Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (22 page)

If Allan thought that Morali didn’t have the clout, or cash, to throw a memorable party, he guessed wrong. For his event, the Frenchman got the Ritchie Family to perform, but the highlight of the party came when the Village People presented Allan with a life-size doll of himself. “It looked like Allan,” says Felipe Rose, “right down to the glasses, the muumuu, the necklaces, the little sneakers.”

Allan recoiled at the sight of it. “What is that?” he groused.

“It’s you!” said Rose.

Allan was not pleased.

“It looked like a big Muppet,” says Belolo.

“Actually, it looked like a very old Muppet,” says Rose.

For the most part, “The party was fun and wild,” says Arlene Phillips. At least, while it lasted. “But there was a strange feeling at that party. It was over. It was like somehow disco had soured.”

Allan had been nearly a constant presence on the
Can’t Stop the Music
set, given a stop or two at Cedars-Sinai. Now it was time to indulge his real expertise: promotion. Much of it was planned, but some of the press attention even Allan didn’t want. When word came down that ABC’s
20/20
planned to air an exposé of the Village People, one that would reveal the true sexual orientation of its members and their fan base, the producers were genuinely worried. Allan cautioned Belolo, “You better take care of Jacques.”

Belolo put it delicately to his effeminate partner. “Don’t act like a woman,” he cautioned. To assuage Morali’s ego, Belolo advised the ABC producers that they introduce Morali as “the man who created the Village People,” and that they call him, simply, “the money man.”

“But Jacques couldn’t contain himself,” says Belolo, and five minutes into the TV interview, his wrists went limp and his hands started flying as he went from sounding like a pseudobasso to a castrato. Otherwise, it was a tame profile by even 1979 standards, and hardly qualified as an exposé.

While ABC revealed that “Homosexuals brought their clothes and lifestyle out of the closet and into the streets of Greenwich Village,” the network never identified any of the Village People members as being gay. Morali, despite his flamboyant gestures, said nothing controversial. He kept it simple. “A lightbulb went off inside my brain,” he said, referring to the “American icons” of the cop, construction worker, and sailor, which he knew would make a great singing group. His G-rated comments were interspersed with footage of the Village
People recording a new song, “(I Like It) Sleazy,” because, as Morali explained, “‘Sleazy’ is the new in word.”

Allan, for his part, barely appeared on
20/20,
and received only enough air-time to say of Morali, “I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me.” Elsewhere in the report, Nancy Walker called the Village People “adorable.” That’s as controversial as it got, and everyone aboard the
Can’t Stop the Music
production let out a collective sigh of relief.

Allan now directed his full attention to the real press campaign, which kicked off with a supersize billboard on Sunset Boulevard. At Allan’s prompting, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed it “Can’t Stop the Music Day,” and to return the favor, Allan rented the biggest billboard on the Sunset Strip, at the juncture of Havenhurst Drive, just south of the famed Chateau Marmont hotel, where John Belushi would famously overdose two years later.

At least, Allan called it “the biggest billboard on Sunset Strip.” He also claimed having “the longest red carpet in the world,” which was the one he unrolled for more than a city block, all the way from Schwab’s drugstore at Laurel Drive and Sunset Boulevard to the billboard, which had been covered with enough white fabric to drape, well, a very large billboard.

Before the momentous unveiling, the Village People and other cast members got ripped at Schwab’s, as did Allan’s usual press corps hangers-on, who’d grown fat on his liquor and food ever since he announced the film’s production a year ago. This band of imbibers made a motley ensemble as they stumbled together down the long, long red carpet to the big, big billboard. The
Hollywood Reporter
’s Robert Osborne called it “the biggest photo op ever,” and to take advantage of that fact, a grandstand filled with fans greeted the
Can’t Stop the Music
entourage in front of the Chateau Marmont.

“Are we supposed to perform?” the Village People asked each other, still crowd-shy after their city hall run-in with several angry San Franciscans.

As Allan carefully explained his billboard stratagem, the cast would march down the red carpet, then be hoisted high above the street on a platform, where Valerie Perrine would pull a trigger to set off a huge fireworks display. The white fabric draping the billboard would drop as fans shrieked, applauded, and carried on at the sight of the triple-life-size image of their idols, the Village People.

The publicity stunt went as planned until Perrine pulled the trigger—at which point the vast fireworks display that Allan had promised produced a few red-white-and-blue sparks and a
pphfffft
noise. David Hodo turned to Randy Jones: “Uh oh, not a good omen.”

