Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  The letter was signed by Julie Andrews, David Brown, Stanley Donen, Blake Edwards, John Foreman, William Friedkin, Larry Gelbart, Sidney Lumet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Paul Newman, Alan J. Pakula, Gregory Peck, Martin Ritt, Mark Rydell, Peter Stone, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann.

  Kahn publicly responded to the comments of the Hollywood 17, as they were soon dubbed, with an upbeat remark: “We’re delighted to receive them, although I certainly don’t agree with them.” Kahn went on to give Allan his support, but in effect, he did acknowledge that his chosen producer was a novice when it came to putting on the Oscars. “Allan’s next show, whenever that might be, will be a lot better than the first one,” Kahn wrote.

  Kahn failed to state outright whether Allan would be invited back—the president was retiring from the Academy on July 31—but the news couldn’t have been clearer: Allan Carr would not be producing the Oscars next year or ever again.

  Kahn launched his own little private investigation into the Hollywood 17, and in his opinion, “the ringleader, the guy who put that letter out, was Blake Edwards,” says Kahn. “He got a lot of those people to sign it.” Weeks later, Kahn ran into a producer who attached his name to the letter, and he asked him, “Were you really that unhappy about the show?”

  “No” came the reply, “but Blake asked me to sign it.”

  That fact was not expressed publicly nor was it ever made known to Allan Carr, who took the brunt of the abuse. “People who were friends of Allan showed up on that letter,” says Kahn, “and those comments really hurt him. I really think that Allan’s declining health in the years following that show are in part attributable to the hurt he felt from some of those people he regarded as friends.”

  Allan considered them friends because they came to his parties, but many people partied at Hilhaven not because they were his friends but because Allan Carr had become “such a visible Hollywood celebrity,” says Gary Pudney. There were also people who came to his parties, overindulged themselves, and then had reason to fear Allan. “They were afraid of his outrageousness. Then, like a pack of hyenas, no one came to his parties after the Oscars. The great thing he wanted in his life was that job, and he got the job and then would spend the rest of his life trying to recover from it. He fell ill,” says the ABC executive.

  Over the following days, the Oscar loathing spread, and it wasn’t only those people who’d drunk Allan’s Cristal and eaten his crab legs and snorted cocaine in his basement disco. On April 9, the Los Angeles Times devoted its entire letters section to Oscar hate mail and titled it “For Some, the Oscar Show Was One Big Carr Crash.” It was official: Ten out of ten letter writers in the Times despised the show. Then, almost one month to the day after the 61st annual Academy Awards, Lucille Ball passed away on April 26. The prevailing joke in Hollywood was that the Oscar telecast had killed her.

  By the end of April, while most people in Hollywood had already forgotten that Rain Man won the top Oscar, the public indignities continued unabated for Allan. On April 28, Kahn announced that the Academy would form an Oscar telecast committee to “figure out why and what we should do in the future. . . . Certain factors this year did involve a lot of comment pro and con.” Gilbert Cates, former president of the Directors Guild of America, was named as committee chairman, and would head up the Awards Presentation Review Committee. A most generous individual, Cates took no potshots at Allan in the press, and publicly presented himself as a thoroughly bemused figurehead. “As soon as my name was mentioned as chairman, people started calling saying they loved the show or hated it. It really is a lightning rod of opinion,” he told Variety.

  Meanwhile, Allan continued to defend himself, weakly. “Jennifer Jones loved it! Janet Leigh loved it. Candice Bergen loved it,” he said. But no defense could mask his devastation.

  Friends in the industry tried being upbeat. Gary Pudney told him, “It will go down in history as one of the highest-rated Oscar telecasts, Allan. And that’s all those fuckers care about. Who cares that Blake Edwards wrote a letter to the Academy?”

  Allan cared.

  It didn’t help, as Bruce Vilanch pointed out, that many of those who signed Blake Edwards’s letter were on those very bridges that Allan had burned. “He didn’t know what was in store for him,” says Vilanch. “All those people he’d said no to at the behest of ABC would turn on him. Certainly no one was expecting the Snow White insanity. That number had been cleared by lawyers at the Academy and at ABC and Disney, which were not yet affiliated.”

