Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (37 page)

Goya
might have made it to Broadway, with or without Domingo, had it been handled properly. But at every turn, instead of being nurtured quietly in readings and workshops, the project developed an early, fatal case of Brobdingnagitis—first as a million-dollar concept album produced by Phil Ramone, and second as a Hollywood Bowl concert produced by Allan Carr.

Yeston believes that Allan had two goals in life, goals that were always at odds with each other. “He had a deep love of the material and the wonderful world of entertainment. He also had a personal goal to create a legend for himself, and if that second goal resulted in some bad or wild behavior, that was all to the good.” He saw himself in the constellation with the great flamboyant producers and impresarios like David Merrick and Mike Todd. “That was terribly important to this overweight, spoiled Jewish kid who wanted to make good on both coasts. It is a classic American tragedy, because everything Allan wanted to do he undermined by being too flamboyant.”

If
Goya
defined Allan Carr’s fate, his next project was the one to seal it.

Ready to give his joints a rest after climbing the Hollywood Bowl, Allan tried to prepare himself emotionally, as well as physically, for yet another trip to Cedars-Sinai, this time to replace his delinquent hip with a hunk of plastic. The operation had been scheduled for October 17 when, three days earlier, Allan received a phone call from the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Richard Kahn wanted to meet in person, and since Allan remained immobile in Beverly Hills, the Academy honcho agreed to come to his house on the hill. Kahn didn’t say much over the phone, but Allan suspected that he wanted him to work his magic on the Governor’s Ball that followed the Oscar telecast. Perhaps the “Broadway at the Bowl” gala sparked Kahn’s memory. Eleven years earlier, Allan had produced the post-Oscars ball, and it won him universal raves. Then again, in his short phone conversation, the Academy president never mentioned the Bowl event, and for good reason. “I didn’t go,” reports Kahn, who had other, more important things to talk over with Allan on that October morning.

Allan prided himself in being shockproof, but poolside at Hilhaven, Kahn offered him his ultimate dream: to produce the 1989 Oscars telecast. Short and much more than sweet, the meeting left Allan elated, and if he was momentarily speechless, he recovered himself enough a few hours later to tell the
Los Angeles Times,
“Dick came over to see me for fifteen minutes, and asked me.” Allan didn’t play coy with Kahn. He didn’t have to think about it. He accepted the
assignment on the spot with blunt delight. Like any other awards-show devotee, Allan had been mouthing his acceptance speech to himself every Oscar night since he listened to the 1940s radiocasts in his pj’s back in Highland Park. Now the night, if not the statue itself, would be his to control and, in essence, own. Allan grabbed the opportunity because he wanted it. He wanted to prove that he could still produce—if not a movie, then Hollywood’s biggest night. And more than he wanted it, he needed it.

At such defining moments in life, a man of Allan Carr’s unbridled enthusiasm never stops to recall the truism about the ill fortune that comes to those who get what they pray for. If he ever did stop to think, Allan would have said that such reservations were for losers. Here was a task he’d prepared for his entire life, even before he bestowed his beloved Poopsie Awards on undeserving no-talents at Lake Forest College. Not for a moment did Allan want Kahn to believe him when he said, “I can’t believe you picked me for the show. I never thought anyone would ask me to do it.” What he really thought was that someone should have asked him years ago, because Allan had talked about wanting to produce the Oscars ever since he took over the Academy’s Governor’s Ball in 1978.

“My wife still talks about it being the greatest of the Governor’s Balls,” Kahn told Allan. And it was the truth. The black-and-white décor that year transformed the tent in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion into an elegant Rainbow Room-style nightclub, complete with a revolving dance floor. The stunningly attired venue induced a number of celebrities to spend more than a few obligatory minutes there, as had been the custom for years. Allan even upped the gourmet level that year by having individual one-ounce containers of Petrossian caviar and chilled Stokskayvia vodka at each place setting. More important, he took the edge off the Oscar competition and delivered the coup of publicly congratulating each and every Oscar nominee, not just the winners. “It was a very generous touch,” says Kahn.

Regardless of his past association with the Academy, Allan Carr was a different, if not downright out-of-the-box, choice to produce the Oscars telecast. In previous years, Kahn played it safe, making his picks from the old establishment pool of Hollywood—men like
West Side Story
director Robert Wise and
Singin’ in the Rain
director Stanley Donen and producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., whose father practically invented the film industry. Allan was younger than any of those men, he was openly gay, and more significant, he wasn’t a buttoned-down guy like Goldwyn, Wise, or Donen.

