Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (8 page)

“Yes, we’ll go to Mexico,” said the second convict, who, along with his partner in crime, repeated this exchange a couple hundred times in the next two hours.

More actor-cops appeared with a list of names that read PRISONERS at the top of the page. “Move them on to booking,” an officer ordered as he motioned to the elevator that took all guests to the jail’s second floor. There, they were fingerprinted, frisked, and had their mug shots taken.

Once they were checked through the security gates, guests could then wander about the cells, which had been deodorized and gussied up for the night. Instead of the expected sweat and urine, the aroma that hit them was of high-end fish food that Allan had flown in from the Gulf Coast and northern California. Lobster, salmon, and Chilean sea bass overflowed from several New Orleans carts parked among dozens of small cocktail tables, each of which had been appointed with votive candles, crystal and silver, and brown linen tablecloths.

At the last minute, amidst the early arrival of a few unfashionable guests, Allan took a final survey of the place, and freaked. “There are no ashtrays!” he screeched. “They’ll mutiny!” Allan followed his initial mortification with four-letter tirades that sent several gofers scurrying to rectify the egregious omission. Allan’s verbal abuse sometimes shocked his childhood friend Joanne Cimbalo. “If he talked to me the way he talked to his assistants, I would have collapsed on the spot,” she says. Whenever Cimbalo repeated her criticism to Allan, he invariably shot back, “I’m the only one who should be collapsing!”

On the occasion of his jailhouse party, Allan turned his impromptu tantrum on all the cops, inmates, and lady wardens who milled about, courtesy of a costume-catering company called the Doo Dah Gang. “Do something!” he yelled.

Nothing about this event had been easy. Allan continued to bask in the accolades for his
Tommy
subway party, but for that event, he relied heavily on the resources of Columbia Pictures. Now he was party giving on his own largesse and muscle.

“I have a headache from all the red tape,” Allan cried, referring to what the city’s Economic Development Office put him through to rent the jail for the
night. “Actually, the week,” he added. “It took a few days to turn this place into something other than a pig sty, which it was.”

Dominick Dunne praised the clean-up crew. “The bathrooms were fit,” he recalled. “That’s where everyone was piling in for the coke.”

When they weren’t imbibing, Allan’s guests made more practical use of the toilets. Since many of the prison johns were in the open, Allan splurged on some strategically hung burlap curtains, and it tickled him when he found Charles Bronson standing guard for Jill Ireland. “He didn’t want anyone peeking at his wife!” Allan said with a giggle.

Marvin Hamlisch knew and appreciated Allan’s split personality. “If you needed a deal, bring in Allan No. 1. If you wanted a wild party with lots of cocaine, bring in Allan No. 2.” Tonight belonged to Allan No. 2, but Allan No. 1 never disappeared completely since he knew when it was important to introduce his clients to someone more important, especially if that VIP had snorted too much coke.

The jailhouse theme came courtesy of the evening’s guest of honor and his most famous book,
In Cold Blood
. Truman Capote had recently escaped New York City to accept his first acting gig, in the Neil Simon movie
Murder by Death
at Columbia Pictures. Back on the East Coast, Capote enjoyed leper status after spilling a bunch of society beans in
Esquire
magazine about Babe Paley and other members of the Park Avenue world. An early look at one of the chapters, “La Cote Basque 1965,” from his long-awaited but never-delivered novel,
Answered Prayers,
had won him no praise among the literary set and lost him entrée to the Beautiful People, as they were known. One of them, Mrs. William Woodward Jr., found herself so unraveled by “La Cote Basque” that she committed suicide on October 10, seven days before the offending
Esquire
issue hit the stands. In a rare gesture of discretion, Capote resorted to using a pseudonym, Ann Hopkins, for Woodward, whom the 13,000-word short story accused of tricking Mr. Woodward into marriage and then murdering him “after he got the goods on her and threatened divorce,” as gossip doyenne Liz Smith revealed in her syndicated column. Other society types who were maligned without the benefit of pseudonyms included the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Margaret, Gloria Vanderbilt, Babe Paley, Mrs. Joshua Logan, and the late Joe Kennedy.

Capote may have been considered infamously outré on his home turf, but on the night of December 14 in the old Lincoln Heights Jail, he remained a literary genius with people who read Liz Smith but not
Esquire
or
In Cold Blood
.
It didn’t matter. Allan knew that the L.A. crowd had seen the movie version of his best seller, and besides, who among them were starring in a Neil Simon movie?

