Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (34 page)

But Allan still had
La Cage
.

While the Grammy meant nothing to Broadway’s box office, the Tony was the cake as well as the frosting, and
La Cage
’s nomination for best musical of the 1983-1984 season, plus seven other Tony nominations, was balm on Allan’s filmmaking wounds. Fortunately,
Cats
was not in awards contention, having won the season before. Ever since
La Cage
opened in August, no real competition reared its unwanted head over the course of the Broadway season, what with such lackluster tuners as
Baby, The Tap Dance Kid,
and
The Rink
presenting the only threat. That is, until Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s
Sunday in the Park with George
held its premiere in the last days of the season, coming in just before the cutoff deadline for Tony nominations, on May 2, 1984. Critics hailed the Sondheim show as a masterpiece, and opening so late in the season, “They have the momentum,” Allan rightfully feared. He held the
New York Times
responsible. “It’s relentless. It’s like they’re giving it their political endorsement,” he said. Every time he picked up the newspaper, there was another article proclaiming it a total triumph. “This went on for months.”

Still,
Sunday in the Park,
an intimate and cerebral show, would have difficulty on tour in the sticks, Allan felt, whereas his show had wowed them in Boston. “They’ll love it in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and New Orleans,” he claimed. As he knew, many of the Tony voters were out-of-town presenters who needed the imprimatur of the Tony to sell shows on their home turf. Why waste the award on Sondheim’s tuner, a show that only the cognoscenti could love and appreciate?

Allan ordered up tons of expensive ads to tout
La Cage
’s Tony potential. But in his head, if not his heart, he didn’t really believe his dream would come true. “We all felt that
Sunday in the Park
would win,” says Shirley Herz.

The year before, Fierstein won two Tonys, for starring in and writing
Torch Song Trilogy,
which transferred to Broadway after its run downtown. At those 1983 Tonys, the lead producer of Fierstein’s play, John Glines, shocked many in the audience with his simple, heartfelt thank-you speech: “I want to thank my producing partner and lover, Lawrence Lane, who never said it can’t be done.” Such an affront to mainstream sensibilities was a first for the Tonys, as well as network TV. Award winners at the Tonys, the Oscars, and the Emmys had been thanking their opposite-sex spouses and lovers for decades. But no homosexual had ever dared mention his or her same-sex partner in the high-profile glare of a nationwide telecast. At the ball following the Tony sweep of
Torch Song Trilogy,
many stalwart members of the straight Broadway community, which had always prided itself on being liberal, found themselves defensive, if not under attack, by the sizable gay minority among them. “You could hear people across America flicking off their TV sets,” said one producer, who feared that the heartland would be offended by Glines’s audacious thank-you to his boyfriend.

Alexander Cohen, who produced the Tony telecasts, also worried about the TV audience. In 1984, the year of
La Cage aux folles, The Tap Dance Kid, The Rink,
and
Sunday in the Park with George
—shows that involved many homosexual writers, directors, and producers—Cohen was not about to endure a repeat of Glines’s public gay gesture from the year before.

When he put on his tux for the Tonys, Harvey Fierstein entertained no plans to rock the heterosexual boat at the Gershwin Theater. He’d already won his Tonys, for
Torch Song Trilogy.
“And besides, I was actually hoping not to win that night,” he says. “I loved
Sunday in the Park with George
. James Lapine had done a magnificent job with the book.”

At least that’s the way he felt
before
Cohen took the stage off camera to lecture the Gershwin Theater’s live audience, giving them the dos and don’ts of on-camera etiquette. In closing he added, “And let’s not have a repeat of last year’s embarrassment with
Torch Song Trilogy
when it comes to giving acceptance speeches.”

Fierstein saw red. He turned to his lover, Scott, and growled, “I want to win.”

And win he did, along with Jerry Herman, George Hearn, Arthur Laurents, and Theoni Aldredge. Fierstein relished breaking Cohen’s rule by, first, kissing
the presenter, who happened to be fellow homosexual Larry Kert, and, second, telling the TV audience, “And I’d like to thank my lover, Scott, who typed the whole thing.”

Hearn accepted his Tony for lead actor in a musical, and displayed a minor case of hetero skittishness when he said of his drag turn, “What a man won’t do! . . .”