From there, the
Can’t Stop the Music
cast retraced their steps on the Sunset Boulevard red carpet for a sit-down dinner at the Director’s Guild, but not before Allan physically pulled the Village People from the buffet line and ordered them to wait until the media and industry guests had been served. Such treatment chafed the group’s hirsute leather man, Glenn Hughes, who complained to a reporter, “It’s constantly shoved down our throats that everything is out of our control. We’re pushed around, told what to do, and put into embarrassing situations.”

Morali threatened to fire his leather man, but it was too late. The
Can’t Stop the Music
train had already left for New York City.

“
That
was my initiation to pharmaceutical drugs,” says Tamara Rawitt.

As VP of publicity and marketing at AFD, the company releasing
Can’t Stop the Music,
Rawitt held sway over several plans to promote the film on the East Coast. From the beginning, she didn’t expect the Allan Carr assignment to be an easy one since “the buzz” around the company, based on early screenings, pegged the movie as
Can’t Stand the Music
. Then again, two years ago those in-house pundits at Paramount had dismissed
Grease
. Rawitt shared several phone conversations with Allan prior to his arrival in New York City. Her first face-to-face confrontation, however, didn’t come until his first morning in New York. It began with a 3 a.m. phone call. It was Allan. He was screaming, “The stems of the calla lilies in the Indian’s room aren’t tall enough!” The Indian in question was the Village People’s Native American, Felipe Rose, and as Rawitt well knew, he and the rest of the
Can’t Stop the Music
cast, along with Allan, were now staying in the tony Plaza Hotel on Central Park South.

Allan’s tirade didn’t stop with the calla lilies. “There aren’t enough champagne truffles in my room!” he continued to scream.

Rawitt threw on some street clothes, and fearing that she might be fired from her AFD gig, cabbed it to the Plaza Hotel to beg forgiveness at 3:30 a.m.

When she arrived, Allan sat draped in a caftan, posing commando-style in a French provincial chair. The stems of the calla lilies and the meager number of truffles were, in his estimation, “egregious errors that could not be repeated.” The success of
Can’t Stop the Music
depended on it. Rawitt knew then that the next few days would require an hourly intake of Valium.

In some respects, she deeply admired the man. “Allan was astoundingly astute,” she says. “He had a sixth sense that was almost psychic, telepathic. He could just read a room right away.”

For instance, the board room of Baskin-Robbins in New York City.

Despite its frothy fun product, the ice cream company is a highly corporate place, and for his pitch to use B-R to help promote
Can’t Stop the Music,
Allan left his dark blue Ralph Lauren jacket in the closet and chose instead to wear a red, white, and blue bejeweled caftan. Rawitt tried to contain her laughter as she watched Allan, his fingers encased in more diamonds and gold than a Vegas showgirl, introduce himself to a half-dozen uptight, two-piece-suited VPs. Having disarmed, if not stunned, them, Allan proceeded to deliver his spiel to the men from Baskin-Robbins.

“I’ve got a new flavor for you!” Allan began. “This new flavor will be called Can’t Stop the Nuts.”

Rawitt called the Baskin-Robbins pitch “one of the great moments in Jimmy Glick showbiz,” since Allan presented his new flavor as if it were the greatest invention since rocky road ice cream. Or possibly “since the Holy Grail,” says Rawitt. As he had done throughout his career, Allan so assaulted straight men with his blatant, seemingly frivolous brand of homosexuality that they found themselves, in the end, totally receptive to, if not downright beguiled by, his hard-sell pitch. “After the board got over the shock of Allan, they did agree to make Can’t Stop the Nuts their sixtieth flavor,” says Rawitt. “Considering what the movie was about, that name—Can’t Stop the Nuts—was a double, if not triple, entendre.”

Allan’s wooing of Baskin-Robbins was only the beginning, as he soon lined up Famous Amos, Fleishmann’s, Sports-in-Motion, and Roach Inc. to market, respectively, Can’t Stop the Cookies, Can’t Stop the Spirits, Can’t Stop the Fashion, and Can’t Stop the Accessories.

