Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (27 page)

Laurents thought fast. “Well, two of the Cagelles are girls,” he blurted out. “It’s up to the audience to decide who are the real girls. They won’t know until the curtain call when the real boys tear off their wigs.”

The potential investor considered it. “That’s great!” Herman loved the idea and so did Allan because, actually, it was his idea, stolen from the drag show at Finocchio’s two years earlier.

Fierstein, for his part, hated mixing the sexes in
La Cage aux folles
. “They sold it to me as ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we make the audience guess which are men and which are women?’ It was a silly cop-out,” he says. “They were so scared of the material. I was openly gay. I didn’t ever consider making apologies for what we were doing.”

“Apologies” is a strong word. Curiously, Fierstein was the only one among the principal creatives who dared mention out loud that
La Cage aux folles
would be the first Broadway musical to feature two male lovers. “Allan never mentioned it. No one,” says Brown. “It was always an entertainment.”

Herman agrees. “We were looking to do an entertainment that had something to say, which is very different from a message piece.” It’s what Allan wanted. “And it’s why it worked,” Herman adds. “It was never a piece of activism, even with Harvey involved.”

Laurents, however, worried about the controversial, groundbreaking material. “The subject of two men living together is still dicey,” he said many years later. “Americans still do not grasp two men living together; they do not want them buying property next door.”

Despite Liz Smith’s efforts to tout
La Cage aux folles
as Broadway’s next big hit, it remained a tough sell. “The money didn’t walk in the door,” says Allan’s friend Manny Kladitis, a Broadway manager-producer. “I don’t know if it was the gay theme, but he didn’t have an easy time raising money.”

To please skittish investors, who blanched at an all-male chorus line, two women were cast as Cagelles despite Fierstein’s vehement protests. (Fierstein jettisoned the concept for the 2004 Broadway revival to make it an all-male chorus line.) Otherwise, the backers’ auditions delivered only one major potential blow to the creative team of three.

In the hurly-burly world of Broadway, the show that opens is often the show that can secure a theater, and in the Gotham landscape there are only a dozen venues, at most, that are large enough to house a musical on the scale that Allan envisioned. One organization, the Shuberts, owns half the Broadway real estate.
It’s a power that gives them the strength to pull strings—strings long and twisted enough to demand significant changes in a show’s makeup, both creatively and financially.

“I’d heard that the Shuberts didn’t want me as director,” says Laurents. “They told Allan if they got Michael Bennett, they would give him a theater.” Bennett, although he’d suffered a disappointment with the box office bomb
Ballroom
during the 1978-1979 season, remained a darling of the Shuberts. His hit musical
A Chorus Line
was only halfway through its fifteen-year run at the organization’s cornerstone Shubert Theater on West 44th Street when
La Cage aux folles
began its series of backers’ auditions. “Allan hadn’t produced on Broadway before,” observes Laurents, who felt he had reason to be worried about his rather tenuous position with this nascent musical. “Allan used an awful lot of coke. You never could tell when he was in his right mind. But for some reason he was extremely loyal to me. He said no to the Shuberts.”

Allan instead went with the Nederlander Organization, part owners of the venerable Palace Theater, famed for having housed Judy Garland’s 1951 Broadway debut engagement, as well as such full-scale musicals as
Sweet Charity
and
Applause
.

The two men, Allan and Laurents, didn’t exactly like each other but they shared an understanding. It was one that the old pro, Laurents, brokered with the new kingmaker on the block, Allan. “Your territory is from the back of the house to the orchestra rail, and my territory is from the orchestra rail to the backstage,” Laurents told him. And Allan honored Laurents’s word. “Once he knew the protocol of the theater, such as, the producer doesn’t talk to the actors, he never broke it.”

Occasionally, Allan did—very diplomatically—make a directorial suggestion.

“There’s the scene in the second act where Georges is trying to make Albin a man,” Laurents recalls. The moment requires Albin to pick up a piece of toast and butter it with a nonlimp flick of the wrist, which he has great difficulty mastering. Allan carefully approached his autocratic director. “Instead of toast, make it a croissant,” he offered.

Laurents liked the idea. “It was his penis,” Laurents says of the croissant. “It was funny.”

