Rappaport also showed off a bit of modern gadgetry. At the flick of a switch, the two closet doors slammed shut, activating an alarm system that not only signaled the Beverly Hills police but jump-started the closet’s individual ventilation system. With the doors automatically locked, the closet functioned as a vault with its own air supply and no visible phone lines. Allan had hired the very best, Gavin de Becker, who designed the security systems used to screen threats to the senior officials of the CIA, as well as the Supreme Court justices and members of Congress.
As Ratner later described it, “You press the panic button and 911 comes. I’d never seen so many cameras. This man was paranoid.”
Hilhaven Lodge impressed, but it wasn’t until Ratner visited the basement that he experienced architectural love at first sight.
It was a fairly nondescript low-ceilinged basement by Beverly Hills standards: One room contained a high-tech chrome gym, the other a pool table with a cheap imitation Tiffany lamp overhead. But that was before Rappaport turned a switch and a yellow-and-red neon sign lit up to announce his entrance to the ALLAN CARR DISCO. The sign led to a narrow room with an even narrower bar, the requisite glass shelves behind it stocked with liquor bottles, sphinx-embossed drinking glasses, and intriguingly, yet another neon sign, which spelled a bit of exotica in ice blue lights: BELLA DARVI BAR. And beyond that, through yet another doorway to his right, Ratner beheld Studio 54.
Or Studio 54 as imagined by an ancient Egyptian midget. Ratner estimated the room to be not more than eighteen by eighteen feet, and although small, it crammed in a pharaoh’s tomb’s worth of ersatz antiquities that ranged from two life-size gold-dipped Egyptian spear carriers, who guarded the front entrance, to a lapis lazuli table retrieved from some sarcophagus of the deeply drugged imagination. Wall murals reflected the overall pyramid-disco motif in its presentation of veritable armies of chariot riders and bizarrely winged hieroglyphic characters, completely unashamed to put their sizable erections on display. One life-size mummy sported an anachronism: A coal miner’s light beamed from his forehead. As for the dance palace itself, the requisite disco ball dropped amidst golden palms and a sky of tiny blue Christmas tree lights that reflected off the copper-floor earth below. Maybe Allan Carr couldn’t make up his mind what to call his mini-pleasure-dome. After the two neon signs in the antechamber, Ratner spotted yet a third on the room’s back wall, this one in understated white. It read simply CLUB OSCAR. Framing the DJ’s booth, two raised gold leather banquettes floated above the mirror of a copper floor. Even the banquettes sported names—REGINE, MALCOLM FORBES, STEVE RUBELL—names that recalled an era redolent with platform shoes, coke spoons, and popper headaches. Multicolored pillows were strewn about to polish the copper floor, and Ratner almost tripped over them, accidentally brushing his leg against one of the booth’s small black tables, which caused it to spin, spin, spin. This time he did laugh out loud. Here was the perfect temple for snorting a line of coke and, with half a revolution of the table, giving your friends a toot, too. He looked up. Overhead, a black “eye” in the ceiling spied down at each table. These mini-cameras, in turn, fed back to a TV set in the master bedroom. With a flip of the channels, Allan and his inner circle of close friends and one-night boyfriends could watch, from the comfort of his four-poster, Hollywood’s most famous noses stuff themselves with blow. How many infidelities had he witnessed? How many tales of indiscretion had he launched just for the fun of it?
For Ratner, it was as if the $3.6-million asking price were an afterthought.
“I’ll take it!” he said, standing in the middle of Allan Carr’s basement disco. “I’ll buy Hilhaven Lodge.”
one
Ingrid, Kim, Allan
In late April, Allan sent out invitations for his party on May 26, 1973. This was Beverly Hills, and Allan wanted to make sure that his famous friends—and they included famous people he wanted to make his friends—would have time to adjust their schedules for his fete on Memorial Day weekend.
That spring, the Hollywood community looked upon Allan Carr with bemused curiosity, especially after gossip columnist Rona Barrett revealed that all 200-plus pounds of him had “streaked” through Chasen’s restaurant one night in March. Allan protested Barrett’s report with a nondenial. “It was a private party and I gave them a little bare shoulder with a slip of my mink coat,” he told people.
