Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (30 page)

Before the bad reviews roll in, Allan looks upbeat in the company of Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Bob Hope, and Corey Feldman in the Club Oscar greenroom, 1989.

ALEX BERLINER/BEIMAGES

Rob Lowe, an instant Oscar disgrace, hides in the background as Patrick Swayze, Bruce Vilanch, and Allan smile for the camera during the Academy Awards telecast, 1989.

ALEX BERLINER/BEIMAGES

Allan inaugurates his basement discotheque at Hilhaven Lodge, its walls (and his caftan) festooned with ersatz Egyptian hieroglyphics, 1978.

PETER C. BORSARI

“An actor,” the haircutter replied. “He comes in here. His name is Russell Todd.”

“Put me in touch,” said Allan. Which led to his pushing aside McGillin for the male lead in
Where the Boys Are
.

Allan’s turn of affection may have had less to do with love, lust, or anything in between than pure business. Where McGillin chose not to sign with Allan’s new company, Anonymous Management, Russell Todd became a client. The result: McGillin ended up playing second stud, his role reduced to the bookends of humping Lorna Luft over the credits and reuniting with her in the film’s last reel.

As Allan prepped
Where the Boys Are,
he continued to work on casting
La Cage aux folles,
where “Everyone from Danny Kaye to Milton Berle to Dick Shawn to Jack Carter to Robert Alda” wanted to star, he told people. Instead, Arthur Laurents cast two actors somewhat less known to the general theatergoing audience: George Hearn and Gene Barry.

The two actors had their doubts. Wearing a blue blazer, Barry looked like he’d just walked off Rodeo Drive for his audition and sang “What Kind of Fool Am I?” but not before having long talks with his wife and children about playing a gay man onstage. (“I don’t play the homosexual part of Georges,” he would later say. “I play the love he feels for Albin.”) Hearn also felt he’d put his masculinity on the line, and required a shot of whiskey before he sang “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in drag. “It was the longest walk I took in my life,” he said of taking the stage that day. Regardless of the actor’s inner turmoil, Allan bought it.

“Hearn walked in wearing a dress and looking like Arlene Dahl,” Allan said of the winning audition, “and he walked out looking like Ann-Margret at Caesars Palace.” After hearing Hearn and Barry, Allan opined, “We knew we could go ahead with the show,” as if the project was ever in danger of falling apart for lack of thespian interest.

While Fierstein considered George Hearn and Gene Barry gifted performers, he knew dozens of talented gay actors from his Off-Off-Broadway days, and felt strongly that only a fellow homosexual could bring the required pathos to the roles of Georges and Albin.

“I insisted on openly gay leads for the show, and Laurents called me a bigot. He called me a lot of things,” says Fierstein.

Laurents didn’t think a performer’s sexual orientation made much difference. “Harvey, an actor is an actor,” he kept saying.

Fierstein challenged him. “You can have the greatest twenty-year-old actress with natural talent and star quality and you can train her brilliantly, but she cannot play a grandmother. There are things life hasn’t shown her. Most gay actors have been beaten all their lives on some level, economically, politically, emotionally.”

In the show’s anthem, “I Am What I Am,” in which Albin defiantly registers his pride in being a gay cross-dresser, Fierstein found special fault with casting a heterosexual: “George Hearn gave his body and soul to that role, he worked that thing. He worked his ass off. He cared about that role. But there is a lifetime of shattered pain in ‘I Am What I Am.’ Those were the battles.” (Later, when the show had run on Broadway for over a year, Laurents cast a gay actor in one of the lead roles. According to Fierstein, “I’m probably one of the three people in the world, living or dead, who Arthur apologized to. He called me to say, ‘You are so right. What a difference it makes!’”)

Allan supported Laurents in these contretemps. “An actor is an actor,” he believed. Also, he felt strongly that his director, a Broadway veteran, knew best, adopting Laurents’s credo “from the orchestra rail to the backstage” as a kind of iron-curtain divide that protected him from Fierstein’s complaints.

Casting wasn’t marketing, and it was here, on Allan’s turf of how to promote and advertise
La Cage aux folles,
that Laurents and his producer finally butted egos.

While everyone involved with the musical saw it as “an entertainment,” the gay subject matter continued to make it a difficult sell, and investors weren’t the only ones to resist its charms. Broadway’s significant homosexual contingency could keep the show running for, maybe, six weeks. But how did Allan capture that much larger core audience—that is, very mature heterosexual tourists—and get them to fall in love with the first gay couple in Broadway musical history?

“Not an easy task,” said the show’s marketing director, Jon Wilner. While some participants—namely, Laurents—found Allan to be “tasteless,” Wilner called
La Cage
’s producer “one of the smartest people I knew,” as well as one of the most unapologetically gay. Or, as Wilner describes him, “Allan was very flamboyant long before
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
.” With
La Cage aux folles,
Allan wanted to push the envelope. In Wilner’s expert opinion, there might have been misjudgments, like Allan’s desire to mess with the Palace Theater. “Let’s paint it pink!” Allan exclaimed.

To which Jerry Herman replied, “Over my dead body!”

Or, as Herman put it more circumspectly years later, “Allan’s flamboyance and his wanting to be a P. T. Barnum did cause some conflicts with regard to tasteless advertising.” Allan, according to Herman, displayed a dual personality: “He was inherently shy and uncomfortable in certain aspects of how he looked and acted. There was a reticence that he covered by doing the opposite and being flamboyant.”

The show’s publicist, Shirley Herz, noticed this personality split. “Before we walked into a room, Allan would be absolutely shaking. He’d take my hand. And then we would walk into the room and he was the consummate showman, totally in control,” she recalls.

