Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (31 page)

“Allan, the bracelet! It’s missing!” he gasped.

A quick tour of Mortons did not produce the errant bracelet. “Don’t worry about it,” Allan said. “It’s insured. I’m getting you another one tomorrow.”

Todd remembers feeling “two inches tall.” But the following day, true to his word, Allan presented him with an identical gold bracelet and an invitation to Century City to see a screening of the new big Oscar contender, Richard Attenborough’s biopic
Gandhi,
about the great pacifist leader of India. Both men were excited to see the film that many in the industry were calling a shoo-in for the Academy Award.

If Todd was impressed, the film left Allan downright shaken. The young actor couldn’t help but notice that tears covered Allan’s face when the lights came up in the theater. “It was a very emotionally moving film. But why are you crying?” Todd asked.

Allan sobbed, “That’s not why I’m crying.”

“Why then?”

“Because I know I’ll never make a movie that good!”

La Cage aux folles
rolled into Boston on a June heat wave. But the producers’ perspiration had less to do with the temperature than with the subject matter of their show. Transvestites in Beantown? That marriage made everyone nervous. One of the show’s producers, Martin Richards, thought, “We’re going to Boston with that orthodox Catholic population and open a show about a drag queens there!?”

Regardless of the subject matter, Allan charmed the town. “He set up a piano in the middle of Boston Commons and everyone sang ‘The Best of Times’ and we got the key to the city,” says Richards.

Arthur Laurents was a little more philosophical. “There wasn’t a choice with Boston. It was the only place we had,” he says of theater availability. The other choice was Washington, D.C. “Not exactly a liberal town either,” he observes.

As the musical loaded its sets into Boston’s Colonial Theater, Allan basked in the venue’s rich history. Built in 1900, the Colonial opened its doors with a touring company of
Ben-Hur
that featured chariots and live horses onstage. “Even I wouldn’t go that far!” exclaimed Allan. His show went so well in its first preview at the Colonial that it had to be canceled.

As Laurents and set designer David Mitchell envisioned it,
La Cage aux folles
would open with two turntables that caused the streets and townhouses of Saint-Tropez to revolve before parting to reveal the marquee lights of the club La Cage aux Folles. It was to be a wildly technical opening to what was, at its heart, a rather intimate musical about a family. “Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors,” says Laurents.

In its very first performance before a paying audience,
La Cage aux folles
opened with that spin of the turntables, but instead of every element gliding together in a beautifully orchestrated symphony of movement, the various pieces crashed into each other to resemble nothing more than a bunch of painted flats.

The paying audience got more, as well as less, than it expected that first night in Boston. After about two minutes of stage time, the big red curtain at the Colonial Theater fell to the stage. “There was no way we go could on with the show that night,” says Barry Brown.

Fortunately, on the following night, after a long tech rehearsal, the stuccoed walls and red-tiled roofs of Saint-Tropez danced together to create an illusion that the audience was peering out a big picture window at the French Riviera.

Allan and his creative team sat in the back of the Colonial. He noticed a typical Bay Area couple in their seventies. He had white hair and wore a blue blazer; she had a purple rinse in her hair. They probably knew the subject matter of
La Cage aux folles,
having seen the movie, but they were nervous and fidgeting in their seats. The movies are so much light play on an inanimate screen. The theater is in-your-face, and here Mr. and Mrs. Middle America were about to witness real live drag queens only a few feet away. The couple’s body
language read stiff. They weren’t comfortable. Then, at the end of the show’s first musical number, “We Are What We Are,” in which the male dancers in female attire pulled off their wigs, Allan held his breath. So did about 1,500 other people.

Near the end of Act I, Gene Barry began his ballad, which he sings to George Hearn. It’s called “Song on the Sand,” and it’s a love song about memory, about young lovers walking on a beach, about two guys holding hands.

“My heart was in my mouth. I stopped breathing,” Jerry Herman recalls, fearing what the old couple in front of him might do. Instead of bolting, the man took his wife’s hand and held it, and a few more bars into “Song on the Sand,” they put their heads together.

Herman called it “the single most exciting moment” in the whole series of previews in Boston. “The song reminded them of themselves, and they laughed and their whole body language changed—it was loose and comfortable—and they stood up at the end of the show and shouted.”

