Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (33 page)

According to Bell, the composer “blushed” and proceeded not to answer his question. “
La Cage
isn’t [auto]biographical” is how Bell recorded Herman’s response in his
Village Voice
column a few days later.

But journalists have a way of telling only their side of the story. What Bell left out of his
La Cage aux folles
report was the full extent of Herman’s retort, which included the words “Do you think an author has to write about himself? Do you think I was Molly Picon in
Milk and Honey
?” he said of his first Broadway musical, from 1961. “Or do you think I know anything about how Dolly
Levi felt when she came down those stairs to return to the human race? You have to have an imagination, Arthur!”

Herman agreed wholeheartedly with Allan on the scourge from the
Village Voice
. “Arthur Bell was one of the classic cranky ‘queens’—that’s not a word I use often—who give homosexuals a bad name. I was never hiding what I was when I went to theater openings.”

A member of the militant gay group Act-Up, Bell positioned himself at the forefront of AIDS awareness in the New York press, and as the only openly gay person who wrote a weekly column in a widely circulated Gotham newspaper, he held sway over other homosexuals when it came to what they saw or didn’t see on Broadway. Bell gave
La Cage aux folles
a decidedly mixed review: “The show’s an old-fashioned formula musical which comes to vivid life during the drag production numbers. The first act has moments of high hilarity. The second act falls flat.”

Homosexual men created and produced
La Cage aux folles,
but that didn’t mean all of their brethren approved. “We were criticized in the gay press,” says Barry Brown. Arthur Laurents said he didn’t care what gay people thought of his show. “If we gave them the show they asked for, we would have closed in three weeks,” he offered. With a then-record advance of $4 million and first-day sales of nearly a quarter million,
La Cage
had no fear of running only three weeks.

Broadway audiences wanted romance and glamour. Gay activists demanded politics and protest. The latter’s response stung some members of the all-gay
La Cage
team, but Laurents took heart that the musical, in addition to being a mere entertainment, did change hearts and minds. A professor at New York University, Laurents taught theater, and after one class, a graduate student gave him the upbeat report: He had come out to his parents after taking them to see a performance of
La Cage aux folles
.

That was the good news. As for the other news,
La Cage aux folles
opened on Broadway just as the epidemic known as AIDS—it had been referred to only two years earlier as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency)—began to enter the public consciousness. On Broadway, a significant number of important creatives had already begun to die, and the disease’s presence even made its insidious way into the Palace Theater.

From the first rehearsals, Gene Barry was not popular with many in the company, who considered him “too Hollywood,” and to make matters even more precarious, his interviews with the press were patronizing, at best, when it came to the subject of playing a homosexual on stage. His standard lines were “People
never think you’re a murderer if you’re playing a murderer” and “I have nothing against homosexuals, but I have no part of their polemics.”

Allan didn’t take offense at such remarks, but Fierstein did. “Gene would say horrible things in the press,” he recalls. Those comments were endured by gay members of the cast and crew, but not tolerated was Barry’s backstage behavior, especially when the chorus boys noticed that he actively shunned them. As they explained it to Fierstein, “Gene Barry won’t ride in the elevator with us because he’s afraid of catching AIDS.”

It was the truth. John Weiner, who played Barry’s son in the show, listened repeatedly as the star expressed his fear of being infected with the AIDS virus. One night, in the wings of the Palace Theater, shortly before their entrance, Weiner put it to Barry in blunt terms: “Gene, you really have nothing to worry about. You’re not going to catch AIDS unless you’re bending over and take it up the ass.”

“OK. OK,” said Barry.

As the show’s publicist, Shirley Herz felt that Barry’s concern went beyond the disease. “He kept asking me if people would think he was a homosexual because he was in
La Cage aux folles
,” says Herz. The publicist kept telling him, “Not if you aren’t.”

Allan fiercely obeyed Laurents’s edict that he never speak to the cast about any problem. Which left it to Fierstein to confront Barry, albeit in a roundabout way: “I went to Gene’s wife, Betty, and told her, ‘This has to stop.’”

And it did. Betty talked to her husband and Barry started riding the elevator with the Cagelles, whether he liked them or not.

