Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  If Goya defined Allan Carr’s fate, his next project was the one to seal it.

  twenty-six

  What He Prayed For

  Ready to give his joints a rest after climbing the Hollywood Bowl, Allan tried to prepare himself emotionally, as well as physically, for yet another trip to Cedars-Sinai, this time to replace his delinquent hip with a hunk of plastic. The operation had been scheduled for October 17 when, three days earlier, Allan received a phone call from the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Richard Kahn wanted to meet in person, and since Allan remained immobile in Beverly Hills, the Academy honcho agreed to come to his house on the hill. Kahn didn’t say much over the phone, but Allan suspected that he wanted him to work his magic on the Governor’s Ball that followed the Oscar telecast. Perhaps the “Broadway at the Bowl” gala sparked Kahn’s memory. Eleven years earlier, Allan had produced the post-Oscars ball, and it won him universal raves. Then again, in his short phone conversation, the Academy president never mentioned the Bowl event, and for good reason. “I didn’t go,” reports Kahn, who had other, more important things to talk over with Allan on that October morning.

  Allan prided himself in being shockproof, but poolside at Hilhaven, Kahn offered him his ultimate dream: to produce the 1989 Oscars telecast. Short and much more than sweet, the meeting left Allan elated, and if he was momentarily speechless, he recovered himself enough a few hours later to tell the Los Angeles Times, “Dick came over to see me for fifteen minutes, and asked me.” Allan didn’t play coy with Kahn. He didn’t have to think about it. He accepted the assignment on the spot with blunt delight. Like any other awards-show devotee, Allan had been mouthing his acceptance speech to himself every Oscar night since he listened to the 1940s radiocasts in his pj’s back in Highland Park. Now the night, if not the statue itself, would be his to control and, in essence, own. Allan grabbed the opportunity because he wanted it. He wanted to prove that he could still produce—if not a movie, then Hollywood’s biggest night. And more than he wanted it, he needed it.

  At such defining moments in life, a man of Allan Carr’s unbridled enthusiasm never stops to recall the truism about the ill fortune that comes to those who get what they pray for. If he ever did stop to think, Allan would have said that such reservations were for losers. Here was a task he’d prepared for his entire life, even before he bestowed his beloved Poopsie Awards on undeserving no-talents at Lake Forest College. Not for a moment did Allan want Kahn to believe him when he said, “I can’t believe you picked me for the show. I never thought anyone would ask me to do it.” What he really thought was that someone should have asked him years ago, because Allan had talked about wanting to produce the Oscars ever since he took over the Academy’s Governor’s Ball in 1978.

  “My wife still talks about it being the greatest of the Governor’s Balls,” Kahn told Allan. And it was the truth. The black-and-white décor that year transformed the tent in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion into an elegant Rainbow Room-style nightclub, complete with a revolving dance floor. The stunningly attired venue induced a number of celebrities to spend more than a few obligatory minutes there, as had been the custom for years. Allan even upped the gourmet level that year by having individual one-ounce containers of Petrossian caviar and chilled Stokskayvia vodka at each place setting. More important, he took the edge off the Oscar competition and delivered the coup of publicly congratulating each and every Oscar nominee, not just the winners. “It was a very generous touch,” says Kahn.

  Regardless of his past association with the Academy, Allan Carr was a different, if not downright out-of-the-box, choice to produce the Oscars telecast. In previous years, Kahn played it safe, making his picks from the old establishment pool of Hollywood—men like West Side Story director Robert Wise and Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen and producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., whose father practically invented the film industry. Allan was younger than any of those men, he was openly gay, and more significant, he wasn’t a buttoned-down guy like Goldwyn, Wise, or Donen.

  “I picked Allan because he was a great showman,” Kahn says.

  Unspoken was the fact that Allan didn’t have another gig at that moment in his career. Sherry Lansing explains why it’s so tough to pick an Oscar producer: “It’s sort of a thankless job, producing the Oscars. You don’t get paid and it takes up a lot of time,” says the former Paramount CEO.

