Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  Off in the wings, one of the models for Hayman’s fashion show wisecracked, “It sounds like planning an invasion.”

  “There will be sparkling drapes,” said Klausen.

  “But we have to have beautiful people in front of them,” said Allan, cutting him off. It was time for the fashion show. Allan could tell the reporters were already starting to crash from their pastry-coffee rush, and he quickly introduced Fred Hayman, who, in turn, brought out three models who wore a white form-fitting gown by Bill Travilla, a shimmering silver and bugle bead number by Oscar de la Renta, and a Bob Mackie ensemble that appeared to have been constructed with whatever drapes Klausen had left over from the Empire State Building.

  Most members of the press didn’t know a Givenchy from a Valentino, but if they were impressed or simply waiting to get back to the donut tray, Hayman promised that designs by Calvin Klein, Karl Lagerfeld, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, and others would be seen on the telecast.

  Most journalists bolted L’Ermitage’s press conference to make an early deadline. Others dove for the remaining croissants and wondered if they could possibly turn this breakfast buffet into lunch. Some reporters groused that Allan’s ego had exploded, but his publicist saw the logic behind the ambition. “He wanted to do something every day, every week to hype the awards. He wanted the biggest ratings ever,” says Linda Dozoretz.

  If Allan couldn’t micromanage every detail of the event, such as who actually received the Oscars, he would personally pick who handed them out and man the phones himself, afraid to leave any of the big presenters to a flunky booker. Occasionally, he left Hilhaven to spend the day at ABC’s rented second-floor offices on La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevards in West Hollywood. A few white sterile rooms formed a horseshoe of offices around an assistants’ area. Allan called it Oscar Ground Zero, even if he made few visits there. It was the kind of mundane workaday office that made him happy he never held a nine-to-five job in his life. Leo’s Flowers did business under Oscar Ground Zero. Allan would gaze up from the florist’s shop at the one flight of stairs and complain, “Couldn’t ABC afford a place with an elevator?” In addition to his hip replacement, he had recently torn his knee cartilage and needed a cane to walk. As he fought his way up the stairs, Oscar’s worker bees could hear him coming, his cane stabbing at each difficult step.

  When Allan first visited the rented ABC offices, he laughed out loud at Bruce Vilanch’s office door. It read MISS GRABLE’S DRESSING ROOM. Vilanch worked the phones to try and explain his material to a recalcitrant star’s publicist. “So she’s not gonna shoot you; blame me,” he said. “And point out to her that he may have the most lines but she has the big joke.” As Vilanch explained to Allan, “A lot of people are afraid to give their clients the material,” the “material” being his patter for the various presenters.

  Allan had his own problems with celebrity wrangling. He loved to bask in the presence of the legends—but only if they cooperated. When their ego got in his way, he had to wonder what else they had to do “except change their Depends” on a Wednesday night. Case in point: Loretta Young. She adamantly refused to be paired with anyone. “I stand on my own two feet,” she told Allan during their fierce negotiations. Better yet, she liked the idea of repeating her 1982 performance at the Oscars when she capped the show by warning against “smutty” pictures, and presented the best-picture award to Chariots of Fire.

  “But dear, you would be presenting an award with Nureyev!” Allan replied.

  If Loretta could play hardball, so could Allan, who declined her services altogether. “And I was offering her Rudolf Nureyev!” he fumed.

  The logistics had gotten awfully convoluted. For some reason, Lana Turner wasn’t responding to his calls, even after Allan enlisted her daughter, Cheryl Crane. He wanted Lana for the big opening Cocoanut Grove spectacular, to appear alongside Dale Evans and Roy Rogers and Alice Faye. “Lana doesn’t want to take part in the program. I don’t know what her problem is, but I’m working on it,” he informed Vilanch. (Perhaps Allan had forgotten that, ten years earlier, when he booked talent for the Oscars, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Lana Turner will not take my calls. I think that should be printed. How dare she?”)

  Movie couples were even tougher. Whom did he call first: Demi or Bruce? Ryan or Farrah? Melanie or Don? Geena or Jeff? “Can’t these people use the same publicist?” Allan wanted to know.

  Allan had talked to Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell about a possible on-air joke regarding their wedding announcement, even though they had no plans to get married. The couple was mulling the gag. There was also the good news that Brigitte Bardot wanted to be on the show. But the bad news: “She wants to talk about animal rights?!” screamed Allan. He assured her long-distance that there would be no furs on the show. “But also no speeches. We are not planning on Sacheen Littlefeather—or a speech on animal rights.”

