The Halston series on Netflix left me in a haze of nostalgia. I may have been fat and unfashionable at the time, but I too was Fabulous in the Seventies.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and I have a shitload of regrets. But I’ve never regretted being a wild, promiscuous, single girl in New York in the Seventies, ready to do anything to break away from my 1950s suburban Jewish roots.
A snapshot of the time.
It was the summer of 1977, Manhattan was still affordable, and we didn’t believe that it or we would ever change.
I was stretched out on the comfortable squishy couch at my friend Susan’s Upper West Side apartment, listening to Jeannie tell her tale of a bold pickup. We hung out at Susan’s place because it was large enough for a few of us to actually fit in.
“So, I was sitting across from this adorable guy on the bus and he was staring at me,” Jeannie said. Her startlingly blue eyes narrowed and her ski jump nose wrinkled as she grinned at us. There was no way her eyes could have actually been that color, or she could have been born with that nose--all the Jewish girls had ski jump noses at the time--but Jeannie would never admit to either blue contact lenses or a nose job.
“I stared back” Jeannie demonstrated how she cocked her head at him flirtatiously, “but he never came over and asked for my number. So, when he got off the bus, I followed him. I got off the bus followed him down the block, tapped him on the shoulder and said ‘Are you going to leave me just like that?'
Jeannie was a big brunette with large, cushiony breasts, who, like me, had to weigh over 200 pounds but, unlike me, never let her weight stop her from flirting with men. She was as brazen as I was self-conscious.
I wasn’t the only one who was in awe of Jeannie’s chutzpah. Angela, Susan’s roommate, the tall, slim most elegant one of us--who regularly wore all black long before it became the uniform of fashionable Manhattanites--shook her head in admiration.
“I could never do that,” Angela said coyly, not mentioning that she was the one having an affair with both a woman and a transvestite man.
“So, what happened then,” I insistently questioned Jeannie who, always the drama queen, had built up suspense with her story and then waited until we begged to find out what happened.
“He asked for my number of course….and he called that day,” she said with a triumphant air.
Jeannie, despite being fat like me, was charismatic--a man magnet. My only semi-lesbian and almost group sex experience was with Jeannie. One night we’d picked up two guys and were going to have sex with them in Jeannie’s dumpy basement apartment on the upper west side. I was crushed when both of them hit on Jeannie, and ignored me. I realized I also wanted to hit on Jeannie, and ignore them. Jeannie was the only woman I was ever really attracted to, but nothing ever came of it. I adored her.
I was always second guessing myself, wondering if I’d said or done the right thing when it came to men. Angela was my role model because she managed to play hard to get, which I found totally impossible. She was also tall and slim, attributes I longed for. My short stature and broad hips would never be trendy.
Ironically, although Angela had the most reserved, proper demeanor, she was the naughtiest of us all. She introduced us to Hellfire, the infamous S&M club in the meatpacking district. She had a playmate, Jason, who wore makeup and women’s clothes on occasion. Angela didn’t care how many other lovers he had, and he had many of both sexes.
We hang at Hellfire
At the time, Hellfire was a scene from a bad porno film. You walked down a metal staircase into a warehouse divided into rooms with various scenarios. There were naked men shackled to the wall waiting to be whipped, dominatrixes in high heeled black boots grinding their stilettos into the bare chests of ecstatic men, tableaus with a variety of graphic sexual acts to watch featuring mostly men, with a few black leather clad women with whips. Hellfire may have been the last place in New York City history where polymorphous perversity ruled. Gays and straights and anyone in between got it on together.
Despite the party atmosphere, the weird thing about Hellfire was the lack of any kind of sound. All the sex was conducted silently, no ecstatic moans or groans. You’d never know people were having sex--it was more like they were at a dinner party.
The only reason I went to Hellfire at all since I wasn’t into S&M was that Saturday night was the loneliest night of the week for me and I couldn’t face spending it alone. I went because my friends went. I didn’t actually want to go to an S&M club, I wanted to pick up a hot guy at a straight bar and bring him home. The men at Hellfire were either gay or looking to be dominated—not my thing.
But at least I’d be with my buddies.
As soon as I walked into Hellfire, men would come up to me and ask “What are you into?” This was the standard question, to find out if I was dominant or submissive. I would answer, “A serious relationship,” and laugh to myself as they hightailed it away. I’d always wind up going home alone—not my preferred way to spend a Saturday night.
Angela eventually got tired of the scene at Hellfire because Maria, a lesbian dominatrix she had been seeing became tiresome. At first Maria was very exciting because she played the role of cruel mistress. But then Maria started getting needy, she’d call Angela every day and beg to see her. Even dominatrixes are insecure it seems. Angela—and the rest of us— finally left the scene when Jason decided to be more homo than bi, and Maria got to be a drag.
