Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  “The crowd was a lot of gay guys and a lot of skin and lots of drag,” says Rawitt. “It was Studio 54 outside and put front and center.” In other words, it was the West Village Halloween parade brought uptown. Photographers had a field day, but not captured in their pictures were the many faces of the Irish cops who’d never been to Studio 54. Incredulous, insane, and unapologetically homophobic—their craggy-faced expressions congealed with a childlike wonder mixed with abject horror. “That party was this last bastion of freedom, of excess and sexual carelessness,” says Rawitt. “Allan Carr italicized the end of an era with that party.”

  Whatever hoopla ensued at Lincoln Center, the press flotsam it produced failed to translate into human bodies buying tickets at the Ziegfeld Theater the next day: The gargantuan movie palace sold virtually no tickets for its first matinee.

  Into this BO void dropped the New York Post’s film reporter Stephen M. Silverman, who, days earlier, had scheduled an interview with Allan. His newspaper had loved the party, gushing in print, “Not since Cecil B. DeMille parted the Red Sea has Hollywood produced a more spectacular show.”

  But a party is not a movie. When Silverman arrived at the Plaza the day after the film’s premiere at the Ziegfeld, Allan’s many assistants scurried about the hotel suite, running back and forth to answer phone calls, locate pieces of lost paper that were the wrong pieces of paper, and otherwise nurse the bruised ego of their producer, who kept braying into various phone receivers, “This movie is so great. Great! Fabulous! It’s doing blockbuster business!” In fact, Can’t Stop the Music had tanked on its very first public screening.

  Allan soldiered on regardless. “Do you know that Walter Mondale requested no fewer than fourteen tickets to the Washington, D.C., premiere?” he asked the reporter.

  Silverman knew Allan to be a quote machine, a journalist’s dream. But that Friday he confronted a very different Allan Carr, one he’d never seen before. This was the distraught Allan Carr. “Allan had been hit with a brick in the head and was still trying to conduct an interview, but his mind was elsewhere,” says Silverman. Allan’s thoughts, much less his sentences, didn’t segue, and his agitated body language belied the calm of a producer who knew he sat on top of a hit movie. “Can’t Stop the Music was a disaster,” says Silverman, “and Allan obviously knew it on Day 1.”

  As did the world by Day 4: Can’t Stop the Music racked up a dismal $1.6 million in 423 theaters during its first weekend.

  None of which stopped Allan from playing the savvy marketer, and he immediately launched Plan B, which included a month-long tour around the world to promote Can’t Stop the Music. Bruce Jenner found a certain educational element in the many screenings that greeted him from St. Louis to San Francisco, where Dykes on Bikes escorted Allan into the Golden Gate Theater, and Los Angeles, where Allan attempted to replicate the streets of Greenwich Village on the plaza of the Music Center, and secured the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, home of the L.A. Philharmonic, to unspool Can’t Stop the Music, the first movie ever to play the august performance hall. Most audiences were respectfully quiet, but in San Francisco, they guffawed at the movie’s strong current of homoerotica. “There’s one scene where one of the Village People turns and we see a red handkerchief in his back pocket,” says Jenner, referring to a gay symbol for fist fucking. “It got a big laugh in San Francisco. People didn’t get that in St. Louis.” Otherwise, as he traveled from city to city, Jenner became increasingly squeamish at having to watch himself morph from conservative lawyer to boy toy, complete with short-short cutoffs and bare midriff, in screening after screening. More painful were the radio interviews. After he said goodbye on air, DJs told him, “Our listeners didn’t want any more disco.”

  It was not a great time to release any movie, much less a disco movie. As Variety reported on its front page that September, “Summer B.O. Worst in Four Years as Ticket Sales Off More than 10% from 1979.”

  Costing $20 million, Can’t Stop the Music brought in only $2 million at the U.S. box office. Overseas sales were even more disappointing, with the exception of three markets: Japan, Australia, and Bali. When decidedly upbeat numbers from those countries rolled in, Allan took solace and referred to Can’t Stop the Music as “my island picture.”

  Jacques Morali took no comfort, and began referring to it as “a 1955 Doris Day movie,” and not in a good way.

