The walls of Patrick McMullan’s apartment on New York’s Lower Fifth are saturated with the stories of the people who have passed through it. It was the late 70s when the photographer first moved in. Having grown up in the Long Island suburbs, he moved to the city to work at the Diamond Exchange while studying night classes in Business at NYU. “I was staying with a girlfriend at the time,” he says now, on a call from that very same apartment. He wanted his own place, and so responded to an advertisement a man named Rob Schweber had placed in the Village Voice. “He had seen a bunch of people, but I, like him, was just a kid going to NYU.” Patrick recalls Rob being infinitely cooler than him. Rob later wound up being Tom Cruise’s assistant.
In 1979, the writer and performer Nora Burns came to town from her native Boston, her best friend David Burns following shortly after. She can vividly recall the first time she met Patrick in 1981. David – the subject of her one-woman show David’s Friend, who died during the AIDS crisis — had called Nora and told her to come to an address on Waverley Place. “I went over and David was in bed with Patrick and Bruce Campbell, [one of Patrick’s closest friends]. I hopped into bed with them and we all just became friends.”
This intersecting of social groups led to Patrick’s apartment becoming “the clubhouse”. Among the people in their circle: Tom Ford, Andy Warhol and David Hockney.
Eventually Rob left, making Patrick the sole consistent occupier, and the revolving door of the Lower Fifth apartment welcomed occupants from around the world who studied, partied, hustled and had fun. “We’d go to Studio 54, and at the end of the night, people that didn’t have anywhere to stay would come here. I remember, like, waking up, there were like five or six people and everybody was on coke or quaaludes.”
In 1982, Patrick received a cancer diagnosis and was told he had six months to live. The images he and Nora have chosen to share “were shot prior to what my friend Danny Field refers to as ‘my tragedy’,” he says. He later made a full recovery, and went on to work at Details magazine, following famed connoisseur of nightlife Stephen Saban, capturing on camera what he wrote about.
The photos here are all taken at the crucial point at which the 70s spilled into the early 80s, when everyone fucked, partied and gossiped at their free will. The AIDS crisis was barely a whisper in their lives as these photos were being taken. Now, many of the subjects present in the pictures have passed away. Here, Nora and Patrick talk us through the pictures and the memories that they hold.
Patrick: I couldn’t tell you exactly where this was. That’s Cecilia Bonevardi, a girl we were very close with, and the other guy [on the left] was Bruce Campbell, and that’s me behind. Bruce was like my closest friend. Boys and girls were always around, you know. It wasn’t an exclusively gay scene – it was more like a pretty people scene.
Nora: That’s my friend David, and the guy on the left is my friend, Todd Hughes. This is a party at Columbia University, which is where I went. A lot of our friends went to Columbia, or Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, NYU…
Patrick: They had dances that anyone could go to. That’s as close as I ever got to Columbia.
Patrick: This is our my friend Pieter Estersohn. We were going up to the Factory and Andy [Warhol] had all these taxidermy animals. Andy was a true renaissance man. He was just interested in everything. He liked the young people. When I came in, I brought my camera with me. Andy said, ‘Oh, you need a pocket camera like I have’. I told him I couldn’t afford it and he sent one down. It was the first time I had a messenger arrive with a package at my apartment.
Patrick: Christopher Scott was involved with the Ridiculous Theater Company. He’d gone to high school with Charles Ludlam, so he got me to do the photography for them. They had their benefit at my apartment, and I had to be a DJ, a bartender, a clean-up guy. The guy in the middle, Scott Fritz, many thought of him as a Great Beauty. We always would call people that: a Great Beauty. He wound up being the partner of Marc Jacobs for many years.
Nora: He was brilliant and really smart and funny. A little nihilistic.
Patrick: After the party, Christopher on the left, said, ‘Patrick, the party was a huge success’. And I had never thought of a party in terms of being a success or not – it was just a party.
Patrick: Bruce and I went out one night and we met Ian [Falconer]. Ian was a rich kid from a very good family. I’d just had a bunch of Studio 54 kids leave my apartment and run off to Spain, so Ian said ‘I’ll move in’. I didn’t even have a couch at that time, and so he came and decorated the apartment. He was popular and elegant, you know, it kind of rubbed off on me a little bit. He got very friendly with David Hockney who took him on as an acolyte. We recently lost him.
