Inside The Scandalous Party That Built Studio 54: Bianca Jagger's 32nd Birthday
She rode in on a horse, and turned a six-day-old nightclub into the most famous room in the world...
The city Bianca Jagger walked into that night was dying.
New York in the spring of 1977 had lost 570,000 payroll jobs in eight years. President Ford had told it to drop dead and the Daily News put the sentence on the front page. Whole blocks of the South Bronx were being torched for insurance money, and the West 54th Street address where the party was happening sat on a corner the local red-light industry considered its own.
Into that block, on the evening of May 2, 1977, walked a slight Nicaraguan woman in a red one-shouldered Halston jersey dress.
She’d once wanted to be a nun.
She was 32 years old that day, married to the most famous active rock star in the world (Mick Jagger), and the marriage, though the papers wouldn’t say so for another year, was already finished.
The room she entered was six days old. It’d opened without a building permit or a liquor license, running on one-day catering exemptions, and had turned away Frank Sinatra on its opening night because he couldn’t get through the crush at the door.
An hour or so into her birthday dinner, a horse was led onto the parquet. She got on it for 90 seconds. A photographer she didn’t know raised her camera, and by morning… the most famous nightclub in the world had its origin story.
