Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (44 page)

People read the dreadful reviews and spent that morning gossiping about how bad the telecast had been. The buzz spiraled from bad to godawful, and soon wound its way down to fiasco. “Then it became this megadisaster,” says Osborne, “so that by the time Allan got to Mortons, the Oscars were considered enough of a disaster that no one wanted to talk to Allan Carr. I hadn’t previously seen that so dramatically displayed by so many people in Hollywood as that day at Mortons—like they’d catch something, like it was a disease.”

That evening, Steve and Jo Silver made what they felt was a difficult but obligatory trip to Allan’s house. Days earlier, Silver had ordered a crystal-star sculpture from Tiffany’s, and engraved it with the words, “You are the Star!” But when he and his wife knocked on the front door of Hilhaven Lodge, an assistant answered to tell them, “Allan is not home.” The young man instinctively reached for the gift-wrapped package.

Silver resisted, saying, “No, I just want to set it down. I know where I’d like Allan to find his present.” He sensed that Allan was home that evening, and after a few minutes of investigation, Silver found him in the basement, a drink in hand in the Bella Darvi Bar. Allan was alone, drunk, depressed.

The three of them hugged. “I just want to give you this gift,” said Silver. “It has been a very special experience for me.” Hearing those few words, Allan began to sob.

There were more phone calls from Disney executives to Richard Kahn. He, in turn, consulted the Academy lawyers. But when Frank Wells demanded a public apology, Kahn felt he stood on solid enough ground to refuse that order.
If Kahn had capitulated, “We would have considered the matter ended,” said Wells.

The matter didn’t end there. Before the end of Thursday’s business day, the Walt Disney Company slapped the Academy with a federal lawsuit charging that the Oscar telecast of March 29, 1989, had abused and irreparably damaged the studio’s fifty-two-year-old Snow White character. It asked for unspecified damages for “copyright infringement, unfair competition, and dilution of business reputation.”

Together with Kahn, ABC’s John Hamlin found himself broadsided by Disney, having assumed there would be no problem. As he told the
Wall Street Journal,
“I had always surmised Disney would be very pleased. Disney loves promotion of Disney characters.”

Many other members of the press were also working the phones, asking Disney about the Snow White brouhaha. “It wasn’t the songs so much, it was her singing,” a company spokesman told them. Several Disney employees had remarked, “Snow White sounded like a Martian.”

More inquiring minds wanted to know why the studio hadn’t also objected to Robin Williams, who donned big mouse ears and made unflattering remarks about Michael Eisner on the Oscar telecast. The spokesman replied that the Williams’s ears were not an exact replica of Mr. Mickey Mouse’s.

While the comedian got a pass,
Beach Blanket Babylon
in San Francisco did not. The Disney lawyers checked on whether any copyright impropriety had been committed up north, and soon learned that the show axed its Snow White character four years earlier.

Stung by news of the lawsuit, Allan went into spin overdrive, and called every friend he knew in the press. He told
Variety
’s Army Archerd that Ronald Reagan had phoned him personally to congratulate him on the show, and that the president was especially impressed by the opening Cocoanut Grove number. “I used to go there,” said Reagan. Or so Allan said he said.

Phoning the
Hollywood Reporter
’s Martin Grove, Allan pointed out that “it was the highest-rated Oscar show in five years. The interesting thing is that the ratings went up as the evening went along as opposed to dropping off, which shows people loved the show.” The ratings in England and Australia were the best ever for the Oscars. “This will be great for business!” he exclaimed, referring to the telecast’s impact on international ticket sales. In England,
Rain Man
was only in its third week,
Dangerous Liaisons
had just opened there. And did Grove know that there was a line that Bruce Vilanch had written for Anne
Archer when she introduced
Dangerous Liaisons
as one of the five nominated pictures? “She called it ‘
The Fatal Attraction
of another era,’” Allan pointed out. “That line is being used by the video company that’s releasing
Liaisons
as their [ad] tagline!” It didn’t seem possible, Allan told Grove, but he had received so many congratulatory flowers, telegrams, and bottles of champagne at Hilhaven that “I’ve had to put a secretary on just to answer the mail. You know when that happens you’ve touched the town.”

