Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  Allan put only one major question to Herman when he signed on. “How do you feel about putting these characters in New Orleans?” he asked, referring to Jay Presson Allen’s book for La Cage aux folles.

  No way, said Herman. “They should be set in Saint-Tropez. It’s a flavor that’s crucial to the piece.”

  Herman, Fierstein, and Laurents bonded over their shared opinion of Allen’s book. “I got to the first stage direction: ‘The décor is old faggot,’” Laurents said of the original Queen and I script. “I stopped reading.”

  In other words, the three men were starting from scratch.

  nineteen

  Diller’s Curse

  As the creative team began its work on La Cage aux folles in New York City, Allan spent the winter of 1982 in Hollywood watching over his Grease 2 production, which, at $11.2 million, boasted nearly twice the budget of the original. Paramount was also in production with Star Trek 2, and callers to the studio’s press department were sometimes greeted with the line, “Paramount Sequels. May I help you?” Everyone thought that Grease 2, sequel to the most successful movie musical ever, would demolish Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn at the box office. (Instead, the Star Trek sequel did nearly $100 million worldwide on its $11-million budget, down from the original’s $43-million budget.)

  Grease 2 began as the classier of the two fluff projects, even if it was filming not on a Hollywood soundstage but the abandoned Excelsior High School in Norwalk, which clocked in as a twenty-minute drive in good traffic from downtown L.A. That distance was by design, since Paramount’s Barry Diller personally banned Allan from the Melrose Avenue lot.

  “Barry Diller was not happy with Allan Carr,” says Carol Green, the unit publicist on Grease 2. Since it was her first gig for Paramount, she didn’t know why the two men loathed each other. It only mattered that Diller wanted “the caftan-wearing producer” nowhere near him or his studio. The Paramount honcho also had his eye on an upcoming Grease 2 profile in the Los Angeles Times. “Barry Diller issued an edict that if Allan got a quote in that article, everybody under [Diller] at the studio would be fired,” says Green.

  It fell to Green to deal with the Los Angeles Times writer Paul Rosenfield. “It was so absurd, but it was my job to keep that [Allan Carr] quote out of the newspaper, and I managed to do that by appealing to Paul,” says Green. “He wanted to remain cooperative with Paramount.”

  Rosenfield, one of the higher-profile and lower-maintenance journalists (until his death by suicide in 1993), eschewed the Diller/Carr wars in his reporting, and instead focused on movie trivia. Who among the Times’s readers knew that the residents of Norwalk, California, hadn’t seen this much movie activity since Lana Turner and John Garfield spent an afternoon filming there at the local train depot for The Postman Always Rings Twice back in 1945? And since the name Allan Carr couldn’t be mentioned in the article, Rosenfield was prevented from reporting on little idiosyncrasies like Allan’s demand that his personal assistants check the toilet to issue their opinion on the kidney stones he passed each day. The omission of Allan’s name also forced Rosenfield to ignore what was fast becoming a stylistic flourish in all Allan Carr- produced films. Allan insisted that Grease 2, like Grease and Can’t Stop the Music, climax with a big party onscreen. For his latest opus, he fashioned a multinight shoot around a big poolside luau, in which several bikers literally crash the high school party by performing Evel Knievel stunts over the open water.

  “The weather was really cold and we had to be in the water,” Lorna Luft recalls. “To make matters worse, they put ice in our mouth so that our breath wouldn’t show.”

  To keep everyone warm, the caterers served chili at three in the morning. “Not a good choice,” says Green. “It was an economic choice rather than a socially conscious choice.”

  For five days, Allan played pasha as Patricia Birch tried to direct the choreographed mayhem of the party finale. He adored his director and showed it by occasionally letting her know, “Hey, Pat, we wanted Marge Champion but we had to settle for you.” Allan let Birch, unlike Nancy Walker, be the director, and for five days he rested poolside, out of shot in his big raccoon coat and “loving every minute of the boys in their short grass skirts and the little flip-flop that covered their penis,” says Green. “Allan was so happy to be there, even though it must have been thirty degrees.”

  The party was fun while it lasted, but in the end, all films must be released. At a preview screening, Birch gave Allan the news. “We’re in trouble,” she said. “They’re all waiting for John, Olivia, and the others to show up. And we’ve only got Didi Conn,” who makes a brief appearance as Frenchy in the sequel.

