Burt Rubin page 3

MG: Tell me more about Studio 54.
BR: It was a dream. I was involved with very hip people at the time, EZ-Wider was pretty well known, particularly in New York. So I was open to go anywhere I wanted, you know, and fair weather friends, quick and easy. I lived with a model, a couple of times, different models. One Ford, one Wilhemina. I've been fortunate, I've been lucky, all my life I've been lucky. I could have been born in Russia during pogrom time.
MG: What do you do after you sell the company? You've got 3.1 million...
BR: You pay the government. I bought a home up in Connecticut and I decided to start learning how to ride horses, do a lot of travel and rebuild this house. I bought an ugly duckling and turned it into a swan type of thing. And I was working on trying to find businesses. I basically liked the action of business. I think there's a certain edge to it and a gambling to it and so I searched and I saw some articles about Halley's Comet. It was supposed to return in November of '85. When it returned in 1910, the sales of telescopes were astronomical--they sold every piece of glass they could get. And I thought that there was an opportunity to buy telescopes and develop a consumer brand name like I had done with E-Z-Wider. And I liked making really good products. I had worked at E-Z-Wider with this senior designer engineer from Polaroid Corporation who knew optics and design. So he also did the telescope which we named the Halleyscope in honor of Edmund Halley, the person who predicted that the comet was going to be sighted, died before the comet came and then the comet showed up just as he had predicted. Edmund Halley was one of the true renaissance men.
We made a very small, very portable telescope that could also be attached to your camera and become a super-telephoto lens, 600 to 2400 mm. The Halleyscope was sold in Sears, Roebuck, J.C. Penney. It got all kinds of write-ups, all over, about the quality. It was considered a best buy in Consumer Digest. I sold 75,000 telescopes. That's a lot of telescopes. They retailed about $199 dollars.
MG: You were way ahead of the curve when it comes to the importance of branding and marketing.
BR: Yeah. Well that's because we've been so branded. We're the branded generation. The Marlboro Man, Anacin, McDonald's, Pepsi-Cola, or EZ-Wider, there's always a brand.
MG: Part of the myth of this generation is that they rejected branding as kids. But suddenly 1978 comes and they're all wearing Calvin Klein jeans.
BR: People go to one way, and then they come back a little bit.
MG: What happens to this company?
BR: We had a lending agreement and just before the comet was supposed to return in April, a bank pulled the plug. The company just went down. I sued the bank as a side action and I prevailed over the bank. I had signed my house away in Connecticut to them and I personally guaranteed everything. That's an entrepreneur, I believe in what I do. I didn't go into bankruptcy but it created havoc for me. I had to retrench completely.
MG: What did you get out of it?
BR: That the law works very, very slowly and it costs a lot but in the end there's a lot of justice. You just have to be in a position to be able to finance that justice. I put 2.5 million dollars into that piece. All my returns from E-Z-Wider plus.
MG: Any other ill effects?
I got very sick. I overdid it, I became weird, paranoid. I joined Cocaine Anonymous, about the same time that everything seemed to fall apart, '85, '86.
MG: Did your sordid past as a rolling paper magnate have anything to do with the bank's turning against you?
BR: No. Nothing whatsoever. I'm a businessman. People know, you can't build a business selling 78 million of something and have 250 employees without being reasonably organized and have something together. It was just a business like somebody sells washers, someone else sells packaging.
MG: Does your lifestyle change again?
BR: Yeah, rapidly. My travel slowed down tremendously. And the style of travel changed. I start doing more reading into certain areas of different religions and Buddhism and things. Some deaths happened, some friends start dying. People I know--all younger than 50. So every one of those is untimely. I'd had a charmed existence. I didn't know it.
MG: As early as the mid-70's, a lot of people our age began to turn to cults, to est, primal scream therapy. Here you are 10 years later, you start reading about religion. Is there any parallel there?
BR: No, no, I think it came out of the stars experience, out of my sense of the distances of space and time. Talking about travel, go to the nearest star where they think there might be a planet, the travel time is 250,000 years. That's a long time. I had no idea what those numbers meant when I was in my 20's. And so that type of understanding starts to come upon me, and I want to look into it what's going on in the planet.
MG: ..You were exploring, not escaping...
BR: Absolutely. I wasn't escaping. I did my escaping. I didn't play when I was a teenager, I didn't play when I was in college, I didn't play afterwards. But when you're in Studio 54 you're a kid.
MG: Then came herpes and AIDS.
BR: AIDS had a big effect. It put a cover on everything. Put a fear on it.
MG: How did it change for you?
BR: I would wear condoms when I was sporting and not when I was in a serious relationship. And that's how it changed.
MG: Did you sport less?
BR: Yeah, but I don't know whether that has to do with the fact that I was then in my 40's. You know, men are blessed with that 25 to 35 year-old period where everything is fun and then·
MG: So what happens next?