It’s also the moment that Allan knew he had a hit. He wasn’t the only one. “They had to hold me down!” Harvey Fierstein says of seeing the musical with its first paying audience. “People were leaning against each other, we were beside ourselves. It was a very exciting thing. We’d all come from different places. They hadn’t seen it,” he says of Laurents, Herman, and Allan. “I’d seen it a lot, but not in a Broadway show. I’d written six shows Off-Off-Broadway, all musicals with gay characters singing love songs. But to see it on a big stage? America is about money. It’s a capitalistic country. If you make money,
that
makes you American.”

Allan came off the high of
La Cage
’s first out-of-town preview by taking an early-morning flight to Fort Lauderdale to visit
Where the Boys Are,
which had already begun on-location production. Wendy Schaal compared the days and nights of filming to a “slumber party,” but when Allan arrived for a visit, the vibe changed to something less high-schoolish. “Oh, Uncle Allan is coming!” someone would announce, giving them about twenty-four hours or less to prepare.

Sometimes Allan surprised everyone and showed up unannounced. After
La Cage
’s success in Boston, he arrived well lubricated at the cast’s hotel. They spotted him in the lobby, where he was trying to cash a check at the reception desk. “He was far gone, really drunk,” says Howard McGillin. Allan turned to say hello to his actors when, holding a big wad of cash, he dropped to the floor. “Allan passed out, and all this money was floating in slow motion in the air.” The young actors looked at each other and gasped, in unison, “Oh my God, this is soooooo Hollywood!”

The next day, completely recovered from his in-flight debauchery, Allan rounded up “my kids,” as he called them, and crammed everybody into his rented red Cadillac convertible. On previous outings with Allan, the cast had accepted the key to the city of Fort Lauderdale and, on another trip, they did a photo op with some dolphins at the local water park. What would it be today?

“Today we’re doing research. I’m taking you back to school!” Allan announced. He was to receive an honorary degree at the College of Boca Raton at the commencement exercises for the class of 1983, and it was an event he had no intention of missing. As he would tell the assembled students, faculty, and alums of Boca Raton, “I never graduated from college, so this means so much to me!” And he meant it, even though the degree was coming from the College of Boca Raton, which, in Spanish, means “mouth of the rat.”

It could be fun making an Allan Carr movie. It could also be life-threatening.

One night, Allan departed the hotel and ran into Wendy Schaal. “Oh, there’s one of my girls, one of my stars!” he announced to no one in particular. And scooping the petite brunette into his arms, Allan tried to maneuver a deep dip, as if the two of them were Astaire and Rogers doing the hustle. But his weight and her weight overtook him and he proceeded to crash into a bed of succulents and gray pebbles. The next day the cast presented Schaal with a specially made T-shirt. It read: “Allan Carr fell on top of me and I lived to tell about it.”

If Allan treated his young cast like royalty, they were all mere dauphins compared to Russell Todd, who had the advantage of claiming Allan as his manager. Where Howard McGillin had once been given the rush, now it was Todd’s turn. Allan couldn’t help but look at him and announce, “You’re a star. How do you like your new life so far?”

Todd smiled and nodded. “It’s pretty good,” he said.

There were benefits to being Russell Todd on the set of
Where the Boys Are
. As Allan did with so many straight men, he showed special concern when Todd experienced family problems and needed to take a long weekend to visit his wife, Kim, back in Albany, New York. The actor approached Allan with trepidation.
Where the Boys Are
was not a luxurious shoot; each day the production clocked in a great deal of film time. Allan brushed aside all of Todd’s concerns. “You’re sick for the next two days. I’ll fly you on Pan Am,” Allan announced, cashing in on his
La Cage aux folles
connections with the airline. “We’ll film your scenes later.”

Yes, it was good being Allan’s favorite.

The success of that second preview at the Colonial Theater turned out not to be a fluke. The positive audience reaction to the show only grew with the following performances, and by opening night in Boston,
La Cage aux folles
had emerged, as entertainment confections go, as American as apple pie with gruyere cheese on top. “Allan was just overjoyed with the success of the show,” says Jerry Herman. “He had been through some rough times. Because of
Can’t Stop the Music,
his reputation in Hollywood was a little soiled. He needed for his own self-esteem to do something successful and be the captain of the ship that didn’t sink.”

