Party Animals Read online

  Being Jewish was pretty much the norm in Highland Park, but that was not the case in the neighboring town of Lake Forest and its college. Here the citizens were solidly Gentile, and Alan’s ethnicity automatically denied him admittance to four of the five fraternities on campus. Only one, Tau Kappa Epsilon, allowed Jews and other minorities as members. “The other fraternities were the jock ones, but the TKEs were the artsy ones,” says David Umbach, a fellow theater devotee whom Alan first befriended in high school.

  In college, Alan preferred to hang out with the Gentile jocks rather than the artistic ethnics. Or, as Groucho Marx once explained it, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

  Alan kept his eye on one of the exclusive jock frat houses, Phi Delta Theta, that excluded all minorities. “Our national chapter wouldn’t permit us to pledge Jewish people,” says James Kenney, another Lake Forest classmate. Such an obstacle only made Allan more determined to belong, and eventually his persistence paid off when the fraternity accepted him as a “social affiliate,” explains Kenney.

  Alan was delighted, because, as he often told people, he wasn’t Jewish. Technically speaking. “My mother is Roman Catholic,” he said. He also told people that his aunt was a nun. Perhaps it was the truth. “I don’t ever remember anything about temple or a bar mitzvah,” says Joanne Cimbalo.

  Being Jewish, or not, was only one roadblock he confronted in finding acceptance among the Greeks. “Alan loved the Gamma Phi Betas,” recalls another coed, Margaret Neely. “They were rich girls and very attractive, and Alan loved hanging out with them.” In this case, Jewish was the least of it. They were girls, he was a boy, but Alan knew better than any of them how to dress, do their hair, and walk in high heels. It didn’t really matter that his entry into the Gamma Phis involved a mock ceremony. He belonged. “Alan wanted to be in a sorority, and so he went through a pinning ceremony,” says Neely.

  In 1956, such behavior didn’t read as gay, surprisingly. For a more retiring type, it might have spelled disgrace. But Alan was defiant in his demands to flaunt the rules and yet be accepted within the social box of the conservative Eisenhower era. If his fellow students dared laugh, Alan was there to laugh first. They said, “Isn’t he interesting?” Or, at worst, “Isn’t he bizarre?” Homosexuality wasn’t discussed, not even in the theater department, and that taboo extended to the year 1957, when Lake Forest College boldly put on the gay-themed play Tea and Sympathy. “It was a very restricted time. Gay or straight, no one was having sex much, certainly not openly,” says David Umbach. “You didn’t talk about sex, particularly gay sex.” Even in college, Umbach and Alan never acknowledged to each other their sexual orientation. But Alan knew. “The other boys were interested in girls. I was not,” he would admit many years later.

  In high school, Umbach and Alan bonded, and their both being homosexual probably had something to do with that friendship. It certainly had a lot to do with their both being “theater nuts,” as Umbach recalls. “I was green, from the corn country, and Alan was so sophisticated. He showed me the theater world of Chicago.”

  Highland Park boasted its own major cultural institution in the summer Ravinia Festival, its grounds a short three-block walk from the Solomon home. When Allan wasn’t entertaining his friend David with tales of his latest trip to New York City, he took him to see concerts at the festival and in Chicago. Umbach says, “We went to places I never would have thought to go, like to see Mae West at the Blue Note. It was very raunchy for the 1950s.” They also saw the bawdy, and openly bisexual, nightclub performer Frances Faye, and it shocked them when the singer took to the stage of the Blue Note and introduced herself with “I’m Frances Faye and I’m gay, gay, gay!” Alan and Umbach thought it meant she took drugs.

  One evening, Alan invited his high school friend to see Carol Channing in a road production of Wonderful Town, and bragged that he had already met the Broadway star at a party in New York City. Umbach didn’t believe his friend, and to prove himself, Allan wangled his way backstage to knock on Channing’s dressing-room door. When she dutifully appeared, her bright orange outfit caused Umbach to gasp. “And she definitely remembered Alan and invited us in and we had a wonderful, long conversation with her,” says Umbach. “Even as a teenager, Alan was a very recognizable, unforgettable person. He pushed his way into places.”