Allan gave Jerry Herman a standing ovation of one at the Gershwin when his
La Cage
score was awarded. With Tony in hand, Herman felt compelled to take a swipe at Sondheim’s more sophisticated score. “There’s a rumor going around for a couple of years that the simple hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it’s alive and well at the Palace,” he said.

The evening, however, belonged to Dustin Hoffman, who emerged as a surprise presenter. The actor had not been nominated for his performance as Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman
. Many theatergoers considered it an oversight, if not a snub, and Hoffman milked the moment by wearing his
Salesman
hat onstage to give out the award for best play.

At evening’s end, Michael Bennett announced the winner for best musical. Since the show had won the other big honors, it was no surprise when he announced, “
La Cage aux folles
,” and Allan bolted to the stage, his legs carrying him faster than even he thought possible. He used his long-awaited moment of glory to indulge in an uncharacteristic bit of humility. “I’m just the conduit,” he said, then stroked his new theater cohorts while dismissing his old movie ones. “This is the only awards show where people who aren’t nominated show up. Hollywood, take a lesson from Broadway,” he said, pointedly referencing the unexpected appearance of Dustin Hoffman.

Offstage, the Tony apparatchiks picked up Allan’s award shortly after he walked into the wings of the Gershwin Theater. They told him it needed to be engraved. “I’m not leaving New York until I get mine back!” he promised. Following the telecast, Allan held court at the ball. He was Broadway’s premiere producer, and for an hour or two, it didn’t bother him that his creative team—Laurents, Herman, and Fierstein—had thanked each other in their acceptance speeches but not him. “He was happy, and it was fun to watch that kind of happiness,” says Fierstein. Allan’s Tony moment effectively erased every personal insult and career mishap of his forty-seven years—that is, until he woke up the next day.

Allan’s friends—and some who weren’t friends—joked that Allan Carr produced
La Cage aux folles
on Broadway so that he could eventually bring it to
Hollywood to show that he still had the stuff of a real producer. With Tony in hand, he concentrated on his grand return to the West Coast as the proud presenter of
La Cage aux folles
. The musical should have played there in a medium-size theater, like the Shubert in Century City. But the Shubert Theater (1,700 seats), in 1984, continued to house
A Chorus Line,
which the mighty theater organization had produced on Broadway. The Ahmanson Theater (2,000 seats) was a bit large, but it housed only limited runs due to its status as a nonprofit theater. Allan didn’t want a limited run for
La Cage
. Not in Los Angeles, anyway. He wanted the real thing, a first-class sit-down production that wouldn’t run for weeks or months but years. Since the Nederlander Organization, one of the show’s producers, owned the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, that venue emerged as the logical, if not the perfect, fit. At a gargantuan 2,700 seats, the mighty Pantages, a former home of the Oscars, is twice the size of the average Broadway theater.

It made economic sense to put out a national company of
La Cage aux folles
; there was its big Tony win and the show continued to sell out on Broadway. But once again, despite its New York success, the musical’s gay content proved a hard sell. Broadway wasn’t like the rest of America. To ease into the California market, Allan decided to open in homophilic San Francisco for a few weeks and then bring the show down to Los Angeles for an open-ended run.

“Allan wanted to show his pals in Hollywood what he could do,” says Barry Brown. The San Francisco engagement scored. “We played fourteen weeks there and sold out, and could have stayed another six months.”

Los Angeles, however, rotated in another orbit in the theater universe. The positive reviews there exceeded the New York notices, and instead of his Pan Am lobby extravaganza, Allan brought a hometown touch to the L.A. opening by taking over one of Hollywood’s favorite eateries, the legendary Chasen’s restaurant. He even renamed the place Chez Jacqueline, after the restaurant in
La Cage aux folles,
and made it a veritable children’s playground with sand drifts of plastic confetti on the floor and colorful balloons within balloons suspended from the oak rafters. If Allan didn’t get his wish to paint the Palace Theater pink, he indulged that fantasy by hanging huge swaths of pink fabric throughout Chasen’s, which turned the restaurant into a very festive-looking Chinese laundry.