BR: I'm looking around. I decided to work in real estate because I knew New York City quite well. I trained there and got my broker's license. Starting to make bucks. But I'm not closed in, which was the thing, and I started to work on a pen. The pen is called the Evo pen. E-V-O, for evolution, evolutionary. And it started with a finger callus which a lot of people have, which is nature's way of saying that something is going on. And it's nature's way of protecting the finger because otherwise it would go straight to the bone. I like creating a product and marketing products, that's what I like to do. I don't just learn about a little pens, I know the history of pens, I know how pens got started, what happened, where, what's going on. Pencil manufacture, I visit pen companies, I mean I involve myself in it. So I enrich myself tremendously by learning all these things.
MG: So you're making the money in real estate while designing this pen?
BR: Right. I joined another company, went to another firm. And then by 1991 I had enough money, and I got Evo Pen started. We start manufacturing in '93. We get all kinds of mentions and we do some advertising and whatever and we sell some 100,000 pens or more. The Museum of Modern Art must sell 8,000 or 10,000 a year. The Smithsonian Institution sells about 2 or 3 thousand a year, with their logo on them. And these pens are commended by the Arthritis Foundation.
MG: It's ironic that you're marketing pens just when personal computers take off.
BR: Yes. Yes. Stupidity. It could be. I had problems of distribution and financing and money. We ran out. I had to go back into real estate. But the pen business is still burgeoning. Booming. 5, 6 billion dollars a year in America. Retail pens could be worldwide 7, 8 billion dollars. I want 5 percent of the pen market. Worldwide pen market. Now it's going to take me time. And I may be totally nuts.
MG: Do you still smoke dope?
MG: There's a sense now among people our age that people who are still taking drugs seem really pathetic.
BR: And boring. Yes. Boring. Absolutely, boring. Just boring. It's all-consuming and it's boring. You're not very productive, you're not learning anything. You're not experiencing anything except that. understand that it's not good for you and that if you continue at that pace it's going to be one direction, down. Now, most people have what I call a flywheel. It takes a lot of energy to stop that flywheel but once it's stopped and it goes in the other direction, and it's moving bad in the other direction, before you get good things going, you got to stop that negative. I remember one time being in the program and this was when I was really early in it, I was maybe sober at the time seven or ten days, thinking that I could go to that club on 20th and 6th, the Limelight. At the time though it was quite a nice club. And one guy sees me and says, oh, I got some great something, and I go no, no, no, man, I'm sober. But a girl comes up and says, listen, I got some cocaine and I want to give you a blow job in the bathroom-and there you go. You slip. So you learn from that. You don't go there anymore.
MG: Did you find that being sober your life was less fun? Was it a loss?
BR: No, it was an experience. I felt the power of chemistry. Chemistry was controlling me and I was out of control. That's powerful. I think that put me on that spiritual study path too. I'm not a believer in God, I'm a believer in nature. And I believe that all smart men are of the same religion. They all have a certain understanding, the golden rule, do unto others.
MG: Have you been involved in philanthropy?
BR: I've loaned a lot of money to friends, I gave a lot of money to family. I donated a lot of money to museums. There's a big corner block at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine that I paid for. I've donated to a lot of Buddhist causes. For 10 years I've been making lunch for homeless at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine every 4th Sunday. There's something called New York Cares. My closest friend from college is the chairman. But when I was with E-Z-Wider, I donated money and helped out. That goes back to the Woodstock generation. I think the Woodstock generation has given a lot of pro bono, more so than most. I'm proud of the generation. I think they've done a good thing. I think they've worked hard.
MG: Have you ever gotten involved in politics?
BR: I vote. I've donated some money to different politicians from time to time. But I've never spent time.
MG: How have your politics evolved over the years?
BR: I've gotten more liberal. As long as somebody's not being harmed by something it's people's right to do what they want to do. I wear a suit and tie often now, okay? Now, a tie is worn with a shirt that has a collar. Dogs have collars and cats have collars. I have a tie that's around my neck. It may be beautiful and I get really nice ones, but basically it's society's thing about pulling you around by the neck and you're going to follow within the pattern. So in that way I'm more--not more conservative, more classical I would say.
MG: More willing to play the game?...
BR: More willing--no. I have to. I don't do it because that's the way I want to be.
MG: Do you have a sense of aging?
BR: Absolutely. You get aches and pains that you never had before. They come say hello and then sometimes you may not hear from them for 3 months and then they come say hello again. I go to sleep earlier and I wake up earlier. I can't eat all the foods that I once did. My metabolism or digestion has changed. But then again, in other ways, the experience has made certain things easier. Conditioning, knowing that the older I get the more exercise I need. So whereas 7, 8 years ago I had back problems and a knee problem, by staying in condition all the time, I have no problems. You want to climb a mountain tomorrow? Yeah. So I'm in better shape than I was 10 years ago. I want to do whatever I want to do when I want to do it. I like to be active. I like to ski, I like to ride horses, I like to climb mountains. I like to do bike. And being physically free is very important to me. Maybe I'm trying to fight the eternal fight for youth. My neck is getting a little fatty-- whereas once I always condemned plastic surgery, I'm starting to think, well, just the neck, okay.
MG: Do you fight the good fight right up until the last?
BR: Yeah. Absolutely. I don't ever want to retire. I will never retire. I can tell you that. As long as I can blink one eye to give you information. One blink is yes and two, no.

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