Now, suited up with all that tie-in armor, he prepared to do battle with the moviegoing public. To premiere his movie in New York City or Los Angeles would have been the obvious choice. “But being the hometown boy who made good was very important to Allan,” says Kathy Berlin, another publicist on the movie. Allan went aquatic in the Windy City. “I remember mermaids in a fountain,” says David Hodo. To keep the finned ladies company, Allan put his bartenders in hip boots and yellow slickers to wade through the pool to serve 2,000 guests in the Hyatt Regency’s Glass House atrium, which also came equipped with a three-story waterfall and circular staircase that Allan filled with balloons.

“I saw Michael Todd do his
Around the World in 80 Days
party when I was six or seven,” Allan announced to his guests, “and I thought, well, we
want to do that.” From a balcony in the atrium, he called out, “Come on up here to the second level, where there’s even more food.” And he had other reasons to celebrate. At nearby Lake Forest College, his alma mater, they had just renamed a building the Allan Carr Theater, inspired by his recent $100,000 donation.

As he often did, Allan took out press insurance by casting journalists in his film. With
Can’t Stop the Music,
he gave his old friend and
Chicago Tribune
reporter Aaron Gold a cameo in the film. In his column, Gold ignored the movie and instead wrote about the party and its “18,000 pounds of ice that were used for the various ice sculptures and the 27 musicians, including female violinists in evening gowns, [who] played continuously.”

The
Hollywood Reporter
columnist Robert Osborne attended the Chicago premiere with his friend actress Barbara Rush, who played Bruce Jenner’s mother in the film. The two of them sat directly in front of the diminutive Nancy Walker, and being a gracious man, Osborne turned to the director of the hour to offer, “Don’t worry. When the movie starts, I’ll scrunch down.”

Walker waved away his concern. “You think I’m sitting through this piece of shit again?” she replied, and she exited the room as soon as the movie started.

Just as Walker grew bored by her opus, Allan’s inordinate interest in one of the film’s headliners waned as well, and shortly after the Chicago screening, he confided to friends, “Steve Guttenberg should have remained in dental school.”

Before he left his hometown, Allan phoned his old friend Joanne Cimbalo to offer an invitation to the New York premiere of
Can’t Stop the Music
. “I’ve chartered a plane. Come join us!” Allan insisted. He even ordered up a limousine so Cimbalo and her young daughter, Margaret, could get to the airport in style. In fact, Allan made sure that everyone, from his many stars to the cinematographer, Bill Butler, each had a limousine.

“It was such an Auntie Mame thing,” Cimbalo says of her six-mile-high rendezvous with the Village People. It was an exceedingly happy crowd. Even the flight attendants put down their napkins and tea bags to tweak each other’s noses with something that looked like powered sugar.

Since his childhood in Highland Park, Allan had dreamed of replicating the showbiz miracle that his idol Mike Todd created at Madison Square Garden to launch
Around the World in 80 Days
. “Allan was affected by Mike Todd’s party, and he always wanted to make a film out of Todd’s life,” says Thom Mount. But that impresario’s bit of 1950s derring-do raised a dilemma: Todd had already
used up the biggest venue in town. Yankee Stadium might be available. But who wanted to trek up to the Bronx? Allan thought out-of-the-box to top Todd. The Metropolitan Opera house was more prestigious than Madison Square Garden, but at a mere 3,800 seats, it was woefully inadequate in size.

At last, he had it. “We’ll hold the party on the plaza of Lincoln Center!” he announced to the people at AFD. As Allan planned it, the premiere screening at the plush Ziegfeld Theater would afford invited guests a very short trip (ten minutes in evening traffic) uptown to the party at Lincoln Center. Allan did borrow at least one aspect of his
Can’t Stop the Music
party from Mike Todd, and that was his circus theme. AFD wags gave it a very contemporary spin. “It was Cirque du So Gay,” says Rawitt.

Granted, the Canadian circus extravaganza was a good four years away from being founded, in 1984, not that Allan ever took credit for inspiring the multimedia circus franchise. In some respects, his Lincoln Center party easily trumped the
Around the World in 80 Days
event at Madison Square Garden. Unlike Mike Todd’s event, Allan’s would be an outdoor affair. Also, “The logistics at Lincoln Center were insane,” says Rawitt. Circuses pulled in and out of Madison Square Garden on a regular basis back in the 1950s. But no one had ever built trapezes over the pool garden in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. “We had to bring in circus equipment and rig everything, and there wasn’t time for rehearsal,” she says. “Could the acrobats do all their stunts? The safety provisions were just amazing.”