Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  In this crowd, only Andy Warhol sank to the level of being totally, unashamedly star-struck. “I just wanted to see Ann-Margret,” he gushed.

  Allan gambled that the paparazzi would go wild, shooting Prince Egon von Furstenberg, bauble maker Elsa Peretti, senator’s wife Marion Javits, and Revlon’s Henry Kuryla as they danced the night away in front of a bank of token booths. Where else in the world could photographers land a shot of Anjelica Huston and her date, Halston, passing through a turnstile to get to the champagne bar? On what other planet could photographer Ara Gallant scout the subway tracks for errant rats with supermodels Appolonia and Maxime de La Falaise looking on? And was it true that fashionistas Jackie Rogers and Stephen Burrows actually threw their emptied clams on the half shell onto those same tracks?

  Around midnight, Allan personally thanked the cops by inviting them off the street and into the subway for a little food and drink. Over a hundred of them had been stationed above ground to keep the crowd of club kids, bums, and late-night dog walkers in their place. As the men in blue descended, people who had never been in a subway before felt the urge to ascend. Returning to street level, many of them had a whole new attitude about life down under. “I love this idea of music in the subways,” said Maxime de La Falaise. “I just talked to a policeman for about a half hour and I told him he should suggest to his bosses that there be music piped into the subway system. All those people would be too busy dancing and listening to the music to even think about mugging anyone.”

  At around two in the morning, Allan’s biggest party to date wound up, and he enjoyed a good laugh as the police force walked off with the centerpieces, a souvenir for their respective wives and kids in the Bronx.

  The stars and socialites had left long ago, and as was their custom, the glitter gays and the drag queens were the last to fold up tent that night in the subway. One young partygoer lamented, “It’s not easy being gay. Not today, the way everyone is trying to get in on the act. Just look at this crowd. They’re so thrilled by all their pretended decadence.”

  Actually, those words were spoken 3,000 miles to the west seventy-two hours later when Allan moved his Tommy party to West Hollywood’s gay disco Studio One, where reporter Gregg Kilday from the Los Angeles Times uncovered “a tribe of bearded men dressed as leather-studded motorcycle women, another man in a cellophane jumpsuit, a female impersonator sashaying around in the character of Mae West,” not to mention Paul and Linda McCartney and David Frost, whom Allan had booked to host an In Concert special on the movie.

  Although the scene was Studio One, the young gay’s comment could have been uttered in the New York subway as well. At night, Manhattan’s 10 percent dined in the homosexual demimonde of George Paul Rozell’s ubiquitous Satyricon parties only to traipse off the following Monday to nearby office buildings, where most of them pretended to be straight. During the week that Tommy opened, Newsweek published a story on New York’s disco world in which it revealed that “cross-sexual cavortings do not play to limited audiences these days. At Le Jardin, the likes of Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Lee Radziwill and Andy Warhol regularly turn up to turn on by joining in.” What Newsweek dared not reveal to its booboisie readership is that such out-there personalities as Capote and Warhol were gay. Only the year before did the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Gay bars and discos flourished at night, but the next morning’s newspaper, including the liberal New York Times, continued to run editorials advocating a don’t ask/don’t tell policy for homosexuals teaching in the public school system. It was a city where the annual Gay Pride parade, instead of being given a primo berth on Fifth Avenue, took up a mere two lanes of traffic on lowly Seventh Avenue.

  Although hardly an activist—“Allan was totally apolitical,” says Roger Smith—he also never blew with the inhospitable 1970-80s winds that saw David Geffen dating Cher and Elton John marrying Renate Blauel. “Allan never had the ‘fiancée,’” says Joan Rivers. “He was always openly gay.”

  “If Allan was seen with a woman, they were just hanging out,” says reporter Gregg Kilday. “He never presented the woman as his ‘date.’”

  If journalists weren’t going to report on his sexual orientation, Allan saw no reason not to push the envelope, and he did that with the “glitter funk” (read: ambisexual attire) of his bicoastal Tommy parties.