  With Goya a no-go and Allan’s hip under repair, the project seemed predestined. Or as Allan told Kahn, “This will be a nice thing to do in my recovery period, when I can’t climb the stairs that lead from my house.”

  Allan and Kahn spoke for only fifteen minutes at their first meeting, but Allan knew precisely what to do with the 1989 Oscars. “I want to bring glamour back to the awards,” he told the Academy president. “Women watch the Oscar show to see what the women are wearing.” For Allan, it was an occasion for style to trump substance, as if the latter were ever in danger of rising phoenix-like at an awards show.

  It’s doubtful if Goldwyn, Wise, or Donen thought of fashion as their first point of business, but then none of them was a five-foot-six 300-pound homosexual whose closet contained over 100 designer caftans and enough women’s jewelry to sink Cleopatra’s barge. Kahn wouldn’t have picked Allan Carr if he didn’t want to shake things up, and that included the ratings of the telecast, which had fallen over the years to an all-time low in 1988. Allan was, first and foremost, a showman, and like any great showman, he did what they all do when embarking on a major enterprise. He hired a personal publicist.

  Linda Dozoretz had already worked with Allan on an ill-fated Lana Turner movie, based on the book Detour, by Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, who had stabbed and killed the actress’s paramour Johnny Stompanato a few decades earlier. Even for a seasoned Hollywood flack like Dozoretz, Allan was an unusual client-producer. He didn’t ask her to drum up publicity. He told her how to drum up publicity.

  “Allan would kick around these ideas about the Oscars and get excited like a little kid,” Dozoretz recalls. “Sometimes I was a sounding board.” Allan talked; the soft-spoken publicist listened. When she talked, he didn’t always listen: “Every one of his ideas, he thought it was the best thing ever.” Rather than disagree with him, Dozoretz simply let Allan’s weaker ideas die on the vine of his attention deficit.

  Allan sought to goose the Oscar telecast’s ratings, and to that end he pushed what many considered his greatest Oscar innovation. “He wanted to stage an Oscar fashion show, which had never been done before,” says Kahn.

  Allan’s second “hire” was the man they called “the father of Rodeo Drive.” Fred Hayman first met Allan shortly after he opened his store, Giorgio Beverly Hills, in 1961. “Rodeo Drive was primitive then,” says Hayman. “Allan used to come in to try on women’s caftans.” By 1988, when Allan approached the boutique owner to work on the Oscars, Hayman was so famous that he dropped the Giorgio moniker to make his store eponymous.

  Prior to Allan’s involvement, the Academy Awards telecast kicked off with sixty seconds of red-carpet gawking, followed by a parade of actresses in gowns that ran the gamut from Armani to Beene to Mackie to sheer chutzpah. The following week, People and a few tabloids published the sartorial hits and misses, and that was the extent of Oscar fashion.

  “But it doesn’t have to be,” Allan insisted. “This should be the world’s greatest fashion show.” Hayman, in Allan’s opinion, was the perfect fashion nexus because Hayman didn’t design clothes. He instead represented lots of designers and sold their dresses, and besides, “Fred Hayman’s is the best place to buy evening wear!” exclaimed Allan, never afraid of the definitive overstatement. “I want you to be the Oscar’s first fashion consultant,” he told Hayman.

  In truth, people like costume designer Edith Head had served as de facto fashion consultants on the telecast over the years, but their obligations had less to do with style than censorship, and they often held court backstage, ready wi
th pieces of lace and fabric to cover a too-exposed décolletage for the TV cameras. Allan didn’t want to wait until the big night to correct any fashion faux pas. He wanted Hayman to show actresses how to dress for the Oscars before the big night. “The fashions have gotten boring,” Allan said. “The concept of Hollywood is far from boring. It’s an illusion.”

  Allan promised to extend the red-carpet section of the broadcast. “Let’s give it five, ten minutes!” he announced. Even more radical, he conceived a fashion show to be staged pre-Oscars, as part of a press conference that would unveil a “new and improved, more exciting and glamorous” Oscars to the world. “And show the women of Hollywood how to dress,” proclaimed the man who often dressed like a woman.

