Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  Actually, it was the cottage—the same one where Bergman and Rossellini kicked off their illicit affair. Some revelers could only wonder if Allan had told his guest of honor of the cottage’s illustrious history and Rudy had taken it upon himself to embellish the legend. Rosenman estimated the line outside the tiny stone house, now being used as Allan’s office, at twenty-five men. He peaked inside the door. Yes, Nureyev was on his back, his heels banging away on a Smith-Corona.

  “But that wasn’t so unusual,” says Rosenman. A few weeks earlier a similar orgy, with Nureyev as the object of too much affection, took place on Saturday afternoon at Bronte Woodard’s house on Mulholland Drive. Once again, the dancer showed immense decorum by using a guest cottage, not the main house, as the scene of his multiple quick-fire assignations.

  Since the cottage’s carpet was good enough for him, Nureyev had no use for the many mattresses that Allan, jokingly, had requested in return for admittance to Hilhaven that evening. The bed offerings, instead, ended up on the floor of Ingrid Bergman’s “barn,” the few pieces of furniture there having been pushed aside to turn the room into a venue for a veritable sports marathon. “There were all these young, hairless boys wrestling,” says Rosenman. “That’s how Allan had sex. He watched these guys wrestle.”

  Rosenman and others had a name for Allan’s young men. They called them the “fetuses.”

  It was, however, Nureyev’s far more famous physique that Allan chose to immortalize in his “Marvin” statue. No sooner did People magazine report the Russian’s modeling assignment than the Academy itself threatened Allan with copyright infringement, and within the week, assistants had no choice but to wield sledge hammers and reduce The Marvin to so much rubble for the Dumpster.

  A similar fate befell a much-beloved Christmas tree that Allan couldn’t bare to throw out. When he renamed it his “Easter bush,” that new moniker graced newspaper reports of a spring party at Hilhaven, and quicker than Rona Barrett could say “Passover seder,” the Beverly Hills Fire Department showed up to remove the dead-tree hazard from their fine city.

  Notable novelties appeared at other parties as well. At a birthday party for Elton John, Allan made a present of a pony that he’d rented for the evening. “There was something about ‘being hung like a horse,’” Alice Cooper recalls. The horse gag played well at the party, and everyone had a good laugh when Allan paraded the pony around the pool, which had been outfitted with several mermen. The full extent of the joke, however, eluded the birthday boy, and the following day, Elton John sent an assistant to Allan’s house to collect the gift, only to learn that the horse had already been returned to its stable in Beach-wood Canyon.

  “Elton John was probably expecting Secretariat,” says Alice Cooper. “Elton John was the kind of guy who once gave Rod Stewart a Rembrandt for a birthday present.”

  Where the rocker’s generosity knew no bounds, Allan’s did, because he was far from being a multimillionaire. While he spent lavishly on gifts, Allan expected gifts in return, and more than one birthday party degenerated into a tantrum when a much-anticipated present failed to arrive at Hilhaven Lodge. It wasn’t always easy being his friend.

  “There was the good Allan and the bad Allan,” says one of those friends, David Geffen. “He could be warm, loving, generous, larger than life. Or angry, unhappy, miserable, fucked up. You never knew which Allan you were getting until you got there.”

  In 1974, Allan wasn’t even a millionaire, despite all appearances to the contrary. It baffled some friends how Allan, in addition to his Hilhaven lifestyle, could afford a bigger hotel suite in Vegas than his client Ann-Margret. “But that’s the way he lived,” says ABC’s Gary Pudney. Or as his erstwhile client Joan Rivers put it, “He lived a big Hollywood life.”

  In time, Allan would figure out how to pay for that life.

  two

  Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Ambition

  Chicago Pizza Works and other product placements aside, Allan needed vast infusions of cash to keep himself, Hilhaven Lodge, and his perpetual parties going at hyper speed. Ten percent of what his stable of stars made was hardly enough, especially when his number-one client, Ann-Margret, suffered from that near-fatal twenty-two-foot fall onstage in 1972. It put her career on hold, and while she had scored two years earlier in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, playing the suicidal sex object Bobbie, her film work since then languished. In fact, the debit side of Allan’s ledger had grown so awash with red ink that it forced him to recall some party gifts to a few young friends.

