Paradise Lost

Once It Was the Seventies and We Were Young and Beautiful, Much As You Are Now

Dear Friends,

It seems to be ‘70s Week at The Republic of Letters — and the larger-than-life Andy Romanoff is able to share a story that is, like, the quintessence of the ‘70s.

-ROL

PARADISE LOST

To me, it still felt like the sixties. Money and drugs flowed freely, there didn’t seem to be any price for unlimited sex and I was still looking for a party. Jerry Brandt came to LA promising to supply one.

Jerry Brandt

Jerry was a hotshot wheeler-dealer out of New York. He’d been a star agent at William Morris, repping the biggest names in the music business before starting The Electric Circus, a seminal NY nightclub. Now he was in L.A. looking for something new to do.

Jerry had convinced a shady millionaire, a guy named Bernie Cornfeld, to invest in a new club called the Paradise Ballroom, an orgasmic dance hall, a vision uniquely suited for L.A. … even though his friends told him no one in L.A. danced. But Jerry believed in his dreams. If you listened to him as he spun the tale it was easy to believe the club was destined to be a big success. So Jerry’s Paradise was taking shape in West Hollywood, in a large old factory building, originally the home of the Mitchell Camera company.

His earlier dream, the Electric Circus had been a far-out entertainment experience located on St Marks Place in the East Village. With fire eaters and mimes, a resident astrologer, a cast of hippie scenesters in flowing gowns, and rooms filled with psychedelic experiences, people had flocked there. But Jerry had partners and when his relationship with them turned south he took his winnings and headed for the door. This new place, The Paradise would draw from ideas that had worked at the Circus, only more. It would be non-stop entertainment, a rock palace cum dance hall cum freak show, cum theater cum sook.

But first, he had to build it. Jerry spent Bernie’s money lavishly, turning the old factory building into something newly magical. The floor, made of thousands of woodblocks, was sanded mirror-smooth and painted a shiny, glossy black. High overhead, a gigantic color organ invented by Don Buchla, of synthesizer fame made ever-changing patterns of light that exploded across the room. The Buchla light machine was a hand-built computer sending signals to a distributed network of twenty nodes, scattered all across the ceiling. Each was sent data that caused a color wheel to turn in front of a lamp and the colored light they generated was optically distributed through hundreds of fiber optics strands that hung everywhere over the floor. The strands from the nodes were woven together in complex patterns so that as the music played tiny pinpoints of ever-changing colored light flowed and swayed over the dancers. This is 1972 for god’s sake! Distributed networks, fiber optics, synchronized colors flowing, forget about it. Nobody was building things like this except Buchla, it was a wonder to behold.

I was there helping this all take shape, hired to work on the sound system by Stan Goldstein of Woodstock fame. We spent our days building a large distributed sound system with tons of speakers hung up in the gloom. It created a pulsating wall of sound you could feel everywhere. There was cocaine and speed, of course, regular supplies to keep the workforce working, so days stretched into nights without notice and it took a few weeks to realize that the paychecks had stopped coming. At first, it was just a glitch, they said, and Jerry would peel off a couple of hundreds to anyone with a rent problem, so it was easy to eat the takeout food that kept arriving, snort up a few lines and keep on wiring. But after a while, it became apparent that money was not flowing our way anymore. Stan, who was living with his wife and tiny baby at the Tropicana Motel, the baby sleeping in a box in the closet, decided it was time to take action and he gathered a bunch of us to take our case to Bernie.

Bernie Cornfeld

Now Bernie lived in a gigantic mansion in Beverly Hills. He had his own private procurer, David the Pimp, and he moved through life surrounded by flocks of beautiful young women. Bernie had built a business worth billions, scammed it when the markets turned against him, managed to keep millions of other people’s money as his investors lost their shirts, and finally, when it was over he had escaped to a life of pretty people, mansions, and parties. Bernie floated through life with a smile on his face. Surely he wouldn’t object to paying his honest workmen.

