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 Page A

trademark—and no fewer than three banquet spreads: one by Westwood’s Chicago Pizza Works (again); another table serving Mexican or “Montezuma’s Revenge,” said Allan; and the third offering Chinese cuisine. Allan, who had a name for everything, called it “Charlie Chan’s Fantasy.”
    At the food bar, Rex Reed complained that “a bunch of hustlers from Hollywood Boulevard” had cut in line, and worse, they advertised “amyl nitrite” on their T-shirts. Wearing a leopard print bathrobe, Allan laughed and called the drug wear “cute,” but even he knew that some damage control was needed when his security team warned that a drag queen had OD’d on his front lawn and the police were on their way.
    “I don’t have a front lawn,” Allan cried in defense. “What happened was a crasher collapsed on my neighbor’s lawn.”
    It was one overdose Allan didn’t have to disown. As Bruce Vilanch describes the general Hilhaven vibe, “People were so chemically altered then. You could have people like Gregory Peck’s wife, Veronique, or Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Edie Goetz or Billy Wilder’s wife, Audrey, talking to Allan’s latest boy toys.”
    More damage control: When word circulated that all the bedrooms were locked, many gay guests took it the wrong way and wondered in delight if perhaps Nureyev was back in action. Allan tried to dispel the locked-doors rumor.
Only two bedrooms had been barricaded, he told the roving journalists. “One where the servants change and one where the Cycle Sluts are getting dressed. Liza, Lorna, and Altovise Davis are helping them get made up,” he insisted.
    It would be reported in the Los Angeles Times that Hugh Hefner looked “aghast” when he caught sight of the Sluts. With their muscled gender-obliterating mien, they compelled few people to listen as they performed. “Out came the Cycle Sluts, these guys in leather chaps with their bums hanging out,” Lorna Luft recalls. “People were shocked—people like the Irving Lazars and the Henry Mancinis. People thought Allan had gone loopy, but then everybody had a really great time.”
    Allan believed in the Cycle Sluts and thought the party would give them the needed exposure to land a recording contract. “This is the future of show business!” he announced to Poitier, Geffen, and Wilder.
    Allan reveled in the bizarre, yet idolized old Hollywood. “That took him back to his childhood of sitting in a movie theater, that was his solace,” says Luft. “We talked a lot about his seeing my mother in movies.” Watching the daughter of Judy Garland watching Gene Kelly watching the Cycle Sluts crack their whips, Allan knew his party plucked the right nerve.
    After the show, when old Hollywood, and much of the new, thought they’d seen enough bearded men in dominatrix gear and left Hilhaven, a few of the boys at the party went skinny-dipping and the girls—Lorna Luft, Liza Minnelli, Altovise Davis, and Lucie Arnaz—retired to the backyard to play volleyball with the Sluts. In his Variety column, Army Archerd made his usual long list of notables present, then went on to comment about those “nameless Hollywood residents who made the sweet smell of summer even sweeter . . . their perfumes mingled with the smell of pizza, pretzels, enchiladas and chow mein. Coke and Champagne tastes also mingled.”
    What Archerd’s purple prose left unsaid is what Allan’s friends knew. He liked to watch boys wrestle and sometimes, throwing off his caftan, he would get down with them in his skivvies. “It was a horrifying sight,” says Howard Rosenman. The lord of Hilhaven Lodge always encouraged his guests to indulge themselves in any way possible, and he helped them in those endeavors by providing the drugs as well as the sexual contacts of easy conquests. Allan’s own carnal knowledge, however, knew its bounds.
    Even as a boy, Allan knew he was gay. “It is just something you know,” he told Dyan Cannon. “All my friends were