Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (11 page)

Allan needed to reinvent
Grease
for the screen, but not too much. One of his first hires was choreographer Patricia Birch, who had been with the stage show since it opened in New York. Birch was five feet tall. She sported a pixie haircut. But she was no pushover. Also, she knew the property better than anyone and, therefore, was not an easy convert to radically rethinking the material. “But I got used to the idea that ‘Greased Lightning’ was going to be a fantasy in the movie,” she says. At the time she thought, “Well, we’ve gone glitzier here than I would have liked. It had been set in Chicago. We lost some of the toughness with the palm trees in California. But you gain some, you lose some. Allan recognized what made the show successful, and what we preserved in the movie were the students’ relationships.”

Allan’s play for power, once he had Stigwood’s money, continued to expand. He even gave himself the task of writing the
Grease
screenplay. What did it matter
that he could not write and was so bad at spelling that his first attempt at a designer license plate came out JAMANI when he meant it to read GEMINI, his astrological sign? He took care of that minor deficiency by bringing aboard his close friend Bronte Woodard, “who can handle the punctuation,” said Allan.

Grease
was set in Chicago. Allan was from Chicago. As he saw it,
Grease
was
his
high school story—after he and Bronte made a few changes.

If it’s true that the greatest celebrities are those who completely reinvent themselves, then Allan started earlier than most.

“I made it closer to my own high school memories,” Allan said of bringing the
Grease
stage show to the screen. In the original musical, most of the high school characters are greasers. At Allan’s Highland Park High School outside Chicago, none of them were—except when the students play-acted at being tough for the school yearbook and hand-held the sign “hood” in case their leather jackets, unlit cigarettes, and carefully pressed blue jeans failed to complete the picture. These teenagers were the progeny of doctors, lawyers, and big businessmen, not the offspring of car mechanics, beauticians, and waitresses. “Money was not the social dividing line,” says Allan’s childhood friend Joanne Cimbalo. “All our families had money.”

Highland Park was only twenty-five minutes by commuter train from those hard Chicago streets that spawned the delinquent leather-clad teens who first inspired songwriters Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey to write
Grease
. But in terms of income, social status, and expensive landscaping, Highland Park may as well have been on the other side of the continental divide. The L.A. palm trees that Patricia Birch objected to in the movie would be the least of Allan’s changes. Or as Jim Jacobs later complained, “The whole nitty-gritty of these tough kids was gone.”

Moviegoers today know Highland Park as the town of expansive blue-grass lawns and quiet oak-lined streets and tastefully oversized colonial and Tudor
houses that are home to the Goodsens, the Jarretts, and the Buellers in, respectively,
Risky Business, Ordinary People,
and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,
all of which were filmed in Highland Park. The small town is just one of a select group of wealthy communities that line the North Shore of Chicago.

Allan’s house looked something like those movie houses, except that his home had all of Lake Michigan for its backyard. “Allan’s house was a couple of steps up from the rest of ours,” says his high school friend Robert Le Clercq, who attended several parties there. High on a bluff overlooking the second biggest lake in America, the split-level house was known as party central for the students of Highland Park High School and, later, nearby Lake Forest College where Allan almost, but not quite, got his B.A. degree. With the waterfront as their dramatic background, the parties at the end of the short cul-de-sac known as Lake View Terrace afforded its young guests catered food, torch lights on tall sticks, polished oak dance floors erected over the lawn, and the music of George Stewart’s band. Even when Allan was sixteen years old, hamburgers and 45 RPMs played on an old Motorola were not his style.

Back then, Allan Carr was known as Alan Solomon, the only child of Ann and Albert Solomon, who were divorced by the time their only son entered junior high school. Both parents were successful Chicago merchants. Albert owned a large furniture store; Ann sold the finest shoes and handbags at her fur and leather-goods boutique. They made plenty of money, and neither stinted at lavishing it on their son, who invariably got his way—if money could buy whatever it was he wanted.

The young Alan, as it turned out, wanted a lot. When Ann and Albert first took him to Florida on spring break, a ten-year-old Alan insisted that they get off the train in Atlanta to spend the night so he could visit the theater where
Gone with the Wind
held its 1939 premiere. Or the time he flew to Detroit, at age twelve, to see Bette Davis in
Two’s Company
and didn’t notify his parents until right before the matinee, when he long-distanced them to say, “Don’t worry. The show is over at 4:45 and I’ll be home around 7 tonight.” Or when he needed money to be a Broadway investor, at age fifteen, and got his parents to put $1,500 into a Tallulah Bankhead vehicle called
The Ziegfield Follies,
which promptly folded on the road.

While Alan lived most of his teen years with his father, it was the nearly biweekly trips to New York City to see Broadway shows with his mother that made her his arts patron, if not his clear favorite as parent. It didn’t matter that she had to pay scalper prices to land primo seats to the original productions of
South
Pacific
and
Wonderful Town
. Best of all were the ducats she brought to
Around the World in 80 Days
premiere at Madison Square Garden on October 17, 1956. Producer Mike Todd played ringmaster, complete with whip and red jacket, while his princess-attired bride-to-be, Elizabeth Taylor, stood at his side. It was there that Ann’s son met his role model for life: “That’s when I knew what I wanted!” Whether the world needed it or not, Alan Solomon vowed to be the next Mike Todd.

His parents paid all the bills and Alan threw all the parties; otherwise, he didn’t talk much about Ann and Albert except to say that his father found him to be “an embarrassment.” With cultivated adolescent insouciance, Alan said it didn’t matter much what his parents thought of him, as long as they gave him the money to invest in Broadway shows and escape to New York City and Fort Lauderdale.

A letter from Camp Indianola, however, gives a more complicated interpretation of that father-son relationship. Written in 1950 when Alan was thirteen, the handwritten missive expresses his “hope” that the August heat is not unbearable in his father’s Chicago store. “It is very hot and the flies are terrible here,” Alan wrote from Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. “Only 3 weks from today and I’ll be home. I can hardly wait. . . . Lots of parents here this wk-end and lots of dads staying over nite. Will you be up next Sunday for a few hrs. I hope? Say hello to everybody at the store. It won’t be long now! I love you very much.”

It is signed “Your best pal, friend, boy, son, Alan.”

An overweight child who was saddled with thick glasses from an early age, Alan had no choice but to avoid those sports that essentially defined boyhood in the Midwest, and gravitated instead to more sensitive pursuits like dressing up in drag to play the titular role in
Charley’s Aunt
and posing for yearbook photos with the theater department’s Garrick Players girls. His appearance as a teenager is what could best be described as “fubsy,” an antiquated word meaning chubby and squat. “Fubsy” also conjures up the clown role that Alan played throughout his school years.

“At home I was secure,” he said, “but at school I felt I was not physically attractive and this exaggerated my desire for approval, to be amusing, to be liked. That’s why I came on so strong.”

Five days a week at Highland Park High, Allan stepped over the foyer’s floor plaque that told him to “Dream. Believe. Achieve.” He dreamed and he believed but he did not achieve very much gradewise. Neither was he known as a particularly good student at Lake Forest College, where his studies invariably
took a backseat to the parties, the clubs, the school plays, and the endless campus pranks that sprang from the school’s busy social network of fraternities and sororities. Here was an institution of higher learning better known for its bucolic, picture-perfect campus than its academic standards. As more than one 1950s grad described it, “Lake Forest is the place you went if your parents had money and you couldn’t get into any other college.”

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?”