At the opening-night party in Los Angeles, Allan kept repeating his formula on how to entertain as if it were his new mantra: “What does it take to make a great party? It takes Alan Bates, Phyllis Diller, Christopher Atkins, Sidney
Poitier and Audrey and Jayne Meadows and Peter Falk in the same room still talking to each other. This is old Hollywood and new Hollywood. We made Chasen’s a cross between 21 and Joe Allen’s.” He then nearly slipped on all the plastic confetti under his shoes. “I’ve gotta sweep this stuff up! Somebody thought it was cocaine on the floor,” he grumbled with good cheer.

For a while, the publicity and positive reviews worked. The Pantages sold out, but only for a few weeks. Twenty-seven hundred seats is equal to filling two Broadway-size theaters on a nightly basis, and within a couple of months, the place was half empty on most week nights. “You needed binoculars even if you were sitting in the first row. It was like playing on a football field” is how Arthur Laurents described it.

La Cage aux folles
ran one year in Los Angeles, not exactly the record longevity of
A Chorus Line,
but four times as long as most Broadway shows played in this notoriously nontheater town. The loss: $2 million. “Los Angeles should have been a stop on the national tour,” says Barry Brown.

Allan did not tempt fate with a London production; instead, he licensed
La Cage
to some British producers. Laurents busied himself with that overseas project, while Allan and Jerry Herman concentrated instead on finding future Albins and Georges for their New York production, which continued to do, in
Variety
slanguage, “boffo biz.” On Broadway, Allan wanted to replace the ailing Gene Barry, who had suffered a heart attack, with Regis Philbin. Laurents balked. He found daytime TV personalities “not classy enough” for his musical, and went with 1940s heartthrob Van Johnson instead.

Johnson, in time, grew increasingly tone-deaf in the role—“He would have sung it forever, if they let him,” says cast member John Weiner—and eventually the former movie star also required a replacement. Two years earlier, Robert Stack had auditioned for Allan and Arthur Laurents at Hilhaven Lodge, where, Jerry Herman recalls, “There was a Lucite grand piano in the living room. It had absolutely no business being there.” Laurents thought the actor needed singing lessons, to which Allan replied, “But Bob’s aunt was an opera singer!” Laurents also expressed concern that Stack, best known for his portrayal of Elliot Ness on TV’s
The Untouchables,
had never appeared on Broadway and his stage experience “was limited to five weeks of summer stock twenty years ago,” according to the director.

Allan did not heed Laurents’s advice. When
La Cage aux folles
needed a Georges replacement after Van Johnson’s departure, Allan went ahead and signed Stack. Advertisements were printed to announce the new cast member,
and with Laurents still putting the London cast through its paces, it fell to Fritz Holt and an assistant director, Jim Pendecost, to rehearse Stack for the New York production. Then Laurents returned to New York City on a Sunday night. It had been a bumpy opening night in London.

“Everyone was in a bad mood because of the bad reviews,” says Jon Wilner. “You don’t tell the English how to do drag in the Palladium.” Indeed, weeks earlier, Harvey Fierstein had complained about putting
La Cage
in the 2,400-seat theater in the West End. “I stood in the back of the house and looked down at that stage so far away, it was like I was seeing it from Passaic.” The thought hit him, “They had forgotten what the show is about. It is a show about a couple in love. It’s about human emotions. The ego of these people.” And there were other problems. Despite the appearance of George Hearn, “It wasn’t well cast in the West End,” says Shirley Herz.

Into this maelstrom of nasty news from London dropped Robert Stack, who was to have his first run-through with a jet-lagged Arthur Laurents on the very day, Monday, that the autocratic director got his first look at the full-page ad in the
New York Times
heralding the appearance of TV’s Elliot Ness in
La Cage aux folles
. If Allan could get his way when it came to taking out advertisements, Laurents was about to show the Broadway community that he controlled everything from the “orchestra rail to the back wall of the theater.”

That Monday morning, Stack performed the role of Georges onstage with the full cast. Georges’s opening monologue, in which he invites everyone to club La Cage aux Folles, didn’t go well. According to Laurents, the meeting that led to Stack’s leaving the show took place between the two men. “After the rehearsal, I met with Bob onstage alone. They had all gone. They fled,” Laurents says, referring to the cast, management, and producers.