Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (7 page)

“I was sure Ed would hold firm, that he would tell Michael that without me he was leaving,” says Hamlisch. But he should have known, “That only happens in the movies. In real life, it goes this way: Since he also wrote music, Ed said he was ready to finish the score by himself.”

Unceremoniously canned, Hamlisch recovered his ego by making a quick phone call to his manager, who had only recently installed his seven-foot “The Marvin” statue in the foyer of Hilhaven Lodge. Allan adored Hamlisch and he adored him even more after he accomplished his 1974 Academy Award trifecta. With men like Hamlisch and Joe Namath, Allan enjoyed tweaking their hetero male vanity by making gifts of full-length mink coats or sending them enough flowers to fill a diva’s office. With Bennett, a fellow control-freak and homosexual, Allan took a completely different tack: He booked the next flight to New York City, and, within twenty-four hours, had set up a meeting to help negotiate a rapprochement between his client and Bennett. Hamlisch desperately wanted to finish the musical. But he told Allan, “I don’t want Michael to think I’m his rubber stamp.” That assessment left Allan little room to negotiate. One doesn’t win three Oscars in a two-hour span and not grow a healthy ego in the process.

Allan’s first words to Bennett: “Michael, you are the most important person. . . .” And from there he continued to flatter and stroke and kiss ass until Hamlisch found himself happily welcomed back into the musical-theater fold. “That’s the kind of savvy you can’t take away from Allan Carr. He was two people in one,” says Hamlisch. “There was the wild guy for public consumption and then there was this very smart guy who listened to people and listened to ideas and knew when to act on them and knew how to get things done.”

Bennett’s lawyer, John Breglio, agrees. “They were having a lot of difficulties on the show. Allan, however, was always the kind of guy who avoided those kinds of confrontations,” says Breglio, who, at the time, was only a few years out of Harvard Law School. “He did everything to patch things back up. So many people thought of him as this flamboyant overweight guy who would gossip and regale you with stories. But he was a very astute man who was dead serious and cared deeply about his client’s career. He could concentrate on fixing things up and making it all work.”

Allan could also play protector when his client needed a cushion to sustain the blows. Shortly after Hamlisch’s triple-Oscar win, ABC came calling. A producer at the network, David Kennedy, wanted to put together a TV special with the composer, but after long negotiations, the deal continued to languish and ABC got nervous. Allan couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer. “Marvin is really involved with this musical about dancers,” he told Kennedy.

“What is it? A Broadway show?”

“No, right now it’s just a workshop.”

“A workshop?!”

“That he’s doing Off-Broadway.”

“He’s turning down a fucking TV special so he can do a fucking workshop Off-Broadway?” Kennedy asked in disbelief.

It’s a conversation that Allan never repeated to Hamlisch. He knew when not to put business before passion, and Hamlisch returned the favor when he asked Allan if he would take his mother, Lily, to the opening of
A Chorus Line
at the Public Theater on May 21. But Allan’s work didn’t end there. It deeply annoyed him that some of the New York critics didn’t fully appreciate Hamlisch’s work on the musical. Or as the composer recalls, “People forget that in some of the original reviews for
A Chorus Line
the music got killed to smithereens.” Allan made sure that those offending critics received a recording of the score, and as a result, they rereviewed it much more favorably a few weeks later when Hamlisch’s “fucking workshop” moved uptown to the Shubert Theater to become one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.

After the Nureyev Mattress Party, Hilhaven Lodge rightfully took its place as
the
gay party house in Los Angeles. Except for the occasional all-out orgy, Allan made sure to keep his house hospitable to straights who wanted to see what everyone was talking about in this new post
Roe v. Wade
era of sexual liberation when
Last Tango in Paris
entertained the masses and
The Devil in Miss Jones
landed a review from Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
. While office decorum dictated that homosexuals remain in the closet, nighttime integration allowed gays to be seen as the engine fueling the social circuit on both coasts. It was a coy one-foot-in-both-worlds approach that had already been used to sell movies as widely divergent as
Women in Love
and
Cabaret,
and would be exploited to the max by publisher Clay Felker with his “bisexual chic” cover lines for
New York
and
New West
magazines.

More than any other Hollywood power broker, Allan brought the ambisexual aesthetic to Los Angeles and pushed it into the open, if not the daylight. The wrestling matches and the orgies starring Nureyev were one thing. What made Allan unique was his ability to bridge Hollywood’s gay and straight worlds—much as he had the Old and New Guard and the movie-star and rock-star worlds—by making Hilhaven
everybody’s
playground.