“This isn’t one of those ‘come to a party’ parties,” Allan claimed. Translation: Allan demanded that his guests dress up, play a role, act like
somebody
. To goose things along, Allan occasionally called out to let the “prisoners” know who had just arrived to have his or her photograph taken. “Peter Sellers is being mugged with the dog Won Ton Ton! Go and watch!” he brayed.

For those who had already watched Lucille Ball and Charles Bronson and David Niven and Christopher Isherwood and Princess Toumanoff and Diana Ross and Francesco Scavullo and Margaux Hemingway being mug-shot, the Doo Dah Gang’s boys and girls conducted tours of the nearby gas chamber as the Linc, a five-piece chamber music group, played old favorites like “Jailhouse Rock” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song.”

“I always knew I’d end up in jail,” said
Midnight Cowboy
director John Schlesinger.

“I bet I’m the only one who’s been here legitimately—500 times,” cracked
The Onion Field
author Joseph Wambaugh, a former cop.

At last, Truman Capote himself stepped out of the prison elevator wearing overly tinted specs and a gangster-ish mix of big-brimmed black Borsalino, double-breasted tuxedo, and what he called “my Brazilian dancing shoes,” which sported red leather and rubber soles. Allan’s
Hollywood Reporter
friend Richard Hach played chauffeur for the night, and picked up Capote at his Malibu rental (the writer had recently bolted Mrs. Johnny Carson’s place in Beverly Hills) to bring him across town to the jail. “I was an old friend of Truman’s and Allan wanted to know Truman,” says Hach, identifying the raison d’être for many Allan Carr get-togethers.

Capote tried to downplay his expulsion from New York City. “Oh, I just thought it would be fun to do something different,” he said of starring in
Murder by Death.
Like Allan’s jailhouse party, the movie played off Capote’s sleuth status, care of
In Cold Blood,
and cast him as an eccentric millionaire who invites five detectives to his house to solve a murder. “I probably won’t act again. It was just for a change from working on the book, and I knew I didn’t have time to take a vacation.”

If anyone asked about his “La Cote Basque 1965” contretemps, he told them not to worry. “Carole Matthau and Gloria Vanderbilt absolutely loved it,” he said without apologies. It was but a warm-up for what he would soon tell Liz Smith:
“Why, if anybody was ever at the center of that world, it was me, so who is rejecting whom in this? I mean I can create any kind of social world I want, anywhere I want.” Anywhere, that is, but Los Angeles. As Capote told Allan’s guests, Los Angeles was “the no place of everywhere” and he could never live there. “In New York City,” he said, “I can get a bowl of onion soup at 4 a.m. I can get my tux cleaned at 4 a.m. and I can enjoy the sexual favors of a policeman at 4 a.m.”

At 10 p.m. in L.A., Capote could do better than onion soup, but when he looked at all the raw seafood in a nearby cart, he nearly passed out. “I’m ordering rice and beans. I’m having jailhouse food,” he said, and instead ate nothing. The hurly-burly of Allan’s party left its guest of honor strangely unnerved, and he soon retreated to one of the cramped eight-by-ten-foot cells with sink and exposed toilet. Capote left it to the 500 other guests to dance and eat and smoke dope in the common area. Dominick Dunne wandered into another cell and for a moment his gaze met Capote’s. “There was such sadness in Truman’s eyes,” Dunne recalled. “He never recovered from that snub of Mrs. Paley’s. This was not his new milieu—Hollywood, and it wasn’t up to what he was used to in New York.”

Worse, the new and older Capote wasn’t anything like the old and younger Capote. “It could have been fun if Truman had been Truman, but he was subdued that night. He wasn’t fun,” says Joseph Wambaugh, who’d been a friend ever since Capote slipped Mrs. Wambaugh a mickey one night so that “Truman could be alone with my cute cop husband,” as she put it. In addition to Capote being in a funk, it also put a crimp in Wambaugh’s evening when one movie actress got smashingly drunk and, turning bitchy, kept berating the Doo Dah Gang’s attempts to impersonate cops, inmates, and guards.