  “One afternoon, there were all these fiesta-colored Honda Civics in the driveway at Hilhaven,” recalls Bruce Vilanch. One of Allan’s accountants sent the dire warning to Hilhaven that too many car payments were due, and it would be best for the many Hondas to be returned to the dealership. “And these surfers types could be seen marching angrily down Benedict Canyon Drive,” adds Vilanch.

  Returning a lot of used Japanese compacts put a tourniquet on the financial hemorrhaging, but Allan knew he needed more than a manager’s cut of his clients’ income. He needed a big piece of the producer’s pie. Due to his close ties to the world of rock ’n’ roll, Allan was one person working in Hollywood who knew all about the Who’s Tommy and how Aussie producer Robert Stigwood wanted to turn the rock opera into a movie courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

  It was Allan’s challenge to sell Stigwood on the all-American (by way of Sweden) Ann-Margret to play the mother of a blind, deaf, and dumb pinball wizard British boy, Tommy, to be played by the Who’s Roger Daltrey, who was exactly three years younger than Ann-Margret. She, in turn, would be Allan’s entrée to the financially rewarding job of promoting Tommy to the world. As Allan sold himself to Stigwood, “Columbia doesn’t have a clue how to advertise this movie.”

  By the time Columbia Pictures green-lit Tommy, the studio’s stock had hit a historic low of $1.50 per share, the result, in part, of producer Ross Hunter’s ill-fated attempt to turn Lost Horizon into a movie musical starring the non-singing actors Liv Ullmann, Peter Finch, and Sir John Gielgud, who played an Asian guru named Chang. In the wake of such a major misfire, Chemical Bank and Bank of America put a low-ball cap on how much Columbia could spend on any one motion picture: a paltry $3 million bucks.

  Stigwood’s right-hand man, Freddie Gershon, exhausted his goodwill whenever he tried to pitch Tommy by telling middle-aged movie VPs that the title character was a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who played pinball. Nor did it help when he switched the subject to the Who.

  “The What?” they asked.

  And even with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road topping the pop charts, the words “Elton John” left a void in most movie-exec eyes.

  Columbia’s new heads Leo Jaffe and David Begelman were equally skeptical of Tommy, but a Young Turk named Peter Guber, also freshly hired at the studio, championed the project.

  “Making Tommy was a nightmare from the time of its conception to the acquisition of rights to the casting to the financing,” says Gershon. A somewhat easier sell was Ann-Margret. Fiftyish moguls like Begelman and Jaffe had at least heard of her. It helped, too, that Stigwood found her manager intriguing. “Robert was convinced that Allan was indeed imaginative, creative, bombastic, passionate, and slightly demented,” says Gershon. Besides, “He needed someone to drive the studio and Peter Guber needed an ally.”

  While Allan promised Stigwood the immediate delivery of Ann-Margret, he hadn’t exactly informed his client of that decision. Like so many otherwise knowledgeable movie types, the actress claimed some ignorance of the Who’s platinum double-album Tommy, oft referred to as the first rock opera. “I’d only heard a couple of songs from the Who’s album and I wasn’t aware that the band had staged it as a play,” says Ann-Margret.

  The actress seemed a little oblivious of the project even when Allan broke the news that she’d won the coveted role to play a thirty-year-old rocker’s mother.

  “You just got the part of Nora!” Allan told her. “In Tommy!”

/>   “What?” she asked.

  “It’s the rock opera. By the Who. It’s the hottest script in town.”

  She wasn’t so sure. In addition to the music, Ann-Margret drew a blank on the movie’s director. “She had never heard of Ken Russell,” says her publicist, Bobby Zarem. The feeling, or lack thereof, was mutual. When Stigwood screened Carnal Knowledge for Russell, the director nodded his approval and then asked, “But can she sing?”

  By taking good care of Ann-Margret, Allan took even better care of himself. His 10 percent of her fee was insignificant compared to the six figures he would get from Stigwood to promote Tommy. “I’m going to make it an event!” said Allan. He and Guber joined forces to present a variety of marketing plans, and that included the winning “See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me” campaign that ultimately became the film’s big catch line. Allan also convinced the studio to feature Jack Nicholson, despite his playing only a cameo in the film, in all the electronic media. “Allan showed Columbia the route to market the film. It would be an emotional, theatrical experience. There would be a story, not just a record cut,” says Peter Guber.

