Yeston tried to explain. “I can’t help it. I have a nine-year-old son, I’m a professor. I left my job with no pay. And I thought we were doing this show.”
Without saying a word, Allan reached into his pocket to pull out a checkbook and began writing. “Use this if you need it,” Allan said, handing his cash-strapped composer the check. It was made out to “Maury Yeston” for $150,000.
Yeston didn’t know what to say, but he knew enough to be cautious. “Remember, these were the cocaine years,” he says of Allan’s magnanimous checkbook maneuver. “It was the quintessential Allan Carr gesture. It was the flamboyance of the gesture. In that gesture, he showed both the extraordinary generosity of the man, his desire to be loved, and, at the same time, the narcissism of it.” In essence, Allan was telling his impoverished songwriter, “Look at me! I can write a check for $150,000!”
That evening, Allan held court at Finocchio’s as he introduced Yeston to the world of drag theater. “This”—he waved—“is what our show is all about!” Allan soaked it up. He drank champagne. He signed autographs. He basked in being the most famous person on the premises. This was his milieu, gay San Francisco, and, in Allan’s opinion, Yeston merely had to fill in a few missing pieces and The Queen of Basin Street would mint money on Broadway. Allan knew it to be true.
When the Finocchio emcee took the stage, he coughed loudly into a handkerchief. “Tonight I have a frog in my throat,” he began. “Last night, it was a prince.” It was the cue for the entrance of the show girls, all of whom were boys but one.
“That’s what I want in our musical,” Allan whispered to his bewildered professor-friend. “One girl, the rest are guys. You won’t be able to tell. All the chorus girls in our show will be boys—except for one. And she will keep the audience guessing.” As far as Allan was concerned, he’d just found the key to unlock the success of his La Cage aux folles.
More research meetings with Allan ensued over the following weeks, whether the city was New York, San Francisco, or Honolulu. Then, just as suddenly as they began, the itinerant tête-à-têtes stopped and Yeston couldn’t get his producer on the phone.
In the end, Allan needed to break with Yeston, too. The composer had worked closely with Jay Presson Allen, and many of his songs were intrinsically bound to her words in situation and dialogue. To use those songs in a new book written by a different writer risked exposing the project to copyright infringement. What portended an even greater obstacle to Yeston’s continued participation was Allan’s having purchased the stage rights to only the play La Cage aux folles. Unbeknownst to either Yeston or Jay Presson Allen was that Allan had failed to also secure the rights to the movie La Cage aux folles.
While the writing duo changed the locale of the story, they “borrowed whole scenes from the movie that never appeared in the play,” says Yeston. And in a turn of fate worthy of the Greek gods, those very precious movie rights were now no longer available at any price since they’d been purchased, ironically, by Mike Nichols, who would later fashion the French movie into his own Hollywood movie comedy The Birdcage, starring Nathan Lane and Robin Williams as the two lovers, and set in Miami’s South Beach. Describing Nichols’s one-upmanship, Yeston says, “The best way to achieve revenge is just to wait.”
seventeen
Why Grease Again?
And there were other reasons that Maury Yeston couldn’t get Allan Carr on the phone. Allan’s Grease agreement with Paramount required that he begin production on the sequel within three years of the original movie. A $5-million check from Paramount depended on Allan’s quick segue from The Queen of Basin Street to Grease 2.
Allan had defied Hollywood wisdom by hiring Nancy Walker to direct Can’t Stop the Music, and he risked the odds a second time by going with another female director, Patricia Birch, on Grease 2. She, at least, had some affinity for the material, having choreographed the first Grease movie, as well as the original stage show. But she harbored qualms about undertaking the sequel. “Why Grease again? I think I’ve done it” was her first reaction. It also troubled Birch that neither the original composers, Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, nor John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John would be doing the sequel.
“I had an idea that John and Olivia would be in the last reel, running a gasoline filling station,” says Birch. But even that minor nod to the original was not to be.
Laurence Mark told Allan, “Don’t do a sequel without the original stars.” But who listens to wise advice with a $5-million check hanging in the balance?
For a moment, Robert Stigwood and Allan toyed with turning Grease 2 into a vehicle for Bee Gees’ brother Andy Gibb. A quick screen test, however, put to rest any thought of Gibb’s being an actor.
