Except by the public. Saturday Night Fever, which had opened late the previous year, had certified John Travolta as the No. 1 heartthrob in the country, and the girls of Los Angeles showed up in force on June 2 to make sure that no one mistook him for a one-hit fluke. Paramount, meanwhile, continued to downplay Grease. The big movie musical that spring/summer was Stigwood’s other extravaganza, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “At its premiere party they had caviar and shrimp,” Kleiser recalls. “For Grease, they served hot dogs and hamburgers.”
Allan turned the McDonald’s food into a plus, calling it “teen cuisine” in honor of his high school movie. Ignoring the studio’s indifference to Grease—“Paramount hated it beyond belief,” says Freddie Gershon—Allan secured a big TV special, which went out to 126 markets. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Paramount flacks gave the credit to studio toppers Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, but that scenario is unlikely since the special is titled “Allan Carr’s Magic Night.” It began taping on premiere night outside the Chinese Theater and continued to the after-party on the Paramount lot, where Allan gave himself the emcee honors by interviewing both John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John (who had changed into something less comfortable, a skin-tight flaming pink jumpsuit), much to Stigwood’s chagrin. The studio did splurge some capital to re-create the film’s big dance-contest scene, set in a high school gymnasium, and the exorbitant cost pissed off at least one cast member.
“We sweated all last summer at Venice High School making the movie,” said the film’s Kenickie, Jeff Conaway. “And now Paramount’s built an air-conditioned set just for the party that we could have filmed the movie in without sweat!”
Four days later, Allan moved the party to New York City and Studio 54, which had been open only a year but already defined the disco era with its shirtless bartenders, its amalgam of celebs and street people, and its cocaine-sniffing half-moon signage that dropped over the dance floor at midnight. The Grease festivities began earlier that evening at Elaine’s restaurant, where Patricia Birch toasted Allan before a hundred friends, including Woody Allen, Ann Miller, Rita Hayworth, Francesco Scavullo, George Plimpton, and Stephen Sondheim. Then Allan bused them all across town to Steve Rubell’s disco, where he revealed that he’d been approached to do a Blackgama “What Becomes a Legend Most” ad. “I’ll wear a mink caftan, what else?” he told Rita Hayworth, who was wearing her own summer fur that night.
For their Studio 54 entrance, John and Olivia repeated their leather and Spandex routine, and no one seemed to notice, once again, that the budget allowed for only hot dogs and burgers to feed the hungry premiere freeloaders.
Despite the restricted budget, Allan managed to hire society florist Renny Reynolds to dress the place up with some vintage cars. Their owner insisted they be emptied of gasoline on the city streets. It was a safety no-no that promptly brought out the police, as well as the fire department, which required the vehicles to seek relief in a nearby gasoline station. The cars then had to be hand-pushed back to Studio 54. Most of them went unscathed.
“There was a 1950 Chevy convertible that got a bit trashed because people climbed in and [cigarette] burned the seats,” says Reynolds. “So we ended up having to pay for new seats. But the party was wild. Fabulous!”
Allan couldn’t have cared less about the auto fracas. He wrapped himself instead in the glory of his three big party coups: Grace Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli, who had recently pocketed a Tony for her turn in The Act. His three lady stars so distracted Allan that he failed to notice a major altercation at the front door when the writers of the original Grease stage show couldn’t get past the notoriously arrogant doormen at Studio 54. Broadway producer Kenneth Waissman spotted Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey in the crowd. “These are the authors of the show,” he said. “They don’t need tickets!”
In a way, the real parties for Grease weren’t held at either Paramount or Studio 54 but in Allan’s basement at Hilhaven Lodge. As he readied Grease to open that June, Allan announced his other major production that season, one that would come to define, more than even the Rolodex Party, his stature as Hollywood’s premiere party-giver. On June 4, 1978, two days after the Grease fete at Paramount, Allan Carr unveiled what he claimed to be the first basement disco in all of moviedom. Let others have their antiquated ballrooms and tennis courts. He brought the lights, sounds, half-naked boys, and drug culture of Studio 54 to Beverly Hills. That night, he called it, simply, the Allan Carr Disco. “Or if you prefer, the AC/DC Disco,” he offered, abbreviating the title with his own personal bisexual letter play.
