Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (18 page)

Belolo’s heterosexuality didn’t deter him from helping to mastermind a gay group, and he harbored few qualms when it came to following Morali’s lead in researching the homosexual lifestyle in Greenwich Village and Fire Island Pines. He chalked it up to his openness as a Frenchman, or at least, his not being American. Plus, he adored his baby-faced business partner. “Morali was openly gay and he had no shyness about it,” says Belolo. “His dream was to bring some of the gay life to the mainstream,” with the operative word being “some.”

The same could be said of Allan, who bought the Frenchmen’s spiel and found the Village People’s gayness a singular plus for movie audiences. “The girls want to take the members of the group home and their boyfriends aren’t resentful, and that’s what makes movie stars,” he reasoned.

When Morali and Belolo told their story of inventing the Village People, right down to the leather chaps and red back-pocket kerchiefs, Allan exclaimed, “That could be a fantastic movie! I want to make this movie!” Some of the group’s gayer aspects would have to be adjusted or disguised or obliterated. But those were minor details, he let them know.

The topic of how gay was open for debate—for a few days, anyway. Allan did talk about it with his faithful
Grease
cinematographer. “There were many discussions on how gay the movie would be, whether the Village People would be gay or like they were on their tour,” says Bill Butler. “Onstage in their tour, they were just kind of there and you made up your own mind.” Which is the way their creators preferred it. “Belolo and Morali were more interested in their possession of their enterprise than anything else.” Indeed, even the Village People took it upon themselves to warn journalists not to bring up the subject of the group’s gay genesis when they interviewed Morali.

In the beginning, Morali and Belolo liked the way Allan “adapted” their gay-rags to a semi-straight-riches story. Says Belolo, “Morali became an American guy named Morell, and my role was divided into three: the head of a record company, a lawyer, and a supermodel.”

Jacqueline Bisset would play the supermodel. “That’s how Hollywood works,” says Belolo.

Only she didn’t. When Bisset bailed, much to Allan’s disappointment, he offered the role to Olivia Newton-John.

“Allan liked the combination of Olivia with the Village People,” says Bruce Vilanch. “He thought it was milk toast and sleaze.”

“Maybe if Allan had said that to me it would have worked,” Olivia Newton-John jokes.

But he didn’t. And in the end, she didn’t. “I just didn’t like the script,” she says. And there was the other matter: the music: The pop singer wanted John Farrar, her “Hopelessly Devoted to You” composer, to rework his magic and write her songs for the Village People project. Morali and Belolo, who had no interest in sharing a piece of their recording profits, nixed that idea, which led Allan to launch into one of his more spectacular hissy fits. Not against Morali or Belolo—after
Grease,
he understood profit points better than anyone—but Olivia Newton-John. Since he had fought the Paramount executives to cast her as Sandy, he took personal credit for making the singer an international movie star. For Chrissakes, he’d even named a bedroom in his house after her! And
this
is how she repaid him?! It especially hurt that the project she took instead was another disco musical,
Xanadu.
“In which she plays a fucking Greek muse on roller skates!” he screamed. Allan called her, among many other things, “ungrateful.”

“He was mad,” she recalls. “Allan didn’t talk to me for two years.”

He did, however, talk to Olivia’s agent, screaming at him, “I made her a movie star!”

Just as the Village People movie was conceived under the influence, the development of the script also had much to do with consumption—or lack thereof. “Bronte Woodard and I went to a fat farm in Durham, North Carolina, to lose weight and write the movie
Discoland,
” says Bruce Vilanch. Allan planned to join them, but business kept him fat and occupied in Los Angeles.

It was not a typical diet, this Durham regimen. “You ate nothing but rice for a month and lost thirty pounds,” says Vilanch. Allan believed in the diet, having done it a number of times with spectacular results—until the weight returned in a month or two. That he didn’t accompany Woodard and Vilanch to North Carolina came as something of a pleasant surprise to the two writers, who preferred that their temperamental third wheel stay behind on the West Coast.

The two writers were at slightly different points in their respective careers. Vilanch had just come off writing a Broadway bomb called
Platinum,
in which Alexis Smith played a stage actress who reinvents herself as a recording artist. It was billed as “the musical with a flip-side,” and ran thirty-three performances.

