Sometime between “Greased Lightning” and “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” Allan forgot about camera angles and instead experienced a Grease epiphany. This musical was his high school story, or, at least, his high school story as he would like to rewrite it. The plot about hip leather greasers versus the plaid-covered nerds reverberated for him, especially the love angle that had the square girl Sandy (i.e., Allan) turning into a floozy to get the sexy guy Danny. “God, it’s even set in Chicago in the 1950s!” Allan gushed.
After the show, he took Hamlisch and Bennett to a late dinner at Joe Allen restaurant, a theater hangout best known not for food but its exposed brick walls, which showcase posters from flop tuners—Dude, Via Galactica, among them—that are legendary for all the wrong reasons. Over his chicken pot pie, Allan let his two companions know his plan: “I have to make this into a movie.”
Let others go broke with sophisticated, avant-garde theater. Allan had the proud taste of a wealthy adolescent; and the very next day, he inquired into the stage rights. Unfortunately, the option to bring Grease to the movies was held by Ralph Bakshi, a filmmaker who had recently scored with some edgy, almost X-rated, animated films. As he’d done with Heavy Traffic and Fritz the Cat, Bakshi planned to turn Grease into a long-format cartoon.
“Which is all wrong,” Allan said when he got the bad news. Then he forgot about Grease, only to remember it at precisely the right moment.
Lunching at Sardi’s restaurant one day, Allan spotted Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox across the crowded dining room. He winked at the two Grease producers, and on his way out of the famed theater eatery, he decided to make nice. “So when’s your movie coming out?” he asked.
“It’s not,” said Waissman. “The rights came back to us.”
“Really?” said Allan. “I’m doing a picture deal with Paramount and I’d really be interested in producing the movie version of Grease.”
“Call me after lunch,” said Waissman, who never expected to hear another word from Allan Carr, since “Allan was waving and talking to everybody else in Sardi’s that day.” After his own Grease/Bakshi turnabout, the Broadway producer tended to discount these Hollywood types.
Forty-five minutes later, Allan made good on his promise to phone. “I really am interested in producing the movie version of Grease,” he began. More than ready to sell their musical, Waissman and Fox sold the option for $200,000, which Allan considered quite a bargain for such a long-running show. At that time, Allan didn’t have $200,000 in quick change, so he “bought it on the installment plan,” as he described it, giving the Broadway producers a few thousand dollars every month.
It was the era of tuner sophisticates like Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse, and many on Shubert Alley considered Grease, with its easy pop-rock melodies and bare-bones staging, “the bastard child of Broadway,” as Allan dubbed it. The theater may have been his first love, but even on this turf, he considered himself the outsider. Allan could relate to Grease’s interloper status, especially when he learned that young people (“under thirty” in theater parlance) were going to see Grease again and again. Repeat business, as Allan knew, is what turns a hit movie into a blockbuster movie.
Grease began as a community theater production in Chicago, scheduled to run only four performances over two weekends in February 1971. But the show, written by two local guys—Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey—caught on with the Windy City audiences, and one year later, it opened on Broadway at a bargain-basement cost of only $100,000, compared to the then-record $750,000 spent on the Stephen Sondheim extravaganza Follies a few months earlier.
When Allan began his rights negotiations, both Follies and the 1972 Tony winner for best musical, Two Gentlemen of Verona, had shuttered, while Tony loser Grease continued to pack them in, albeit at discounted prices for its young audiences. In negotiations, he and Waissman enjoyed a good working relationship before reality fouled everything by week’s end. Allan wanted the earliest possible movie release date for his investment while Waissman, fearing that the movie would cut into his stage-show ticket sales, wanted that date postponed. These talks caused a major freeze between the two parties, and when they bumped into each other at industry events, Allan indulged in this habit of looking through Waissman to say clever things like, “Who are you?”
Their deal went to arbitration with the Dramatists Guild, which settled in Waissman’s favor with a 1978 release date. “It seemed like a long time into the future,” says Waissman. Allan knew how to hold a grudge. Since he didn’t win that battle, he thought he could waive the option money. “It forced him to bring in Stigwood,” says Waissman, who also thought it would be a good deal if his percentage was based on gross after break-even rather than a back-end deal. “My feeling was at that point $500,000 or $250,000—what is the difference?”
In its wisdom, Paramount Pictures jumped at the savings, because “while Michael Eisner thought the movie could be a success, Barry Diller didn’t have great faith,” says Waissman. In Allan’s opinion, everyone at Paramount was “nervous,” and that included Eisner, who had been brought on by Diller to revitalize the studio. (And Eisner did with Saturday Night Fever, Happy Days, Cheers, the Star Trek franchise, and, of course, Grease.)
Allan’s wrangling and perseverance paid off. He also secured one major caveat from the stage producers, and that was the rarely won interpolation clause. In essence, Waissman agreed “that if some of the music from the stage musical wasn’t quite right for the movie, [Carr and Stigwood] had the right to add additional songs to the picture.”