As the guests made their way to Hilhaven Lodge’s refurbished basement—the same basement space where Mama Cass, Petula Clark, and Ann-Margret once rehearsed for their manager—Allan and his valet, John, stood over them in his immense closet/vault and proceeded to encase the lord of Hilhaven Lodge in a Ten Commandments-style caftan and cape, complete with Day-Glo geometric hieroglyphics and Victor Mature shoulder pads. The occasion was so immense in his own imagination that Allan set up a video camera to record it for posterity.
“This was made for me for the opening of the disco,” he said of his glittering outfit. Allan gazed at himself in multiple floor-length mirrors that recalled the final scene in All About Eve, where the image of a young girl, Phoebe, also encased in a beaded cape, is fractured into endless replications of itself. John the valet flattered Allan on his “Mary Tyler Moore” smile, and Allan returned the compliment. “Did you model caftans in GQ before you became a movie star?” he asked John.
Intoxicated with his own impending success, Allan let his valet know, “These are the good old days. We’re doing it now. I don’t feel I’ve missed anything. Yes, I would have liked to have been around for Ingrid Bergman and Clark Gable, but I don’t feel I’ve missed anything.” And with that, he spun around and around in front of the mirror, his broad-shouldered cape swirling about him like a latter-day Phoebe, ready to take his place in the movie pantheon next to Margo Channing and Eve Harrington.
Downstairs in the disco, Allan didn’t stint, hiring star DJ Don Blanton, who had recently performed at Studio 54 and Odyssey. The song “I Feel Love” blared as guests first confronted the Allan Carr Disco sign, which led to the Bella Darvi Bar and the Edmund Purdom Lounge (the restroom) and beyond it the copper-encased pleasure dome itself, complete with a disco ball and a life-size mummy with a light beam stuck in its head. “It’s someone who used to work for me. I had him mummified,” Allan told John Travolta.
He then broke away to share a private moment with Olivia Newton-John, who honored Allan by having her hairdresser go through much trouble to put tiny braids in her otherwise flowing blond hair. “This is our new play place. There’s a back entrance. I’ll make a key for you,” Allan said, referring to a secret exit through the laundry room.
A handsome blond man snuggled passed him. “Didn’t I see you in Holocaust? ” Allan asked.
“No.” And the man walked on.
“Well, it looked like Holocaust!” cracked Allan, miffed at his anonymous guest’s lack of attention.
The disco’s architect, Phyllis Moore, congratulated Allan on the fabulousness of her creation. “It cost me $100,000!” Allan bragged to everyone. Then he turned to Moore to threaten, “If you copy this all over town for $18,000, I’ll kill you!”
Despite the din from the DJ, a loud explosion made every semisober person in the room jump. “We had a champagne injury already!” Allan exclaimed. He turned to complain to Dominick Dunne, “You stepped on my caftan!”
Since his good friend Jacqueline Bisset couldn’t make the party, Allan felt free to tell her Greek Tycoon costar Camilla Sparv, “You’re a major actor-performer. You were the only one in the movie I sympathized with.”
Throughout the evening, Allan took up the slack whenever the other one hundred people crammed into a space built for ten ran out of compliments. “It’s a soul train for rich kids,” he said of his disco. “Just when you think I’
ve run out of ideas. . . . This is Playboy’s penthouse.” He pointed to the copper nameplates nailed into the two leather banquettes that flanked the room. “Regine, Malcolm Forbes, Steve Rubell. I can’t wait for them to see it,” he said.
Not everyone loved being immortalized in Allan’s basement. When he told Joan Collins that he wanted to showcase her Egyptian heritage—she played Princess Nellifer in 1955’s The Land of the Pharaohs—the English actress took one look at the Bella Darvi Bar, not to mention the Edmund Purdom Lounge, and notified her impresario friend that she was having none of it: “Listen, I am living, working. And don’t you dare name a room after me as though I were dead!”
