Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (3 page)

Allan also approved the master bedroom’s four-poster bed with overhead mirror, the legacy of Kim Novak’s brief occupancy of Hilhaven in the 1950s. (The actress lived there with her
Bell, Book and Candle
director Richard Quine, who owned the house and sold it to Allan.) Otherwise, the joint needed major renovations, which only added to Gottlieb’s concerns. “Allan couldn’t afford it, but he wanted it because it was a statement of his arrival in Hollywood,” says Hach.

The house was also perfect for the weight-impaired Allan Carr. In his redo, he forged a new entrance to the master bedroom from the living room, replacing a few steps with a gentle ramp that gave him easy access between the two rooms. “Allan rarely visited the second-floor bedrooms,” Hach says.

Allan was a big man, despite his five-foot six-inch frame, and at his peak, which he scaled often, Allan weighed 310 pounds. The legendary publicist Warren Cowan remembered his first meeting with Allan in the mid-1960s, when he brought Ann-Margret to the Beverly Hills offices of Rogers & Cowan. Allan wanted Cowan to handle her publicity chores—that is, if Allan could make his way through the PR firm’s front door. “He had to walk sideways, and it wasn’t a small door,” said Cowan.

Allan once complained to comedy writer Bruce Vilanch about having to wear a cast on his foot. Vilanch asked what happened. “I stepped off the curb,” Allan replied. His 300-plus pounds so overwhelmed Allan’s small-boned body that his ankle cracked under the pressure.

On the evening of May 26, 1973, Allan weighed something less than a baby whale. Unlike his age, he didn’t lie to party guests about the poundage. Fat is one thing, encroaching middle age quite another. Hilhaven figured large in his master plan to gain social entrée to the Hollywood elite. The other part—besides an illustrious client list that he managed—involved a gastric bypass operation that literally stapled off eighteen feet of his intestines. “It was so life-threatening. It was a very rare procedure then,” says Ann-Margret. “Finally, Allan had to go to Louisville to have it done.”

Prior to his bypass, Allan produced two movies with Ann-Margret’s husband, Roger Smith:
The First Time,
starring Jacqueline Bisset, and
C.C. and Company,
noted for featuring a nude love scene between Ann-Margret and Joe Namath in
his sophomore film effort. During the
C.C. and Company
shoot, Allan posed for pictures with Joe Namath, and he held the playboy football-star-turned-incompetent-actor personally responsible for his body overhaul. Allan took one look at the photos. “I was shocked,” he said. “I got the pictures back and you could not see the bike. Just me—the blob—and the motorcycle outfit and the Gucci shoes!”

C.C. and Company
died at the box office, as did
The First Time,
and those two flops momentarily put Allan’s producer ambitions on hold. Acquiring Hilhaven and losing a hundred pounds, Allan believed, could make him a Hollywood player again. “He was just not pleasant to look at,” says Roger Smith.

While Allan never fessed up to having an eye job, he reveled in discussing every detail of disposing of half his digestive tract. The one operation was routine, the other dramatic. And Allan never missed the opportunity to eschew the former and embrace the latter. On the night of his birthday/housewarming at Hilhaven, Allan made his grand entrance with the words, “Body by Dr. Rex Kennamer!” In case anyone arrived late and missed that salutation, he spent the remainder of the night bragging about the bypass. To the press.

“I use the old trick—dress in blue around the middle,” he offered. “But that operation really worked.”

“What operation?” a reporter asked.

“The bypass.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, let me see. Around the time
Sleuth
opened.”

The master of verbal inversion, Allan turned bombshells into yesterday’s news and made a front-page story out of absolute drivel. Regarding Dr. Kennamer’s handiwork, he couldn’t stop talking. “Well, I mean, my stomach looks like Joe Namath’s knees, the doctors have done so much to it. It’s not a pretty picture, let’s face it,” he blabbered.

Someone of Allan’s fervid imagination could even put a provocative spin on the folds of loose skin that draped his newly deflated body. Always ready with the choice moniker, Allan ruefully dubbed it “my elephant skin.” He wanted the skin tightened, but no doctor would oblige him there. “They tell me my skin has lost its elasticity, and if I regain the weight, I’ll burst!” he bragged.

