Seated in the Club Oscar green room, Bruce Vilanch watched the show on one of several TV sets. “They looked at Snow White like she was a plague,” he says of Hanks, Pfeiffer, Close. The auditorium looked as overlit as any TV set—hardly the mood for embracing something as outré as Snow White singing a duet with Rob Lowe followed by, as Vilanch put it, “the wax works of Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Dorothy Lamour, and Alice Faye, who had to be led around by a bunch of chorus boys so they wouldn’t topple over.” It was obvious that almost no one in the Shrine audience understood why Merv Griffin was there or that he had actually sung “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” at the real Cocoanut Grove umpteen hundred years ago. “It made no sense,” says Vilanch. Even his attempt to salvage Lily Tomlin from the wreckage with his line “I told them if they could just come up with an entrance” met with stunned silence.
Down in the Shrine’s orchestra pit, baton in hand, Marvin Hamlisch felt a cold wave of rejection push at the backside of his tuxedo. The sweat gathered there as he smiled for the TV cameras. Despite the enthusiastic applause that capped the opening number, “You knew you’d hit a wall,” he says. “There was no question. This thing that Allan was so wild about, this Las Vegas/San Francisco thing, didn’t translate either to the stage or to TV. It didn’t. It just wasn’t classy enough. And the rest of the evening was putting a Band-Aid on something that was hemorrhaging. It was obviously a disaster.”
Sitting in Row L center, Jo Schuman Silver heard the applause and turned to her husband, Steve. No matter that she’d never been to the Oscars before, the audience seemed to love it, in her opinion. “I’m so proud of you! It’s a big hit,” she told him.
Steve Silver let out a long sigh, then closed his eyes. “It’s a piece of shit!” he whispered back.
Allan stood backstage, watching the show on monitors when, after a commercial break, a very slicked-back Tom Selleck walked into the lights to announce, “We’re going to try something different.” The 1989 Oscars, he said, would be conducted with “no hosts. People will arrive as couples, companions, friends, costars, compadres.”
Allan blanched. Friends? Where did “friends” come from? It ruined the wonderful alliteration of his four C’s!
Standing in front of the cameras, Selleck revealed that past Oscar hosts like Chevy Chase, Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson “would have you in stitches by now.” As if to prove his point, no one in the Shrine auditorium laughed at Selleck’s remark.
In a flop sweat, Rob Lowe wandered into the green room, the Club Oscar sign lit up overhead. In the corner he saw an old woman in a bad red wig sitting alone. She motioned for him to take the seat beside her. It was Lucille Ball. “You’re baaaaaad!” she said, indulging in a bit of street jargon. “I had no idea you were such a good singer. Be a love and get me some aspirin.” Lowe obeyed, got her the painkiller, and the two of them spent the next hour holding hands as he attempted to figured out what tonnage of bricks had just been dumped on his career.
Despite Selleck’s “friends” glitch, Allan was soon feeling no anxiety. To his finely attuned ears, the opening number delivered an ovation, and even if the TV cameras diminished the spectacle of Ray Klausen’s clever re-creations of the Cocoanut Grove and the Chinese Theater, it played well to the live audience. “Fabulous!” he kept telling himself and anyone else who’d listen. He got goose bumps when he heard the big applause that capped the number, and a minute later there were tears in his eyes as he walked into Club Oscar arm in arm with Linda Dozoretz. His “star participants” were there waiting to go on—Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Michael Caine—and they actually rose to their feet to give him a standing ovation. Everything was going so well that when a major coup evaporated—Goldie and Kurt told him that they decided not to joke about their nonexistent nuptials—he didn’t snap or get mad or blurt out some four-letter expletive.
Allan took solace in the fact that his couples were delivering their lines as rehearsed. First up, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson came out in matching poodle dog dos to give out the supporting actress award. “It’s appropriate because I’ve supported one or two actresses,” Johnson said.
“And a few have supported you,” said Griffith.
Like any stage mother, Allan repeated the scripted lines along with his performers.
Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Michael Caine clowned it up to give out the supporting actor award. “My name is Bond,” said Connery. And pointing to Moore, Caine said, “He’s Bond.”
