The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [6]
There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.
The music ceased when the giant clock struck midnight, the waltzers froze, all dutifully waiting for the twelve chimes to ring. Suddenly, there was a stranger among them:
tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat.… His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
The courtiers were confused, torn between rage and horror. Not Prince Prospero, he was simply enraged. “Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?” he commanded, ordering the intruder to be seized and hanged. Still awed, no one moved; all watching as the stranger turned and stalked from the blue to the purple chamber, to the green, the orange, the white, finally halting in the violet chamber. Meekly, the courtiers followed, cringing along the walls, before making a hesitant motion to arrest the intruder. Prince Prospero did not hesitate. Dagger in hand, he bolted through the six chambers, and as he was about to plunge the knife into his victim, the intruder turned. A loud shriek reverberated through the chambers as Prince Prospero fell dead.
Timid no more, the revellers lurched to seize the tall, motionless figure, gasping “in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.”
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life and the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
A “MULTITUDE OF DREAMS” was loose on New Year’s Eve in Manhattan as 1977 drew to a close. Selected guests were invited to pay $300 per couple to attend a masquerade ball at Régine’s, the very chic, very in Park Avenue discotheque. From behind a peephole, cold eyes screened the guests before the door opened to a room of varnished lights and mirrored ceilings. On regular nights, the menu advertised two scrambled eggs with caviar: “Les Deux Oeufs Poule au Caviar” ($19), “Caviar d’Iran” ($60). A bottle of Chivas Regal could be purchased for $90; a bottle of Coca-Cola, for $6. The disco, owner Régine Zylberberg once told writer Julie Baumgold, “has a whole psychology. You must make people into actors and exhibitionists.… People with no names come to see people with names. People with names come to see others they know.”
Two thousand elite guests received scroll invitations to attend an unusual New Year’s party at Studio 54, the even more in disco on the West Side of Manhattan. “Nothing new has been done on New Year’s Eve for a long time,” explained thirty-three-year-old co-owner Steve Rubell, “and we thought this year was the year to do it.” Starting at 3 A.M., and for only $40 per person, Grace Jones would be performing—The Grace Jones, who had driven motorcycles onstage, danced half naked in gay discos, her head shaved into a fuzzy cap, her pretty face masked with green and red paint. People were just dying to know what she would do next. “I know what I’m doing,” Grace said, “and I know there is money to be made at what I am doing.”
The plague spreading