“Not an easy task,” said the show’s marketing director, Jon Wilner. While some participants—namely, Laurents—found Allan to be “tasteless,” Wilner called La Cage’s producer “one of the smartest people I knew,” as well as one of the most unapologetically gay. Or, as Wilner describes him, “Allan was very flamboyant long before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” With La Cage aux folles, Allan wanted to push the envelope. In Wilner’s expert opinion, there might have been misjudgments, like Allan’s desire to mess with the Palace Theater. “Let’s paint it pink!” Allan exclaimed.
To which Jerry Herman replied, “Over my dead body!”
Or, as Herman put it more circumspectly years later, “Allan’s flamboyance and his wanting to be a P. T. Barnum did cause some conflicts with regard to tasteless advertising.” Allan, according to Herman, displayed a dual personality: “He was inherently shy and uncomfortable in certain aspects of how he looked and acted. There was a reticence that he covered by doing the opposite and being flamboyant.”
The show’s publicist, Shirley Herz, noticed this personality split. “Before we walked into a room, Allan would be absolutely shaking. He’d take my hand. And then we would walk into the room and he was the consummate showman, totally in control,” she recalls.
Herz, a Broadway veteran, feared Allan from afar. But once she met him, she found “if you talked back to him, he respected you. If he saw he could bulldoze you, you were dead.”
If, in fact, Allan followed Laurents’s edict that the producer’s world ended at the orchestra rail, then by extension it swept across the orchestra seats and out the front doors to the street. And it was this larger domain that Allan claimed with a vengeance: The overall print and TV campaign belonged to him, and he had no reason to disguise what he wanted to sell with La Cage aux folles. Allan was selling drag queens and, by extension, himself as a caftan-wearing man. If Grease and Where the Boys Are celebrated his youth, La Cage embodied everything he wanted to say about his life as an adult. Again, as with Can’t Stop the Music, he was that accidental gay activist.
To brand the show with one image, marketing director Jon Wilner eschewed the usual Broadway illustrators and instead went with a Saks Fifth Avenue window dresser named Bill Berta, who promptly delivered four sketches. Allan loved them. “They were essentially the Mame poster twenty years later. La Cage was a sister to Mame,” says Wilner. In that historic 1966 poster, also designed by Berta, a caricature of Angela Lansbury came whirlwinded in a lavish swirl of a costume, with an oversized trumpet jutting from her left hand. For La Cage, Allan liked the portrait of a similar bigger-than-life “female” figure swathed in what could be construed as a gigantic feather boa, and he suggested that “she” be winking at the viewer. “Because if she’s winking,” Allan explained, “we’re in on the joke with her. We’re laughing with her. We’re in on it.” He also suggested that a sailor’s tattoo decorate “her” exposed shoulder. (The tattoo remained, but the wink got cut from the final poster.) Herman also loved the she-male image, which came to be known as “Berta,” an homage to the poster designer.
But Laurents loathed “Berta.”
“There were horrible fights between Arthur and Allan on advertising,” says Wilner. “Allan wanted it flamboyant. Arthur wanted it to be mainstream. Arthur wanted it straight,” which translated into no images of men dressed up in women’s clothes. “Drag turned me off,” Laurents had maintained, and “drag in the theatre wasn’t to my taste, either.”
Allan insisted the show’s campaign play up its transvestite roots. “Arthur met his match with Allan Carr and Allan won,” says Wilner, who went ahead and featured Berta in a full-page ad in the New York Times. The first day it ran, the line to the box office snaked around the corner of the Palace Theater. “The artwork worked, it clicked,” says Wilner.
Laurents did not agree. “Look at the ads for La Cage. It’s a carnival,” he complained. And he blamed Allan. “It makes sense he would do that stuff. He had this childish idea of Hollywood glamour. That was his dream. He would love to have lived in a Busby Berkeley movie.”
Laurents agreed with Jerry Herman that Allan was “a big kid,” but not in a positive way. “Allan was a boy. He was not a man,” Laurents offers. Boy or man, Allan fought like a pro, and he got what he wanted in Bill Berta’s campy drag-queen image (complete with shoulder tattoo), despite Laurents’s objections.
