Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (14 page)

The film’s new songs weren’t so easily massaged. On Olivia Newton-John’s suggestion, her LP producer John Farrar wrote “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and “You’re the One That I Want.” Which caused a minor pique of jealousy in Travolta, who also wanted a new song to sing. Since “Greased Lightning,” sung on stage by the Kenickie character, wasn’t enough to assuage the star’s ego, Allan went to Louis St. Louis, who had handled dance and vocal arrangements for the original Broadway show.

“You know, girls’ names songs were big in the early 1960s,” St. Louis informed Allan. He mentioned a few—“Cherie Baby,” “Paula,” “Renee”—and suggested that Travolta get a new song called “Sandy.”

Allan clapped his hands in excitement. “You should go back to the hotel and write it!” he announced.

The assignment marked a major rapprochement between the two men. Years earlier, St. Louis put together an act for Alexis Smith, which opened at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Allan had seen the show and hated it, and later taunted the composer-arranger in that hotel’s lobby by telling friends in a very loud whisper, “There’s the guy that ruined, absolutely destroyed Alexis Smith!”

St. Louis preferred not to think about that previous encounter as he drove back to the Sunset Marquis hotel to write “Sandy.” It took him twenty minutes to write the song and get his friend Scott Simon to flesh out his one verse, “Stranded at the drive-in,” into full lyrics. The next morning, he rushed to Hilhaven to try his luck on the Lucite grand piano, playing the song for Allan at 10 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. for Stigwood’s executive producer Bill Oakes and yet again at 3 p.m. for Travolta and Stigwood himself. “At 4 p.m. it was my song, and I had a deal,” St. Louis recalls. His gift to himself: a new navy blue Honda Prelude.

In the end, Olivia Newton-John got to sing the most new songs, but it was movie star John Travolta who benefited more from headlining with this recording star. On
Grease,
“They each had a most-favored-nations contract, which means that he got what she got and vice versa,” says Thurm. “People made more from the record
Grease
than the movie
Grease
.”

If Allan missed his own
Grease
kickoff party, he skipped few days of production despite his recurring health problems. In a way,
Grease
was an extension of the parties he gave at his father’s house in Highland Park. At least once a week, Allan brought a celebrity to the set, whether it be Rudolf Nureyev, George Cukor, Jane Fonda, Kirk Douglas, or psychic spoon-bender Yuri Geller. They’d stay for about an hour, and then, as it often happens on movie sets, their interest invariably began to wane in the wake of too much downtime. Sometimes Allan would announce a visit with much fanfare, then cancel. “He had infections from the stomach staples,” says Thurm, and they would necessitate a return to Cedars-Sinai for massive injections of antibiotics. And if it wasn’t the stomach staples, it was problems with his kidney stones or his hips, which had begun to bother him as a result of the bypass, which had leached his bones of needed calcium. Appearance meant everything to a man of Allan’s delicate condition, and if he couldn’t measure up to his own impossible standards of physical perfection, he made sure that his stars did.

Just as he advised the girls of Gamma Phi Beta how to dress, he spent an inordinate amount of time on what his
Grease
actresses wore onscreen.

“Stars do not wear poodle skirts!” he informed Olivia Newton-John, and promptly put her in Spandex.

Allan also obsessed over Stockard Channing’s red-and-black polka-dot dress in the movie’s dance-contest scene, and insisted that the camera pan from her shoes up to her face. He called the camera movement “very Ava Gardner!” In another scene, he pushed aside the makeup artist, grabbed an eyebrow pencil, and personally applied freckles to the actress’s face. “Allan was kind of a nasty mother figure,” Channing recalls. “He never liked your hair, what you were wearing.”

With the guys, he showed equal impatience, as well as attention to detail. When John Travolta thought his ill-fitting jeans didn’t allow him enough room to bump and grind sufficiently, Allan retired his star to a waiting limousine for an impromptu sartorial consultation. Twenty minutes later, Travolta emerged a new man but wearing the same old Levi’s.

Even when Allan lay flat on his back in Cedars-Sinai, his spirit never left the set. “Allan had all kinds of deals for contests and these prizewinners,” says Randal Kleiser. One group of would-be actors came in the shape of out-of-town journalists. “They’ll go back home and write their articles, saying how great the movie is,” Allan told his director. “Find a place for them in the movie.” Kleiser
rolled with the punches of Allan’s movie-as-circus. He took one look at his randomly assembled crew of small-town reporters—often referred to as “those press-junket whores”—and decided, “Well, they’re old enough. They could be teachers,” and cast them as faculty chaperones in the dance-contest scene.