  It impressed the powers at Columbia Pictures that Allan secured no fewer than five consecutive segments on the Mike Douglas TV show to feature Elton John, Ann-Margret, and Tina Turner in quick rotation. “It was unprecedented to get such TV coverage in those days,” said Warren Cowan, who handled publicity chores on the film. Mike Douglas would sell tickets to the masses, but he wouldn’t fulfill Allan’s greater goal: to make Allan Carr a legend. To take his “instant Elsa Maxwell” persona national, all he needed was a Tommy party venue to equal the size of his ambition.

  The film’s central imagery of a pinball arcade led Allan to visit F.A.O. Schwarz, the most magnificent toy emporium in the world. “But it was too obvious a choice for the opening-night party,” he conceded after one quick tour of the Fifth Avenue store. He dreamed of someplace special. For sheer size, he could never top Mike Todd’s opening-night party for Around the World in 80 Days, staged at Madison Square Garden on October 17, 1956. And for sheer class, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball set the standard for Manhattan elegance by cramming so many celebs into the Plaza Hotel’s ballroom that no one could remember the guest of honor (the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham). What Allan needed to promote himself, and Tommy, was a New York landmark that didn’t define the word “party” so much as defy it. Such a place would make his choice irresistible and, therefore, newsworthy. If Allan came up with the idea all by himself, others stood ready to take full credit.

  “Allan’s Tommy party in the subway was lifted from my What a Way to Go press party on the subway,” said Warren Cowan. In 1964, Cowan invited reporters to join the film’s cast—Shirley MacLaine and Gene Kelly included—to ride the subway to the World’s Fair in Queens, New York. The publicist claimed that he and Allan had discussed the logistics of that event when planning the Tommy party.

  Not everyone agrees. “Allan came up with the subway concept himself,” says Kathy Berlin, a Rogers & Cowan publicist. “We’d sit around and throw out ideas.” If Allan heard an idea he liked, he’d screamed, “Aaaaaaaaah! Get in the car. We’re going there.”

  That’s two versions of what happened. The third is more complicated.

  Since Allan held the reins on the entire Tommy promotion, he brought on a press agent to help him stage the monumental party. Enter Bobby Zarem, who had recently bolted Rogers & Cowan to start his own firm. While Allan earned upwards of $150,000 to create the drum roll for Tommy, he bestowed upon Zarem a rather slim slice of that sum—$5,000, to be exact—to help with more press-specific duties. Having repped Ann-Margret for five years, first at Rogers & Cowan and now at Zarem Inc., Bobby Zarem was well acquainted with the ways of Allan Carr.

  “When Allan hired me [in 1970] to do publicity for Ann-Margret, he made it a condition that I spend 50 percent of my time on him. Of course, Ann-Margret was paying 100 percent of the fee,” says Zarem.

  For the all-important Tommy party, Allan wanted to replicate the film’s anarchic mix of rock and opera. Opera is refined, rock is gritty. Opera is high culture, rock is low. The Tommy party must reflect these contradictions, Allan believed. “This was the days before the Internet and Entertainment Tonight,” says Freddie Gershon. One party could make a difference, if it were grand and special and outrageous enough to receive the media saturation of the day, which translated into articles in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the AP.

  According to Zarem, Allan left it to him to find the appropriate party place after F.A.O. Schwarz proved too ordinary. “There’s a scene in Tommy which is all white and glass and metal, so I went around town looking for a site that was white and glass and metal,” says Zarem, who discovered just such a place in the new subway station at Sixth Avenue and 57th Street.

  After long negotiations, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority signed off on the unusual project, a first in its history. In effect, Allan rented the new (and as yet, unused) mezzanine level of the subway entrance for his Tommy party. The affair would be catered with tables set up for 600 guests to dine and dance only one floor below the street and one floor above the active subway tracks. Allan dreamed of ornate candelabras and vast floral arrangements to give the cavernous space an intimate, romantic glow as hundreds of candle flames reflected off the glass and metal. “But the MTA stopped us there due to smoke inhalation,” says Zarem.

  There were other hitches, too. Angry at Zarem for having recently departed their company, Warren Cowan and his partner, Henry Rogers, bad-mouthed the renegade publicist by labeling the party-in-a-subway concept as “dangerous.” But to no effect. “Stigwood was already sold on the idea,” says Zarem, and wasn’t about to cancel what he knew would be a publicity-grabbing event.

