Party Animals Page 3

  Lee Remick wondered, “Why the black-and-white theme?”

  “Ever heard of Cecil Beaton?” Allan shot back.

  Sidney Poitier, Peter Sellers, Ann-Margret, Dyan Cannon, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Michael Crichton, and Kirk Douglas also visited Hilhaven Lodge during Allan’s first year there. “It was like going to the movies only in 3-D,” says Joanne Cimbalo, a friend who had known Allan since their grammar-school days in Highland Park, Illinois. She was the sibling he never had, and they remained in close, constant contact throughout his life. Each autumn, Cimbalo mailed Allan big packages of leaves—“at the height of their color,” she says—so that he could spread them across his Beverly Hills lawn and feel at home.

  Allan liked to mix it up at his parties, and that included famous friends and friends like Cimbalo, as well as strangers who were young, pretty, and willing. “Everything happens at parties!” Allan crowed, and in addition to the fun and sex and drugs, he meant business as his clients brushed shoulders with the film world’s top agents, studio execs, and producers, as well as the old guard of Billy and Audrey Wilder, Janet and Fred de Cordova, Irving and Mary Lazar, Virginia and Henry Mancini, and Monica and Jennings Lang, the once-famous agent-producer who, Allan used to tell the youngsters at his parties, “got shot in the balls by Walter Wanger.” He also invited select members of the press, because, if it wasn’t written up in Variety or the Los Angeles Times, the party didn’t happen, in Allan’s opinion.

  One reporter wanted to know why no one was dancing on the oak floor that Allan erected over his pool.

  “Because they’re all doing business first,” said Andy Warhol superstar Pat Ast, who was yet another Jewish fat kid whom Allan befriended. “Then they’ll eat, then they’ll dance.”

  Clients who missed an Allan Carr party didn’t remain an Allan Carr client for long. Such an affront warranted the inevitable next-day phone call, which invariably began, “Hello. It’s Allan. I hope you were really sick last night.”

  When Allan said he wanted to bring back glamour, he didn’t mean something that reeked of leftover absinthe or molting feather boas. While he adored Hollywood’s old guard, he defiantly broke their rule never to mix with the rock ’n’ roll set, and through Hilhaven Lodge, he provided the meeting ground where movie stars and rockers could party together. If Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, and Bianca and Mick Jagger weren’t there on the evening of May 26, they certainly attended one or more of the dozen other get-togethers that followed during Allan’s first season on Benedict Canyon Drive.

  In the early days of Allan’s party-giving, before he had turned the cottage into his office, he relied on Richard Hach to send out the invitations. At one party, United Artists executive David Picker, responsible for inking the James Bond franchise, turned to new-boy-in-town Howard Rosenman, fresh off an affair with Leonard Bernstein back in New York City and already in production with a few TV movies, to say, “Allan must have invited his Rolodex.”

  Actually, it was two Rolodexes: his and Hach’s.

  “We cross-pollinated lists,” Hach confirms.

  As long as Allan plied them with food, liquor, drugs, and sex, the guests didn’t seem to mind when their host said clunky things like “I’m instant Elsa Maxwell!” Whoever the hell she was. The food was good, the drugs and sex even better.

  That first summer at Hilhaven, the parties merged deliriously into each other. So many people spent so many nights at Allan’s house that many who attended don’t remember being there the night of May 26, and many who think they were weren’t. His housewarming was followed in quick succession with fetes honoring a lazy Susan array of celebrities that ranged from Elton John and Martha Raye to Rudolf Nureyev and Mick Jagger, who didn’t make it to the party in his honor. “But that didn’t matter,” says Hach. “Bianca Jagger showed up, and besides, Mick Jagger was at half a dozen Allan Carr parties that he hadn’t been invited to.”

  “It was just before the Robert Stigwood disco period,” says Alice Cooper, “and Allan was the social butterfly who had a million different parties because he was always promoting something.” Cooper called it a “family thing” since the parties usually included fellow rockers Elton, Rod, Mick, Ringo. “For a while there, we were out almost every night,” he recalls, and Allan was the catalyst that brought them together with the movie and TV people. “I became friends with Groucho Marx. We’d go to Allan’s and it would not be surprising to find Mae West sitting next to Rod Stewart or Salvador Dali or Jack Benny. Those people did hang out there,” says Cooper.

