Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr
by Robert Hofler
Da Capo Press. 344 pages (paper), $15.95
GROWING UP as an only child in Highland Park, Illinois, Alan Solomon always got what he wanted. And why not? His parents, divorced by the time Alan was a teenager, had plenty to spend on their son, and happily funded several large theatre productions before the now overweight, bespectacled Alan was eighteen years old. Such were the relatively auspicious beginnings of the man later known as Allan Carr, who would go on to produce the movie Grease and several others in the late 1970’s and early 80’s.
Following high school, Alan (still the original, pre-“Allan” spelling) had some minor successes with theatre productions in Chicago, but when he failed in college, he headed for Hollywood, where he worked as talent director for Hugh Hefner’s new TV show Playboy’s Penthouse. This job introduced him to the world of talent booking—and to dozens of Hollywood’s biggest names.
After Hefner’s project ended, “Allan Carr” became manager to the stars, a job that fully utilized his skills. Calmly negotiating, he could soothe feuding celebs’ anger and jealousy (though anyone who angered Carr himself received a blistering tirade). When he had an idea or saw an opportunity, he was relentless—a trait that was at once good for his clients and annoying for everyone else. He could charm anybody, often sweet-talking “sponsors” into funding his lavish, legendary, multi-day parties so he didn’t have to pay for food or drinks. More than one person knew him as a first-class schmoozer who never failed to get his way.
But Allan Carr had a dream: he wanted to be a movie producer. So when he fell in love with a lesser-known Broadway production called Grease, he knew he could “reinvent” it for the big screen. He got the rights, tweaked the show, and the rest is history. And Carr’s career took off … for awhile.
Though blessed with golden powers of persuasion, Carr’s sense of timing was ultimately poor, and his visions, bloated. Following the mega-success of Grease, he launched his pet project Can’t Stop the Music, but by the time it was released, disco was starting to take a dive, and so did this movie when it was released in 1980. Other projects never went anywhere or were ill-conceived to begin with, and when Carr finally got his chance to produce television’s Academy Awards show in 1989, the resulting mess was witnessed by the entire world. Carr’s last production, sadly, was a party that he never lived to attend. He died in 1999, morbidly obese, ailing, and angry at “those bastards” who had forgotten him and his work.
Filled with big names and little scandals—Allan Carr was openly gay when gay was taboo to talk about in Hollywood—Party Animals is exhaustively researched, over-the-top snarky, gossipy, sarcastically funny, and teetering on the very edge of boring. For the most part, this biography of tenacity, flamboyancy, and debauchery is thoroughly enjoyable, but there is a relentlessness to the parade of stories about big ideas and failed projects, not to mention personal encounters that rose and fell with the seasons. Robert Hofler tells the tale like a true insider, full of all the juicy detail you’d expect, but there are times when the story just doesn’t seem all that important. That may be because Allan Carr wasn’t exactly a household name outside of the industry, and most of his career played out a generation or more ago, capturing a frivolous era whose appeal hasn’t stood the test of time.
