Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (23 page)

In the beginning, the AFD folk didn’t believe Allan’s threat to stage his party on the Lincoln Center Plaza, because no one thought he could shepherd the necessary paperwork through the arts complex’s enormous bureaucracy. But they didn’t know Allan.

“He bludgeoned everyone with money,” says Rawitt.

“He gave Lincoln Center a major contribution,” says Kathy Berlin.

Despite the enormous preparation that the Lincoln Center gala required, Allan never lost sight of the fact that he also had a movie to debut. Where the party would be a magnificent hodgepodge of excitement—trapeze artists, jugglers, clowns, brass bands—the premiere itself was to be an exercise in minimalism, albeit extravagant minimalism.

“It will be white!” he proclaimed, taking a cue from the already infamous “Milkshake” number. He ordered Theoni Aldredge to make all-white outfits for the Village People’s movie debut. Whereas the performers had started their
career wearing flannel and jeans and leather, Aldredge encased them in white silk and satin and matching beads and glitter. Each star got his own white stretch limousine for the night. White was definitely the look, if not the theme. And it went beyond the mere visuals.

“It’s the only movie premiere where they asked, ‘Do you want your popcorn powdered?’” Rawitt joked.

And there were other drugs of choice. David Hodo took a Quaalude or two during his limousine ride to the Ziegfeld Theater. He’d given up on the white powder sometime earlier. “We were traveling around the world, eight times in a couple of years.” And the cocaine got him up and going. “This is great, this is the answer,” he thought. But one day in Norway he poured his stash out the window, and “never touched it again.”

Quaaludes were another story. The powerful sedative, if it didn’t induce instant narcolepsy, left some adherents feeling floatingly mellow. In Hodo’s case, it also made him fall flat on his face as soon as he stepped out of the rented white limousine and onto the rented red carpet. He’d never worn the Theoni Aldredge-designed white metallic construction boots before. “They were cheesy, and the toes caught the rim of the limousine,” he recalls. And combined with the debilitating wooziness of the Quaaludes, he landed on his hands and knees. “God never lets me get too grand,” he said on the spot, sprawling out like a sun-bleached starfish.

To ensure an appropriately adulatory opening night for their
Can’t Stop the Music,
Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali flew over forty friends from Paris. But even that core group of fans didn’t help to goose the opening-night response at the Ziegfeld. “It was a very cold reception,” says Belolo. “There was polite applause. Not wow!”

Publicist Kathy Berlin feared as much, and worried that no one would go to the party after seeing the movie. “Which is why we spent so much on limousines,” she recalls. Allan insisted, “Do what you have to do to get the celebrities there.” As a result, all VIPs, from the Metropolitan Museum’s Thomas Hoving to Stockard Channing, had a limousine at their service for the entire evening. (The limo bill for all U.S. premieres of
Can’t Stop the Music:
$118,000.)

The movie had its supporters. Allan’s friend Jack Martin, now with the
New York Post,
said it was the “best film musical since
Singin’ in the Rain,”
and Martin’s old boss Liz Smith wrote not one but two love letters to
Can’t Stop the Music
in her syndicated column.

Elsewhere, “People were relieved,” says Kathy Berlin, to be out of the theater and at the party, where the naysayers gathered in a tent to eat and, more important, dish what they’d just seen onscreen. The all-white motif at the Ziegfeld spilled over to Lincoln Center, and white plastic hard hats found their way into everybody’s hands so that they could all be part of the lack-of-color scheme. The hard hats effectively reflected light from the several dozen mirrored disco balls that were suspended on wires across the north plaza. Allan knew how to make a grand entrance, not just for himself but his entire cast, which entered the Lincoln Center Plaza between two gospel choirs. The
Can’t Stop the Music
cast, together with Allan, then stepped onto scaffolding that hoisted them up over the crowd as they were serenaded by the choirs and a high school marching band that began its procession from the opposite corner of the plaza.

Perhaps the grips and riggers were more cautious securing the circus high wires and trapezes, because no sooner did Allan and his actors begin their rise above the multitudes than the scaffolding started to shake and groan as the crane lifted them skyward. Only Allan exuded absolute serenity in the face of possible disaster. “He was Mussolini on the balcony,” says Ron Bernstein. “He was the great emperor meeting his people.”