At last, La Cage was ready for out-of-town previews in Boston. “Oh, conservative Boston!” moaned Fierstein. He had to wonder why these experienced Broadway hands wanted to open a show about drag queens in notoriously uptight Beantown. It was the city, after all, that coined the phrase “banned in Boston.”
twenty-two
Mickey & Judy Time
With La Cage ready to pop, Allan flew back to Los Angeles to meet and congratulate his Where the Boys Are ’84 ensemble. In many ways, the four actresses in Boys were a precursor of the all-femme chemistry that made hits of The Golden Girls and later Sex and the City. There was Lisa Hartman’s ultrasmart Jennie, Lynn-Holly Johnson’s sex-crazed Laurie, Wendy Schaal’s conservative Sandra, and Lorna Luft’s sardonic Carole. Russell Todd and Howard McGillin would play their boyfriends.
With the actors’ deals yet to be finalized, Allan decided to throw a party for them at Hilhaven. He wanted to introduce the various cast members to each other and also to dream out loud among them. The actors had their questions, too. After months of waiting, McGillin wanted to know what he’d be paid for his reduced gig in Where the Boys Are.
That answer came as soon as Allan took center stage by the Hilhaven pool to reveal, “This movie is going to be like Mickey and Judy putting on a show in a barn.” Although no one was swimming, everyone’s heart sank into the pool like a plaster lawn ornament. As McGillin described the general feeling of deflated hopes, “We all realized then that this was going to be a down-low budget. We were going to be working for not very much money.”
Eventually, the actors did sign—for not very much money. Most of them did their signature writing in an agent’s office or were mailed a copy of the contract. Russell Todd’s big moment was cause for somewhat more celebration since Allan insisted that the actor return in person to Hilhaven Lodge. The two men sat at opposite ends of the long oak table in the dining room, and Allan watched intently as the young actor signed the contract. Allan almost had to shout as he stared him down. “So tell me,” he began once the papers had been signed. “Are you gay or straight?”
“I’m straight,” replied Todd.
“Thank God!” exclaimed Allan, clapping his hands. “We’re going to get along great!”
The celebration didn’t stop there. Over dinner at Mortons restaurant, Allan presented his fledgling star with a black velvet box. Inside, Todd found a beautiful gold bracelet, which, to please his benefactor, he immediately wrapped around his left wrist. Over his mushroom risotto, Allan enjoyed showing off his newest talent acquisition to everyone who stopped by the centrally located table. Later, when it came time to speed away in Allan’s Cadillac, Todd noticed that his left wrist felt a few pounds lighter. He looked down.
“Allan, the bracelet! It’s missing!” he gasped.
A quick tour of Mortons did not produce the errant bracelet. “Don’t worry about it,” Allan said. “It’s insured. I’m getting you another one tomorrow.”
Todd remembers feeling “two inches tall.” But the following day, true to his word, Allan presented him with an identical gold bracelet and an invitation to Century City to see a screening of the new big Oscar contender, Richard Attenborough’s biopic Gandhi, about the great pacifist leader of India. Both men were excited to see the film that many in the industry were calling a shoo-in for the Academy Award.
If Todd was impressed, the film left Allan downright shaken. The young actor couldn’t help but notice that tears covered Allan’s face when the lights came up in the theater. “It was a very emotionally moving film. But why are you crying?” Todd asked.
&nbs
p; Allan sobbed, “That’s not why I’m crying.”
“Why then?”
“Because I know I’ll never make a movie that good!”
La Cage aux folles rolled into Boston on a June heat wave. But the producers’ perspiration had less to do with the temperature than with the subject matter of their show. Transvestites in Beantown? That marriage made everyone nervous. One of the show’s producers, Martin Richards, thought, “We’re going to Boston with that orthodox Catholic population and open a show about a drag queens there!?”
Regardless of the subject matter, Allan charmed the town. “He set up a piano in the middle of Boston Commons and everyone sang ‘The Best of Times’ and we got the key to the city,” says Richards.