  “Allan was the bridge between new and old Hollywood,” says Flashdance producer Peter Guber. “When I first came to Hollywood, he gave parties on a scale of what you read about in Harold Robbins.”

  Allan’s parties weren’t the only starry gatherings in town. Agent Sue Mengers’s dinner parties were strictly A-list, as were the weekend salons over at Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s house. “What made Allan’s parties unique is that you just didn’t know who would walk in the door,” says agent Ron Bernstein.

  Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher agrees. “It was like Noah’s ark. His parties were two of everything.”

  “Allan’s parties were loud, vulgar extravaganzas to which he invited half the town,” says critic and Gong Show regular Rex Reed.

  Who knew? The next person through the door could be Rita Hayworth or L.A. Philharmonic conductor Zubin Mehta, Diana Ross or rock mogul David Geffen, Sidney Poitier or porn star Harry Reems or a neighbor’s good-looking pool boy. It was Allan’s introduction of the rockers to the movie mix, however, that really shook up Hollywood. “He was a force that drove that kind of thinking in the 1970s,” Guber adds.

  Time magazine put the epicenter of the rock star/movie star confluence at two points on the Los Angeles map. A club called On the Rox occupied the second floor above the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. Unofficially, people called it Lou Adler’s Living Room, since it boasted an exclusive list of only forty members. Most of them were rockers but a few made movies, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal, and his pubescent daughter Tatum in the flush of her Paper Moon Oscar-win days.

  As Time put it, there are “only two places where L.A. music and film personalities can meet informally.” On the Rox was one. “The other location is Allan Carr’s house in Benedict Canyon,” Time continued. “If a rock, film or TV performer wants to cross over, his journey must begin here.” The newsweekly went on to call Allan Carr “the king of the A list.”

  Although few among the rock set became his clients, the Rod Stewarts and the Keith Moons of the world found an equally protective “career doctor,” as Allan advertised himself, at Hilhaven Lodge. “The rock people don’t come from affluent backgrounds,” he observed. “They’re not used to socializing in chic and elegant style.” Whether Mylar staircases and Lucite pianos are hallmarks of true elegance, Allan countered with Cristal Champagne, Petrossian caviar, and stone crabs flown in from Florida. More important, Allan and his rock friends bonded over an interior decorator named Phyllis Morris, who reveled in the moniker that Time magazine gave her, “la dame du flash.” She specialized in zebra rugs, Borsalino mirrors, St. Regis candelabras, and Corsican coffee tables—an aesthetic best described as loud and lacquered.

  “Rock people are just like the movie stars of the 1940s,” Morris proclaimed. “It’s exciting to watch them spend money. They’re looking for something that says they’ve arrived. They’re creative, emotional, uninhibited. And in their homes you’ll find an atmosphere of uncontrolled funk.”

  She could have been speaking of Allan Carr, and as it turned out, her pièce de résistance was to be his AC/DC Disco, installed for $100,000. That basement retreat rivaled Hugh Hefner’s mansion and grotto only a few blocks away. “There was a whole rash of new stars then. It was movie stars and rock stars. It was party central between Allan’s house and the Playboy mansion,” Alice Cooper recalls. Hefner, whom Allan had talent-
scouted for in the early 1960s, provided the girls. In a less explicit way, Allan provided the boys, bringing a bisexual frisson to an era that was still militantly hetero but increasingly curious about the sexually outré. If they didn’t experiment, the people on Allan’s guest list had read about homosexuality in The Joy of Sex and Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, and they’d seen it in new movies like The Boys in the Band, Midnight Cowboy, Fellini Satyricon, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

  “Nobody in those days ever said ‘gay,’” notes Alice Cooper, who predated the sexual ambivalence of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona by a few years. In 1973, the oddly named male rock star Alice Cooper reigned atop the pop music field, having broken U.S. box office records set by the Rolling Stones. Teenagers came to his concerts not just to hear his brand of heavy metal but to watch the “shock rocker” decapitate baby dolls, throw live chickens into the audience, and fiddle around with a guillotine. Sexual ambivalence, if swathed in enough blood, fake or otherwise, was one thing. Confirmed homosexuality registered somewhat lower on the social totem pole. Even in Hollywood, its name remained unspoken despite the Stonewall Riots only four years earlier. Alice Cooper explains, “It was a much more heterosexual period, a hedonistic era of excess. Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah, and Allan Carr’s house would have been that clubhouse.”

