Free Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr by Robert Hofler Page B

absolutely loved it,” he said without apologies. It was but a warm-up for what he would soon tell Liz Smith:
“Why, if anybody was ever at the center of that world, it was me, so who is rejecting whom in this? I mean I can create any kind of social world I want, anywhere I want.” Anywhere, that is, but Los Angeles. As Capote told Allan’s guests, Los Angeles was “the no place of everywhere” and he could never live there. “In New York City,” he said, “I can get a bowl of onion soup at 4 a.m. I can get my tux cleaned at 4 a.m. and I can enjoy the sexual favors of a policeman at 4 a.m.”
    At 10 p.m. in L.A., Capote could do better than onion soup, but when he looked at all the raw seafood in a nearby cart, he nearly passed out. “I’m ordering rice and beans. I’m having jailhouse food,” he said, and instead ate nothing. The hurly-burly of Allan’s party left its guest of honor strangely unnerved, and he soon retreated to one of the cramped eight-by-ten-foot cells with sink and exposed toilet. Capote left it to the 500 other guests to dance and eat and smoke dope in the common area. Dominick Dunne wandered into another cell and for a moment his gaze met Capote’s. “There was such sadness in Truman’s eyes,” Dunne recalled. “He never recovered from that snub of Mrs. Paley’s. This was not his new milieu—Hollywood, and it wasn’t up to what he was used to in New York.”
    Worse, the new and older Capote wasn’t anything like the old and younger Capote. “It could have been fun if Truman had been Truman, but he was subdued that night. He wasn’t fun,” says Joseph Wambaugh, who’d been a friend ever since Capote slipped Mrs. Wambaugh a mickey one night so that “Truman could be alone with my cute cop husband,” as she put it. In addition to Capote being in a funk, it also put a crimp in Wambaugh’s evening when one movie actress got smashingly drunk and, turning bitchy, kept berating the Doo Dah Gang’s attempts to impersonate cops, inmates, and guards.
    As with any party, the guest of honor is merely an excuse for the revels, especially those that involve heaps of drugs and the incongruous sight of famous people in evening dress in a decaying jailhouse. It didn’t really matter if Truman was the life of the party or stuck away in a cell or asleep in Malibu in his rented bed. He was, in the end, just another celebrity. “Allan had two kinds of friends at his parties,” says publicist David Steinberg. “He had famous people and he had more famous people.” But this being Los Angeles, Allan couldn’t invite the kind of society people who truly impressed Capote. Betsy Bloomingdale? Dorothy Chandler? Capote wouldn’t know them if he stumbled over them.
    The Los Angeles Times ’s society writer Jody Jacobs called it “the party of the year” and likened it to Capote’s own Black and White Ball from 1966 in New York.

    But not everyone was so impressed. Christopher Isherwood’s longtime partner, painter Don Bachardy, complained, “It was one of those occasions that was thought to be very wry, but when it came down to the actual night, it was very tedious. The jail cast a pall over everything.” But not all was lost for Isherwood’s lover. “I met Diana Ross that night. She looked like a real star, very glamorous,” Bachardy notes.
    “The joke of the jailhouse party was who had been there before,” says Bruce Vilanch, who, in the end, took a position somewhere between Jacobs’s rave and Bachardy’s pan: “It was campy and silly and theatrical and what people liked in that period of time.”
    Even Allan had to admit that his Jail House Party wasn’t as “spectacular” as Capote’s Black and White Ball. “But it was probably more inventive, since we had to take an abandoned jail . . . and refurbish it,” he said. Whatever anyone else thought, the event got Allan precisely want he wanted—lots of press—and something that he needed even more. Quite by accident, the