  The bad omen delivered on its promise at Grease 2’s world premiere at Hollywood’s Pacific Cinerama Dome. A relic of the futuristic 1960s, the theater looks like a spaceship, but instead of Steven Spielberg aliens, Allan Carr popped out of the limousine that night on Sunset and Vine. Perhaps Barry Diller, who was MIA that evening, did put a curse on Grease 2, because no sooner had Allan emerged curbside than he saw his composer of the hour, Louis St. Louis, and gasped out loud. Both men were wearing the same Kenzo sweaters! Allan nearly turned around to go home.

  “Would Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin wear the same outfit to a premiere?” he admonished St. Louis.

  Then there was the cut-rate party nearby at the Hollywood Bowling Club on El Centro. Plagued by his kidney stones and other maladies, Allan had left it to Paramount to produce the premiere party. Now, stuck at a bowling alley, he passed on the greasy burgers and hero sandwiches, and wondered why the DJ Phast Phreddie was playing Chubby Checkers’s “The Twist” and Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” instead of the Grease 2 soundtrack.

  A reporter asked Allan if he bowled. “Bowl? Sure I bowl,” he cracked. “It’s the only thing I could do in high school.” But that night he didn’t bowl or eat or even smile very much. “Where’s Michelle?” Allan wanted to know.

  Still bruised by his fashion faux pas, Louis St. Louis kept his distance from Allan and instead tried to chat up the film’s other producer. “There’s no way I can thank you for this opportunity,” St. Louis told Robert Stigwood.

  Stigwood, who had imbibed much that evening, merely smiled. “Oh, yes there is!” he replied.

  Allan tried to put a positive spin on his new movie. “If Grease 2 earns half as much money as our first Grease earned, we’ll all be very happy,” he told well-wishers.

  But no one would be happy. Paramount released the sequel against an oddly titled movie by Steven Spielberg, and immediately regretted the contest. “E.T. creamed us,” says Maxwell Caulfield. Despite the stiff competition, the actor took much blame for the failure of Grease 2, and Allan was there ready to give credit whether credit was due or not.

  Before and during the shoot, he adored Caulfield, and even lent him his Hawaii home as soon as the film finished production. But just as Allan came to reexamine his lust for Steve Guttenberg after a screening or two of Can’t Stop the Music, the same fate befell Maxwell Caulfield when Grease 2 tanked at the box office. Allan told friends that it was Paramount, not he, that wanted Caulfield, and it was Paramount that objected to his first choice. “Tim Hutton came, sang, and danced in my living room. He had done Guys and Dolls in college, and that’s who I wanted and preferred. But they didn’t consider him sexy enough,” Allan said postrelease.

  And there were other apocryphal tales. “Another prospect came over and, like Timothy Hutton, sang and danced in my living room. He just oozed stardom,” Allan revealed. “If I had had my way, it would have been Tom Cruise and Michelle Pfeiffer.”

  Those stories eventually reached their desired target. Juliet Mills heard them from her friend Joan Collins, who heard them from her friend Valerie Perrine: “Allan is over Maxwell with a vengeance.”

  twenty

  Make It a Croissant

  Back in New York City, La Cage aux folles’s triumvirate of Jerry Herman, Arthur Laurents, and Harvey Fierst
ein held to a disciplined regimen, meeting once a week at the songwriter’s townhouse on East 61st Street. Years earlier, Herman had converted the brownstone’s fourth floor into one large floor-through studio. It was a spectacular room, especially for space-restricted Manhattan. A balcony overlooked a small garden in the back, and skylights bathed the room in an afternoon sun that often blazed against the cool, neutral tones of the walls. Herman called them “stone and mushroom,” which he felt emphasized the bright, primary colors of the posters from his tuners Mack and Mabel, Mame, and Hello, Dolly! which decorated the walls.

  Each week, Laurents made his critique as Fierstein read a new scene, and Herman, in turn, sang whatever song he’d written for the material that Fierstein had given them the week before. Herman did his own singing and piano playing, seated at a huge Mason & Hamlin grand piano, which had been hoisted up four flights and lifted through the front window of the studio. On especially chilly afternoons, Herman’s housekeeper, Damian, lit a fire in the fireplace, and otherwise busied himself serving home-cooked meals as the three men worked on La Cage aux folles. “Damian kept us well fed and up to date with the latest gossip from Broadway and Hollywood,” says Fierstein.

