You might think you’ve been to a crazy opening night party but you weren’t at New York’s Studio 54 back in 1977, the jol that has come to be the most mythologised opening party of all time.

Not that the myths are without basis, however, because by all accounts the night of April 26 was one to be remembered. Think celebs, think drugs and orgies, think people arriving on the back of white horses – oh, and Donald Trump was there too.

So you want the dirty details, who was doing what and how much and where? The excerpts below from the Daily Beast are a summation of the excess on display:

[CNN reporter Robin] Leach looked down on the joyous human froth, the cocaine spoon traveling to the nose of the Man in the Moon…

“All of us knew that night that we weren’t at the opening of a discotheque but the opening of something historical, that was going to change the shape of the way people lived or played … There were no rules. Sodom and Gomorrah met the High Street that night.”

…one of [partygoer Robin Turley’s] people, a doctor, was being generous with a giant bottle of Quaaludes.

“They took about 15 or 20 minutes to kick in,” he said. “About 30 people standing around us took them, and then everybody started having this mad sexual orgy. All the men had their dicks out … the women were showing their tits … everybody was feeling everybody else …”

The party continued inside with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol amongst the crowd of revellers. The A-list celebs partied safe in the knowledge that no one was recording their every move on their smartphones and uploading it to YouTube, something today’s stars must be constantly in fear of.

So what sounded the death knoll for a club that came to symbolise the excess and revelry of the late 70’s and early 80’s?

AIDS arrived, as did the realization that cocaine was not just a non-habit-forming energy enhancer. We had two terms of Rudy Giuliani as a non-nightlife-loving mayor, community boards became more powerful and getting a liquor license became ever more onerous.

Society man, society. Oh well fans of Studio 54, you’ll always have those four glorious years (and one particularly hedonistic evening) to reminisce about.

[source:dailybeast]