Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  After the show, when old Hollywood, and much of the new, thought they’d seen enough bearded men in dominatrix gear and left Hilhaven, a few of the boys at the party went skinny-dipping and the girls—Lorna Luft, Liza Minnelli, Altovise Davis, and Lucie Arnaz—retired to the backyard to play volleyball with the Sluts. In his Variety column, Army Archerd made his usual long list of notables present, then went on to comment about those “nameless Hollywood residents who made the sweet smell of summer even sweeter . . . their perfumes mingled with the smell of pizza, pretzels, enchiladas and chow mein. Coke and Champagne tastes also mingled.”

  What Archerd’s purple prose left unsaid is what Allan’s friends knew. He liked to watch boys wrestle and sometimes, throwing off his caftan, he would get down with them in his skivvies. “It was a horrifying sight,” says Howard Rosenman. The lord of Hilhaven Lodge always encouraged his guests to indulge themselves in any way possible, and he helped them in those endeavors by providing the drugs as well as the sexual contacts of easy conquests. Allan’s own carnal knowledge, however, knew its bounds.

  Even as a boy, Allan knew he was gay. “It is just something you know,” he told Dyan Cannon. “All my friends were interested in girls. I wasn’t.” When Cannon asked if he ever felt traumatized by his sexual orientation, Allan said no. “But sometimes people answer too quickly,” Cannon offers.

  Joel Schumacher found Allan to be “a survival story of a lot of pain. Being gay has been a plus in my life. Then there are those people who have made it a plus but went through hell to get there,” says Schumacher, who put Allan squarely in the latter category.

  David Geffen had known Allan when the Dreamworks founder was still an agent at William Morris in the 1960s. “Before Allan decided not to be very fat, he was a happier guy,” says Geffen. “He hadn’t really discovered sex at that point. Which led to all kinds of complications.”

  Another longtime friend agrees. “I think Allan was a virgin until quite late in his life,” says Gary Pudney. According to the ABC executive, Allan didn’t find love, or some facsimile thereof, until September 1975. Pudney had rented a house in Puerto Vallarta and invited Allan to come down to relax and party for a few days. Unfortunately, Allan’s luggage didn’t make the same airplane, and Pudney had to take him into town to buy clothes. There in the ladies’ section of one boutique, Allan alarmed the shopkeeper with his ululant cry of happy discovery when he found one especially outrageous caftan: It was bright red and very Mexican with lots of fringe, jewels, and medallions that sparkled and made noise like a wedding getaway car. Allan couldn’t wait to put it on, and wearing it out of the store, he proceeded to down several margaritas, get smashed, and fall in love with a beautiful young blond. “I think it was the first time he went to bed with a man,” says Pudney. “He had not slept with women.”

  The next morning, Allan told his TV exec friend, “This guy has changed my life.” Allan was in love at last, he said, and so happy that he couldn’t stop talking about his affair. Love is forever until it’s over, and for Allan, eternity could be counted on two hands. “Over the years, Allan had half a dozen relationships,” says Pudney, “He had a mental picture of a fantasy man, and he would try to find that figure.”

  These men were inevitably young, beautiful, tall, well built, perfect—everything Allan felt, and knew, he was not.

  five

  Capote’s Retreat

  Diana Ross, Peter Sellers, Lucille Ball, Dominick Dunne, and a few hundred other Hollywood notables were stunned by the summons delivered to their doorstep that crisp November day. Most subpoenas are delivered by a plainclothesman. This one was handed to them by a uniformed officer of the law. “It was quite a shock to receive it,” observed Dunne. “When you open the front door and someone is serving you a subpoena, your heart stops!”

  The joke was pure Allan Carr. In his mind, the party scheduled for December 14, 1975, began three weeks earlier when those three hundred “summons,” i.e. invitations, went out by way of a few dozen unemployed actors dressed up in cop costumes. The law-enforcement theme carried right through to the December 14 party itself, held in the Lincoln Heights Jail in northeast Los Angeles. The prison, which once housed 2,800 convicts, shut its doors shortly after the Watts riots in 1965, and in recent years sat deserted except for its occasional use by film companies in need of an ugly, dank jail.

  On that mid-December night, most of Allan’s guests rode in limousines that took them past downtown L.A. and the gaudy lights of Chinatown, where banks are disguised as ersatz pagodas, and through an anonymous neighborhood that few of them had ever seen, and never much cared to visit again. Lincoln Heights is the dumping ground of the city’s vast transportation departments, its asphalt-paved lots filled with menacing-looking bulldozers and trucks. The hills of Elysian Fields park rise to the northwest, only to be blotted out, momentarily, by the Lincoln Heights Jail. Limo drivers followed the instructions of Allan’s invitation/summons, which directed them to cruise up North Avenue 19 and past the prison’s stern, multilevel edifice, its meager front lawn strewn with weeds and litter. There, guests were greeted by police officers, who motioned with their flashlights to drive up the ramp to the parking lot. Two more cops then approached the car, and were just as quickly replaced with two other guys in striped prison uniforms. “That looks like a good one. Take that car. It’s our getaway car,” said one of the inmates.

  “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.

  six

  Survival Techniques

  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?”