Woodard, on the other hand, had written
Grease,
now the top-grossing movie musical of all time, and he’d gotten good reviews for his first (and only) novel,
Meet Me at the Melba,
a southern tale of romance that was based on his parents’ courtship. It was a very personal project. “And Bronte’s sole mission in life was to get that novel made into a movie,” says Vilanch. Allan optioned it and kept announcing everyone from Meryl Streep to Jill Clayburgh to play the female leads. “So here Bronte was writing
Discoland
with hopes that Allan would eventually produce
Melba
.” His intentions were admirable. “But Bronte’s property didn’t really appeal to Allan’s sensibilities,” says Vilanch.

While Allan never made it to North Carolina to help write the
Discoland
script, his long-distance phone calls were a constant in Durham. When Olivia Newton-John refused the project, Allan phoned Woodard and Vilanch. “Now it’s Cher! Rewrite for Cher!” he ordered.

The next day, their editor from Hilhaven Lodge instructed them, “We’re writing for Henry Fonda!” Shirlee Fonda, the actor’s wife, had been a recent guest of Allan’s, and she promised to show her husband the finished script. Allan thought Henry Fonda would be perfect to play the cameo of a stuffy law-firm executive in the film.

There was also input from the Village People’s lead singer, who was the sole hetero of the group. “Victor Willis didn’t want people to perceive him as being gay,” says Vilanch, “so he insisted we write the role of a girlfriend, to be played
by his wife, Phylicia Rashad,” aka the future Mrs. Huxtable of
The Cosby Show
fame.

Equally problematic was the continuing debate over how to cast the movie’s leading lady. After Woodard and Vilanch wrote the supermodel role for Cher, Allan phoned to tell them, “Cher is out! Now it’s Raquel Welch. She will be the supermodel in the movie. Write for Raquel Welch. Think Raquel!”

Screenwriter contracts are complex affairs written on many pieces of paper. Myriad situations are covered in minute detail, more than a few of which are open to interpretation by any number of parties. In this instance, it was the opinion of Vilanch that “step two of the deal had kicked in.” He had been put through numerous rewrites as various actresses came and went in the imagination of Allan Carr. According to the contract, each rewrite necessitates more money, and at this point in the leading-lady marathon, Allan had asked his screenwriters to embark on at least their third rewrite, by Vilanch’s calculation.

“I need more money,” he told Allan.

Allan’s response: “Bronte will write it!”

Thirty pounds lighter but not much richer in the pocketbook, Vilanch returned to Los Angeles.

If any piece of the casting puzzle didn’t get shuffled, it was a hunk who’d never acted before. Allan invited Bruce Jenner, the Olympics 1976 triathlon champion, to one his Hilhaven parties in the mid-1970s, and listened with sympathy as the former athlete and current Wheaties box cover boy mused about the on-again, off-again negotiations for his starring in the new
Superman
movie, a role that eventually went to Christopher Reeve. After one such bitch session, Allan told his new athlete-friend, “I want to do a movie with you.”

“Great,” said Jenner.

“I just don’t know what it is, but I will find the right vehicle.”

“Great,” said Jenner.

And then, as with the
Superman
project, the waiting began. There were more parties at Hilhaven, but no movie deal. Then, six months later, Allan phoned to inform Jenner, “I’ve been thinking about this project. I’ve finally got the idea. I was with the Village People the other day. There’s a story there. You could play their lawyer. To put you together with them is brilliant casting. It’s Mutt and Jeff.”

Jenner harbored a few reservations when he heard the words “the Village People.” As the Wheaties model, he couldn’t afford to blow his all-American
image. “And at that point in time, people didn’t know how to take the Village People,” he recalls. The six singers occupied an odd, amorphous place in pop culture. “They were promoted as a disco group.” But were they gay? Were they macho men? Were they gay macho men? Only later did Jenner get the picture: “In the casting, boy, you learned quickly, this is a gay group!”

When Cher nixed the idea of making a film called
Discoland,
the next head on the chopping block belonged to Raquel Welch. The ultimate arbiters here, however, were neither Allan Carr nor Raquel Welch but rather the Village People.