In case anyone had time to look elsewhere, there were clowns on stilts, acrobats in silver lamé leotards doing back flips, trapeze artists swinging high in the air, and—just like at Mike Todd’s Madison Square party—elephants. If the assembled guests were jazzed by the sheer spectacle of it all, the Village People were not. Smiling, they waved by rote. “At that point, it wasn’t a thrill to be someplace at ten o’clock at night in your gear,” says Hodo. “Basically, we weren’t into any of it at all.”

For the novices at such Allan Carr-inspired commotion—Bruce Jenner and Steve Guttenberg among them—it was another story. “It was the biggest party I’d ever been to in my life!” says Jenner. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

“It was totally out of control!” says Guttenberg. “There were 5,000 people, and Allan was there totally controlling, being bigger than life, and directing people, telling people what to do: laugh, eat, drink. He lived it!”

The Lincoln Center event so psyched Allan that he actually underwent an out-of-body experience and started to refer to himself only in the third person. “Doesn’t Allan Carr know how to give a great party?” he asked. “New York City asked for an Allan Carr party and New York City got an Allan Carr party!”

The party was a circus. In addition to the elephants, the tightrope walkers, the trapeze artists, and a couple hundred singers and musicians, Allan made sure that any guest could become part of the show—and he provided the costumes and extravagant makeup. Those makeover stations, however, proved to be a minor waste of money.

“The crowd was a lot of gay guys and a lot of skin and lots of drag,” says Rawitt. “It was Studio 54 outside and put front and center.” In other words, it was the West Village Halloween parade brought uptown. Photographers had a field day, but not captured in their pictures were the many faces of the Irish cops who’d never been to Studio 54. Incredulous, insane, and unapologetically homophobic—their craggy-faced expressions congealed with a childlike wonder mixed with abject horror. “That party was this last bastion of freedom, of excess and sexual carelessness,” says Rawitt. “Allan Carr italicized the end of an era with that party.”

Whatever hoopla ensued at Lincoln Center, the press flotsam it produced failed to translate into human bodies buying tickets at the Ziegfeld Theater the next day: The gargantuan movie palace sold virtually no tickets for its first matinee.

Into this BO void dropped the
New York Post
’s film reporter Stephen M. Silverman, who, days earlier, had scheduled an interview with Allan. His newspaper had loved the party, gushing in print, “Not since Cecil B. DeMille parted the Red Sea has Hollywood produced a more spectacular show.”

But a party is not a movie. When Silverman arrived at the Plaza the day after the film’s premiere at the Ziegfeld, Allan’s many assistants scurried about the hotel suite, running back and forth to answer phone calls, locate pieces of lost paper that were the wrong pieces of paper, and otherwise nurse the bruised ego of their producer, who kept braying into various phone receivers, “This movie is so great. Great! Fabulous! It’s doing blockbuster business!” In fact,
Can’t Stop the Music
had tanked on its very first public screening.

Allan soldiered on regardless. “Do you know that Walter Mondale requested no fewer than fourteen tickets to the Washington, D.C., premiere?” he asked the reporter.

Silverman knew Allan to be a quote machine, a journalist’s dream. But that Friday he confronted a very different Allan Carr, one he’d never seen before. This was the distraught Allan Carr. “Allan had been hit with a brick in the head and was still trying to conduct an interview, but his mind was elsewhere,” says Silverman. Allan’s thoughts, much less his sentences, didn’t segue, and his agitated
body language belied the calm of a producer who knew he sat on top of a hit movie. “
Can’t Stop the Music
was a disaster,” says Silverman, “and Allan obviously knew it on Day 1.”

As did the world by Day 4:
Can’t Stop the Music
racked up a dismal $1.6 million in 423 theaters during its first weekend.

None of which stopped Allan from playing the savvy marketer, and he immediately launched Plan B, which included a month-long tour around the world to promote
Can’t Stop the Music.
Bruce Jenner found a certain educational element in the many screenings that greeted him from St. Louis to San Francisco, where Dykes on Bikes escorted Allan into the Golden Gate Theater, and Los Angeles, where Allan attempted to replicate the streets of Greenwich Village on the plaza of the Music Center, and secured the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, home of the L.A. Philharmonic, to unspool
Can’t Stop the Music,
the first movie ever to play the august performance hall. Most audiences were respectfully quiet, but in San Francisco, they guffawed at the movie’s strong current of homoerotica. “There’s one scene where one of the Village People turns and we see a red handkerchief in his back pocket,” says Jenner, referring to a gay symbol for fist fucking. “It got a big laugh in San Francisco. People didn’t get that in St. Louis.” Otherwise, as he traveled from city to city, Jenner became increasingly squeamish at having to watch himself morph from conservative lawyer to boy toy, complete with short-short cutoffs and bare midriff, in screening after screening. More painful were the radio interviews. After he said goodbye on air, DJs told him, “Our listeners didn’t want any more disco.”