  What he could not have choreographed that March was the mixed company that Tommy kept. The movie opened within days of such passé turkeys as Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, an homage to Cole Porter, which put a lid on Cybill Shepherd’s film career for at least a year, and Barbra Streisand’s lackluster follow-up to Funny Girl, the not so Funny Lady. In comparison, despite the film’s mixed reviews, Tommy emerged as the edgy new kid on the movie-musical block.

  All endings must have a beginning, and in a way, Allan’s successful promotion of Tommy both established his working relationship with Stigwood and, just as effectively, signaled the beginning of its slow unraveling.

  Lila Burkeman, a U.K.-based promoter, had known Allan since the mid- 1960s, when he arrived in London with Ann-Margret to see Laurence Olivier in Othello. Allan was so humongous at the time that he had to wedge himself into the theater seat in order to sit sideways. Burkeman also knew Stigwood and planned the Tommy party—on a gaggle of yachts—for its launch at the Cannes Film Festival, two months after the Gotham premiere.

  “Allan Carr was a perfection creation of that whole 1970s hedonistic era,” she recalls. “And Stigwood had a marvelous ability to pick the right people to do things for him.” The two men could use each other because, in a way, they were near opposites. “Robert is a bit of a recluse, even though he entertained lavishly. He would fall asleep at some of his own dinners. Allan always took the spotlight.”

  When the two men met, supersuccess was but a flicker in Allan’s eye, whereas Stigwood had already managed the Bee Gees and Cream and produced Jesus Christ Superstar onstage. Such an enormous difference in their status did not deter Allan, and somehow, despite Stigwood being its producer, Tommy quickly transmogrified into Allan’s movie in the eyes of the press and, hence, the world.

  “Stigwood didn’t talk. It was easy for Allan to upstage him,” says Kathy Berlin.

  And even more important, “Allan was synchronistic with the film,” says Peter Guber. Flamboyant, loud, visual, hysterical. The result was that Allan’s name appeared thirteen times in the Los Angeles Times’s coverage of the film’s premiere. Poor Stiggie. In the same article, the man who actually produced Tommy got to read the name Robert Stigwood only once.

  three

  Three-Piece-Suit Negotiations

  After the subway Tommy party, all New York knew what L.A. had long known: Allan Carr was America’s premiere party giver, someone who glittered like gold and measured less than an inch in depth. But amidst his many sparkling, giddy events, Allan possessed a savvy business head that heretofore had gone unheralded. The perception of him as nothing more than Hollywood’s gayest gadfly was about to change.

  His client Marvin Hamlisch had been working on a stage musical with choreographer Michael Bennett. Bennett had not yet solo-directed a show, although Broadway impresario Harold Prince did give him a codirector credit on the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies, in 1971. Like most geniuses, Bennett was a driven, determined talent who knew what he wanted. On Follies and the previous Sondheim musical, Company, which he choreographed, he never played the indebted novice, and he often clashed with the theater veterans around him—and won. At the time that Hamlisch entered his professional life, the thirty-one-year-old Bennett had already spent months at the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, talking to Broadway dancers about their offstage lives and how they managed to keep their careers going before hanging up their leotards at age thirty or younger. Using those interviews as his guide book, Bennett looked to conceive a new theater piece that would meld song and dance to salute the unsung heroes of the stage musical: thos
e so-called gypsies who travel from show to show on the Great White Way.

  Despite his great success in Hollywood and Las Vegas, Hamlisch wanted nothing more than to write for the theater, and he’d already written three songs for Bennett’s show when its creator made a request that Hamlisch was not supposed to refuse.

  “Michael wanted me to write another dance song,” Hamlisch recalls, “and I protested that we were getting away from the show, which was about the dancers, not dancing.”

  That’s when Bennett did the unthinkable and fired Hamlisch. Bennett, his sizable ego switching into fifth gear, thought he didn’t have to kowtow to anyone, and that included a multi-Oscar-winner like Hamlisch. Dancers dance, and this musical was all about dancers. Besides, Bennett held an ace in the show’s lyricist, Ed Kleban, who was also a composer. Apparently, Bennett knew Kleban much better than Hamlisch did.

  “I was sure Ed would hold firm, that he would tell Michael that without me he was leaving,” says Hamlisch. But he should have known, “That only happens in the movies. In real life, it goes this way: Since he also wrote music, Ed said he was ready to finish the score by himself.”

