'NY' Mag: AIDS Was Steve Rubell's Lying Karma
Studio 54, now a theater company, turns 30 this year. New York magazine sent aged historian Philip Nobile to kick around the entrails of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager's 70's hotspot. Have the intervening three decades yielded any insight? Why yes, they have!
Rubell's greatest crime went unpunished: a last-ditch snitch on Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter's White House chief of staff, for allegedly doing lines in the basement.... Karma caught up with Rubell. He succumbed to AIDS in 1989.
Ah, AIDS as karmic retribution for being a snitch. That was... neat.
Okay, what else? Only that partying for three decades makes you either dead or kooky, and perhaps both. Unless you're Ian Schrager, in which case you just get really really rich.
Some more "then and now "of the people that apparently didn't lie enough to get the AIDS:
