Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (38 page)

It was then that Allan broke out in what he called “an Oscar rash.”

In its December issue,
Los Angeles
magazine took a first potshot at the new Oscar producer. The rag published a two-inch item that opined, “Carr . . . has some of the Academy’s conservatives edgy about what the flamboyant producer may come up with.” Allan knew what “flamboyant” meant. It meant “fag.” He didn’t mind their pointing out the “black-tie dinner dance in honor of Truman Capote at the Lincoln Heights jail” in the article or that he “even hired the man who streaked the 1974 Oscars to do the same for another get-together.” But flamboyant? Allan could only be happy that
Los Angeles
magazine failed to mention his hiring Steve Silver from “San Francisco,” that other gay code word. Linda Dozoretz recalls, “There were some whispers: It’s going to be too gay, whatever words were used. Allan, though, just shrugged that off.”

Or maybe he baited it.

Ebullient over his Oscar gig, Allan defied any and all naysayers. “What did they know?” he said of
Los Angeles
magazine. He was on a roll. Good or bad, the speculation fueled him, and when he was inspired, he thought up his best ideas—or so he claimed.

One night, it came to him in the middle of an Academy Award dream. “The Oscars was not about the winners. It was all about the presenters,” he believed. “The presenters would be compadres, costars, couples, and companions!” He
phoned Dozoretz the very next morning. She liked the idea. If she hadn’t like it, he would have gone with it anyway.

It was such a lovely disease, this “Oscar rash,” and to give it a good scratching, Allan retreated to Fiji for Christmas. “Whenever he went on vacation, he took three or four twinkies with him,” says Kathy Berlin. “Most of the time, he didn’t even know the guys’ names.” He also took with him every combination of star pairings that could be crammed into the presenters’ rubric of “compadres, costars, couples, and companions.” He also packed a couple of suitcases full of old-movie videotapes, as well as arcane information on gift baskets and green rooms and limousines that ranged from rules like “Don’t argue with your driver” to “How can we keep the bottles of Coca-Cola chilled?” He would leave nothing to chance with this Oscar production, whether it be the correct pronunciation of the foreign film titles or how many buckets of ice to dump into the Shrine Auditorium’s urinals.

Roasting himself on the beaches of Fiji, Allan put together his dream list of star pairings: Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep. Roger and Jessica Rabbit. New movie couples, classic movie couples. He could dream. And with a big enough carrot, he could lure anyone to the show. He wondered aloud, “What about a tribute to Sophia Loren and her producer husband, Carlo Ponti?”

On Fiji, everything was possible.

Back in Hollywood, reality fouled his fantasy when word arrived in early January that Joanne Woodward refused to fly from her Connecticut home. Roseanne Barr considered herself “too TV” for the Oscars. Beatty, Farrow, and Kerr were being difficult. And cartoon Jessica Rabbit was deemed too expensive. “The real stars are cheap compared to the animated ones!” Allan ruefully learned. He could take only small comfort in pulling some strings at
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter,
both of which agreed to publish a new, rotating feature called “Oscar Watch.” In effect, it was a day-to-day drumroll to announce all those stars who were confirmed to present, and over the following weeks, Allan took pleasure in releasing the names of such real-life couples as Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and legends like Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball and Bob Hope.

Allan came up with a new mantra: “The night is 10 percent for the town and 90 percent for the world!” He especially liked his young star couples, but he
needed a coup—a genuine Hollywood legend who hadn’t shown up at the Oscars for decades, which in Hollywood was as close to eternity as anyone ever got.

“What about Doris Day?” Allan asked Dozoretz.

Dozoretz had long toiled as publicist for Hollywood’s longest-living onscreen virgin, and knew better than anyone how difficult a catch Doris would be.

“She won’t do it,” Dozoretz replied.

Allan smiled, and asked his publicist why Doris Day wouldn’t do the Oscars when she was scheduled to appear on the Golden Globes later that month.

“Doris was kind of tricked into coming to the Golden Globes,” Dozoretz surmises. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the Golden Globes, lured the retired actress back to Hollywood with its Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. It helped, too, that her son, Terry Melcher, had been nominated by the HFPA for writing the song “Kokomo” for the Tom Cruise movie
Cocktail
.

