Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (35 page)

Producer Barry Brown and actor John Weiner recall being present that day, and they tell a slightly more theatrical story.

Sitting in the auditorium of the Palace Theater, surrounded by a few cast members and assistants, Laurents was not a happy director, according to Brown and Weiner. “I’m going to be rid of him after this rehearsal,” he said of Stack.

Someone whispered back, “Oh, he’s just nervous.”

“It’s not going to get better,” Laurents cracked.

Among other problems, Stack found it difficult to negotiate the furniture onstage. Worse, his role required that he function as the evening’s emcee, and he simply lacked the requisite charm and bonhomie that Van Johnson and Gene Barry exuded. Laurents made minor adjustments in Stack’s performance, but
it soon became clear that Stack had progressed from clumsy to downright scared. Then Stack launched into “Song on the Sand,” the love song he sings to Albin.

No sooner had he finished than Laurents called a halt to the rehearsal, and made his way to the stage. It’s never a good sign when the director leaves his orchestra seat to confront an actor face-to-face onstage. Again, Laurents made minor suggestions to Stack. At first, they were delivered sotto voce, but soon his voice began to escalate, and in front of the full company, who had gradually made their collective way to within earshot, he told Stack, “You can’t sing. You can’t act. What can you do?”

Marvin Krauss, the show’s general manager, materialized from the wings. “Everybody in the lobby!” he announced as if speaking to a room of eavesdropping schoolchildren. But the company of actors didn’t leave fast enough, and as they shuffled out, they were able to catch Stack’s defense. “Jerry Herman and Allan Carr heard me sing and thought I sang very nicely,” he said.

“Well, I resent Jerry Herman and Allan Carr saying that,” Laurents replied.

“You think I’m doing this show?” Stack sputtered.

It’s exactly what Arthur Laurents wanted to hear. He didn’t have to fire Robert Stack. Robert Stack fired himself.

Laurents wrote in his book
Mainly on Directing
that he delivered his rejection of Stack in private and that the actor took it “without a trace of resentment,” that “we shook hands, he quit that day, and I never saw him again.”

Regardless of who was present (or eavesdropping) during the infamous showdown between Laurents and Stack, there’s no doubt that the director’s next encounter with his producer, via a letter, was not so amicable. In a missive posted from Quogue, New York, Laurents chastised Allan in withering detail: “You, the Veteran Producer (according to your theatre program bio which, however, lists absolutely no previous experience worth mentioning), waited until I was in London and then insisted on signing Stack without anyone hearing him read, let alone sing, in a theatre. Now you were in high gear and really on a power trip.” Laurents went on to accuse Allan of costing the production $100,000 as a result of the Stack hiring/firing: “Did you pay? No, the show did, the investors did. Will they ever know? How creative is your bookkeeping? As creative as your ducking responsibility? Because who, in this whole painful and unnecessary episode, who got off scot-free? You did.”

There it was, finally, out in the open. The two men hated each other, and that animosity only escalated
La Cage
’s ongoing marketing wars. Laurents had
always loathed the print ads that stressed the show’s transvestite subject matter. “After three years, we were sick of Arthur complaining,” says Wilner, who, along with Allan, decided to release what was called their “straight campaign,” one that featured the young lovers, Jean-Michel and Anne. No sooner did the new advertisements appear in newspapers than the gay activist group ACT UP voiced its objection in the “Page Six” gossip column of the
New York Post
.

Allan consulted no one. He read the
Post
’s ACT UP item and ordered, “Get rid of the new ads! We didn’t do this show to hurt the gay community. Pull everything. Go back to the original.”

Early in the show’s run, Rock Hudson and his longtime friend and occasional lover Tom Clarke paid a visit to
La Cage aux folles
. They even made the obligatory visit backstage to say hello to the show’s stars and pose for photographs. If AIDS would eventually claim many of Broadway’s finest in the 1980s, including one of the show’s executive producers, Fritz Holt, it took its most famous victim, Rock Hudson, on October 2, 1985. His death came on a Wednesday, and by the end of that day’s matinee, CBS had already dispatched its camera crew to the sidewalk in front of the Palace Theater to ask theatergoers what they thought of not only the movie star’s death from AIDS but Broadway’s only gay musical,
La Cage aux folles
.