Nora: I mean, Ian lived with David Hockney in California.
Patrick: After I got sick, I was depressed, and Ian said, ‘Just get on an airplane and come out here. I’ll ask David if you can stay’. David was in New York working on the opera, so he said, ‘Put him in my room’. I think David had an opening at the Grey Arts Gallery around then, that’s when this was taken.
Patrick: That’s the couch that Ian brought, and the lamp, which I guess was a fancy kind of a lamp too. Ian was always redesigning the apartment. I’d come home and it would have all been moved around. This would be a classic group I would have over. We were probably waiting for Nora and David to get there to go out because they still have their coats on.
Patrick: This was a New Year’s Eve party.
Nora: Andrew Rosenblum was the first person I knew who died of AIDS. At that time, it was still very unknown. Andrew was so fun. He didn’t want people to know he had it.
Patrick: Gustavo, Cecilia’s brother, is an extraordinary guy. He created the tower of lights that go up at the World Trade Center [memorial] every anniversary. Elena Levine, on the right, passed from cancer. We were all just jolly good friends. I was very happy when people I put together became close.
Patrick: This was at an Uptown thing, and I remember being told that I had to dress up. Andy was getting ready to take a picture, and I quickly took a picture of him. You always think of him being really old, but he had a real youthful energy.
Patrick: Bruce was the love of my life. My best friend. To me, he always had a kind of Richard Gere look but a little more feminine. He kind of wanted to be a model, but he did not have the tenacity to do that. He had the looks, but he did not have the ability to show up for an appointment. When he was living here with me, a friend of mine literally kicked him out because we was being so wild. I loved him so much, though. When he died of AIDS, he listed me as his next of kin.
Patrick: This was at Studio 54 around 1981, when Debbie Harry was on the cover of Interview magazine. They had a party, and this is one of the first pictures I took on Rupert Smith’s camera, which is before I got the camera from Andy.
Nora: Chris Makos is on the left, we’re still really good friends with him. He lived downstairs from me and David.
Patrick: David Villa was one of the great beauties; the girls and boys loved him. He was one of those international guys that was living here before they all took off. He was a great dancer. You’d see him out dancing and he was always the star of the night. I guess Bruce invented him for us. He brought him home. But I love this picture, because it just shows what I’d wake up and see.
Patrick: John was a person that was always around, and I became friendly with him over the years. He was like a real movie star to a New Yorker, and he was very, very charismatic. This was a party Elton John had on a boat. I think I was the only person taking pictures.
Patrick: So there [on the far left] is a guy named Ron Wanless. He was an art director for all the movie companies like New Line Cinema. He was very elegant, you know? He’d say, ‘I’m having a little party. Can you bring a few friends over?’, and he’d have all best top shelf liquor.
Nora: There was a certain group of guys who didn’t love having women around. There were definitely nights when Cecelia and I would say ‘Okay, let’s not join’!
Patrick: That was Tom Ford on the right. Ian and Tom met in college, and they were boyfriends. They lived here with me. Edwin Meyer was a very elegant guy too, but he was a friend of Ian’s. I didn’t really know too much about him.
Patrick: I met Tom when he was 17 and he was going to NYU. He got out of high school early, but he was living here and he had a dorm room, which was like a couple of blocks away. But he was always staying here. He had a set of keys. He was definitely one of our pals and was always a sweetheart, dedicated to what he did. Rob Robinson, on the right, was another one of my roommates. In the middle is Jill. She was my girlfriend during much of the period that we’re talking about. I met her at that party with John Kennedy. She was always with me, and you know, I loved her, but I was a little all over the place.
Nora: When Jill moved out from Patrick’s, she moved in with me and David and it was only supposed to be for like two weeks. It ended up being a year. I just never thought to ask her to leave.
Patrick: Joe was somebody I loved so much. This was right before I became ill. I was involved with Joe and he lived with me, just the two of us living as roommates, and we got extremely, extremely close. He wound up dying of AIDS, but he stuck it out with me.
Patrick McMullan’s book ‘SO80S’ is available to purchase here. Nora Burns’ show David’s Friend can be streamed here.
Credits
All photography Patrick McMullan