If Dozoretz had been wrong about her client never again basking in the Hollywood limelight, she made up for it by getting Allan seated at Doris Day’s table at the HFPA’s 1989 awards ceremony. It was there, in the Beverly Hilton Hotel ballroom, that Allan made his pitch. “I’m doing the most glamorous Academy Awards show ever,” he told the reluctant star during commercial breaks. “So many of your costars will be there.” Doris listened patiently, politely. She found Allan extremely funny and wondered where he got all his energy and enthusiasm. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no.

“But as the night went on at the Golden Globes, she got uncomfortable,” Dozoretz recalls. When it came time for the presentation of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, Clint Eastwood took the stage. His was a gracious speech, but as the encomium passed the sixty-second mark, Doris Day’s all-teeth smile began to harden under her equally famous freckles. “It was the length of the clips from her old movies, and the TV camera was on her constantly. She is not one to look back,” says her publicist.

Later that evening, the retired actress told Dozoretz, “I can’t do this again.” Allan never believed those words, and since he didn’t actually hear Doris Day speak them, he interpreted her silence as yes or, at least, maybe. Dozoretz warned Allan, but it didn’t matter what she said. His fantasy had jelled into reality, and the name Doris Day soon made the list of presenters in
Variety
’s “Oscar Watch.”

Shortly after the Academy announced its many nominations in mid-February, Allan decided to give his Oscar rash to all those old establishment “conservatives” in Hollywood who had complained about such a “flamboyant” man producing the Academy Awards. To tweak their squeamishness even further, he hired as the telecast’s one and only writer the Chicago-born Bruce Vilanch, who’d been openly gay from the moment he first set foot in the Hollywood Hills over a decade ago. Since Vilanch had never written any material for the Oscars, much less the entire telecast, it was appropriate that Allan’s protégé be introduced to the big brass at the ABC network by having them all visit Hilhaven Lodge for a meet and greet.

Before the suits arrived, Allan put out several bottles of Cristal on ice. “But they’re coming here to talk business,” Vilanch pointed out to his producer-boss. “I don’t think anyone will be wanting to drink champagne in the middle of the day.”

Allan brushed aside the comment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just make sure the label shows. I want those bastards to know I have class.”

He also placed a glossy photograph of Ingrid Bergman in the foyer, and slipped it into a silver frame, but not before he inscribed it to himself:

For the high-level confab with ABC, Allan wore a caftan. Vilanch wore T-shirt and jeans. ABC vice president John Hamlin played it only slightly more formal in a dress shirt and slacks. Everybody sat down on pillows in the poolside white tent to talk about the Oscars, leaving the Cristal to sweat in buckets of ice, as Vilanch predicted.

“One pair of presenters will follow another,” Allan began. “It is the passing of the baton that keeps the show moving,” he said, elaborating briefly on his four C’s: the “compadres, costars, couples, and companions,” of which he continued to be very proud.

The ABC VPs asked about the telecast’s host.

“There won’t be a host. We don’t need a host,” Allan said, who segued to another controversial subject: the three nominated songs. It was his opinion, which he delivered as fact, that the songwriters’ division of the Academy had rightfully chosen only three songs, and none of them deserved to be performed. “They’re awful,” said Allan. “I can’t get performers for these three turds. So let’s not do them.”

Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” from
Working Girl
was the best of the lot. “But Carly has legendary stage fright and won’t perform,” Allan informed them. Then there was Lamont Dozier and Phil Collins’s “Two Hearts” from a movie no one had seen,
Buster
. “Collins had been nominated four years ago for his song ‘Take a Look at Me Now’ from
Against All Odds,
and it got turned into a ballet for Ann Reinking and he’s pissed off, so he won’t perform. And, of course, Bob Telson’s ‘Calling You’ from
Bagdad Café
is no song at all.”

These nominated songs, Allan told the men of ABC, would be announced but not performed. “There’s no reason we have to endure sitting through any B-list singer trying to put over those songs. And besides, it gives us more time for the opening number,” he concluded.