David Hodo, the group’s construction worker, began his career in show business in a Broadway bomb called
Doctor Jazz,
and had already heard too many horror stories about La Welch. And while she did display the courage to strap on a dildo ten years earlier in
Myra Breckinridge
, the six men insisted, “No Raquel.”

The news came to Allan during one of his many sojourns in Cedars-Sinai. Valerie Perrine happened to be visiting him in the hospital after the Village People’s edict came down. Five years earlier, the former Vegas showgirl had created much hoopla with her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Lenny Bruce’s drugged-out bimbo wife in
Lenny
. In more recent years, her star slipped a bit with below-the-title roles in
The Electric Horseman
and
Superman,
in which she played Lex Luthor’s paramour. Allan and Perrine were old friends, and in the midst of their usual gossip treadmill of extramarital affairs, career misfortunes, and plastic surgery mishaps, the blond actress noticed something about Allan that had previously escaped her attention. “Allan kept looking at my legs,” she recalls. And there was plenty of leg to check out under Perrine’s microminiskirt. Considering her friend’s sexual orientation, “I thought that strange.” His fixation on the lower part of her anatomy continued until, finally, he announced, “You can play a supermodel!”

Allan’s impromptu choice to play the supermodel—sometimes referred to as “a woman,” as Janet Maslin described the role in her
New York Times
review of the film—impressed the Village People. The actress’s mildly risqué screen persona preceded her and she certainly seemed like a fun, good-old party girl that five, if not six, gay men could relate to.

How much fun the Village People did not know until they performed at Madison Square Garden, a venue of 17,000 seats, which, to Allan’s promoter eyes, made it the ideal place to announce his
Discoland
cast. Before entering the Garden, Allan saw a sign for the new Broadway play
The Elephant Man
. He scrunched up his face. “What’s
that
about?” he asked Bruce Vilanch.

“It’s a play about the ugliest man in the world” came the reply.

Allan let out a whiff of disgust. “Good, I won’t turn it into a movie.”

He entertained more attractive plans.

The Garden gig came near the end of the Village People’s 1979 national tour—one that had already taken them to forty-six cities in a fast, if not numbing, fifty-four days. The Village People looked dead on arrival at Madison Square Garden, but nonetheless anticipated with excitement their first movie, even if it left them only a short two-week break between their tour schedule and the first day of filming. Backstage at the Garden, Allan took the opportunity not only to introduce them to Valerie Perrine and Bruce Jenner but to hand each of the six men his own copy of the long-awaited
Discoland
script. The words “By Allan Carr and Bronte Woodard” were nearly as large as the title itself.

The Village People collectively dropped their scripts when Allan introduced Perrine. “Valerie turned around, bent over, and mooned us,” Hodo says. “She had on a g-string.” Yes, this would be a fun shoot.

“Valerie scared the shit out of Bruce Jenner,” says his then-publicist, Kathy Berlin. “Bruce had never kissed anyone onscreen. He hadn’t spent any time around gays. This movie was really out of his element.”

The plan that evening was for Allan to introduce his
Discoland
cast during the intermission at the Garden. If Allan was the showman, Perrine was the showgirl, who, once again, did not disappoint. Just before she took the stage to greet the Village People’s many adoring fans, “She tweaked her nipples so that they stood up through her dress,” says Hodo. The effect may have been lost on many in the crowd that night, but not on those who mattered most. “It was driving our roadies crazy,” says Hodo.

Crazy, too, was Allan, who genuinely loved the Village People. He couldn’t believe the audience’s ovation for each and every number they performed. “Wow!” he exclaimed afterward. “You guys are more popular than Farrah Fawcett!”

More than ready to unwind, the Village People took to their respective hotel suites after the show, ready to hunker down with a good script, in this case, Allan Carr and Bronte Woodard’s
Discoland
screenplay. They couldn’t wait to see what the genius behind
Grease
had wrought this time. During their many, many evenings on the road, the six men had often dreamed about the kind of movie they wanted to headline. They batted around various story lines, but the concept they liked best was to play vampires—vampires who would perform their disco show in a different town every night, and when they left the next morning, a dozen dead bodies trailed their tour bus. They even had thought about what
they’d wear: “Red, white, and blue costumes with lots of stars and stripes,” says Hodo.