  Allan would go on to produce other films and projects, but none with his close friend and scriptwriting partner. On August 6, less than two months after the release of Can’t Stop the Music, Bronte Woodard died of AIDS. The memorial service in Beverly Hills was distinguished for the prominent number of porn stars in attendance, many of whom had been unofficial guests of honor at Woodard’s various Saturday afternoon parties over the years. Randal Kleiser and Allan spoke at the memorial, and it was obvious from what the two men said, as well as the music played, which Allan Carr/Bronte Woodard movie the deceased writer preferred. The service included several selections from the Grease soundtrack but not one song by the Village People.

  sixteen

  The Queen and I

  Can’t Stop the Music didn’t play out as Allan dreamed, but it did lead him to a former, if not first, love. “Allan had flown to Paris on the Concorde, and I suggested he see La Cage aux folles,” says Henri Belolo. The film La Cage aux folles was yet to be released, but its source material, Jean Poiret’s stage comedy of the same name, had been running for five years on the Paris boards, and it was that show that Belolo recommended to Allan when they first embarked on their Discoland project. Belolo rightfully assumed that the stage farce, about a drag performer who must impersonate a woman in order to impress the future in-laws of his male partner’s son, would delight his flamboyant friend from Hollywood.

  “Allan immediately saw it as a musical,” says Belolo. It was summer 1978. At the time, Allan had little interest in something called La Cage aux folles. In fact, “I dreaded going,” Allan said. “I thought it was going to be another boulevard comedy in a language I wouldn’t understand.” But not wanting to disappoint Belolo, he saw the play. “And of course that night it hit me: I had to have the American rights,” he said.

  Upon returning to New York, Allan phoned John Breglio, the lawyer he’d worked with on A Chorus Line and Survive! Breglio immediately put out feelers only to learn that David Merrick was already in touch with Poiret about turning the play into a stage musical. Allan had never produced a Broadway musical, while Merrick had birthed dozens, including the hits Gypsy, Hello, Dolly!, and Promises, Promises. Eager to play Broadway’s David to Merrick’s Goliath, Allan ultimately settled on the only strategy that always works.

  “Allan put a lot of money on the table,” says Breglio. “He paid $100,000 for a one-year option. No one in his right mind had ever done that before. Most [options] were $50,000 tops then.”

  Merrick, a shrewd businessman, knew an outrageous price tag when he saw one. He was, after all, David Merrick, the greatest producer of Broadway musicals. Allan Carr was merely someone with a lot of money who had never produced anything on the Great White Way. It was no contest, obviously.

  Poiret took the money and Allan won.

  So many great Broadway musicals are, at their core, shows about putting on shows—Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, Funny Girl, Cabaret, Chicago. La Cage aux folles fell into that time-honored vein, even if it would break new ground as the first Broadway musical ever to feature same-sex lovers. Then again, the movie version of La Cage aux folles, starring Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault as boyfriends, turned into a surprise hit. “The Broadway musical will be even bigger,” Allan believed. Movie gender benders like Tootsie and Victor/Victoria did well at the box office in 1982, and top-drawer talents like director Mike Nichols, book writer Jay Presson Allen, and choreographer Tommy Tune soon shared Allan’s enthusiasm for turning the material into a stage tuner. With such expensive talent at his disposal, it’s possible that Allan felt just the slightest urge to economize, or at least mi
x things up, when he rounded out the creative team with a songwriter who’d never composed a Broadway show.

  Maury Yeston, a professor of music at Yale, had written incidental music for Tune’s off Broadway production of Caryl Churchill’s comedy Cloud Nine, and he was also “in talks” to adapt Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film 8½ for Broadway, again with Tune. When Tune mentioned the La Cage aux folles project to Yeston, he cautioned him that Marvin Hamlisch, Cy Coleman, and Jerry Herman were already circling to be the tuner’s composer.

  Herman, especially, had his cheerleaders.

  Producer Martin Richards (Sweeney Todd, Chicago) also wanted to turn La Cage aux folles into a stage musical. “I saw the movie one afternoon with a bunch of ladies who carried their shopping bags into the movie theater,” he says. “They loved it. I flipped out over it.” When he checked on the stage rights, he found they were held by Allan Carr. “He was a genius with press and publicity, so far ahead of his time in so many ways. I suggested Jerry Herman to Allan,” Richards says.