During another hospital sojourn, Allan phoned Kleiser to give him more casting news: “I’ve got thirty contest winners who must be in the movie. I’m flying them in next week and they must be in the movie.”

“Where am I going to put them?” asked Kleiser.

“You’ll figure something out,” said Allan. End of conversation.

Kleiser sandwiched this latest bunch of nonprofessionals into a scene where students flee the school at semester’s end. “They were winners of various department store contests, like ‘Win a Spot in
Grease,
’” says Laurence Mark. “Allan turned
Grease
into a complete and utter romp.” Allan may have been the first and only producer in Hollywood history ever to be “thrilled” to chat up the studio apparatchiks in charge of department store tie-ins. “There were many people who thought that was low-rent,” says Mark. “Nothing was too low-rent for Allan,” who believed in creating buzz any way he could.

He worshipped at the shrine of product placement. For Olivia Newton-John’s big song, “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” a Pepsi-Cola sign looms brazenly on the character’s back porch. Pepsi signs were also supposed to populate a hamburger hangout called Frosty Palace. Instead, the set designer used posters from another slightly more iconic soda-pop company.

“Who did this?!” Allan screamed when he visited the set, only to discover that the Frosty Palace moment had already been committed to celluloid. “Who let those fucking Coke signs in my movie? I’ve got a deal with Pepsi. It has to be Pepsi-Cola!”

Later, in the film’s postproduction phase, some poor flunky had to hand-paint out the Coke signs behind Olivia Newton-John’s head. “You can see it’s blurry in the final film,” says Kleiser.

“Producing
Grease
made me feel like I was the president of my class,” Allan said.

Early in the filming, Allan asked some of his actors to pose with him for “a class picture,” as he put it. Didi Conn, who played the destined-for-a-beauty-school character Frenchy, recalls that momentous afternoon. “There were all these cool greasers around him, and Allan was this honorary greaser, and that was something he never was in high school,” she says. “He was happy finally to be the hot guy on campus. He liked that role.”

Tellingly, Allan decided to be different from all the other guys in that photo, and opted not to wear a leather jacket and jeans. Instead, he wore Bermuda shorts.
Plaid
Bermuda shorts.

“He just beamed when he came on the set,” says Stockard Channing. “Allan had been very sick and he loved all of these boys and girls hugging and kissing him and being affectionate. He really believed in that glossy high school world, which is probably why he tapped into the gestalt of what so many people feel about high school.”

While he was riding high with the production of a new movie musical, Allan decided to capitalize on his newfound producer status with an überparty. Unlike the
Tommy
Subway Party or the Truman Capote Jail House Party, this one would not have the gimmick of a funky locale. It would be a real class act—and he’d stage it at his new Malibu beach house, Seahaven. “I’m going to hold a party that runs over two nights,” he announced. He called it his Rolodex Party.
“People with last names A-L will be invited on Friday night. Those with names M-Z on Saturday night.”

Producer David Picker had joked that Allan invited his entire Rolodex to the Hilhaven Lodge housewarming party back in 1973. Five years later, Allan took that gentle jab and turned it into a party theme to publicize
Grease
and show off Seahaven. According to
Variety
’s Army Archerd, it was the house “that
Survive!
bought and
A Chorus Line
furnished.”

“Everyone in Hollywood was trying to get an invitation to
that
party,” says producer Howard Rosenman.

Allan knew it would be his best party to date. “It felt like the opening night of a Broadway show,” he said. And to back up that claim, he rolled out a yards-long red carpet on Old Malibu Road and even set up a few klieg lights in case any of his guests couldn’t find their way. And that was just Friday! The following evening he did it all over again, in total inviting over 750 of his best friends to a two-night party.