  Word had already gotten back to Allan that Gregory Peck was pissed that no one asked him to present an Oscar. Allan rolled his eyes. The American Film Institute tribute to Peck had aired recently—and even worse than being overexposed, Peck pulled in no ratings for the NBC telecast. In any other year, Allan would have done pliés to get Elizabeth Taylor to present. Unfortunately, a week before the Oscars, ABC was scheduled to air its tribute to the star. So no Liz. Paul Newman loomed as a possibility, but Allan wanted him to appear with Joanne Woodward, and since she wasn’t flying to Los Angeles, Allan didn’t re-extend an invite to her willing husband. Also not flying was a very pregnant Susan Sarandon, who looked forward to popping her first kid any minute.

  Genuine excuses or poor reasons, Allan accepted every rejection as if the star had pummeled him with his or her Guccis. He went from loving the potential presenter to hating anyone who said no. Like Sophia Loren, who announced that she couldn’t show up for her own tribute. “Whaaaaat?” Allan brayed at the news. “I offered her the moon—Oscar tickets for her kids—anything.” Rightly or wrongly, Allan blamed it on her acting coach, Anna Strasberg, and her publicist, Bobby Zarem. “So instead, she accepts a benefit in Florida for the University of Miami, three nights later?! And she could have done both.” Allan retaliated by canceling the Pontis’ tribute.

  Or when John Travolta wouldn’t say yes or no to introducing a montage of musical clips. “He appeared in Grease, for Chrissakes!” said Allan, as if he owned the actor. The offer then went out to Patrick Swayze, hot off Dirty Dancing, which had outgrossed Travolta’s last movie, Perfect, in which he played a Rolling Stone reporter investigating health clubs. “The ungrateful!” Allan called any star who wouldn’t cooperate. He took no delight in the second-choice Swayze pick, but kept it civil, professional. “I want Patrick Swayze’s people to see the tape of the movie musical montage,” he said. “I want to see how he feels about it.”

  In the middle of the booking madness, Allan took a call from an A-list publicist, who was pushing a B-list client. “I like her,” Allan told the flack. “We were at the fat farm in England together three years ago—she’s terrific. But I’ve got biggies on the waiting list. . . . Love you, too.” Then he hung up without thinking to say good-bye.

  Someone in the office delivered a pseudobombshell. “Don Ameche can’t do the show. He is in New York to be in Our Town.”

  Allan didn’t even bother to look up from his bagel. “I knew that three days ago. What world are you people living in? They better wake up.”

  There’re no demands like show-business demands. Allan tried to indulge them all. His patience, which was nonexistent for friends and family, knew no limits for a star. If Doris Day required a dog sitter to make the trip to Los Angeles, “Then get her a fucking dog sitter!” he ordered no one in particular. She also wanted to be driven, not flown, down from Carmel. Her neighbor Kim Novak wanted to be flown, not driven, from her home on Big Sur. Both women insisted on hotel suites, wardrobe, hair and makeup, and a certain size of dressing room. And of course neither of them would sit in the audience with the Oscar no
minees and other stars during the telecast. Alice Faye wanted to be limoed from Rancho Mirage. She’d do her own hair, but insisted she sit onstage next to Dorothy Lamour, who didn’t really care one way or the other about much of anything. The real troupers of the affair, Dale Evans and Roy Rogers, would get themselves to the Oscars on time and even bring their own horsy wardrobe. But they didn’t much care for the accommodations at L’Ermitage and preferred to stay at the Tolucan. “Whatever they want!” Allan harrumphed.

  He wanted the entire Oscar experience to be a party for his stars, and to that end he created a green room, or hospitality suite, at the Shrine. “He did everything to make them feel like stars,” says Richard Kahn, “and he wanted to create that kind of a private protective enclave for them to relax in.” Other producers might have provided them a bare-bones room to sit and watch the telecast in before their appearance. “Allan was the first to put a label on it,” Kahn says of the fancy green room. Allan called it Club Oscar, and he even made a sign to hang on the wall. Club Oscar would be a party room not only on the big night but during the four days of rehearsal leading up to the show. Dom Perignon, Moët & Chandon, and cuisine by Fernaud Page would be served to the star participants, “who never get to see each other,” Allan said. Sometimes it seemed as if he had truly thought of everything. He even had the green room sponsored by Waverly fabrics, “so that the Academy wouldn’t have to pay the costs of decorating it,” says Dozoretz.