  Laurents and Herman would suggest a bit of stage business or dialogue, but if it was terribly clever, alarm bells went off in Fierstein’s head. “Is that from the movie?” he shot back. He continued to pride himself on never having seen the movie La Cage aux folles, from which Herman and Laurents had, on occasion, inadvertently pilfered. Fierstein feared violating the movie copyright, not to mention his own prickly sense of originality. When it came to guarding against plagiarism, “I became the arbiter of that!” says Fierstein. Laurents admits, “It got ticklish, but we never infringed.”

  Regarding arguments with his director, Fierstein claims, “I only walked out of Jerry’s house twice.” It was, all in all, a quick pregnancy. At the end of three months, Allan decided it was time to hear and see something. “I’ve been patient,” he told them.

  At that very first reading, Herman played the piano and sang, while Laurents and Fierstein divvied up reading the roles. It was an extraordinarily small audience: Allan attended with his executive producers, Barry Brown and Fritz Holt, and his lawyer, John Breglio. “He wanted to keep a tight control on things until he felt [the show] was ready to be exposed. Which was very smart of him,” says Brown.

  Sometime during Act II of the reading, Allan began to hyperventilate, and it was genuinely feared by those present that their obese producer was suffering a heart attack. But Allan waved them away. “I’m all right,” he whispered dramatically. When they finished the reading, instead of joining in the applause of a dozen hands slapping together, Allan escaped to the nearest sofa to sprawl himself out on the pillows. Then he smiled a beatific smile. “He was in love with the show from the very beginning and never lost any of that enthusiasm,” says Herman.

  “His excitement was palpable,” says Brown.

  After extensive jiggering on the book, Laurents deemed the show ready for a series of backers’ auditions for potential producers, major investors, and the three big Broadway theater chains: the Shuberts, Jujamcyn, and the Nederlanders. Again, these subsequent readings were casual affairs, held in Herman’s top-floor studio, but eventually Gotham gossip doyenne Liz Smith got wind of the soirees and wrote that they were “the in place to be” in New York City, and she went on to give a long tally of theater celebrities who’d been invited.

  Despite the positive feedback, La Cage aux folles, the musical, remained an extraordinarily fluid venture. “We made it up as we went along at the backers’ auditions,” says Laurents.

  At one such reading, a potential investor asked the director, “Why aren’t there any girls in the chorus line?” This money person wanted girls in the Broadway chorus line, since it hadn’t occurred to him that La Cage aux folles was set in a male drag club in Saint-Tropez.

  Laurents thought fast. “Well, two of the Cagelles are girls,” he blurted out. “It’s up to the audience to decide who are the real girls. They won’t know until the curtain call when the real boys tear off their wigs.”

  The potential investor considered it. “That’s great!” Herman loved the idea and so did Allan because, actually, it was his idea, stolen from the drag show at Finocchio’s two years earlier.

  Fierstein, for his part, hated mixing the sexes in La Cage aux folles. “They sold it to me as ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we make the audience guess which are men and which are women?’ It was a silly cop-out,” he says. “They were so scared of the material. I was openly gay. I didn’t ever consider making apologies for what we were doing.”

  “Apologies” is a strong word. Curiously, Fierstein was the only one among the principal creatives who dared mention out loud that La Cage aux folles would be the first Broadway musical to feature two male lovers. “Allan never mentioned it. No one,” says Brown. “It was always an entertainment.”

  Herman agrees. “We were looking to do an entertainment that had something to say, which is very different from a message piece.” It’s what Allan wanted. “And it’s why it worked,” Herman adds. “It was never a piece of activism, even with Harvey involved.”

  Laurents, however, worried about the controversial, groundbreaking material. “The subject of two men living together is still dicey,” he said many years later. “Americans still do not grasp two men living together; they do not want them buying property next door.”