“I picked Allan because he was a great showman,” Kahn says.

Unspoken was the fact that Allan didn’t have another gig at that moment in his career. Sherry Lansing explains why it’s so tough to pick an Oscar producer: “It’s sort of a thankless job, producing the Oscars. You don’t get paid and it takes up a lot of time,” says the former Paramount CEO.

With
Goya
a no-go and Allan’s hip under repair, the project seemed predestined. Or as Allan told Kahn, “This will be a nice thing to do in my recovery period, when I can’t climb the stairs that lead from my house.”

Allan and Kahn spoke for only fifteen minutes at their first meeting, but Allan knew precisely what to do with the 1989 Oscars. “I want to bring glamour back to the awards,” he told the Academy president. “Women watch the Oscar show to see what the women are wearing.” For Allan, it was an occasion for style to trump substance, as if the latter were ever in danger of rising phoenix-like at an awards show.

It’s doubtful if Goldwyn, Wise, or Donen thought of fashion as their first point of business, but then none of them was a five-foot-six 300-pound homosexual whose closet contained over 100 designer caftans and enough women’s jewelry to sink Cleopatra’s barge. Kahn wouldn’t have picked Allan Carr if he didn’t want to shake things up, and that included the ratings of the telecast, which had fallen over the years to an all-time low in 1988. Allan was, first and foremost, a showman, and like any great showman, he did what they all do when embarking on a major enterprise. He hired a personal publicist.

Linda Dozoretz had already worked with Allan on an ill-fated Lana Turner movie, based on the book
Detour,
by Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who had stabbed and killed the actress’s paramour Johnny Stompanato a few decades earlier. Even for a seasoned Hollywood flack like Dozoretz, Allan was an unusual client-producer. He didn’t ask her to drum up publicity. He told her
how
to drum up publicity.

“Allan would kick around these ideas about the Oscars and get excited like a little kid,” Dozoretz recalls. “Sometimes I was a sounding board.” Allan talked; the soft-spoken publicist listened. When she talked, he didn’t always listen: “Every one of his ideas, he thought it was the best thing ever.” Rather than disagree with him, Dozoretz simply let Allan’s weaker ideas die on the vine of his attention deficit.

Allan sought to goose the Oscar telecast’s ratings, and to that end he pushed what many considered his greatest Oscar innovation. “He wanted to stage an Oscar fashion show, which had never been done before,” says Kahn.

Allan’s second “hire” was the man they called “the father of Rodeo Drive.” Fred Hayman first met Allan shortly after he opened his store, Giorgio Beverly Hills, in 1961. “Rodeo Drive was primitive then,” says Hayman. “Allan used to come in to try on women’s caftans.” By 1988, when Allan approached the boutique owner to work on the Oscars, Hayman was so famous that he dropped the Giorgio moniker to make his store eponymous.

Prior to Allan’s involvement, the Academy Awards telecast kicked off with sixty seconds of red-carpet gawking, followed by a parade of actresses in gowns that ran the gamut from Armani to Beene to Mackie to sheer chutzpah. The following week,
People
and a few tabloids published the sartorial hits and misses, and that was the extent of Oscar fashion.

“But it doesn’t have to be,” Allan insisted. “This should be the world’s greatest fashion show.” Hayman, in Allan’s opinion, was the perfect fashion nexus because Hayman didn’t design clothes. He instead represented lots of designers and sold their dresses, and besides, “Fred Hayman’s is the best place to buy evening wear!” exclaimed Allan, never afraid of the definitive overstatement. “I want you to be the Oscar’s first fashion consultant,” he told Hayman.

In truth, people like costume designer Edith Head had served as de facto fashion consultants on the telecast over the years, but their obligations had less to do with style than censorship, and they often held court backstage, ready with pieces of lace and fabric to cover a too-exposed décolletage for the TV cameras. Allan didn’t want to wait until the big night to correct any fashion faux pas. He wanted Hayman to show actresses how to dress for the Oscars
before
the big night. “The fashions have gotten boring,” Allan said. “The concept of Hollywood is far from boring. It’s an illusion.”

