Raised Rent Spells End of the Rainbow

It was a place so classy, Keith Richards wore a necktie.

A place so full of stars, that one evening Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra came separately for drinks, and the maitre d’ sat them next to Bob Hope at Rosemary Clooney’s wedding.

But on Saturday night, the Rainbow Room danced its last dance.

For the first time since a major remodeling in the 1980s, there won’t be a stroke-of-midnight conga line snaking through the club on New Year’s Eve.

“It’s on to someplace else, I guess, which is sad, because it was such a classy way to start the year,” said 33-year-old Caroline Capelli of Cleveland, whose Dec. 31 visits to the Rainbow Room were the centerpiece of her family’s winter trips to New York.

Last week, even Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter dropped by for a couple of martinis and one last dance.

After 64 years, the gilded, glass-walled supper club that boasted breathtaking views from the 65th floor of the old RCA Building, high above the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center, closed because of a dispute over a new lease.

“It’s very sad, very nostalgic,” said Dale DeGroff, the club’s longtime head bartender.

“It’s been a great run here,” he said wistfully, a few days before the closing. “Anybody you can name has been up here.”

Since 1985, Tishman Speyer Properties, the co-owner of Rockefeller Center, has leased the landmark place to Joseph Baum and David Emil. They spent $20 million to update its look and emphasize its 1930s glamour, and made the restaurant the second-highest grossing eatery in the nation.

But when the Tishman group sought to raise the rent from $3 million to $4 million a year, and to update the room’s image, the partnership bowed out. The sticking point was that the new agreement would not allow for a rent reduction in case the economy soured.

The new leaseholder is the Cipriani family, which plans to open a smaller space similar to Harry’s Bar in Los Angeles, which the family also owns, and turn the rest of the multiroom complex into private banquet rooms.

There was no comment Sunday from representatives of the Cipriani family; calls to other New York restaurants operated by the family were not returned.

More than its decor, the fancy cocktails, world-class food and entertainment, the spectacular view was what kept them coming in.

That view includes the Chrysler Building to the east, the Empire State Building due south, Central Park straight north, and farther off to the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge.

“It’s magical up here,” said Bismark Irving, the club’s head maitre d’. “It’s very theatrical. Every night is a gathering of New York’s finest people.”

And the stories . . .

Of the night President Clinton danced with actress Rita Moreno and said it fulfilled a lifelong dream. Remarked Moreno to the nearby first lady: “Sorry, Hillary.”

Of the night Rolling Stones guitarist Richards put on a tie to see Marianne Faithful perform. The tie lasted until the middle of her show, when he tossed it onstage and broke into a frenzied dance.

Of Sinatra, passing through one evening several years ago with his entourage, and demanding that a bar be set up by his table so his own man could mix his drinks. Nothing complicated. “Jack Daniel’s, with a couple of drops of water,” DeGroff remembered.