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 B
Authors: Robert Hofler
Tags: General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Reference, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, Art, Film & Video, Popular Culture, Individual Director
Ads: Link
interested in girls. I wasn’t.” When
Cannon asked if he ever felt traumatized by his sexual orientation, Allan said no. “But sometimes people answer too quickly,” Cannon offers.
Joel Schumacher found Allan to be “a survival story of a lot of pain. Being gay has been a plus in my life. Then there are those people who have made it a plus but went through hell to get there,” says Schumacher, who put Allan squarely in the latter category.
David Geffen had known Allan when the Dreamworks founder was still an agent at William Morris in the 1960s. “Before Allan decided not to be very fat, he was a happier guy,” says Geffen. “He hadn’t really discovered sex at that point. Which led to all kinds of complications.”
Another longtime friend agrees. “I think Allan was a virgin until quite late in his life,” says Gary Pudney. According to the ABC executive, Allan didn’t find love, or some facsimile thereof, until September 1975. Pudney had rented a house in Puerto Vallarta and invited Allan to come down to relax and party for a few days. Unfortunately, Allan’s luggage didn’t make the same airplane, and Pudney had to take him into town to buy clothes. There in the ladies’ section of one boutique, Allan alarmed the shopkeeper with his ululant cry of happy discovery when he found one especially outrageous caftan: It was bright red and very Mexican with lots of fringe, jewels, and medallions that sparkled and made noise like a wedding getaway car. Allan couldn’t wait to put it on, and wearing it out of the store, he proceeded to down several margaritas, get smashed, and fall in love with a beautiful young blond. “I think it was the first time he went to bed with a man,” says Pudney. “He had not slept with women.”
The next morning, Allan told his TV exec friend, “This guy has changed my life.” Allan was in love at last, he said, and so happy that he couldn’t stop talking about his affair. Love is forever until it’s over, and for Allan, eternity could be counted on two hands. “Over the years, Allan had half a dozen relationships,” says Pudney, “He had a mental picture of a fantasy man, and he would try to find that figure.”
These men were inevitably young, beautiful, tall, well built, perfect—everything Allan felt, and knew, he was not.
five
Capote’s Retreat
Diana Ross, Peter Sellers, Lucille Ball, Dominick Dunne, and a few hundred other Hollywood notables were stunned by the summons delivered to their doorstep that crisp November day. Most subpoenas are delivered by a plainclothesman. This one was handed to them by a uniformed officer of the law. “It was quite a shock to receive it,” observed Dunne. “When you open the front door and someone is serving you a subpoena, your heart stops!”
The joke was pure Allan Carr. In his mind, the party scheduled for December 14, 1975, began three weeks earlier when those three hundred “summons,” i.e. invitations, went out by way of a few dozen unemployed actors dressed up in cop costumes. The law-enforcement theme carried right through to the December 14 party itself, held in the Lincoln Heights Jail in northeast Los Angeles. The prison, which once housed 2,800 convicts, shut its doors shortly after the Watts riots in 1965, and in recent years sat deserted except for its occasional use by film companies in need of an ugly, dank jail.
On that mid-December night, most of Allan’s guests rode in limousines that took them past downtown L.A. and the gaudy lights of Chinatown, where banks are disguised as ersatz pagodas, and through an anonymous neighborhood that few of them had ever seen, and never much cared to visit again. Lincoln Heights is the dumping ground of the city’s vast transportation departments, its asphalt-paved lots filled with menacing-looking bulldozers and trucks. The hills of Elysian Fields park rise to the northwest, only to be blotted out, momentarily, by the Lincoln Heights Jail. Limo drivers followed the
Cannon asked if he ever felt traumatized by his sexual orientation, Allan said no. “But sometimes people answer too quickly,” Cannon offers.
Joel Schumacher found Allan to be “a survival story of a lot of pain. Being gay has been a plus in my life. Then there are those people who have made it a plus but went through hell to get there,” says Schumacher, who put Allan squarely in the latter category.
David Geffen had known Allan when the Dreamworks founder was still an agent at William Morris in the 1960s. “Before Allan decided not to be very fat, he was a happier guy,” says Geffen. “He hadn’t really discovered sex at that point. Which led to all kinds of complications.”
Another longtime friend agrees. “I think Allan was a virgin until quite late in his life,” says Gary Pudney. According to the ABC executive, Allan didn’t find love, or some facsimile thereof, until September 1975. Pudney had rented a house in Puerto Vallarta and invited Allan to come down to relax and party for a few days. Unfortunately, Allan’s luggage didn’t make the same airplane, and Pudney had to take him into town to buy clothes. There in the ladies’ section of one boutique, Allan alarmed the shopkeeper with his ululant cry of happy discovery when he found one especially outrageous caftan: It was bright red and very Mexican with lots of fringe, jewels, and medallions that sparkled and made noise like a wedding getaway car. Allan couldn’t wait to put it on, and wearing it out of the store, he proceeded to down several margaritas, get smashed, and fall in love with a beautiful young blond. “I think it was the first time he went to bed with a man,” says Pudney. “He had not slept with women.”
The next morning, Allan told his TV exec friend, “This guy has changed my life.” Allan was in love at last, he said, and so happy that he couldn’t stop talking about his affair. Love is forever until it’s over, and for Allan, eternity could be counted on two hands. “Over the years, Allan had half a dozen relationships,” says Pudney, “He had a mental picture of a fantasy man, and he would try to find that figure.”
These men were inevitably young, beautiful, tall, well built, perfect—everything Allan felt, and knew, he was not.
five
Capote’s Retreat
Diana Ross, Peter Sellers, Lucille Ball, Dominick Dunne, and a few hundred other Hollywood notables were stunned by the summons delivered to their doorstep that crisp November day. Most subpoenas are delivered by a plainclothesman. This one was handed to them by a uniformed officer of the law. “It was quite a shock to receive it,” observed Dunne. “When you open the front door and someone is serving you a subpoena, your heart stops!”
The joke was pure Allan Carr. In his mind, the party scheduled for December 14, 1975, began three weeks earlier when those three hundred “summons,” i.e. invitations, went out by way of a few dozen unemployed actors dressed up in cop costumes. The law-enforcement theme carried right through to the December 14 party itself, held in the Lincoln Heights Jail in northeast Los Angeles. The prison, which once housed 2,800 convicts, shut its doors shortly after the Watts riots in 1965, and in recent years sat deserted except for its occasional use by film companies in need of an ugly, dank jail.
On that mid-December night, most of Allan’s guests rode in limousines that took them past downtown L.A. and the gaudy lights of Chinatown, where banks are disguised as ersatz pagodas, and through an anonymous neighborhood that few of them had ever seen, and never much cared to visit again. Lincoln Heights is the dumping ground of the city’s vast transportation departments, its asphalt-paved lots filled with menacing-looking bulldozers and trucks. The hills of Elysian Fields park rise to the northwest, only to be blotted out, momentarily, by the Lincoln Heights Jail. Limo drivers followed the
Similar Books
