Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (6 page)

There were other hitches, too. Angry at Zarem for having recently departed their company, Warren Cowan and his partner, Henry Rogers, bad-mouthed the renegade publicist by labeling the party-in-a-subway concept as “dangerous.” But to no effect. “Stigwood was already sold on the idea,” says Zarem, and wasn’t about to cancel what he knew would be a publicity-grabbing event.

Stigwood made a huge donation to the Police Athletic League to help grease another New York City department, and from the time the premiere screening of
Tommy
ended at 8:30 p.m. until 9 p.m., the city’s finest made sure that all lanes of traffic on the Avenue of the Americas (aka Sixth Avenue) between 54th Street and 57th came to a halt as hundreds of invited guests traipsed from the Ziegfeld Theater to the subway, a red carpet protecting their high heels and patent-leather shoes from the street grime. One hundred cops on horseback also ensured their safety so that the hoi polloi wouldn’t disturb the first-nighters on their pilgrimage northward. Allan prayed for mild weather and got it on the night of March 18, 1975. Any cold wafts coming off Central Park failed to disturb the phalanx of formally attired partygoers, and even the occasional horse turd steaming in the gutter only added to the overall sense of displaced, antic fun.

“Everybody thought it was the greatest goof of all time,” says Gershon. “This was a crowd that ranged from the carriage trade society and the press mixing with rock stars and movie folk. But many of them had been to see the Cockettes and had gone to Andy Warhol’s Factory. Anything avant-garde was very de rigueur for them. And Allan tapped into all of that.”

Most relieved among the first-nighters was Peter Guber, whose head had been stewing in the
Tommy
pressure cooker for months. The dailies on the film confounded Begelman and Jaffe, who complained that Ken Russell’s bizarre visuals
didn’t add up to a conventional narrative. “I was having sphincter arrest for weeks before
Tommy
was released,” says Guber. Then he heard the opening-night ovation at the Ziegfeld. “I was so relieved, like I’d taken a giant Percodan.”

It was a happy audience that left the theater to make a three-block journey up Sixth Avenue and down one flight of newly cemented, not-yet-filth-encrusted steps into the subway mezzanine, where an eight-foot long
Tommy
sign fashioned from 3,000 cherry tomatoes, radishes, cauliflowers, and broccoli greeted them. When someone asked Allan why all the vegetables, he shot back, “Didn’t you see the movie?”

Guests expecting the usual garbage-urine odor inhaled instead the fresh construction smell mixed with the perfume of thousands of fresh-cut flowers. “Forty thousand dollars worth of flowers!” Allan announced.

The
Tommy
invitation requested “black tie or glitter funk,” and in the definitive words of
Women’s Wear Daily,
the subway that evening showcased every look from “terrific to terrible.”

Allan made sure that no one ate the vegetable signage by offering a buffet comprising 50 pounds of octopus flown in from the Bahamas, 600 oysters from Virginia, five 30-pound lobsters from Nova Scotia, a 20-pound king crab from Alaska, 100-pound rounds of roast beef from Omaha, and pastry fantasies ripped from Ken Russell’s own imagination as seen on the screen only minutes before. This was one of Allan’s more spectacular Hilhaven spreads. “But bigger!” he told New Yorkers.

Trains rumbled below, only occasionally drowning out the piped-in
Tommy
score, as those 700 guests fought over the 600 seats. It was a scene of such unbridled frenzy that Elton John, lightly dusted with black sequins, remarked, “I’ve never been so frightened in my life!”

Allan reveled in bringing the press together with the movie stars, the rockers, and Manhattan’s Old Guard. New to his mix were the drag queens. If Allan didn’t discover them at the
Tommy
party, he certainly learned to promote them there. “The party was almost a costume ball,” says
Tommy
publicist Kathy Berlin. “But leather weird.” Having just seen
The Rocky Horror Show
on Broadway, Allan proclaimed transvestites an absolute must for any opening other than a Gristedes. Some people disagreed. The odd amalgam of cross-dressers and society matrons unnerved no less a notable than Pete Townshend, who complained, “I just hope none of them turn up at any Who concerts.”