He did it by titillating, if not shocking, movieland’s elite.

Enter the Cycle Sluts.

On the evening of July 4, 1975, David Geffen, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, James Caan, Mario Puzo, David Janssen, Buck Henry, Tony Richardson,
Hugh Hefner, Rex Reed, Sidney and Joanna Poitier, and Altovise and Sammy Davis Jr., along with 300 other people, came to Hilhaven to see the new pop group that Allan touted as clients. The Sluts were ten very bearded men who wore female S&M leather gear—studded bras, corsets, chaps, high-heel boots—as they cranked out a rather diluted brand of heavy-metal rock. The group’s emcee, Michael Bates (aka Cycle Slut Mother Goddam), saw a message in their outrageous makeup, if not their music. “We don’t pretend to be singers or dancers,” he said. “We take away stereotypes and labels by holding them up to be ridiculous. There’s no social redemption involved.” Whenever the Sluts took a break from their drums and guitars and vocals, they continued to entertain by brandishing whips to flick at flying insects navigating the Beverly Hills night air. Apparently this was not enough to entertain Allan’s guests, because as host he also devised a circus theme for the party, and once again made Mick Jagger his guest of honor. And once again Mick Jagger didn’t show since he preferred to attend only those parties to which he had not been invited.

The party’s circus theme took form with clowns and palm readers and a Puerto Rican band (accompanied on the bongos by George Schlatter and George Hamilton) and a mermaid floating in the pool—this was fast becoming an Allan Carr trademark—and no fewer than three banquet spreads: one by Westwood’s Chicago Pizza Works (again); another table serving Mexican or “Montezuma’s Revenge,” said Allan; and the third offering Chinese cuisine. Allan, who had a name for everything, called it “Charlie Chan’s Fantasy.”

At the food bar, Rex Reed complained that “a bunch of hustlers from Hollywood Boulevard” had cut in line, and worse, they advertised “amyl nitrite” on their T-shirts. Wearing a leopard print bathrobe, Allan laughed and called the drug wear “cute,” but even he knew that some damage control was needed when his security team warned that a drag queen had OD’d on his front lawn and the police were on their way.

“I don’t have a front lawn,” Allan cried in defense. “What happened was a crasher collapsed on my neighbor’s lawn.”

It was one overdose Allan didn’t have to disown. As Bruce Vilanch describes the general Hilhaven vibe, “People were so chemically altered then. You could have people like Gregory Peck’s wife, Veronique, or Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Edie Goetz or Billy Wilder’s wife, Audrey, talking to Allan’s latest boy toys.”

More damage control: When word circulated that all the bedrooms were locked, many gay guests took it the wrong way and wondered in delight if perhaps Nureyev was back in action. Allan tried to dispel the locked-doors rumor.
Only two bedrooms had been barricaded, he told the roving journalists. “One where the servants change and one where the Cycle Sluts are getting dressed. Liza, Lorna, and Altovise Davis are helping them get made up,” he insisted.

It would be reported in the
Los Angeles Times
that Hugh Hefner looked “aghast” when he caught sight of the Sluts. With their muscled gender-obliterating mien, they compelled few people to listen as they performed. “Out came the Cycle Sluts, these guys in leather chaps with their bums hanging out,” Lorna Luft recalls. “People were shocked—people like the Irving Lazars and the Henry Mancinis. People thought Allan had gone loopy, but then everybody had a really great time.”

Allan believed in the Cycle Sluts and thought the party would give them the needed exposure to land a recording contract. “This is the future of show business!” he announced to Poitier, Geffen, and Wilder.

Allan reveled in the bizarre, yet idolized old Hollywood. “That took him back to his childhood of sitting in a movie theater, that was his solace,” says Luft. “We talked a lot about his seeing my mother in movies.” Watching the daughter of Judy Garland watching Gene Kelly watching the Cycle Sluts crack their whips, Allan knew his party plucked the right nerve.

After the show, when old Hollywood, and much of the new, thought they’d seen enough bearded men in dominatrix gear and left Hilhaven, a few of the boys at the party went skinny-dipping and the girls—Lorna Luft, Liza Minnelli, Altovise Davis, and Lucie Arnaz—retired to the backyard to play volleyball with the Sluts. In his
Variety
column, Army Archerd made his usual long list of notables present, then went on to comment about those “nameless Hollywood residents who made the sweet smell of summer even sweeter . . . their perfumes mingled with the smell of pizza, pretzels, enchiladas and chow mein. Coke and Champagne tastes also mingled.”