As that rocker’s movie fortunes cratered, a young Scottish actor began to attract attention stateside for his portrayal of a bisexual hustler in an Off-Broadway production of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane. His reviews were ecstatic, and such notables as Diane Keaton, Rudolf Nureyev, and Tennessee Williams came to the little Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village to see the play. A few others came not to see Maxwell Caulfield act but to see him get naked, which he did eight performances a week. One of those voyeurs was Allan Carr.
The night Allan arrived, he brought a date, Valerie Perrine, and afterward, they made the obligatory trip backstage to meet and congratulate the twenty-two-year-old actor. Even though Allan was the producer in search of a new leading man, he was, as usual, a magnanimous host as he led Perrine to Caulfield’s dressing room. “Are you going to have him or am I going to try my luck?” Allan asked his friend.
Caulfield’s stint in Entertaining Mr. Sloane was not the first time Allan had seen the actor in the all together. “I was the It Kid in New York City, and I was being photographed by Bruce Weber and Kenn Duncan and a lot of the hot photographers, specifically known for a somewhat homoerotic style of photography,” says Caulfield. “That piqued Allan’s interest.”
While Allan focused on who would be his leading man, he left it to Patricia Birch to come up with a new femme lead.
Michelle Pfeiffer came in at six-thirty at night for an audition, Birch recalls. “It was a huge dance call. I saw immediately that she had something. She could move.” A few months earlier, Pfeiffer had been working at the checkout counter of a Von’s supermarket in Orange County. She’d also done a little modeling, when her agent sent her to the Grease 2 cattle call.
“There were about 1,500 people dancing,” Pfeiffer recalls. “They were professional dancers. I almost left halfway through it, but [Birch] was really supportive. I’d hide behind somebody, but I stuck around. When the day was over, I just wanted to die.”
Birch saw something beyond Pfeiffer’s footwear—“the only way I was able to pick her out was because she was wearing these purple boots,” says Birch—and she ordered up a screen test. “She just ate up the camera.”
No one ever thought to test her with Maxwell Caulfield. “They were all in love with Maxwell,” Birch reveals. “Stigwood and Allan saw him onstage without his clothes.”
Stigwood even went so far as to tell Caulfield, “We will be making movies together forever!”
Ready to make his film debut, the young actor took his new status in stride when he described himself to Life magazine as “this year’s piece of pop meat.” He’d beaten not only Andy Gibb but Shaun Cassidy, Rex Smith, Rick Springfield, and, as Caulfield put it, “These guys [who] couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag.”
Pfeiffer won out over Pat Benatar, Andrea McArdle, Lisa Hartman, and Kristy McNichol. Allan liked to brag that he got Caulfield and Pfeiffer for a mere $100,000 apiece. Cheap, but also not bad for actors whose recent gigs were playing a two-hundred-seat theater in Greenwich Village and a cash register at Von’s supermarket. Then again, Allan didn’t see it that way, quoting the figure of $1.8 million for pairing those Blue Lagoon stars Brooke Shields and Chris Atkins if they reteamed.
It was an arduous audition process not only for
Pfeiffer and Caulfield but Judy Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft, who would essentially take over for Stockard Channing in the role of bad girl Paulette Rebchuck. Luft recalls, “I did my audition three times for all those suits at Paramount, including that crazy guy who died, Don Simpson, who never took off his sunglasses even though it was night. How many drugs have you taken, Don?” Although Allan said that he had the final say and that the auditioning process was a “mere formality,” most actors learned the hard way that “it wasn’t enough for Allan to say yes, because of the powers at Paramount,” says Luft.
Allan also promised his two new stars, Caulfield and Pfeiffer, that “you are going to be Elvis and Ann-Margret,” when instead they ended up, as Caulfield described it, “with my being Olivia Newton-John and Michelle got to be the Danny Zuko character.” He wanted to “sing rock and gyrate, except they never let me cut loose like Elvis,” for the simple reasons that Caulfield could not sing and gyrate.
Composer Louis St. Louis pinpointed the major casting dilemma. “I couldn’t get permission to dub their voices,” he said.
