If cinematographer Bill Butler channeled Busby Berkeley for Grease, Allan kept to an equally 1930s aesthetic—one that had much to do with “Mickey and Judy put on a show.” Regardless of the approach, the powers at Paramount Pictures never really cared for Grease. Box office prognosticators were much more excited about Robert Stigwood’s other upcoming movie musical that summer, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And so was Stigwood, who viewed Grease “as Allan’s movie,” says the Sgt. Pepper screenwriter Henry Edwards.
Paramount wanted its TV star Henry Winkler, of Happy Days, to headline Grease. “The Fonz,” tired of playing greasers, passed—much to Paramount’s disappointment and much to Allan and Stigwood’s delight. Stigwood had his eye on John Travolta ever since the teenager auditioned for the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. “That kid’s going to be a star!” Stigwood said at the time. From his opposing catbird seat, Allan also claimed credit for the young actor’s subsequent stardom, and often told the story that a headshot of Travolta, sent to him by publicist Ronni Chasen, led to Travolta’s being cast in Grease. Regardless, it was Stigwood who first signed the young actor, not only to Grease but to the producer’s three-picture contract with Paramount, which began with Saturday Night Fever (and ended with a big thud called Moment by Moment).
Travolta made only two requests before agreeing to star in Grease. He told Allan, “I want blue black hair like Elvis Presley and Rock Hudson in the movies. It’s surreal and it’s very 1950s.” And since the Danny Zuko character doesn’t sing very much in the stage version, Travolta wanted his Zuko to get another song in the movie. Allan immediately promised him the Kenickie number “Greased Lightning.”
From the beginning, the bigger casting quandary had to do with the female lead character, good-girl Sandy Dumbrowski. Very few names got tossed into the actress blender. “Carrie Fisher couldn’t sing and Marie Osmond wasn’t that interested,” says the film’s casting director, Joel Thurm. When those two options didn’t materialize, Allan mentioned Olivia Newton-John. He’d met the pop singer at a dinner party given by fellow Aussie Helen Reddy of “I Am Woman” fame. It was a setup of sorts, arranged in part by Reddy’s husband, Jeff Wald, who knew that Allan wanted Olivia for the role.
“One day, Allan Carr was there at Helen Reddy’s house. We had never met,” Olivia Newton-John recalls. She sat next to him at the dinner table, and Allan made exceedingly little chitchat before broaching the subject of Grease. She’d seen the musical in London with Richard Gere in the lead. When Allan first suggested that she play the all-American Sandy, Olivia jumped away from the offer.
“But I’m Australian,” she said.
“We’ll make Sandy Australian,” Allan replied.
“I’m twenty-eight years old. I’m too old.”
“Everybody in the movie will be too old. It’s a comedy.”
“I don’t know if I have chemistry with John Travolta.”
“You’ll meet John. He’s fabulous!”
“I’m not sure about the music.”
“We’ll write new songs for you.”
Thanks to Allan, “No one else was really seriously considered for the role,” says Thurm. “Allan was smart. He needed someone who was a star, could sing, and could play an ingenue. It was not an easy role to cast.”
The Paramount execs remained leery about almost every aspect of Grease, and that included the casting of Olivia Newton-John. “But Allan was adamant. It was his idea to cast Olivia, and he kept pushing,” says director Randal Kleiser.
Much as he reinvented Ann-Margret, taking her from kitten with a whip to a serious Oscar-nominated actress, Allan wanted to take pop music’s girl-next-door and turn her into a vixen. Just as in college, if Allan couldn’t be one of the Lake Forest sorority girls, then he would tell them what to wear to get the boys. He knew exactly how to package Olivia Newton-John for male mass consumption.
“She is goody-goody two-shoes. And in front of your eyes, you’re going to see her become hot stuff!” is how Allan put it to the Paramount brass. Leave subtext to losers. When he was on a marketing roll, Allan spoke only in exclamation points as if titling a Broadway musical: “Put her in spikes! Put her in Spandex! Put her in peddle pushers! Put her in lots of makeup! Tease her hair out to here! I’ll make a hot tamale out of her!”
Finally, Paramount agreed and Olivia Newton-John agreed, but on one condition.
“I have to have a screen test,” she insisted.
