HAPPY VALLEY
“Oh, Charlie, that’s geeenius!” And to Junior: “Promise you’ll be there? You will? Geeenius!”
The desire to throw a weekly party again first came on like an itch, a tickle of loneliness. It’s not that Susanne had disappeared from nightlife completely—there were fashion parties, Halloween balls, New Year’s Eve in Miami—but she hadn’t been a regular fixture in years.
“I missed being out,” she says, “missed seeing people.” There are more altruistic motives for her return as well: “The state of nightlife today, it’s dismal!” she says. “The clubs are soulless, dollar-driven. There is no energy, none of the mixing that I love.” She despairs of what’s become of her beloved nightlife, co-opted by post-frat players standing in line at Marquee with masochistically tweezed postpubescent girls. While she was gone, clubs morphed into slick terrariums of exclusion, segregated by who could access the VIP area, who was trust-funded or hedge-funded enough to drop $300 for a $15 bottle of vodka, who was moderately famous. It made Susanne depressed, which, as with any artist, is when creativity strikes.
She started wondering if she could re-create something like the venerated nights she hosted nearly twenty years ago, something like her notorious monthly Thursday-night party at the Copacabana, which is where you went to witness Marc Jacobs and Malcolm Forbes mingling in an undulating sea of trannie hookers and, as Susanne wistfully remembers, “a stripper who smoked cigarettes with her pussy.” Anita Sarko, a D.J. and onetime Copa regular, remembers Susanne as the ringmaster presiding over a lawless carnival: “She had a way of taking all these weirdos, giving them a place to congregate, and as a result she turned them into icons.” The parties were one of the reasons that Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, devoted a chapter of his book Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons From Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women to Susanne. “I used to tear up to the Copa after finishing the windows at the store,” he recalls. “She had another stripper named Lady Hennessey Brown who could lactate! It was fabulous! Susanne is really the first person to make sleaziness groovy. She’s a visionary that way, you know?”
By the early nineties, Susanne had carved out an eccentric niche for herself as the maternal figure to self-orphaned club kids living lives their real mothers didn’t understand. Then things got tricky. Susanne became a real mother herself. Among the bustle in the apartment is a precocious, curly-haired 11-year-old named Bailey, Susanne’s son with David Barton, her second husband, a man best known for a chain of gyms that bear a passing resemblance to his wife’s parties. Bailey was born in 1994, a year before the couple married in a Playboy-sponsored ceremony with Betsey Johnson and Ingrid Sischy among the 43 bridesmaids. It was then that Susanne retired from throwing regular parties: nothing formal, just a dignified fade from the scene. But Bailey is now a sixth-grader at St. Ann’s—mature enough that his mother doesn’t feel guilty leaving him with his longtime nanny on Tuesday nights when she undergoes her “transformation from housewife to glamourpuss.”
A few years back, HBO flirted with the idea of creating a reality show around Bartsch, her family, and her entourage of rakish groupies. (“Before The Osbournes,” Susanne likes to point out. “Before anyone, really.”) The show was nixed, but given the dizzying surrealism of the party preparations, it’s hard to understand why. Here comes Zaldy, her clothing guy, who lives downstairs and designs Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. collection. “Oh, this is going to look fabulous,” he says, showing Susanne tonight’s outfit: a green velvet maiden dress, baroque gold-plated belt, cast-iron unicorn pendant, burgundy leather lace-up stiletto boots.
And here comes David Barton, who has a bodybuilder’s spring-loaded physique and spiky, frosted bangs falling over his eyes like stalactites. “Rufus is doing really well at the gym,” he says as his wife gets dressed—Rufus being Rufus Wainwright, the singer. Though the couple seems perfectly matched—both are guided by instinct, both are fond of praising one another’s bedroom technique to near total strangers—the relationship hasn’t always been an easy one. In 1999, the two separated, their mutual obsessions with work not mixing with their outsize personalities; they reconnected in the wake of September 11. All has been congenial since, though Susanne still refuses to give Barton back his closet space.
As for Bailey, he used to find his mother’s fashion proclivities somewhat dismaying (“Bailey would say to me all the time that when I got into drag I looked oooogly,” says Susanne), but now he describes her as “funny” and leaves it at that. At present, he wanders over and slumps into the overstuffed couch, his feet propped up on the driftwood coffee table where Awakening the Buddha Within sits atop The Economist.
“Hi, darling. How was school?” Susanne asks, talking simultaneously to the club via cell: “Yes, Junior swears he is coming . . . ”
“I read a poem in class that everyone loved,” says Bailey. “The assignment was to write a poem that made no sense but had a deeper meaning. Mine was about death. It was very dark. It was called ‘The Upside of Saying Good-bye.’ ”
“Oh, that’s excellent, darling.” And then: “Hey, Zaldy? Can we make the hem shorter?”
Zaldy drops to his knees for some ad hoc alterations.
“The whole celeb thing is getting on my nerves. People don’t even care about the décor. You can give them a toilet—if there’s a celeb there, it thrills. I like Brad Pitt, but he’s not going to make my event, you know? "
“Mom?” Bailey jumps in, yawning, the time nearing eleven.
“Yes?”
“Permission to go to bed?”
“Of course, darling. Give us a kiss good night.”
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