Having dismissed the three Oscar-nominated songs, Allan jumped off the pillows to act out the telecast’s much-anticipated opening number. It was as if Judy Garland had been reborn to perform that bare-bones production number called “Somewhere There’s a Someone” in Vicky Lester’s living room in
A Star Is Born
. Judy didn’t need costumes and locations to take her fans around the world, and neither did Allan when it came to duplicating what the stage would look like at the Shrine in six weeks. With his gestures and expressions, he re-created the huge headdresses, the palm trees, and the dancing tables of the Cocoanut Grove.

“I’d never seen anyone so excited about his dream coming true,” says Hamlin. “And I’ve worked on over forty Oscar shows. It was truly amazing to see such enthusiasm.”

In passing, Allan mentioned the San Francisco revue
Beach Blanket Bingo
with its send-up of Snow White, which he wanted to replicate.

Hamlin wondered out loud, “Will that go over the heads of our TV audience?”

Allan said not to worry. “We’ll make it work!”

While no one mentioned anything about copyright infringement regarding the Disney character, there was much talk about keeping the show “young.” The demographics for the Oscars had grown increasingly older over the years, a problem that Allan hoped to solve. “We’ve got a ‘Young Hollywood’ number planned for the second half of the show. It will be young, young, young, and these stars of tomorrow will all be singing and dancing. Hollywood has never seen anything like it since Mickey and Judy put on a show in the barn!” he said.

So much for the ABC brass.

At a meeting later that February, when Allan shared the Snow White concept with his creative team, set designer Ray Klausen worried about how they’d pull it off. He didn’t mention his concerns to Allan, but he wondered nonetheless: “Everyone at the Oscars is in tuxedoes and evening gowns. They’re expecting an elegant evening. And this wasn’t an elegant number.” It was the designer’s opinion that if you’re going to parody something, like having Snow White serenaded by Prince Charming, “You need to tip off the audience that you’re having good fun.”

Klausen hated to puncture the fantasy, since Allan was so clearly in love with Steve Silver’s campy San Francisco concept of the beloved Disney princess and prince. Fortunately for Klausen, Marvin Hamlisch beat him to it.

Allan’s former composer-client would conduct the Oscar orchestra and be musical director for the event. “You know, Allan, I’m having problems with this opening number,” Hamlisch said at the creative-team meeting. “We need to let the audience know that this is a spoof. Otherwise, I’m not sure how they’ll react.”

Hamlisch said it would be a simple thing to accomplish. Klausen also thought the whole concept missed “just one beat.”

Allan smoldered, then nearly attacked Hamlisch. “It’s brilliant! It’s perfect! It will be different!” he said as he quickly segued to the next topic of business: who would play Snow White. After seeing Allan’s reaction to Hamlisch, Klausen
wisely chose to remain mute. “There wasn’t any point,” he says. “Allan was going to do what Allan was going to do.”

The production number had its supporters. “It was grandiose,” says the telecast’s director, Jeff Margolis. “Allan thought big, like a film person. He wanted to push the boundaries of television.” Margolis’s recent work on the Emmy and the American Music Awards telecasts had impressed Allan, who hired the director for what would be the first of many Oscar assignments. The sheer extravagance of having Snow White segue into a big Cocoanut Grove number followed by a Broadway-like dance routine at Grauman’s Chinese Theater thrilled Margolis, who loved the challenge. “It’s possibly the biggest thing that had ever been attempted in the history of TV. Plus, we were going to be doing it live!” he says.

David O. Selznick took nearly a year to test hundreds of actresses for the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone with the Wind
. Allan didn’t have that much time to find his Snow White and Prince Charming. Surprisingly, the latter half of that duo turned out to be the easy part. Allan asked Rob Lowe and Rob Lowe said yes. Four years earlier, the handsome actor found himself a charter member of the so-called Brat Pack due to his appearance in the film
St. Elmo’s Fire
. In the following years, along with his costars Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy, he had suffered from the media fallout of being labeled a movie-star brat. Perhaps Lowe felt he needed the imprimatur of the Oscars, and if he couldn’t give an Oscar-worthy performance, then an Oscar-night performance would have to suffice. Besides, “[Allan Carr] had produced one of my favorite movies,
Grease,
” Lowe explained years later. “I figured he knows about musicals. And you have to understand. I’m from the Midwest, and Midwestern values tell you, if someone asks you nicely, to say yes, especially if it is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”