Stars always refuse to audition, but this one was different. Olivia Newton-John had already made Toomorrow, a sci-fi musical in which aliens kidnap a pop music group, and she didn’t want to mar her singing career with a second movie disaster. “I worry about making another mistake,” she kept telling Allan.
To help woo her, Allan sent Travolta to Newton-John’s house for a meeting. Whatever happened there, she reported back to Allan, “Yes, we have great chemistry!”
Then came the screen test. “Olivia worried about looking too old, so we used very soft lighting,” says Joel Thurm. And to show that her off-screen chemistry with Travolta was no fluke, the casting director chose the drive-in-movie scene where Sandy slams the car door on Danny’s crotch.
“But it didn’t pop,” says Thurm. He took another look at Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s book and decided the problem wasn’t his actors but rather Allan Carr and Bronte Woodard’s new screenplay. Kleiser agreed. “Let’s use the original script,” said the director, and they went back to having Sandy throw Danny’s ring at him. She slams the door, and screams, “Do you think I’m going to stay with you in this sin wagon? You can take this piece of tin!” Grabbing his loins, he replies in pain, “Sandy, you can’t just walk out of a drive-in!” With those words reinstated, the scene clicked. It would be the first of many on-set rewrites. While “the screenplay effectively opens up the stage play,” says Kleiser, it also added a lot of campy humor that was pure Allan. In one scene, the school principal, played by Eve Arden, tells the student body, “If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.”
“That was Allan’s!” says Kleiser.
With his two leads secured, Allan proceeded to cast the supporting players. Forget the palm trees or the excising of a few dirty words. It’s here that Allan’s showbiz aesthetic replaced the original urban grime of Grease with pure Hollywood cotton candy. He fought and won to cast stars from his school days—Eve Arden, Frankie Avalon, Joan Blondell, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes—as featured players. They were hardly anything like the pedestrian teachers who populated Highland Park High, but they were, Allan believed, his real teachers—the ones who taught him at countless Saturday matinees the world according to MGM and 20th Century Fox.
Sometimes Allan’s novel approach to casting Grease got too creative for the Paramount powers—like when he made a controversial choice to fill the role of Coach Calhoun.
Herbert Streicher, better known as Harry Reems, had appeared in over a hundred porn movies, including the instant classics Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. If those films didn’t make him rich (he received $100 for his day’s work on the Linda Lovelace opus), they made him infamous, as well as one of the nation’s better-known felons. In 1976, the U.S. government convicted Reems on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines. In the following days, Allan met Reems at one of Hugh Hefner’s many “First Amendment” fund-raisers, held to help defray the legal costs of attorney Alan Dershowitz, who, in a few years’ time, would achieve even greater courtroom fame by getting Claus von Bülow acquitted of murder charges. As Allan readied Grease, he and Reems became good acquaintances, if not close friends, over evenings spent watching old movies at the Playboy mansion in Beverly Hills. After a screening of Casablanca, Hef’s favorite movie, Allan popped the newly acquitted Reems an unusual proposition.
“I’m making the movie version of Grease, and I’m going to get this part for you,” he said. “You’ll be the coach in my new movie.”
“When d
o I audition?” asked Reems.
“We don’t need an audition,” said Allan, repeating what would soon become one of his favorite, and most abused, lines.
Reems nearly fell backward into the lobster dip. “Finally, a breakthrough!” he thought to himself. While Hefner and others had been generous in footing his legal bills, Reems remained broke and unemployed. Despite his acquittal, porn companies continued to reel in the aftermath of the Reems conviction, and respectable movie producers were not about to take up the slack in the actor’s employment. They included the Paramount brass, who eschewed putting ex-porn stars on their payroll, especially for family fare like Grease.
“They bounced me out of the cast,” says Reems. “They thought they might lose some play dates in the South. Allan felt terrible about it.”
Allan, in fact, felt so terrible that he wrote Reems a personal check for $5,000.
The X-rated star wasn’t the only casting casualty. Lucie Arnaz considered herself Allan’s personal favorite to play Grease’s “knocked-up” bad girl Betty Rizzo. Then came the audition, even though there wasn’t supposed to be an audition.
Michael Eisner, the new president of Paramount Pictures, took keen interest even in the minor detail of who would play a supporting role in a $6-million film that he’d inherited and didn’t really think would make money.