  Unceremoniously canned, Hamlisch recovered his ego by making a quick phone call to his manager, who had only recently installed his seven-foot “The Marvin” statue in the foyer of Hilhaven Lodge. Allan adored Hamlisch and he adored him even more after he accomplished his 1974 Academy Award trifecta. With men like Hamlisch and Joe Namath, Allan enjoyed tweaking their hetero male vanity by making gifts of full-length mink coats or sending them enough flowers to fill a diva’s office. With Bennett, a fellow control-freak and homosexual, Allan took a completely different tack: He booked the next flight to New York City, and, within twenty-four hours, had set up a meeting to help negotiate a rapprochement between his client and Bennett. Hamlisch desperately wanted to finish the musical. But he told Allan, “I don’t want Michael to think I’m his rubber stamp.” That assessment left Allan little room to negotiate. One doesn’t win three Oscars in a two-hour span and not grow a healthy ego in the process.

  Allan’s first words to Bennett: “Michael, you are the most important person. . . .” And from there he continued to flatter and stroke and kiss ass until Hamlisch found himself happily welcomed back into the musical-theater fold. “That’s the kind of savvy you can’t take away from Allan Carr. He was two people in one,” says Hamlisch. “There was the wild guy for public consumption and then there was this very smart guy who listened to people and listened to ideas and knew when to act on them and knew how to get things done.”

  Bennett’s lawyer, John Breglio, agrees. “They were having a lot of difficulties on the show. Allan, however, was always the kind of guy who avoided those kinds of confrontations,” says Breglio, who, at the time, was only a few years out of Harvard Law School. “He did everything to patch things back up. So many people thought of him as this flamboyant overweight guy who would gossip and regale you with stories. But he was a very astute man who was dead serious and cared deeply about his client’s career. He could concentrate on fixing things up and making it all work.”

  Allan could also play protector when his client needed a cushion to sustain the blows. Shortly after Hamlisch’s triple-Oscar win, ABC came calling. A producer at the network, David Kennedy, wanted to put together a TV special with the composer, but after long negotiations, the deal continued to languish and ABC got nervous. Allan couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer. “Marvin is really involved with this musical about dancers,” he told Kennedy.

  “What is it? A Broadway show?”

  “No, right now it’s just a workshop.”

  “A workshop?!”

  “That he’s doing Off-Broadway.”

  “He’s turning down a fucking TV special so he can do a fucking workshop Off-Broadway?” Kennedy asked in disbelief.

  It’s a conversation that Allan never repeated to Hamlisch. He knew when not to put business before passion, and Hamlisch returned the favor when he asked Allan if he would take his mother, Lily, to the opening of A Chorus Line at the Public Theater on May 21. But Allan’s work didn’t end there. It deeply annoyed him that some of the New York critics didn’t fully appreciate Hamlisch’s work on the musical. Or as the composer recalls, “People forget that in some of the original reviews for A Chorus Line the music got killed to smithereens.” Allan made sure that those offending critics received a recording of the score, and as a result, they rereviewed it much more favorably a few weeks later when Hamlisch’s “fucking workshop” moved uptown to the Shubert Theater to become one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.

  four

  Sluts’ Night Out

  After the Nureyev Mattress Party, Hilhaven Lodge rightfully took its place as the gay party house in Los Angeles. Except for the occasional all-out orgy, Allan made sure to keep his house hospitable to straights who wanted to see what everyone was talking about in this new post Roe v. Wade era of sexual liberation when Last Tango in Paris entertained the masses and The Devil in Miss Jones landed a review from Vincent Canby in the New York Times. While office decorum dictated that homosexuals remain in the closet, nighttime integration allowed gays to be seen as the engine fueling the social circuit on both coasts. It was a coy one-foot-in-both-worlds approach that had already been used to sell movies as widely divergent as Women in Love and Cabaret, and would be exploited to the max by publisher Clay Felker with his “bisexual chic” cover lines for New York and New West magazines.

