How a New Nightclub Gets Hot : Stock Exchange Gets Ready to Cash In on the VIP Trade as L.A. Enjoys a Bull Market in After-Dark Entertainment

Top maitre d’s were the first to be told. Next in line were the fashion designers and art gallery owners, show-biz wheeler-dealers and gossip columnists.

Soon, it seemed that everyone hip and hot in Los Angeles knew about Stock Exchange, a nightclub still under construction whose word-of-mouth campaign was spread even more successfully than Ivan Boesky’s insider-trading tips.

It’s Most Faaaabulous

“I’ve had more people come up to me and ask ‘When is Stock Exchange opening?’ than I can count,” says Ron Arden, menswear director for the California Mart. “Even months ago, it was being touted as going to be THE most f aaaa bulous place of all.”

Hyperbole is as much a mainstay of the L.A. club scene these days as are Dennis Hopper, Bruce Willis and the pretty people dressed in their “white on white on tans.” But it’s no exaggeration to observe that long before its two-ton bronze doors swing wide Aug. 6, Stock Exchange was, and still is, the most talked-about, eagerly awaited hot spot in recent memory.

Why? The answer goes hand-in-hand with the way that fast-track L.A. life styles have changed from an early-to-bed-early-to-rise schedule to a 24-hour demand for entertainment. Yes, there were already some clubs, but no equivalents of New York’s exclusive, upscale, often elegant, always eclectic dance-until-dawn playgrounds.

What they did discover were so-called underground clubs that are “rammer-jammer type discos where the owners put three grand into the place to get the bar going, cram people in for 10 bucks a head, don’t care who or what gets in, walk away after three months with a pocketful of profits and then do it all over again in a new place under a different name,” says Henry Eshelman, Stock Exchange’s creative director, who cut his teeth at New York’s Studio 54, Tunnel and Palladium.

In the past two years, however, much has changed--thanks to the 1985 openings of three upper-echelon nightclubs whose reputations for arrogance are as carefully cultivated as their VIP-only guest lists:

- Helena’s, the membership-only celebrity hang-out at Lafayette Park Place where regulars like A&M; Records senior vice president Charlie Minor and Triad agent Rob Lee know that every dance is a career move next to Madonna and Jack Nicholson.

- Vertigo, the mecca at Olympic and Grand where even the stunning sometimes have to cool their heels outside, though never Mickey Rourke, Don Johnson or auto-racer Danny Sullivan (with Rogers and Cowan senior vice president Alan Nierob in tow).

- Tramp, the Beverly Center branch of the private London disco where the older and richer regulars come to catch up with the likes of Michael Caine, producer David Niven Jr. and Beverly Hills real estate salesman Stan Herman.

Heading to a club to “dance with the names in your Rolodex”--as one film producer refers to it--has really caught on as owners vie for the most fast-track, fashionable and just plain “fun” people that Los Angeles’ arts and entertainment industries have to offer. One of the most successful new clubs is the ethnic-inspired Flaming Colossus in a Masonic Temple Lodge at 9th and Bonnie Brae, whose priority guest list includes Allan Carr (one time trailing Tina Sinatra), furniture designer Harry Segil and director/writer Laurie Frank.

Others Opening Soon

And more are on the way. Le Mondrian debuts Piet’s Place on Aug. 14, the first supper club on Sunset Strip in 40 years, which is boasting live “New Wave vaudeville” entertainment, dancing and some clear space “to celebrate the return of intelligent conversation.”

And at the end of this year, restaurateur Francois Petit’s new club, F/X, will open at Olympic and Barrington, giving Westsiders an elegant supper club that, in his words, “celebrates Hollywood and the film industry itself” through an interior decorated with actual movie sets. As general manager of Rebecca’s and the West Beach Cafe in Venice, Petit will bring to the club a Triple A-list crowd of celebs, including best friend Dennis Hopper, Lee Majors and Sean Penn to hang out in the VIP room known as Le Privilege. “It’s going to be really wild,” Petit says.

With all this feverish, if not frenzied, activity from dark to dawn, L.A. club owners are in the midst of preparing themselves for some keenly competitive times ahead. As a result, they are having to refine their concepts in order to attract the “right people” and achieve the “right look” so theirs can become the “right club.”

The Trail-Blazers

Though Helena’s, Vertigo and Tramp were all trail-blazers that built their clientele slowly and only after opening their doors, Stock Exchange had the luxury of starting on its guest list as soon as 28-year-old developer Brian Potashnik bought the 1929 Pacific Stock Exchange building, in what was once Los Angeles’ financial heart, for $4.6 million in January, forked over an additional $2 million to make the 12,000-square-foot dance club and restaurant and assembled a team of contemporaries trendier than his button-down self. And before even beginning any blueprints, the staff had the advantage of looking at the city’s successful nightspots and choosing to incorporate the good, avoid the bad, and create the new.

That, undoubtedly, is why the club has been attracting so much attention even as the hammers still pound, the chain saws still whir and the dust still flies at 618 S. Spring St. “We’re such a locomotive going full-steam ahead right now that the other clubs are curious and nervous at the same time,” says executive director David Greenberg.

