Nell's place and what it says about New York.

• Author: Toynbee, Polly
• Position: Nell's nightclub

Nell's Place

The word is exclusive. If the street isn't packed with the desperate hordes of the excluded, then a nightclub isn't worth going to. And some of the excluded would rather die than be left outside. The week I was in New York, a 44-year-old man excluded from Rascals, a club on First Avenue, pulled a gun. The doorman shot him dead. It seems that half the fun of going to a top club is proving to your friends that you have the social pull to get in. It's referred to as table-power.

These are not kids' discos. These are not teenage groupies hanging around without the price of admission. These are grown men and women. They stand on the sidewalk behind the red velvet ropes and desperately shout at stonyfaced bouncers: "But I know the manger! He's my best friend!"

I know a man who went to a favored club with his wife. She was let in. He wasn't. When it came to the crunch, she couldn't bear to pass up the glory of sailing past the crowd and through those magic doors. So she left him outside, where, in an altercation with the doorman, he was clubbed on the head with a baseball bat.

Money and success are indivisible in New York. The allure of Manhattan has always exerted a strong pull on status-seekers. The nightclubs are where the stockbrokers, lawyers, hot journalists, television producers, and advertising executives come to "play." Native New Yorkers are rarely part of the crowd. Expatriots in their own country, the newcomers have a keener need to show attachment, belonging, knowledge of their whereabouts. "I was at ---- last night," "Have you seen the ---- exhibit?" are sentences uttered at cocktail parties in the same way other people, in other places, wear badges of honor. These activities are their proof of success. This insecurity pervades every aspect of their life, from their kitchen appliances to their VCRs to their automobiles.

In New York nothing is worth having unless it is hard to get. When everyone has so much money, it no longer counts for much. Scarcity value has to be created in other ways. Trends change faster in New York than anywhere else: the place to dine, the clothes to wear, the club to dance. When the historian R.H. Tawney mocked those who insisted on the freedom to dine at the Ritz, he hadn't considered the more complicated question of dining at The Odeon, Indochine, or Cafe Luxembourg.

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