Author Robert Hofler Talks About His New Biography on Allan Carr

by bill biss

In the history of filmmaking Allan Carr is not an instantly recognizable household name.

 

Yet, this openly gay man (when it was so not fashionable to be out) produced one of the top-grossing musicals of all time known as Grease starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

 

His marketing savvy and astoundingly over-the-top parties are well known and still remembered within the ranks of the Hollywood elite and the pretty people of a decade from 1975 to 1985.

 

Overweight, insecure and following his dream of being an important force to be reckoned with in the film and the­atre business, Carr also was the producing force behind the ground breaking Broadway musical called La Cage aux Folles. More notoriously, Carr also produced the devastatingly bad 1979 musical starring The Village People called Can’t Stop the Music.

 

His thumbprint also as a producer is on the 1989 Academy Award ceremony. One that will go down in the history books, as one of the most innovative for it’s time and most repulsive to those in the industry.

 

Enter Robert Hofler, Variety Senior Editor in L.A. and author of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson. His creative skill to document Allan Carr’s life and his wild ride of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, which swirled around Carr and a generation, is a fascinating read in his latest book Party Animals.

 

The Rage Monthly spoke with Hofler to discover how the book came to be, what intrigued the author most and why Carr deserves a resurrec­tion within the pages of Hofler’s biography.

 

Why a biography on Allan Carr? Hofler elaborates, “It kind of came out of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson in that I was very interested in Henry Willson [a notorious closeted gay man and talent agent of the 1940s and 1950s]. That book was also an exploration of what it meant to be gay in Hollywood from the 1930s through the 1960s.

 

So, I was thinking that would be interesting to continue through the 1970s and 1980s. I find it interesting to be gay in Hollywood because I think it’s a very homophobic town. I mean now…a lot of agents and directors, screenwriters and producers are out. But, they certainly weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Still to this day we don’t have that really out movie star. Some people in TV have been able to do it. So it was really kind of this picture of ‘Why dowork in this town or how do you work in this industry that hates you?

 

[In the telling] Allan Carr gives me not only Can’t Stop the Music and The Village People but he also gives me La Cage aux Folles and the disastrous Oscars…”

 

It’s quite true that the time period Allan Carr was a part of is full of astounding and amazing Hollywood stories. “One reason I wanted to do this book is that I feel the 1970s is a very misinterpreted period. Particularly in gay history because we always think that everything was very repressed and then there’s the 1970s where everything all happened.

 

I always felt that people tend to think that there was Stonewall in 1969 so the 1970s was terribly liberated politically.

 

My memory of that time period was that it was all a nighttime integration. That it was all party time but if you went to the office; politically it was nowhere. But certainly in Hollywood [Carr] was the only powerbroker who was out of the closet.”

 

Robert Hofler shares who he felt was able to give him the most detailed and factual information on the real Allan Carr. “There were really a lot of people but one of them who is well-known is Bruce Vilanch. Bruce Vilanch had known him from Chicago in the 1960s to his death. He had worked on so many projects with him…he got fired from Can’t Stop The Music and had written patter for Cass Elliot and I believe Ann-Margret.

 

Bruce has written so many of the Oscar telecasts but [1989’s Oscars] was his first one. Bruce was really great. There was also a guy named Freddy Gershon who was president of Robert Stigwood’s organization. He just really knew Allan not only from a personal viewpoint but also a real business viewpoint so that was intriguing.”

 

Allan Carr was notorious for his outrageous and drug and alcohol-fueled Hollywood parties in his home called Hillhaven in Beverly Hills. Author Hofler touches base on just one private party that astounds him out of the many mentioned in his book. “I think the one I was most fasci­nated with was one of his private parties and that was the [Rudolf] Nureyev ‘Mattress’ party.

 

I’ve never been to any­thing like that! Carr had given this party for The National Ballet of Canada and then a week or two later, he had a private party where he said, ‘bring a mattress.’

 

All these guys brought a mattress and they put them on a floor in his living room and he [Carr] watched the young boys wrestle. What is kind of interesting to me and it’s not part of the book.

 

It’s how I got information through Dominick Dunne. Dunne was kind of ‘in the closet’ until he died. He said, ‘Well…I wasn’t there but he had this party where all these hustlers were hired. One for each room so Nureyev could be serviced on the spot.’

 

I confirmed that with other people who were there and then they talked about that there was this line outside the cottage where Nureyev was getting serviced (laughter).

 

It was interesting because I called Dominick Dunne back a year later and said there was something else I learned. He said, ‘Oh yeah. That Nureyev party…that was a good one.’ Then he didn’t give me the x-rated version but he was there.”

 

Allan Carr was often described as two people…the wild party man and the savvy business-minded individual. In mentioning what an innovative Hollywood trendsetter Carr was, Hofler states, “Yes and no. There are certainly innovations with the Oscars. I think the big innovation that he had was he really trumped up the fashion. That he had a fashion show before the Oscars.

 

Then he got a lot of designers to lend dresses to the actresses, which now, of course, they fight over it but at that time it hadn’t been done. Arms really had to be twisted to get people like Halston and Lagerfeld to lend them these clothes.

 

He really expanded the red carpet coverage, which now is like a billion dollar industry. That’s taken over the Emmys, the Grammys and everything now.

 

So that was all Allan. Continuing Hofler adds, “A lot of his other promotional stuff I don’t think has endured because in today’s media if you gave a huge party and spent $100,000 or $200,000 (because that’s what Allan spent on let’s say for Cage aux Folles)…that kind of thing, I don’t think that in today’s media saturation you would get much ‘bang-for-your-buck’ by doing that.

 

Back then, you could still get that because everything was so much print. His parties were written up in Time and Newsweek—these big magazines that everyone read. Now it would just be a flash on the TV set and it’s over with. Also the celebrities would not give that kind of access.

 

You couldn’t throw those par­ties and have the press wandering around interviewing them and photographing them. Now, everything is just done on the red carpet in front of the vodka sign. I don’t think some of his showmanship would endure today.”

 

Robert Hofler gives his overall evaluation of the man, Allan Carr. “His kind of major conflict was his weight be­cause he was morbidly obese. He’d even had this bypass operation in 1972, which was very early to have that done. That was very chancy. He never had great health.

 

Was he the role model I wanted in the 1970s? No. I think he was innately honest and innately honest about him­self. So, he had that gay identity very, very early on. He might have been troubled by it but I didn’t get that.”