  Straight stars liked it. Closeted gay stars liked it even better. As Allan used to tell them, “You can’t go out and be yourself. So if you’re going to be naughty, come to Casa Allan and carry on!”

  Over the years, some of the biggest celebrities, regardless of their sexual orientation, showed up at Allan’s parties on a regular basis, “whether they would admit they were there,” says Allan’s friend Gary Pudney, a longtime ABC vice-president. “He got beautiful people to let their hair down at his house, to get down and dirty. Allan was able to bring out the worst in everyone and have a wonderful time of it.”

  It was Allan’s unspoken goal to bring gay into the Hollywood mainstream. “Only at Allan’s parties would you find Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Edie Goetz chatting up some young hustler that Allan had picked up the night before,” says Howard Rosenman, producer of The Celluloid Closet.

  “There would be these big Hollywood stars, and then you would see these beach kids. You’d think, What are they doing there?” says Hairspray producer Craig Zadan.

  Allan referred to these kids either affectionately or dismissively, depending on his mood, as “the twinkies.” For the gay half of Allan’s guest list, they were a major attraction. When Brett Ratner became the proud owner of Hilhaven Lodge, he heard the stories repeatedly. “So many gay guys tell me they fell in love in this house,” he says. Not that the fun was restricted to same-sex attractions. As a famous TV actress once joked to Ratner, “If you ever find a broad’s panties in that house . . . ”

  Whether his guests were hetero or homo, the gayest thing at an Allan Carr party was unquestionably Allan Carr. “He was really out there,” says Gregg Kilday, who profiled Allan many times for the Los Angeles Times and the Herald-Examiner . “But of course, the press would never write about anybody being gay in the 1970s for fear of libel. They used the code word ‘flamboyant.’”

  Or “epicene,” as Time did in its profile of Allan.

  To the press, Allan’s mantra told Hollywood to “get back to glamour!” Privately, “He was making it up as he went along,” says Richard Hach. “He was pretending. He was living his fantasy the way he thought it should be.” If he wasn’t yet the great Hollywood producer that he had longed to be since his childhood in Highland Park, Illinois, Allan Carr would instead be the great Hollywood party giver—until the rest of his fantasy fell into shape.

  Not that Chasen’s catered every Hilhaven party. Since Allan would often invite 200 people and 300 showed up, the quality of the food, the décor, and the entertainment varied radically. Business manager Daniel Gottlieb was right. Allan couldn’t afford his house, nor could he afford to entertain extravagantly several times a month. In hindsight, publicist-turned-producer Laurence Mark (As Good As It Gets, Dreamgirls) jokes that Allan gave the first “product-placement parties.” Chicago Pizza Works catered a few events, and Allan made sure to sprinkle his parties with members of the press—the Hollywood Reporter’s George Christy, Variety’s Army Archerd, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s Wanda McDaniel, the Los Angeles Times’s Jody Jacobs, and Liz Smith’s legman Jack Martin—who, in turn, were encouraged to write up the events. It was an era before journalists and Hollywood celebs had declared war on each other. “Allan would get the caterers to do a lot of it for free in exchange for being able to advertise that they had done the party. Allan saved money and they got free publicity. It was marketing,” says Hach.

  Some parties didn’t make the papers, and whether the Fourth Estate was present or not, the code remained in effect: If it’s gay, it doesn’t see the light of day.

  In early April 1974, Allan further expanded his social circle of celebrities to include the artistes of the classical ballet world when Rudolf Nureyev came to town with the National Ballet of Canada. Allan had first met the Russian-émigré dancer through his close friend the screenwriter Bronte Woodard, who was variously described as “a good old gay southern boy,” “a comical version of Truman Capote but without the poetry,” and “a sweet guy who did lots of drugs.” Even before the party honoring the National Ballet of Canada, Allan and Nureyev enjoyed a high-profile friendship of low expectations.