Allan loved the Bond bit and he laughed despite his having memorized it. He especially liked the patter that Bruce Willis and Demi Moore had planned. It was their idea to show bad home footage of their baby, Rumer, which segued into their presenting the cinematography award, which Bruce announced as “and the winner is,” to which Demi corrected, “And the Oscar goes to . . . ”
Allan appreciated her correction. And he laughed out loud when Robin Williams showed up in big mouse ears and white gloves to joke, “Hello, I’m Michael Eisner. Tonight’s Disney movie stars Sylvester Stallone as Bambo.”
But the highlight for Allan was watching Walter Matthau introduce Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. The two legends were there to announce the Break-Out Super Stars of Tomorrow number, and when the Shrine audience rose to its feet at the sound of the song “Thanks for the Memory” and Lucy turned to Bob Hope to say, “Look, they’re standing!” it was as if they were saluting him, Allan Carr. Tearing up all over again, Allan turned to his publicist to say, “Let’s check out the pressroom.”
Every time Allan walked into his Club Oscar green room, he scored a standing ovation. Even the crew backstage couldn’t stop congratulating him. “So Allan wandered into the pressroom to bask in their applause, too,” says Linda Dozoretz.
Allan didn’t have to look far to find a friend among the journalists. Seated in the front row was the USA Today columnist Jeannie Williams, who had often written enthusiastically about his many projects. He could count on Williams to give things a positive spin. Allan waved. “Hi, Jeannie.”
Even though Williams obeyed the Oscar’s formal dress code, she looked more than a little rumpled, her blond hair tossed as if by its own wind machine. “Allan!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you think the Snow White opening was a bit . . . over the top?”
Dozoretz could feel Allan’s fingers burrow into her right arm. “Are you kidding?” he asked Williams. “Did you hear the ovations out there? It was magical.”
A veteran gossip, Williams may have been supportive of Allan in the past, but she wasn’t letting go of a good story on Oscar night. “But Allan,” she continued, “why Snow White? What’s the connection between her and, well, the whole Cocoanut Grove theme of the show?”
“It’s called theatrical!” Allan was no longer smiling.
“So, Allan, tell us,” Williams taunted. “Would you do it all again?”
“Ask me tomorrow,” he replied a little too fast.
As soon as the Break-Out Super Stars of Tomorrow number ended, an army of publicists led Ricki Lake, Blair Underwood, Christian Slater, and other youngsters into the pressroom. “Get me out of here!” Allan whispered to Dozoretz. Allan was so shaken by his Jeannie Williams run-in that he actually had trouble walking. “It was piling on him. It hadn’t occurred to him that the show had been anything but a huge success until that moment in the pressroom,” says Dozoretz. When Allan let go of his publicist, she checked her arm. A dark purple bruise was already growing there. “Protect me,” he begged.
In another of his Oscar innovations that year, Allan separated the various categories of the press—print, TV, radio, and a new one called “the Internet”—into separate rooms. He fully intended to jump from one pressroom to the next to bask in the reporters’ adulation. But that long journey came to an abrupt end after his impromptu chat with the USA Today columnist. “That’s as far as we got,” says Dozoretz, who escorted her client back to the safe, friendlier terrain of Club Oscar.
As the te
lecast continued, there were fewer and fewer celebs hanging out in the green room, and Allan watched the final minutes of the show in relative quiet without being hassled or, for that matter, congratulated. The Jeannie Williams encounter, however, left him so stunned that he didn’t even comment when Cher, giving out the best picture award, made the ultimate faux pas and said, “And the winner is . . . Rain Man.”
By now he’d sweated through his black sequined dinner jacket, and there was nothing left to do but face the jury at the Governor’s Ball. He could only hope that what he’d witnessed in the pressroom was not replicated among his peers in the Shrine’s adjoining Expo Hall.
Ray Klausen watched the final moments of the telecast from the back of the Shrine Auditorium, and couldn’t really deconstruct the audience reaction. Lots of applause doesn’t always mean lots of excitement, especially on Broadway opening nights or at Hollywood galas, as he well knew. As soon as Cher announced Rain Man, he dashed out of the theater to make his way backstage. He wanted to thank his crew for a job well done. The sets for an awards show need to be assembled quickly, and they aren’t always the most reliable or well-built structures. “You’re just grateful that you didn’t have a bad accident and that you got through it unscathed,” he surmises. In that regard, the 1989 Oscar production qualified as a success. No one got killed. (Only later, when he saw the show on videotape, did he realize what had happened: “The look on the audience’s face was priceless. Oh, my God!” And Klausen didn’t mean that in a good way.)
