Read Online Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr by Robert Hofler - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Hofler
Tags: General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Reference, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Art, Film & Video, Popular Culture, Individual Director
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he’s doing Off-Broadway.”
“He’s turning down a fucking TV special so he can do a fucking workshop Off-Broadway?” Kennedy asked in disbelief.
It’s a conversation that Allan never repeated to Hamlisch. He knew when not to put business before passion, and Hamlisch returned the favor when he asked Allan if he would take his mother, Lily, to the opening of A Chorus Line at the Public Theater on May 21. But Allan’s work didn’t end there. It deeply annoyed him that some of the New York critics didn’t fully appreciate Hamlisch’s work on the musical. Or as the composer recalls, “People forget that in some of the original reviews for A Chorus Line the music got killed to smithereens.” Allan made sure that those offending critics received a recording of the score, and as a result, they rereviewed it much more favorably a few weeks later when Hamlisch’s “fucking workshop” moved uptown to the Shubert Theater to become one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.
four
Sluts’ Night Out
After the Nureyev Mattress Party, Hilhaven Lodge rightfully took its place as the gay party house in Los Angeles. Except for the occasional all-out orgy, Allan made sure to keep his house hospitable to straights who wanted to see what everyone was talking about in this new post Roe v. Wade era of sexual liberation when Last Tango in Paris entertained the masses and The Devil in Miss Jones landed a review from Vincent Canby in the New York Times . While office decorum dictated that homosexuals remain in the closet, nighttime integration allowed gays to be seen as the engine fueling the social circuit on both coasts. It was a coy one-foot-in-both-worlds approach that had already been used to sell movies as widely divergent as Women in Love and Cabaret, and would be exploited to the max by publisher Clay Felker with his “bisexual chic” cover lines for New York and New West magazines.
More than any other Hollywood power broker, Allan brought the ambisexual aesthetic to Los Angeles and pushed it into the open, if not the daylight. The wrestling matches and the orgies starring Nureyev were one thing. What made Allan unique was his ability to bridge Hollywood’s gay and straight worlds—much as he had the Old and New Guard and the movie-star and rock-star worlds—by making Hilhaven everybody’s playground.
He did it by titillating, if not shocking, movieland’s elite.
Enter the Cycle Sluts.
On the evening of July 4, 1975, David Geffen, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, James Caan, Mario Puzo, David Janssen, Buck Henry, Tony Richardson,
Hugh Hefner, Rex Reed, Sidney and Joanna Poitier, and Altovise and Sammy Davis Jr., along with 300 other people, came to Hilhaven to see the new pop group that Allan touted as clients. The Sluts were ten very bearded men who wore female S&M leather gear—studded bras, corsets, chaps, high-heel boots—as they cranked out a rather diluted brand of heavy-metal rock. The group’s emcee, Michael Bates (aka Cycle Slut Mother Goddam), saw a message in their outrageous makeup, if not their music. “We don’t pretend to be singers or dancers,” he said. “We take away stereotypes and labels by holding them up to be ridiculous. There’s no social redemption involved.” Whenever the Sluts took a break from their drums and guitars and vocals, they continued to entertain by brandishing whips to flick at flying insects navigating the Beverly Hills night air. Apparently this was not enough to entertain Allan’s guests, because as host he also devised a circus theme for the party, and once again made Mick Jagger his guest of honor. And once again Mick Jagger didn’t show since he preferred to attend only those parties to which he had not been invited.
The party’s circus theme took form with clowns and palm readers and a Puerto Rican band (accompanied on the bongos by George Schlatter and George Hamilton) and a mermaid floating in the pool—this was fast becoming an Allan Carr
“He’s turning down a fucking TV special so he can do a fucking workshop Off-Broadway?” Kennedy asked in disbelief.
It’s a conversation that Allan never repeated to Hamlisch. He knew when not to put business before passion, and Hamlisch returned the favor when he asked Allan if he would take his mother, Lily, to the opening of A Chorus Line at the Public Theater on May 21. But Allan’s work didn’t end there. It deeply annoyed him that some of the New York critics didn’t fully appreciate Hamlisch’s work on the musical. Or as the composer recalls, “People forget that in some of the original reviews for A Chorus Line the music got killed to smithereens.” Allan made sure that those offending critics received a recording of the score, and as a result, they rereviewed it much more favorably a few weeks later when Hamlisch’s “fucking workshop” moved uptown to the Shubert Theater to become one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.
four
Sluts’ Night Out
After the Nureyev Mattress Party, Hilhaven Lodge rightfully took its place as the gay party house in Los Angeles. Except for the occasional all-out orgy, Allan made sure to keep his house hospitable to straights who wanted to see what everyone was talking about in this new post Roe v. Wade era of sexual liberation when Last Tango in Paris entertained the masses and The Devil in Miss Jones landed a review from Vincent Canby in the New York Times . While office decorum dictated that homosexuals remain in the closet, nighttime integration allowed gays to be seen as the engine fueling the social circuit on both coasts. It was a coy one-foot-in-both-worlds approach that had already been used to sell movies as widely divergent as Women in Love and Cabaret, and would be exploited to the max by publisher Clay Felker with his “bisexual chic” cover lines for New York and New West magazines.
More than any other Hollywood power broker, Allan brought the ambisexual aesthetic to Los Angeles and pushed it into the open, if not the daylight. The wrestling matches and the orgies starring Nureyev were one thing. What made Allan unique was his ability to bridge Hollywood’s gay and straight worlds—much as he had the Old and New Guard and the movie-star and rock-star worlds—by making Hilhaven everybody’s playground.
He did it by titillating, if not shocking, movieland’s elite.
Enter the Cycle Sluts.
On the evening of July 4, 1975, David Geffen, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, James Caan, Mario Puzo, David Janssen, Buck Henry, Tony Richardson,
Hugh Hefner, Rex Reed, Sidney and Joanna Poitier, and Altovise and Sammy Davis Jr., along with 300 other people, came to Hilhaven to see the new pop group that Allan touted as clients. The Sluts were ten very bearded men who wore female S&M leather gear—studded bras, corsets, chaps, high-heel boots—as they cranked out a rather diluted brand of heavy-metal rock. The group’s emcee, Michael Bates (aka Cycle Slut Mother Goddam), saw a message in their outrageous makeup, if not their music. “We don’t pretend to be singers or dancers,” he said. “We take away stereotypes and labels by holding them up to be ridiculous. There’s no social redemption involved.” Whenever the Sluts took a break from their drums and guitars and vocals, they continued to entertain by brandishing whips to flick at flying insects navigating the Beverly Hills night air. Apparently this was not enough to entertain Allan’s guests, because as host he also devised a circus theme for the party, and once again made Mick Jagger his guest of honor. And once again Mick Jagger didn’t show since he preferred to attend only those parties to which he had not been invited.
The party’s circus theme took form with clowns and palm readers and a Puerto Rican band (accompanied on the bongos by George Schlatter and George Hamilton) and a mermaid floating in the pool—this was fast becoming an Allan Carr
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