  More than any other Hollywood power broker, Allan brought the ambisexual aesthetic to Los Angeles and pushed it into the open, if not the daylight. The wrestling matches and the orgies starring Nureyev were one thing. What made Allan unique was his ability to bridge Hollywood’s gay and straight worlds—much as he had the Old and New Guard and the movie-star and rock-star worlds—by making Hilhaven everybody’s playground.

  He did it by titillating, if not shocking, movieland’s elite.

  Enter the Cycle Sluts.

  On the evening of July 4, 1975, David Geffen, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, James Caan, Mario Puzo, David Janssen, Buck Henry, Tony Richardson, Hugh Hefner, Rex Reed, Sidney and Joanna Poitier, and Altovise and Sammy Davis Jr., along with 300 other people, came to Hilhaven to see the new pop group that Allan touted as clients. The Sluts were ten very bearded men who wore female S&M leather gear—studded bras, corsets, chaps, high-heel boots—as they cranked out a rather diluted brand of heavy-metal rock. The group’s emcee, Michael Bates (aka Cycle Slut Mother Goddam), saw a message in their outrageous makeup, if not their music. “We don’t pretend to be singers or dancers,” he said. “We take away stereotypes and labels by holding them up to be ridiculous. There’s no social redemption involved.” Whenever the Sluts took a break from their drums and guitars and vocals, they continued to entertain by brandishing whips to flick at flying insects navigating the Beverly Hills night air. Apparently this was not enough to entertain Allan’s guests, because as host he also devised a circus theme for the party, and once again made Mick Jagger his guest of honor. And once again Mick Jagger didn’t show since he preferred to attend only those parties to which he had not been invited.

  The party’s circus theme took form with clowns and palm readers and a Puerto Rican band (accompanied on the bongos by George Schlatter and George Hamilton) and a mermaid floating in the pool—this was fast becoming an Allan Carr trademark—and no fewer than three banquet spreads: one by Westwood’s Chicago Pizza Works (again); another table serving Mexican or “Montezuma’s Revenge,” said Allan; and the third offering Chinese cuisine. Allan, who had a name for everything, called it “Charlie Chan’s Fantasy.”

  At the food bar, Rex Reed complained that “a bunch of hustlers from Hollywood Boulevard” had cut in line, and worse, they advertised “amyl nitrite” on their T-shirts. Wearing a leopard print bathrobe, Allan laughed and called the drug wear “cute,” but even he knew that some damage control was needed when his security team warned that a
drag queen had OD’d on his front lawn and the police were on their way.

  “I don’t have a front lawn,” Allan cried in defense. “What happened was a crasher collapsed on my neighbor’s lawn.”

  It was one overdose Allan didn’t have to disown. As Bruce Vilanch describes the general Hilhaven vibe, “People were so chemically altered then. You could have people like Gregory Peck’s wife, Veronique, or Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Edie Goetz or Billy Wilder’s wife, Audrey, talking to Allan’s latest boy toys.”

  More damage control: When word circulated that all the bedrooms were locked, many gay guests took it the wrong way and wondered in delight if perhaps Nureyev was back in action. Allan tried to dispel the locked-doors rumor. Only two bedrooms had been barricaded, he told the roving journalists. “One where the servants change and one where the Cycle Sluts are getting dressed. Liza, Lorna, and Altovise Davis are helping them get made up,” he insisted.

  It would be reported in the Los Angeles Times that Hugh Hefner looked “aghast” when he caught sight of the Sluts. With their muscled gender-obliterating mien, they compelled few people to listen as they performed. “Out came the Cycle Sluts, these guys in leather chaps with their bums hanging out,” Lorna Luft recalls. “People were shocked—people like the Irving Lazars and the Henry Mancinis. People thought Allan had gone loopy, but then everybody had a really great time.”

  Allan believed in the Cycle Sluts and thought the party would give them the needed exposure to land a recording contract. “This is the future of show business!” he announced to Poitier, Geffen, and Wilder.

  Allan reveled in the bizarre, yet idolized old Hollywood. “That took him back to his childhood of sitting in a movie theater, that was his solace,” says Luft. “We talked a lot about his seeing my mother in movies.” Watching the daughter of Judy Garland watching Gene Kelly watching the Cycle Sluts crack their whips, Allan knew his party plucked the right nerve.