  Allan rued the day that he failed to invite as presenters such industry stalwarts as Gregory Peck and Paul Newman. He could only thank God that Elizabeth Taylor, whom he had also rejected as a presenter, didn’t sign the petition. By 1989, she was the patron saint of gay people for having championed AIDS care and research as a cause.

  It seemed the most improbable thing, but Allan gave up talking to the press for the first time in his life, and became uncharacteristically “unavailable for comment.” Variety reported that he was traveling in Mexico. “He was such an easy target,” says Marvin Hamlisch. “He was bigger than life. He felt wherever he would walk, they were whispering, ‘He’s the guy who screwed it up.’”

  Despite Allan’s disappearance to Mexico, the snowball effect of the Oscar disaster only grew. In the beginning, it was bad enough that Rob Lowe couldn’t sing. In the beginning, like Allan, Lowe defended himself. “The Academy asked me to take that role. So I was a good soldier and did it. You can’t be your own manager and agent and soothsayer—you have to take risks. And on that one I got shot in the foot,” said Lowe. And then, like Allan, Lowe just shut up.

  And for good reason. In early May of that year, the actor got hit with a personal injury lawsuit regarding allegations filed by a teenage girl’s mother. The investigation involved criminal sexual activity with a minor during Lowe’s attendance at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta the previous summer. A videotape had surfaced showing Lowe and another man as they took turns having sexual intercourse with a young woman. Just when the Oscar fiasco began to wind its way out of the newspapers, it resurfaced as part of the Rob Lowe sex scandal, as if, in his now-infinite bad taste, Allan Carr had managed, with 20-20 foresight, to capitalize on the infamous videotape to help promote his Oscars telecast. That was nonsense, but legends don’t always fuel themselves on the facts.

  Allan tried to reinvent the Oscars through camp comedy, and thought he could entertain the Hollywood royalty just as he had Gregory Peck and Billy Wilder and Gene Kelly years ago at Hilhaven with the Cycle Sluts. “But the Oscars is the one night Hollywood has no sense of humor,” says Lorna Luft. “Their careers are on the line that night. It’s not funny, and nobody in the audience that night is having fun. Ask anybody who has hosted the Oscars.”

  Allan never admitted ever that the Snow White number was anything but stupendous. “In Allan’s world it was a fabulous number that had Alice Faye and Dorothy Lamour and Buddy Rogers and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and Merv Griffin at the Cocoanut Grove,” says Bruce Vilanch. “It was that old Hollywood glamour. But they were old chess pieces, and they didn’t do what had made them famous years ago. And people didn’t know who they were.”

  To his credit, Cates refused to discuss the recommendations of the august Awards Presentation Review Committee, which met that summer. But in time, he did speak to the matter. “Allan did a good job,” Cates surmised nearly twenty years later, “but he made one tragic mistake: He put a questionable number at the beginning of the show and he let it run for twelve minutes.”

  Allan tried to edit it in rehearsals. “Some stuff did get cut,” says Vilanch. “But we were in so deep with Snow White that you couldn’t cut enough.”

  In Hollywood, there’s an old truism that’s popular among film directors: Never show a studio executive more than three takes. Too much material inspires them to get critical. The same could be said of the Oscar audience. “If the number had been only three minutes,” says Cates, “Allan would be alive
today.”

  “Allan thought like a film person,” says Jeff Margolis. “He didn’t understand TV, where twelve minutes is an eternity.”

  Vilanch and Margolis survived to write and direct, respectively, many more Oscar telecasts. But the 1989 show remains their most memorable, if for all the wrong reasons. “No one involved ever thought it would have the effect it had,” says Vilanch.

  Despite the criticism heaped on the telecast, Cates kept a number of Allan’s innovations in the more than fourteen Oscar telecasts that he produced in the following years. Those Allan Carr touches included the fashion show, the extended coverage of the red carpet, the separate presentations of the five nominated best pictures, and the line “The Oscar goes to . . . ”

  That Allan was banned from ever producing the show again seemed like an extreme reaction, but one with which Cates could identify. “It sounds like our town,” he says. “Banned? What did he do? Fuck the queen?”