For Klausen, the evening had only hit its halfway mark, since he was also in charge of decorating the cavernous Expo Hall. Playing off the old Hollywood theme of the Cocoanut Grove number, he doused the place in red, white, and gold. “It’s kind of like decorating a Bavarian hangar,” he says. “But it’s become wonderfully glamorous and handsome.” If he said so himself.
Along with the 6 million tulips outside, the Flower Council of Holland supplied a few acres of red and white tulips to complement the estimated 5,000 yards of red and white chiffon that draped the Expo Hall walls. As the twenty-piece orchestra played, three giant Oscars slowly revolved in unison with the dance floor, inducing vague nausea in anyone who had already gorged on the poached salmon, arugula salad, free-range chicken breast grilled over alder wood, and the contents of the crisp potato baskets, of which there were an estimated 2,000.
Kevin Kline, who won as supporting actor for his role in A Fish Called Wanda, joked about getting a hernia. “This weighs a ton!” he said of his gold statuette, which no pundit had predicted he’d win. “I thought they’d assign someone to carry it for me.” To that end, Jodie Foster, the best-actress award-winner for essaying a rape victim in The Accused, got her nephew Christian Dunn, age twelve, to carry her Oscar as she pretended to be physically enamored of her walker date for the evening, Julian Sands. But winners aside, the real story that March 29 evening was the Oscar production itself. Away from the Shrine glare, people were only beginning to compare notes on what Allan Carr had wrought.
Richard Kahn and his wife, Gloria, accepted the many kudos with polished restraint. They couldn’t tell if the congrats were sincere or forced. Kahn had traveled long enough in the Hollywood world to know that it’s difficult to tell the difference. “You try to filter out the pro forma congratulations that come at the end of any show,” he philosophizes.
Out of Kahn’s earshot, Jeff Berg, who headed up the newly created Creative Artists Agency (CAA), ran into Thom Mount, the former president of Universal Pictures, who was riding high on the hit Bull Durham. Standing together at the bar, they both felt the need for a strong drink. “We just looked at each other,” says Mount. “What on earth was that?!” He told Berg that the Snow White number had caused him to undergo a “Martian out-of-body experience,” and in his opinion, the Shrine audience had been “incredulous and stunned.” The Break-Out Super Stars of Tomorrow number didn’t get a much better review. “It was painful,” says Mount.
The immediate feedback was not all negative, and Peter Guber, Rain Man’s executive producer, noted a distinct generational divide in the criticism. “There were two reactions,” says Guber. “The view that we’ve punctured the sacrosanct Oscar awards ceremony was held by the conservative folks. The young people were ‘Hoorah, what a breath of fresh air. We’re headed for oblivion if we have our eyes in the rearview mirror.’ Inadvertently Allan set the tone for folks to take another way to do this staid event.”
Mrs. Steve Silver chose to feel the younger, kinder vibe that evening. At the Governor’s Ball, well-wishers like Gene Hackman, Amy Irving, Don Johnson, and Melanie Griffith offered their congratulations to her husband. Many of them had seen Beach Blanket Babylon either in San Francisco or Las Vegas, and were fans. “Everyone made such a fuss about Steve, how brilliant and wonderful the show was,” she recalls. Even some bigwigs from Disney expressed their wholehearted approval, and according to Mrs. Silver, more than one Disney executive asked her husband, “Have you ever thought of doing movies?”
For a moment, the orchestra stopped playing and, from the dais, Richard Kahn thanked Jeff Margolis and Allan, who, in turn, thanked everyone and then escaped to a roped-off area of the Expo Hall. “He wanted to have his own private party at the ball,” says Kahn. It was there that Allan holed up with his Young Hollywood kids, who included Patrick Dempsey, twenty-three, who was stepdad to Corey Parker, twenty-three, whose mom, Rocky, forty-eight, was Dempsey’s wife. Some of Allan’s star participants also showed up, and Allan hugged Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as if for support.
