The blows hurt, but with his stock portfolio now strong again—Allan often told his financial analyst, “Get rid of this turkey, it has gone up only twenty percent!” —he gradually looked to get back into producing for the theater, if not the movies. He hired a private trainer, Rob Bonet, who, like more than a few assistants before him, became a boyfriend of sorts. An underwater treadmill now graced the pool so that Allan could exercise without putting undue strain on his hips. He occasionally went out to eat, and yet, despite Angie Dickinson’s best efforts, Allan assiduously avoided events like the AFI gala and instead frequented West Hollywood restaurants, like Marik’s and the Abbey, where he could still impress attractive young men and not worry about the unattractive powerful men in Hollywood. Bonet sometimes enlisted the help of his friend Blaise Noto, a publicist at Paramount, to help get Allan into a car and keep him entertained.
The theater world of New York City posed a more difficult trip, especially after Allan lost his beloved Viewhaven atop the St. Moritz. It happened unfortuitously one day when the owner of the Central Park South building, a lady named Leona Helmsley, asked who was living in the penthouse. When she learned that Billy Joel sublet it from the current renter, Allan Carr, the infamous Queen of Mean became so outraged that she terminated the lease.
On one New York trip, Allan went to the theater to see the Ken Ludwig comedy Moon over Buffalo, starring Carol Burnett, and immediately pronounced it a perfect West End vehicle for his friend Joan Collins. He contacted Ludwig to obtain the rights, and what ensued was a long transcontinental telephone relationship in which the two men didn’t meet but became “good friends,” says the playwright. Soon, as happened with so many of Allan’s family-man friends, he sent lavish gifts to Ludwig’s wife and two young children. No Christmas or birthday went unobserved without a present from Hilhaven Lodge.
Excited about producing Moon over Buffalo in London, Allan considered calling in some Hollywood favors for all the free marketing advice he’d given over the years. He also had a new movie property, Personal Shopper, that he wanted to pitch to Paramount, and to sweeten the deal, there was the fast-approaching twentieth anniversary of Grease. He went to the top at the studio, CEO Sherry Lansing. It hurt that her husband, The Exorcist director William Friedkin, was one of the seventeen who signed the infamous “ban Allan Carr from the Oscars” petition spearheaded by Blake Edwards. Swallowing that indignity, he informed Lansing that Grease remained the highest-grossing movie musical of all time. (It remained in that exalted position for thirty years, when, in 2008, Mamma Mia! replaced it with total ticket sales of over $600 million, compared to Grease’s nearly $400 million. Domestically, Grease continued to beat Mamma Mia! $188 million to $144 million in figures that are not inflation-adjusted.) “It would be wonderful to rerelease Grease,” he told her.
Allan persisted, but “movie rereleases are difficult,” says Lansing. A few years earlier, Paramount’s Godfather rerelease, after two decades, failed to generate much business. Allan dismissed the comparison, and barraged her with all the Grease figures, especially the $188 million that Grease had grossed domestically. “And he made that rerelease happen,” says Lansing. “It took him almost a year, but he made it happen.”
This time around, the Paramount brass were enthusiastic about Grease. For the rerelease, they booked the Chinese Theater, where the film had its world premiere, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John not only attended but brought their families. Before the screening that night, Allan walked the red carpet. It was difficult, but he walked without a cane. “It was like a whole new person emerged,” says Blaise Noto. “The flashbulbs went off, and it brought him back to his past days of glory. He just changed, his whole face and body.”
A reporter from People magazine tried to dampen Allan’s enthusiasm with questions about his recent, inactive past, but Allan refused to be anything but upbeat. “To have a huge Broadway hit and to make this big musical, that’s enough,” he replied. “I’ve made my statement, thank you.”
In Allan’s long phone conversations about taking Moon over Buffalo to London, Ken Ludwig did what all playwrights do when chatting up a producer: He mentioned his new project, a musical version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Allan responded with his favorite three words: “I love it!” And he quickly snapped up the rights. “He saw it as his next Broadway project,” says Ludwig.
But Allan had no intention of taking the musical to Broadway—not right away.
Allan gave Ludwig’s agent, Peter Franklin at William Morris, the following bit of theater wisdom on how he wanted to handle the new tuner. “The critical establishment in New York City will never like a show about Tom Sawyer,” he said. Instead, his concept was to tour the musical and then “play New York like it is just one stop on the road. You have to make a show look like a hit, because Tom Sawyer is something that will be produced in church basements forever,” Allan believed.