  Having given Hayman his fashion dictate, Allan took up his third point of business and phoned an old friend in San Francisco. He’d been a big fan of Beach Blanket Babylon ever since director Steve Silver conceived the Frisco revue back in 1974. Silver wrote that original show with Tales of the City scribe Armistead Maupin, and while it had radically morphed over the years, Beach Blanket continued to be the acropolis of camp in a city that practically invented the gay aesthetic. With its outrageous costumes, split-timing derring-do, and wicked send-ups of every entertainment figure from Elvis Presley to Snow White, Silver’s show stood as the antithesis of the ossified, endless Academy Awards telecast. Allan knew it in his gut: This genius helmer on the Barbary Coast would be his ticket to reinventing the Oscars in a way it hadn’t been overhauled since Bette Davis moved the awards across Hollywood Boulevard from the Roosevelt Hotel to Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 1945, put it on the radio for the first time ever, and invited 200 servicemen to sit onstage. Allan dreamed as big as Bette.

  Allan particularly adored Silver’s rococo overlay of ornate costumes and huge headdresses. Those hats, in fact, were so big that one creation carried the entire cityscape of San Francisco, complete with fog machine and a running trolley car. The revue changed from year to year, and Allan had seen practically every incarnation, but his absolute favorite was one titled “Beach Blanket Babylon Goes to the Stars,” in which Silver re-created the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, replete with dancing tables. “That’s what Allan saw and remembered—the dancing tables,” says Silver’s widow, Jo Schuman Silver. “And he loved the big hats. The Beach Blanket Babylon trademark is the big hats. The concept was all Steve’s.”

  Allan and Silver were an even draw when it came to worshipping at the altar of Oscar. Like Allan, Silver could parody entertainers because he adored entertainers. Beach Blanket Babylon might have started as a cult show, but it had since spawned a sister act in Las Vegas, and there were plans to take it to New York City. Silver wanted his BBB to go mainstream, and it doesn’t get any more public than directing the opening act of the Oscars. The director got so excited about the Academy Awards assignment that he rejected all other invitations—including offers to take his revue to the White House for the Christmas holidays and to perform at one of George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inauguration balls. It seemed, at least for a while, that all of San Francisco blessed Silver’s Oscar fixation. The local press, which usually disdained everything SoCal, couldn’t have been more supportive and happy to see its local boy make good. As the director told the Contra Costa Times, “Life in my book is nothing more than crossing things off your list. The more you cross off, the clearer your path in life becomes. On [March] 19th, I’m crossing a big, big line.” Silver so anticipated his March 29 date with Oscar that he mistakenly moved it up ten days.

  While Silver worked to replicate the camp glamour of his Beach Blanket costumes for the Oscar telecast, Allan hired production designer Ray Klausen to re-create what would be the Cocoanut Grove, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and a box of popcorn big enough to accommodate a superstar’s entrance on the Oscar stage. Klausen had always wanted to design for the stage but got “sidetracked into TV work,” he says, when ABC hired him to do a show called Hooray for Hollywood. For Allan, Klausen represented the perfect mix of Broadway dreams and Hollywood illusion, and he knew he’d made the right choice when, during their first meeting, the set designer mentioned what he hated most about the Academy Awards.

  “I don’t like it when the presenters say, ‘And the winner is.’ It makes everyone else look like a loser,” the designer groused.

  Allan didn’t miss a beat. “That’s a really good idea,” he said. “We’ll change it to . . . ‘And the Oscar goes to . . . ’”

  Allan was out to burn other Oscar bridges to the past as well, including the sacrosanct best-song category. He personally detested all the eligible songs from 1988 films. “If I’m lucky, might I be able to get away with having only two or three nominated songs?” he wondered. None of them, in his opinion, were TVWORTHY. He petitioned the Academy’s songwriters division to nominate only those songs that received a certain number of votes. It was a long shot, but the songwriters, surprisingly, agreed, and as a result, Allan succeeded in having only three tunes nominated.

  It was then that Allan broke out in what he called “an Oscar rash.”