Both Stigwood and Allan wanted there to be a Grease title song, something the stage show lacked. To add new songs by new songwriters—it was a major, if not outrageous, concession. “Something that composers for the legitimate theater never agree to,” said Allan, who knew full well that Casey and Jacobs were not Lerner and Loewe. In this case, Allan asked for Camelot, and he got Camelot.
However, before he and Stigwood could commission composers Barry Gibb, John Farrar, and Louis St. Louis to write new songs, before John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John were cast as high school sweethearts Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson (née Dumbrowski), Allan needed to get Stigwood’s attention. It was Stigwood, after all, who was looking for properties to fulfill his three-picture deal with Paramount.
The Aussie producer wasn’t averse to putting his money into a movie musical, but as he continually pointed out to Allan, movie musicals weren’t making money. In fact, there had been few box-office winners since Barbra Streisand made her film debut in 1968’s Funny Girl. Then again, Stigwood was banking on his Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to make him a ton of money at the box office. But unlike Grease, “Sgt. Pepper has the Beatles. It can’t lose,” said Stigwood.
Allan didn’t quite know how to convince Stigwood of Grease’s commercial validity until he contacted a mild-mannered cinematographer named Bill Butler, who was extraordinarily busy with two back-to-back projects: Jaws, directed by a young director named Steven Spielberg, and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, directed by a new Czech director named Milos Forman.
Butler and Allan made an unlikely partnership, but like so many family men, the avuncular cinematographer, who rarely raised his voice above a whisper, took an immediate liking to Hollywood’s loudest, most “flamboyant” producer-manager, and vice versa. Back in the 1970s, when Hollywood was enjoying the golden age of The Godfather and Taxi Driver and American Graffiti, many producers considered their next picture a work of art beyond reproach. “Allan’s attitude was different,” says Butler. “He was ‘Hey, let’s have fun making a movie.’” That playful approach to the job even carried over to his personal life. “Allan was gay as could be, and that’s part of what I liked about him. He wasn’t trying to hide anything,” adds Butler, who remembers one meeting at Seahaven in Malibu. Allan had just gotten back from Hawaii. “And there was this young boyfriend Allan had picked up there. There was a surfboard in the back of his convertible. I loved him for that.”
Rather than meet his potential Grease collaborators in a restaurant or hotel room, Stigwood chose a more convenient location for the confab. “We met in Stigwood’s limousine,” Butler recalls. “Allan was the greatest salesman you could ever imagine. Stigwood was cold and distant, he didn’t want to deal with me. I was just a cameraman.” Allan presented his “realistic musical” to Stigwood, who bought the concept in about ten minutes.
Allan needed to reinvent Grease for the screen, but not too much. One of his first hires was choreographer Patricia Birch, who had been with the stage show since it opened in New York. Birch was five feet tall. She sported a pixie haircut. But she was no pushover. Also, she knew the property better than anyone and, therefore, was not an easy convert to radically rethinking the material. “But I got used to the idea that ‘Greased Lightning’ was going to be a fantasy in the movie,” she says. At the time she thought, “Well, we’ve gone glitzier here than I would have liked. It had been set in Chicago. We lost some of the toughness with the palm trees in California. But you gain some, you lose some. Allan recognized what made the show successful, and what we preserved in the movie were the students’ relationships.”
Allan’s play for power, once he had Stigwood’s money, continued to expand. He even gave himself the task of writing the Grease screenplay. What did it matter that he could not write and was so bad at spelling that his first attempt at a designer license plate came out JAMANI when he meant it to read GEMINI, his astrological sign? He took care of that minor deficiency by bringing aboard his close friend Bronte Woodard, “who can handle the punctuation,” said Allan.
Grease was set in Chicago. Allan was from Chicago. As he saw it, Grease was his high school story—after he and Bronte made a few changes.
eight
High School Confidential
If it’s true that the greatest celebrities are those who completely reinvent themselves, then Allan started earlier than most.
“I made it closer to my own high school memories,” Allan said of bringing the Grease stage show to the screen. In the original musical, most of the high school characters are greasers. At Allan’s Highland Park High School outside Chicago, none of them were—except when the students play-acted at being tough for the school yearbook and hand-held the sign “hood” in case their leather jackets, unlit cigarettes, and carefully pressed blue jeans failed to complete the picture. These teenagers were the progeny of doctors, lawyers, and big businessmen, not the offspring of car mechanics, beauticians, and waitresses. “Money was not the social dividing line,” says Allan’s childhood friend Joanne Cimbalo. “All our families had money.”
Highland Park was only twenty-five minutes by commuter train from those hard Chicago streets that spawned the delinquent leather-clad teens who first inspired songwriters Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey to write Grease. But in terms of income, social status, and expensive landscaping, Highland Park may as well have been on the other side of the continental divide. The L.A. palm trees that Patricia Birch objected to in the movie would be the least of Allan’s changes. Or as Jim Jacobs later complained, “The whole nitty-gritty of these tough kids was gone.”