Other topics discussed at Allan’s first Hilhaven party included the recent un-spooling of Bernardo Bertolucci’s
Last Tango in Paris
at the Cannes Film Festival (an outraged Earl Wilson called it “pornography”) to the ongoing Watergate scandal (Jimmy the Greek gave odds of 100 to 1 that Nixon would be impeached
and 1000 to 1 that he would resign). But those were minor distractions as Allan’s guests eagerly explored the legendary Hilhaven, and stood in line to take tours of the cottage where Bergman and Rossellini trysted so many years ago. There were even more radical dieting tips to be learned—like the one Allan picked up from Ann-Margret after her near fatal twenty-two-foot fall at a theater in Stateline, Nevada, in 1972.

“I had to have my jaw wired shut, and I could only drink through a straw,” she recalls. “Allan was so impressed with how much weight I lost that he had his own jaws wired shut too.” (When Steven Spielberg’s shark epic hit the screens in 1975, wags immediately applied its title,
Jaws,
to Allan.)

Here were two survivors who needed each other. She had endured a fall of twenty-two feet; he had endured the removal of eighteen feet of his innards. He was her manager; she was his fantasy. “Allan was a true confidante to Ann-Margret,” says his client Marvin Hamlisch. “Was Ann-Margret his alter ego? Probably. If Allan could have been in show business as a performer, he would have wanted it. He was made for it. The only life he knew how to lead was a showbizzy life.”

Allan singlehandedly reinvented the B-movie star Ann-Margret for Las Vegas. That makeover included Hamlisch’s music services, as well as the full glitz treatment of dancers on motorcycles and Broadway-like technical pyrotechnics that the gambling audiences had never seen before. Ann-Margret was talented, but not so gifted that she didn’t need Allan to fill in some blanks. “She’s not a great singer or dancer,” Allan opined. “But she’s malleable, and she wants to succeed.” He told her what to sing, how to do her hair, what gels belonged in the spotlights. Most managers take their 10 percent and think that the answer is to go from job to job. “Allan saw that it wasn’t about getting work,” says Hamlisch. “He saw the big picture. It wasn’t a two-year plan. His was a twenty-year plan.”

Roger Smith put it more simply: “Ann-Margret owes a lot of her career to Allan Carr.”

Other performers who relied on Allan’s concert/nightclub expertise were Cass Elliot, after the Mamas and the Papas, and Dyan Cannon, after
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
“He did every step,” says Cannon, “from the costumes to the back-up singers to the cities on the tour. He demanded the final say, which is why we parted ways.”

Allan disagreed with her on the latter part, and forgetting that it was she who hired him, he insisted, “I fired Dyan Cannon. She didn’t do what I wanted her to do.” When it came to being a diva, Allan showed them how. “I don’t do
hand-holding,” he maintained. “If they need that, then they get someone else. Their dishwasher breaks, they gotta call someone else.”

Allan and Cass Elliot parted ways more amicably, if unexpectedly, when, after two acclaimed sold-out performances at London’s Palladium, the thirty-three-year-old singer died of a heart attack brought on by her extreme obesity. Coincidence or not, she and Allan bounced around in the same 200-to-300-pound weight range. Allan commiserated, “She always seemed to be on a diet of some kind or other, always losing and gaining weight.” He could have been talking about himself, and knew it.

Allan hired Bruce Vilanch to write jokes and patter for a number of his clients, including Mama Cass. “Cass Elliot and Allan Carr were two Jewish fat kids who wanted to be something other than what they were,” says Vilanch, “and they saw the other as helping to make that possible.”

Mama Cass had fourteen months left to live when she made her way up the Hilhaven Lodge driveway for the first time, to celebrate her manager’s thirty-third (or thirty-sixth) birthday and new ownership of the house. It was not an easy journey regardless of one’s physical condition. In what was to become a party ritual, Allan hired a phalanx of burly security guards to check each guest before any of them made the trip from Benedict Canyon Drive up the long cul-de-sac to his house. The guards communicated with other security men at the top of the hill via walkie-talkies, then sent the guests up the hill in escorted vans. Torches on long poles illuminated the driveway where Ingrid’s red carpet once welcomed Roberto. Hundreds of white gardenias punctuated the night air as the torch flames lent the towering ficus a romantically ominous flair, as if the Great Gatsby had been transported five decades into the future across 3,000 miles from East Egg to the West Coast.

John Kander, composer of
Cabaret
and
Chicago,
wasn’t much of a party person. “But I would drive by Allan’s house when I was staying in Beverly Hills, and it always looked like the most exciting parties—the torches, the limousines, the valet, the music,” he said.