Bob was my Halston—gay and just as handsome. He looked like a dissolute Italian count. When we met he hadn’t come out yet. Eventually he emerged from the closet, rented a share in the Pines on Fire Island, and even visited the baths before anyone knew about AIDS. He’d tell me stories about anonymous sex at the baths and then chortle, “I can’t believe I did that--a nice Italian boy from Brooklyn like me.”
But Bob was a stone romantic at heart and, like me, longed for true love. We shared heartbreak together, often wandering around the Village bemoaning the loss of the latest of our lovers--I can’t remember who any of them were but I do remember how we bonded over the melodrama of losing them.
Like Elsa Peretti with Halston, I was just a little bit in love with Bob like so many lonely women are with their handsome gay friends. I knew sex was out of the question but I wanted to spend more time with him. But Bob said he needed “space.” I wasn’t familiar with the concept of respecting my friends “space.” Where there was space, I wanted to fill it.
Jill, another close friend and fellow sexual adventurer, lived upstairs from me on East 84th St. Short, cute bubbly with a wide grin and spiky short punk hair, Jill was an athletic type who wore no makeup and sported a hiking, biking look before it was fashionable Unafraid to say anything to anybody, she often embarrassed me with her outspokenness, especially about her sex life. Ironically, I had the same problem. Bob defined it as “oral expulsive disorder,” the opposite of anal-retentive disorder. He said, “everything that goes through your head comes out of your mouth.”.
I’d known Jill since we went to City College together in the 60s, where we both suffered from the same awkwardness with men. Neither of us were man magnets, but Jill managed to pull off a “bitch” act that sometimes reeled them in. “Men love it when you give them a hard time,” she told me. When a guy came on to her at a bar, she’d say something like, “I really don’t like guys who dress in suits,” or “Why do you think I’d want to talk to you?” and they’d be all over her. Unfortunately, her bitchy attitude covered a well of insecurity and when they found out, they’d flee.
Jill recently told me the story of one time at Hellfire where she was watching a guy dressed as a female dominatrix. Somehow, they got to talking and he invited her to go with a group to see Rocky Horror Show. “I got a thrill out of that,” she said, “Then we agreed to meet again, but this time he came dressed as a man. What a letdown! We went back to my apartment but when we started to make out, he wanted to be passive and wanted me to be aggressive. That didn’t work out.”
Along with Hellfire, we went to Su Casa in the summer. Su Casa was a hippie resort near Woodstock New York, run as a kind of commune. Nakedness at the pool was de riguer. Angela fearlessly took off her clothes and marched around the pool unselfconsciously. Or at least she pretended to be unselfconscious. Jill and I didn’t have the nerve to take ours off, except in the hot tub where the foam provided some cover.
My most daring sexual adventure was one time in the hot tub when a naked man sitting across from me made me come with his foot. He pursued me after that but I was too embarrassed and avoided him. I’d always thought of myself as fearless, but not when it came to getting naked in public.
The beginning of the end of our Seventies idyll was the day Jeannie announced she’d started “seeing” a guru in the Catskills, Baba Muktananda. I felt betrayed. My licentious, wild buddy was all of a sudden getting religion? It seemed unbelievable. I went to the ashram a few times but the whole scene turned me off—Baba was more interested in celebrities than enlightenment.
This may have been the first time I realized friends could change in ways I wouldn’t approve of or even understand.
Angela was the first to give up her wicked ways for a man. Formerly only attracted to star quality men, glamorous but unavailable, she settled down with Jeff, a computer nerd, a supremely nice guy, who treated her like a queen. He wasn’t flashy or charming, or intellectual or Jewish, and didn’t bare his soul like us. Jeff never got angry with Angela and thought everything about her was perfect. At the time I didn’t “get” his appeal. I do now.
Bob moved in with Beryl, the lover he had finally settled down with. Beryl seemed bland to me, nice enough, but very stiff and uptight, lacking Bob’s charisma and sense of humor. They were monogamous, which saved them from AIDS.
I wound up with social phobic Ira, who was 14 years younger than me. He hated my friends and manipulated me into dumping them. My marriage to him is my biggest regret—a long story I’ve told elsewhere.
My only old friend left was Loni who wasn’t part of the Hellfire gang. She was the most beautiful of us all, and picked up men wherever she went. We’d managed to stay friends because she got along with Ira, not an easy task.
Now the Seventies are long gone and so is my marriage. Despite all the risky sex none of us got AIDS. We left the scene just in time, as the Seventies came to an end. Liza Minelli is the only one of Halston’s gang still alive, but my gang is still hanging on. We eventually reconciled and are in touch, but we live all over the country and rarely see each other.
I wish I could report that I visited Studio 54 but I didn’t bother because they’d never have let me in. It’s just as well. I went regularly to an equally fabulous but not famous club on the Lower East Side — the name of which escapes me --which catered to a more counterculture crowd.
It’s impossible to know what memories you will treasure when you get old. I thought I was a failure for not getting married and having kids in my thirties. I didn’t know how much I would treasure my memories of the Seventies.