Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager’s sentencing

The sentencing of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager brought the owners of Studio 54 from a postponement and a final nightclub appearance to prison terms of three and a half years each. The diary records not only the sentence but the uneasy days around it: a dispute over sworn testimony, a farewell party, and signs that the club’s legal troubles had reached into its owners’ private affairs.

The Postponed Sentence

On January 15, Steve Rubell told the diarist that his sentencing had been postponed because authorities wanted him to testify in court that Hamilton Jordan had used cocaine at Studio 54. Rubell said he would not do so. When Halston pointed out that Rubell had already made the claim on television, Rubell distinguished a televised statement from swearing to it on a Bible. The diarist agreed that the two were not the same, recording the distinction without resolving the truth of the allegation.

A Farewell at Studio 54

Two days later, after a screening of American Gigolo, the diarist encountered Halston and Bianca Jagger as Halston’s limousine arrived. They said they were going to Studio 54 for Rubell’s farewell party before sentencing, and the diarist’s cab followed them. The club was crowded and people were taking photographs. Halston, whom the diarist described as perceptive about the situation, disappeared; the diarist did not at first understand what was happening. The entry also notes that someone said locks had been put on Rubell’s safety-deposit boxes, a detail that casts the party against the practical consequences gathering around him.

The Sentence

On January 18, the diary gives the outcome in a single, stark line: Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager each received three and a half years. The compressed record contrasts with the crowded farewell only a day earlier. It supplies the sentence but does not describe the court proceedings, specify further legal terms, or say what happened afterward. The event’s force in the diary comes from that abrupt transition: the postponed hearing and public farewell give way to a precise prison term.