Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (43 page)

The immediate feedback was not all negative, and Peter Guber,
Rain Man
’s executive producer, noted a distinct generational divide in the criticism. “There were two reactions,” says Guber. “The view that we’ve punctured the sacrosanct Oscar awards ceremony was held by the conservative folks. The young people were ‘Hoorah, what a breath of fresh air. We’re headed for oblivion if we have our eyes in the rearview mirror.’ Inadvertently Allan set the tone for folks to take another way to do this staid event.”

Mrs. Steve Silver chose to feel the younger, kinder vibe that evening. At the Governor’s Ball, well-wishers like Gene Hackman, Amy Irving, Don Johnson, and Melanie Griffith offered their congratulations to her husband. Many of them had seen
Beach Blanket Babylon
either in San Francisco or Las Vegas, and were fans. “Everyone made such a fuss about Steve, how brilliant and wonderful the show was,” she recalls. Even some bigwigs from Disney expressed their wholehearted approval, and according to Mrs. Silver, more than one Disney executive asked her husband, “Have you ever thought of doing movies?”

For a moment, the orchestra stopped playing and, from the dais, Richard Kahn thanked Jeff Margolis and Allan, who, in turn, thanked everyone and then escaped to a roped-off area of the Expo Hall. “He wanted to have his own private party at the ball,” says Kahn. It was there that Allan holed up with his Young Hollywood kids, who included Patrick Dempsey, twenty-three, who was stepdad to Corey Parker, twenty-three, whose mom, Rocky, forty-eight, was Dempsey’s wife. Some of Allan’s star participants also showed up, and Allan hugged Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as if for support.

“Overall, the reaction was subdued,” says Dozoretz. “And Allan definitely picked up on that.”

Under other circumstances, Dozoretz might have accepted Allan’s invitation to go to Swifty Lazar’s party at Spago, but she claimed to be tired, and declined. Exhausted or not, Dozoretz wanted to rush home to check out that new invention, the Internet, to read early reviews. Indeed, the wire services had already posted their pan reviews of the event. Some of the smaller news outlets were also delivering decidedly downbeat verdicts. Her face to the computer, “I saw what was happening,” she says. Tomorrow morning, Dozoretz knew, would be her most difficult challenge when Allan called for a rundown of all the reviews.

Jeff Margolis also made an early exit. “To go home and collapse,” he told friends.

On the limo ride from the Shrine to Spago, Allan poured champagne for Bruce Vilanch, and told him with no joy, “I burned a lotta bridges with this one.”

Vilanch thought that Allan realized how poorly the show had been received. “But in fact he didn’t know, not yet,” says the writer. “Instead, he was referring to all the people whom he had rejected as presenters.”

Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party wasn’t anything like the Governor’s Ball or even the future
Vanity Fair
fetes, where celebrities made an appearance to have their photos taken and then ran out to have their photos taken again elsewhere. “At Swifty Lazar’s you sat down to dinner with Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor,” says George Christy, who wrote the
Hollywood Reporter
’s party column during the superagent’s heyday. Swifty greeted everyone at the door like a master general, and it wasn’t only movie stars who came. Publishing giants like Random House’s Bennett Cerf and Simon & Schuster’s Michael Korda and Putnam’s Phyllis Gran made the grand trek out west to attend, and there would also be royalty, like Princess Grace’s kids, to chow down on Wolfgang Puck’s pizza, chef Serge Falesitch’s red snapper, and pastry chef Mary Bergin’s macadamia nut tarts. “There was heat at those parties, major, sizzling heat; it was like your fingers got burned,” says Christy.

At Spago that night, Swifty was there not only to party but to hold nervous, unhappy hands. Like those of Tom Cruise.

“They quoted my mother!” the
Rain Man
star complained to Swifty. “They had the nerve to make up a quote from my mother. They never spoke to my mother!” Cruise was still huffy over reports from England that had him dying of breast cancer. “I had the flu,” he told Swifty. “The worst flu I’ve ever had in my life. My wife had it, too,” he said of Mimi Rogers. “They put me in the hospital in Paris because they thought I had malaria. I don’t have cancer. It’s total bullshit.”