“You’re in it,” Allan assured Arnaz. “Mike Eisner just wants to see all our choices. He doesn’t have a veto.”
She went through the pro forma motions, and that included reading for Allan, Eisner, and Kleiser. As Eisner sat chin in hand, Allan beamed encouragingly at Arnaz as she performed with Jeff Conaway, who’d already been cast as Kenickie, the character who “impregnates” Rizzo in what turns out to be a false alarm. Afterward, Arnaz believed that she’d “cinched the reading.”
Paramount’s new president saw it from another perspective. He took one deep breath as he shook his head in amazement. “Wow! The entire time you were reading I was thinking that your father, Desi Arnaz, used to own this studio—and now I run it,” said Eisner.
Outside in the parking lot, Allan’s response was equally doubt-provoking. “We’ll know in a couple of days,” he told Arnaz. She waited four weeks and, hearing no word from Allan, the actress pulled herself out of contention and signed to perform in a touring production of Bye Bye Birdie. Arnaz gave him the news on a Wednesday. The next day, talking on the phone with one of his clients, Allan let out a triumphant war cry when Stockard Channing casually mentioned how much she enjoyed playing a car thief in a little movie called Sweet Revenge. “You can play Rizzo!” he exclaimed. The thirty-three-year-old actress screen-tested on Friday, and arrived on the Grease set the following Monday to play teen-slut Betty Rizzo. “It all happened in twenty-four hours,” says Channing.
To show his gratitude to Lucie Arnaz, Allan concocted a rather bizarre rumor. “I had picked Lucie Arnaz to play Rizzo, she was perfect,” Allan told friends. “Paramount wanted Lucie to test with John and Olivia, just to see how the three of them looked together, but her mother, Lucille Ball, wouldn’t let her do a test.” According to Allan, Lucy said, “I used to own that studio, my daughter doesn’t have to test.” Allan added, “No test, no part.”
Arnaz calls Allan’s story “ridiculous. My mother really never got involved like that in my career,” she insists. (Also, both Allan and Eisner were wrong about Arnaz’s parents’ running Paramount. Their Desilu production company purchased the RKO facilities, which later became part of Paramount.)
Grease began filming on June 23, 1977, at the Venice High School in Venice, California. Two days earlier, Allan threw a party at Hilhaven, but at the last minute, he had to be a no-show for his own fete, having been felled by a kidney infection and rushed to Cedars-Sinai. The entire cast showed up at Allan’s party, including the last-minute invites of Stockard Channing and Lorenzo Lamas, his hair bleached so as not to compete with Travolta’s new blue black do. Lamas would be playing Tom Chisum, meant to rhyme with “jissum” since the character rivals Danny for the affection of Sandy. Allan wanted Stephen Ford to play the role, but only a few days earlier, the son of President Gerald Ford quit the project despite his being a guest at a few Hilhaven Lodge parties. “Ford knew we would exploit him,” says Joel Thurm. Allan took the rejection well. “He was just as happy that he had the son of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl as that of President Ford,” says Thurm.
The Grease kickoff party was notable for a number of reasons. In addition to “everybody getting smashed,” says Stockard Channing, the highlights included Olivia Newton-John’s sliding under a table when Kenneth Waissman introduced her to Patricia Birch, who coaxed the fledgling movie star from her hiding place with words of encouragement. Another tender, if less spontaneous, moment developed when the actress held John Travolta’s hand a minute or two. Allan may have been recuperating a few blocks away in Cedars-Sinai, but word of Olivia’s loving gesture was enough for him to alert gossip columnist Rona Barrett, who dutifully reported:Good news for die-hard movie-buff romantics who remember the good old Hollywood days when the actors and actresses met on a movie set and fell in love as the whole world looked on. My sources say it’s happening again on the set of Grease, where stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John came together first as costars, but are now discovering each other personally and liking what they see.
In time, matching John Travolta with a mate of the opposite sex turned into a cottage industry, and Allan together with a number of the actor’s handlers paired the bachelor star with Kate Edwards, Marilu Henner, Priscilla Presley, Cher, Brooke Shields, and Allan’s client Marisa Berenson.