So Sunday morning we drove up to Bernie’s house, probably ten of us, and parked in the driveway. We rang the bell and after a time David came rushing out to see what was going on. When we told him that we hadn’t been paid and we wanted Bernie to fix things he erupted at us shouting, “This man is a king! This man is doing you a favor letting you work on this! How dare you come to his house to bother him” … and besides Bernie wasn’t there at the moment. Bernie was at Hugh Hefner’s house and couldn’t be bothered. We told David we would wait until Bernie returned, and after more threats and abuse that’s what we did.

By the time Bernie returned, Jerry was there too and after yelling and disagreement and the threat of work coming to a stop, Bernie grudgingly promised to move some money come Monday, so the work went on.

The Village Voice had running coverage of the story

Even with the hiccups, the Paradise was really taking shape now. Every day, Nick Casey, Jerry’s talent coordinator was busy auditioning acts for the promised non-stop entertainment. Jugglers, circus acts, magicians, and more paraded in to show Nick their wares. The house band was the then-unknown Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (before they become Oingo Boingo and Danny Elfman). Tere were beautiful women whose only job was to be revealed by spotlights. There was stuff! For the opening, Jerry was bringing in a Hog Farm bus and Wavy Gravy. The Hog Farm was going to fly Rex the Wonder Dog on a wire over the audience and oh wait, there was also going to be a dance marathon except dance marathons were illegal now so it had been rejiggered as an endless dance contest with filmmaker Bob Greenberg as a rollerskating referee…don’t ask.

In retrospect, it seems to me we might have been lost souls searching for our missing vision of the sixties, an early manifestation of the Eagles’ “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969” understanding. But at that moment we were without the understanding, only the experience.

Opening night. The Freep was there.

Finally. Opening night. We are ready. Almost. The sound system is pumping Tiny Dancer, colored swirls of light are pulsing to the music overhead, guests are assembled outside. it’s a big Hollywood crowd, one filled with celebrities. A marching band is playing in the street, the ballroom sits waiting, it’s time to open the doors … only the stage lights aren’t finished. Chip Monck, the voice of Woodstock, the lighting designer of Woodstock is still scrambling from fixture to fixture, sweating and aiming and focusing as the crowd grows restive outside. An endless hour passes with police cars and bullhorns and tempers rising until finally, the doors swing open, the crowd pours in, the dancing and drinking and roller skating referees begin. Paradise is open and there’s a party going on.

In truth, I’m detached from the party. For me, it’s about the building of something, the making of a thing. I always preferred backstage to front of house and tonight is no different. I wander around on the floor, check out the action, then climb back up into the booth where I can watch the partygoers from afar. I was always more a carney than a mark.

***

I had no idea I would learn to admire some things about Jerry, only the knowledge that I needed more than memory to write this story. It was Jerry’s obituary that brought him back to my consciousness after fifty years. Reading it, Jerry and the Paradise Ballroom floated into my mind and I heard murmurs of stories that wanted to be told. Writing down the first words it became clear I needed more than memories to bring the place to life so I Googled my way through a long afternoon looking for traces of its existence. There was practically nothing. Remembering the shifting color ceiling I found remnants of Don Buchla but no mention of his color organ, only his synths, Nick Casey, lost from collective memory too. I’d have called Stan Goldstein but I already knew he was gone.

Thinking of Stan though, I remembered that I had been with him at the end and that, afterward, I had been one of the people who helped empty his apartment. One of the few things I had taken away that day was a brown file folder filled with photos, newspaper clippings, and a few documents, Stan’s savings from the Paradise. Leafing through them brought the ballroom fresh to my mind again albeit with a hundred new questions.