Others at Swifty’s party had less reason to be testy with the press, and they included Art Buchwald, Jackie Collins, Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Cybill Shepherd, Merv Griffin, and Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both of whom brought their respective wives. Amy Irving came with Richard Dreyfuss and his wife, Jeramie, since Steven Spielberg remained home in Los Angeles on Oscar night, causing everyone to speculate that not all was well with Mr. and Mrs. Spielberg. Alana Stewart, divorced from Rod Stewart, arrived with first former husband, George Hamilton. Shirley MacLaine, pissed over Bob Hope’s crack about her reincarnation habits on the telecast, complained, “I think the jokes about me are getting stale. They need updating, maybe some new writers.”

Allan arrived at the party with Bruce Vilanch, who had most definitely not written Bob Hope’s barb regarding Shirley MacLaine, and to prove it, the writer and the actress spent much of the night together schmoozing. Allan looked for Swifty Lazar, but the host had already gone home.

Robin Williams praised Allan: “I hear he’s doing the Nobel Prize next. Lots of singing and dancing.”

The
Nightline
TV show corralled Michael Caine for an interview, but after being miked for ten minutes without being asked one question, he finally un-wired himself. “What is this?” the actor asked to no one in particular. “Am I working?” At which he rejoined the party by offering a toast to Allan.

“The reception was very warm, actually,” says Vilanch. “People told Allan how much they had loved it.” Too often, however, they asked Allan, “Will you produce it again?” He would have preferred to hear, “It was the greatest show I’ve ever seen.”

Allan could only smile and reply, “Ask me tomorrow.” Or he said without enthusiasm, “The scenery didn’t fall down. I’m ecstatic.”

Tired of repeating himself, Allan left Spago after a brief visit, to make his way home alone to Hilhaven. The greatest day of his life had just ended, and for some reason he wasn’t feeling so great.

A few hours later, Steve and Jo Silver rose early in their room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They were eager to read the reviews, and with a raft of newspapers under their arms, they retired to one of the poolside cabanas. They sat down with their coffee and croissants, and began to read. No surprise, their hometown paper, the
San Francisco Examiner,
gave him a rave: “After a decade-plus of dull, dull, dull telecasts, a shot of good old San Francisco camp restored Oscar to his rightful place as king of TV awards shows.”

Variety,
on the other hand, suffered from a slight case of press schizophrenia. Army Archerd, who appeared in the Snow White number, called the telecast “a hit.” But the newspaper’s TV reviewer, Tony Scott, whose notice ran on the same page as Archerd’s, had witnessed a different telecast: “The 61st Annual Academy Awards extravaganza—seen in 91 countries including, for the first time, the Soviet Union—turned out to be a TV nyet.” Scott went on to trash a “feeble-voiced Rob Lowe” and a “squeaky-voiced Snow White,” but saved his real condemnation for the Break-Out Super Stars number with its “youngsters few have heard of, cavorting around a giant Oscar as if it were the Golden Calf.”

Since the
Daily Variety
review saved its nastier comments for the telecast’s
other
production number, Steve Silver thought he could live with those words. Then came the
New York Times.
“The 61st Academy Awards ceremony began by creating the impression that there would never be a 62nd,” wrote Janet Maslin. “The evening’s opening number, which deserves a permanent place in the annals of Oscar embarrassments, was indeed as bad as that. Barely five minutes
into the show, Merv Griffin was on hand to sing ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,’ and that was only the beginning. Snow White, played as a simpering ninny, performed a duet of ‘Proud Mary’ with Rob Lowe, who would be well-advised to confine all future musical activities to the shower.”

Silver read no further. Barely did he have time to recover from that assault in print than Gael Love, the editor of
Andy Warhol’s Interview,
stuck her head in the cabana. “You’re Steve Silver?” she asked. “You directed the Oscars last night, right?”

Silver nodded. “Well, the opening number . . . ”

“The one with Snow White and Rob Lowe, yeah.” Never one for the delicate touch, Love got right to it. “So what did you think of it? Were you happy with how it turned out?”

Silver took a breath. He even managed to grin. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me!” he exclaimed. He thought a moment, still holding the
New York Times
in his hand. “Janet Maslin says it is the worst production number in the history of the Oscars. I guess you can’t top that. The publicity for
Beach Blanket Babylon
ought to be wonderful.”