With such glamorous niceties as the sweeping marble staircase, stained-glass windows and tongue-in-groove hardwood floors already part of its trading floor, the stock exchange evolved into Stock Exchange as designers turned the solid-walnut trading booths into bars, the telephone stations along the wall into stand-up drinking areas and the mezzanine into a glass-enclosed restaurant in which head chef Mark Tydell will serve relentlessly chic “urban” cuisine like Sonoma lamb chili and Nepalese cactus salad.

“To develop our image, we first figured out what was the void,” says Greenberg. “So we decided to bring back an era of night life that had not been here since the ‘40s and the ‘50s--that elegance, that romanticism, that top-drawer quality which is something you can’t get in L.A. right now because the nightclubs are all just places where singles go and hang out.”

Still, Stock Exchange’s staff realized from the outset that even the most magnificent setting wasn’t going to be appreciated if no one saw it. So they embarked on months of what they now jokingly refer to as “hand-to-hand, kiss-to-kiss” meetings with people who make up Los Angeles’ spheres of influence. “Basically, we took advantage of L.A.’s small-town atmosphere and used a grass-roots approach the same way that someone would start up a tavern in the olden days,” says Greenberg.

Actually, their plan of attack was more worthy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than Joe’s Bar.

“We went to the people who drive the social life of this town--people like artist Richard Duardo, gallery owner Robert Berman, fashion designer Robert Tarantino,” says Eshelman. Tarantino even was enlisted to design the club’s uniforms (Marilyn Monroe halter tops for women and loose Nehru shirts for men). “And we would look them in the eye and then invite them to come to our club. And then we’d explain to them what it’s all about.”

The maitre d’s at all the top restaurants were targeted first, since patrons often ask them for after-dinner recommendations. Concierges at the luxury hotels were given special passes for VIP out-of-towners. Gallery owners and their star artists were invited to display work in the restaurant. Designers at the California Mart three blocks away were informed that fashion shows would be held every Wednesday. Record industry executives were given private tours of the sound system. And press kits were sent to all the major studios’ location directors.

Taking Reservations

The word began to move out and soon the whispers about Stock Exchange turned into a veritable shout. Next, the telephone lines began to hum as magazines, fashion designers, department stores and others called to reserve the club.

As of this week, 14 private parties are already planned, including Rolling Stone’s 20th anniversary bash (Aug. 13), the club’s pre-opening party hosted by Details magazine (Aug. 6), the official opening party hosted by LA Style (Aug. 8), a Prima Modeling Agency soiree (Aug. 20) and the City of Hope charity fund-raiser (Oct. 29).

“The boys were quite clever,” says Mario Tamayo, owner of Cha Cha Cha restaurant. “First, they knew a lot of people to begin with. And then they made the rounds and met a lot more great people and then invited everyone to have parties there. When everyone gets involved like that, everybody wants it to work.”

Eshelman says, with a sigh: “I must have gone to 15 million gallery openings and movie premieres in the last year.”

About the only group that Stock Exchange didn’t court, strangely enough, were L.A. celebrities. “If we’re hot, they’ll come to us,” says Eshelman regally.

The truth is that peppering a place with celebrities is no guarantee in itself of a club’s success. “You can’t put a bunch of celebrities in a room and suddenly have a hot club,” Greenberg says. But what the likes of Elton John, Harry Dean Stanton, and Nicolas Cage can do is help shore up a club’s image as the home of the hip. “Celebrities do make one thing happen: press coverage. The columnists pick up on someone being at such and such club. But not all celebrities are good celebrities,” Greenberg says.

“And,” says Eshelman, “having them around also breeds sycophants.”

Still, it’s hardly likely that Stock Exchange’s four-man door team is going to start turning away even the soap opera stars. In charge is Smoot Hull, a cherubic-faced transplanted Texan whose full-time job as director of guest services is to keep the club’s priority admittance list of “must-be-let-in” VIPs and to monitor who gets in and who stays out.

Realizing from the outset that exclusivity has become an accepted, even demanded, way of life at L.A. membership clubs, Hull and Eshelman together came up with a membership card system so complicated that even they can’t keep it straight.

“We have two different cards,” Hull begins to explain.

‘No,” interrupts Eshelman. “There are three cards.”

Their boss, Greenberg, starts to laugh. “Why don’t you say we have five cards and it means no one will be let in?”

Price of Membership

Planned for the present is a gold card that lets in “special friends” for free and another card that lets in “priority” people who still have to pay the as-yet-unfixed cover charge. Later, a third, platinum card will be issued to carefully screened members who have agreed to shell out anywhere from $500 to $1,000 annually, for which they get the run of the club, including a future, eighth-floor VIP nook known as The Boardroom.

What Stock Exchange hopes to do is to mix an eclectic crowd every Wednesday through Saturday night, like a bartender who knows what cocktail he wants to make but isn’t sure what ingredients he has. “You want to create happenings between people as disparate as an artist and a stock broker,” says Eshelman, who claims to have learned his mixology at the hands of the Studio 54 masters. “Considered on their own, they might not be as interesting as the interaction that would happen if you threw them together.”