Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (20 page)

“
Cruising
?” Allan screamed back. “This is
Discoland
!”

Stunned, Perrine wiped the man’s spittle away with the back of her hand. “A good old New York cop took him away,” she recalls.

Although it was only the second day of production, irate homosexuals were already the least of Perrine’s problems. Even under the very controlled environment of a Hollywood soundstage, directing one’s first movie is a difficult, formidable task. Confronting the chaotic street life of Greenwich Village, Nancy Walker crumbled. Completely. Then her leading lady got slimed.

“This guy spitting at Valerie happens in the middle of a scene,” Bruce Jenner recalls. “Nancy Walker was just overwhelmed by it all.” The four-foot-eleven director kept telling herself, “I will be OK. I will be OK. I will be OK.”

And that was only Day 2.

By Day 4, Perrine barely remembered the spit in her face. The bigger problem, she believed, was Nancy Walker. The actress had already started relying on Bill Butler for direction, and for good reason. In one street scene, the cinematographer set up his camera and an assistant sounded the clack board: “Take one!” Several seconds into the scene, Walker yelled out, “Cut!” and turned to Perrine. “Would you shut up?! Don’t you know not to talk during a take?!”

“But the camera’s rolling,” Perrine replied.

“So shut up!”

“But it’s my scene. I’m acting!”

When Walker repeated the tirade the following day, Perrine let it be known. “Nancy,” she said, “no matter how hard you scream and yell at me, my tits are real and I’ll always be taller than you!”

Allan, who had busied himself directing gay protesters to the meatpacking district where
Cruising
had taken up residence, ordered Perrine and Walker into his stretch limousine parked over on Carmine and Bleecker Streets. At first, it looked as though Allan was going to ply them with kindness. But soon, “The car was rocking,” says David Hodo. He and other cast members gathered around to listen as Allan brayed at the guests in his limo, “If you two cunts don’t start getting along, I’m going to publish it in every magazine and newspaper in America!”

But it wasn’t all rancor that first week of production. Allan immediately gratified his Steve Guttenberg obsession by shooting the title sequence—an exercise in minimalism that focused exclusively on the now-buff actor, poured into T-shirt and cutoffs, skating through the streets of New York for no fewer than four minutes of screen time. For further release, Allan led his cast on nightly pilgrimages uptown to Studio 54, that temple of lust and coke dust. Or, as Perrine described the joint, “They used to say that if you remember going to Studio 54, you didn’t have a good time there.”

In the two weeks they filmed in New York City, Bruce Jenner conscientiously resisted all invitations to Steve Rubell’s pleasure dome. But his wholesome Wheaties image could endure only so much polishing, and after much persuasion, Allan finally convinced his uptight athlete-turned-movie-actor to indulge himself and attend the famed disco on the last night of location filming in Manhattan.

“Hey, the whole cast and crew are going,” Allan told his reluctant star, who had to mull the proposal for days. Being seen out with the notorious Village People was one thing, but Jenner found safety in the fact that the film’s female contingent—Valerie Perrine, Nancy Walker, and the very pregnant choreographer Arlene Phillips—would also be along for the ride.

For the
Discoland
cast’s final night in Manhattan, one grand entrance did not suffice. Allan wanted several entrances, and ordered up a whole fleet of limousines, one for each of his people, Village and otherwise. “Allan made a big deal of getting everyone into Studio 54,” says Jenner. He especially played up his close-close relationship with owner Steve Rubell, and let the long line of would-be patrons on the street know, “Make way for the stars of
Discoland
!” as the limo flotilla, one by one, discharged its starry cargo at 254 West 54th Street.

Inside, Bruce Jenner took several deep breaths as socialites, drag queens, beautiful girls in bikinis, and muscled boys in jockstraps danced by him like so many moths on their way to a lightbulb electrocution. The painted wood cutout of the man-in-the-moon dangled overhead, its face winking as a big spoon miraculously filled with white powder. It signaled all revelers to follow suit while a metal Aztec sun god spewed smoke across the 5,400-square-foot dance floor. “This is not your Wheaties crowd!” Jenner told his host, who luxuriated in the expression of shock on his cereal-box cover boy. “This is obviously where you go to look at people,” Jenner added, gulping for air.

