Tired of repeating himself, Allan left Spago after a brief visit, to make his way home alone to Hilhaven. The greatest day of his life had just ended, and for some reason he wasn’t feeling so great.
twenty-nine
Death by Oscar
A few hours later, Steve and Jo Silver rose early in their room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They were eager to read the reviews, and with a raft of newspapers under their arms, they retired to one of the poolside cabanas. They sat down with their coffee and croissants, and began to read. No surprise, their hometown paper, the San Francisco Examiner, gave him a rave: “After a decade-plus of dull, dull, dull telecasts, a shot of good old San Francisco camp restored Oscar to his rightful place as king of TV awards shows.”
Variety, on the other hand, suffered from a slight case of press schizophrenia. Army Archerd, who appeared in the Snow White number, called the telecast “a hit.” But the newspaper’s TV reviewer, Tony Scott, whose notice ran on the same page as Archerd’s, had witnessed a different telecast: “The 61st Annual Academy Awards extravaganza—seen in 91 countries including, for the first time, the Soviet Union—turned out to be a TV nyet.” Scott went on to trash a “feeble-voiced Rob Lowe” and a “squeaky-voiced Snow White,” but saved his real condemnation for the Break-Out Super Stars number with its “youngsters few have heard of, cavorting around a giant Oscar as if it were the Golden Calf.”
Since the Daily Variety review saved its nastier comments for the telecast’s other production number, Steve Silver thought he could live with those words. Then came the New York Times. “The 61st Academy Awards ceremony began by creating the impression that there would never be a 62nd,” wrote Janet Maslin. “The evening’s opening number, which deserves a permanent place in the annals of Oscar embarrassments, was indeed as bad as that. Barely five minutes into the show, Merv Griffin was on hand to sing ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,’ and that was only the beginning. Snow White, played as a simpering ninny, performed a duet of ‘Proud Mary’ with Rob Lowe, who would be well-advised to confine all future musical activities to the shower.”
Silver read no further. Barely did he have time to recover from that assault in print than Gael Love, the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview, stuck her head in the cabana. “You’re Steve Silver?” she asked. “You directed the Oscars last night, right?”
Silver nodded. “Well, the opening number . . . ”
“The one with Snow White and Rob Lowe, yeah.” Never one for the delicate touch, Love got right to it. “So what did you think of it? Were you happy with how it turned out?”
Silver took a breath. He even managed to grin. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me!” he exclaimed. He thought a moment, still holding the New York Times in his hand. “Janet Maslin says it is the worst production number in the history of the Oscars. I guess you can’t top that. The publicity for Beach Blanket Babylon ought to be wonderful.”
Silver went on to tell Love that the opening number wasn’t what he originally envisioned. Then again, his job wasn’t on the line. Unlike other people involved with the Oscars, he didn’t have to wait for his next gig. “Steve has a hit show in San Francisco,” Jo Silver informed the Interview editor.
A few blocks east toward the hills, Allan Carr was one of those people waiting for his next job. He had expected to get a phone call from Richard Kahn, begging him to produce the 1990 Oscars. Instead, Allan sat in his white tent by the pool, the copies of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times already tattered and blowing in the wind at his feet. Since the phone didn’t stir, he picked it up to dial his publicist.
When Dozoretz answered, he didn’t introduce himself. “No one has called,” said Allan. She commiserated by mentioning the TV ratings, which looked very good. “It’s still early,” Dozoretz added. There was plenty of time for phone calls and flowers and telegrams to arrive. But it was clear. “Allan didn’t know what hit him,” she says.
A more circumspect man, Bruce Vilanch decided not to make phone calls or show his face in the wake of the reviews. “I was in bed all the next day cheering up several members of the Young Hollywood number,” he recalls.
Resting the morning after in his Beverly Hills home, Kahn tossed off the bad reviews, just as he did in previous years. “Producers usually shrug them off,” he says. The Janet Maslin review was a little more bloodletting than usual, he thought, but since when did a New York Times reviewer ever like the Oscars? Kahn chose to believe the well-wishers at the Governor’s Ball. The critics who watched it at home on TV weren’t always the best judge. “When you’re watching it in the auditorium, it’s a different show. You can have a fabulous time in the theater, and then people say it was so boring on TV.”