  Cates didn’t witness the 1989 Oscar show firsthand—he saw it on tape—nor did he ever see Allan Carr again. His last memory of Allan Carr in the flesh came a few years before the 1989 Oscars. “There was this trapeze act in the Shrine Auditorium,” Cates recalls, “and Allan was seated in the audience. There was this absolute childlike look of wonder in his eyes as he watched those people on the trapeze. He loved everything about show business.”

  Some time after the Oscar telecast, “when the dust had settled,” Lorna Luft mailed Allan a note. “Don’t worry,” she wrote. “Everything will be fine.” But she never heard back from him. Luft kept his Snow White invitation a secret, but people found out regardless. Years later, no less a Hollywood personage than Dreamworks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg told her, “Thank God you didn’t do Snow White.”

  She had to wonder, “How did he know?”

  Allan missed all these secondhand humiliations by retreating to his beloved Hilhaven Lodge. When he did leave the house, he made sure also to leave the country. When Mexico proved not far enough away, he planned one of his trips to Fiji.

  On a day in December 1989, his assistant Jeff Paul drove Allan to the airport, where both men ran into James T. Ballard, an attorney, whom Paul knew from the West Hollywood Swim Club. In his early thirties, Paul was a stunningly built nonprofessional athlete who spent his days swimming, riding a bike through the streets of the gay enclave, and not working—except for the occasional gig that Allan threw him, whether that be as his chauffeur or gofer. “Guys on the swim team used to ask Jeff Paul why he did these odd jobs for Allan Carr,” Ballard recalls. Paul’s response never changed. “Allan will take care of me,” he said.

  At LAX, Allan was clearly distracted when Paul introduced Ballard to his patron-boyfriend. Allan wore a discrete beige caftan and carried a small suitcase. “Allan had a look of panicked depression,” Ballard recalls. Before they boarded the plane to Tahiti, which would carry Allan on to Fiji, Allan briefly commiserated with Ballard, saying, “Oh, it’s such a long flight. I’d hate to be flying coach.”

  Ballard let the comment pass, but took great satisfaction when, a few minutes later, he took his seat in front of Allan in the airplane’s first-class section.

  “Oh, you’re flying first-class!” Allan exclaimed.

  Even before the flight took off, Allan began to rummage through his small suitcase. “I’d never seen so many pills, outside of a doctor’s office, in one bag,” says Ballard. “Allan Carr took two or three of everything.” Then washed them down with cheap complimentary champagne.

  Allan eventually dozed off but not before he finished a fifteen-minute conversation with himself. “Those bastards in Hollywood,” he mumbled. “Those ungrateful SOBs! I gave them everything. I did everything for them. And then those assholes treat me like this. Those bastards!”

  EPILOGUE

  No Second Acts

  During his La Cage aux folles heyday, Allan remarked that he tried doing nothing for four weeks at his Surfhaven house in Hawaii. “My mind turned into mai tais,” he said. “The Gemini personality is all or nothing.” Now, post-Oscars 1989, Allan experienced nothing.

  Two years after that debacle, Allan remained sequestered in Hilhaven Lodge. As for so many Americans, the 1991 recession savaged his stock portfolio, and while he was still financially secure, Allan could no longer blithely tear off a check for a few hundred thousand dollars, as he did in 1984 to help bring the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing to Broadway. Parties no longer held any appeal for him, because he feared, quite correctly, that the A-list celebs and powerbrokers would no longer make the trip to his basement disco to dance and get stoned. And most important, Allan’s health, always precarious, completely deserted him in the wake of the Academy Awards fiasco. He rarely knew good health, but in the past, Allan bravely coped with the bad hip, the morbid obesity, the dialysis, the kidney stones, and the various bypass infections that prompted frequent visits to Cedars-Sinai hospital. He endured because he willed himself to work, and his work, in turn, became an anodyne for whatever afflicted him physically. Now, he found himself a prisoner not only of his body but his beloved Hilhaven Lodge, with its long flight of stairs to the garage level. He put in an elevator, but even that mechanical conveyance didn’t carry him out of the house often enough. He avoided old haunts like Le Dome and Mortons, where former business associates might fail to greet him or, worse, point and whisper, “There he goes. The one who screwed it up.”

  In spring 1991, his good friend Angie Dickinson phoned him with an invitation. The actress would be speaking at the American Film Institute’s gala honoring Kirk Douglas, and she asked Allan to be her date for the evening.

  He hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  She wouldn’t give up. “C’mon, go with me.”

  It took more phone calls and “great urging” on Dickinson’s part before Allan relented, making the AFI event at the Beverly Hills Hilton his delicate, if not grand, return to Hollywood. Angie Dickinson supported him physically, as well as emotionally, and except for those few minutes that she had to speak onstage, the actress remained at his side to help make conversation whenever a former Hollywood comrade asked, “So Allan, what are you doing now?”

  He didn’t say much that evening, but appeared to enjoy himself. “It helped him to say hello to many big people who wouldn’t say hello to him before,” says Dickinson.

  Gradually, as the U.S. economy rebounded from the early 1990s recession, Allan’s stock portfolio recouped its losses and began to grow again. Where he had previously spent his days in bed watching game shows and soap operas, he now turned his attention to CNBC to fixate on the stock market. “It was amazing to watch Allan,” says his business manager Asa Manor. “Making money can be an antidote to depression.”

  It helped, too, that some studio chiefs remained in touch with him, albeit behind the scenes. While they badmouthed his Oscar telecast and turned their back on him in public, a few continued to phone Hilhaven for his advice. Allan’s Deer Hunter cohort Thom Mount was one of the few who actually made personal visits, and it amazed the producer how often his reclusive friend’s phone rang. It would be a movie-studio macher asking Allan how to handle the X, Y, or Z problem of marketing a movie. Allan would say, “No, move the film three months” or “Yes, audiences will go for it if you change the tag line.” He never refused a request regardless of infractions suffered. Mount found the situation both hilarious and sad. No one would give Allan a job, “but he was the secret marketing machine of Hollywood,” says the producer. “He was a better publicist than any publicist he met and a better marketing person than any marketing person.”

  Allan never admitted that his Oscar telecast was anything less than wonderful. And why should he? In 1995, David Letterman hosted the show and put a spinning dog, among other low-rent touches, on the stage. Bruce Vilanch wanted to send Allan a note—“And to think you got in trouble for Snow White. How times have changed”—but never did.

  The name Allan Car
r still meant something. Asa Manor phoned Allan one day to ask if he had seen the latest issue of Buzz. It contained an unwelcome reminder of his current legacy. In an article on Hollywood excess, the magazine mentioned Allan Carr as the man who “produced Can’t Stop the Music, which he did.”

  Then there was George Plimpton’s book Truman Capote, published in 1997. Allan sat in bed reading it, checking the index to see if his famous Jail House Party for the In Cold Blood author was mentioned. It surprised him that his name didn’t appear. Then he came to page 414, which included a long quote from his close friend Dominick Dunne. It read:[Capote and I] were at a party in Hollywood given by this guy who was up-and-coming, trying to make a name for himself, and it was given in the Los Angeles County Jail. It was attended by what they used to call out there in those days a kind of “B” group party list, wannabes and has-beens. It wasn’t the kind of party that Truman was used to at all . . . lots of coke being taken, and he was at his table in one cell, my table was in another, and we kind of looked across and saw each other; he understood that I understood that this wasn’t how it used to be; his eyes were very, very sad.

  Allan put the book down and broke into tears. He was still crying when he phoned Dunne. Their conversation didn’t go well despite his friend’s contrition. Later, Dunne wrote to Allan, and recalled the financial and emotional support Allan had shown him in the early 1970s, when Dunne’s own career was in a “downward spiral” in the movie business.

  “I hope you will forgive me,” Dunne wrote. “You were one of the people who didn’t drop me and I’ll never forget that. I remember the trip we took to Puerta Vallarta, and the trip you took me on to Saint-Tropez, when we went out on Harold and Grace Robbins yacht, and then the Plaza Athenée in Paris. I remember the nights and nights of parties and good times at your house, with you at the center, directing, wanting to make everybody happy. I remember the laughs you and I have had together, fall-on-the-floor kind of laughing, because we both have the same take on so much of what happens. . . . with hopes of forgiveness, Dominick.”