Nell's

Nell’s emerges in the diary as more than a new club: it is a test of whether downtown nightlife can be turned into an exclusive, carefully designed destination without losing the people whose presence gives it character. From an early consultation about the venue’s layout and door charge to a crowded opening and later visits, the club becomes a recurring setting for disputes about access, social status, and the cost of belonging.

Planning a downtown club

On an early visit, Rupert drove the diary’s narrator and others to 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, where Keith McNally was preparing to open Nell’s with Nell Campbell, known from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as hostess. McNally asked for opinions about the food and whether admission should cost $15 or $5. The narrator argued that downtown people would resent being charged and doubted that a fee would make the place into a private club or anything more elevated; in his view, it would simply become a disco. The distinction mattered: a cover charge might collect money, but would not automatically create the kind of exclusivity or atmosphere that its advocates wanted.

The physical arrangement sharpened that question. There would be a disco downstairs and a quieter, noise-free upstairs. The narrator found the downstairs room alarming, describing it as a real firetrap. His observations combine a practical concern about safety with skepticism about the club’s promise: the venue’s architecture and pricing could shape its character, but neither seemed to guarantee the distinction McNally might have hoped for. The visit left Nell’s poised between a dance floor open to a downtown crowd and an effort to manage who entered and what sort of experience they found.

Opening night and its crowd

When Nell’s opened, the diary recorded a notably different impression: the event was exciting, and the club quickly gathered a crowd recognizable from the surrounding downtown scene. Nell told the narrator that he alone would be allowed to take pictures, but he did not feel like moving around to photograph the room. That permission placed him in a privileged position while also making his reluctance visible; the opening was not simply a spectacle to document, even for someone accustomed to observing social occasions through a camera.

Rupert Everett arrived with a costar. Bianca Jagger, Lauren Hutton, and Julian Schnabel were there, along with people who would ordinarily have been at The Odeon. Paige went downstairs to dance with Benjamin, Julian Schnabel, and Alba Clemente, while Peter Beard attended with his entourage. The crowd brought together the downtown regulars the narrator had worried might resent a charge and more prominent guests associated with the same social world. The admission price settled at $5. He still wondered whether the downtown crowd would object, since those young people were used to getting in free; the opening’s excitement therefore did not resolve the question of who would feel the club was for them.

A gathering place with mixed signals

Later visits show Nell’s functioning as a flexible meeting place: people went there after dinners, business engagements, and other social outings, and groups could settle at a table or move downstairs to dance. On one evening, after dinner at Indochine, a story circulated that Fred Hughes had stood on a table at Nell’s and pulled down his pants in front of the restaurant. The narrator and seven others then went to the club, where they were given a table at the back. They stayed for a couple of hours before he left without paying the check. The diary records the action without explaining it further, preserving the abruptness of his decision rather than turning it into a general judgment about the club.

Nell’s also became the setting for a revealing encounter around a dinner the narrator believed had been arranged for him. After being told that Larry Gagosian’s pre-opening dinner was cancelled, he went to another business dinner and later followed Steven Greenberg to Nell’s. There he saw Gagosian seated with Fred, Faye Dunaway, and Jerry Hall. The narrator suspected that the gathering might in fact have been the dinner intended for him and that he had been told it was cancelled so he would not attend, though he acknowledged that he could not know whether their presence together was coincidental. The club’s sociability could thus feel welcoming and exciting while also exposing exclusions and uncertain loyalties.

Admission, membership, and belonging

The initial $5 cover was not the only model of access associated with Nell’s. By late November, Fred had made a reservation to take a German woman and her boyfriend to the club, and the narrator thought Fred had become a member. He estimated that membership cost $200 a year, while noting that it had not yet gone through. He refused to join, saying he thought joining stank. The contrast with the opening-night cover is sharp: a modest one-time charge had raised doubts about whether downtown patrons would pay, while an annual membership represented a more durable form of selection that the narrator rejected outright.

Across these entries, Nell’s changes from a venue whose proposed policies and cramped downstairs space invite scrutiny into a lively social address where familiar people gather, dance, conduct business, and trade stories. Yet the diary never treats popularity as proof that the club’s social experiment has succeeded. The question of who pays, who gets admitted, who is invited to a private dinner, and who is left out continues to shadow the room. Nell’s significance in these recollections lies in that tension: it offers the excitement of a new meeting place while making the boundaries of downtown belonging newly visible.