Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  If the audience reaction delighted La Cage’s team, the critical reviews only heightened their euphoria. That general bonhomie, however, came crashing down like a fire curtain at the opening-night party in Boston. A party wouldn’t be an Allan Carr party if it didn’t have klieg lights. Did it matter that Beantown wasn’t Hollywood? Allan rented a few tinseltown-style lights to burn in front of the Nine Lansdowne dance club, and not being accustomed to such overlit city streets, a reporter from the Boston Globe mistook the klieg lights for “rotating World War II searchlights.” Borrowing from his Can’t Stop the Music launch in Los Angeles, Allan took pains to make the trek from venue to party as simple, and as impressive, as possible. Four double-decker buses fetched theatergoers at the Colonial Theater and promptly deposited them at the entrance of the Nine Lansdowne with its yards of red carpet, multiple bright lights, and enough reporters to restaff a small newsroom.

  Fierstein arrived, took one look at the mob scene inside the club, and grabbed his mother’s arm. “Oh my God! Cir-cus! Cir-cus!” he exclaimed.

  Herman let it be known, “I’ve tried out many shows in Boston, but I’ve never heard the audience roar like this.”

  Relieved that he had not been fired by Laurents, Gene Barry exuded such excitement—“It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever been in,” he crowed—that he felt compelled to reveal too much of the tuner’s plot, forcing Allan to grab the WXKS microphone away from his star and yell, “Don’t tell any more! It’s thirty-five dollars a ticket!”

  John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, and Rod Stewart were promised to be there but didn’t show up, much to the reporters’ disappointment. Neither did Senator Teddy Kennedy’s ex-wife, Joan, who had recently broken off with Dr. Gerald Aronoff. Allan had provided the former Mrs. Kennedy with ten freebie tickets to the show, which went unused—except for the two that somehow fell into Aronoff’s pocket. The good doctor even attended the party, but refused all interviews. “What does he think he’s here for?” cracked one wag.

  Allan arrived fashionably late for his own party. Waiting for him at the Nine Lansdowne was Arthur Laurents, who turned his producer’s entrance into a Bette Davis moment. In his one attempt to economize, Allan had relegated the team of Laurents, Herman, and Fierstein to one table, while reserving a number of other tables for the musical’s various producers, investors, and friends. Laurents saw the three name cards on the one small table, and let Allan have it as soon as he walked into the party.

  “Out!” he told Allan. “Your kind isn’t wanted here!”

  When Allan decided to stay put at his own party, it was Laurents who walked out, and he led the cast and creatives to a nearby bar to celebrate sans the money people. Since Allan had no intention of leaving his own party, he cut the cake. And it was such a big cake, too. Allan’s fetes typically featured grand displays of baked goods fashioned into novel shapes, and this particular cake sculpture mimicked a chorus girl’s (or boy’s) leg. Allan posed with it, he hugged it, and the photographers shot him as he obediently stuck his fingers in the icing and licked them clean. Playing off the tuner’s showbiz theme of “Break a leg,” Allan brought out several gift-wrapped eight-pound chunks of solid chocolate modeled in the form of a leg wrapped in a bright red garter. Each carried the tag “Break it or eat it.” Most recipients chose to “leave it” since they’d already abandoned the Nine Lansdowne to hang out with Laurents at a nearby watering hole.

  On that breath of contentious air, La Cage aux folles rolled into New York City. Some investors were shocked at an interview Fierstein gave to the Boston Globe, in which he called for a boycott of the almighty New York Times due to “the paper’s lousy, slipshod treatment of AIDS.”

  As some irate money people put it to Allan, “You just don’t say those things about the Times when you’re opening your musical the next month!” Allan, on the contrary, was amused and claimed that another Fierstein profile—this one in New York magazine—goosed the show’s advance ticket sales, which came to an unprecedented $4 million. It was early August, La Cage aux folles looked like a hit, and they hadn’t done battle yet with the infamous Gotham critics.