Pundits made a national sport of attacking the Oscars, saying that each year is the worst, the most boring. Allan, in Kahn’s opinion, achieved the impossible: The TV ratings for the 1989 edition weren’t just good, they were spectacular, and had reversed the show’s five-year numbers slide. “There was a feeling we owned the town,” Kahn recalls. The telecast made it into no fewer than 26.9 million homes in the United States, and with a 29.8 rating; the Oscar telecast hadn’t done that well since 1984, when it did 30.5.
Kahn took pleasure in analyzing the telecast ratings. Then the phone rang. It was Frank Wells, president of Disney. “Frank, how are you?” Kahn asked, expecting him to say something nice about last night’s show.
Wells said, “Dick, we got a problem.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, we’re very unhappy, we at Disney.”
“Yes?”
“About the show.”
“Oh?”
“Disney is upset over the appearance of Snow White.”
It was the first sign that there might be trouble ahead, because no sooner had Kahn put down the phone with Wells than he received a messenger-delivered missive. It was a letter of complaint about the telecast from a former Academy president,—and Oscar-winning actor—named Gregory Peck. “I didn’t know why he was so upset,” says Kahn. He phoned Peck to find out.
“The show reminds me of those Photoplay Awards!” said the actor, referring to a now-defunct fanzine that published puff pieces on the Hollywood stars and, each year, congratulated itself with a meaningless awards show. Apparently, Peck never liked the Photoplay Awards, and found them tacky, not sophisticated, beneath dignity.
“That was a very difficult day for me as president of the Academy,” says Kahn.
Allan, disappointed by the lack of day-after accolades, decided to go hunting for them. Rather than cancel his lunch plans, he kept his appointment at Mortons restaurant that Thursday afternoon, as did Robert Osborne, who happened to be dining there that day. The Hollywood Reporter columnist had been very supportive of the Beach Blanket Babylon revue in San Francisco, but Osborne’s enthusiasm did not extend to Steve Silver’s work on the Oscar production.
“I knew Steve Silver. Allan loved that show in San Francisco,” Osborne says. “But what Allan did with it—it didn’t have any of the humor or the terrificness of Silver’s show.” He was surprised to see Allan at Mortons the day after the Oscars. “It was foolish. Allan must have known that these powerful Hollywood figures would be there. Maybe it was his way of showing defiance.”
More likely, despite the paucity of phoned-in congratulations, Allan continued not to process how much the Hollywood establishment despised his Oscar telecast. At Mortons, many fellow diners turned away from the Oscar producer’s table and actually extended their lunch hour, waiting for Allan to leave first. “When they got up, finally, they took the most indirect route to get by Allan. You could tell that he became aware of that,” says Osborne.
People read the dreadful reviews and spent that morning gossiping about how bad the telecast had been. The buzz spiraled from bad to godawful, and soon wound its way down to fiasco. “Then it became this megadisaster,” says Osborne, “so that by the time Allan got to Mortons, the Oscars were considered enough of a disaster
that no one wanted to talk to Allan Carr. I hadn’t previously seen that so dramatically displayed by so many people in Hollywood as that day at Mortons—like they’d catch something, like it was a disease.”
That evening, Steve and Jo Silver made what they felt was a difficult but obligatory trip to Allan’s house. Days earlier, Silver had ordered a crystal-star sculpture from Tiffany’s, and engraved it with the words, “You are the Star!” But when he and his wife knocked on the front door of Hilhaven Lodge, an assistant answered to tell them, “Allan is not home.” The young man instinctively reached for the gift-wrapped package.
Silver resisted, saying, “No, I just want to set it down. I know where I’d like Allan to find his present.” He sensed that Allan was home that evening, and after a few minutes of investigation, Silver found him in the basement, a drink in hand in the Bella Darvi Bar. Allan was alone, drunk, depressed.
The three of them hugged. “I just want to give you this gift,” said Silver. “It has been a very special experience for me.” Hearing those few words, Allan began to sob.