Moviegoers today know Highland Park as the town of expansive blue-grass lawns and quiet oak-lined streets and tastefully oversized colonial and Tudor houses that are home to the Goodsens, the Jarretts, and the Buellers in, respectively, Risky Business, Ordinary People, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, all of which were filmed in Highland Park. The small town is just one of a select group of wealthy communities that line the North Shore of Chicago.
Allan’s house looked something like those movie houses, except that his home had all of Lake Michigan for its backyard. “Allan’s house was a couple of steps up from the rest of ours,” says his high school friend Robert Le Clercq, who attended several parties there. High on a bluff overlooking the second biggest lake in America, the split-level house was known as party central for the students of Highland Park High School and, later, nearby Lake Forest College where Allan almost, but not quite, got his B.A. degree. With the waterfront as their dramatic background, the parties at the end of the short cul-de-sac known as Lake View Terrace afforded its young guests catered food, torch lights on tall sticks, polished oak dance floors erected over the lawn, and the music of George Stewart’s band. Even when Allan was sixteen years old, hamburgers and 45 RPMs played on an old Motorola were not his style.
Back then, Allan Carr was known as Alan Solomon, the only child of Ann and Albert Solomon, who were divorced by the time their only son entered junior high school. Both parents were successful Chicago merchants. Albert owned a large furniture store; Ann sold the finest shoes and handbags at her fur and leather-goods boutique. They made plenty of money, and neither stinted at lavishing it on their son, who invariably got his way—if money could buy whatever it was he wanted.
The young Alan, as it turned out, wanted a lot. When Ann and Albert first took him to Florida on spring break, a ten-year-old Alan insisted that they get off the train in Atlanta to spend the night so he could visit the theater where Gone with the Wind held its 1939 premiere. Or the time he flew to Detroit, at age twelve, to see Bette Davis in Two’s Company and didn’t notify his parents until right before the matinee, when he long-distanced them to say, “Don’t worry. The show is over at 4:45 and I’ll be home around 7 tonight.” Or when he needed money to be a Broadway investor, at age fifteen, and got his parents to put $1,500 into a Tallulah Bankhead vehicle called The Ziegfield Follies, which promptly folded on the road.
While Alan lived most of his teen years with his father, it was the nearly biweekly trips to New York City to see Broadway shows with his mother that made her his arts patron, if not his clear favorite as parent. It didn’t matter that she had to pay scalper prices to land primo seats to the original productions of South Pacific and Wonderful Town. Best of all were the ducats she brought to Around the World in 80 Days premiere at Madison Square Garden on October 17, 1956. Producer Mike Todd played ringmaster, complete with whip and red jacket, while his princess-attired bride-to-be, Elizabeth Taylor, stood at his side. It was there that Ann’s son met his role model for life: “That’s when I knew what I wanted!” Whether the world needed it or not, Alan Solomon vowed to be the next Mike Todd.
His parents paid all the bills and Alan threw all the parties; otherwise, he didn’t talk much about Ann and Albert except to say that his father found him to be “an embarrassment.” With cultivated adolescent insouciance, Alan said it didn’t matter much what his parents thought of him, as long as they gave him the money to invest in Broadway shows and escape to New York City and Fort Lauderdale.
A letter from Camp Indianola, however, gives a more complicated interpretation of that father-son relationship. Written in 1950 when Alan was thirteen, the handwritten missive expresses his “hope” that the August heat is not unbearable in his father’s Chicago store. “It is very hot and the flies are terrible here,” Alan wrote from Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. “Only 3 weks from today and I’ll be home. I can hardly wait. . . . Lots of parents here this
wk-end and lots of dads staying over nite. Will you be up next Sunday for a few hrs. I hope? Say hello to everybody at the store. It won’t be long now! I love you very much.”
It is signed “Your best pal, friend, boy, son, Alan.”
An overweight child who was saddled with thick glasses from an early age, Alan had no choice but to avoid those sports that essentially defined boyhood in the Midwest, and gravitated instead to more sensitive pursuits like dressing up in drag to play the titular role in Charley’s Aunt and posing for yearbook photos with the theater department’s Garrick Players girls. His appearance as a teenager is what could best be described as “fubsy,” an antiquated word meaning chubby and squat. “Fubsy” also conjures up the clown role that Alan played throughout his school years.
“At home I was secure,” he said, “but at school I felt I was not physically attractive and this exaggerated my desire for approval, to be amusing, to be liked. That’s why I came on so strong.”
Five days a week at Highland Park High, Allan stepped over the foyer’s floor plaque that told him to “Dream. Believe. Achieve.” He dreamed and he believed but he did not achieve very much gradewise. Neither was he known as a particularly good student at Lake Forest College, where his studies invariably took a backseat to the parties, the clubs, the school plays, and the endless campus pranks that sprang from the school’s busy social network of fraternities and sororities. Here was an institution of higher learning better known for its bucolic, picture-perfect campus than its academic standards. As more than one 1950s grad described it, “Lake Forest is the place you went if your parents had money and you couldn’t get into any other college.”
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