It was not a great time to release any movie, much less a disco movie. As
Variety
reported on its front page that September, “Summer B.O. Worst in Four Years as Ticket Sales Off More than 10% from 1979.”

Costing $20 million,
Can’t Stop the Music
brought in only $2 million at the U.S. box office. Overseas sales were even more disappointing, with the exception of three markets: Japan, Australia, and Bali. When decidedly upbeat numbers from those countries rolled in, Allan took solace and referred to
Can’t Stop the Music
as “my island picture.”

Jacques Morali took no comfort, and began referring to it as “a 1955 Doris Day movie,” and not in a good way.

Allan would go on to produce other films and projects, but none with his close friend and scriptwriting partner. On August 6, less than two months after the release of
Can’t Stop the Music,
Bronte Woodard died of AIDS. The memorial service in Beverly Hills was distinguished for the prominent number of
porn stars in attendance, many of whom had been unofficial guests of honor at Woodard’s various Saturday afternoon parties over the years. Randal Kleiser and Allan spoke at the memorial, and it was obvious from what the two men said, as well as the music played, which Allan Carr/Bronte Woodard movie the deceased writer preferred. The service included several selections from the
Grease
soundtrack but not one song by the Village People.

Can’t Stop the Music
didn’t play out as Allan dreamed, but it did lead him to a former, if not first, love. “Allan had flown to Paris on the Concorde, and I suggested he see
La Cage aux folles
,” says Henri Belolo. The film
La Cage aux folles
was yet to be released, but its source material, Jean Poiret’s stage comedy of the same name, had been running for five years on the Paris boards, and it was that show that Belolo recommended to Allan when they first embarked on their
Discoland
project. Belolo rightfully assumed that the stage farce, about a drag performer who must impersonate a woman in order to impress the future in-laws of his male partner’s son, would delight his flamboyant friend from Hollywood.

“Allan immediately saw it as a musical,” says Belolo. It was summer 1978. At the time, Allan had little interest in something called
La Cage aux folles
. In fact, “I dreaded going,” Allan said. “I thought it was going to be another boulevard comedy in a language I wouldn’t understand.” But not wanting to disappoint Belolo, he saw the play. “And of course that night it hit me: I had to have the American rights,” he said.

Upon returning to New York, Allan phoned John Breglio, the lawyer he’d worked with on
A Chorus Line
and
Survive!
Breglio immediately put out feelers only to learn that David Merrick was already in touch with Poiret about turning the play into a stage musical. Allan had never produced a Broadway musical, while Merrick had birthed dozens, including the hits
Gypsy, Hello, Dolly!,
and
Promises, Promises
. Eager to play Broadway’s David to Merrick’s Goliath, Allan ultimately settled on the only strategy that always works.

“Allan put a lot of money on the table,” says Breglio. “He paid $100,000 for a one-year option. No one in his right mind had ever done that before. Most [options] were $50,000 tops then.”

Merrick, a shrewd businessman, knew an outrageous price tag when he saw one. He was, after all, David Merrick, the greatest producer of Broadway musicals. Allan Carr was merely someone with a lot of money who had never produced anything on the Great White Way. It was no contest, obviously.

Poiret took the money and Allan won.

So many great Broadway musicals are, at their core, shows about putting on shows—
Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, Funny Girl, Cabaret, Chicago. La Cage aux folles
fell into that time-honored vein, even if it would break new ground as the first Broadway musical ever to feature same-sex lovers. Then again, the movie version of
La Cage aux folles,
starring Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault as boyfriends, turned into a surprise hit. “The Broadway musical will be even bigger,” Allan believed. Movie gender benders like
Tootsie
and
Victor/Victoria
did well at the box office in 1982, and top-drawer talents like director Mike Nichols, book writer Jay Presson Allen, and choreographer Tommy Tune soon shared Allan’s enthusiasm for turning the material into a stage tuner. With such expensive talent at his disposal, it’s possible that Allan felt just the slightest urge to economize, or at least mix things up, when he rounded out the creative team with a songwriter who’d never composed a Broadway show.