There were more phone calls from Disney executives to Richard Kahn. He, in turn, consulted the Academy lawyers. But when Frank Wells demanded a public apology, Kahn felt he stood on solid enough ground to refuse that order. If Kahn had capitulated, “We would have considered the matter ended,” said Wells.
The matter didn’t end there. Before the end of Thursday’s business day, the Walt Disney Company slapped the Academy with a federal lawsuit charging that the Oscar telecast of March 29, 1989, had abused and irreparably damaged the studio’s fifty-two-year-old Snow White character. It asked for unspecified damages for “copyright infringement, unfair competition, and dilution of business reputation.”
Together with Kahn, ABC’s John Hamlin found himself broadsided by Disney, having assumed there would be no problem. As he told the Wall Street Journal, “I had always surmised Disney would be very pleased. Disney loves promotion of Disney characters.”
Many other members of the press were also working the phones, asking Disney about the Snow White brouhaha. “It wasn’t the songs so much, it was her singing,” a company spokesman told them. Several Disney employees had remarked, “Snow White sounded like a Martian.”
More inquiring minds wanted to know why the studio hadn’t also objected to Robin Williams, who donned big mouse ears and made unflattering remarks about Michael Eisner on the Oscar telecast. The spokesman replied that the Williams’s ears were not an exact replica of Mr. Mickey Mouse’s.
While the comedian got a pass, Beach Blanket Babylon in San Francisco did not. The Disney lawyers checked on whether any copyright impropriety had been committed up north, and soon learned that the show axed its Snow White character four years earlier.
Stung by news of the lawsuit, Allan went into spin overdrive, and called every friend he knew in the press. He told Variety’s Army Archerd that Ronald Reagan had phoned him personally to congratulate him on the show, and that the president was especially impressed by the opening Cocoanut Grove number. “I used to go there,” said Reagan. Or so Allan said he said.
Phoning the Hollywood Reporter’s Martin Grove, Allan pointed out that “it was the highest-rated Oscar show in five years. The interesting thing is that the ratings went up as the evening went along as opposed to dropping off, which shows people loved the show.” The ratings in England and Australia were the best ever for the Oscars. “This will be great for business!” he exclaimed, referring to the telecast’s impact on international ticket sales. In England, Rain Man was only in its third week, Dangerous Liaisons had just opened there. And did Grove know that there was a line that Bruce Vilanch had written for Anne Archer when she introduced Dangerous Liaisons as one of the five nominated pictures? “She called it ‘The Fatal Attraction of another era,’” Allan pointed out. “That line is being used by the video company that’s releasing Liaisons as their [ad] tagline!” It didn’t seem possible, Allan told Grove, but he had received so many congratulatory flowers, telegrams, and bottles of champagne at Hilhaven that “I’ve had to put a secretary on just to answer the mail. You know when that happens you’ve touched the town.”
Hollywood was, in fact, so affected that the Los Angeles Times’s top film reviewer-reporter, Charles Champlin, wanted to meet with Allan to talk about the show—in person on Friday. Allan looked forward to the interview to clear his reputation. Champlin owed him: Shortly before La Cage aux folles opened in Boston, he’d set up a big student confab for the journalist at Harvard. Allan knew he could count on Champlin to help get out his version of events.
Allan decided to go casual for the Los Angeles Times interview, and donning yet another caftan, he flicked off his slippers and mixed himself a vodka and grapefruit juice. He was barefoot and nonchalantly sipping the drink when Champlin came to the door. “Chuck!” he exclaimed, as if the reporter were paying an impromptu visit. Allan made sure that flowers filled the living room, and he remarked, “It resembles a flower shop or a gangster’s funeral.” It was a line that Champlin later noted in his newspaper report.
“There were more flowers,” Allan pointed out, “but I’ve already had most of them shipped to a children’s hospital.” Allan read aloud a handwritten note from a dear friend: “You delivered. Jennifer Jones.” There was another letter from the American Film Institute’s Jean Firstenberg: “You put the show back in show business.” And it meant so much to Allan that his friend at CAA Michael Ovitz took the time to write, “You brought show business back to the movie business.” Ovitz had reason to celebrate regardless of the telecast: The agency’s big film, Rain Man, had won the top Oscar. “And Candy Bergen called to say how angry she was about the reviews,” Allan told Champlin. “Janet Leigh had also called to say how much she disagreed with the reviews.”
