Paul Fortune’s Fake Club Was Where 1980s Hollywood Gathered to Party All Night - Vanity Fair

Paul Fortune’s Fake Club Was Where 1980s Hollywood Gathered to Party All Night - Vanity Fair

Jump-cut—or slow dissolve—to four years later.

He had done…not much, actually. Made cactus lamps out of Plexiglas (Barbra Streisand bought one). Appeared as an extra (a Stetson-cologne-spraying salesman in Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart). Let the good times roll, and keep on rolling. “All I wanted to do was make rent and explore Hollywood and run around and take drugs and go to parties.” More notably, he’d shucked “Paul Fortune Fearon” like a shapeless winter coat and slipped into the sleeker, gaudier “Paul Fortune.” (Well, how far would Cary Grant have gotten if he’d stuck with Archie Leach? A name-in-lights type name wasn’t just de rigueur for an aspirant, it was sine qua non, the first step to self-invention.) He’d also acquired a boyfriend, Lloyd Ziff, art director of New West. Says Ziff, “Paul was an artist who hadn’t found his form yet. But he was handsome and charming, and he moved into my Laurel Canyon house.” And he didn’t move out when he and Ziff split, Ziff heading to New York and a job at Condé Nast.

This house was key to Fortune’s development. It was where the man would make his move, the artist find his form. It was also something else. Says Ziff, “A set designer built it and John Wayne used to help. It was a kind of Mexican-Spanish hacienda nestled into the hillside. The master bedroom was built like a ship’s cabin—wood-paneled with a porthole. There were terraces and patios and a two-story living room that had a wall painted to look like rock, but wasn’t. It was this whole mishmash of styles and fantasies, and just wonderful.”

Pinkietessa (in black), Denise Crosby (harlequin), and Bette Davis Dancers.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

Juliette Hohnen and Madonna.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

Fortune (in cowboy hat), Holly Hollington (in white tee), Annie Kelly (in black bathing suit), and unidentified friends.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

Sharah, Gerlinde Costiff, and Donald Dunham.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

Under Fortune’s auspices, it became a home for wayward (and overgrown) boys and girls, party guests turning into houseguests turning into long-term houseguests. Staying with him in the winter of ’81 was a young British woman, a stylist, named Sharman Forman. “I’d moved in with Paul, but I was still going back and forth to London. That’s when I saw these one-night, two-night clubs popping up. It was the New Romantic era—Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants. Vivienne Westwood was a friend and she was doing her pirate collection, dressing up these groups.”

Fortune’s ear swiveled. Also staying with him was Alan MacDonald. “Alan had been my boyfriend in London. He was one of the beautiful kids who hung out at the Blitz club. There was nowhere to go in L.A. at night. The Whisky and the Roxy were too straight and rock-and-roll. The Masque was punk and punk was stupid and the music was horrible. There was a twinky disco on San Vicente. And that was pretty much it. Everything was separate—a place for if you were gay, black, in the film industry…. You’d wind up eating knishes at Canter’s because it was the only place open late.”

Sylvie Temple and Amanda Temple.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

Holly Hollington (with mouth open), Annie Kelly (in black bathing suit), Tim Street-Porter (sticking out tongue), and unidentified friends.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

John Maybury and Rupert Everett.

Courtesy Paul Fortune.

Wolfgang Tillmans (at left), Laila Kabulikan (in white tee), Louise de Teliga (in dark dress), Thom Browne (in blue shirt), and unidentified friends.

Courtesy of Paul Fortune.

Side note. The city was, at that moment, as delicately poised as Fortune himself: between its sleepy small-town past and its never-sleeps modern metropolis future; also between the anything-goes ’60s and ’70s—that brief post-pill sexual idyll when the body seemed to exist only for pleasure, biology and puritanism vanquished at last, and drugs were considered consciousness-expanding plus a guaranteed good time—and the chickens-come-home-to-roost ’80s, a decade largely defined by two dire acronyms, A.A. and AIDS. Says Fortune, “We started to think, Why not do a London club here?”

A DJ was found, yet another London exile, John Ingham, a rock critic, the first to interview the Sex Pistols. Then a venue, which Fortune happened upon when his Karmann Ghia broke down and he took it to a Hollywood garage. “Across the street was the Trailways bus depot, and in the depot was this bar. I needed to use a pay phone, so I walked in. It was, like, 10 in the morning, and already full of these desperate characters. But it was a good setup—a bar, a dance floor, a second bar. I asked the bartender how much to rent it out for a night. He said, ‘120 bucks.’ ”

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2020-01-24 13:02:18Z
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/01/the-secret-history-of-hollywoods-wildest-club-in-the-1980s
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