At Allan’s Grease party, the occasional question arose, “Where are Jim and Warren?” as in Jacobs and Casey, the original writers of Grease. Casey was out of town. “But I was here in Los Angeles,” Jacobs recalls. If his noninvite to Allan’s party was a clue, the songwriter knew his lowly status for certain when filming began on the Paramount lot. Jacobs recognized the famed Paramount gate from the movie Sunset Boulevard, in which the silent-movie star Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, is almost turned away before a veteran guard allows her to enter the hallowed studio walls. Jacobs wasn’t quite so lucky when he pulled up to that black iron gate.
“Sorry, your name isn’t on any list,” the guard told Jacobs.
Neither Jacobs nor Casey ever got to visit the set. “That’s Hollywood, man!” Jacobs surmises. “They’re like, ‘Even though you wrote this, we know we can make it better than you can.’”
Bit by bit, some of Jacobs’s original dialogue for Grease eased its way back into the movie. As Travolta himself told the scribe during filming, “Don’t worry. We’re getting your script in there.” Having performed Grease hundreds of times on the road, Travolta knew the Jacobs/Casey book by heart, and when he didn’t think something worked in front of the cameras, he often asked Randal Kleiser, “Let me try doing something like this,” and he would quote the original stage show. Kleiser would listen, and then say, “Oh yeah, that’s better.”
The film’s new songs weren’t so easily massaged. On Olivia Newton-John’s suggestion, her LP producer John Farrar wrote “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and “You’re the One That I Want.” Which caused a minor pique of jealousy in Travolta, who also wanted a new song to sing. Since “Greased Lightning,” sung on stage by the Kenickie character, wasn’t enough to assuage the star’s ego, Allan went to Louis St. Louis, who had handled dance and vocal arrangements for the original Broadway show.
“You know, girls’ names songs were big in the early 1960s,” St. Louis informed Allan. He mentioned a few—“Cherie Baby,” “Paula,” “Renee”—and suggested that Travolta get a new song called “Sandy.”
Allan clapped his hands in excitement. “You should go back to the hotel and write it!” he announced.
The assignment marked a major rapprochement between the two men. Years earlier, St. Louis put together an act for Alexis Smith, which opened at the Fairmont Hotel in San
Francisco. Allan had seen the show and hated it, and later taunted the composer-arranger in that hotel’s lobby by telling friends in a very loud whisper, “There’s the guy that ruined, absolutely destroyed Alexis Smith!”
St. Louis preferred not to think about that previous encounter as he drove back to the Sunset Marquis hotel to write “Sandy.” It took him twenty minutes to write the song and get his friend Scott Simon to flesh out his one verse, “Stranded at the drive-in,” into full lyrics. The next morning, he rushed to Hilhaven to try his luck on the Lucite grand piano, playing the song for Allan at 10 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. for Stigwood’s executive producer Bill Oakes and yet again at 3 p.m. for Travolta and Stigwood himself. “At 4 p.m. it was my song, and I had a deal,” St. Louis recalls. His gift to himself: a new navy blue Honda Prelude.
In the end, Olivia Newton-John got to sing the most new songs, but it was movie star John Travolta who benefited more from headlining with this recording star. On Grease, “They each had a most-favored-nations contract, which means that he got what she got and vice versa,” says Thurm. “People made more from the record Grease than the movie Grease.”
If Allan missed his own Grease kickoff party, he skipped few days of production despite his recurring health problems. In a way, Grease was an extension of the parties he gave at his father’s house in Highland Park. At least once a week, Allan brought a celebrity to the set, whether it be Rudolf Nureyev, George Cukor, Jane Fonda, Kirk Douglas, or psychic spoon-bender Yuri Geller. They’d stay for about an hour, and then, as it often happens on movie sets, their interest invariably began to wane in the wake of too much downtime. Sometimes Allan would announce a visit with much fanfare, then cancel. “He had infections from the stomach staples,” says Thurm, and they would necessitate a return to Cedars-Sinai for massive injections of antibiotics. And if it wasn’t the stomach staples, it was problems with his kidney stones or his hips, which had begun to bother him as a result of the bypass, which had leached his bones of needed calcium. Appearance meant everything to a man of Allan’s delicate condition, and if he couldn’t measure up to his own impossible standards of physical perfection, he made sure that his stars did.
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