But not all of Allan’s ideas found a receptive audience with the show’s creatives, and in time, the three men developed a nickname for their tyro producer. They called him Flo, short for “menstrual flow,” since they never knew what
mood they might find him in. Even in Allan’s company, they could be heard to remark, “Did you hear what Flo said today?” Allan had no idea what they were talking about.

After a few more backers’ auditions, Allan flew Fritz Holt and Laurents to his house in Honolulu for a more relaxed powwow. Here was one of Diamond Head’s more famous houses, called Rakuen, which means “paradise” in Japanese. The two-story house, which Allan nicknamed Surfhaven and purchased for $5.7 million, had been built with an abundance of silk-paneled doors, or shojis, in nineteenth-century in Japan and reassembled in Hawaii in 1912. The grounds’ arching stone bridge, waterfall, and koi pond lived up to the house’s original name, “paradise,” and even though every plant and architectural piece had been transported across the Pacific Ocean, that strict attention to Asian detail didn’t stop Allan from hanging a large crystal chandelier amidst the shojis in the living room. He also added a few throw pillows, which were a gift from his neighbor down the road, Clare Booth Luce—one of them read NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED—who had needlepointed them herself. Also strategically placed about the house were photos of Surfhaven guests, people like Robert Redford and Doris Duke and Bruce Jenner at his wedding, which took place on the grounds, and John Travolta, who stayed there so often that Allan put up a copper plaque on one of the bedroom doors. It read THE JOHN TRAVOLTA ROOM.

Shoji screens divided the rooms, and in the morning, some guests from the mainland complained of the bright morning light flooding their bedrooms. Every room opened to the outside, and occasionally Allan would forget to warn a novice guest before he or she descended a few stone steps to the beach and triggered the alarm system. Within seconds, half a dozen security guards would appear and point their guns.

Most people found it to be a very impressive house. Arthur Laurents wasn’t one of those people. “It was on a ratty beach of rock and cut glass,” he recalls. Even more unappetizing was the sight of Allan in swim trunks. “Not pleasant,” says Laurents. “He had his jaws wired shut and he ate like a pig.”

Chocolate cake, it seems, topped Allan’s list of favorite foods the weekend that Laurents and Holt visited Surfhaven, even though not much of it got through the wires coursing through his teeth, which had recently been snapped shut—again. “Allan took a knife and cut through the cake, spreading the chocolate all over his breasts. Don’t ask me why,” says Laurents.

He then made a kind offer to his two guests from the
La Cage aux folles
battlefield. “Why don’t you take a nap and I’ll have this guy come in and blow you?” Allan offered.

Holt and Laurents declined the invitation. The potential blow-jobber was, in Laurents’s estimation, “a kid who had done
West Side Story
in high school, and Allan was using me to impress him. He looked like a frightened lamb.”

As
La Cage aux folles
came together, Allan attempted to resuscitate his reputation in Hollywood after the ill-fated double blowouts of
Can’t Stop the Music
and
Grease 2
. It was not an especially auspicious choice with which to make his comeback, but
Where the Boys Are
spoke to Allan. Just as
Grease
was his hopelessly romanticized rendition of what were tragic times at Highland Park High,
WTBA
symbolized his Lake Forest College days as he wanted to relive them, with the Fort Lauderdale spring break thrown into the mix. No matter that the original
Where the Boys Are
is a fairly standard-issue run-of-the-mill beach-blanket-bingo movie circa 1960. Its ultrawaspish stars, from Jim Hutton and George Hamilton to Yvette Mimieux and Paula Prentiss, loomed as the idealized copies of the Illinois frat boys and sorority girls whom Allan wrote about incessantly in his “Through the Keyhole” gossip column.

Equally important, Allan could make the remake fast, he could make it cheap at $5 million, and he could do what he did best: create a few new stars and party with them in the process.

The new
Where the Boys Are
let Allan reexperience spring break, albeit thirty years later, the upshot being that he got laid this time around. “We shot scenes of spring break, driving up and down the beach looking for beautiful people to be in the movie,” says the film’s production manager, Neil Machlis. As they cruised down the boulevard off the beach, Allan waved from his rented Cadillac. As always, it was the casting process that really got his juices, creative and otherwise, flowing. “Want to be in a movie?” he cried to every shirtless buff
guy on the sidewalk. “Hi, I’m Allan Carr. I’m the producer of
Grease
.” It was his Florida update on his recent pickup line, “Cash or career?”

For any college boy or coed who doubted his sincerity, Allan pointed to a couple of cameramen in his entourage, who followed in another car. Allan possessed an eye for talent—or, at least, physical beauty—and to prove it, the footage shot on his Fort Lauderdale tour convinced the film company ITC to green-light the
Where the Boys Are
remake.

For a few days in April 1983, as Arthur Laurents and company toiled away on
La Cage aux folles
in New York and Allan trolled the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, it was for Allan the best of both worlds, combining as he did the Hollywood of
Where the Boys Are
with the Broadway of a new musical. Once he finished with the Florida college boys, Allan took his talent search to Los Angeles, where he found himself completely smitten by a twenty-six-year-old actor named Howard McGillin. In time, McGillin would earn himself a place in
The Guinness Book of Records
for clocking in more performances in the title role in
The Phantom of the Opera
than any other human being
.
But in 1983, McGillin struggled to support his wife and son, and needed to establish himself in the entertainment business. Along with dozens of other actors who auditioned for the role of the “son,” Jean-Michel, in
La Cage aux folles,
McGillin waited his turn to sing the love song “With Anne on My Arm,” in which the character Jean-Michel professes his love for his fiancée.

Unlike those other contenders, however, McGillin inspired Allan to call the long, arduous audition process to an abrupt halt. Suddenly, it wasn’t the sweet strains of Jerry Herman’s ballad that kept Allan’s ears buzzing as he followed McGillin out of the Debbie Reynolds Studios and into the asphalt heat of the parking lot on that unduly warm spring day in North Hollywood.

“You’re going to be a star!” Allan called out. He then reintroduced himself to McGillin, and launched into a promo of not
La Cage aux folles
but
Where the Boys Are ’84.
Since McGillin had never seen the original beach-blanket movie, the on-the-spot offer to appear in the remake impressed him. “You must come up to my house,” Allan continued. “It’s a great house. Ingrid Bergman used to own it. You’re going to be the star of
Where the Boys Are
!”

Despite McGillin’s audition for
La Cage aux folles,
that Broadway project quickly evaporated into the white glare of the sun-baked smog over the San Fernando Valley. For an actor in search of any and all credits, those seven words—“You’re going to be a movie star!”—summed up, if not his every dream, then at least next month’s rent.

Over the next few weeks, as Allan shuttled back and forth between New York City, to take care of
La Cage aux folles
business, and Fort Lauderdale, to scout
Where the Boys Are
locations, he found ample time to entertain McGillin at Hilhaven Lodge and introduce him to potential writers and directors for
Where the Boys Are
. McGillin reread the script many times to help audition other actors whom Allan liked. “I was drawn into this crazy roller-coaster period of about two months,” says McGillin. There were incessant phone calls to McGillin’s house. When the actor’s wife answered, Allan wanted to know, “Is the star there?” Every time Allan called, the conversation would lead to “Get up here. Right away.”

It didn’t much matter what day of the week or what time of day. Early one Sunday morning, McGillin found himself unceremoniously summoned to Allan’s house. “I was leery, and it didn’t help that he came to the door wearing a bathrobe. But Allan was very respectful of [heterosexual men]. That’s true,” says McGillin, who years later came out as a homosexual.

Only once did McGillin consider saying no to his movie mentor’s demands, and that minor stab at recalcitrance coincided with his son’s second birthday party. McGillin had invited his closest friends to celebrate the big event, held on a Saturday, when the phone rang early that morning. “You must be at the Universal Sheraton today. It’s the final audition,” announced Allan.

McGillin couldn’t help but wonder: Hadn’t he already been put through several final auditions?

Two hours later, the currently unemployed but future movie star walked down the hallway of the Universal Sheraton, where dozens of other twenty-ish actors were preparing to audition for
Where the Boys Are ’84
. Many of them brought entire wardrobes. In the middle of such planned chaos, McGillin watched as Allan jumped from suitcase to suitcase to check out clothes. “This shirt is fabulous!” he told one boy. “My dog wouldn’t be caught dead in those shorts!” he told another.