Allan could have sued the gossip columnist, but her timing was so impeccable that he invited Rona to his party instead. The event melded two momentous occasions: his purchase of Hilhaven Lodge and his thirty-third birthday, which was actually his thirty-sixth. If either milestone left anyone unimpressed, Allan designed an inducement that made Hilhaven Lodge, not its new owner, the ticket. He needed only to showcase its legendary status—first, with his fairy-tale sketch of the house, and second, by borrowing some storybook copy. Allan believed wholeheartedly in first impressions. “If your invitation isn’t fabulous, then your event isn’t going to be fabulous,” he decreed. Printed on an elegant cream-color rag-cloth paper, the party invitation for his housewarming showcased Allan’s newly purchased four-level manse together with a smiley-face sun gleaming in the sky above and an equally smiley-face duck floating in Dr. Lindstrom’s pool below. It took Allan hours to find just the right script, which could best be described as King Arthur font, and even more hours to tweak the prose that would establish him forever in the Hilhaven firmament:In the fabled hills of Beverly, there was an enchanted castle (see illustration) nestled neatly in a sunlit canyon of the kingdom. And this castle had been built in a bygone age, when there had lived in it a famous and exceptionally photogenic princess. Many years later, a man passed by. He was a man who managed well, and his name was Allan, and he said, “Hoohah, such a castle,” and he moved in. Upon settling in, he proceeded to invite the worthies of the kingdom to aid him in the warming of his house.
The invitation went on to describe the castle as “Hilhaven Lodge” and the “Occupants of the Castle” as “Ingrid Bergman, Richard Quine, Kim Novak, James Caan, Allan Carr.”
The more vital information was relegated to a few words:And that is how you happened to be invited to Allan Carr’s Birthdayhousewarming open house. Sat., May 26, eight p.m. 1220 Benedict Canyon. Cocktails and buffet RSVP 274 8518.
Allan’s business manager, Daniel Gottlieb, had found the house, and though its $200,000 price tag in 1973 dollars proved daunting, Allan felt he couldn’t afford not to buy it. “Ingrid Bergman lived here!” he exclaimed, as if his owning it sealed his destiny in ways that only money could buy. Allan knew better than anyone: Nothing announces a person’s ascendancy in Hollywood like a historic Hollywood house.
Before he actually owned Hilhaven Lodge, Allan first needed to see Hilhaven Lodge, and for one of his initial tours he enlisted a new friend to accompany him there. Richard Hach was a TV Guide columnist, who, in time, would position himself to even better advantage for Allan’s filmland ascendency when he migrated across town to the Hollywood Reporter. “James Caan was renting the house at the time,” Hach recalls. Caan had just scored his greatest triumph by playing the testosterone-drenched Sonny in The Godfather, but he spent none of his newfound lucre on furniture. “There was a mattress on the floor in the living room, and a basketball hoop nailed to the wall there,” adds Hach.
Allan described the Caan aesthetic with less charity. “It was pig city,” he said. “Caan turned Ingrid Bergman’s house into a Jewish gymnasium.” The basketball hoop was the first thing to go. If Caan didn’t take the mattress with him, Allan kept it to indulge his favorite sport: watching young men wrestle.
Allan also approved the master bedroom’s four-poster bed with overhead mirror, the legacy of Kim Novak’s brief occupancy of Hilhaven in the 1950s. (The actress lived there with her Bell, Book and Candle director Richard Quine, who owned the house and sold it to Allan.) Otherwise, the joint needed major renovations, which only added to Gottlieb’s concerns. “Allan couldn’t afford it, but he wanted it
because it was a statement of his arrival in Hollywood,” says Hach.
The house was also perfect for the weight-impaired Allan Carr. In his redo, he forged a new entrance to the master bedroom from the living room, replacing a few steps with a gentle ramp that gave him easy access between the two rooms. “Allan rarely visited the second-floor bedrooms,” Hach says.
Allan was a big man, despite his five-foot six-inch frame, and at his peak, which he scaled often, Allan weighed 310 pounds. The legendary publicist Warren Cowan remembered his first meeting with Allan in the mid-1960s, when he brought Ann-Margret to the Beverly Hills offices of Rogers & Cowan. Allan wanted Cowan to handle her publicity chores—that is, if Allan could make his way through the PR firm’s front door. “He had to walk sideways, and it wasn’t a small door,” said Cowan.
