Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (12 page)

Her lack of ethics shocked Alan. “Margaret, you’re the editor and I’m the artist, and I’ve got to say what I want to say. This is freedom of the press!” he insisted.

If Alan had no problem attaching his own name to the theater reviews, he knew the limits of freedom when it came to penning the anonymous “Through the Keyhole,”
The Stentor
’s must-read gossip column. It was an act of sheer stealth for Alan to breathlessly report on the romantic goings-on of the coeds and jocks each week of the semester. “No one knew he wrote it,” says Neely. Every week Alan slid his typewritten news under the dorm-room door of Neely’s boyfriend (and future husband), Roger Wilhelm, Lake Forest’s star basketball center. Often confused with baseball great Hoyt Wilhelm, the six-foot-six college athlete acted as conduit between his editor-girlfriend Neely and Alan, which made the gossip column as much an act of tabloid journalism as it was one of personal infatuation. “Alan was always attracted to Roger and several other men who were athletes, and I’m sure that was an operating factor,” Neely says of Alan’s commitment to “Through the Keyhole.”

As their college tenure progressed, Alan and his gay friend David Umbach saw less of each other. Alan preferred the company of the tony Gamma Phi Beta girls and the manly Phi Delta Theta jocks, who saw him as a novelty. He was their klutzy younger brother, but also the smart aleck who could level any physically strong but mentally dense adversary with the well-delivered, lethal quip. It helped, too, that he had been blessed with a confidence man’s voice—unwavering and in control even when he didn’t know what he was talking about. His Greek friends might have called him a “mascot,” but Alan rejected such second-class status. He was equal but separate and therefore special, maybe even singular. It was a respectful, loving social dichotomy he was to nurture with dozens of straight family men and women throughout his life.

On the making of the movie
Grease,
Allan Carr often said that he was an expert on the subject of young outsiders because, “Like many kids, I was not too popular.”

With the exception of
Charley’s Aunt,
he didn’t star in many school plays, but he did write all the theater reviews. He wasn’t voted prom king, but he did throw the best parties. He didn’t find love, but he called himself “the matchmaker” in the college newspaper. He wasn’t the senior class president, but in many ways, he was the most high-profile student on campus.

“He advertised himself,” says Franz Schulze, a Lake Forest College professor. “Students recognized him as Poopsie. He was very, very stout and made no bones about that. And in a way he took advantage of his uniqueness.” Even his many Poopsie columns and reviews carried a pen-and-ink caricature that humorously captured Alan’s already jowly, nearly shapeless face.

But high-profile is not the same as popular, nor can it be confused with handsome. If he lusted after the school’s top athletes, he kept it to himself. “Alan wasn’t a beauty,” says Umbach. “His sexual inclination would have been to be shy and not bring it up until later in life when he could control it.”

Regarding the opposite sex or his own sex, he didn’t indulge—except when it came to that de rigueur date for the junior prom, and even then Alan took a pretty but less-than-available girl, Margie Tegtmeyer, who had momentarily split from her boyfriend (and future husband). “Alan knew Bob [Cohen] was taking someone else,” Tegtmeyer recalls. Back in 1957, Margie qualified as a safe bet, in Alan’s estimation, one who wouldn’t be interested in a goodnight kiss or follow-up date. The Lake Forest junior prom qualified as the big date night, and college students there didn’t decorate the gym for the event. They rented the expensive
Milwaukee Clipper
to cruise Lake Michigan. Margie and Alan had a “very nice time,” as she remembers, but her prom date wasn’t anything like Bob Cohen. “Alan was very concerned about what I’d wear and he brought flowers to go with what I wore. He was thoughtful about those things,” she notes, even if he was inordinately nitpicking about the décor, the place settings, the music, and anything else having to do with proper entertaining. “This shouldn’t be there,” he said of one flower arrangement. “It should be
there
.”

Whether it was his weight, his homosexuality, his ethnicity, or his troubled family life, “Alan didn’t feel he ever fit in, both in high school and college,” says Joanne Cimbalo. “He found excitement, he loved to entertain, and he was always going going going. But in his reflective moments, he never found peace. Never.”