Franklin was impressed. “Allan Carr knew exactly what to do with that show,” says the agent.
The theater was different from film. In Hollywood, a producer is only as good as his last movie. Broadway is more forgiving, and besides, Allan’s last show there, La Cage aux folles, had been a superhit, and the denizens of Shubert Alley remembered it with genuine fondness. Allan felt good negotiating with Broadway powers; they treated him better than film people did, and he felt secure putting up the money for no fewer than two major workshops, at a cost of a quarter million dollars, for his Tom Sawyer musical.
After many months of phone conversations, he and Ludwig finally met face-to-face at the first of those workshops, held at the 890 Broadway rehearsal hall. Allan rolled around in a wheelchair, and there were needles sticking out of his ears. They made him look like a Martian, but Allan was used to being stared at for all the wrong reasons. He said the acupuncture helped control the pain and dizziness from a combination of illnesses, the worst of which was his failing kidneys. His skin, on some days, gave him the appearance of a ripe pumpkin.
For that first Tom Sawyer workshop staging, Allan invited 150 guests to observe Ludwig’s and composer Don Schlitz’s new show. For a brief moment, Allan left his wheelchair to stand up and address the audience of friends, potential investors, producers, and theater owners. “Oh, I’m so happy you are all here,” he began. “I forgot when we worked on A Chorus Line what a messy and ratty place this is. I’m sorry about that. Enjoy the show.”
Sometime between the first and second workshop of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Allan took time to have one of his kidneys replaced. It was Christmas 1998, and he’d been told by doctors not to leave Beverly Hills. He was on a waiting list, and the kidney might become available over the holidays. It arrived Christmas Eve.
For a couple of months after that surgery, Allan felt great, reborn, ready to do business and throw a party. Friends advised him against such an expenditure of energy, but he dismissed those reservations. While he still worried if Hollywood had forgiven him for the 1989 Oscar fiasco, he took out social insurance by throwing the party not only for himself and his new kidney, which he nicknamed Poopsie, but his friend Mo Rothman, a longtime executive at Universal and Columbia Pictures. Rothman had just turned eighty and suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
The party was a success—if success at a party can be measured by the number of invitees who actually show up. Allan made fun of his most recent bout with the surgeon’s knife by having Mo’s birthday cake include a dedication to the kidney named Poopsie. Even though his orange complexion alarmed some guests, Allan told everyone that he’d never felt better. Then, while they all partied away in Club Oscar and drank at the Bella Darvi Bar, he retired to his bedroom. It was from this safe haven that he phoned Cedars-Sinai, which made a discreet ambulance call to 1220 Benedict Canyon Drive. An hour later, Allan was back in the hospital while Donna Summer blared away in the basement of Hilhaven Lodge.
Allan felt well enough to attend the second Tom Sawyer workshop in New York, but he looked weaker and, thi
s time, he didn’t leave his wheelchair to make a precurtain announcement. On that trip, his Can’t Stop the Music discovery Steve Guttenberg ran into him outside the Pierre Hotel, where Allan was staying. “He was totally different: sweet, considerate,” says the actor.
Then, suddenly, Allan was back in Beverly Hills, a recluse again, hidden away as assistants and housekeepers tried, but didn’t always succeed, to keep friends away—old friends like Angie Dickinson and Freddie Gershon and Ann-Margret, who came to sing a song and dance a dance for an audience of one. He let a few of those friends know the truth. He had liver cancer. As Allan told it, the immune suppressants he was given to keep his body from rejecting the new kidney had left his body defenseless to the rapid spread of cancer.
He didn’t want to talk about his terminal illness, even with close friends, and he invariably changed the subject. “I want to have a party,” he announced. This final party, he told them, would be like no other, because it contained an element of surprise. As Allan envisioned it, the party would involve a tour of Hilhaven Lodge in which guests got to put their name on whatever possession it was they wanted. Later, after his death, the item would be messengered to its new owner.
Allan took great pleasure in planning what was to be his final party, but he didn’t live long enough to play host. It didn’t matter. People took things regardless when he died on June 29, 1999. “It was like day of the locusts,” Freddie Gershon says of those who descended on Hilhaven to loot the place. There were as many fingers pointing at the suspected culprits as Allan had assistants, housekeepers, business associates, and friends. “It’s still a mystery who got the money after his death,” says Gary Pudney.