Hollywood was, in fact, so affected that the
Los Angeles Times
’s top film reviewer-reporter, Charles Champlin, wanted to meet with Allan to talk about the show—in person on Friday. Allan looked forward to the interview to clear his reputation. Champlin owed him: Shortly before
La Cage aux folles
opened in Boston, he’d set up a big student confab for the journalist at Harvard. Allan knew he could count on Champlin to help get out his version of events.

Allan decided to go casual for the
Los Angeles Times
interview, and donning yet another caftan, he flicked off his slippers and mixed himself a vodka and grapefruit juice. He was barefoot and nonchalantly sipping the drink when Champlin came to the door. “Chuck!” he exclaimed, as if the reporter were paying an impromptu visit. Allan made sure that flowers filled the living room, and he remarked, “It resembles a flower shop or a gangster’s funeral.” It was a line that Champlin later noted in his newspaper report.

“There were more flowers,” Allan pointed out, “but I’ve already had most of them shipped to a children’s hospital.” Allan read aloud a handwritten note from a dear friend: “You delivered. Jennifer Jones.” There was another letter from the American Film Institute’s Jean Firstenberg: “You put the show back in show business.” And it meant so much to Allan that his friend at CAA Michael Ovitz took the time to write, “You brought show business back to the movie business.” Ovitz had reason to celebrate regardless of the telecast: The agency’s big film,
Rain Man,
had won the top Oscar. “And Candy Bergen called to say how angry she was about the reviews,” Allan told Champlin. “Janet Leigh had also called to say how much she disagreed with the reviews.”

Allan stopped himself. It was bad form to dwell on the negative when a reporter had his tape recorder going. “And I suppose you’ve heard,” he said. “Ronald Reagan called to say he how much he liked the Cocoanut Grove number.”

Champlin smiled and nodded. He’d read that in Army Archerd’s
Variety
column. Allan grimaced. He should have known better. That bit of news was a minor coup for Archerd, and reporters, who lived from item to item, hated it
when they’d been scooped. Allan’s mind raced. If only he could give Champlin some news on the level of the Reagan story. He’d hoped by now that he could announce that, yes, the Academy wanted him back to produce next year’s telecast. But while he’d spoken to Richard Kahn about the Disney lawsuit and Gregory Peck’s complaints, the Academy president never mentioned anything about the 1990 telecast. Then again, Kahn was retiring from the Academy at the end of July. Lame ducks don’t have any power, Allan kept telling himself.

In the end, the only thing Allan could offer Champlin in the way of a first-rate story was his very veiled assumption that there was something homophobic about certain people’s condemnation of the telecast. He repeated what Ronald Reagan and Jennifer Jones and Janet Leigh said about his Oscars. But he firmly believed, “If it came from Lincoln Center and not San Francisco . . . ,” San Francisco, by way of Steve Silver, being the buzzword for “gay,” the reaction would have been uniformly positive.

While Allan looked for scapegoats, he was not alone in believing that the “gay thing” contributed to the brouhaha. “I always thought it was
that,
” says Dozoretz.

“I felt there was a surge of homophobia,” says producer Craig Zadan. “But Allan played into that. He never attempted to tone it down. He embraced all of that extravagance. Everything was flamboyant and he liked to shock people.”

“The fact of Allan’s being gay helped fuel in people’s minds the anger and the recrimination,” says ABC’s John Hamlin.

“So what if Allan was gay?” says Fred Hayman. “I have never seen anything so outrageous as the way Hollywood reacted against that show. It was vicious and uncalled for, and they destroyed Allan.”

After Allan Carr and Steve Silver, Bruce Vilanch comprised the third big gay component of the 1989 Oscar telecast. He put another wrinkle on the disaster. “Allan had said it was going to be the biggest and best for so long,” says Vilanch. “Everyone who’d produced the show before, or knew someone who had done it before, took umbrage.”

Then there was the telecast itself. “People didn’t hate it because Allan was gay,” says David Geffen. “It was a terrible show.”

Allan’s upbeat words defending himself appeared in the
Los Angeles Times, Variety,
and the
Hollywood Reporter,
but were, in the end, a mere bandage over a deepening, infected wound.