Arthur Laurents was a little more philosophical. “There wasn’t a choice with Boston. It was the only place we had,” he says of theater availability. The other choice was Washington, D.C. “Not exactly a liberal town either,” he observes.
As the musical loaded its sets into Boston’s Colonial Theater, Allan basked in the venue’s rich history. Built in 1900, the Colonial opened its doors with a touring company of Ben-Hur that featured chariots and live horses onstage. “Even I wouldn’t go that far!” exclaimed Allan. His show went so well in its first preview at the Colonial that it had to be canceled.
As Laurents and set designer David Mitchell envisioned it, La Cage aux folles would open with two turntables that caused the streets and townhouses of Saint-Tropez to revolve before parting to reveal the marquee lights of the club La Cage aux Folles. It was to be a wildly technical opening to what was, at its heart, a rather intimate musical about a family. “Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors,” says Laurents.
In its very first performance before a paying audience, La Cage aux folles opened with that spin of the turntables, but instead of every element gliding together in a beautifully orchestrated symphony of movement, the various pieces crashed into each other to resemble nothing more than a bunch of painted flats.
The paying audience got more, as well as less, than it expected that first night in Boston. After about two minutes of stage time, the big red curtain at the Colonial Theater fell to the stage. “There was no way we go could on with the show that night,” says Barry Brown.
Fortunately, on the following night, after a long tech rehearsal, the stuccoed walls and red-tiled roofs of Saint-Tropez danced together to create an illusion that the audience was peering out a big picture window at the French Riviera.
Allan and his creative team sat in the back of the Colonial. He noticed a typical Bay Area couple in their seventies. He had white hair and wore a blue blazer; she had a purple rinse in her hair. They probably knew the subject matter of La Cage aux folles, having seen the movie, but they were nervous and fidgeting in their seats. The movies are so much light play on an inanimate screen. The theater is in-your-face, and here Mr. and Mrs. Middle America were about to witness real live drag queens only a few feet away. The couple’s body language read stiff. They weren’t comfortable. Then, at the end of the show’s first musical number, “We Are What We Are,” in which the male dancers in female attire pulled off their wigs, Allan held his breath. So did about 1,500 other people.
Near the end of Act I, Gene Barry began his ballad, which he sings to George Hearn. It’s called “Song on the Sand,” and it’s a love song about memory, about young lovers walking on a beach, about two guys holding hands.
“My heart was in my mouth. I stopped breathing,” Jerry Herman recalls, fearing what the old couple in front of him might do. Instead of bolting, the man took his wife’s hand and held it, and a few more bars into “Song on the Sand,” they put their heads together.
Herman called it “the single most exciting moment” in the whole series of previews in Boston. “The song reminded them of themselves, and they laughed and their whole body language changed—it was loose and comfortable—and they stood up at the end of the show and shouted.”
It’s also the moment that Allan knew he had a hit. He wasn’t the only one. “They had to hold me down!” Harvey Fierstein says of seeing the musical with its first paying audience. “People were leaning against each other, we were beside ourselves. It was a very exciting thing. We’d all come from different places. They hadn’t seen it,” he says of Laurents, Herman, and Allan. “I’d seen it a lot, but not in a Broadway show. I’d written six shows Off-Off-Broadway, all musicals with gay characters singing love songs. But to see it on a big stage? America is about money. It’s a capitalistic country. If you make money, that makes you American.”
Allan came off the high of La Cage’s first out-of-town preview by taking an early-morning flight to Fort Lauderdale to visit Where the Boys Are, which had already begun on-location production. Wendy Schaal compared the days and nights of filming to a “slumber party,” but when Allan arrived for a visit, the vibe changed to something less high-schoolish. “Oh, Uncle Allan is coming!” someone would announce, giving them about twenty-four hours or less to prepare.