Allan promised to extend the red-carpet section of the broadcast. “Let’s give it five, ten minutes!” he announced. Even more radical, he conceived a fashion show to be staged pre-Oscars, as part of a press conference that would unveil a “new and improved, more exciting and glamorous” Oscars to the world. “And show the women of Hollywood how to dress,” proclaimed the man who often dressed like a woman.

Having given Hayman his fashion dictate, Allan took up his third point of business and phoned an old friend in San Francisco. He’d been a big fan of
Beach Blanket Babylon
ever since director Steve Silver conceived the Frisco revue back in 1974. Silver wrote that original show with
Tales of the City
scribe Armistead Maupin, and while it had radically morphed over the years,
Beach Blanket
continued to be the acropolis of camp in a city that practically invented
the gay aesthetic. With its outrageous costumes, split-timing derring-do, and wicked send-ups of every entertainment figure from Elvis Presley to Snow White, Silver’s show stood as the antithesis of the ossified, endless Academy Awards telecast. Allan knew it in his gut: This genius helmer on the Barbary Coast would be his ticket to reinventing the Oscars in a way it hadn’t been overhauled since Bette Davis moved the awards across Hollywood Boulevard from the Roosevelt Hotel to Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 1945, put it on the radio for the first time ever, and invited 200 servicemen to sit onstage. Allan dreamed as big as Bette.

Allan particularly adored Silver’s rococo overlay of ornate costumes and huge headdresses. Those hats, in fact, were so big that one creation carried the entire cityscape of San Francisco, complete with fog machine and a running trolley car. The revue changed from year to year, and Allan had seen practically every incarnation, but his absolute favorite was one titled “
Beach Blanket Babylon
Goes to the Stars,” in which Silver re-created the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, replete with dancing tables. “That’s what Allan saw and remembered—the dancing tables,” says Silver’s widow, Jo Schuman Silver. “And he loved the big hats. The
Beach Blanket Babylon
trademark is the big hats. The concept was all Steve’s.”

Allan and Silver were an even draw when it came to worshipping at the altar of Oscar. Like Allan, Silver could parody entertainers because he adored entertainers.
Beach Blanket Babylon
might have started as a cult show, but it had since spawned a sister act in Las Vegas, and there were plans to take it to New York City. Silver wanted his
BBB
to go mainstream, and it doesn’t get any more public than directing the opening act of the Oscars. The director got so excited about the Academy Awards assignment that he rejected all other invitations—including offers to take his revue to the White House for the Christmas holidays and to perform at one of George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inauguration balls. It seemed, at least for a while, that all of San Francisco blessed Silver’s Oscar fixation. The local press, which usually disdained everything SoCal, couldn’t have been more supportive and happy to see its local boy make good. As the director told the
Contra Costa Times,
“Life in my book is nothing more than crossing things off your list. The more you cross off, the clearer your path in life becomes. On [March] 19th, I’m crossing a big, big line.” Silver so anticipated his March 29 date with Oscar that he mistakenly moved it up ten days.

While Silver worked to replicate the camp glamour of his
Beach Blanket
costumes for the Oscar telecast, Allan hired production designer Ray Klausen to re-create what would be the Cocoanut Grove, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and a box of popcorn big enough to accommodate a superstar’s entrance on the
Oscar stage. Klausen had always wanted to design for the stage but got “sidetracked into TV work,” he says, when ABC hired him to do a show called
Hooray for Hollywood
. For Allan, Klausen represented the perfect mix of Broadway dreams and Hollywood illusion, and he knew he’d made the right choice when, during their first meeting, the set designer mentioned what he hated most about the Academy Awards.

“I don’t like it when the presenters say, ‘And the winner is.’ It makes everyone else look like a loser,” the designer groused.

Allan didn’t miss a beat. “That’s a really good idea,” he said. “We’ll change it to . . . ‘And the Oscar goes to . . . ’”

Allan was out to burn other Oscar bridges to the past as well, including the sacrosanct best-song category. He personally detested all the eligible songs from 1988 films. “If I’m lucky, might I be able to get away with having only two or three nominated songs?” he wondered. None of them, in his opinion, were TVWORTHY. He petitioned the Academy’s songwriters division to nominate only those songs that received a certain number of votes. It was a long shot, but the songwriters, surprisingly, agreed, and as a result, Allan succeeded in having only three tunes nominated.