  In its December issue, Los Angeles magazine took a first potshot at the new Oscar producer. The rag published a two-inch item that opined, “Carr . . . has some of the Academy’s conservatives edgy about what the flamboyant producer may come up with.” Allan knew what “flamboyant” meant. It meant “fag.” He didn’t mind their pointing out the “black-tie dinner dance in honor of Truman Capote at the Lincoln Heights jail” in the article or that he “even hired the man who streaked the 1974 Oscars to do the same for another get-together.” But flamboyant? Allan could only be happy that Los Angeles magazine failed to mention his hiring Steve Silver from “San Francisco,” that other gay code word. Linda Dozoretz recalls, “There were some whispers: It’s going to be too gay, whatever words were used. Allan, though, just shrugged that off.”

  Or maybe he baited it.

  Ebullient over his Oscar gig, Allan defied any and all naysayers. “What did they know?” he said of Los Angeles magazine. He was on a roll. Good or bad, the speculation fueled him, and when he was inspired, he thought up his best ideas—or so he claimed.

  One night, it came to him in the middle of an Academy Award dream. “The Oscars was not about the winners. It was all about the presenters,” he believed. “The presenters would be compadres, costars, couples, and companions!” He phoned Dozoretz the very next morning. She liked the idea. If she hadn’t like it, he would have gone with it anyway.

  It was such a lovely disease, this “Oscar rash,” and to give it a good scratching, Allan retreated to Fiji for Christmas. “Whenever he went on vacation, he took three or four twinkies with him,” says Kathy Berlin. “Most of the time, he didn’t even know the guys’ names.” He also took with him every combination of star pairings that could be crammed into the presenters’ rubric of “compadres, costars, couples, and companions.” He also packed a couple of suitcases full of old-movie videotapes, as well as arcane information on gift baskets and green rooms and limousines that ranged from rules like “Don’t argue with your driver” to “How can we keep the bottles of Coca-Cola chilled?” He would leave nothing to chance with this Oscar production, whether it be the correct pronunciation of the foreign film titles or how many buckets of ice to dump into the Shrine Auditorium’s urinals.

  Roasting himself on the beaches of Fiji, Allan put together his dream list of star pairings: Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep. Roger and Jessica Rabbit. New movie couples, classic movie couples. He could dream. And with a big enough carrot, he could lure anyone to the show. He wondered aloud, “What about a tribute to Sophia Loren and her producer husband, Carlo Ponti?”

  On Fiji, everything was possible.

  Back in Hollywood, reality fouled his fantasy when word arrived in early January that Joanne Woodward refused to fly from her Connecticut home. Ros
eanne Barr considered herself “too TV” for the Oscars. Beatty, Farrow, and Kerr were being difficult. And cartoon Jessica Rabbit was deemed too expensive. “The real stars are cheap compared to the animated ones!” Allan ruefully learned. He could take only small comfort in pulling some strings at Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, both of which agreed to publish a new, rotating feature called “Oscar Watch.” In effect, it was a day-to-day drumroll to announce all those stars who were confirmed to present, and over the following weeks, Allan took pleasure in releasing the names of such real-life couples as Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and legends like Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball and Bob Hope.

  Allan came up with a new mantra: “The night is 10 percent for the town and 90 percent for the world!” He especially liked his young star couples, but he needed a coup—a genuine Hollywood legend who hadn’t shown up at the Oscars for decades, which in Hollywood was as close to eternity as anyone ever got.

  “What about Doris Day?” Allan asked Dozoretz.

  Dozoretz had long toiled as publicist for Hollywood’s longest-living onscreen virgin, and knew better than anyone how difficult a catch Doris would be.

  “She won’t do it,” Dozoretz replied.

  Allan smiled, and asked his publicist why Doris Day wouldn’t do the Oscars when she was scheduled to appear on the Golden Globes later that month.

  “Doris was kind of tricked into coming to the Golden Globes,” Dozoretz surmises. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the Golden Globes, lured the retired actress back to Hollywood with its Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. It helped, too, that her son, Terry Melcher, had been nominated by the HFPA for writing the song “Kokomo” for the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail.