Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (16 page)

Downstairs in the disco, Allan didn’t stint, hiring star DJ Don Blanton, who had recently performed at Studio 54 and Odyssey. The song “I Feel Love” blared as guests first confronted the Allan Carr Disco sign, which led to the Bella Darvi Bar and the Edmund Purdom Lounge (the restroom) and beyond it the copper-encased pleasure dome itself, complete with a disco ball and a life-size mummy with a light beam stuck in its head. “It’s someone who used to work for me. I had him mummified,” Allan told John Travolta.

He then broke away to share a private moment with Olivia Newton-John, who honored Allan by having her hairdresser go through much trouble to put tiny braids in her otherwise flowing blond hair. “This is our new play place. There’s a back entrance. I’ll make a key for you,” Allan said, referring to a secret exit through the laundry room.

A handsome blond man snuggled passed him. “Didn’t I see you in
Holocaust?
” Allan asked.

“No.” And the man walked on.

“Well, it looked like
Holocaust!
” cracked Allan, miffed at his anonymous guest’s lack of attention.

The disco’s architect, Phyllis Moore, congratulated Allan on the fabulousness of her creation. “It cost me $100,000!” Allan bragged to everyone. Then he turned to Moore to threaten, “If you copy this all over town for $18,000, I’ll kill you!”

Despite the din from the DJ, a loud explosion made every semisober person in the room jump. “We had a champagne injury already!” Allan exclaimed. He turned to complain to Dominick Dunne, “You stepped on my caftan!”

Since his good friend Jacqueline Bisset couldn’t make the party, Allan felt free to tell her
Greek Tycoon
costar Camilla Sparv, “You’re a major actor-performer. You were the only one in the movie I sympathized with.”

Throughout the evening, Allan took up the slack whenever the other one hundred people crammed into a space built for ten ran out of compliments. “It’s a soul train for rich kids,” he said of his disco. “Just when you think I’ve run out of ideas. . . . This is
Playboy
’s penthouse.” He pointed to the copper nameplates nailed into the two leather banquettes that flanked the room. “Regine, Malcolm Forbes, Steve Rubell. I can’t wait for them to see it,” he said.

Not everyone loved being immortalized in Allan’s basement. When he told Joan Collins that he wanted to showcase her Egyptian heritage—she played Princess Nellifer in 1955’s
The Land of the Pharaohs
—the English actress took one look at the Bella Darvi Bar, not to mention the Edmund Purdom Lounge, and notified her impresario friend that she was having none of it: “Listen, I am living, working. And don’t you dare name a room after me as though I were dead!”

The disco was but a prelude. That very June weekend,
Grease
took in over $9.3 million and barely missed beating the No. 1 film,
Jaws 2,
which made only half a million more at the box office. The one-two punch of this movie duo shook Hollywood and prompted a big page-one story from
Variety,
which boasted, “The unprecedented has happened in the film industry: never before have there been two day and date opening smash pictures reaching the stratospheric weekend box office heights of Universal’s
Jaws 2
and Paramount’s
Grease
.”

Everybody in the movie business read that page-one story in
Variety,
and one of the first to congratulate Allan in person was Ron Bernstein. That summer, the literary agent was repping Larry Kramer’s scabrous novel
Faggots,
a no-holds-barred exposé of the gay vacation town Fire Island Pines, New York. “I really wracked my brain on who would have the chutzpah to make this movie,”
says Bernstein, and he admits that “nothing could have been more incongruous” than selling it to Allan Carr in his post-
Grease
glory days. Nonetheless, he made the pilgrimage to Hilhaven Lodge, and Allan greeted him poolside in his white tent. “Like I was seeing a potentate in Saudi Arabia,” the agent recalls. “There were hundreds of pillows stacked everywhere and at least a dozen copies of
Variety
laid at Allan’s feet.”

“Did you see the
Grease
grosses in St. Louis?” Allan wanted to know. “Did you see the
Grease
grosses in Chicago? I understand Middle America.”

Congrats and other business niceties aside, Bernstein finally got around to mentioning
Faggots,
at which Allan gave him a look that slid rapidly from incredulous to dismissive. “I don’t think that’s what America wants now,” he said. Then putting aside his Illinois-boy hat, Allan asked under his breath, “So how juicy is it?”

Bernstein could not lie. Kramer’s
Faggots
fairly oozed semen on every page, but Allan might be interested in at least taking a look. As the agent described it, the novel contained “this terrible send-up of Barry Diller.”

Allan couldn’t contain himself. “Oh, let me read it!” he exclaimed.

That was Monday morning. The following week,
Jaws 2
stumbled at the box office and
Grease
replaced it as the No. 1 film, a position it held for an astounding five straight weeks. And for five straight weeks—plus several months—Allan enjoyed every moment of his newfound fame. “Something happens where you get recognized,” he sermonized. “But I’ve been doing the same thing for five years now. Suddenly, you’re the hot new kid in town,” he said, recalling what happened to “Spielberg after
Jaws
and Travolta after
Saturday Night Fever
. It’s like Dolly Levi at Ma Maison. I’m at a table between Jack Nicholson and Jack Lemmon, and it is shallow but I’ve arrived.”

Allan was right on both counts. He had arrived. And it was shallow. But most important, his
Grease
success meant that whenever anyone tried to rub his nose in his gayness or his fatness, he could now fling the abuse right back. A few days after
Grease
became the No. 1 movie in America, Allan decided to celebrate by lunching at Le Dome and wallowing in everybody else’s envy. Allan, his royal blue silk caftan flowing, walked by one table and heard a fellow producer remark, “Look, she’s wearing one of her dresses again!” Allan seized the moment to strike as the restaurant fell silent. “Keep a civil tongue in my ass!” he replied.

As David Geffen described the change in his friend, “
Grease
was the best thing that happened to Allan, and it was the worst thing.”

And his parties grew more lavish. When Allan received the Producer of the Year award from the Cairo Film Festival, he returned from Africa to throw himself a Night on the Nile Party. As if the disco in his basement wasn’t flashy enough, he extended its Egyptian décor to every room in Hilhaven Lodge, and even rented scenery from the movie
Cleopatra
to help immortalize his overseas prize.

And his parties grew more intimate, too. In addition to spinning records for the 300-plus affairs, Don Blanton worked the turntables at what Allan called his “private parties.”

“I’d get a call at 3 or 4 a.m. to play at Allan’s disco,” Blanton recalls. When the twenty-one-year-old DJ would arrive for these early-morning affairs, he invariably got frisked by security man Gavin de Becker, who made sure that Blanton wasn’t carrying a camera or recording device. He always cautioned the young man, “What you see here you don’t repeat.”

As Blanton recalls, “Those clandestine parties had a lot of powerful people at them, a lot of top politicians who people wouldn’t think were gay, and Allan arranged these meetings for them to be with boys late at night and I’d be the DJ.” They were small gatherings of half a dozen guests, and included men like Merv Griffin, Roy Cohn, and fedora-wearing attorney Harry Weiss, a West Hollywood legend who had fashioned a lucrative business out of representing homosexuals who’d run afoul of the law. Despite his $200 fee to play music for a couple of hours, Blanton came to resent Allan’s early-morning private parties. He was a star disc jockey at the height of disco mania. “And these young guys, these little brats would come up and request songs, a favorite song, and I was reduced to playing these punks’ requests,” Blanton says of having to spin “Rock the Boat” ad nauseam.

There was never a paucity of young men delusional enough to think that their movie careers depended on being guests at an Allan Carr party, whether it be intimate or one of his blowout affairs. If that well of eager supplicants ever ran dry, Allan’s assistants could always make a quick trip to the Odyssey disco, which was Blanton’s real “night job.” The DJ booth there offered a panoramic view of the dance floor below, and it was not unusual for celebrities to send their assistants to Odyssey to check out beautiful young men and women who, in turn, could be whisked off in limousines to someone’s bedroom in the Hollywood hills. “The Odyssey was a juice bar. It didn’t serve alcohol,” says Blanton. “So there was no eighteen-year-old age limit.”

Whether the party at Allan’s was big or small, press-worthy or private, what very few of the guests, famous or anonymous, knew was that the disco ceiling in the basement held video cameras. “Allan used them to monitor what was going on while he was in his bedroom so he knew who did what to whom,” says Blanton.