  Richards and Allan were not strangers. They’d already joined forces to try to bring Chicago to the screen, and regarding that movie project, Allan promised “a celebrity in every cell.” On La Cage, his brain blossomed forth with even more ideas.

  An occasional resident of the UN Plaza Hotel, Allan invited Richards to his East Side pied-à-terre to discuss La Cage aux folles and possibly have him come aboard as a coproducer. Over the phone, Allan told Richards that “Jerry Herman is perfect!” Richards thought he’d sweeten the meeting by bringing a potential book writer, James Kirkwood, who had done similar duties on A Chorus Line. Allan was in a typically festive mood that day, serving champagne, strawberries, and heavy cream. “And he wore a little nightgown down to his rear end,” Richards recalls. Allan couldn’t contain his excitement at meeting Kirkwood, and he launched into fond recollections of managing Marvin Hamlisch and saving A Chorus Line from the ego of Michael Bennett. Finally, he got right to it.

  “So, Marty?” he asked. “Can you get Jerry Herman to write a couple of songs to show us how he’d handle this material?”

  Richards smiled. Pleasantries were exchanged, and then Richards departed the UN Plaza Hotel, realizing that Allan didn’t know the ways of Broadway. Seasoned talent like Jerry Herman wrote nada on spec.

  Herman always considered La Cage aux folles the show he most wanted to write. “It’s hard finding source material. I knew in my heart that I knew how to do this material,” says the composer of Mame and Hello, Dolly! “But I just wrote it off as the show that got away.”

  Unlike Herman, Yeston had no such qualms about putting his talent and reputation on the line. “Look, give me a chance,” Yeston told Allan. “Let me write something on spec. I’ll write six songs.”

  Allan never balked at getting something for nothing, so he handed Yeston the musical’s book, titled The Queen and I by Jay Presson Allen, who’d written the play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the Cabaret screenplay. “Call me when you’ve written your six songs,” he added.

  Yeston promised he’d have them in two weeks, and he set to work. “Mike Nichols, Allan Carr, Jay Presson Allen. It was overwhelming for me. I had nothing to lose,” he says.

  Yeston liked that Jay Presson Allen had Americanized the material by switching the La Cage aux folles locale from Saint-Tropez to New Orleans. Yeston knew that jazz milieu, and the first song he wrote was “The Queen of Basin Street,” about the female impersonator Zaza, the show’s lead character.

  Nichols loved the song, and so did Allan. “That will be the title of the show. The Queen of Basin Street!” Allan announced. He had his composer. Who cared that few people knew of Maury Yeston? “He’s got talent!” Allan said. “Tie him to the sofa!”

  Instead, Yeston took a leave of absence without pay from Yale after his agent, the legendary Flora Roberts, won him an advance of $10,000 to write The Queen of Basin Street score. “It was a thrilling, heady experience,” Yeston recalls. “At that point,” he adds ruefully.

  Indeed, problems were already brewing in the august law offices of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Breglio, head of the firm’s theater department, quickly discovered that negotiating the contracts for creative talent of the caliber of Mike Nichols, Jay Presson Allen, and Tommy Tune was not easy, and as their deals grew richer and richer, Allan only grew poorer and poorer as a producer. Breglio soon found himself in an awkward position. Despite the star power of the show’s creative triumvirate, the lawyer “simply couldn’t recommend” the package’s economics to Allan.

  While Roberts repped Yeston, the remainder of Allan’s creative team—Nichols, Tune, and Allen—shared just one agent: Sam Cohn. ICM’s mighty agent lunched daily at the Russian Tea Room and never returned phone calls or wore a tie—all of which made him the most powerful, as well as elusive, agent on the East Coast.

  When Breglio told Allan he couldn’t make financial sense of the Queen of Basin Street creative package, Allan didn’t waste a breath. “OK, I’m flying in to deal with Cohn,” he said. Allan got on the next airplane to New York City, but prior to meeting with Cohn, he called a powwow in his new apartment. Now that he was a Broadway producer, Allan decided it was time to move out of the UN Plaza Hotel and into the penthouse at the St. Moritz, once the living space of the most famed and feared columnist in America, the red-baiting Walter Winchell. The St. Moritz penthouse is a historic triplex that, in addition to its view of Central Park from three terraces, offers its residents a sauna and a greenhouse in the sky. Even the most sophisticated New Yorkers were impressed by the space, and many of them didn’t notice, at first glance, that Allan had decorated the art deco apartment in a very California style, with lots of matching, oversized pale furniture.

