The Studio 54 of Sex

Bettmann / Corbis From its nude Jacuzzi to the orgy-filled “mat room,” at Plato’s Retreat you could have sex next to Sammy Davis Jr., a porn star, or even a bus driver, writes Jon Hart, the director of American Swing.

It started with a cab ride on a frigid December afternoon in the West Village. The driver pushed on the gas pedal and proceeded west through the labyrinth of downtown streets. “We were degenerates,” he said in a hoarse voice. “But we were good people.”

Less than a decade earlier, the driver, Larry Levenson, had owned a large part of midnight. While CBGB was ground zero for punk and Studio 54 was the focal point of celebrity nightlife, Plato’s Retreat, which Levenson owned, was the first public swingers club. It was where celebrities like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Richard Dreyfuss—to name just a very few—partied alongside the everyman.

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By the time I met Levenson, it was a decade after the demise of his empire. He was resigned to life as a hack, trolling for fares. I was a young journalist pursuing a piece on cab drivers. I had never heard of him, but I vaguely recalled seeing his club’s commercials on public-access television as a youngster. As he picked up fares, I peppered him with questions. It was the first meeting in what would become a close friendship that lasted until the day he died. During these years, Larry disclosed to me a wealth of memories that would ultimately enable me to co-direct American Swing, the new documentary about his infamous club.

At Plato’s, clothing was strictly optional, Levenson told me that first day in the cab. There was a buffet, a game room, a dance floor, an enormous Jacuzzi, and a mammoth swimming pool. In the back, there were private rooms for intimate acts. And right off the dance floor, sectioned off with plants, was Plato’s piece de resistance: the mat room, where exhibitionistic couples engaged in group activity.

Richard Dreyfuss, who lived several floors above the club, took more interest in adult performer Jamie Gillis, male star of Deep Throat, than the cuisine.

It was a different era—after Woodstock, before safe sex. Times Square was a pit of vice. Elected mayor on the strength of an anticrime platform, Edward I. Koch had just taken office. On the conservative Upper West Side, across the street from Fairway, the city’s well-known gourmet supermarket, Plato’s became a phenomenon mere weeks after its September 23, 1977, opening.

Just a year earlier, Levenson was struggling to get by. Twice-divorced and unemployed, he was selling soft drinks and ice cream on the beach at Coney Island. One night at the Golden Gate Motel, a downscale pit stop in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, Levenson met Ellie, a very married, adventurous housewife, who introduced him to the neighborhood’s subterranean clubs, where couples arranged intimate encounters at alternate locations. Soon after this, Levenson had a eureka moment: He decided to host parties, where everything could take place at one venue. “I wanted to make things more convenient,” he explained. A caterer with organized-crime connections took notice of Levenson’s soirees and inserted his claws. “Right now you got a grocery store,” said the caterer, Frank Pernice. “I can turn it into a supermarket.”

Levenson took the bait, and moved his shenanigans to the Ansonia Hotel, a majestic building on Broadway that had formerly housed the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse where Bette Midler used to sing. For the Ansonia’s opening night, though, he feared no one would show because it was pouring rain. He prayed for a crowd, and when he opened the Ansonia’s door, Levenson viewed a mass of humanity that stretched around the block. “I cried,” he told me. “It was the happiest day of my life.” Not everyone was thrilled. Bacho, Plato’s DJ, was alarmed by the lascivious activities. “Bacho ran over to me. He could not speak. He just pointed to the mat room,” Levenson recalled. “He did not know what kind of club this was. He thought it was a plain disco and people were just gonna dance.”

Once inside, couples participated in an unspoken tango. “If you wanted to make it with somebody, you reached over and caressed their leg,” said Levenson. “If your hand was not removed and the leg did not move away, you knew you were in.”