Thirteen-year-old Ben Stiller’s disguise to get into New York’s infamous Studio 54 nightclub was surprisingly unsophisticated.
Stiller shared stories on NPR about his and his sister’s childhood escapades whenever their famous parents were away performing their “Stiller & Meara” comedy act. One story revealed the outfit that got him admitted to the storied celebrity haunt “a few times.” Stiller told Terry Gross on Fresh Air, “My sister started going to Studio 54 when I think she was, like, 17 and I was 13. And she would take me to Studio 54 with her friends and they would sneak us in.”
“They put me in a yellow and green polka-dotted Fiorucci shirt,” an “army jacket, and these Mickey Mouse sunglasses. And they put this outfit on me and we went up and [the bouncer] Mark saw us and he pointed to us and said, ‘Come on in.’ And we were in. And that happened a few times. So I think I was 13.”
Stiller, who directed Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, a documentary about his comedy-legend parents, said Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, would leave him and his sister with their nanny when they were away performing. “It was kind of like a free-for-all a little bit when we were on our own,” Stiller said.
Another of Stiller’s stories from the time period included the first time he took LSD. It was “when my parents were out doing The Love Boat once,” he said. “I was the guy who called his parents on LSD. I called them up in L.A. because I was scared. I was having a bad trip,” he explained.
“My mom got really mad at me. And my dad was actually much nicer and kind of tried to help talk me down. And he said, ‘I understand what you’re going through. When I was 11 years old, I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and I was sick for two days.’”
And I was like, ‘No, Dad, you don’t understand. I don’t understand what reality is.’ But he was great. He was actually great about it.” Still, Stiller said, he learned his lesson enough never to indulge the drug again. It was the only time I ever did LSD,” he concluded.