  Despite Liz Smith’s efforts to tout La Cage aux folles as Broadway’s next big hit, it remained a tough sell. “The money didn’t walk in the door,” says Allan’s friend Manny Kladitis, a Broadway manager-producer. “I don’t know if it was the gay theme, but he didn’t have an easy time raising money.”

  To please skittish investors, who blanched at an all-male chorus line, two women were cast as Cagelles despite Fierstein’s vehement protests. (Fierstein jettisoned the concept for the 2004 Broadway revival to make it an all-male chorus line.) Otherwise, the backers’ auditions delivered only one major potential blow to the creative team of three.

  In the hurly-burly world of Broadway, the show that opens is often the show that can secure a theater, and in the Gotham landscape there are only a dozen venues, at most, that are large enough to house a musical on the scale that Allan envisioned. One organization, the Shuberts, owns half the Broadway real estate. It’s a power that gives them the strength to pull strings—strings long and twisted enough to demand significant changes in a show’s makeup, both creatively and financially.

  “I’d heard that the Shuberts didn’t want me as director,” says Laurents. “They told Allan if they got Michael Bennett, they would give him a theater.” Bennett, although he’d suffered a disappointment with the box office bomb Ballroom during the 1978-1979 season, remained a darling of the Shuberts. His hit musical A Chorus Line was only halfway through its fifteen-year run at the organization’s cornerstone Shubert Theater on West 44th Street when La Cage aux folles began its series of backers’ auditions. “Allan hadn’t produced on Broadway before,” observes Laurents, who felt he had reason to be worried about his rather tenuous position with this nascent musical. “Allan used an awful lot of coke. You never could tell when he was in his right mind. But for some reason he was extremely loyal to me. He said no to the Shuberts.”

  Allan instead went with the Nederlander Organization, part owners of the venerable Palace Theater, famed for having housed Judy Garland’s 1951 Broadway debut engagement, as well as such full-scale musicals as Sweet Charity and Applause.

  The two men, Allan and Laurents, didn’t exactly like each other but they shared an understanding. It was one that the old pro, Laurents, brokered with the new kingmaker on the block, Allan. “Your territory is from the back of the house to the orchestra rail, and my territory is from the orchestra rail to the backstage,” Laurents told him. And Allan honored Laurents’s word. “Once he knew the protocol of the theater, such as, the producer doesn’t talk to the a
ctors, he never broke it.”

  Occasionally, Allan did—very diplomatically—make a directorial suggestion.

  “There’s the scene in the second act where Georges is trying to make Albin a man,” Laurents recalls. The moment requires Albin to pick up a piece of toast and butter it with a nonlimp flick of the wrist, which he has great difficulty mastering. Allan carefully approached his autocratic director. “Instead of toast, make it a croissant,” he offered.

  Laurents liked the idea. “It was his penis,” Laurents says of the croissant. “It was funny.”

  But not all of Allan’s ideas found a receptive audience with the show’s creatives, and in time, the three men developed a nickname for their tyro producer. They called him Flo, short for “menstrual flow,” since they never knew what mood they might find him in. Even in Allan’s company, they could be heard to remark, “Did you hear what Flo said today?” Allan had no idea what they were talking about.

  After a few more backers’ auditions, Allan flew Fritz Holt and Laurents to his house in Honolulu for a more relaxed powwow. Here was one of Diamond Head’s more famous houses, called Rakuen, which means “paradise” in Japanese. The two-story house, which Allan nicknamed Surfhaven and purchased for $5.7 million, had been built with an abundance of silk-paneled doors, or shojis, in nineteenth-century in Japan and reassembled in Hawaii in 1912. The grounds’ arching stone bridge, waterfall, and koi pond lived up to the house’s original name, “paradise,” and even though every plant and architectural piece had been transported across the Pacific Ocean, that strict attention to Asian detail didn’t stop Allan from hanging a large crystal chandelier amidst the shojis in the living room. He also added a few throw pillows, which were a gift from his neighbor down the road, Clare Booth Luce—one of them read NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED—who had needlepointed them herself. Also strategically placed about the house were photos of Surfhaven guests, people like Robert Redford and Doris Duke and Bruce Jenner at his wedding, which took place on the grounds, and John Travolta, who stayed there so often that Allan put up a copper plaque on one of the bedroom doors. It read THE JOHN TRAVOLTA ROOM.