One Hollywood notable who escaped being immortalized on Allan’s home video system was the one person Allan most wanted to capture there. It rankled Allan that Barry Diller never partook of the Hilhaven festivities. Or that he didn’t show any delight at
Grease
’s box-office lucre
.
But then,
Grease
wasn’t really Diller’s movie, and it upset the CEO that the success of such a little film could eclipse his pet project, the prestigious
Heaven Can Wait,
directed by and starring Warren Beatty. Because Allan’s piddling teen movie musical got in its way,
Heaven Can Wait
failed to reach the exalted top slot on
Variety
’s box-office chart.

There were other reasons, too, for Diller to be repelled by the
Grease
producer. “Barry is very elegant, plays it very close to the vest,” says Howard Rosenman. “Allan was the exact opposite: outspoken and tacky.”

Allan gave a more detailed analysis of why Diller didn’t want him to succeed. Despite the fact that
Grease
was well on its way to becoming the highest-grossing movie musical in the world, and eventually grossed over $341 million, Diller dismissed Allan’s hard-won accomplishment. First
Survive!
and now
Grease
. Allan did much for Paramount’s bottom line, and it hurt him that Diller never genuflected at the altar of his twin hits. As Allan explained the situation, “Barry can’t believe that a queen who wears caftans and is so out and visible could make as much money as I did. Because of
Grease,
I made him sign the biggest check he has ever signed, and he will never forgive me.”

While Allan and Paramount people not named Barry Diller continued to sink their well-manicured toenails into the plush box-office numbers for
Grease,
trouble loomed across the Hollywood Hills at Universal Pictures. Studio chiefs Lew Wasserman, Sid Sheinberg, and Thom Mount had flown to Detroit for a preview screening of
The Deer Hunter.
Not one for the JuJu Beans crowd, Michael Cimino’s drama offers a somber portrait of Vietnam War vets. The screening did not go well.

“The worst preview I’d ever seen,” says Mount, then president of Universal. “
The Deer Hunter
died.”

The film’s producer, Barry Spikings, held a postmortem with Universal’s top brass, and together they made the difficult decision to shorten the film’s considerable three-hour running time. Ultimately, “We realized we’d cut the heart out of it,” says Spikings. “We put it back together. But Universal was nervous how to market it.”

Spikings can’t recall why Allan was indebted to him back in 1978, but Allan did owe him for
something
. One afternoon, Spikings, desperate after his Universal showdown, decided to collect on Allan’s debt to him. “He was in his cabana at the far end of his pool, dressed in a very relaxed fashion, drinking champagne,” says Spikings, an English gentleman who prefers business suits and ties to the normal Hollywood attire.

Allan was gracious as he remained seated in his plush throne of pillows. He extended a hand.

“I’ve come to call in a favor,” Spikings began.

“That’s fine. What is it?” Allan asked.

Spikings proceeded to tell him about his hard-hitting film, directed by Michael Cimino and starring Robert De Niro as a Vietnam War vet who returns home to despair and the suicide of a fellow soldier, played by newcomer Christopher Walken. Called
The Deer Hunter,
the film previewed in Detroit. “But it didn’t go well,” Spikings said. “We need someone to market the film, someone like you, Allan.”

Allan listened. He liked having his ego stroked as he drank champagne. “You want me to sell a long movie about poor people who go to war and get killed? No thank you,” he said, and promptly finished off the Cristal.

“I’ve got a car waiting,” said Spikings.

With a heavy shrug, Allan slowly lifted himself up out of the pillows, slipped into flip-flops, and let himself be sped away to the Universal Pictures lot in the San Fernando Valley, where Spikings had taken the liberty of reserving a screening room.

The next day, Allan sat in Sid Sheinberg’s office, telling the CEO, “This is an important movie, and I want to run the marketing campaign. I know exactly how to sell this movie. It is an incredible movie.” Allan Carr may well have been the only person to have seen
The Deer Hunter
who actually believed it could be a hit. After the previous day’s private screening, Allan had embraced Spikings and wept. He even shed tears when he spoke to Sheinberg. Much to Spikings’s surprise, Sheinberg called in Universal’s marketing and distribution department, and introduced them to Allan on the spot. He told them, “This is the man who is going to market
The Deer Hunter
.”