  Club Oscar emerged as an oasis of overstated relaxation in the midst of the general decay and grime of the Shrine. “You never would have known that you were backstage in a theater,” says Jeff Margolis. “It was like you were in some highfalutin’ club in West Hollywood or New York City.”

  The closer it came to Oscar Day, the more Allan’s dream solidified as a triumph in his brain. “His ego was becoming the size of the Academy Awards. Everybody was calling Allan,” says Dozoretz. “And everyone was bowing. He liked that in real life. He had all this power. I couldn’t believe who was calling him for favors and asking him. Allan knew for a few days that he would never have again that power. Allan, who was not always the most polite man, burned bridges. He was the king of the world.”

  Even one of Allan’s most admired Hollywood major players, überagent Swifty Lazar, offered his respects. Swifty’s annual Academy Awards party had, over the years, eclipsed the telecast in star power, draining the talent pool of A-list celebs, who preferred to watch the TV proceedings in the comfort of Spago restaurant rather than embarrass themselves at the Oscars and remind everyone that they hadn’t been nominated.

  Allan saw it as the passing of the torch when Swifty graciously accepted his invitation to make a brief appearance in the Cocoanut Grove opening number. Allan gushed, “He’s a legend. Swifty is as much a legend as the Cocoanut Grove.” And Swifty returned the favor. In no less a forum than the Sunday Los Angeles Times, the agent predicted that the 1989 Oscar telecast would be “the best party we’ve had. There’s a greater feeling of fun than I’ve ever had before. There are so many new people who are going to be here after the telecast, new blood. Allan Carr is such a great showman, and he’s having about 40 people present the awards, up from about 20.”

  Allan dramatically upped the telecast’s celeb population. “We won’t show the movie clips all in one big clump at the end of the telecast!” he ordered his Oscar bookers. “Instead, we’ll have each nominated film and its clip introduced by a big star and intersperse them throughout the evening. It gives us five more star participants!”

  Allan referred to the seven days before March 29 as “White Knuckle Week,” and if he fretted unduly over the presenters and the movie clips, he bet the show’s success on his two big production numbers, each of which was clocking in at a whopping twelve minutes. ABC was also feeling the pressure, and insisted in the final days that Allan hire Hildy Parks, who’d written several Tony Awards telecasts, to join Vilanch as cowriter.

  Rehearsals began on a Thursday only six days before the actual broadcast. With Marvin Hamlisch at the piano, Allan stood on the bleachers in Rehearsal Hall No. 1 at the ABC Studios on Vine in Hollywood. Together with lyricist Fred Ebb, Hamlisch had written the “(I Want to Be) an Oscar Winner” for the fourteen young actors and actresses who were now watching their leotarded reflections in a giant mirror set on rollers. Only one of the scheduled performers, fifteen-year-old Savion Glover, remained behind on the East Coast, having to appear on Broadway in the new musical Black and Blue before he flew to Los Angeles on Monday for the final run-throughs. The other showbiz newcomers were ready to go, and that included such to-be-or-not-to-be stars as Blair Underwood, Patrick Dempsey, Christian Slater, and Ricki Lake, as well as those here-by-the-grace-of-their-famous-parent kids like Patrick Cassidy, Carrie (Burnett) Hamilton, Patrick O’Neal, and Tyrone Power Jr. Allan didn’t mess around when it came to making predictions about their future success. He called them, simply, the “Break-Out Super Stars of Tomorrow.”

  Despite his new plastic hip, Allan jumped up and down on the bleachers or, at the very least, he bounced a little, his body like jelly in aspic. It thrilled him that he’d rounded up the children of the famous in this one room, while in Rehearsal Hall No. 2 he held court with the real legends, everyone from Vincent Price and Alice Faye to Buddy Rogers and the Nicholas Brothers. Allan had sold Rob Lowe on playing Prince Charming in the opening Cocoanut Grove number as an homage to old Hollywood “and those who came before us.” But in rehearsals the twenty-five-year-old actor grew leery of the concept as soon as it became clear that “a lot of the legendary old Hollywood folk could not walk unassisted,” Lowe observed firsthand.

  Their overall immobility didn’t disturb Allan, who quickly ordered Vincent Price and others to simply sit at the tables and wave. Or if need be, he got a chorus boy to help walk them across the stage.

