WHEN the death notice appeared in the newspapers - 'Gordon Richard Huthart, 45, passed away peacefully' - hundreds if not thousands of people across the territory surely must have felt sudden prickles of remembrance and said to themselves, 'So that's what happened to him'.
It was Huthart's first newspaper appearance in more than six years, but there was a time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was scarcely out of the headlines: the youngest son of a prominent local family; jailed for his homosexuality; creator of Lan Kwai Fong's now legendary first nightclub, Disco Disco. Between December 1978 - when, aged 28, he opened Disco Disco - until the start of the '97 group with the opening of the 1997 Cafe in 1982, Huthart reigned as the unchallenged king of Hong Kong night life.
And then he dropped out of the limelight to become, in his last few years, almost a recluse until, 15 months ago, terminal cancer of the oesophagus was diagnosed. At his wake, held in stately splendour in the Mandarin Hotel last week, guests nibbled on canapes and politely sipped their mineral water. His family, the wealthy Huthart clan, whose patriarch, Robert Senior, who is credited with building up the Lane Crawford empire during his time there between the mid-60s to the mid-80s, were there and a handful of older expatriates representing old Hong Kong families. There were half a dozen handsome young Chinese men, former employees of Disco Disco, and a dozen mainly expatriate fortysomethings in suits, a university lecturer, a recruitment specialist, a entrepreneur, who had once partied at the club.
More than one asked the organiser, Dick Kaufman, what they were doing celebrating the life of Gordon Huthart in such restrained fashion. Wasn't he the man who encouraged unrestrained self-expression, endless dancing and held such outrageous parties? That was then, Kaufman pointed out. By the time Huthart died, he had settled down into a domestic life once scarcely imaginable.
It is also hard to image just what a breakthrough Disco Disco represented. Not just the only place to go because it was cool, it was quite literally the only place to go for nearly four years. Nightclubs in Hong Kong - all in Kowloon - had been of the padded seat, glass-topped table variety. 'The kind of place,' remembers Kaufman, who worked at Disco Disco as a creative director, 'where you didn't want to stand up because some attendant would rush over and demand what you wanted to drink.' Huthart wanted to create something much like the discos he had loved as a student in San Francisco, somewhere where everyone danced and the walls were sweaty. There were to be no padded chairs, no obsequious waiters; the 5,400-square feet space was designed for 'cruising'. 'You could look for your friends all night and still never find them,' says Kaufman.
It was a bold concept, made bolder by the fact that Huthart selected for his location D'Aguilar Street, then home to a few grubby garment stores. 'It was a garbage heap,' says his brother, Bobby, who now runs his executive recruitment agency from offices overlooking the street, 'and my brother had all these expensive cars pulling up outside and society people waiting to get in. He had a line stretching down to Queens Road.' Six months on, Disco Disco was heaving seven days a week with every glamorous face in town, from Canto stars to artists, Westerners, locals, rich kids and porters. Visiting celebrities like Rod Stewart and Calvin Klein dropped by. If you had the right look, you were in, and that look included 'the full demographic span,' according to Kaufman.