  On another theater outing, the two teenagers took in a performance of the musical Pajama Game, which featured the memorable “Hernando’s Hideaway” number. At one point in the show stopper, the stage goes dark and a character cries out to her boyfriend, “Poopsie! Poopsie!”

  Umbach turned to his friend. “You are Poopsie!” he said.

  Alan threw his head back to squeal with delight. He fell in love with the moniker and immediately adopted it for the slug “Poopsie’s Column” that appeared above his theater reviews in the Lake Forest College newspaper, The Stentor. He even created a brand of awards, the Poopsies, not to be confused with the Tonys or the Oscars or the Emmys, to bestow upon local theater talent. They honored “true excellence in the theater.” To everyone else, including many Lake Forest students, Alan wrote brutally negative reviews. Margaret Neely, who edited The Stentor, used to complain, “Alan, could you go a little easier on the school productions and not be quite so abusive?”

  Her lack of ethics shocked Alan. “Margaret, you’re the editor and I’m the artist, and I’ve got to say what I want to say. This is freedom of the press!” he insisted.

  If Alan had no problem attaching his own name to the theater reviews, he knew the limits of freedom when it came to penning the anonymous “Through the Keyhole,” The Stentor’s must-read gossip column. It was an act of sheer stealth for Alan to breathlessly report on the romantic goings-on of the coeds and jocks each week of the semester. “No one knew he wrote it,” says Neely. Every week Alan slid his typewritten news under the dorm-room door of Neely’s boyfriend (and future husband), Roger Wilhelm, Lake Forest’s star basketball center. Often confused with baseball great Hoyt Wilhelm, the six-foot-six college athlete acted as conduit between his editor-girlfriend Neely and Alan, which made the gossip column as much an act of tabloid journalism as it was one of personal infatuation. “Alan was always attracted to Roger and several other men who were athletes, and I’m sure that was an operating factor,” Neely says of Alan’s commitment to “Through the Keyhole.”

  As their college tenure progressed, Alan and his gay friend David Umbach saw less of each other. Alan preferred the company of the tony Gamma Phi Beta girls and the manly Phi Delta Theta jocks, who saw him as a novelty. He was their klutzy younger brother, but also the smart aleck who could level any physically strong but mentally dense adversary with the well-delivered, lethal quip. It helped, too, that he had been blessed with a confidence man’s voice—unwavering and in control even when he didn’t know what he was talking about. His Greek friends might have called him a “mascot,” but Alan rejected such second-class status. He was equal but separate and therefore special, maybe even singular. It was a respectful, loving social dichotomy he was to nurture with dozens of straight family men and women throughout his life.

  On the making of the movie Grease, Allan Carr often said that he was an expert on the subject of young outsiders because, “Like many kids, I was not too popular.”

  With the exception of Charley’s Aunt, he didn’t star in many school plays, but he did write all the theater reviews. He wasn’t voted prom king, but he did throw the best parties. He didn’t find love, but he called himself “the matchmaker” in the college newspaper. He wasn’t the senior class president, but in many ways, he was the most high-profile student on campus.

  “He advertised himself,” says Franz Schulze, a Lake Forest College professor. “Students recognized him as Poopsie. He was very, very stout and made no bones about that. And in a way he took advantage of his uniqueness.” Even his many Poopsie columns and reviews carried a pen-and-ink caricature that humorously captured Alan’s
already jowly, nearly shapeless face.

  But high-profile is not the same as popular, nor can it be confused with handsome. If he lusted after the school’s top athletes, he kept it to himself. “Alan wasn’t a beauty,” says Umbach. “His sexual inclination would have been to be shy and not bring it up until later in life when he could control it.”