St. Louis’s bubblegum score didn’t require opera singers, but it did need charismatic performers, and the much hoped-for chemistry between Caulfield and Pfeiffer never materialized onscreen because, in part, it never existed off-screen. Caulfield described their relationship alternately as “Michelle and I got along infamously” and “The only thing we had in common was discussing our imminent stardom.”
Caulfield, who was married to Juliet Mills, an actress eighteen years his senior, couldn’t have been more different from the character he played in Entertaining Mr. Sloane. In some ways, Caulfield represented the yin-yang of Allan’s attraction to straight men.
“Allan liked that I was a family man,” says Caulfield. “He lent my wife and our daughter his beach house in Diamond Head. He threw it over to us for ten days, and there were all these fabulous houseboys running around at our beck and call.”
At the same time, Allan found himself sexually attracted to Caulfield. “He didn’t come on to you, but you could see it in his eyes,” says Caulfield. “They lit up.” And in that way, Caulfield’s role of a bisexual hustler in Entertaining Mr. Sloane was the perfect entrée to Allan’s id. He went for Caulfield’s onstage character in the Orton play but wound up getting his stay-at-home persona onscreen in Grease 2.
A frequent houseguest at Hilhaven Lodge, Patricia Birch saw up close and personal her host’s sex drive at work. “He had some pretty rough characters in and out of the house. I worried for him, and I told him so. That rough trade might be the reason he had so much security at Hilhaven,” she says, voicing a sentiment that other Allan Carr friends confirm.
Birch soon learned that Allan had problems controlling all his appetites, sexual and otherwise. His teeth wiring, for example, led to his jamming chopped liver through his braces. “It was such a tragic but brilliant portrait of addiction,” says his friend Joel Schumacher. “That’s what addiction looks like.”
Attempting to thwart Allan’s lethal intake of food, Birch took it upon herself to lock up the refrigerator that Allan kept at his bedside, and he retaliated by scolding her whenever she came home after hours. “Too late,” he would say. If Allan couldn’t take care of himself, he liked being “a mother hen” to others, says Birch. Or as Stockard Channing put it, somewhat more darkly, “He had this Mommie Dearest thing.”
eighteen
Big B’way Babies
Even though he didn’t return Maury Yeston’s phone calls, Allan never forgot about the musical La Cage aux folles as he readied Grease 2 for the cameras. Three years after Allen purchased those stage rights, he was back where he started—without a creative team or a director.
But not quite. Shortly before the Sam Cohn showdown, Allan put out feelers to a hungry composer. “Even though there was no deal, Allan knew he had Jerry Herman in his pocket,” says John Breglio.
The new La Cage team was, in many ways, the artful handiwork of two lovers, Fritz Holt and Barry Brown, who, as the latter put it, “had just come off three huge flops” back-to-back-to-back: Platinum, The Madwoman of Central Park West, and Wally’s Café. “They left us without the money for dinner,” says Brown. Allan, more than ready with his checkbook, gave them $10,000 to come aboard as executive producers of La Cage aux folles.
To jump-start Holt and Brown, he gave the producing duo a copy of Jay Presson Allen’s book. Neither man much liked The Queen and I; in fact, they pretty much hated it, and despite their financial straits, the two partners knew not to go forward with the project. No one needs a fourth Broadway flop to his credit.
Allan begged. “I need you, I need you,” he said. “How would you do it?”
Jerry Herman’s love of the material was now legend in the Broadway community, and a quickly arranged dinner with the Hello, Dolly! composer at Ted Hook’s Backstage restaurant on West 45th sealed the deal. Holt and Brown had seen Harvey Fierstein’s Off-Broadway hit Torch Song Trilogy, which presaged by at least a decade the hot topic of gay couples with children. They considered Fierstein a bold but logical choice to write the book about another fictional gay family, and Allan championed the pick. “Because it will increase our credibility in the gay community,” he said. Allan saw Torch Song Trilogy numerous times, and never forgot to leave his calling card. Whenever he visited the Actors’ Play-house in Greenwich Village, its house manager always commented on the number of Cristal bottles left behind in the aisles.
The wooing of Fierstein didn’t require arduous effort. Summoned to Allan’s St. Moritz penthouse, the author of Torch Song Trilogy wore a big down coat held together by gaffer’s tape and staples. Greeting him at the door, Holt and Brown presented the thirty-year-old writer-actor with two dozen red roses, while Allan positioned himself in the middle of the living room, surrounding himself with magnificent views of midtown Manhattan and Central Park. Better yet, Allan held a check for $10,000 and handed it to Fierstein with the greeting, “Go buy a decent coat.”