In some respects, the Gene Barry problem should have been handled by Allan, not Fierstein. Allan, however, was not a favorite among the chorus boys, more than a few of whom found him arrogant. Allan showed respect to the principal actors but often mistreated the chorus members, whom he considered on the level of assistants, secretaries, gofers. At one party for the show, John Weiner stood at the bar with a Cagelle. “And after Allan congratulated me on my performance, he completely ignored this other actor, who was quite upset by the slight,” says Weiner.

Even a misanthrope like Arthur Laurents noted Allan’s dark side. “He could say cutting things and behave badly,” he recalls. “But Allan didn’t mean to be a killer. Rather, he was filled with self-loathing, because of his weight, I think.”

Gene Barry’s “problem” with
La Cage aux folles
was not entirely without basis. The show had a definite “vibe,” as cast member Mark Waldrop recalls.
“We all knew Allan had a wild party reputation,” he says. “There was a great atmosphere around the show: It was a gay show and there were these gay men in charge of it. There was a sort of an early 1980s charge of sexuality surrounding the show, with the older men choosing up among the younger men. That was the impression.”

Whether that bonhomie among cast, creatives, and producers qualified as a bad thing or not depended on how one looked at it. As Jon Wilner describes the scene backstage at
La Cage,
“It was incestuous. Everyone was sleeping with the Cagelles. Everyone had a Cagelle. It was a great time.”

When the party ended in the Pan Am lobby, Allan moved it to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, where his update of
Where the Boys Are
continued to film. “There were always plenty of Hollywood-style good-looking guys who were being interviewed and then stuck in the background of the film,” says Howard McGillin.

The film’s party quotient hit its greatest density when, in one scene, a flotilla of motor boats, yachts, sailboats, Jet Skiers, and two parachutists literally crash (one boat leaves the water to beach itself in the front lawn) a private gathering hosted by a rich kid, a character evocatively named Camden Roxbury (Daniel McDonald), and his mother (Louise Sorel). The movie never reveals how these spring-break students, who couldn’t afford decent hotel rooms, lucked into owning, renting, or even hijacking such expensive watercraft. Not that Allan didn’t consider the expense.

It sent him into a phone-calling frenzy when one manufacturer wouldn’t provide the Jet Skis free of charge. “Are they crazy? They’ll see Kawasaki all over the movie!” he cried. When the sportsware company wouldn’t buy his pitch, Allan sought to apply pressure and ordered an assistant to start making phone calls. “Bo Derek’s father used to be a Kawasaki executive,” he began, “but let’s start with Bruce Jenner. I think he did a Kawasaki ad in Hawaii.”

When Bo and Bruce’s connections proved worthless, Allan took subtle revenge. “Make sure you tape out the name,” he said of the Kawasaki logo. “I ain’t giving away free publicity to people who aren’t nice.”

In what came to be known as the Jet Skis scene, Russell Todd plays the fire-brand leader, who, in addition to leading the rowdy rebels à la George Washington across the canals of Boca Raton, rescues Lisa Hartman from a no-good rich boy and a fate worse than warm Dom Perignon. Filmed at the end of summer, the scene was “chaos,” says Todd, “and I was wearing this really heavy, itchy sweater. It was hotter than hell, at least 110 degrees.”

McGillin had never experienced anything like it before—or since. “There were cranes everywhere,” he recalls. “There was even an airplane involved in the shooting.” For the most part, Hy Averback, the sixty-two-year-old director, took a backseat, having found himself a piece of shade under a big magnolia tree.

With the opening of
La Cage
out of the way, not to mention Arthur Laurents, Allan relished being at the helm of a big production that he got to direct. From the balcony of a rented Boca Raton mansion, Allan led the charge as he yelled through a bullhorn, “OK, start your engines. Let’s rip! Action!”

By walkie-talkie, he cautioned Russell Todd. “Don’t fall off the boat!” he cried. “I don’t want to lose you.”

The thought did enter Todd’s mind: Dozens of motorboats crisscrossed the canal, making the water choppier than the open seas, and while there were no boating accidents, “One parachutist did miss his mark, and ended up in the bushes instead of on the ground,” says Todd. “It was a mass assault coming in at all directions and angles.”

