An Interview With Ian Schrager

Ian Schrager

Image: Joshua Lutz/Redux

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Few people have equaled Ian Schrager's impact on American commercial design and popular culture. But what a long, strange trip it has been for the 61-year-old hotelier.

Thirty years ago, with his best friend and fellow Brooklynite Steve Rubell, Schrager launched Studio 54. The legendary disco was for a brief, shining moment the epicenter of celebrity, hedonism, and status anxiety that epitomized what Tom Wolfe famously branded "The Me Decade." After a small detour—13 months in prison for tax evasion—Schrager and Rubell rose from the ashes to start another famed nightclub, Palladium, before finding their true calling, the hospitality business. In the early 1980s, they renovated a down-at-the-heels hotel on Madison Avenue according to their quirkily chic design sensibility and dubbed it Morgans. Thus was born the Morgans Hotel Group, which still claims such Schrageresque landmarks—noted for their theatrically stylized lobbies, dimly lit corridors, elegantly compact rooms, and aggressively cool staff—as the Royalton in New York, the Mondrian in Los Angeles, and the Delano in Miami. Schrager still keenly feels the absence of his closest friend and confidante, Rubell, who died of AIDS in 1989.

Since Schrager left Morgans two years ago—out of unhappiness and exhaustion—he has been busier than ever, overseeing a critically acclaimed renovation of the Gramercy Park Hotel, building such spectacular apartments as 40 Bond in the Noho neighborhood of Manhattan and planning even bigger projects with his business partner, real estate baron Aby Rosen. More recently, the ultra-hip Schrager joined forces this summer with the straight-laced Bill Marriott, the hospitality king, to build more than 100 chic hotels around the world. Never mind that Marriott is a teetotaling Mormon for whom Studio 54 would have been hell on earth.

"Is Bill Marriott any different than I am? Than Steve Rubell was? I mean, we're complementary, our DNA is alike," Schrager told Portfolio.com this week in an exclusive interview. "We're both competitive and in pursuit of excellence."

Lloyd Grove: Today in the New York Post, there was an article about Harvey Weinstein getting into a brawl at the Gramercy Park Hotel—some kind of slap-down with the D.J. in the Rose Bar while movie stars looked on in shock.
 
Ian Schrager: Not really. We're getting a little color on this.
 
L.G.: Is that good for the Gramercy Park Hotel?
 
I.S.: No, it's not good, it's not bad. I don't know what the people, when they read Page Six, what they get out of it. I suppose reading about how popular the bar is and who was there is good. The kind of brouhaha that happened—which is really much ado about nothing—I don't think it hurts. You know, I think it might help. Would I rather that it didn't appear? Yes, I would rather it didn't appear.

L.G.: Is that not the image that you want to project for that property?
 
I.S.: Yes.
 
L.G.: No fistfights in the bar.
 
I.S.: No, it has nothing to do with fistfighting. Maybe if I were younger, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, maybe I would've been okay with it. But at this point in my life, that kind of thing, I think, is a little bit beneath my dignity, and the dignity of the hotel.
 
L.G.: You're getting more into dignity now as time passes?
 
I.S.: [Laughs] I was always into dignity. I just never talked about it!

L.G.: You've had an amazing run. You've lived at least three lifetimes, haven't you?
 
I.S.: Maybe more.
 
L.G.: Maybe more than that. Just because there's a bit of confusion in my mind about your projects versus Morgans [the hotel group Schrager left in 2005], and they're often conflated in recent press accounts, can you just take me through them? I mean, obviously, 40 Bond Street, One Madison- 

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