“
La Cage aux folles
had nothing to do with AIDS, but in people’s mind it was about gay people and the equation was made,” Allan lamented. After the CBS report aired, box office at
La Cage aux folles
took an immediate tumble, never to return to its former superhit status. The impact was even greater elsewhere. “The AIDS epidemic was partially responsible for the show’s failure in London,” says Barry Brown. And on the West Coast, it didn’t help
La Cage
’s box office when the Screen Actors Guild responded in the press to reports that homosexual actors were being discriminated against because of AIDS.

The media stoked the AIDS frenzy, which quickly turned into a gay backlash, especially in the once-friendly terrain of the downtown nightlife. In
New York
magazine, Bianca Jagger was quoted as saying that she appreciated the heterosexual atmosphere at Steve Rubell’s new club, the Palladium. And Rubell himself remarked, “Gay, it’s an empty life,” despite the fact that he was already taking the drug AZT to control his HIV, which, four years later, would take his life.

By summer 1987,
La Cage
’s company was ready to traipse a few blocks north from the Palace to the smaller Mark Hellinger Theater. AIDS wasn’t the only thing that forced the planned move: Air rights had been sold over the
Palace Theater, to make way for a new DoubleTree Hotel. The move looked like a sure thing. Actor Lee Roy Reams from
42nd Street
had been rehearsed, the Hellinger sported a new
La Cage
marquee
,
and while the show’s box office continued to dwindle in the wake of the AIDS crisis, the marketing director, Jon Wilner, welcomed the move away from the discount tickets booth, known as TKTS, that sat directly in front of the Palace Theater in Duffy Square.
La Cage
had heretofore never been able to take advantage of the booth, because “If you sold half price, you could never get full price,” says Wilner. In residence at the Hellinger, the musical would finally be able to go the discount route.

Wilner never got to test his theory. Shortly before the planned transfer to the Hellinger, Marvin Krauss called a meeting in lawyer John Breglio’s office. It was not a good sign. “You never have a meeting at a lawyer’s office,” says Wilner, “because it means you will be canceled.” Allan didn’t attend. Suffering from his kidney stones, he remained in California.

Breglio got right to the point. “There is no [current] economic justification for
La Cage,
” he said. The show’s advance ticket sales were in freefall, and according to the lawyer, the show’s box-office decline was due to forces outside anyone’s control. “It was sad and depressing,” Breglio later observed. “Because of the AIDS crisis, [the subject matter of
La Cage
] was no longer something you could easily fool with.”

Broadway itself was reeling. In addition to Fritz Holt, the theater community had lost Michael Bennett,
Company
star Larry Kert, and many others to AIDS. “No one closes a hit show.
La Cage
had run four and a half years. It had run its course,” says Brown.

Arthur Laurents took the opportunity to blame Allan for the early closing, and he offered a bizarre explanation: “We were set to move to the Mark Hellinger. The Moonies, however, wanted the Hellinger for their tabernacle. They offered Allan Carr a lot of money. . . . He took it, and that was the end of
La Cage aux folles,
the musical.”

The followers of Sun Myung Moon, of course, had nothing to do with the show’s shuttering. The Mark Hellinger Theater eventually became the home of the evangelical Times Square Church, but not before another musical, the Peter Allen flop,
Legs Diamond,
opened and quickly closed there.

If Allan was too indisposed to make it to Breglio’s office to deliver the bad news, he didn’t miss the opportunity to attend a good party two weeks later. After their final performance on November 15, 1987, the cast members of
La
Cage
said good-bye to each other at a small restaurant on the corner of Amsterdam and West 79th Street.

“We were surprised that Allan came to the party,” says cast member Mark Waldrop. “Everyone was mad at him.”

Wilner disregarded the cast’s negative attitude. Many of the actors were young, and didn’t know that
La Cage
had been a rather atypical Broadway experience. Producers often replace casts on a yearly basis, but Allan proved much more generous and loyal to his actors. As the marketing director points out, “The cast kept getting raises on a regular basis. There were few defections. They didn’t go to other shows.”

John Weiner, who never left the Broadway
La Cage
during its entire four-year run, agrees: “We had parties all the time, they treated us like gold.” He recalls one of the older cast members telling him, “This is a real special kind of thing.”