By his senior year in college, Alan’s weight had already ballooned his five-foot-six frame to well over 200 pounds, and he had even begun to wear caftans or muumuus on campus to disguise his burgeoning obesity. If he had simply retreated to a corner of the campus, Alan might have been ridiculed or, at best, ignored. But he possessed too strong a personality to be dismissed, and despite the fact that he was now dressing, in essence, like a woman, and an extravagant woman at that, Cimbalo never heard him referred to as a sissy, a queer, or a fairy. “His clothes, like his weight and his interest in Broadway, were just one more thing that made him unique,” she says. What most students didn’t know was that the high-profile Alan Solomon never graduated from college. Semester after semester, he put off fulfilling the school’s science requirement and waited until the second semester of his senior year to take biology. He failed the course.

While that ignominy only solidified his outsider status, at least to himself, he took out career insurance by quickly setting up a postcollege job prior to his nongraduation.

“We reopened the Civic Theater in Chicago,” says Jack Tourville, a Lake Forest College alum who also came up short on graduation credits. The reason for their double failure was easy to pinpoint: Instead of studying biology that final semester, Alan enlisted Tourville to emcee the annual Lake Forest
Garrick Gaieties
. The show was a success, their studies were not. They wisely decided to pursue success.

“We’ll become theater producers!” Alan told his friend.

Before he got down to the nitty-gritty of raising money, acquiring stage properties, and securing a theater, Alan set forth his top priority as an impresario. “I’m getting a new name!” he said. “There are too many Solomons in Chicago.”

He even hired a lawyer to change his name to Alan Carr. (The “Allan” came a few years later when a numerologist suggested the change.) When the judge asked him why he needed a new name, the newly monickered young man replied, “I’m divorcing my parents!” Always the performer, Allan knew it would get a reaction in court. But secretly, in the back of his mind, “I was really thinking about that marquee. I was thinking of billing and how a name looked in a newspaper ad.”

If the new Mr. Carr divorced his parents that day in court, he failed to notify Ann and Albert Solomon of that split when he asked them to bankroll the new Chicago Civic Theater. It was their money that bought an impressive 1958 season: Eva Le Gallienne in
Mary Stuart
, a repertory offering of Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
and
The Tempest,
plus Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in
The World of Carl Sandburg
. Alan had seen the Merrills perform the Sandburg offering in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and promptly barged his way into their dressing room. “I don’t want to be rude,” he began the conversation, “but why are you playing in this auditorium?”

“Good question,” said Davis, who liked the boy’s spunk.

Alan let her know, “I think you should come to Chicago. Carl Sandburg is from Chicago.”

He had more than just his parents’ money to start a first-class theater company. Alan laid the groundwork for the Civic Theater by assiduously courting the favor of the
Chicago Tribune
’s entertainment columnist Herb Lyon and its chief theater critic, Claudia Cassidy, who, in turn, lavished much ink on the project. It was Cassidy who suggested the venue, which heretofore had been used as a rehearsal space for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Cassidy also cooperated when it came to the reviews, but there was nothing that she could do about the box office. Undeterred, Alan and his friend Jack Tourville set out to put together a spring 1959 season. Alan had recently seen Lorraine Hansberry’s
A Raisin in the Sun
on Broadway and wanted to bring it to Chicago, where the play is set. The tyro impresarios sat down with the play’s producer, Philip Rose, and Alan threw out a box-office guarantee number. “It was too much money,” says Tourville. But his partner told him not to worry. Alan Solomon was now Alan Carr, and he knew that showmen from Flo Ziegfeld to Mike Todd often had to lie to get what they wanted. The trick, he believed, was to lie so extravagantly that he instilled confidence. Tourville saw finances in a different light. “It was scary for us,” he recalls.

Alan wanted to round out his spring 1959 season with
Eugenia.
It had been a flop on Broadway, but it was a flop starring Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead was now touring in it, and Alan and Tourville drove to Detroit in hopes they could convince the tempestuous, and cocaine-addicted, actress to bring the show to Chicago.

“We sent her roses and we visited her backstage,” Tourville recalls. “It was a terrible show. She admitted as much. It needed work.”