Silver went on to tell Love that the opening number wasn’t what he originally envisioned. Then again, his job wasn’t on the line. Unlike other people involved with the Oscars, he didn’t have to wait for his next gig. “Steve has a hit show in San Francisco,” Jo Silver informed the
Interview
editor.

A few blocks east toward the hills, Allan Carr was one of those people waiting for his next job. He had expected to get a phone call from Richard Kahn, begging him to produce the 1990 Oscars. Instead, Allan sat in his white tent by the pool, the copies of the
Los Angeles Times
and the
New York Times
already tattered and blowing in the wind at his feet. Since the phone didn’t stir, he picked it up to dial his publicist.

When Dozoretz answered, he didn’t introduce himself. “No one has called,” said Allan. She commiserated by mentioning the TV ratings, which looked very good. “It’s still early,” Dozoretz added. There was plenty of time for phone calls and flowers and telegrams to arrive. But it was clear. “Allan didn’t know what hit him,” she says.

A more circumspect man, Bruce Vilanch decided not to make phone calls or show his face in the wake of the reviews. “I was in bed all the next day cheering up several members of the Young Hollywood number,” he recalls.

Resting the morning after in his Beverly Hills home, Kahn tossed off the bad reviews, just as he did in previous years. “Producers usually shrug them off,” he
says. The Janet Maslin review was a little more bloodletting than usual, he thought, but since when did a
New York Times
reviewer ever like the Oscars? Kahn chose to believe the well-wishers at the Governor’s Ball. The critics who watched it at home on TV weren’t always the best judge. “When you’re watching it in the auditorium, it’s a different show. You can have a fabulous time in the theater, and then people say it was so boring on TV.”

Pundits made a national sport of attacking the Oscars, saying that each year is the worst, the most boring. Allan, in Kahn’s opinion, achieved the impossible: The TV ratings for the 1989 edition weren’t just good, they were spectacular, and had reversed the show’s five-year numbers slide. “There was a feeling we owned the town,” Kahn recalls. The telecast made it into no fewer than 26.9 million homes in the United States, and with a 29.8 rating; the Oscar telecast hadn’t done that well since 1984, when it did 30.5.

Kahn took pleasure in analyzing the telecast ratings. Then the phone rang. It was Frank Wells, president of Disney. “Frank, how are you?” Kahn asked, expecting him to say something nice about last night’s show.

Wells said, “Dick, we got a problem.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, we’re very unhappy, we at Disney.”

“Yes?”

“About the show.”

“Oh?”

“Disney is upset over the appearance of Snow White.”

It was the first sign that there might be trouble ahead, because no sooner had Kahn put down the phone with Wells than he received a messenger-delivered missive. It was a letter of complaint about the telecast from a former Academy president,—and Oscar-winning actor—named Gregory Peck. “I didn’t know why he was so upset,” says Kahn. He phoned Peck to find out.

“The show reminds me of those Photoplay Awards!” said the actor, referring to a now-defunct fanzine that published puff pieces on the Hollywood stars and, each year, congratulated itself with a meaningless awards show. Apparently, Peck never liked the Photoplay Awards, and found them tacky, not sophisticated, beneath dignity.

“That was a very difficult day for me as president of the Academy,” says Kahn.

Allan, disappointed by the lack of day-after accolades, decided to go hunting for them. Rather than cancel his lunch plans, he kept his appointment at Mortons restaurant that Thursday afternoon, as did Robert Osborne, who happened
to be dining there that day. The
Hollywood Reporter
columnist had been very supportive of the
Beach Blanket Babylon
revue in San Francisco, but Osborne’s enthusiasm did not extend to Steve Silver’s work on the Oscar production.

“I knew Steve Silver. Allan loved that show in San Francisco,” Osborne says. “But what Allan did with it—it didn’t have any of the humor or the terrificness of Silver’s show.” He was surprised to see Allan at Mortons the day after the Oscars. “It was foolish. Allan must have known that these powerful Hollywood figures would be there. Maybe it was his way of showing defiance.”

More likely, despite the paucity of phoned-in congratulations, Allan continued not to process how much the Hollywood establishment despised his Oscar telecast. At Mortons, many fellow diners turned away from the Oscar producer’s table and actually extended their lunch hour, waiting for Allan to leave first. “When they got up, finally, they took the most indirect route to get by Allan. You could tell that he became aware of that,” says Osborne.