A Three-Year Breather in New York
With such a cancer scare, Geffen decided it was time to slow down. “I had had enough at that moment,” he said later. He felt the need to get away from it for a while. He spent three years in New York. By day, he taught and lectured on business; by night he would frolic around with Calvin Klein and others from the Studio 54 crowd.
David Geffen, Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Steve Rubell, Nan Kempner, and Fernando Sanchez at Studio 54 on September 20th, 1978. Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd. / Ron Galella Collection / Getty Images
By 1980, he was ready to make a comeback, with a new label: Geffen Records. The people he used to compete with in 1970 when he started Asylum Records were still around but considerably older. “I was still pretty young,” Geffen recalled. “I thought, ‘If I could do it then, I can do it now.’”