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Every ballroom has a backdoor.
The hotel guests at Dream Downtown had suitcases, satchels and children piled up next to the check-in counter, waiting interminably for a chance at a room, and as they did swirls of fashionable men and women speed-walked by without a word or a look—they were headed to the last big event of the week, the after-party for Marc Jacobs and his spring and summer collection. The hotel guests ventured an occasional glace at the well-attired cohort with the mysterious wristbands, striding confidently toward the tucked-away area in the back, but mostly they slouched on pieces of luggage and scratched at purple eyes, unknowing of the scene unfolding out of sight.
They didn’t know that Madonna was around, that Mick Jagger was having a late dinner in a basement lounge, that Lindsay Lohan was bypassing checkpoints set up to prevent her entry.
Since its opening last May, the Dream Downtown has sprouted party spots so fast it’s hard to keep track of them. There is PHD—as in “Penthouse: Dream”—a skyborne glassy atrium with nooks for bottle service and a shrubbery-laden smoker’s deck. And there’s the beach, a sand-and-palm-tree stretch next to the pool. And because it’s not enough to put Malibu in Manhattan, there are two places you won’t find on the otherwise anything-but-inscrutable website: the pint-size, 100-capacity Electric Room and the Gallery at Dream. Mr. Jacobs, who closed this year’s Fashion Week with a Bob Fosse-inspired collection, was hosting the first-ever bash in the gallery space.
If you didn’t have a wristband you couldn’t come in, and a certain former actress couldn’t get one.
“Lindsay rolled in, and we had to tell all the security checkpoints that she’s not allowed into the Marc Jacobs party,” noted an employee working by the front door, as we stood having a cigarette.
“Because of last night?” we asked.
The evening before, Ms. Lohan had thrown a cocktail at a photographer at a party at the Boom Boom Room hosted by V magazine and noisily uprooted her large group—referred to as “The Family,” even if only her mother and brother were related—after a woman nearby stumbled into a table and gashed up her shoulder, bleeding all over the pristine leather couches.
“Yes,” the person at the door said.
Back at the party in the Gallery, Michael Pitt sat with Kim Gordon and Sofia Coppola, and Mr. Jacobs walked around introducing Dakota Fanning, the face of his campaign, to friends. Trays of Champagne whirled around us, and upon finishing one off a girl to our right let out a horrified shriek.
“We made eye contact and I was, I was … O.M.G.!” the girl said between fluttering breaths.
She had made eye contact with Ms. Lohan, who had somehow slipped into the party undetected, and beelined toward the roped off area in the back.
“Major security scandal,” the person at the door texted The Observer. “Mischa Barton, too. Someone gave her a bracelet.”
It was over soon enough. In came the guards, and a peeved Ms. Lohan stomped out as a rapt crowd lifted iPhones and iPads into the air to grab a picture. Ms. Barton, another starlet not as in demand as she once was, also ducked through the crowd, and then quickly disappeared. Mr. Jacobs, too—he left his own party before nearly all of his guests.
Where did they go? There was word of an after-after-party in one of the hotel’s many, many liquor-stocked appendages. Another gathering would be a valiant attempt to keep the diversion of Fashion Week going just a little longer.
“I was told they got her,” the friend out front texted, when she got word of Ms. Lohan’s exit. “What a mess.”
Soon enough we located the next party. It was in Electric Room, a tiny, subterranean, blue-glowing box with so few couches that everybody is always sitting next to everybody. It had been just over a week since we first stepped into Nur Khan’s brand new Britannia-inspired space, and with five drop-ins since then, it had begun to seem smaller. We made quite a few sightings in that time—Adrien Grenier, Mary-Kate Olsen, Shaun White, Ms. Lohan, Ryan McGinley, the requisite smattering of models, the requisite crew of men who walk the models arm in arm, the others whose visages flash in a strobe light just as they had the night before—and marked them in our note pad, many names popping up again and again, as if the ink had bled through the pages.
A certain name only appeared once. “Clear the tables, clear the tables!” a security guard bellowed suddenly. He was enormous and accompanied by six colleagues, forming a circle. In the center was a wiry man with full lips and a feline gait, a phenomenal power-feline gait. He was small but he walked like a god. He was Mick Jagger, and when he took his seat on a couch, the few dozen men and women in the room were stricken with fear, or awe.
What’s there to say to Mick Jagger? Nothing. To us, his presence alone trumped the entire spectacle that had unfolded all week—the fierce swagger of the runways, the string of late, late nights, the endless celebrity antics, all waved away like a cloud of cigarette smoke by the arrival of the man who, for us, seemed to have invented and destroyed it all long ago.
And he was surrounded by quite the entourage, giving the room almost a salon feel, or maybe a peek at the energy of Mick’s table at Studio 54 a few decades prior. They would have made quite a band, all of them. Directly next to him sat Daphne Guinness and her shock of white hair and shoes like Malaysian skyscrapers. And Courtney Love. And Owen Wilson (bongos?). And Ellen Barkin (tambourine?). And of course Ms. Lohan, who was sitting a bench over from Mr. Jagger—she was in that same seat the night before, when she recognized us as a writer, pointed at our heart and shouted “You!”
We thought to chat with Mr. Jagger, imagined what we might say, but there was to be “no satisfaction.” When Mick and his crew left, we did soon after, heading to the bar at Tom & Jerry’s to meet a friend. The bartender brought over our Budweiser, and pointed to our arm.
“What’s that silly wristband you got on you?” he asked.
nfreeman@observer.com // @nfreeman1234
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