  Regarding the opposite sex or his own sex, he didn’t indulge—except when it came to that de rigueur date for the junior prom, and even then Alan took a pretty but less-than-available girl, Margie Tegtmeyer, who had momentarily split from her boyfriend (and future husband). “Alan knew Bob [Cohen] was taking someone else,” Tegtmeyer recalls. Back in 1957, Margie qualified as a safe bet, in Alan’s estimation, one who wouldn’t be interested in a goodnight kiss or follow-up date. The Lake Forest junior prom qualified as the big date night, and college students there didn’t decorate the gym for the event. They rented the expensive Milwaukee Clipper to cruise Lake Michigan. Margie and Alan had a “very nice time,” as she remembers, but her prom date wasn’t anything like Bob Cohen. “Alan was very concerned about what I’d wear and he brought flowers to go with what I wore. He was thoughtful about those things,” she notes, even if he was inordinately nitpicking about the décor, the place settings, the music, and anything else having to do with proper entertaining. “This shouldn’t be there,” he said of one flower arrangement. “It should be there.”

  Whether it was his weight, his homosexuality, his ethnicity, or his troubled family life, “Alan didn’t feel he ever fit in, both in high school and college,” says Joanne Cimbalo. “He found excitement, he loved to entertain, and he was always going going going. But in his reflective moments, he never found peace. Never.”

  By his senior year in college, Alan’s weight had already ballooned his five-foot-six frame to well over 200 pounds, and he had even begun to wear caftans or muumuus on campus to disguise his burgeoning obesity. If he had simply retreated to a corner of the campus, Alan might have been ridiculed or, at best, ignored. But he possessed too strong a personality to be dismissed, and despite the fact that he was now dressing, in essence, like a woman, and an extravagant woman at that, Cimbalo never heard him referred to as a sissy, a queer, or a fairy. “His clothes, like his weight and his interest in Broadway, were just one more thing that made him unique,” she says. What most students didn’t know was that the high-profile Alan Solomon never graduated from college. Semester after semester, he put off fulfilling the school’s science requirement and waited until the second semester of his senior year to take biology. He failed the course.

  While that ignominy only solidified his outsider status, at least to himself, he took out career insurance by quickly setting up a postcollege job prior to his nongraduation.

  “We reopened the Civic Theater in Chicago,” says Jack Tourville, a Lake Forest College alum who also came up short on graduation credits. The reason for their double failure was easy to pinpoint: Instead of studying biology that final semester, Alan enlisted Tourville to emcee the annual Lake Forest Garrick Gaieties. The show was a success, their studies were not. They wisely decided to pursue success.

  “We’ll become theater producers!” Alan told his friend.

  Before he got down to the nitty-gritty of raising money, acquiring stage properties, and securing a theater, Alan set forth his top priority as an impresario. “I’m getting a new name!” he said. “There are too many Solomons in Chicago.”

  He even hired a lawyer to change his name to Alan Carr. (The “Allan” came a few years later when a numerologist suggested the change.) When the judge asked him why he needed a new name, the newly monickered young man replied, “I’m divorcing my parents!” Always the performer, Allan knew it would get a reaction in court. But secretly, in the back of his mind, “I was really thinking about that marquee. I was thinking of billing and how a name looked in a newspaper ad.”

  If the new Mr. Carr divorced his parents that day in court, he failed to notify Ann and Albert Solomon of that split when he asked them to bankroll the new Chicago Civic Theater. It was their money that bought an impressive 1958 season: Eva Le Gallienne in Mary Stuart, a repertory offering of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Tempest, plus Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in The World of Carl Sandburg. Alan had seen the Merrills perform the Sandburg offering in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and promptly barged his way into their dressing room. “I don’t want to be rude,” he began the conversation, “but why are you playing in this auditorium?”

  “Good question,” said Davis, who liked the boy’s spunk.

  Alan let her know, “I think you should come to Chicago. Carl Sandburg is from Chicago.”

