Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (15 page)

On Saturday night, Allan noticed a sudden change in the room’s temperature, and looking around, he saw the
Rosemary’s Baby
director—all sixty-five inches of him—in the doorway. Even though he was already standing, Allan motioned for everyone else to rise, and he led an ovation for the much-maligned Polanski, who’d been accused of the statutory rape of Samantha Geimer, a thirteen-year-old from Woodland Hills, on March 10. Everyone in America, much less Malibu, had been following the trial and knew that the film director had taken nude photos of the girl after plying her with champagne and Quaaludes at Jack Nicholson’s house up on Mulholland Drive. Sometime during the impromptu photo session, Nicholson’s ex-girl friend, Anjelica Huston, returned to the house to pick up some belongings, and no sooner had she expressed outrage at Polanski’s underage company than the police arrived. Polanski accused Samantha’s mother of the tip-off. The police booked Polanski. In a surprise twist, they also booked Huston after finding cocaine in her purse, and in exchange for immunity on all charges of drug possession, the actress gave evidence for the prosecution.

“The DA’s case would be weak without some supporting testimony from Anjelica Huston, who could place me in the house and the room where [the thirteen-year-old] and I had made love,” Polanski wrote years later in his autobiography. Huston’s testimony had been nasty. She called Polanski a “freak” and ridiculed his story that the photographs were for
Vogue.
The night of the Rolodex Party, Polanski told Allan’s guests that he couldn’t really blame Anjelica for accepting the deal, “though it left me feeling slightly bitter,” he said.

Polanski was now free on his own recognizance, having paid a $2,500 bail, and he tried to keep a low profile—until the Rolodex Party—and the photographers at Seahaven went wild. With the trial going on, Polanski’s appearance on the second night of Allan’s party propelled it from a must-attend event to one for the record books, giving the Malibu event the softest brush of scandal. With his standing ovation for Polanski, Allan let Hollywood’s most recently indicted
rapist know that he was a welcome guest, and the gesture moved Polanski to tears, even though not everyone approved. “Only in Hollywood,” complained Alana Hamilton.

For two evenings, Allan had it all.
Survive!
and
A Chorus Line
made him a multimillionaire, and with
Grease
now before the cameras, he was clutching the producer’s brass ring. No longer was he somebody who got lucky recycling a Mexican flick. Allan was a Hollywood power broker, and he liked having that power. Friends noticed that it brought out a new side to his personality. As his school friend David Umbach had observed, Allan “wasn’t a beauty. His sexual inclination would have been to be shy and not bring it up until later in life when he could control it.”

A true Hollywood player at long last, Allan could now “control it” with a vengeance, and when he wasn’t flinging out his arms to say, “I’m Allan Carr and it rhymes with star,” he approached young men with a newfound confidence. He no longer tried to seduce or be seduced or even roll out a mattress on the pretext of a late-night wrestling match. He instead took a shortcut to the object of his desire, and asked point blank, “Cash or career? What will it be?”

“He saw me as a worker bee on
Grease
,” says Randal Kleiser.

Allan had a way of treating fellow homosexuals like mere employees and straight male friends like the brothers he never had. Despite Kleiser and Joel Thurm’s exemplary work on
Grease,
it was the film’s cinematographer, Bill Butler, whom Allan sought to adopt as an honorary brother of sorts, and he rewarded Butler in ways that went far beyond the dollars of his contract.

One weekend, as he drove his
Grease
cinematographer to Malibu, Allan let go with a surprise.

“Your salary on this picture is not enough,” Allan said.

“It’s a very good salary,” Butler replied.

Allan shook his head. “I want you to have a piece of this picture.” And out of his own percentage of the gross, he handed Butler one point of the gross profits from
Grease
. “I’ll have our lawyers write it up tomorrow,” Allan said. And he did.

As filming on
Grease
continued into its final days, Stigwood and Allan began to turn their attention to the film’s title sequence, which had been animated at great expense by John D. Wilson. Stigwood wasn’t happy with the music and got the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb to slap together an alternate tune. Allan thought it was great, but Kleiser disagreed. “The beat of Gibb’s song is out of sync with the editing,” said the director. “The lyrics don’t reflect the movie. They’re too serious.”