After one desultory performance, Bankhead sat in her dressing room and listened as two postteenage producers made their pitch. She didn’t bother to change out of her robe, but had already consumed half a bottle of scotch. “Alan and I shared some thoughts with her and preconceived notions of what we wanted to do. That kind of stuff. And then we gracefully got out of there,” says Tourville.

Bankhead never made it to Chicago that theater season.
A Raisin in the Sun
did arrive, but under the auspices of another producing entity, and Jack Tourville joined the army. He told Alan that he couldn’t keep taking Albert Solomon’s money, since their first season with the Civic Theater failed to break even and it was unlikely that their second season would be any different. “It was an exciting time,” says Tourville. “But my dad was concerned and Alan’s relationship with his father was not good. It was through his mother that Alan got the money. His father had crumbled and moaned and finally just said OK.”

But without Tourville’s business acumen and emotional support, Alan also called it quits. It helped that he got a job offer from an unlikely source.

“I was starting this new TV show and hired Alan Carr to be my talent director,” says Hugh Hefner. The show:
Playboy’s Penthouse
. It lasted only a couple of seasons, but it spawned the magazine’s vast network of Playboy clubs, and introduced Allan to the world of booking talent—talent that included Ella Fitzgerald, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Newhart, and even some performers, like Marlo Thomas, Mama Cass Elliot, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, and Ann-Margret, who never made it on the show but ended up being managed by Alan Carr as soon as he migrated from Chicago to Los Angeles.

It’s often said that famous people never look back. Allan Carr was different. He looked back often, which is why he could never stop running.

Broadway is hardly a bastion of street reality and grit, but in the hands of Allan and his friend Bronte Woodard,
Grease
lost whatever real dirt it once possessed. Choreographer Patricia Birch, the only major creative talent to work on both projects, may have worried about the substitution of California succulents for Chicago asphalt, but in the end, she felt that Allan and Woodard’s screenplay kept the show’s adolescent soul. “Those high school kids were popular in any school. They are archetypal. If you look at any high school class, you find the outsiders getting left out, people vying for position,” she says.

John Travolta spoke for Allan when he analyzed the movie’s success: “The 1950s didn’t have a lot of great causes. Everything was more dull, bland, and complacent. And in a lot of ways, that’s the way things are today in the 1970s. I think audiences can relate to that.”

It’s not as if Allan were messing with a hard-hitting teen classic, like
Rebel Without a Cause,
when he rewrote
Grease. Grease
is, and always was, a light-hearted musical. Allan never apologized for sanitizing his greasers. The movie would be his story. It was never to be
their
story. “I based my changes on my high school in the Chicago suburbs, where the kids were not all greasers, like in the stage musical,” he said. “They were tough but good kids, and by moving the setting to the suburbs, I made it closer to my own high school memories and, much more important, more resonant for a wider audience. To that end, I also cleaned up some of the raunchy language.”

If cinematographer Bill Butler channeled Busby Berkeley for
Grease,
Allan kept to an equally 1930s aesthetic—one that had much to do with “Mickey and Judy put on a show.” Regardless of the approach, the powers at Paramount Pictures never really cared for
Grease
. Box office prognosticators were much more excited about Robert Stigwood’s other upcoming movie musical that summer,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. And so was Stigwood, who viewed
Grease
“as Allan’s movie,” says the
Sgt. Pepper
screenwriter Henry Edwards.

Paramount wanted its TV star Henry Winkler, of
Happy Days,
to headline
Grease
. “The Fonz,” tired of playing greasers, passed—much to Paramount’s disappointment and much to Allan and Stigwood’s delight. Stigwood had his eye on John Travolta ever since the teenager auditioned for the Broadway production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
in 1971. “That kid’s going to be a star!” Stigwood said at the time. From his opposing catbird seat, Allan also claimed credit for the young actor’s subsequent stardom, and often told the story that a headshot of Travolta, sent to him by publicist Ronni Chasen, led to Travolta’s being cast in
Grease
. Regardless, it was Stigwood who first signed the young actor, not only to
Grease
but to the producer’s three-picture contract with Paramount, which began with
Saturday Night Fever
(and ended with a big thud called
Moment by Moment
).