“The idea was to sweep me off my feet,” says Fierstein, “and they did.” They also made sure that he returned the two dozen red roses before leaving the St. Moritz.
At that meeting, Allan wanted to talk about La Cage aux folles, but he made one thing very clear to his new book writer. “We have the rights to the play, not the movie,” he said.
“That’s OK,” replied Fierstein, “since I haven’t seen the movie.”
Unlike most producers, Allan didn’t flinch at his book writer’s casual dismissal of the original source material. He liked Fierstein’s explanation that he loathed straight actors playing homosexual characters, and how he avoided any and all such efforts in plays and films. (Fierstein would, in time, be forced to make an exception with his first Broadway musical.)
With Fierstein aboard, it was Jerry Herman’s turn to pay a visit to Greenwich Village to see Torch Song Trilogy. He arrived with his Hello, Dolly! star Carol Channing, and the two of them honored the ritual of visiting Fierstein backstage after the performance. The actress wore white. “Like she was going to play tennis,” Fierstein recalls. “Even though it wasn’t summer.”
“Harvey!” she exclaimed in her raspy basso profundo. “Your play reminds me of a gay Raisin in the Sun.”
Fierstein didn’t hold this comment against her date, Jerry Herman.
When it came to picking a director, Brown thought back to his and Holt’s 1974 Broadway revival of Gypsy, starring Angela Lansbury and directed by Arthur Laurents. Laurents’s book for that bio musical about stripper Gypsy Rose Lee is oft cited as the gold standard.
Holt, however, blanched at the idea of working with Laurents on La Cage aux folles. After their success with the Gypsy revival, he and Brown tried to find a star actress to appear in Laurents’s new play Scream but came up empty-handed, and the two parties stopped speaking to each other. When Brown thought of Laurents to direct La Cage aux folles—“And who better to help Harvey write the book than the author of Gypsy?” said Brown—
his partner threw up his hands. “I want nothing to do with him,” said Holt, who promptly left for California on a business trip. Undaunted, Brown pursued the mercurial Arthur Laurents to Quogue, Long Island, where the writer-director summered on the ocean.
Laurents expressed both interest and no interest in the project. In characteristic form, he let go with his objections first. “If you want me to write La Cage aux folles, the answer is no. That’s not what I want.”
“Would you consider directing?” Brown asked.
“Do you have writers?” asked Laurents.
Brown mentioned Herman and Fierstein.
“Have you signed them?!” Laurents wanted to know.
“Yes.”
“Then yes, I’ll do it.”
And then, as if the Scream dispute had never happened, Laurents launched into a detailed discussion of designers and tech people he wanted to bring aboard the project.
Allan greeted the news with unbridled enthusiasm. “I love it, love it, love it,” he exclaimed.
Not everyone was so sure how much Arthur Laurents, Jerry Herman, and Harvey Fierstein would love it, and that included Jerry Herman. “It was a risky situation. Here we were, three people from three totally different worlds. We were so different, but Allan purposefully left us alone, which was good.”
The three men were gay and Jewish. Otherwise, they had nothing in common. The chemistry of the theater’s greatest contrarian (Laurents), gentlest man (Herman), and edgiest activist (Fierstein) threatened to make very dissonant music. (Fierstein called his two collaborators “the sunshine boy and the grump.”) Putting these three together would be Allan’s grandest gamble to date.
Over the next three months, Jerry pushed Harvey to be more Broadway and Harvey pushed Jerry to be more political, which left it to Arthur Laurents to play mediator. Allan almost always took Laurents’s side, making it three against one. He told Fierstein, “Listen to the old men. We’re making a musical here,” not a political treatise. Then again, Allan liked that Fierstein gave Herman’s show tunes some much needed edge. Of the three, Herman was probably the happiest, or at least, the most grateful, as the three of them set out to create a new show. Working on La Cage made him feel like he’d been given a second chance. “I’d been brooding about losing it. It seemed like a miracle that this was happening,” says the composer, who hadn’t had a big Broadway hit for almost twenty years.
Party Animals Page 19