One week after the Oscars, Richard Kahn relented, on the advice of counsel, and issued a statement. It read, “The Academy sincerely apologizes to Disney
for the unauthorized use of Disney’s copyrighted Snow White character and for unintentionally creating the impression that Disney had participated in or sanctioned the opening production number on the Academy Awards telecast.”

As part of the agreement, Disney dropped its federal suit on the condition that the Academy never “reuse the segment” with Snow White or “use Disney’s Snow White character in the future without Disney’s permission.”

Allan could deal with the Disney lawsuit, especially now that it had so conveniently disappeared. But April 7 brought new trouble. If Peter Guber surmised that the younger generation applauded Allan’s Oscarcast as a “breath of fresh air,” they were clearly not the ones in control of the Academy. No sooner did Kahn clear up the House of Mouse mess than another problem materialized in the form of a letter signed by seventeen of the most prominent (read: “older generation”) figures in the Hollywood film community. It began:

The letter was signed by Julie Andrews, David Brown, Stanley Donen, Blake Edwards, John Foreman, William Friedkin, Larry Gelbart, Sidney Lumet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Paul Newman, Alan J. Pakula, Gregory Peck, Martin Ritt, Mark Rydell, Peter Stone, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann.

Kahn publicly responded to the comments of the Hollywood 17, as they were soon dubbed, with an upbeat remark: “We’re delighted to receive them, although I certainly don’t agree with them.” Kahn went on to give Allan his support, but in effect, he did acknowledge that his chosen producer was a novice when it came to putting on the Oscars. “Allan’s next show, whenever that might be, will be a lot better than the first one,” Kahn wrote.

Kahn failed to state outright whether Allan would be invited back—the president was retiring from the Academy on July 31—but the news couldn’t have been clearer: Allan Carr would not be producing the Oscars next year or ever again.

Kahn launched his own little private investigation into the Hollywood 17, and in his opinion, “the ringleader, the guy who put that letter out, was Blake
Edwards,” says Kahn. “He got a lot of those people to sign it.” Weeks later, Kahn ran into a producer who attached his name to the letter, and he asked him, “Were you really that unhappy about the show?”

“No” came the reply, “but Blake asked me to sign it.”

That fact was not expressed publicly nor was it ever made known to Allan Carr, who took the brunt of the abuse. “People who were friends of Allan showed up on that letter,” says Kahn, “and those comments really hurt him. I really think that Allan’s declining health in the years following that show are in part attributable to the hurt he felt from some of those people he regarded as friends.”

Allan considered them friends because they came to his parties, but many people partied at Hilhaven not because they were his friends but because Allan Carr had become “such a visible Hollywood celebrity,” says Gary Pudney. There were also people who came to his parties, overindulged themselves, and then had reason to fear Allan. “They were afraid of his outrageousness. Then, like a pack of hyenas, no one came to his parties after the Oscars. The great thing he wanted in his life was that job, and he got the job and then would spend the rest of his life trying to recover from it. He fell ill,” says the ABC executive.

Over the following days, the Oscar loathing spread, and it wasn’t only those people who’d drunk Allan’s Cristal and eaten his crab legs and snorted cocaine in his basement disco. On April 9, the
Los Angeles Times
devoted its entire letters section to Oscar hate mail and titled it “For Some, the Oscar Show Was One Big Carr Crash.” It was official: Ten out of ten letter writers in the
Times
despised the show. Then, almost one month to the day after the 61st annual Academy Awards, Lucille Ball passed away on April 26. The prevailing joke in Hollywood was that the Oscar telecast had killed her.

By the end of April, while most people in Hollywood had already forgotten that
Rain Man
won the top Oscar, the public indignities continued unabated for Allan. On April 28, Kahn announced that the Academy would form an Oscar telecast committee to “figure out why and what we should do in the future. . . . Certain factors this year did involve a lot of comment pro and con.” Gilbert Cates, former president of the Directors Guild of America, was named as committee chairman, and would head up the Awards Presentation Review Committee. A most generous individual, Cates took no potshots at Allan in the press, and publicly presented himself as a thoroughly bemused figurehead. “As soon as my name was mentioned as chairman, people started calling saying they loved the show or hated it. It really is a lightning rod of opinion,” he told
Variety
.