As with any party, the guest of honor is merely an excuse for the revels, especially those that involve heaps of drugs and the incongruous sight of famous people in evening dress in a decaying jailhouse. It didn’t really matter if Truman was the life of the party or stuck away in a cell or asleep in Malibu in his rented bed. He was, in the end, just another celebrity. “Allan had two kinds of friends at his parties,” says publicist David Steinberg. “He had famous people and he had more famous people.” But this being Los Angeles, Allan couldn’t invite the kind of society people who truly impressed Capote. Betsy Bloomingdale? Dorothy Chandler? Capote wouldn’t know them if he stumbled over them.

The
Los Angeles Times
’s society writer Jody Jacobs called it “the party of the year” and likened it to Capote’s own Black and White Ball from 1966 in New York.

But not everyone was so impressed. Christopher Isherwood’s longtime partner, painter Don Bachardy, complained, “It was one of those occasions that was thought to be very wry, but when it came down to the actual night, it was very tedious. The jail cast a pall over everything.” But not all was lost for Isherwood’s lover. “I met Diana Ross that night. She looked like a real star, very glamorous,” Bachardy notes.

“The joke of the jailhouse party was who had been there before,” says Bruce Vilanch, who, in the end, took a position somewhere between Jacobs’s rave and Bachardy’s pan: “It was campy and silly and theatrical and what people liked in that period of time.”

Even Allan had to admit that his Jail House Party wasn’t as “spectacular” as Capote’s Black and White Ball. “But it was probably more inventive, since we had to take an abandoned jail . . . and refurbish it,” he said. Whatever anyone else thought, the event got Allan precisely want he wanted—lots of press—and something that he needed even more. Quite by accident, the party turned him back into a movie producer. And a successful one at that. He would soon be a multimillionaire at long last—and just in time.

Having invited John Schlesinger to his Truman Capote Jail House Party, Allan scored with that gesture by promptly receiving a dinner invitation from the British director. As usual at such Hollywood affairs, the conversation quickly devolved into the subject of everyone’s ongoing projects, real or imagined, and when Allan asked the Oscar-winning helmer of
Midnight Cowboy
about his next film, Schlesinger casually mentioned that he wanted to bring the best-selling book
Alive!
to the screen.

Allan wanted to know: Was this the story about the rugby players whose plane crashed in the Andes and they ended up eating each other to stay alive?

Schlesinger nodded. “Yes, that story. But you know, there’s a Mexico cheapo version that is already out in theaters there.”

That simple exchange was Allan’s good fortune and Schlesinger’s big mistake.

In the coming months, Allan planned to visit Mexico City to open
Tommy
there and take a much-needed vacation. After a successful launch in Western Europe, Robert Stigwood had set his sights on Mexico and South America, and needed his ace marketer to handle the new round of promotions. With Schlesinger’s
Alive!
rattling in the back of his head, Allan arrived in Mexico City to find the cheapo version playing at a theater near his hotel. He glanced at the marquee:
Supervivientes de los Andes.
Curiosity drew him closer. People stood in line praying; some clutched rosaries; a few were on their knees. The movie’s Spanish-language poster contained only one word that Allan knew, but it was the right word—“canibal”
—
and together with the visuals of goggled
young men caught in a blizzard, Allan felt a mild jolt in his gut. “Does anyone speak English?” he asked the sidewalk crowd. “What does . . .
supervivientes
mean?”

A woman on her knees looked up, her fingers braided with holy beads. “Survivors,” she said. “Survivors de los Andes.” Rather than drop to the sidewalk, Allan bought a ticket to see the movie, which left him both appalled and exhilarated. Later that night, he could hardly sleep as his mind raced to find a way to sell his idea to Stigwood. The next day he placed a phone call to his friend at the Robert Stigwood Organization, Freddie Gershon, who had recently been promoted to president of the company.

“Freddie, you’re not going to believe this,” Allan began. “I just saw a movie called
Supervivientes de los Andes
!”

“
Supervive
what?” asked Gershon.

“You know that John Schlesinger movie
Alive!
about these rugby players who resorted to cannibalism when their airplane crashed over the Andes in 1972?”

Gershon knew of the project, vaguely.

Allan informed his friend that Schlesinger was working on that same story, after he finished the Dustin Hoffman picture
The Marathon Man,
but that
Alive!
would never get made because they—Allan and Gershon—would beat him to it by acquiring this Mexican movie. Best of all, they could pick it up cheap. As Allan explained, Roman Catholics south of the border loved the story because, even though it was ghoulish, it was blessedly not immoral. The pope himself had declared the real-life rugby players not guilty of mortal sin since they restricted themselves to eating only dead meat. Allan believed that American moviegoers would eat it up too.