“Overall, the reaction was subdued,” says Dozoretz. “And Allan definitely picked up on that.”
Under other circumstances, Dozoretz might have accepted Allan’s invitation to go to Swifty Lazar’s party at Spago, but she claimed to be tired, and declined. Exhausted or not, Dozoretz wanted to rush home to check out that new invention, the Internet, to read early reviews. Indeed, the wire services had already posted their pan reviews of the event. Some of the smaller news outlets were also delivering decidedly downbeat verdicts. Her face to the computer, “I saw what was happening,” she says. Tomorrow morning, Dozoretz knew, would be her most difficult challenge when Allan called for a rundown of all the reviews.
Jeff Margolis also made an early exit. “To go home and collapse,” he told friends.
On the limo ride from the Shrine to Spago, Allan poured champagne for Bruce Vilanch, and told him with no joy, “I burned a lotta bridges with this one.”
Vilanch thought that Allan realized how poorly the show had been received. “But in fact he didn’t know, not yet,” says the writer. “Instead, he was referring to all the people whom he had rejected as presenters.”
Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party wasn’t anything like the Governor’s Ball or even the future Vanity Fair fetes, where celebrities made an appearance to have their photos taken and then ran out to have their photos taken again elsewhere. “At Swifty Lazar’s you sat down to dinner with Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor,” says George Christy, who wrote the Hollywood Reporter’s party column during the superagent’s heyday. Swifty greeted everyone at the door like a master general, and it wasn’t only movie stars who came. Publishing giants like Random House’s Bennett Cerf and Simon & Schuster’s Michael Korda and Putnam’s Phyllis Gran made the grand trek out west to attend, and there would also be royalty, like Princess Grace’s kids, to chow down on Wolfgang Puck’s pizza, chef Serge Falesitch’s red snapper, and pastry chef Mary Bergin’s macadamia nut tarts. “There was heat at those parties, major, sizzling heat; it was like your fingers got burned,” says Christy.
At Spago that night, Swifty was there not only to party but to hold nervous, unhappy hands. Like those of Tom Cruise.
“They quoted my mother!” the Rain Man star complained to Swifty. “They had the nerve to make up a quote from my mother. They never spoke to my mother!” Cruise was still huffy over reports from England that had him dying of breast cancer. “I had the flu,” he told Swifty. �
�The worst flu I’ve ever had in my life. My wife had it, too,” he said of Mimi Rogers. “They put me in the hospital in Paris because they thought I had malaria. I don’t have cancer. It’s total bullshit.”
Others at Swifty’s party had less reason to be testy with the press, and they included Art Buchwald, Jackie Collins, Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Cybill Shepherd, Merv Griffin, and Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both of whom brought their respective wives. Amy Irving came with Richard Dreyfuss and his wife, Jeramie, since Steven Spielberg remained home in Los Angeles on Oscar night, causing everyone to speculate that not all was well with Mr. and Mrs. Spielberg. Alana Stewart, divorced from Rod Stewart, arrived with first former husband, George Hamilton. Shirley MacLaine, pissed over Bob Hope’s crack about her reincarnation habits on the telecast, complained, “I think the jokes about me are getting stale. They need updating, maybe some new writers.”
Allan arrived at the party with Bruce Vilanch, who had most definitely not written Bob Hope’s barb regarding Shirley MacLaine, and to prove it, the writer and the actress spent much of the night together schmoozing. Allan looked for Swifty Lazar, but the host had already gone home.
Robin Williams praised Allan: “I hear he’s doing the Nobel Prize next. Lots of singing and dancing.”
The Nightline TV show corralled Michael Caine for an interview, but after being miked for ten minutes without being asked one question, he finally un-wired himself. “What is this?” the actor asked to no one in particular. “Am I working?” At which he rejoined the party by offering a toast to Allan.
“The reception was very warm, actually,” says Vilanch. “People told Allan how much they had loved it.” Too often, however, they asked Allan, “Will you produce it again?” He would have preferred to hear, “It was the greatest show I’ve ever seen.”
Allan could only smile and reply, “Ask me tomorrow.” Or he said without enthusiasm, “The scenery didn’t fall down. I’m ecstatic.”
Party Animals Page 31