  He had more than just his parents’ money to start a first-class theater company. Alan laid the groundwork for the Civic Theater by assiduously courting the favor of the Chicago Tribune’s entertainment columnist Herb Lyon and its chief theater critic, Claudia Cassidy, who, in turn, lavished much ink on the project. It was Cassidy who suggested the venue, which heretofore had been used as a rehearsal space for the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

  Cassidy also cooperated when it came to the reviews, but there was nothing that she could do about the box office. Undeterred, Alan and his friend Jack Tourville set out to put together a spring 1959 season. Alan had recently seen Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway and wanted to bring it to Chicago, where the play is set. The tyro impresarios sat down with the play’s producer, Philip Rose, and Alan threw out a box-office guarantee number. “It was too much money,” says Tourville. But his partner told him not to worry. Alan Solomon was now Alan Carr, and he knew that showmen from Flo Ziegfeld to Mike Todd often had to lie to get what they wanted. The trick, he believed, was to lie so extravagantly that he instilled confidence. Tourville saw finances in a different light. “It was scary for us,” he recalls.

  Alan wanted to round out his spring 1959 season with Eugenia. It had been a flop on Broadway, but it was a flop starring Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead was now touring in it, and Alan and Tourville drove to Detroit in hopes they could convince the tempestuous, and cocaine-addicted, actress to bring the show to Chicago.

  “We sent her roses and we visited her backstage,” Tourville recalls. “It was a terrible show. She admitted as much. It needed work.”

  After one desultory performance, Bankhead sat in her dressing room and listened as two postteenage producers made their pitch. She didn’t bother to change out of her robe, but had already consumed half a bottle of scotch. “Alan and I shared some thoughts with her and preconceived notions of what we wanted to do. That kind of stuff. And then we gracefully got out of there,” says Tourville.

  Bankhead never made it to Chicago that theater season. A Raisin in the Sun did arrive, but under the auspices of another producing entity, and Jack Tourville joined the army. He told Alan that he couldn’t keep taking Albert Solomon’s money, since their first season with the Civic Theater failed to break even and it was unlikely that their second season would be any different. “It was an exciting time,” says Tourville. “But my dad was concerned and Alan’s relationship with his father was not good. It was through his mother that Alan got the money. His father had crumbled and moaned and finally just said OK.”

  But without Tourville’s business acumen and emotional support, Alan also called it quits. It helped that he got a job offer from an unlikely source.

  “I was starting this new TV show and hired Alan Carr to be my talent director,” says Hugh Hefner. The show: Playboy’s Penthouse. It lasted only a couple of seasons, but it spawned the magazine’s vast network of Playboy clubs, and introduced Allan to the world of booking talent—talent that included Ella Fitzgerald, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Newhart, and even some performers, like Marlo Thomas, Mama Cass Elliot, Joan Rivers, Phyllis Diller, and Ann-Margret, who never made it on the show but ended up being managed by Alan Carr as soon as he migrated from Chicago to Los Angeles.

  It’s often said that famous people ne
ver look back. Allan Carr was different. He looked back often, which is why he could never stop running.

  nine

  It’s Pepsi-Cola Time

  Broadway is hardly a bastion of street reality and grit, but in the hands of Allan and his friend Bronte Woodard, Grease lost whatever real dirt it once possessed. Choreographer Patricia Birch, the only major creative talent to work on both projects, may have worried about the substitution of California succulents for Chicago asphalt, but in the end, she felt that Allan and Woodard’s screenplay kept the show’s adolescent soul. “Those high school kids were popular in any school. They are archetypal. If you look at any high school class, you find the outsiders getting left out, people vying for position,” she says.

  John Travolta spoke for Allan when he analyzed the movie’s success: “The 1950s didn’t have a lot of great causes. Everything was more dull, bland, and complacent. And in a lot of ways, that’s the way things are today in the 1970s. I think audiences can relate to that.”

  It’s not as if Allan were messing with a hard-hitting teen classic, like Rebel Without a Cause, when he rewrote Grease. Grease is, and always was, a light-hearted musical. Allan never apologized for sanitizing his greasers. The movie would be his story. It was never to be their story. “I based my changes on my high school in the Chicago suburbs, where the kids were not all greasers, like in the stage musical,” he said. “They were tough but good kids, and by moving the setting to the suburbs, I made it closer to my own high school memories and, much more important, more resonant for a wider audience. To that end, I also cleaned up some of the raunchy language.”