The disco was but a prelude. That very June weekend, Grease took in over $9.3 million and barely missed beating the No. 1 film, Jaws 2, which made only half a million more at the box office. The one-two punch of this movie duo shook Hollywood and prompted a big page-one story from Variety, which boasted, “The unprecedented has happened in the film industry: never before have there been two day and date opening smash pictures reaching the stratospheric weekend box office heights of Universal’s Jaws 2 and Paramount’s Grease.”
Everybody in the movie business read that page-one story in Variety, and one of the first to congratulate Allan in person was Ron Bernstein. That summer, the literary agent was repping Larry Kramer’s scabrous novel Faggots, a no-holds-barred exposé of the gay vacation town Fire Island Pines, New York. “I really wracked my brain on who would have the chutzpah to make this movie,” says Bernstein, and he admits that “nothing could have been more incongruous” than selling it to Allan Carr in his post-Grease glory days. Nonetheless, he made the pilgrimage to Hilhaven Lodge, and Allan greeted him poolside in his white tent. “Like I was seeing a potentate in Saudi Arabia,” the agent recalls. “There were hundreds of pillows stacked everywhere and at least a dozen copies of Variety laid at Allan’s feet.”
“Did you see the Grease grosses in St. Louis?” Allan wanted to know. “Did you see the Grease grosses in Chicago? I understand Middle America.”
Congrats and other business niceties aside, Bernstein finally got around to mentioning Faggots, at which Allan gave him a look that slid rapidly from incredulous to dismissive. “I don’t think that’s what America wants now,” he said. Then putting aside his Illinois-boy hat, Allan asked under his breath, “So how juicy is it?”
Bernstein could not lie. Kramer’s Faggots fairly oozed semen on every page, but Allan might be interested in at least taking a look. As the agent described it, the novel contained “this terrible send-up of Barry Diller.”
Allan couldn’t contain himself. “Oh, let me read it!” he exclaimed.
That was Monday morning. The following week, Jaws 2 stumbled at the box office and Grease replaced it as the No. 1 film, a position it held for an astounding five straight weeks. And for five straight weeks—plus several months—Allan enjoyed every moment of his newfound fame. “Something happens where you get recognized,” he sermonized. “But I’ve been doing the same thing for five years now. Suddenly, you’re the hot new kid in town,” he said, recalling what happened to “Spielberg after Jaws and Travolta after Saturday Night Fever. It’s like Dolly Levi at Ma Maison. I’m at a table between Jack Nicholson and Jack Lemmon, and it is shallow but I’ve arrived.”
Allan was right on both counts. He had arrived. And it was shallow. But most important, his Grease success meant that whenever anyone tried to rub his nose in his gayness or his fatness, he could now fling the abuse right back. A few days after Grease became the No. 1 movie in America, Allan decided to celebrate by lunching at Le Dome and wallowing in everybody else’s envy. Allan, his royal blue silk caftan flowing, walked by one table and heard a fellow producer remark, “Look, she’s wearing one of her dresses again!” Allan seized the moment to strike as the restaurant fell silent. “Keep a civil tongue in my ass!” he replied.
As David Geffen described the change in his friend, “Grease was the best thing that happened to Allan, and it was the worst thing.”
And his parties grew more lavish. When Allan received the Producer of the Year award from the Cairo Film Festival, he returned from Africa to throw himself a Night on the Nile Party. As if the disco in his basement wasn’t flashy enough, he extended its Egyptian décor to every room in Hilhaven Lodge, and even rented scenery from the movie Cleopatra to help immortalize his overseas prize.
And his parties grew more intimate, too. In addition to spinning records for the 300-plus affairs, Don Blanton worked the turntables at what Allan called his “private parties.”
“I’d get a call at 3 or 4 a.m. to play at Allan’s disco,” Blanton recalls. When the twenty-one-year-old DJ would arrive for these early-morning affairs, he invariably got frisked by security man Gavin de Becker, who made sure that Blanton wasn’t carrying a camera or recording device. He always cautioned the young man, “What you see here you don’t repeat.”