Sherry Lansing took it upon herself to give a memorial on the Paramount lot. Over 400 people showed up. Angie Dickinson told amusing stories. Ann-Margret read poetry. And John Travolta, who also attended, made sure that the lobby and auditorium were filled with flowers. The event was so newsworthy that Liz Smith wrote it up in her syndicated gossip column, in which she called Allan “Hollywood’s flashiest producer and partygiver.”
Two weeks later, Ann-Margret flew to Hawaii to spread Allan’s ashes in the ocean in front of Surfhaven. Allan’s friend Richard Hach, retired from TV Guide, was now living in Hawaii, where he received a big envelope from 1220 Benedict Canyon Drive. Allan wanted Hach to write his biography, and to facilitate that dream, he sent him a large packet of handwritten notes. As always, Allan’s penmanship presented a problem. “I couldn’t read a word of it,” says Hach, who received the pages four days after his friend’s death.
Back in Allan’s hometown of Highland Park, Joanne Cimbalo mourned the loss of her oldest friend in the world. His successes in the movies and theater left her dazzled, but in spite of those accomplishments, she felt he’d never known real contentment or happiness. “Allan always felt apart. His weight made him, in his eyes, different,” Cimbalo explains. “You have a picture of yourself that you carry with you, and that may not have anything to do with reality, but it’s your reality. He carried that picture with him his whole life. I would describe Allan as tortured. It’s a strong word, but he was so impacted by what he saw as rejection. And it was an incredibly powerful rejection.”
At his worst moments, Allan might have agreed with his childhood friend. But on other days, including some that were very dark, he liked the life he lived. Or at least, he liked it better than if he had been born straight, gotten married, had kids, and lived out his days in Highland Park. “I’d be living on Moraine Road with my kids and my wife’s money,” he fantasized. “It’d be a combination of B’nai B’rith and the Junior League, and no one would even raffle me off.”
One day, Cimbalo and her daughter, Margaret, were on a commercial airplane flying from Chicago to Los Angeles. An attendant approached them to ask, “Excuse me, but didn’t I meet you many years ago?” Cimbalo didn’t recognize the middle-aged woman standing in front of her in the aisle, and she had to apologize. The flight attendant smiled. “You and your daughter were on a chartered flight for the movie Can’t Stop the Music,” she said. “The Village People were there and Valerie Perrine and Bruce Jenner. It was the kind of Allan Carr party I’d only read about, and I have to tell you, that was the most fun I’ve ever had.”
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began with a phone call to my friend Shirley Herz, who handled publicity for Allan Carr’s original Broadway production of La Cage aux folles. “Is Allan Carr a book?” I asked. Herz responded, “I don’t really know. But you should call Freddie Gershon, who worked with Allan for years.”
Gershon and I spoke for about half an hour, and at the end of that conversation, he said, “So yes, I think Allan Carr is a book.” That was August 2005 and I finished Party Animals four years later.
Over those years, Gershon and Herz have been generous sources who not only gave insightful interviews but put me in touch with other Allan Carr associates and friends. Henri Belolo, Ronni Chase, and Bruce Vilanch were also essential contacts whom I relied on repeatedly. Brett Ratner took time from his busy filmmaking schedule to give me a personal tour of Hilhaven Lodge and share various Allan Carr memorabilia. Michael Riedel provided important theater insights. And the alumni office at Lake Forest College graciously put me in touch with Margaret Neely Wilhelm, who, in turn, invited me to the fiftieth reunion of the class of 1958, which led to so many interviews with Allan Carr’s classmates. In total, over 200 other people were interviewed, either on or off the record, and each of those conversations proved invaluable. I am deeply indebted to all of you.
James T. Ballard, Peter Bloch, Anna Stewart, and Nanette Varian are friends who gave me great line-editing tips.
My Variety associates Sam Thielman and Chris Jones were kind enough to perform interview and research duties, respectively.
I’d also like to express gratitude to the dedicated librarians at the Los Angeles Public Library, Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and One Institute.
I am deeply indebted to Da Capo Press’s production editor Collin Tracy, copyeditor Margaret Ritchie, and publicist Lissa Warren.
Most important, I thank the five major contributors to this book: my Da Capo Press editor, Jonathan Crowe; my agent, Eric Myers at the Joseph Spieler Agency; my photo-research guru, Howard Mandelbaum of Photofest; and my dear friends Denise Smaldino and Don Weise.
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