Sometimes Allan surprised everyone and showed up unannounced. After La Cage’s success in Boston, he arrived well lubricated at the cast’s hotel. They spotted him in the lobby, where he was trying to cash a check at the reception desk. “He was far gone, really drunk,” says Howard McGillin. Allan turned to say hello to his actors when, holding a big wad of cash, he dropped to the floor. “Allan passed out, and all this money was floating in slow motion in the air.” The young actors looked at each other and gasped, in unison, “Oh my God, this is soooooo Hollywood!”
The next day, completely recovered from his in-flight debauchery, Allan rounded up “my kids,” as he called them, and crammed everybody into his rented red Cadillac convertible. On previous outings with Allan, the cast had accepted the key to the city of Fort Lauderdale and, on another trip, they did a photo op with some dolphins at the local water park. What would it be today?
“Today we’re doing research. I’m taking you back to school!” Allan announced. He was to receive an honorary degree at the College of Boca Raton at the commencement exercises for the class of 1983, and it was an event he had no intention of missing. As he would tell the assembled students, faculty, and alums of Boca Raton, “I never graduated from college, so this means so much to me!” And he meant it, even though the degree was coming from the College of Boca Raton, which, in Spanish, means “mouth of the rat.”
It could be fun making an Allan Carr movie. It could also be life-threatening.
One night, Allan departed the hotel and ran into Wendy Schaal. “Oh, there’s one of my girls, one of my stars!” he announced to no one in particular. And scooping the petite brunette into his arms, Allan tried to maneuver a deep dip, as if the two of them were Astaire and Rogers doing the hustle. But his weight and her weight overtook him and he proceeded to crash into a bed of succulents and gray pebbles. The next day the cast presented Schaal with a specially made T-shirt. It read: “Allan Carr fell on top of me and I lived to tell about it.”
If Allan treated his young cast like royalty, they were all mere dauphins compared to Russell Todd, who had the advantage of claiming Allan as his manager. Where Howard McGillin had once been given the rush, now it was Todd’s turn. Allan couldn’t help but look at him and announce, “You’re a star. How do you like your new life so far?”
Todd smiled and nodded. “It’s pretty good,” he said.
There were benefits to being Russell Todd on the set of Where the Boys Are. As Allan did with so many straight men, he showed special concern when Todd experienced family problems and needed to take a long weekend to visit his wife, Kim, back in Albany, New York. The actor approached Allan with trepidation. Where the Boys Are was not a luxurious shoot; each day the production clocked in a great deal of film time. Allan brushed aside all of Todd’s concerns. “You’re sick for the next two days. I’ll fly you on Pan Am,” Allan announced, cashing in on his La Cage aux folles connections with the airline. “We’ll film your scenes later.”
; Yes, it was good being Allan’s favorite.
twenty-three
Here Come the Cagelles!
The success of that second preview at the Colonial Theater turned out not to be a fluke. The positive audience reaction to the show only grew with the following performances, and by opening night in Boston, La Cage aux folles had emerged, as entertainment confections go, as American as apple pie with gruyere cheese on top. “Allan was just overjoyed with the success of the show,” says Jerry Herman. “He had been through some rough times. Because of Can’t Stop the Music, his reputation in Hollywood was a little soiled. He needed for his own self-esteem to do something successful and be the captain of the ship that didn’t sink.”
It helped, too, that, much to everyone’s surprise, Gene Barry came alive in front of an audience. There had been worries in rehearsals that the former TV star would never give a Broadway-worthy performance. The Boston run dispelled those concerns. “Gene turned on in Boston,” says Jon Wilner. “Then we knew it would be OK.” Up to that point, Arthur Laurents had been a difficult taskmaster. “He didn’t trust Gene Barry to have that green light come on. That’s the way Arthur works. He’ll break you down,” Wilner adds.
Both Allan and Barry suffered from that West Coast thing—a Hollywood species out of water in the Broadway pool. “Gene wanted to be the star, have people kiss his ass,” says actor John Weiner, who played Barry’s son in the show. “But nobody did. He had to be one of us.”
Worse, from the very first rehearsals, the TV actor was not respected by George Hearn, who played his stage lover. “Gene felt it, but George never showed it onstage,” says Weiner.
Party Animals Page 22