Gibb wasn’t smiling when he suggested, “So why don’t you shoot a serious scene for the movie?”

Ill fitting or not, the title song “Grease” helped sell 13 million albums in the soundtrack’s first year of release, and Gibb received a full 1 percent of the net profits on the movie for his songwriting effort.

Early in the producing process, Allan and Stigwood divided their respective fiefdoms. Stigwood handled the music, Allan masterminded the film’s production and promotion, and they basically stayed out of each other’s way. “Robert was quiet, he made his presence felt, but his style was much more laid back,” says Laurence Mark. “Allan was much more out there in every way. They complemented each other that way nicely.”

Until they didn’t.

The showier of the two men, Allan sometimes got credit—or took credit—where none was due. It began with
Tommy,
and now Stigwood watched as his producing partner leveraged a similar publicity grab on
Grease
. Reporters often mentioned Allan as the producer of
Grease,
with no ink spilled Stigwood’s way. It’s difficult to say whether it was a
Variety
or a
Los Angeles Times
profile of the fabulous Allan Carr, “the producer of
Grease,”
that pushed Stigwood out of the backseat.

“It made Stigwood nutty,” Kevin McCormick says of the hoopla surrounding Allan. It was McCormick who brought Nik Cohn’s
New York Magazine
article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” to Stigwood’s attention and, in turn, became executive producer of
Saturday Night Fever
. McCormick recalls a phone call that Stigwood placed to Allan: “He started making fun of Allan’s clothes, how ridiculous he was. It was hurtful.”

For much of the filming and postproduction, the two men didn’t speak and instead used go-betweens like McCormick and Freddie Gershon to relay messages. It wasn’t until the Hollywood premiere of
Grease
that they met again, face to face. “They pretended it didn’t happen,” McCormick says of their long-distance blowout. “But they both knew it had.”

On June 2, 1978,
Grease
premiered in Hollywood at the Chinese Theater. Allan came with Elton John, and they double-dated with Stockard Channing and her husband, David Debin. In the limousine, the rocker told the actress, “I really like your singing in the movie,” and on the strength of that high praise, she paid little attention to anything else that happened on the way to the theater. Stigwood brought Lily Tomlin, who was starring in his upcoming
Moment by
Moment
with John Travolta, who arrived with Olivia Newton-John. John wore black leather, Olivia a vintage prom dress. “There was total panic in the streets outside the theater,” says Randal Kleiser. Channing was dumbfounded by the crowds, which “recalled the golden age of Hollywood!” Allan exclaimed. Since the buzz on the film had been so subdued, the actress never expected multitudes of people on the street. “Everybody in the business was puzzled by it.
Grease
was dismissed,” she says.

Except by the public.
Saturday Night Fever,
which had opened late the previous year, had certified John Travolta as the No. 1 heartthrob in the country, and the girls of Los Angeles showed up in force on June 2 to make sure that no one mistook him for a one-hit fluke. Paramount, meanwhile, continued to downplay
Grease
. The big movie musical that spring/summer was Stigwood’s other extravaganza,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. “At its premiere party they had caviar and shrimp,” Kleiser recalls. “For
Grease,
they served hot dogs and hamburgers.”

Allan turned the McDonald’s food into a plus, calling it “teen cuisine” in honor of his high school movie. Ignoring the studio’s indifference to
Grease
—“Paramount hated it beyond belief,” says Freddie Gershon—Allan secured a big TV special, which went out to 126 markets. According to the
Hollywood Reporter,
Paramount flacks gave the credit to studio toppers Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, but that scenario is unlikely since the special is titled “Allan Carr’s Magic Night.” It began taping on premiere night outside the Chinese Theater and continued to the after-party on the Paramount lot, where Allan gave himself the emcee honors by interviewing both John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John (who had changed into something less comfortable, a skin-tight flaming pink jumpsuit), much to Stigwood’s chagrin. The studio did splurge some capital to re-create the film’s big dance-contest scene, set in a high school gymnasium, and the exorbitant cost pissed off at least one cast member.

“We sweated all last summer at Venice High School making the movie,” said the film’s Kenickie, Jeff Conaway. “And now Paramount’s built an air-conditioned set just for the party that we could have filmed the movie in without sweat!”