The one thing Allan liked better than shocking heterosexual men was introducing famous people to even more famous people, and he beelined his way right to the first one he saw at the bar. “Mischa!” cried Allan, giving Mikhail Baryshnikov a big hug. “You must meet my good friend Bruce!” Two years earlier, the Russian émigré danseur had enjoyed a great success in the movies, playing a Russian émigré danseur in
Turning Point
. Hollywood even honored him with an Oscar nomination for his effort at playing himself. Allan wanted to follow up that success with another Baryshnikov headliner, an original MGM musical called
Riviera
to costar Grace Jones.

“Mischa, darling! Bruce is making a movie,
Discoland,
with me!” Allan took both men by the arm and led them to one of the banquettes. Since Jenner had been to the Soviet Union a number of times, he tried to make polite conversation by asking Baryshnikov about his homeland and, in turn, Baryshnikov asked Jenner about winning the triathlon at the Olympics. But Studio 54 was not designed for conversations, and even as intriguing as the Bruce and Mischa tête-à-tête might have been, it soon turned into a trial of disco din over polite words from their respective résumés. Baryshnikov gave up making small talk. “Bruce, do you want to dance?” he asked.

Jenner choked. “Uh, uh, no, but thanks.” Having never confronted this situation before, he didn’t quite know how to turn down another man’s invitation to boogie.

Allan looked on, bemused. “You’re turning him down? You’re turning down the opportunity to dance with Mikhail Baryshnikov? You’re turning down a dance with the greatest dancer in the world!?”

Jenner’s smile tightened. “At least it’s Baryshnikov asking me to dance.”

Ultraprotective of his all-American image, Jenner got squeamish when it came to homosexuality. The other big taboo was drugs, and he could only envision
tomorrow’s
New York Post,
its cover emblazoned with a photo of a coke spoon up his nose or of him dancing with another man. It didn’t take much imagination to envision the morals clause of his Wheaties contract as it burst into tabloid flames.

And so the
Discoland
production completed its two-week shoot in New York with a two-week hiatus. Cast and crew were happy to leave the hectic city streets to move west to the more controlled environs of the grand old MGM studio in Culver City, California. The break was especially appreciated by the film’s British choreographer, Arlene Phillips. While everyone else used the time to relax and set up camp in Los Angeles, Phillips went into labor to give birth to her first child, a baby girl, whom she named Alana in honor of her current, beloved movie producer.

Allan had met the young Brit when he was doing publicity chores for
Grease
in London. Phillips had never choreographed a movie or a major stage production before, but her dance group, Hot Gossip, did perform at a prelaunch party for
Grease
at the Embassy Club on Bond Street. Olivia Newton-John came with Allan, and singer Sarah Brightman, who would later marry Andrew Lloyd Webber (and then divorce him, but not before he tried to make her a star with
The Phantom of the Opera
), performed with Hot Gossip. It wasn’t your usual dance troupe. For starters, both the men and the women in Hot Gossip wore garters and stockings and bras—“sex shop clothes,” as Phillips describes it—that were made out of plastic, rubber, and torn fabric, and Phillips’s dance moves sometimes simulated various sex acts. In other words, “This is exactly the kind of choreography I need for
Discoland
!” Allan gushed to Phillips after seeing her dancers perform. “You must come to the
Grease
premiere next week. You must come to America to choreograph
Discoland
!”

As was often the case with Allan, the hire was just that quick and easy.

But there were complications. Shortly after Phillips signed the contract, she learned of her pregnancy. She checked the production schedule and noted that between the shoots in New York and Los Angeles, there was a two-week hiatus beginning September 3. The baby was due September 3.

Phillips knew she had no choice. She phoned her new boss. “Allan, this is the most unforgivable thing: Can I have a week off during the September hiatus?” she asked.

“Why?” he asked.

“I’m going to have a baby then.”

“Sure. Fine. Whatever you need.”

Fortunately, Alana arrived right on schedule, September 3, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and when Phillips got back from the delivery room, she found her hospital room filled with literally hundreds of flowers, courtesy of Allan.