Amidst the not so carefully organized chaos, Allan positioned himself high on a balcony or crane. Whatever his perch, he could be heard yelling, “Boys, take your shirts off!”

The film was replete with fantastically proportioned young men and women in Speedos and bikinis. “
That
made sense,” says McGillin. “But what no one could figure out were some of the other extras.” Many of them looked vaguely familiar, and, in fact, bore uncanny resemblances to Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. “Allan liked celebrities at his parties,” McGillin surmises. “There was this need he had to surround himself with celebrities. Even if he couldn’t have the real thing, he’d get the look-alikes. And up there on the balcony was Allan, perhaps a little chemically borne, yelling, ‘More boys around the pool!’”

Farther back under the magnolia tree sat Averback, fanning himself with the script. “I just remember thinking, I feel so sorry for him,” says McGillin. On calmer days, the director enjoyed kicking back with the young actors and recalling
his early days in television when he acted in
Dragnet
and
I Love Lucy
and, later, directed episodes of
The Beverly Hillbillies
. It puzzled some cast members why a man his age had been hired to direct a teen beach comedy. But then no director could have competed with a hands-on producer like Allan, who knew exactly what he wanted, especially for the big party that capped the Boca Raton scene.

He had handpicked the mansion, owned by an Australian industrialist who now grew oranges in Florida, and in Allan’s opinion, it was a “wet dream of a house.” The house inspired him to think big and he wanted that personal vision recorded so that it would end up in the film. “I want a couple screwing under the stairway,” Allan told a note-taking assistant. “I want some girl with big tits lying on the staircase, drunk, saying, ‘Does anyone wanna take me upstairs?’ I want four tits looking out those bay windows behind the wet bar and two tits over by the fireplace and two more on the couch. I want a girl with big tits being pushed around on a serving cart like she was an hors d’oeuvre. I want another girl coming around with franks on a skewer, saying, ‘You want my dogs?’ In other words, in this scene more is not enough.”

Allan took a breath, then turned to the esteemed owner of the house. “And now I want to go swimming,” he said. “It’s a fabulous pool.”

When
Where the Boys Are
wrapped, Allan busied himself with dreams that
La Cage aux folles
would win the Grammy for best cast album against such formidable competition as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats
. Allan gave much thought to which song should be performed on the telecast, and instead of choosing one of the more innocuous numbers, Allan insisted that actor Walter Charles (subbing for George Hearn, who didn’t want to fly to Los Angeles during the show’s run) deliver the Act I curtain dropper, the gay anthem “I Am What I Am.” It’s a defiant, almost militant, song, and standing on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium, Charles delivered it in full drag, tearing off his female wig at the song’s angry conclusion.

Fierstein liked Allan’s determination to show some political defiance on network TV. “But out of context the song makes no sense for an audience that doesn’t know the show,” he says. “The audience was going ‘Why that? Wha’s that?’”

When it came time to announce the winner, Allan braced himself, ready to take the stage. “And the Grammy goes to . . .
Cats
!”

Cats. La Cage aux folles.
The two titles don’t sound alike, but to Allan’s ears on that particular night, after too much Cristal and cocaine,
Cats
came out sounding exactly like the title of his show. Excited, overjoyed, his adrenalin
pumping, Allan rose in his seat to accept the Grammy. What he didn’t immediately realize was that friends were begging him to sit down.

Suddenly, as if crossing a busy street on a green light only to see red midway, Allan crumpled back into his seat and began sweating through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s acceptance speech. He waited for a commercial break so he could hightail it back home to Hilhaven Lodge.

There was more ignominy to come. Rather than rescue his reputation in Hollywood,
Where the Boys Are ’84
sank it completely, preceded as it was by
Can’t Stop the Music
in 1980 and
Grease 2
in 1982. At least,
Boys
disappeared before anyone noticed it had opened. Only the party at Studio 54, with its re-creation of Fort Lauderdale and three tons of real sand, lingered in anyone’s memory. “The parties were always great,” says publicist Kathy Berlin. “Only the movies stank.”