Allan was proud of his multilevel beach house, which resembled his Highland Park home in that it sat high on a bluff overlooking the water. Allan took almost a year to decorate Seahaven, and he was eager to show off the fake palm trees and real ostrich feathers and peacock-and-pheasant-feathered dining table—“Every one of them molted. I couldn’t hear of anything being killed,” said Allan—and enough mirrors to stock a fun house. Allan wanted Seahaven to be a veritable jungle of kitsch, and he enjoyed pointing out the entryway’s big round fish tank, which, he told guests, featured “very, very expensive” tropical fish. (A caretaker, who filled the tank, revealed that no fish ever cost more than $35.) Never one for understatement, Allan glued Valentino fabric to the walls and used it to also sheathe his “conversation pit,” that 1970s architectural oddity otherwise known as a sunken living room. He considered the Valentino fabric a classy touch, because it restricted the décor to the colors gray, white, and silver. And so it hurt when, on the second night of the Rolodex Parties, his Malibu neighbor Merle Oberon—looking preternaturally young at sixty-six years next to her even younger husband, Rob Wolders, of indeterminate age—advised Allan on how to treat mold in an oceanside house. “Get rid of the wall fabric!” Oberon ordered as soon as she stepped inside Seahaven.

Other Malibu residents dealt with their own soap operas that weekend. Dani and David Janssen, who lived next door and were estranged, made amends at the Rolodex Party. Britt Ekland, having just broken up with Rod Stewart, told her sob story to George Hamilton, who had just broken up with his date for the
night, his soon-to-be-ex-wife Alana Hamilton, who a year later would marry Rod Stewart. Hamilton, in turn, offered Ekland his Malibu couch for the night, while the
Hollywood Reporter
’s George Christy wondered aloud why “George and Alana are seeing each other more now that they are separated.”

Where the invitation for his Cycle Sluts Party had read “glitterfunk,” Allan asked everyone to wear “beach chic” to his Rolodex Party. Keith Carradine came in a jogging suit. Gossip columnist Rona Barrett wore a terry beach robe and diamonds. Struggling photographer (and ex-wife of the Canadian prime minister) Margaret Trudeau arrived in a simple suit. Sophia Loren’s husband, producer Carlo Ponti, showed up in a checked jacket and open-neck shirt.

Allan insisted that his client Stockard Channing attend both nights, so she could meet important people. No sooner did she walk into Seahaven than he rolled his eyes. “It’s all wrong,” he said of her Halston knockoff, then whispered, “Never leave the house unless you look like an eight-by-ten glossy.” He suggested a more appropriate outfit for Saturday night, and picking some lint off her dress, he turned to kiss a drag queen made up to look like Bette Midler.

That first night, Allan changed his outfit three times, donning first a scarf caftan by La Vetta, followed by a Japanese obi jacket with harem pants, and finally an Egyptian fisherman’s tunic and pants. After so many trips to Cedars-Sinai, he looked svelte that weekend, and proud of it. One more jaw wiring and he’d get himself down to under 200 pounds, he promised. He’d recently gone to the hospital to have the bypass removed, hoping somehow that it would relieve his chronic problem with kidney stones. He told guests, “I am confident that I can now maintain my weight. There is no doubt I want to stay happy about the way I look more than I want to eat.”

If he was on a diet, Allan didn’t think it fair to make his guests stick to veggie sticks and brown rice during the two nights of the Rolodex affair. Now that he could afford better, he eschewed the pro bono food of Chicago Pizza Works in favor of the Studio Grill’s chef, Tom Rolla, who prepared a buffet menu that included his newest invention, a fresh crab and lobster mousse. Also served was a “wall of seafood,” as Allan described the hors d’oeuvres.

Partygoers John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Michael Eisner (but not Barry Diller, with whom Allan was already feuding), ABC’s Gary Pudney, William Morris’s Stan Kamen, Roger Vadim, Lee Grant, Michele Lee, Johnny Carson and his producer Fred De Cordova, and Steven Spielberg obeyed Allan’s weekend dictate, with the A through L’s arriving on Friday night and the M through Z’s waiting until Saturday.

A notable exception was Anjelica Huston, who broke the alphabet rule by attending the second night and regretting her decision the minute Roman Polanski, her major courtroom nemesis, stepped through the front door of Seahaven. The big news at both parties was (1) Roman Polanski’s rape trial and (2) Cher’s breakup and reconciliation with Gregg Allman after nine days of marriage. Allan had invited the Polish émigré, as well as the rock-pop couple. At that moment in time in Hollywood, they could make any party by their mere appearance. If Allan didn’t land Cher and Gregg Allman for his party, he got the other 50 percent, and in his opinion it was the better half: Polanski.