Allan stopped himself. It was bad form to dwell on the negative when a reporter had his tape recorder going. “And I suppose you’ve heard,” he said. “Ronald Reagan called to say he how much he liked the Cocoanut Grove number.”
Champlin smiled and nodded. He’d read that in Army Archerd’s Variety column. Allan grimaced. He should have known better. That bit of news was a minor coup for Archerd, and reporters, who lived from item to item, hated it when they’d been scooped. Allan’s mind raced. If only he could give Champlin some news on the level of the Reagan story. He’d hoped by now that he could announce that, yes, the Academy wanted him back to produce next year’s telecast. But while he’d spoken to Richard Kahn about the Disney lawsuit and Gregory Peck’s complaints, the Academy president never mentioned anything about the 1990 telecast. Then again, Kahn was retiring from the Academy at the end of July. Lame ducks don’t have any power, Allan kept telling himself.
In the end, the only thing Allan could offer Champlin in the way of a first-rate story was his very veiled assumption that there was something homophobic about certain people’s condemnation of the telecast. He repeated what Ronald Reagan and Jennifer Jones and Janet Leigh said about his Oscars. But he firmly believed, “If it came from Lincoln Center and not San Francisco . . . ,” San Francisco, by way of Steve Silver, being the buzzword for “gay,” the reaction would have been uniformly positive.
While Allan looked for scapegoats, he was not alone in believing that the “gay thing” contributed to the brouhaha. “I always thought it was that,” says Dozoretz.
“I felt there was a surge of homophobia,” says producer Craig Zadan. “But Allan played into that. He never attempted to tone it down. He embraced all of that extravagance. Everything was flamboyant and he liked to shock people.”
“The fact of Allan’s being gay helped fuel in people’s minds the anger and the recrimination,” says ABC’s John Hamlin.
“So what if Allan was gay?” says Fred Hayman. “I have never seen anything so outrageous as the way Hollywood reacted against that show. It was vicious and uncalled for, and they destroyed Allan.”
After Allan Carr and Steve Silver, Bruce Vilanch comprised the third
big gay component of the 1989 Oscar telecast. He put another wrinkle on the disaster. “Allan had said it was going to be the biggest and best for so long,” says Vilanch. “Everyone who’d produced the show before, or knew someone who had done it before, took umbrage.”
Then there was the telecast itself. “People didn’t hate it because Allan was gay,” says David Geffen. “It was a terrible show.”
Allan’s upbeat words defending himself appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Variety, and the Hollywood Reporter, but were, in the end, a mere bandage over a deepening, infected wound.
One week after the Oscars, Richard Kahn relented, on the advice of counsel, and issued a statement. It read, “The Academy sincerely apologizes to Disney for the unauthorized use of Disney’s copyrighted Snow White character and for unintentionally creating the impression that Disney had participated in or sanctioned the opening production number on the Academy Awards telecast.”
As part of the agreement, Disney dropped its federal suit on the condition that the Academy never “reuse the segment” with Snow White or “use Disney’s Snow White character in the future without Disney’s permission.”
Allan could deal with the Disney lawsuit, especially now that it had so conveniently disappeared. But April 7 brought new trouble. If Peter Guber surmised that the younger generation applauded Allan’s Oscarcast as a “breath of fresh air,” they were clearly not the ones in control of the Academy. No sooner did Kahn clear up the House of Mouse mess than another problem materialized in the form of a letter signed by seventeen of the most prominent (read: “older generation”) figures in the Hollywood film community. It began:The 61st Academy Awards show was an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry. It is neither fitting nor acceptable that the best work in motion pictures be acknowledged in such a demeaning fashion. We urge the president and governors of the Academy to ensure that future award presentations reflect the same standard of excellence as that set by the films and filmmakers they honor.
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