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Susanne Bartsch HAPPY VALLEY

The makeup guy is a total absolute geeenius. Just look at the way he swoops and orbits around her pale, narrow face—a surgeon with the glittery periwinkle eyeliner, his hands seemingly laser-sighted as he carefully crimps a pair of very long, very fake eyelashes. Over the years, legions of theatrical boy-men have hovered over her face with their tiny wands and top-secret compacts, but she digs Bruce like no other. The man is a guru. A magician. With Bruce around, you would never guess that Susanne Bartsch is 55 years old and has, minus a brief hiatus to give birth to a child, been going out nightly for the past four decades. “Bruce, seriously, you are a total, absolute geeenius,” she says, sitting amid the shabby clutter of her apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. And then, into her cell: “Junior! Are you still there, Junior?” Junior is Junior Sanchez, the D.J., “an amazing person, very connected with Madonna, whom I adore.” Tonight is a Tuesday, the evening of Susanne’s party at Happy Valley, a club on East 27th, where she is trying to wrangle Junior to spin later. Consider it a testament to her prodigious hostessing powers that until recently, Happy Valley was a nocturnal no-man’s-land: desolate and struggling, not talked about by the people who talk about these things. Then Susanne decided to throw a party, something she hadn’t done since the late eighties. Suddenly, you started hearing the expectant murmurs: Susanne Bartsch—the fabled underground iconoclast, the promoter whose decadent nights cured New York of its post-disco hangover, the woman once anointed the “Pied Piper of nightlife”—had emerged from the exile of motherhood to indulge in a long-awaited encore. “Of course people are buzzing about Susanne,” says her friend Ian Schrager, the Studio 54 owner turned hotelier. “Throwing parties is in her DNA. She is a true icon of the night, someone who goes down in the nightlife hall of fame.” Getting ready for an event is, for Susanne, an event in itself: multiple phones ringing, music blaring, people coming and going as if moved through her apartment via conveyor belt. Rarely does anything go according to plan because rarely is there a plan to go by. Take Junior: He is supposed to spin later, but, then again, he was supposed to spin last week. “You better not be stuck in the stooodio with that bloody Shakeeera again,” Susanne scolds him over the phone. She is from Switzerland, ended up in New York by way of swinging London, and her Teutonic accent remains severe, every third word drawn out like a piece of taffy, something to savor and flaunt. As she speaks, in comes Charlie, her hair guy, who starts grafting a flowing black synthetic wig onto Bartsch’s head with the precision of a topiary artist. CLICK HERE FOR COMPLET TEXT BRUCE LINDSTROM    /     SUSANNE BARTSCH   /   NICKY LONDON     /    HAPPY VALLEY