  Stigwood made a huge donation to the Police Athletic League to help grease another New York City department, and from the time the premiere screening of Tommy ended at 8:30 p.m. until 9 p.m., the city’s finest made sure that all lanes of traffic on the Avenue of the Americas (aka Sixth Avenue) between 54th Street and 57th came to a halt as hundreds of invited guests traipsed from the Ziegfeld Theater to the subway, a red carpet protecting their high heels and patent-leather shoes from the street grime. One hundred cops on horseback also ensured their safety so that the hoi polloi wouldn’t disturb the first-nighters on their pilgrimage northward. Allan prayed for mild weather and got it on the night of March 18, 1975. Any cold wafts coming off Central Park failed to disturb the phalanx of formally attired partygoers, and even the occasional horse turd steaming in the gutter only added to the overall sense of displaced, antic fun.

  “Everybody thought it was the greatest goof of all time,” says Gershon. “This was a crowd that ranged from the carriage trade society and the press mixing with rock stars and movie folk. But many of them had been to see the Cockettes and had gone to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Anything avant-garde was very de rigueur for them. And Allan tapped into all of that.”

  Most relieved among the first-nighters was Peter Guber, whose head had been stewing in the Tommy pressure cooker for months. The dailies on the film confounded Begelman and Jaffe, who complained that Ken Russell’s bizarre visuals didn’t add up to a conventional narrative. “I was having sphincter arrest for weeks before Tommy was released,” says Guber. Then he heard the opening-night ovation at the Ziegfeld. “I was so relieved, like I’d taken a giant Percodan.”

  It was a happy audience that left the theater to make a three-block journey up Sixth Avenue and down one flight of newly cemented, not-yet-filth-encrusted steps into the subway mezzanine, where an eight-foot long Tommy sign fashioned from 3,000 cherry tomatoes, radishes, cauliflowers, and broccoli greeted them. When someone asked Allan why all the vegetables, he shot back, “Didn’t you see the movie?”

  Guests expecting the usual garbage-urine odor inhaled instead the fresh construction smell mixed with the perfume of thousands of fresh-cut flowers. “Forty thousand dollars
worth of flowers!” Allan announced.

  The Tommy invitation requested “black tie or glitter funk,” and in the definitive words of Women’s Wear Daily, the subway that evening showcased every look from “terrific to terrible.”

  Allan made sure that no one ate the vegetable signage by offering a buffet comprising 50 pounds of octopus flown in from the Bahamas, 600 oysters from Virginia, five 30-pound lobsters from Nova Scotia, a 20-pound king crab from Alaska, 100-pound rounds of roast beef from Omaha, and pastry fantasies ripped from Ken Russell’s own imagination as seen on the screen only minutes before. This was one of Allan’s more spectacular Hilhaven spreads. “But bigger!” he told New Yorkers.

  Trains rumbled below, only occasionally drowning out the piped-in Tommy score, as those 700 guests fought over the 600 seats. It was a scene of such unbridled frenzy that Elton John, lightly dusted with black sequins, remarked, “I’ve never been so frightened in my life!”

  Allan reveled in bringing the press together with the movie stars, the rockers, and Manhattan’s Old Guard. New to his mix were the drag queens. If Allan didn’t discover them at the Tommy party, he certainly learned to promote them there. “The party was almost a costume ball,” says Tommy publicist Kathy Berlin. “But leather weird.” Having just seen The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway, Allan proclaimed transvestites an absolute must for any opening other than a Gristedes. Some people disagreed. The odd amalgam of cross-dressers and society matrons unnerved no less a notable than Pete Townshend, who complained, “I just hope none of them turn up at any Who concerts.”

  Tina Turner was no less indelicate. “We have a little bit of everybody here, and not everybody has soul,” she remarked only moments before taking her seat in a roped-off section of the subway near a bugle-beaded Ann-Margret. Even though it wasn’t his movie—he merely promoted it—Allan broke protocol and lavished the film’s stars with gifts, and those trinkets included silver-plated hypodermics (similar to what Tina Turner wields in the movie), which the singer promptly displayed to good photo-op use with her new friend Ann-Margret.