Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  Allan watched “the dinosaurs,” as they came to be called, walk across the rehearsal hall. Or, at least, they tried to walk. Fortunately, Cyd Charisse’s legs still looked great and she could dance, as could Fayard and Harold Nicholas, who hadn’t stopped tap-dancing since they appeared with Eubie Blake and his orchestra nearly sixty years ago.

  Ray Klausen’s Cocoanut Grove set also moved well, segueing seamlessly into his rendering of Grauman’s Chinese as a chorus line of high-stepping ushers led up to the big box of popcorn from which Lily Tomlin would descend a long flight of stairs. It was supposed to be Bette Midler, but she departed the telecast soon after her name was not announced as one of the best-actress nominees, for her over-the-top performance as a pop singer in Beaches. It fell to Tomlin to cap the production. The comedian did it as a favor to her friend Bruce Vilanch. But in rehearsals she was having second and third thoughts, so Vilanch wrote her an opening line, “How do you follow this?” It was a tacit acknowledgment of all the questionable extravagance that would precede her. Vilanch also thought it might be funny for Tomlin to lose her shoe on the set—“Like what else could go wrong?” he surmised—at which she would say, “So on with the shoe. I mean, show,” as a chorus-boy-usher slithered down the stairs to pick up her errant slipper.

  If it bothered Allan that his handpicked head writer and star were secretly hedging their bets, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t been seeing straight ever since he came down with a less than healthy appreciation of the talents of his Prince Charming. “He thought Rob Lowe could sing,” says Linda Dozoretz. “He had great belief in Rob Lowe and where his stardom would go. And Rob Lowe thought he could sing. There was nothing tongue-in-cheek, it was serious. Allan believed Rob Lowe was Prince Charming and Lowe believed that, too. Everyone thought he was cute.”

  Prince Charming’s date with Snow White at the Oscars worked its charm even on people not named Allan Carr—none of whom thought to ask, “Do you hear what he sounds like?” And if not beguiled by Allan’s romantic fantasy, at the very least, the concept came as no surprise to anyone at ABC or the Oscars, including Richard Kahn. Some producers talk to the president on a weekly basis. “Others on a daily basis, which was my relationship with Allan,” says Kahn. Regarding Snow White, “Allan wanted to return glamour to the Oscars and somehow marry that to the eclectic excitement of Steve Silver’s show up in San Francisco with Snow White,” adds the former Academy president.

  Whatever the qualms—and there were few among Allan’s coterie of Oscar workers—most doubts evaporated as soon as the lavish costumes arrived. “Everyone was laughing,” Dozoretz recalls. They were so spectacular and outrageous, these giant headdresses and the tables that danced. “The excitement was that the show would just be bigger and better than anything.”

  Coupled with Ray Klausen’s equally kaleidoscopic sets, the costumes jazzed the performers, and the jump from ABC’s sterile rehearsal halls to the stage of the Shrine Auditorium propelled Allan’s fantasy to life. Except for Kevin Koffler’s “nepotism” comment in the Herald-Examiner, the press reports of the rehearsals were uniformly upbeat. It helped, too, to see Army Archerd in person. The Variety columnist, who had presided over the Oscars’ red carpet for almost three decades, made a brief appearance at the rehearsals. His mere presence gave a showbiz imprimatur to the project, and Allan expected him to write a flattering notice of the rehearsals in his Variety column. According to the telecast script, Archerd would greet Snow White in front of the Shrine, where she asks him how to get to the Oscars. “Just follow the stars” was the reply.

  “The rehearsal was fun,” said Archerd. “We all thought it would be terrific, an amusing way to introduce the Oscars and not the usual send-off into one of the secondary awards. Allan wanted to do something different.” And Archerd wasn’t the only one who approved. “They all loved the idea of Snow White,” Freddie Gershon says of the powers at the Academy and ABC.

  As moods go, ecstasy is not one of the more enduring. Some of the Oscar youngsters, accustomed to performing in the close confines of the ABC rehearsal hall, froze on the gargantuan 65-by-185-foot stage as they looked out over the Shrine’s 6,500 seats. The old-timers harbored other problems. Alice Faye complained that she’d been reduced to “a dress extra” along with her friend Dorothy Lamour. And worse, the Nicholas Brothers needed to be cut completely from the Cocoanut Grove number. The decision devastated Allan.