It helped, too, that, much to everyone’s surprise, Gene Barry came alive in front of an audience. There had been worries in rehearsals that the former TV star would never give a Broadway-worthy performance. The Boston run dispelled those concerns. “Gene turned on in Boston,” says Jon Wilner. “Then we knew it would be OK.” Up to that point, Arthur Laurents had been a difficult taskmaster. “He didn’t trust Gene Barry to have that green light come on. That’s the way Arthur works. He’ll break you down,” Wilner adds.

Both Allan and Barry suffered from that West Coast thing—a Hollywood species out of water in the Broadway pool. “Gene wanted to be the star, have people kiss his ass,” says actor John Weiner, who played Barry’s son in the show. “But nobody did. He had to be one of us.”

Worse, from the very first rehearsals, the TV actor was not respected by George Hearn, who played his stage lover. “Gene felt it, but George never showed it onstage,” says Weiner.

If the audience reaction delighted
La Cage
’s team, the critical reviews only heightened their euphoria. That general bonhomie, however, came crashing down like a fire curtain at the opening-night party in Boston. A party wouldn’t be an Allan Carr party if it didn’t have klieg lights. Did it matter that Beantown wasn’t Hollywood? Allan rented a few tinseltown-style lights to burn in front of the Nine Lansdowne dance club, and not being accustomed to such overlit city streets, a reporter from the
Boston Globe
mistook the klieg lights for “rotating World War II searchlights.” Borrowing from his
Can’t Stop the Music
launch in Los Angeles, Allan took pains to make the trek from venue to party as simple, and as impressive, as possible. Four double-decker buses fetched theatergoers at the Colonial Theater and promptly deposited them at the entrance of the Nine Lansdowne with its yards of red carpet, multiple bright lights, and enough reporters to restaff a small newsroom.

Fierstein arrived, took one look at the mob scene inside the club, and grabbed his mother’s arm. “Oh my God! Cir-cus! Cir-cus!” he exclaimed.

Herman let it be known, “I’ve tried out many shows in Boston, but I’ve never heard the audience roar like this.”

Relieved that he had not been fired by Laurents, Gene Barry exuded such excitement—“It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever been in,” he crowed—that he felt compelled to reveal too much of the tuner’s plot, forcing Allan to grab the WXKS microphone away from his star and yell, “Don’t tell any more! It’s thirty-five dollars a ticket!”

John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, and Rod Stewart were promised to be there but didn’t show up, much to the reporters’ disappointment. Neither did Senator Teddy Kennedy’s ex-wife, Joan, who had recently broken off with Dr. Gerald Aronoff. Allan had provided the former Mrs. Kennedy with ten freebie tickets to the show, which went unused—except for the two that somehow fell into Aronoff’s pocket. The good doctor even attended the party, but refused all interviews. “What does he think he’s here for?” cracked one wag.

Allan arrived fashionably late for his own party. Waiting for him at the Nine Lansdowne was Arthur Laurents, who turned his producer’s entrance into a Bette Davis moment. In his one attempt to economize, Allan had relegated the team of Laurents, Herman, and Fierstein to one table, while reserving a number of other tables for the musical’s various producers, investors, and friends. Laurents saw the three name cards on the one small table, and let Allan have it as soon as he walked into the party.

“Out!” he told Allan. “Your kind isn’t wanted here!”

When Allan decided to stay put at his own party, it was Laurents who walked out, and he led the cast and creatives to a nearby bar to celebrate sans the money people. Since Allan had no intention of leaving his own party, he cut the cake. And it was such a big cake, too. Allan’s fetes typically featured grand displays of baked goods fashioned into novel shapes, and this particular cake sculpture mimicked a chorus girl’s (or boy’s) leg. Allan posed with it, he hugged it, and the photographers shot him as he obediently stuck his fingers in the icing and licked them clean. Playing off the tuner’s showbiz theme of “Break a leg,” Allan brought out several gift-wrapped eight-pound chunks of solid chocolate modeled in the form of a leg wrapped in a bright red garter. Each carried the tag “Break it or eat it.” Most recipients chose to “leave it” since they’d already abandoned the Nine Lansdowne to hang out with Laurents at a nearby watering hole.