Allan once complained to comedy writer Bruce Vilanch about having to wear a cast on his foot. Vilanch asked what happened. “I stepped off the curb,” Allan replied. His 300-plus pounds so overwhelmed Allan’s small-boned body that his ankle cracked under the pressure.
On the evening of May 26, 1973, Allan weighed something less than a baby whale. Unlike his age, he didn’t lie to party guests about the poundage. Fat is one thing, encroaching middle age quite another. Hilhaven figured large in his master plan to gain social entrée to the Hollywood elite. The other part—besides an illustrious client list that he managed—involved a gastric bypass operation that literally stapled off eighteen feet of his intestines. “It was so life-threatening. It was a very rare procedure then,” says Ann-Margret. “Finally, Allan had to go to Louisville to have it done.”
Prior to his bypass, Allan produced two movies with Ann-Margret’s husband, Roger Smith: The First Time, starring Jacqueline Bisset, and C.C. and Company, noted for featuring a nude love scene between Ann-Margret and Joe Namath in his sophomore film effort. During the C.C. and Company shoot, Allan posed for pictures with Joe Namath, and he held the playboy football-star-turned-incompetent-actor personally responsible for his body overhaul. Allan took one look at the photos. “I was shocked,” he said. “I got the pictures back and you could not see the bike. Just me—the blob—and the motorcycle outfit and the Gucci shoes!”
C.C. and Company died at the box office, as did The First Time, and those two flops momentarily put Allan’s producer ambitions on hold. Acquiring Hilhaven and losing a hundred pounds, Allan believed, could make him a Hollywood player again. “He was just not pleasant to look at,” says Roger Smith.
While Allan never fessed up to having an eye job, he reveled in discussing every detail of disposing of half his digestive tract. The one operation was routine, the other dramatic. And Allan never missed the opportunity to eschew the former and embrace the latter. On the night of his birthday/housewarming at Hilhaven, Allan made his grand entrance with the words, “Body by Dr. Rex Kennamer!” In case anyone arrived late and missed that salutation, he spent the remainder of the night bragging about the bypass. To the press.
“I use the old trick—dress in blue around the middle,” he offered. “But that operation really worked.”
“What operation?” a reporter asked.
“The bypass.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, let me see. Around the time Sleuth opened.”
The master of verbal inversion, Allan turned bombshells into yesterday’s news and made a front-page story out of absolute drivel. Regarding Dr. Kennamer’s handiwork, he couldn’t stop talking. “Well, I mean, my stomach looks like Joe Namath’s knees, the doctors have done so much to it. It’s not a pretty picture, let’s face it,” he blabbered.
Someone of Allan’s fervid imagination could even put a provocative spin on the folds of loose skin that draped his newly deflated body. Always ready with the choice moniker, Allan ruefully dubbed it “my elephant skin.” He wanted the skin tightened, but no doctor would oblige him there. “They tell me my skin has lost its elasticity, and if I regain the weight, I’ll burst!” he bragged.
Other topics discussed at Allan’s first Hilhaven party included the recent un-spooling of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris at the Cannes Film Festival (an outraged Earl Wilson called it “pornography”) to the ongoing Watergate scandal (Jimmy the Greek gave odds of 100 to 1 that Nixon would be impeached and 1000 to 1 that he would resign). But those were minor distractions as Allan’s guests eagerly explored the legendary Hilhaven, and stood in line to take tours of the cottage where Bergman and Rossellini trysted so many years ago. There were even more radical dieting tips to be learned—like the one Allan picked up from Ann-Margret after her near fatal twenty-two-foot fall at a theater in Stateline, Nevada, in 1972.
“I had to have my jaw wired shut, and I could only drink through a straw,” she recalls. “Allan was so impressed with how much weight I lost that he had his own jaws wired shut too.” (When Steven Spielberg’s shark epic hit the screens in 1975, wags immediately applied its title, Jaws, to Allan.)
Here were two survivors who needed each other. She had endured a fall of twenty-two feet; he had endured the removal of eighteen feet of his innards. He was her manager; she was his fantasy. “Allan was a true confidante to Ann-Margret,” says his client Marvin Hamlisch. “Was Ann-Margret his alter ego? Probably. If Allan could have been in show business as a performer, he would have wanted it. He was made for it. The only life he knew how to lead was a showbizzy life.”
