Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr Read Online Free PDF

list.”
    Although few among the rock set became his clients, the Rod Stewarts and the Keith Moons of the world found an equally protective “career doctor,” as Allan advertised himself, at Hilhaven Lodge. “The rock people don’t come from
affluent backgrounds,” he observed. “They’re not used to socializing in chic and elegant style.” Whether Mylar staircases and Lucite pianos are hallmarks of true elegance, Allan countered with Cristal Champagne, Petrossian caviar, and stone crabs flown in from Florida. More important, Allan and his rock friends bonded over an interior decorator named Phyllis Morris, who reveled in the moniker that Time magazine gave her, “la dame du flash.” She specialized in zebra rugs, Borsalino mirrors, St. Regis candelabras, and Corsican coffee tables—an aesthetic best described as loud and lacquered.
    “Rock people are just like the movie stars of the 1940s,” Morris proclaimed. “It’s exciting to watch them spend money. They’re looking for something that says they’ve arrived. They’re creative, emotional, uninhibited. And in their homes you’ll find an atmosphere of uncontrolled funk.”
    She could have been speaking of Allan Carr, and as it turned out, her pièce de résistance was to be his AC/DC Disco, installed for $100,000. That basement retreat rivaled Hugh Hefner’s mansion and grotto only a few blocks away. “There was a whole rash of new stars then. It was movie stars and rock stars. It was party central between Allan’s house and the Playboy mansion,” Alice Cooper recalls. Hefner, whom Allan had talent-scouted for in the early 1960s, provided the girls. In a less explicit way, Allan provided the boys, bringing a bisexual frisson to an era that was still militantly hetero but increasingly curious about the sexually outré. If they didn’t experiment, the people on Allan’s guest list had read about homosexuality in The Joy of Sex and Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex, and they’d seen it in new movies like The Boys in the Band, Midnight Cowboy, Fellini Satyricon, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
    “Nobody in those days ever said ‘gay,’” notes Alice Cooper, who predated the sexual ambivalence of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona by a few years. In 1973, the oddly named male rock star Alice Cooper reigned atop the pop music field, having broken U.S. box office records set by the Rolling Stones. Teenagers came to his concerts not just to hear his brand of heavy metal but to watch the “shock rocker” decapitate baby dolls, throw live chickens into the audience, and fiddle around with a guillotine. Sexual ambivalence, if swathed in enough blood, fake or otherwise, was one thing. Confirmed homosexuality registered somewhat lower on the social totem pole. Even in Hollywood, its name remained unspoken despite the Stonewall Riots only four years earlier. Alice Cooper explains, “It was a much more heterosexual period, a hedonistic era of excess. Hollywood was Sodom and Gomorrah, and Allan Carr’s house would have been that clubhouse.”

    Straight stars liked it. Closeted gay stars liked it even better. As Allan used to tell them, “You can’t go out and be yourself. So if you’re going to be naughty, come to Casa Allan and carry on!”
    Over the years, some of the biggest celebrities, regardless of their sexual orientation, showed up at Allan’s parties on a regular basis, “whether they would admit they were there,” says Allan’s friend Gary Pudney, a longtime ABC vice-president. “He got beautiful people to let their hair down at his house, to get down and dirty. Allan was able to bring out the worst in everyone and have a wonderful time of it.”
    It was Allan’s unspoken goal to bring gay into the Hollywood mainstream. “Only at Allan’s parties would you find Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Edie Goetz chatting up some young hustler that Allan had picked up the night before,” says Howard Rosenman, producer of The Celluloid Closet