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

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    “There would be these big Hollywood stars, and then you would see these beach kids. You’d think, What are they doing there?” says Hairspray producer Craig Zadan.
    Allan referred to these kids either affectionately or dismissively, depending on his mood, as “the twinkies.” For the gay half of Allan’s guest list, they were a major attraction. When Brett Ratner became the proud owner of Hilhaven Lodge, he heard the stories repeatedly. “So many gay guys tell me they fell in love in this house,” he says. Not that the fun was restricted to same-sex attractions. As a famous TV actress once joked to Ratner, “If you ever find a broad’s panties in that house . . . ”
    Whether his guests were hetero or homo, the gayest thing at an Allan Carr party was unquestionably Allan Carr. “He was really out there,” says Gregg Kilday, who profiled Allan many times for the Los Angeles Times and the Herald-Examiner . “But of course, the press would never write about anybody being gay in the 1970s for fear of libel. They used the code word ‘flamboyant.’”
    Or “epicene,” as Time did in its profile of Allan .
    To the press, Allan’s mantra told Hollywood to “get back to glamour!” Privately, “He was making it up as he went along,” says Richard Hach. “He was pretending. He was living his fantasy the way he thought it should be.” If he wasn’t yet the great Hollywood producer that he had longed to be since his childhood in Highland Park, Illinois, Allan Carr would instead be the great Hollywood party giver—until the rest of his fantasy fell into shape.
    Not that Chasen’s catered every Hilhaven party. Since Allan would often invite 200 people and 300 showed up, the quality of the food, the décor, and
the entertainment varied radically. Business manager Daniel Gottlieb was right. Allan couldn’t afford his house, nor could he afford to entertain extravagantly several times a month. In hindsight, publicist-turned-producer Laurence Mark ( As Good As It Gets, Dreamgirls ) jokes that Allan gave the first “product-placement parties.” Chicago Pizza Works catered a few events, and Allan made sure to sprinkle his parties with members of the press—the Hollywood Reporter ’s George Christy, Variety ’s Army Archerd, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner ’s Wanda McDaniel, the Los Angeles Times’ s Jody Jacobs, and Liz Smith’s legman Jack Martin—who, in turn, were encouraged to write up the events. It was an era before journalists and Hollywood celebs had declared war on each other. “Allan would get the caterers to do a lot of it for free in exchange for being able to advertise that they had done the party. Allan saved money and they got free publicity. It was marketing,” says Hach.
    Some parties didn’t make the papers, and whether the Fourth Estate was present or not, the code remained in effect: If it’s gay, it doesn’t see the light of day.
    In early April 1974, Allan further expanded his social circle of celebrities to include the artistes of the classical ballet world when Rudolf Nureyev came to town with the National Ballet of Canada. Allan had first met the Russian-émigré dancer through his close friend the screenwriter Bronte Woodard, who was variously described as “a good old gay southern boy,” “a comical version of Truman Capote but without the poetry,” and “a sweet guy who did lots of drugs.” Even before the party honoring the National Ballet of Canada, Allan and Nureyev enjoyed a high-profile friendship of low expectations.
    “Allan could never understand him because of his thick Russian accent,” says Hach. Over dinner at the Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills, “Everybody would pretend they were having a conversation, but they didn’t know what Nureyev was saying.”
    It didn’t matter. Nureyev gave Allan the perfect excuse to throw a party on April 9, 1974, and tout L.A.—Bianca Jagger, Paul Morrissey, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Diana Ross, Roman Polanski,