  Even an old-timer like Jimmy Nederlander believed that Allan had a foolproof hit on his hands. As part owner of the Palace Theater, he felt the show needed an even bigger venue to fill the ticket-buying demand. “Why not open the second balcony?” he asked, referring to the “nosebleed section” of the theater. It had been closed since 1966 when Gwen Verdon played there in Sweet Charity. Allan, despite his weight and bad hip, traipsed up to the second balcony, where no elevator existed, and thought he saw rats. “OK,” he said, escaping back to terra firma. “You can open the second balcony. But clean it up first and don’t charge anymore than fifteen dollars a seat. That’s all it’s worth, if that.”

  On opening night, Allan’s favorite review came from the Daily News’s Douglas Watt, who remarked of the critics, “This show doesn’t really need us. I’d have to say the show will soar with us or without us.” It certainly soared without the seal of approval from the New York Times’s Frank Rich, known as the Butcher of Broadway. Although he very much liked Jerry Herman’s score and a few of the performances, Rich criticized the show for sometimes being “as shamelessly calculating as a candidate for public office.” Fortunately, most of the other reviews were upbeat, if not downright raves, and as Watt opined, the buzz from Boston had essentially inoculated the show against naysayers like Rich, who wouldn’t love an old-fashioned Broadway musical if it kissed them. “The show was a huge hit, and because of the kind of hit it was, it didn’t matter what the reviews were,” says Fierstein.

  After their last curtain call, Allan did kiss Fierstein, and said, “We’re just like Tommy Tune and Twiggy.” Fierstein never asked if he was him or her, because someone took him aside backstage to say, “Now get out of here! The problem lots of people in the theater have is they write a huge hit and then they stand in the back of the house too long. Get out of the theater. Collect your checks and get on with your life.”

  If only Allan had heard those words. For the next four years he would try to recycle La Cage aux folles in as many ways as possible, using it, unsuccessfully, to regain his foothold in Hollywood and London. But those dark days were well into his future. On the night of August 21, he threw yet another Allan Carr party, and Allan never felt more alive than when he was about to enter an extravaganza of his own making. The Village People party at Lincoln Center might have been bigger, the Tommy subway party was edgier, the Truman Capote Jail House Party more novel. But this was Broadway. It had to be classy, and to that end, Allan turned on his grand spigot of cash.

  Months earlier he told his party planner Elaine Krauss, “You can have whatever money you need, but it just has to be the most spectacular Broadway party ever thrown. It can’t be a Sardi’s roast-beef-and-peas number,” he added, referring to restaurants like Sardi’s and Tavern on the Green, which, in his opinion, served no better function than to get the cast fed and the investors drunk before the reviews rolled in. Allan, donning his Tommy hat, wanted to give a party in a venue that defied everyone’s expectations, and to that effect, he thought back to a famous Life magazine photograph of screen legend Gloria Swanson, decked out in an evening gown, her arms stretched up to the heavens, standing amidst the rubble of the famed Roxy Theater after its demolition in 1960.

  The Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters on Broadway were currently being razed to make way for a big Marriott hotel in Times Square. Those adjoining lots, Allan thought, were the ideal spot for his La Cage aux folles party. He only needed to convince the Marriott people of the fabulousness of his idea. “They tore down the Morosco and the Helen Hayes, now they get a chance to welcome the biggest play to hit Broadway in years,” he said, working the phones.

  When insurance concerns felled his party-among-the-ruins concept, Allan let PR concerns trump his imagination. “Pan Am is a sponsor of La Cage aux folles. I want the party held in the Pan Am lobby,” he ordered.

/>   The airline’s headquarters towered over Grand Central Station, and Allan devised a travelogue for the party in which guests were greeted with a phalanx of ticket booths outside the Pan Am building. “We built an airport at which you checked in and picked up your tickets,” says Krauss. “And then when you walked into the building, the lobby of the Pan Am, it was as if you had landed in Saint-Tropez.”

  From there, guests wandered through a Saint-Tropez street, the Pan Am lobby turned into a veritable Potemkin Village of the French Riviera. They could “shop” for everything from cheese and pastries to flowers and beachwear—with La Cage aux folles’s logo attached, of course—and pick their way through carts overflowing with snails, crabs, chicken, roast beef, wine, and glacés. Allan also made sure to haul in truckloads of sand to help steady dozens of umbrellas and beach chairs, the entire tableau set off by a huge cyclorama that replicated the Mediterranean sky and sea.

  Tickets to the party proved to be more in demand than those to the opening-night performance itself. “They’re calling me Mrs. Hitler. The whole world wants tickets,” Krauss noted with pride. If Elaine Krauss was Eva, that made her producer-boss Adolf himself, and Allan could not have been happier to handle each ticket request with Prussian-like precision. He called it his “VIP problem,” and he loved every minute of the hours he spent in his St. Moritz penthouse as he shuffled names, tickets, bodies, seats, and egos. It was great, for one short month, to be the king of Broadway.

  And he wasn’t about to disappoint any of the 1,200 invitees. Allan wanted live music. “A band?” asked Krauss. “No, an orchestra,” Allan corrected. Twenty-five pieces, to be exact, as many as there were in La Cage’s orchestra at the Palace Theater. He liked the idea of a revolving dance floor, which meant that one had to be built in the lobby—and at the center of it all, Allan envisioned a thirty-foot-high replica of La Cage’s “lady” Berta, covered in nothing but a few strategically placed ostrich feathers. (The Village Voice would refer to it as “Carmen Miranda” in its party coverage.)

  And so it went.

  On the night of the party, even the French were duly impressed. “We just got back from Saint-Tropez, and this lobby certainly has more class,” said Dolores Bosshard, whose husband, Peter, was executive vice president of Credit Suisse.

  The original La Cage scribe, Jean Poiret, also voiced his approval. “This is more extraordinary, more glamorous than Parisian opening-night parties at Maxim’s,” said Poiret, who revealed that August 21 was the tenth anniversary of the play’s premiere in Paris.

  Allan demurred. “Tonight is a tasteful minor extravaganza,” he noted.

  Allan also splurged on opening-night gifts. Elaine Krauss, for her efforts, received a ring of Burmese sapphires and diamonds from Fred’s of Beverly Hills. Costume designer Theoni Aldredge unwrapped a gold pin with the words “La Cage” spelled out in diamonds, again from Fred’s.

  The evening’s most symbolic gift, however, went to Arthur Laurents. Allan gave him an antique Hero Derringer handgun. A Hero has only one shot, and if that fact was lost on the director, Allan made sure to let him know with a handwritten note, which read: “Dear Arthur, I’m so glad I didn’t have to use this. . . . Though the thought crossed my mind a few times. And vice versa, I’m sure.”

  When a New York Post reporter, Diana Maychick, asked if there were any gifts for his actors, Allan could only sniff. “Just the promise of five years of employment!” he shot back angrily. What he didn’t give George Hearn and Gene Barry were any points in the show’s profits or receipts. Each actor received $7,500 a week for the show’s first year, a fact that Maychick duly noted in the next day’s edition of her newspaper.

  The biggest gifts of the night, surprisingly, came from Pan Am. The soon-to-be-defunct airline offered the principal creatives and producers two roundtrip tickets apiece to anywhere in the world Pan Am flew, and more than a few La Cage participants cashed in with flights to China.

  Even the party’s goodie bags were unique for Broadway since each one contained La Cage aux folles’s cast album. “RCA had to have it pressed and ready and on every table that night,” says Jon Wilner. Such a fast turnaround had never been managed before in Broadway history. Whereas most shows record shortly after opening night, Allan insisted that they use the three-day hiatus between Boston and New York to make the album. Record producer Thomas Z. Shepard had no choice but to stage a marathon fifteen-hour session, giving RCA only six days to press the album. “It’s what I want,” Allan said. End of discussion.

  The price tag for the party came to a record-breaking $150,000. In 1983, $50,000 would have been considered excessive.

  “It cost $150,000,” says Barry Brown, “but we got a million dollars worth of publicity.”

  Who actually paid for the party remains open to question. Most participants say the funds came from La Cage’s budget. But Wilner insists that Allan was too smart to pay out of pocket when he could get somebody else to pick up the tab.

  “It was the summertime. Pan Am was trying to sell Kennedy [Airport]-to-Saint-Tropez flights,” says Wilner. It was Allan who sold the airline on The Clipper La Cage, because, as he put it, “La Cage aux folles is gay and gay people buy first-class tickets.”

  Although most people from the insular Broadway world found Allan excessive, they could never fault him for thinking small. “Allan was the first person to come up with a national marketing campaign for a Broadway show,” says Wilner. “Pan Am paid for that opening-night party.” Certainly Allan knew how to treat the Pan Am executives, seating celebs like Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore next to veteran airline VPs. “Allan knew that the best deals are made on the golf course and at parties, he knew that,” Wilner adds.

  Allan’s various deals, however, won him few friends among the show’s participants that evening, And the frosty divide in Boston between him and his creatives resurfaced at the New York fete. “It was a mixed-up party, somehow with the producers and the investors and the director,” says Theoni Aldredge. “They didn’t get along beautifully. It was very ‘This is my side and that’s your side.’ It wasn’t a real company party.”

  Allan made sure to give Laurents, Fierstein, and Herman each his own table. “But the best tables were reserved for Allan’s friends from Hollywood,” says cast member John Weiner. “Those of us in the show looked at them, like, ‘What are you doing here?’”

  Laurents agreed. “The party was lavish. But it was too big and gaudy and just too much. It wasn’t a party for the company. It was a party for Allan Carr and his world, whatever that was.”

  Allan knew the press better than most Broadway types. Reporters only cared to interview Hollywood stars at such events, and fortunately for them, Mary Tyler Moore played along. “I know drag,” said the actress, decked out in her own decorative ensemble of paisley print pajamas. “I’ve been to San Francisco.” A Cher look-alike approached Moore, who brushed off the guy with a quick, “I like your peplum skirt better than mine.”

  For his La Cage party, Allan retired his Mike Todd ringleader role and spent most of the evening holed away offstage reading the reviews. As if the intoxication of those notices wasn’t heady enough, despite there being a Frank Rich in the ointment, he goosed the situation by getting stoned and inebriated, and was definitely smashed by the time he walked into the Pan Am lobby to make a speech. “Don’t give me the bill for this party!” he brayed to his guests. “Give it to the Nederheimers,” he added, mangling the name Nederlander.

  The party came with only one other hitch: Allan’s old nemesis at the Village Voice, writer Arthur Bell, had somehow secured a ticket despite the best efforts to keep him off the premises. Years earlier, Bell wrote a hatchet job on Ann-Margret, and outraged at the offense, Allan threatened the journalist with a pointed “I’m going to get you!”

  “It was very Mafia-style,” says the New York Post reporter Stephen M. Silverman. Bell feared for his physical safety, until someone at the Village Voice suggested, “If you have a column, no
one can touch you.” Bell liked that idea and lobbied his editors to up his workload and give him a weekly column, which they did, called “Bell Tells.” That column soon featured the annual Ann-Margret Awards, a dishonor that the columnist bestowed upon famous people he considered major twits.

  At La Cage’s party, Allan wanted to protect Ann-Margret from a face-to-face confrontation with their mutual nemesis at the Village Voice, and so he placed the actress in a roped-off section. In the end, Ann-Margret, a major investor in La Cage aux folles, didn’t need the ropes. With flowers in her hair, she arrived at the party with husband Roger Smith and no fewer than four bodyguards. Jerry Herman, for one, came unprotected and soon found himself on the receiving end of one of Bell’s more pointed questions—pointed, at least, for 1983. The columnist wanted to know if Herman was ready to “make a pronouncement” in light of the show’s out-of-the-closet anthem “I Am What I Am.”

  According to Bell, the composer “blushed” and proceeded not to answer his question. “La Cage isn’t [auto]biographical” is how Bell recorded Herman’s response in his Village Voice column a few days later.

  But journalists have a way of telling only their side of the story. What Bell left out of his La Cage aux folles report was the full extent of Herman’s retort, which included the words “Do you think an author has to write about himself? Do you think I was Molly Picon in Milk and Honey?” he said of his first Broadway musical, from 1961. “Or do you think I know anything about how Dolly Levi felt when she came down those stairs to return to the human race? You have to have an imagination, Arthur!”

  Herman agreed wholeheartedly with Allan on the scourge from the Village Voice. “Arthur Bell was one of the classic cranky ‘queens’—that’s not a word I use often—who give homosexuals a bad name. I was never hiding what I was when I went to theater openings.”