Regardless of Allan’s largesse for the preceding four years, the sudden posting of the closing notice made for hurt feelings. If Allan sensed that
Macbeth
atmosphere, he didn’t advertise his outsider status. At the closing party, he even smiled when three of the Cagelles sang the tune “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” but changed the lyrics to reflect the occasion. As
La Cage
’s trio put it to the newly unemployed among them, “Hey, don’t you remember? I was a star in my fabulous prime. I once did a show for Allan Carr. Brother, can you spare a dime?”

Before he shuttered
La Cage aux folles,
Allan made a visit to the Metropolitan Opera as the guest of Sybil Harrington. A Texas oil heiress worth close to a billion dollars, give or take a few barrels, the silver-haired Mrs. Harrington was such a dutiful patron of the opera house that the management named its 3,800-seat theater in her honor while she could still enjoy it. Before the Texas heiress did ascend to that great Valhalla in the sky, Harrington liked to show her friends the newly placed bronze plaque on the orchestra level. It read “The Sybil Harrington Auditorium.” One flight of marble stairs up, on the parterre level, she often took up residence in the general manager’s primo left-corner box. On this particular evening, her guests were Placido Domingo and Allan. During the first intermission, the opera novice among them made the faux pas of asking the great Spanish tenor a naive question.

“Placido,” Allan began, “who does the sound system in this house? It sounds so natural. I don’t see the microphones.”

Domingo laughed. “This is opera,” he informed Harrington’s opera-challenged friend. “We don’t use microphones here.”

“Amazing!” said Allan.

During the second intermission, it was Domingo’s turn to ask the ingenuous question. “I want to do a Broadway show,” he said. “Is it possible to create a new show for me?”

“Of course” came the quick answer. “But it’s easier said than done,” said Allan, thinking back to the seven years it took to create
La Cage aux folles
.

“I just did a pop song with John Denver,” Domingo added. “One day I will have to make the graceful and gracious move away from opera. I can’t do
South Pacific,
that’s Ezio Pinza’s role.”

“Like Pinza, you need an original role,” Allan agreed.

As the house lights dimmed for the third act of
Madama Butterfly,
Allan added, “We will discuss this after the opera.” He had already begun writing the new intro paragraph of his
New York Times
obituary: “Allan Carr, the impresario who brought Placido Domingo to Broadway . . . ” Allan thought of nothing else for the next thirty minutes of unrequited love, child abandonment, humiliation, and suicide. Cio-Cio-San’s tragedy came and went. Allan didn’t notice. Instead of listening to Puccini’s music as it pumped through the Met’s nonexistent sound system, he compiled a list of questions for his eager Broadway debutant. After the performance, over drinks and a late-night dinner at the Ginger Man restaurant, he set out to get Domingo’s answer to each and every one of them.

Over their endive salads, Allan put forth the greatest unknown. “What famous Spanish figure would you like to portray onstage?” he asked Domingo.

The tenor didn’t have to think long. “What about a bullfighter like Manolete?”

Allan looked at Domingo, who was svelte for an opera singer but not svelte for a Broadway star. He carefully composed his response as Domingo proceeded to tell him all about Manuel Rodríguez Sánchez, aka Manolete, a great bullfighter who expired in the bullring in 1947 after being gored by a fierce Miura bull. Manolete’s only solace, as Domingo told it, was that the Miura also died in battle.

“A great story!” said Allan, his hands clapping as Domingo finished his bull-fighting profile. “A great story, perfect for the opera. But Broadway? Placido, funny, but you don’t look like a bullfighter. A voice you have, but the body of a bullfighter? You will have to wear a bullfighter’s costume on Broadway, and the sequins will not cover all the pasta and paella you’ve consumed.”

Allan knew the only way to criticize a person’s weight is to level the attack with tongue planted firmly in his own jowly cheek. Domingo digested Allan’s critique of his physique along with his pasta that evening, and said he’d think about it. “I will give you a list of other famous Spanish people,” Domingo added. “In the meantime, you must come hear me perform at Madison Square Garden. I sing zarzuela. It’s like a Broadway musical.” Domingo devoted several engagements a year to performing in the Spanish folk idiom, which, like American musical theater, weaves together songs and spoken dialogue. His family in Madrid,
where Domingo was born, ran a zarzuela company, which they later moved to Mexico City.