  Sitting atop the St. Moritz, Allan welcomed Jay Presson Allen, Maury Yeston, and the composer’s agent, Flora Roberts, to his new apartment, which he’d already dubbed Viewhaven in honor of his other “havens” around the world. He avoided the fact that, in this case, he rented and did not own.

  Jay Presson Allen came ready for a fight that day. She began by saying that she loved Yeston’s music for Cloud Nine, the show Tommy Tune had directed at the tiny Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street in the West Village. Niceties out of the way, she then leveled her sights at The Queen of Basin Street. “This show has too many directors,” she said. “Fire Mike Nichols and replace him with Tommy Tune.” Instead of registering dismay or even surprise, Allan’s eyes grew big. “Fire Mike Nichols?” he asked.

  Yeston blurted out, “Nobody fires Mike Nichols!”

  Allan’s eyes more than glistened behind his tinted aviator glasses. “Fire Mike Nichols? I’ll be a legend!” he whispered in his best Norma Desmond impersonation.

  “Don’t break this team up,” Yeston begged.

  Jay Presson Allen ignored the Broadway novice. “It could work,” she said.

  The next day, wearing a sports coat and tie, Allan walked into the offices of ICM on West 57th Street. He brought Breglio with him. No longer the flamboyant party-giver, Allan presented himself as “the hardened businessman,” according to the lawyer. There was no stroking of Cohn’s massive ego as Allan took him to the mat.

  “Sam, it’s too much,” he began. “I love them. Mike, Tommy, and Jay. But they are too famous and they are too rich for me. I can’t afford it. I’m going elsewhere.”

  Allan left Cohn speechless. It was over. Finished. Allan had done what he always wanted and turned himself into a legend. What Cohn must have been thinking is what everyone else in the New York theater world would soon be shouting in Shubert Alley: “No one fires Mike Nichols!”

  Chaos among the original team ensued. “It was a big uproar. Everybody got mad at one another,” said Jay Presson Allen. “Mike and I still don’t speak.” (That is, until the writer died in 2006.) But somehow she remained sanguine regarding her onetime theater producer. “Any production is a series of disasters,” she offered. “If you’re going to do that kind of wo
rk, it is wonderful to have someone who can deal with it humorously, and Allan Carr could see the humor in almost anything. Allan was honest, and did pretty much what he said he was going to do.” Except for firing practically everybody on the original team.

  For a moment, rumors circulated that Allan would increase Tune’s responsibilities on the project, keeping him on as choreographer and making him director. Cloud Nine had opened to rave reviews and great box office, and on Broadway his little musical-that-could, A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, also scored.

  But Tune could never bring himself to pick up the directorial pieces—or continue as choreographer. As Tune told Yeston, “My friendship with Mike is more important and takes precedence.”

  Jay Presson Allen recalled the situation, “Tommy was very nervous about it and correctly so.” She and Yeston, however, found themselves in different boats since they had essentially completed their respective work on book and score. Allen, a famous writer, could proceed to one of the many other projects that she currently juggled. Yeston, on the other hand, had no other project—or source of income.

  Allan remained jubilant regardless of a creative team that now numbered only one: Yeston. With casual fanfare, he insisted that the composer meet him for lunch at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. It didn’t matter that Yeston remained on the East Coast, leaving him no choice but to fly west to salvage his career and finances. There on Nob Hill, Allan laid it out for his composer. “You’ll write the score and the book, and I’ve just hired this great new director, Michael Smuin.”

  Smuin?

  “He’s got a big hit on Broadway with Sophisticated Ladies,” continued Allan, referring to the Duke Ellington revue. Blithely, he changed the subject: “Now, I want you to be my date tonight. I want you to go to Finocchio’s. It’s a great drag club. It’s research!” The switch from Mike Nichols to Michael Smuin left Yeston stricken. He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “What’s the matter with you?” Allan asked, oblivious of his composer’s concerns.