  Allan had one eye on the past and one finger on the current pulse. He also had to watch his rear. “That Young Hollywood number was the direct result of ABC’s edict that he ‘young-up’ the show,” says Bruce Vilanch.

  Allan wanted to sex-up the Oscars as well, and he hired Dirty Dancing choreographer Kenny Ortega to put his Young Hollywood troupe through its paces. Christian Slater agreed to do the production number on one condition: “If I could swing in on a rope,” he said. Ricki Lake claimed some expertise. “I had a year of ballet when I was five,” she said, “but I don’t think that really counts.” Tracy Nelson, granddaughter of TV’s Ozzie and Harriet, had actually studied ballet and did a mean pirouette, but other than her and Savion Glover, there wasn’t a lot of innate talent or training for what these novice performers would be required to do in front of the vast television audience—for twelve long minutes.

  Could Tyrone Power’s son sing? Could he dance? If Allan didn’t ask these questions, it’s because he had fallen in love with the charm of the future—and his role as star maker. “Allan was like a little kid jumping up and down,” Linda Dozoretz says of the rehearsals. “The excitement of his meeting Tyrone Power’s son!”

  Allan gave Kenny Ortega only four rehearsal days to perform his miracle. While other producers might want to cloak such protégés in a secure blanket of secrecy, Allan chose to invite select members of the press to the rehearsals. “People put down Young Hollywood as a group of actors who are pretty but not very talented,” he told reporters. “There are a lot of talented, caring young actors out there. On Oscar night, we’re going to acknowledge them. I think it’s going to be a showstopper.”

  Power Jr. put his finger on the challenge faced by these showbiz newbies. “All of the production numbers on Oscar night are usually so serious,” he told Allan’s phalanx of reporters. “This is just a bunch of young actors, none of whom are really singers, dancers, or fencers, goofing around and having fun. Hopefully everyone else will too.”

  The next day, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner gossip Kevin Koffler wrote up the rehearsal. He titled his column, “Hooray for Nepotism!”

  While ch
oreographer Kenny Ortega worked with the kids, Hamlisch played nursemaid to a nervous Eileen Bowman, who only a year before had been singing in the chorus of Youth for Christ. “Snow White is a bigger celebrity than anyone else in that audience,” Hamlisch assured her.

  Bowman wasn’t so sure. Earlier in the day, she’d fought back nausea just thinking about Wednesday night. If she feared that she might “look at one person and forget my lines,” Allan harbored no such doubts as he threw out ideas. “It will be gold if we have Snow White greet and shake the hands of the celebs in the audience,” he said.

  Steve Silver hated having actors interact with the audience. “It won’t work,” he told Allan. “It never works.”

  Vilanch also cautioned, “The Shrine will be lit up. There’s no place to hide. I don’t think you can take a woman dressed up as Snow White and put her in the audience with Tom Hanks and Sigourney Weaver and Geena Davis and expect them to react to her. They’ll freeze and not play along.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Allan. “It’s going to be gold!”

  Silver tried to explain: What made Beach Blanket Babylon a success was its speed. “Things are always edited down,” he said. But he saw the reverse happening with the Oscar telecast’s opening number, which only grew in size as more and more celebs were added. “Everyone wants input,” Silver said. And the more the input, the more that got put in. Instead of lasting eight minutes, the number soon clocked fifteen. Rather than cut, Allan added yet another legendary actor to the Cocoanut Grove parade. Silver worried about the extra minutes that the Snow White meet and greet would add. He timed it. “Sixteen minutes!” he exclaimed. “Nothing should be sixteen minutes!”

  Allan took his director aside. “Look, you’ve got your show in San Francisco. This is my next job!”

  The rehearsals continued. While Eileen Bowman practiced shaking the imaginary hands of movie stars, another crooner substituted momentarily for Merv Griffin, who would not only sing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” but introduce the evening’s Prince Charming: “And your blind date for the Oscars, Snow White, is none other than Rob Lowe!” At which Bowman and Lowe would break into “Proud Mary,” singing the new lyrics, “Keep those cameras rolling, rolling, rolling.” It worried Allan that Merv Griffin couldn’t rehearse on the Shrine stage. Then again, Griffin had already sung “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” a thousand times when he used to deliver it with a cockney accent for $150 a week at the real Cocoanut Grove in the 1940s.