  “People hadn’t seen the Nicholas Brothers for a long time,” says Dozoretz. “Allan was so excited about bringing those guys back.” It worried him too that people would criticize him for excising the only two African Americans in the entire production number.

  No sooner had Allan eliminated the Nicholas Brothers than the bad karma came knocking. Swifty Lazar sent word that he wouldn’t be able to appear, as promised. “Too busy,” he said. Then Doris Day phoned to say that she had tripped over a sprinkler at her home in Carmel. A swollen ankle prevented her from making the trip down the California coast.

  Allan endured these hits, buoyed by the in-house praise surrounding his Cocoanut Grove opening number. Occasionally he tempered his excitement by acknowledging the ephemeral nature of the event. “Two nights after Oscar is the Vanity Fair party in honor of the Man Ray exhibit. The next night is something else. So if you are lucky, it’s only for one wonderful moment,” Allan said. But what a moment! He couldn’t help but dream.

  The rehearsals behind him, Carr walked out of the Shrine to inspect the hanging of the Oscar banners over the building’s Moorish arches. Tulips don’t have much odor, but six million tulips flown over from the Netherlands do, and their sweet aroma was so pungent that people kept having this urge to slip into wooden shoes. At least the Shrine wouldn’t stink like a toilet, even if the management didn’t live up to its promise that the place would be something less than filthy. “What is that muff in my face?” Allan asked. The feathered boom mike belonged to a cameraman from Entertainment Tonight. “I thought you were here to clean the Shrine,” he cracked.

  Located on Jefferson Boulevard near Figueroa Street, the sixty-three-year-old Shrine Auditorium occupies that busy street corner with its towering 100-foot walls and elaborate Arabesque filigree. The façade of the Shrine had faded, if not actually started to crumble, and to hide its faded glory, Allan ordered up a few gold statues of Oscar that loomed up twenty-four feet to help highlight, along with all those banners, the theater’s multiple entrances. Allan was ready for the day he’d been planning all his life.

  Swifty Lazar. Doris Day. The Nicholas Brothers. Suddenly, they were minor irritants that disappeared into the city’s smog as it drifted eastward over Pasadena. Unbeknownst to Allan, however, was this pesky lawyer who’d been calling the offices of the Academy every day for the past week. The lawyer wanted the Academy to know that he and others at the Walt Disney Studios had heard rumors that there was an “unauthorized and unflattering reference to Disney material” planned for the telecast. These phone calls had been going on for a week, but it was only on Wednesday, March 29, the afternoon of the ceremony, that an Academy spokesperson finally deigned to return the call, assuring the Disney lawyer that there was no foul play regarding a beloved animated icon. No one bothered to mention any of these things to Allan.

  twenty-eight

  Snow Blight

  That Wednesday, otherwise known as Oscar Day, the arrivals of the stars started early—and Allan made sure that every minute of their procession into the annals of Hollywood royalty would be recorded for posterity, even if not every momentous second could be included in the ABC telecast. “Before Allan, the red carpet had been just a frill, a minute of montage,” says Bruce Vilanch. “There wasn’t the frenzy of now. Allan made that happen.”

  The traffic was so clog-free around the Shrine that Glenn Close, who had been forced to hoof the final block the year before, joked about the improved car flow. “We had to circle the Shrine three times so we wouldn’t be the first to arrive,” she told the TV cameras. The dubiou
s distinction of being first went to Sylvester Stallone, who at 4 p.m. jumped the official arrival time by thirty minutes. At 4:30 p.m., Army Archerd announced, “Good evening, movie fans!” Publicists whispered the names of their clients in Archerd’s ear so that the seventy-seven-year-old reporter could accurately welcome newlyweds Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, along with John Cleese, Billy Crystal, and Olivia Newton-John, whose nubile husband, Matt Lattanzi, would be performing in the Young Hollywood number. Meryl Streep, having perfected her role as the Hollywood interloper despite eight nominations and two wins, told onlookers, “I’m still not used to all this.” While speculation swirled that Rob Lowe might show up with his new girlfriend, Fawn Hall, fresh from her Oliver North shredding episode, Allan’s new Prince Charming disappointed by making a tedious choice: He brought his mom, Barbara. If Fawn didn’t show, another Washington, D.C., scandal girl, Donna Rice, who’d brought down presidential hopeful Gary Hart on a boat called Monkey Business, walked the red carpet. Behind police barricades on Jefferson Boulevard, four men in Mae West wigs and gold lamé gowns, known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indignity, came “to show our support for Allan Carr,” they said, because this was the first “gay Oscars.” These Frisco refugees failed to notice when Allan himself entered the arena wearing a black sequin dinner jacket by Luis Estevez. The transvestites’ view had been blocked by placards that petitioned MAKE MORE G-RATED MOVIES.

  Married or not, couples on the red carpet included Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal, Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. Those accompanying less famous women were “comedy star nominee” Tom Hanks, “maestro” Marvin Hamlisch, and the “cuddly” Dudley Moore.

  “The doors will be closing in ten minutes!” announced Army Archerd. “Please enter the theater!”

  Bob Hope walked a little faster. Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Willem Dafoe, and Lucille Ball gave a final wave. Cybill Shepherd flexed her biceps for the paparazzi, and then she, too, disappeared inside. The red carpet was relatively empty for a good five minutes before Cher, showing lots of leg in a black lace mini by Bob Mackie, materialized off the asphalt with boyfriend Rob Camiletti and daughter Chastity Bono. With her dangling black earrings and black-beaded headdress and black mass of curls, Cher didn’t disappoint the bleacher crowd, who gave the star their longest, most undivided wave of applause of the evening. Weeks earlier, Allan had publicly promised to lock the Shrine doors at 5:45 p.m. sharp, and yet one half hour late, Cher and company gained entrance without incident.

  Allan’s longtime dream entered its final reality phase when, inside the auditorium, a disembodied voice used the loudspeaker to announce again and again, “The star of all time will be here soon.”

  Publicist Warren Cowan wondered, Who could it be? Katharine Hepburn? Greta Garbo? “It was Snow White,” he recalled.

  Right on schedule, the ABC cameras caught Eileen Bowman in her princess-in-exile getup outside the Shrine. “How do you get to the Oscars?” she asked Army Archerd.

  “That’s easy, Snow. Just follow the Hollywood stars!” Archerd replied on cue.

  Bowman traipsed down the center aisle of the Shrine to shake the hands of Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Ryan O’Neal, Glenn Close, and a blushing Michelle Pfeiffer, who giggled ominously. None of them looked happy to be holding hands with a warm, life-size Disney cartoon. As the curtains parted, TV talk-show host Merv Griffin launched into “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” and the audience caught its first glimpse of Ray Klausen’s re-creation of the Cocoanut Grove, where Cyd Charisse, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Buddy Rogers, Dorothy Lamour, Alice Faye, Vincent Price, and Coral Browne made their respective bows. Merv Griffin stopped crooning long enough to introduce Rob Lowe to Snow White, “Meet your blind date, Prince Charming.” It was their cue to break into “Late nights keep on burnin’ . . . keep the cameras rollin’, rollin’, rollin’.” Then came the dancing tables, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a chorus line of ushers, and, finally, Lily Tomlin, who walked out of the giant box of popcorn, dropped her shoe on the stairway, and read the lines that Bruce Vilanch had written for her: “I told them if they could just come up with an entrance. One and half billion people just watched it. And they’re trying to make sense of it. So sit back and welcome to the shoe. Show.”

  That’s how it looked to the audience watching the 1989 Academy Awards on TV. For nearly everybody else, it played differently.

  Walking down the Shrine’s center aisle, Eileen Bowman shook the hands of many Oscar-nominated actors. “She was so embarrassed, she could not even give me her hand,” Bowman says of Michelle Pfeiffer, nominated for her featured performance as an ex-virgin in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. “Then Michelle started to laugh and giggle and that made me feel better. If she was nervous, then why should I be?” For the first time in many years at the Oscar telecast, there was a curtain—the one that Ray Klausen claimed could cover half the Empire State Building—and when it parted, Bowman believed everything would be fine. “I saw all my friends onstage—all the dancers—I felt really great,” she says.

  In the parking lot behind the Shrine stage, director Jeff Margolis sat in the large “remote truck” that functioned as the ABC control room for the telecast. He’d attended the rehearsals for the Snow White opener, and found its logistics daunting. If this were a movie, he would have worked five to ten weeks to plan every camera shot and angle. The Oscars, on the other hand, is live TV and there’d been less than a week to rehearse. Where most shows use half a dozen cameras, he ordered up fourteen for the opening number. Margolis clocked it: During the number’s twelve minutes, instead of fifty cues, there would be at least a hundred for everything from the sets and lighting to the music and actors. In rehearsals, he’d found the Snow White number to be “entertaining.” On Oscar night, he wasn’t there to be amused. “It was intense calling dozens of cues within the course of twelve minutes,” he says. “It required 100 percent concentration. Something like this had never been attempted before on TV.”

  Below the Shrine stage in the men’s room, Academy president Richard Kahn could hear Rob Lowe and Eileen Bowman launch into “Proud Mary.” He couldn’t see what was going on, but he knew the staging and felt no need to worry. “Let Snow White take care of herself,” he thought. He had to pee now, because in ten minutes he’d be up onstage himself to represent the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and thank everyone for being there, either in the Shrine Auditorium or at home watching on TV. Forgetting for a moment about Snow White, Kahn saw that the Shrine lived up to its reputation as a pigsty, as Allan continually warned him. The Shrine may have refurbished its first-floor restrooms, but the men’s room in the basement was flooded, one of the toilets or urinals having overflowed. There in the fetid water, Kahn saw a penny on the tiled floor. He would have picked up the coin, but not wanting to contaminate himself with god-only-knows what in the water, he kicked the penny to a dry spot and then reached down to put it in his pocket. “For good luck,” he told himself.

  Kahn walked upstairs and into the wings—“I was standing downstage right. I could see only the first row of the audience from back there. But the reaction seemed terrific”—and he waited his turn to walk into the spotlight.

  Ten miles to the north in Studio City, Lorna Luft sank into the couch at a friend’s house to watch the Oscars along with those oft-mentioned other billion and a half TV viewers. It was a rather large gathering of thirty people, many of them friends, and as the telecast began and Luft watched Candice Bergen and Jodie Foster and Sean Connery cross the red carpet to enter the Shrine Auditorium, it occurred to her, “Gee, it might have been fun to do the number. Maybe I made a terrible mistake. Maybe I should have done it.” Someone offered her a bowl of popcorn. She nervously downed a handful and watched as Eileen Bowman, dressed as the beloved Disney princess, tried to shake people’s hands. Suddenly, Luft didn’t feel so left out. “There was such a look o
n Michelle Pfeiffer’s face of ‘If you don’t get away from me now I’ll kill you.’ It was shock and dismay,” Luft says.

  Merv Griffin introduced Snow White to her “blind date,” and when they sang the revised “Proud Mary,” Rob Lowe found himself fixating on one person in the audience, Barry Levinson, whom most observers picked as a shoo-in to win the Oscar for directing Rain Man. Bumping and grinding away, a microphone to his mouth, Lowe should have been gazing lovingly at his Snow White, but instead he caught yet another glimpse of Levinson, who turned to his date to say something. He may have been yards away, but Lowe found that he could actually read his lips:

  “What . . . the . . . fuck?”

  Lowe continued singing Tina Turner’s recrafted anthem, but his mind was elsewhere. “Please God,” he thought. “Let me get out of here alive!”

  Like all things good or bad, Bowman and Lowe’s duet came to an end. The opening number lumbered on, however, for minutes more as Prince Charming and Snow White disappeared only to be replaced by Grauman’s Chinese Theater and those high-kicking ushers. Lorna Luft exhaled, and in the comfort of her friend’s Studio City home, she heard someone telling her, “If you would have done that song, we would be taking you to Cedars-Sinai right now, because you would have tried to jump off the top of the Shrine.”