Four days later, Allan moved the party to New York City and Studio 54, which had been open only a year but already defined the disco era with its shirtless bartenders, its amalgam of celebs and street people, and its cocaine-sniffing half-moon signage that dropped over the dance floor at midnight. The
Grease
festivities began earlier that evening at Elaine’s restaurant, where Patricia Birch
toasted Allan before a hundred friends, including Woody Allen, Ann Miller, Rita Hayworth, Francesco Scavullo, George Plimpton, and Stephen Sondheim. Then Allan bused them all across town to Steve Rubell’s disco, where he revealed that he’d been approached to do a Blackgama “What Becomes a Legend Most” ad. “I’ll wear a mink caftan, what else?” he told Rita Hayworth, who was wearing her own summer fur that night.

For their Studio 54 entrance, John and Olivia repeated their leather and Spandex routine, and no one seemed to notice, once again, that the budget allowed for only hot dogs and burgers to feed the hungry premiere freeloaders.

Despite the restricted budget, Allan managed to hire society florist Renny Reynolds to dress the place up with some vintage cars. Their owner insisted they be emptied of gasoline on the city streets. It was a safety no-no that promptly brought out the police, as well as the fire department, which required the vehicles to seek relief in a nearby gasoline station. The cars then had to be hand-pushed back to Studio 54. Most of them went unscathed.

“There was a 1950 Chevy convertible that got a bit trashed because people climbed in and [cigarette] burned the seats,” says Reynolds. “So we ended up having to pay for new seats. But the party was wild. Fabulous!”

Allan couldn’t have cared less about the auto fracas. He wrapped himself instead in the glory of his three big party coups: Grace Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli, who had recently pocketed a Tony for her turn in
The Act.
His three lady stars so distracted Allan that he failed to notice a major altercation at the front door when the writers of the original
Grease
stage show couldn’t get past the notoriously arrogant doormen at Studio 54. Broadway producer Kenneth Waissman spotted Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey in the crowd. “These are the authors of the show,” he said. “They don’t need tickets!”

In a way, the real parties for
Grease
weren’t held at either Paramount or Studio 54 but in Allan’s basement at Hilhaven Lodge. As he readied
Grease
to open that June, Allan announced his other major production that season, one that would come to define, more than even the Rolodex Party, his stature as Hollywood’s premiere party-giver. On June 4, 1978, two days after the
Grease
fete at Paramount, Allan Carr unveiled what he claimed to be the first basement disco in all of moviedom. Let others have their antiquated ballrooms and tennis courts. He brought the lights, sounds, half-naked boys, and drug culture of Studio 54 to Beverly Hills. That night, he called it, simply, the Allan Carr Disco. “Or if you prefer, the AC/DC Disco,” he offered, abbreviating the title with his own personal bisexual letter play.

As the guests made their way to Hilhaven Lodge’s refurbished basement—the same basement space where Mama Cass, Petula Clark, and Ann-Margret once rehearsed for their manager—Allan and his valet, John, stood over them in his immense closet/vault and proceeded to encase the lord of Hilhaven Lodge in a
Ten Commandments
-style caftan and cape, complete with Day-Glo geometric hieroglyphics and Victor Mature shoulder pads. The occasion was so immense in his own imagination that Allan set up a video camera to record it for posterity.

“This was made for me for the opening of the disco,” he said of his glittering outfit. Allan gazed at himself in multiple floor-length mirrors that recalled the final scene in
All About Eve,
where the image of a young girl, Phoebe, also encased in a beaded cape, is fractured into endless replications of itself. John the valet flattered Allan on his “Mary Tyler Moore” smile, and Allan returned the compliment. “Did you model caftans in
GQ
before you became a movie star?” he asked John.

Intoxicated with his own impending success, Allan let his valet know, “These are the good old days. We’re doing it now. I don’t feel I’ve missed anything. Yes, I would have liked to have been around for Ingrid Bergman and Clark Gable, but I don’t feel I’ve missed anything.” And with that, he spun around and around in front of the mirror, his broad-shouldered cape swirling about him like a latter-day Phoebe
,
ready to take his place in the movie pantheon next to Margo Channing and Eve Harrington.