  “Allan could never understand him because of his thick Russian accent,” says Hach. Over dinner at the Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills, “Everybody would pretend they were having a conversation, but they didn’t know what Nureyev was saying.”

  It didn’t matter. Nureyev gave Allan the perfect excuse to throw a party on April 9, 1974, and tout L.A.—Bianca Jagger, Paul Morrissey, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Diana Ross, Roman Polanski, Charles Bronson, Zubin Mehta, Michelle Phillips, Aaron Spelling—showed up at Hilhaven to honor the Russian émigré, as well as celebrate Marvin Hamlisch’s recent triple Academy Award wins (The Sting, The Way We Were) and Mrs. Harold Robbins’s birthday. To honor the award winner, Allan unveiled a seven-foot replica of the Oscar known as “The Marvin” (“I feel like Secretariat,” gushed the composer), and for the Mrs., he rolled out a cake fashioned in the shape of the Robbins’s yacht, the pleasures of which Allan had recently enjoyed with his good friend Dominick Dunne.

  Three guests of honor didn’t prevent Allan from inviting an unofficial fourth: The previous month, Robert Opel entered the Oscar history books when he “streaked” the telecast by running across the stage naked. During the day, Opel toiled as an ad man, but at night he dreamed of being a stand-up comic. Until that gig arrived, Allan made use of Opel’s brief fame to épater le Hollywood bourgeoisie, and the streaker obliged by wearing a floor-length cape, silver cod-piece, stiff white collar, and formal black tie to the ballet party. He then announced poolside, “Everyone should take their clothes off and be counted!” at which Opel obeyed his own commandment by discarding everything but his collar and tie.

  For his part, Nureyev spent the evening licking sartorial wounds. Decked out in satin Cossack pants, knee-high cobra-skin boots, and matching tunic, he should have been a singular sensation. Then Rudy got an eyeful of Peggy Lee’s bodyguard only to discover that the hunk was wearing the very same knee-high cobra-skin boots. “No! No! I didn’t know [Nureyev] would be wearing them, really!” the bodyguard protested.

  The real highlights of this party, however, weren’t the celebs but rather the young and nameless men, like Peggy Lee’s bodyguard, who were fast becoming an Allan Carr trademark. L.A. Times gossip Joyce Haber remarked on them obliquely in her coverage of the party honouring the National Ballet of Canada.

  “If [Easter] Bunnies were lacking, muscle-bound young men were not. Mae West would have had as much of a ball as Nureyev,” wrote Haber. Those two sentences were a promise that both Allan and Rudy delivered on at a following party, w
hich featured a much more exclusive, if less famous, guest list.

  “Nureyev was sexually insatiable,” noted writer Dominick Dunne, a frequent visitor to Hilhaven. “For one party in his honor, Allan hired a hustler for every room in his house so Nureyev could be serviced on the spot, if he so chose.”

  This is what came to be known, unofficially, as the Nureyev Mattress Party, which might have been pay-back for all the women Rudy had to dance with on that previous evening.

  “It was a midnight party,” recalls publicist David Steinberg, who performed press chores for Allan’s client Peter Sellers. The invitation—an obvious joke of sorts—required that all guests bring a mattress to gain admittance. Steinberg lent one member of the press some old bedding. “I was always looking to buy a story,” Steinberg explains. “I did it as a favor to the journalist. What did Allan do with the mattresses? I assume they were for reclining.”

  The Mattress Party was one of Allan’s strictly men-only affairs, which didn’t necessarily mean there were no reporters present. “If it was mixed, I would have been invited,” says Steinberg.

  Producer Howard Rosenman attended, and as he recalls, Allan welcomed his Russian guest of honor with an abundance of Beluga caviar and Stolichnaya vodka and Hollywood rent boys. Curiously, it was the latter dishes that Nureyev never got around to sampling, although reports circulated that other guests made quick use of them. At one point in the evening, Rosenman wondered when he was going to see, much less meet, the world’s greatest dancer. Then he heard someone cry out into the jasmine-filled night air, “Nureyev’s getting fucked in the lanai!”