was crowded early, photographs were being taken, and someone reported that locks had been placed on Rubell’s safety-deposit boxes. Andy’s account follows the uncertainty of the scene more than any official explanation: Halston left discreetly, while Andy did not at first understand what was happening. The episode marks the point at which the club’s celebratory machinery and Rubell’s legal jeopardy occupied the same room.

The eventual sentence was three and a half years for Rubell and Ian Schrager. In prison, Rubell’s connection to the outside world became more constrained and carefully mediated. Bianca Jagger spoke to him by telephone, inserting nickels every three minutes. Andy heard conflicting accounts about whether calls were monitored: Rubell denied it, while someone else said a person on an earlier call had warned him to be careful about what he said. Carmen D'Alessio visited him once a week and described meetings in the prison waiting room among visitors and other prisoners. These details replace the club’s unrestricted movement with timed calls, visiting rules, and the guarded exchange of news.

During this period, Carmen D'Alessio also signed a contract with Mark Fleishman, the new owner of Studio 54, to continue doing parties and publicity. Fleishman expected to obtain a liquor license within twelve weeks. The club’s social functions therefore continued under new ownership while Rubell was incarcerated, a concrete separation between the institution and the man whose presence had made it a gathering point. Andy later heard that Rubell would be out of jail in two weeks. When Rubell and Schrager appeared at the office, they said they were in the neighborhood and had to return to a halfway house by eleven. Rubell looked tan and wore many clothes to conceal the weight he had gained from prison food; Schrager looked well. Their appearance signaled a return to familiar company, but under the schedule and conditions of supervised release.

Return to nightlife and new ventures

Rubell’s return was repeatedly narrated as a comeback, but the diaries make it a process rather than a single triumphant moment. At a dinner, Andy heard that Rubell had gone from jail to what he called the Big Comeback and had said he had never lost faith. Andy added that Rubell had lost hair. The dry contrast keeps the public language of recovery beside a visible change in Rubell’s appearance, resisting a polished redemption story.

Rubell resumed his place in the social circuit. He appeared at dinners, parties, and cultural events with Halston, Bianca Jagger, and other familiar figures. When Duran Duran performed at The Savoy, the band went to Studio 54 afterward; Rubell welcomed its members, brought them to a booth, and gave them drinks. At another point he arranged for a car to collect Andy and take him to a Go-Go’s party at Private Eyes, which Andy regarded as an especially exciting event. These encounters show Rubell still exercising the familiar powers of hospitality and access, now after imprisonment had interrupted them.

His social influence was not always effortless. Before Studio 54 reopened, Halston wanted to host a party for Rubell, but Rubell said Calvin Klein was already giving one. Halston asked him to choose between them, and Rubell chose Klein; Klein then called Halston and invited him, smoothing over the slight. The episode makes the loyalties of this network visible as something negotiated through invitations and gestures, rather than an unchanging circle of friends.

Rubell and Schrager also pursued a hotel venture: Andy noted that their deal to buy a hotel had gone through. The diaries do not specify the hotel’s operation or the venture’s later course, but the transaction records an effort to extend their business beyond the club. Rubell’s club-building ambitions became clearer when he showed Andy the Palladium Theater, a large former Academy of Music on 14th Street, and asked repeatedly whether Andy loved it. He said a prominent Japanese architect was working on it. Later, Rubell was getting artists to create work for the new club; Keith Haring made a backdrop that could be lowered from the ceiling to the dance floor. Rubell’s joke that it would simply not be lowered often if it proved unsuccessful placed artistic display inside the practical calculations of running a venue.

Palladium and the persistence of spectacle

The Palladium entries show Rubell transferring the logic of Studio 54 into another space. At one dinner, Andy described a planned club scene through Rubell’s interest in the work artists could contribute. Later, the club’s interior became the main event: men holding candles marked the approach, flowers on tables received colored spotlights, chairs had been sprayed silver, and each place setting had five glasses. A large stage and sound system made the room feel built for performance, while Peter Duchin played through the evening. Andy’s attention to the coordinated lights, flowers, and furnishings conveys how the venue’s impact depended on designed abundance rather than on celebrity alone.

The club could also disappoint despite its scale. At a later Palladium party with Halston, the room had been arranged like a vast gambling casino, with a huge pool and ball-shaped balloons in different colors across the ceiling. Andy thought the theme recalled Studio 54 in its earlier days, when Rubell’s parties had made elaborate set pieces feel exciting. This time, however, he found the party boring. The contrast suggests that spectacle was not automatically renewed by repeating its visual vocabulary: Rubell could recreate the scale and theme of an earlier club, but the diary’s response makes clear that size alone did not restore the old charge.

Rubell continued to move among people and projects connected to nightlife. He asked Andy about a large party Barry Diller was planning for Calvin Klein’s new marriage and where it should be held. He also bought the Diamond Horseshoe, formerly associated with Billy Rose. These later details extend his activity beyond the two clubs most prominent in the diaries, though they do not establish what he did with the venue. His presence remains that of a man looking for places to stage gatherings and make connections.

Narrative role

The diaries build Rubell through scenes of access, observation, and recurrence rather than through a continuous account of his private life. He appears opening a door for Andy’s group, remembering a stray proposal, arranging rides, feeding guests, and later asking visitors to see the Palladium. The same social fluency is tested by arrest, sentence, prison visits, and the halfway-house curfew. His return to nightlife is real in the record, but it does not erase the interruption or settle every uncertainty around his public image.

Andy’s perspective also leaves Rubell’s self-fashioning exposed to affectionate skepticism. The remembered childhood origin of his ice-eating ritual sits beside Andy’s suspicion that Rubell wanted to be remembered as a character; the comeback declaration sits beside the observation that he had lost hair; and the grand design of Palladium sits beside the judgment that one of its parties was boring. These contrasts give Rubell more than the simple role of a flamboyant host. He is shown as a maker of memorable scenes who was himself trying to become memorable, and whose authority depended on the shifting worlds of clubs, celebrities, business, and friendship.