“His generosity didn’t stop there,” says Phillips. When production started on the MGM lot, he ordered up a nanny and a Winnebago large enough to satisfy any star’s ego. “Sometimes Allan’s exterior could be harsh,” says Phillips, “and then there would be these immense acts of generosity that just couldn’t be believed.”

Allan always chose to show his best side to family people. Like his production manager, Neil Machlis, who confronted his own major crisis that summer. “It was a bad time for me. My two-year-old son had cancer. I was on the set, in the hospital, on the set, in the hospital. Allan was great,” says Machlis.

While Phillips and Machlis grew to adore Allan, they sometimes glimpsed another side of the man. This “other” Allan first made his appearance at the MGM studios when Phillips began rehearsals for one of the movie’s big production numbers, “Red,” which featured several female dancers from her Hot Gossip troupe. “They couldn’t give all of the Village People girlfriends,” jokes Phillips, “so they just surrounded them with women.” One of those girls was chunkier than the others. “Allan couldn’t stand her. He hated her,” says the choreographer.

During rehearsals one morning, Allan shot up from his director’s chair and pointed at the girl. “Put her in the back!” he yelled at Phillips. “Hide her waaaaaay in the back!” It didn’t matter that the zaftig dancer stood right beside Phillips and Allan’s finger nearly poked her in the nostrils.

In the homosexual community of
Discoland,
Phillips became the production’s unofficial female mascot, which made her more privy to the overload of drugs on the set than some of the other straight participants.

“There were a lot of drugs around,” says Phillips, who developed such a gay rapport that
Discoland
screenwriter Bronte Woodard invited her to his otherwise all-male parties at his Hollywood Hills home on Mulholland Drive. “I’d be the only woman there. They were just chock full of young boys and drugs. Cocaine right, left, and center. The party started at the swimming pool and ended up in the bedroom.”

They were quite the A-list orgies. “Bronte was into Falcon models, Al Parker, among others,” says celebrity photographer Greg Gorman, who scored one of
his first major assignments with the
Discoland
production. “Bronte lived larger than life.” Woodard cultivated his thick Georgia accent and wore white broadband hats. Having written the southern romance
Meet Me at the Melba
, he considered himself another Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams. But late in the
Discoland
production, Woodard’s energy began to wane, and he often had to cancel some of the weekend fetes at his house or simply not show up for them. Then he stopped coming to the set altogether. Allan told people, “Bronte’s not feeling well.”

On at least one occasion, the Bronte free-for-all spirit surfaced on the set of
Discoland
. Instead of re-creating a disco on the MGM soundstage, Allan took over Studio One for one scene, and dressed up the West Hollywood club with several towers of light so that it resembled Studio 54. In the scene, the Jack Morell character gets his big break when he convinces the local DJ to break the Village People’s first single. It was a simple scene between Steve Guttenberg and Don Blanton, Allan’s real-life DJ, who, two years earlier had actually debuted the Village People’s song “San Francisco” at the Odyssey. Blanton wasn’t the only bit of typecasting. Allan also larded the background with several of his ex-boyfriends, whose on-set behavior drastically delayed the filming. “It got out of control,” says Blanton. “Everyone was having sex with one another. Guys would come by your dressing room and ask, ‘Can I give you a blow job?’ Allan got angry because it was costing him money because they weren’t able to find the people to do the scene.”

Allan had no choice but to issue a warning: “Anyone caught having sex will be thrown off the set!”

A modicum of order returned when the production moved back to MGM; unfortunately, the nostalgia of filming where Esther Williams and Judy Garland once cavorted brought little cohesion to the production. “Everyone had ideas for that movie,” says Bill Butler, who, in effect, became the de facto helmer on
Discoland
. While he had never directed a film, the cinematographer had worked with some of the best: Milos Forman on
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
Steven Spielberg on
Jaws,
Francis Ford Coppola on
Rain People
. “You learn tons from these people,” says Butler. And what he learned that came in most handy on
Discoland
was how to direct actors who can’t act.

“When you have actors like the Village People who are not actors but performers, they tend to go over the top. They throw their emotions in, and it looks unreal,” says Butler.