Allan singlehandedly reinvented the B-movie star Ann-Margret for Las Vegas. That makeover included Hamlisch’s music services, as well as the full glitz treatment of dancers on motorcycles and Broadway-like technical pyrotechnics that the gambling audiences had never seen before. Ann-Margret was talented, but not so gifted that she didn’t need Allan to fill in some blanks. “She’s not a great singer or dancer,” Allan opined. “But she’s malleable, and she wants to succeed.” He told her what to sing, how to do her hair, what gels belonged in the spotlights. Most managers take their 10 percent and think that the answer is to go from job to job. “Allan saw that it wasn’t about getting work,” says Hamlisch. “He saw the big picture. It wasn’t a two-year plan. His was a twenty-year plan.”
Roger Smith put it more simply: “Ann-Margret owes a lot of her career to Allan Carr.”
Other performers who relied on Allan’s concert/nightclub expertise were Cass Elliot, after the Mamas and the Papas, and Dyan Cannon, after Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. “He did every step,” says Cannon, “from the costumes to the back-up singers to the cities on the tour. He demanded the final say, which is why we parted ways.”
Allan disagreed with her on the latter part, and forgetting that it was she who hired him, he insisted, “I fired Dyan Cannon. She didn’t do what I wanted her to do.” When it came to being a diva, Allan showed them how. “I don’t do hand-holding,” he maintained. “If they need that, then they get someone else. Their dishwasher breaks, they gotta call someone else.”
Allan and Cass Elliot parted ways more amicably, if unexpectedly, when, after two acclaimed sold-out performances at London’s Palladium, the thirty-three-year-old singer died of a heart attack brought on by her extreme obesity. Coincidence or not, she and Allan bounced around in the same 200-to-300-pound weight range. Allan commiserated, “She always seemed to be on a diet of some kind or other, always losing and gaining weight.” He could have been talking about himself, and knew it.
Allan hired Bruce Vilanch to write jokes and patter for a number of his clients, including Mama Cass. “Cass Elliot and Allan Carr were two Jewish fat kids who wanted to be something other than what they were,” says Vilanch, “and they saw the other as helping to make that possible.”
Mama Cass had fourteen months left to live when she made her way up the Hilhaven Lodge driveway for the first time, to celebrate her manager’s thirty-third (or thirty-sixth) birthday and new ownership of the house. It was not an easy journey regardless of one’s physical condition. In what was to become a party ritual, Allan hired a phalanx of burly security guards to check
each guest before any of them made the trip from Benedict Canyon Drive up the long cul-de-sac to his house. The guards communicated with other security men at the top of the hill via walkie-talkies, then sent the guests up the hill in escorted vans. Torches on long poles illuminated the driveway where Ingrid’s red carpet once welcomed Roberto. Hundreds of white gardenias punctuated the night air as the torch flames lent the towering ficus a romantically ominous flair, as if the Great Gatsby had been transported five decades into the future across 3,000 miles from East Egg to the West Coast.
John Kander, composer of Cabaret and Chicago, wasn’t much of a party person. “But I would drive by Allan’s house when I was staying in Beverly Hills, and it always looked like the most exciting parties—the torches, the limousines, the valet, the music,” he said.
And security. Always lots of security. The Charles Manson murders of Sharon Tate and others in 1969 took place only a mile up Benedict Canyon Drive. Like many in the film community, Allan remained ultracautious (his newly installed “panic room” a testament to such fears), but not so wary that he wanted to remain stuck in the hippy-macramé-LSD years.
“I want to bring glamour back to Hollywood,” he often said. “Everybody, let’s dress up!”
To show them what he meant, Allan demanded that his security men wear tuxedos in an age when young men no longer knew how to work a bow tie. The well-fashioned guards pointed the way up the zigzagging stone stairs to Hilhaven Lodge, where its oversize host and his absurd Lucite grand awaited them. “One of the six in the world!” Allan said of his piano. Black and white silk draped the rafters of the living room, and outside, black moiré covered the chairs on the terrace. “Do you think Allan is as rich as he seems to be?” asked his friend Joan Hackett.
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