NEW YORK — Mark Fleischman, the man who operated the favorite club of celebrities in the early 1980s at Studio 54, died Wednesday from assisted suicide. He was 82.
Fleischman had reportedly been in poor health for several years. He was unable to walk or take care of himself, according to the BBC.
After the first owners got sent to prison for tax evasion, Fleischman took over ownership in 1980 and managed the club until 1996.
“From the very first night we opened, in 1981, I was swept up in a world of celebrities, drugs, power and sex,” he wrote in a book, “Inside Studio 54,” that was released in 2017.
“Every night, celebrities and stunning women made their way through the crowd, up the stairs to my office to sip champagne and share lines of cocaine using my golden straw or rolled-up $100 bills.”
A former business partner, Daniel Fitzgerald, organized a “living wake” for Fleischman last week. He said he hoped his old friend would reconsider the assisted suicide.
“I thought maybe we could convince him not to,” Fitzgerald told the BBC. “We had a really nice party for him and a lot of his friends came, and everyone thought, ‘He’s going to postpone it a month and we’ll see what we can do’. But he was set on doing it.”
Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland. The Dignitas clinic near Zurich where Fleischman died opened in 2002.
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