What Archerd’s purple prose left unsaid is what Allan’s friends knew. He liked to watch boys wrestle and sometimes, throwing off his caftan, he would get down with them in his skivvies. “It was a horrifying sight,” says Howard Rosenman. The lord of Hilhaven Lodge always encouraged his guests to indulge themselves in any way possible, and he helped them in those endeavors by providing the drugs as well as the sexual contacts of easy conquests. Allan’s own carnal knowledge, however, knew its bounds.

Even as a boy, Allan knew he was gay. “It is just something you know,” he told Dyan Cannon. “All my friends were interested in girls. I wasn’t.” When
Cannon asked if he ever felt traumatized by his sexual orientation, Allan said no. “But sometimes people answer too quickly,” Cannon offers.

Joel Schumacher found Allan to be “a survival story of a lot of pain. Being gay has been a plus in my life. Then there are those people who have made it a plus but went through hell to get there,” says Schumacher, who put Allan squarely in the latter category.

David Geffen had known Allan when the Dreamworks founder was still an agent at William Morris in the 1960s. “Before Allan decided not to be very fat, he was a happier guy,” says Geffen. “He hadn’t really discovered sex at that point. Which led to all kinds of complications.”

Another longtime friend agrees. “I think Allan was a virgin until quite late in his life,” says Gary Pudney. According to the ABC executive, Allan didn’t find love, or some facsimile thereof, until September 1975. Pudney had rented a house in Puerto Vallarta and invited Allan to come down to relax and party for a few days. Unfortunately, Allan’s luggage didn’t make the same airplane, and Pudney had to take him into town to buy clothes. There in the ladies’ section of one boutique, Allan alarmed the shopkeeper with his ululant cry of happy discovery when he found one especially outrageous caftan: It was bright red and very Mexican with lots of fringe, jewels, and medallions that sparkled and made noise like a wedding getaway car. Allan couldn’t wait to put it on, and wearing it out of the store, he proceeded to down several margaritas, get smashed, and fall in love with a beautiful young blond. “I think it was the first time he went to bed with a man,” says Pudney. “He had not slept with women.”

The next morning, Allan told his TV exec friend, “This guy has changed my life.” Allan was in love at last, he said, and so happy that he couldn’t stop talking about his affair. Love is forever until it’s over, and for Allan, eternity could be counted on two hands. “Over the years, Allan had half a dozen relationships,” says Pudney, “He had a mental picture of a fantasy man, and he would try to find that figure.”

These men were inevitably young, beautiful, tall, well built, perfect—everything Allan felt, and knew, he was not.

Diana Ross, Peter Sellers, Lucille Ball, Dominick Dunne, and a few hundred other Hollywood notables were stunned by the summons delivered to their doorstep that crisp November day. Most subpoenas are delivered by a plainclothesman. This one was handed to them by a uniformed officer of the law. “It was quite a shock to receive it,” observed Dunne. “When you open the front door and someone is serving you a subpoena, your heart stops!”

The joke was pure Allan Carr. In his mind, the party scheduled for December 14, 1975, began three weeks earlier when those three hundred “summons,” i.e. invitations, went out by way of a few dozen unemployed actors dressed up in cop costumes. The law-enforcement theme carried right through to the December 14 party itself, held in the Lincoln Heights Jail in northeast Los Angeles. The prison, which once housed 2,800 convicts, shut its doors shortly after the Watts riots in 1965, and in recent years sat deserted except for its occasional use by film companies in need of an ugly, dank jail.

On that mid-December night, most of Allan’s guests rode in limousines that took them past downtown L.A. and the gaudy lights of Chinatown, where banks are disguised as ersatz pagodas, and through an anonymous neighborhood that few of them had ever seen, and never much cared to visit again. Lincoln Heights is the dumping ground of the city’s vast transportation departments, its asphalt-paved lots filled with menacing-looking bulldozers and trucks. The hills of Elysian Fields park rise to the northwest, only to be blotted out, momentarily, by the Lincoln Heights Jail. Limo drivers followed the instructions of Allan’s
invitation/summons, which directed them to cruise up North Avenue 19 and past the prison’s stern, multilevel edifice, its meager front lawn strewn with weeds and litter. There, guests were greeted by police officers, who motioned with their flashlights to drive up the ramp to the parking lot. Two more cops then approached the car, and were just as quickly replaced with two other guys in striped prison uniforms. “That looks like a good one. Take that car. It’s our getaway car,” said one of the inmates.