And security. Always lots of security. The Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate and others in 1969 took place only a mile up Benedict Canyon Drive. Like many in the film community, Allan remained ultracautious (his newly installed “panic room” a testament to such fears), but not so wary that he wanted to remain stuck in the hippy-macramé-LSD years.

“I want to bring glamour back to Hollywood,” he often said. “Everybody, let’s dress up!”

To show them what he meant, Allan demanded that his security men wear tuxedos in an age when young men no longer knew how to work a bow tie. The well-fashioned guards pointed the way up the zigzagging stone stairs to Hilhaven Lodge, where its oversize host and his absurd Lucite grand awaited them. “One of the six in the world!” Allan said of his piano. Black and white silk draped the rafters of the living room, and outside, black moiré covered the chairs on the terrace. “Do you think Allan is as rich as he seems to be?” asked his friend Joan Hackett.

Lee Remick wondered, “Why the black-and-white theme?”

“Ever heard of Cecil Beaton?” Allan shot back.

Sidney Poitier, Peter Sellers, Ann-Margret, Dyan Cannon, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Michael Crichton, and Kirk Douglas also visited Hilhaven Lodge during Allan’s first year there. “It was like going to the movies only in 3-D,” says Joanne Cimbalo, a friend who had known Allan since their grammar-school days in Highland Park, Illinois. She was the sibling he never had, and they remained in close, constant contact throughout his life. Each autumn, Cimbalo mailed Allan big packages of leaves—“at the height of their color,” she says—so that he could spread them across his Beverly Hills lawn and feel at home.

Allan liked to mix it up at his parties, and that included famous friends and friends like Cimbalo, as well as strangers who were young, pretty, and willing. “Everything happens at parties!” Allan crowed, and in addition to the fun and sex and drugs, he meant business as his clients brushed shoulders with the film world’s top agents, studio execs, and producers, as well as the old guard of Billy and Audrey Wilder, Janet and Fred de Cordova, Irving and Mary Lazar, Virginia and Henry Mancini, and Monica and Jennings Lang, the once-famous agent-producer who, Allan used to tell the youngsters at his parties, “got shot in the balls by Walter Wanger.” He also invited select members of the press, because, if it wasn’t written up in
Variety
or the
Los Angeles Times,
the party didn’t happen, in Allan’s opinion.

One reporter wanted to know why no one was dancing on the oak floor that Allan erected over his pool.

“Because they’re all doing business first,” said Andy Warhol superstar Pat Ast, who was yet another Jewish fat kid whom Allan befriended. “Then they’ll eat, then they’ll dance.”

Clients who missed an Allan Carr party didn’t remain an Allan Carr client for long. Such an affront warranted the inevitable next-day phone call, which invariably began, “Hello. It’s Allan. I hope you were really sick last night.”

When Allan said he wanted to bring back glamour, he didn’t mean something that reeked of leftover absinthe or molting feather boas. While he adored Hollywood’s old guard, he defiantly broke their rule never to mix with the rock ’n’ roll set, and through Hilhaven Lodge, he provided the meeting ground where movie stars and rockers could party together. If Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, and Bianca and Mick Jagger weren’t there on the evening of May 26, they certainly attended one or more of the dozen other get-togethers that followed during Allan’s first season on Benedict Canyon Drive.

In the early days of Allan’s party-giving, before he had turned the cottage into his office, he relied on Richard Hach to send out the invitations. At one party, United Artists executive David Picker, responsible for inking the James Bond franchise, turned to new-boy-in-town Howard Rosenman, fresh off an affair with Leonard Bernstein back in New York City and already in production with a few TV movies, to say, “Allan must have invited his Rolodex.”

Actually, it was two Rolodexes: his and Hach’s.

“We cross-pollinated lists,” Hach confirms
.

As long as Allan plied them with food, liquor, drugs, and sex, the guests didn’t seem to mind when their host said clunky things like “I’m instant Elsa Maxwell!” Whoever the hell she was. The food was good, the drugs and sex even better.

That first summer at Hilhaven, the parties merged deliriously into each other. So many people spent so many nights at Allan’s house that many who attended don’t remember being there the night of May 26, and many who think they were weren’t. His housewarming was followed in quick succession with fetes honoring a lazy Susan array of celebrities that ranged from Elton John and Martha Raye to Rudolf Nureyev and Mick Jagger, who didn’t make it to the party in his honor. “But that didn’t matter,” says Hach. “Bianca Jagger showed up, and besides, Mick Jagger was at half a dozen Allan Carr parties that he hadn’t been invited to.”