Searching further I found that Jerry had written a book called It’s a Short Walk From Brooklyn — If You Run. I ordered a copy, planning to read only the part about The Paradise but then I read the first few words, a forward by Andrew Loog Oldham and I knew I had to know more. Here’s what he wrote “…There is a profound difference between a hustle and a scam. A scam may pay the rent in the present but denies the future. The ideal hustler and his hustle live simultaneously in the past, present, and future informed by a calm like wisdom. And with that in mind, I give you Jerry Brandt…”

You can get my attention any time with words like that. It turned out we had things in common from the first page. Missing fathers, beautiful mothers, their subsequent marriages for the wrong reasons, our dislike for the men they married, our growing up in the streets. I was entranced. I kept reading and eventually, I got to the Paradise ballroom. Jerry had given it only a page or two, a short chapter in his life, one that didn’t merit much telling. In his version, Bernie is a swindler but Jerry makes a deal with him anyway because Bernie has the money he needs. Bernie gives him $250K, Jerry puts up 50K, they build the joint, it has a smash opening night but then no one shows up after because with convicted felon Bernie as a co-owner there is no way to get a liquor license. Also, they charge a four dollar entrance fee which no one wants to pay. Yeah maybe.

Whatever the reason, the difference between opening night and the nights that come after is astonishing. Opening night Paradise was awash with celebrity, beauty, and money. Everybody partied late, danced hard, promised much. The next night, crickets. No one came in, I mean no one. It is beyond understanding. Jerry sits on the rooftop with Sly Stone saying I might as well jump off now. He splits for the desert and Bernie takes over. He puts David the Pimp in charge, then his mistress. It doesn’t matter. All the hype, all the noise, all the good intentions. Nothing. Paradise is over.

***

I like to think of myself as streetwise and knowing. I guess in some ways I am. but Bernie and Jerry were playing at a level I hadn’t even glimpsed. Bernie made his fortune by fleecing people with a company called Investors Overseas Services. Well, maybe not fleecing exactly. Like any good hustler, Bernie had believed in his hustle, and for the years it was making money he’d been ok. When the game went south though, Bernie had gone from hustler to scammer to keep his lifestyle afloat, turning IOS into a Ponzi scheme. And while that was happening, an even slicker scammer, Richard Nixon pal Robert Vesco had taken Bernie for a $500 million ride. These guys didn’t play around. Now, with the lawyers and courts behind him, Bernie was adrift in Beverly Hills, plenty of women and money, but no juice, no action. Bernie was looking for a play.

Jerry was hustling for love. He had married a beautiful actress, Janet Margolin, but Janet had left him and New York. Jerry, determined to keep her, had followed Janet out to L.A. and pitched Paradise to Bernie for the money. But in his heart, it was a play to bring Janet back to him and everyone knew it.

The way Jerry tells it, the problem with Paradise was Bernie but I think the truth was more about something he wrote after sleeping with Janet the night of the opening, “She was a conquest, this upper West Side girl, an intellectual and a great cook. But it didn’t turn me on. I was upgrading myself, and once I got her the chase was over.” Maybe true, maybe not all the truth, Jerry was born to hustle and he loved to win, but not just at love. Jerry believed he could storm L.A. like he had stormed New York. When the doors opened to an empty street he knew he had bet a loser and it was time to bail.

So Jerry stopped hustling as soon as the joint opened and Janet was bedded and Paradise withered away. To me at the time, the problems looked solvable, just a few more dollars, just a little more hustle but I was not on the inside game. Bernie was done playing, Jerry was done playing, the life-force that underlay this reality had moved on. We stayed open for a few more weeks, the money stopped flowing again, I ended up taking an expensive amplifier, a Crown DC 300, and a big spool of multicore wire to even things up and later I sold them to Frank Zappa’s manager. Paradise was over.

***

Bernie floated until he died, Jerry hustled, again and again, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, eventually losing everything to Covid. Me, I learned a little as I went along, and without their sharp natures keeping me too focused on winning I’ve had a good life. I got to live here in Paradise, getting older and maybe beautiful, and I get to tell you these stories.

Andy Romanoff tells stories at Stories I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

All the pictures for this story have come from Stan Goldstein’s archives.