Herz, a Broadway veteran, feared Allan from afar. But once she met him, she found “if you talked back to him, he respected you. If he saw he could bulldoze you, you were dead.”

If, in fact, Allan followed Laurents’s edict that the producer’s world ended at the orchestra rail, then by extension it swept across the orchestra seats and out the front doors to the street. And it was this larger domain that Allan claimed with a vengeance: The overall print and TV campaign belonged to him, and he had no reason to disguise what he wanted to sell with
La Cage aux folles
. Allan was selling drag queens and, by extension, himself as a caftan-wearing man. If
Grease
and
Where the Boys Are
celebrated his youth,
La Cage
embodied everything he wanted to say about his life as an adult. Again, as with
Can’t Stop the Music,
he was that accidental gay activist.

To brand the show with one image, marketing director Jon Wilner eschewed the usual Broadway illustrators and instead went with a Saks Fifth Avenue window dresser named Bill Berta, who promptly delivered four sketches. Allan loved them. “They were essentially the
Mame
poster twenty years later.
La Cage
was a sister to
Mame,
” says Wilner. In that historic 1966 poster, also designed by Berta, a caricature of Angela Lansbury came whirlwinded in a lavish swirl of a costume, with an oversized trumpet jutting from her left hand. For
La Cage,
Allan liked the portrait of a similar bigger-than-life “female” figure swathed in what could be construed as a gigantic feather boa, and he suggested that “she” be winking at the viewer. “Because if she’s winking,” Allan explained, “we’re in on the joke with her. We’re laughing with her. We’re in on it.” He also suggested that a sailor’s tattoo decorate “her” exposed shoulder. (The tattoo remained, but the wink got cut from the final poster.) Herman also loved the she-male image, which came to be known as “Berta,” an homage to the poster designer.

But Laurents loathed “Berta.”

“There were horrible fights between Arthur and Allan on advertising,” says Wilner. “Allan wanted it flamboyant. Arthur wanted it to be mainstream. Arthur wanted it straight,” which translated into no images of men dressed up in women’s clothes. “Drag turned me off,” Laurents had maintained, and “drag in the theatre wasn’t to my taste, either.”

Allan insisted the show’s campaign play up its transvestite roots. “Arthur met his match with Allan Carr and Allan won,” says Wilner, who went ahead and featured Berta in a full-page ad in the
New York Times
. The first day it ran, the line to the box office snaked around the corner of the Palace Theater. “The artwork worked, it clicked,” says Wilner.

Laurents did not agree. “Look at the ads for
La Cage
. It’s a carnival,” he complained. And he blamed Allan. “It makes sense he would do that stuff. He had this childish idea of Hollywood glamour. That was his dream. He would love to have lived in a Busby Berkeley movie.”

Laurents agreed with Jerry Herman that Allan was “a big kid,” but not in a positive way. “Allan was a boy. He was not a man,” Laurents offers. Boy or man, Allan fought like a pro, and he got what he wanted in Bill Berta’s campy drag-queen image (complete with shoulder tattoo), despite Laurents’s objections.

At last,
La Cage
was ready for out-of-town previews in Boston. “Oh, conservative Boston!” moaned Fierstein. He had to wonder why these experienced Broadway hands wanted to open a show about drag queens in notoriously uptight Beantown. It was the city, after all, that coined the phrase “banned in Boston.”

With
La Cage
ready to pop, Allan flew back to Los Angeles to meet and congratulate his
Where the Boys Are ’84
ensemble. In many ways, the four actresses in
Boys
were a precursor of the all-femme chemistry that made hits of
The Golden Girls
and later
Sex and the City
. There was Lisa Hartman’s ultrasmart Jennie, Lynn-Holly Johnson’s sex-crazed Laurie, Wendy Schaal’s conservative Sandra, and Lorna Luft’s sardonic Carole. Russell Todd and Howard McGillin would play their boyfriends.

With the actors’ deals yet to be finalized, Allan decided to throw a party for them at Hilhaven. He wanted to introduce the various cast members to each other and also to dream out loud among them. The actors had their questions, too. After months of waiting, McGillin wanted to know what he’d be paid for his reduced gig in
Where the Boys Are
.

That answer came as soon as Allan took center stage by the Hilhaven pool to reveal, “This movie is going to be like Mickey and Judy putting on a show in a barn.” Although no one was swimming, everyone’s heart sank into the pool like a plaster lawn ornament. As McGillin described the general feeling of deflated hopes, “We all realized then that this was going to be a down-low budget. We were going to be working for not very much money.”

Eventually, the actors did sign—for not very much money. Most of them did their signature writing in an agent’s office or were mailed a copy of the contract. Russell Todd’s big moment was cause for somewhat more celebration since Allan insisted that the actor return in person to Hilhaven Lodge. The two men
sat at opposite ends of the long oak table in the dining room, and Allan watched intently as the young actor signed the contract. Allan almost had to shout as he stared him down. “So tell me,” he began once the papers had been signed. “Are you gay or straight?”

“I’m straight,” replied Todd.

“Thank God!” exclaimed Allan, clapping his hands. “We’re going to get along great!”

The celebration didn’t stop there. Over dinner at Mortons restaurant, Allan presented his fledgling star with a black velvet box. Inside, Todd found a beautiful gold bracelet, which, to please his benefactor, he immediately wrapped around his left wrist. Over his mushroom risotto, Allan enjoyed showing off his newest talent acquisition to everyone who stopped by the centrally located table. Later, when it came time to speed away in Allan’s Cadillac, Todd noticed that his left wrist felt a few pounds lighter. He looked down.