As Blanton recalls, “Those clandestine parties had a lot of powerful people at them, a lot of top politicians who people wouldn’t think were gay, and Allan arranged these meetings for them to be with boys late at night and I’d be the DJ.” They were small gatherings of half a dozen guests, and included men like Merv Griffin, Roy Cohn, and fedora-wearing attorney Harry Weiss, a West Hollywood legend who had fashioned a lucrative business out of representing homosexuals who’d run afoul of the law. Despite his $200 fee to play music for a couple of hours, Blanton came to resent Allan’s early-morning private parties. He was a star disc jockey at the height of disco mania. “And these young guys, these little brats would come up and request songs, a favorite song, and I was reduced to playing these punks’ requests,” Blanton says of having to spin “Rock the Boat” ad nauseam.
There was never a paucity of young men delusional enough to think that their movie careers depended on being guests at an Allan Carr party, whether it be intimate or one of his blowout affairs. If that well of eager supplicants ever ran dry, Allan’s assistants could always make a quick trip to the Odyssey disco, which was Blanton’s real “night job.” The DJ booth there offered a panoramic view of the dance floor below, and it was not unusual for celebrities to send their assistants to Odyssey to check out beautiful young men and women who, in turn, could be whisked off in limousines to someone’s bedroom in the Hollywood hills. “The Odyssey was a juice bar. It didn’t serve alcohol,” says Blanton. “So there was no eighteen-year-old age limit.”
Whether the party at Allan’s was big or small, press-worthy or private, what very few of the guests, famous or anonymous, knew was that the disco ceiling in the basement held video cameras. “Allan used them to monitor what was going on while he was in his bedroom so he knew who did what to whom,” says Blanton.
One Hollywood notable who escaped being immortalized on Allan’s home video system was the one person Allan most wanted to capture there. It rankled Allan that Barry Diller never partook of the Hilhaven festivities. Or that he didn’t show any delight at Grease’s box-office lucre. But then, Grease wasn’t really Diller’s movie, and it upset the CEO that the success of such a little film could eclipse his pet project, the prestigious Heaven Can Wait, directed by and starring Warren Beatty. Because Allan’s piddling teen movie musical got in its way, Heaven Can Wait failed to reach the exalted top slot on Variety’s box-office chart.
There were other reasons, too, for Diller to be repelled by the Grease producer. “Barry is very elegant, plays it very close to the vest,” says Howard Rosenman. “Allan was the exact opposite: outspoken and tacky.”
Allan gave a more detailed analysis of why Diller didn’t want him to succeed. Despite the fact that Grease was well on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie musical in the world, and eventually grossed over $341 million, Diller dismissed Allan’s hard-won accomplishment. First Survive! and now Grease. Allan did much for Paramount’s bottom line, and it hurt him that Diller never genuflected at the altar of his twin hits. As Allan explained the situation, “Barry ca
n’t believe that a queen who wears caftans and is so out and visible could make as much money as I did. Because of Grease, I made him sign the biggest check he has ever signed, and he will never forgive me.”
twelve
Oscar’s First Consultant
While Allan and Paramount people not named Barry Diller continued to sink their well-manicured toenails into the plush box-office numbers for Grease, trouble loomed across the Hollywood Hills at Universal Pictures. Studio chiefs Lew Wasserman, Sid Sheinberg, and Thom Mount had flown to Detroit for a preview screening of The Deer Hunter. Not one for the JuJu Beans crowd, Michael Cimino’s drama offers a somber portrait of Vietnam War vets. The screening did not go well.
“The worst preview I’d ever seen,” says Mount, then president of Universal. “The Deer Hunter died.”
The film’s producer, Barry Spikings, held a postmortem with Universal’s top brass, and together they made the difficult decision to shorten the film’s considerable three-hour running time. Ultimately, “We realized we’d cut the heart out of it,” says Spikings. “We put it back together. But Universal was nervous how to market it.”
Spikings can’t recall why Allan was indebted to him back in 1978, but Allan did owe him for something. One afternoon, Spikings, desperate after his Universal showdown, decided to collect on Allan’s debt to him. “He was in his cabana at the far end of his pool, dressed in a very relaxed fashion, drinking champagne,” says Spikings, an English gentleman who prefers business suits and ties to the normal Hollywood attire.
Party Animals Page 12