Tina Turner was no less indelicate. “We have a little bit of everybody here, and not everybody has soul,” she remarked only moments before taking her seat
in a roped-off section of the subway near a bugle-beaded Ann-Margret. Even though it wasn’t his movie—he merely promoted it—Allan broke protocol and lavished the film’s stars with gifts, and those trinkets included silver-plated hypodermics (similar to what Tina Turner wields in the movie), which the singer promptly displayed to good photo-op use with her new friend Ann-Margret.

In this crowd, only Andy Warhol sank to the level of being totally, unashamedly star-struck. “I just wanted to see Ann-Margret,” he gushed.

Allan gambled that the paparazzi would go wild, shooting Prince Egon von Furstenberg, bauble maker Elsa Peretti, senator’s wife Marion Javits, and Revlon’s Henry Kuryla as they danced the night away in front of a bank of token booths. Where else in the world could photographers land a shot of Anjelica Huston and her date, Halston, passing through a turnstile to get to the champagne bar? On what other planet could photographer Ara Gallant scout the subway tracks for errant rats with supermodels Appolonia and Maxime de La Falaise looking on? And was it true that fashionistas Jackie Rogers and Stephen Burrows actually threw their emptied clams on the half shell onto those same tracks?

Around midnight, Allan personally thanked the cops by inviting them off the street and into the subway for a little food and drink. Over a hundred of them had been stationed above ground to keep the crowd of club kids, bums, and late-night dog walkers in their place. As the men in blue descended, people who had never been in a subway before felt the urge to ascend. Returning to street level, many of them had a whole new attitude about life down under. “I love this idea of music in the subways,” said Maxime de La Falaise. “I just talked to a policeman for about a half hour and I told him he should suggest to his bosses that there be music piped into the subway system. All those people would be too busy dancing and listening to the music to even think about mugging anyone.”

At around two in the morning, Allan’s biggest party to date wound up, and he enjoyed a good laugh as the police force walked off with the centerpieces, a souvenir for their respective wives and kids in the Bronx.

The stars and socialites had left long ago, and as was their custom, the glitter gays and the drag queens were the last to fold up tent that night in the subway. One young partygoer lamented, “It’s not easy being gay. Not today, the way everyone is trying to get in on the act. Just look at this crowd. They’re so thrilled by all their pretended decadence.”

Actually, those words were spoken 3,000 miles to the west seventy-two hours later when Allan moved his
Tommy
party to West Hollywood’s gay disco Studio One, where reporter Gregg Kilday from the
Los Angeles Times
uncovered “a
tribe of bearded men dressed as leather-studded motorcycle women, another man in a cellophane jumpsuit, a female impersonator sashaying around in the character of Mae West,” not to mention Paul and Linda McCartney and David Frost, whom Allan had booked to host an In Concert special on the movie.

Although the scene was Studio One, the young gay’s comment could have been uttered in the New York subway as well. At night, Manhattan’s 10 percent dined in the homosexual demimonde of George Paul Rozell’s ubiquitous
Satyricon
parties only to traipse off the following Monday to nearby office buildings, where most of them pretended to be straight. During the week that
Tommy
opened,
Newsweek
published a story on New York’s disco world in which it revealed that “cross-sexual cavortings do not play to limited audiences these days. At Le Jardin, the likes of Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Lee Radziwill and Andy Warhol regularly turn up to turn on by joining in.” What
Newsweek
dared not reveal to its booboisie readership is that such out-there personalities as Capote and Warhol were gay. Only the year before did the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Gay bars and discos flourished at night, but the next morning’s newspaper, including the liberal
New York Times,
continued to run editorials advocating a don’t ask/don’t tell policy for homosexuals teaching in the public school system. It was a city where the annual Gay Pride parade, instead of being given a primo berth on Fifth Avenue, took up a mere two lanes of traffic on lowly Seventh Avenue.

Although hardly an activist—“Allan was totally apolitical,” says Roger Smith—he also never blew with the inhospitable 1970-80s winds that saw David Geffen dating Cher and Elton John marrying Renate Blauel. “Allan never had the ‘fiancée,’” says Joan Rivers. “He was always openly gay.”

“If Allan was seen with a woman, they were just hanging out,” says reporter Gregg Kilday. “He never presented the woman as his ‘date.’”

If journalists weren’t going to report on his sexual orientation, Allan saw no reason not to push the envelope, and he did that with the “glitter funk” (read: ambisexual attire) of his bicoastal
Tommy
parties.

What he could not have choreographed that March was the mixed company that
Tommy
kept. The movie opened within days of such passé turkeys as Peter Bogdanovich’s
At Long Last Love,
an homage to Cole Porter, which put a lid on Cybill Shepherd’s film career for at least a year, and Barbra Streisand’s lackluster follow-up to
Funny Girl,
the not so
Funny Lady
. In comparison, despite the film’s mixed reviews,
Tommy
emerged as the edgy new kid on the movie-musical block.

All endings must have a beginning, and in a way, Allan’s successful promotion of
Tommy
both established his working relationship with Stigwood and, just as effectively, signaled the beginning of its slow unraveling.

Lila Burkeman, a U.K.-based promoter, had known Allan since the mid- 1960s, when he arrived in London with Ann-Margret to see Laurence Olivier in
Othello
. Allan was so humongous at the time that he had to wedge himself into the theater seat in order to sit sideways. Burkeman also knew Stigwood and planned the
Tommy
party—on a gaggle of yachts—for its launch at the Cannes Film Festival, two months after the Gotham premiere.

“Allan Carr was a perfection creation of that whole 1970s hedonistic era,” she recalls. “And Stigwood had a marvelous ability to pick the right people to do things for him.” The two men could use each other because, in a way, they were near opposites. “Robert is a bit of a recluse, even though he entertained lavishly. He would fall asleep at some of his own dinners. Allan always took the spotlight.”

When the two men met, supersuccess was but a flicker in Allan’s eye, whereas Stigwood had already managed the Bee Gees and Cream and produced
Jesus Christ Superstar
onstage. Such an enormous difference in their status did not deter Allan, and somehow, despite Stigwood being its producer,
Tommy
quickly transmogrified into Allan’s movie in the eyes of the press and, hence, the world.

“Stigwood didn’t talk. It was easy for Allan to upstage him,” says Kathy Berlin.

And even more important, “Allan was synchronistic with the film,” says Peter Guber. Flamboyant, loud, visual, hysterical. The result was that Allan’s name appeared thirteen times in the
Los Angeles Times
’s coverage of the film’s premiere. Poor Stiggie. In the same article, the man who actually produced
Tommy
got to read the name Robert Stigwood only once.

After the subway
Tommy
party, all New York knew what L.A. had long known: Allan Carr was America’s premiere party giver, someone who glittered like gold and measured less than an inch in depth. But amidst his many sparkling, giddy events, Allan possessed a savvy business head that heretofore had gone unheralded. The perception of him as nothing more than Hollywood’s gayest gadfly was about to change.

His client Marvin Hamlisch had been working on a stage musical with choreographer Michael Bennett. Bennett had not yet solo-directed a show, although Broadway impresario Harold Prince did give him a codirector credit on the Stephen Sondheim musical
Follies
, in 1971. Like most geniuses, Bennett was a driven, determined talent who knew what he wanted. On
Follies
and the previous Sondheim musical,
Company,
which he choreographed, he never played the indebted novice, and he often clashed with the theater veterans around him—and won. At the time that Hamlisch entered his professional life, the thirty-one-year-old Bennett had already spent months at the Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, talking to Broadway dancers about their offstage lives and how they managed to keep their careers going before hanging up their leotards at age thirty or younger. Using those interviews as his guide book, Bennett looked to conceive a new theater piece that would meld song and dance to salute the unsung heroes of the stage musical: those so-called gypsies who travel from show to show on the Great White Way.

Despite his great success in Hollywood and Las Vegas, Hamlisch wanted nothing more than to write for the theater, and he’d already written three songs for Bennett’s show when its creator made a request that Hamlisch was not supposed to refuse.

“Michael wanted me to write another dance song,” Hamlisch recalls, “and I protested that we were getting away from the show, which was about the dancers, not dancing.”

That’s when Bennett did the unthinkable and fired Hamlisch. Bennett, his sizable ego switching into fifth gear, thought he didn’t have to kowtow to anyone, and that included a multi-Oscar-winner like Hamlisch. Dancers dance, and this musical was all about dancers. Besides, Bennett held an ace in the show’s lyricist, Ed Kleban, who was also a composer. Apparently, Bennett knew Kleban much better than Hamlisch did.