from the magazine
February 2016 Issue

How Grease Beat the Odds and Became the Biggest Movie Musical of the 20th Century

As Fox preps a for-TV revival, Michael Callahan looks at what made Grease lightning in a bottle.
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Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta share a moment during the filming of Grease, 1977.By Dave Friedman.

He drove a yellow Mercedes with a personalized license plate that read CAFTANS, a nod to the more than 100 flowing muumuus hanging in his closet. The décor inside his Benedict Canyon mansion was gaudy, lacquered, and more than a tad narcissistic: there were several gilt-framed portraits of himself on the walls. He threw outrageous parties accented with Petrossian caviar and Cristal champagne, their invitations so coveted in Hollywood that he split them up into “Rolodex parties,” hosting the A-L guest list one night, the M-Z one the next. Many of his after-parties were even spicier—all-gay affairs with actors and moguls mingling with lithe, sinewy young men he called his “twinkies,” their collective sexual exploits watched by the host from his master bedroom on closed-circuit television. His home contained a stainless-steel refrigerator in the master bedroom and a dialysis machine—a testament to both his voracious appetite and the health problems that would plague him his entire life.

His name was Allan Carr, and he had grown up as Alan Solomon in the suburbs of Chicago, a nice Jewish boy known as Poopsie who had a flashy personality and a stubbornly pudgy physique. In the 1960s, bankrolled by his parents, he dabbled in small-potatoes theatrical producing before branching out as an event planner (he once staged a party in a jail for Truman Capote) and talent manager, at one time or another overseeing the careers of performers from Tony Curtis to Joan Rivers to Mama Cass Elliot. He produced a series of sparkly television specials for Ann-Margret. He drifted into marketing films, first for Robert Stigwood’s 1975 rock opera, Tommy, and a year later for Survive!, a Mexican film about plane-crash survivors who turn to cannibalism. It was this last movie, eviscerated by critics but a surprise hit at the box office, that made him a player at Paramount Pictures.

At Paramount, Carr would single-handedly revive a genre of tinselly filmmaking left for dead, help create superstardom for the era’s most bankable leading man, and oversee the highest-grossing American movie musical of the 20th century: Grease. The slapdash production, mapped out in five weeks and shot over two months, was given a modest $6 million budget by Paramount C.E.O. Barry Diller, who dismissed the whole thing as so much cinematic cotton candy. Its leading lady was foreign and untried, its cast was too old, its score uneven, its choreography and staging more often than not thought up on the fly. Its supporting cast was made up largely of a ragtag cluster of 1950s has-beens, and its second lead actor was a wild child who would later die of complications from drug abuse.

There were so many reasons Grease should not have worked, so many times one decision made in the other direction could have blown apart the entire production like a house of cards. But Grease had Carr—“he was like Uncle Allan,” Didi Conn, who played beauty-school dropout Frenchy, says today—and, in the end, that’s what transformed it from fluffy hokum into a celluloid icon. Its stage version still pops up at high schools every year and is now being reimagined as a live, one-night-only television event on Fox, airing January 31. “Without Allan being the showman, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off,” says John Travolta, who carried the film as good-hearted bad boy Danny Zuko. “He was the Barnum & Bailey of it all.”

“Allan would come in standing on the dolly cart in his caftan, with his arms outstretched like Moses, and he would say, ‘Children, children, gather round,’ and then give us the reports on the dailies and how they were being received,” recalls Dinah Manoff, who played Marty, one of the Pink Ladies, in the movie. “There was nobody like him. He was really the star of Grease.

Casting and Crow’s-Feet

Grease was the brainchild of an advertising copywriter, Jim Jacobs, and a high-school art teacher, Warren Casey. The two had met through an amateur theater group in Chicago in the early 1960s. Jacobs had been a greaser himself in high school; Casey had been bookish and studious. Hearing Led Zeppelin records playing at a late-night cast party, they both lamented the passing of the great doo-wop songs of the 1950s, which turned into an idea of writing a stage musical about a bunch of ne’er-do-well high-schoolers with that music as the backbone of its score. They would call it Grease, an homage to the era’s greasy hair, greasy engines, and greasy food. The gritty, profanity-laced, raunchy story of teenage attitude—for which Jacobs and Casey collaborated on the book, the lyrics, and the music—opened on February 5, 1971, in a former trolley barn in Chicago.

When it arrived in New York a year later, playing Off Broadway at the Eden Theatre, Carr caught it one night with composer Marvin Hamlisch and director-choreographer Michael Bennett and instantly saw its potential as a film. Film rights had already been sold to Ralph Bakshi (the animator who made the X-rated Fritz the Cat), but when they lapsed, Carr snapped them up for $200,000 and took the project to Paramount. The studio sniffed at the idea as lowbrow even as it green-lighted it. “Barry Diller and Allan Carr hated each other’s guts,” says Robert Hofler, Carr’s biographer. “Barry considered Allan to be this gross joke.” Diller disputes this characterization, stating that he “didn’t intensely like or dislike Allan Carr,” whom he recalls as “a flamboyant fellow who had occasional good instincts.” Diller does admit “there were disagreements throughout production and editing, not particularly unusual, but—because of the parties involved—complex.”

Carr booked 30-year-old first-timer Randal Kleiser—a college roommate of George Lucas’s—to direct and hired a young southern novelist named Bronte Woodard to help him adapt the screenplay. The original treatment, submitted to the studio in December 1976, shows just how radically (and horribly) different Grease might have turned out. Carr’s vision included Danny Zuko as a busboy and gas-station attendant (doing a song called “Gas Pump Jockey”); Paul Lynde (at that time best known as Uncle Arthur on television’s Bewitched) as the Rydell High principal; Detroit Tigers star Mark “The Bird” Fidrych as the school baseball hero; Donny Osmond as Teen Angel; and the Beach Boys doing the showstopping garage production number, “Greased Lightnin’.” There was even a scene with Lynde dressed as Carmen Miranda. (Mercifully, none of it came to pass.)

Paramount had wanted Henry Winkler, Fonzie on ABC’s popular sitcom Happy Days, as Danny, but Winkler, leery of being typecast, passed. Stigwood, Carr’s co-producer, had a three-picture deal with the 22-year-old Travolta, the Farrah-maned breakout star of ABC’s Welcome Back, Kotter. The actor had grown up in a musical home (“My house was like Glee,” he now says), had played Doody, one of the Burger Palace Boys (later the T-Birds), in the traveling company of Grease, and had teamed up with Kleiser in the ABC tele-movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. He would make Stigwood’s picture Saturday Night Fever first. But he was in.

Casting Sandy, the good-girl counterweight to Travolta’s slick Danny, would prove thornier. Kleiser took a gander at rushes from a new film his old college pal Lucas was making, titled Star Wars, to see if its female lead, Carrie Fisher, could be a fit. Unable to judge either her acting or singing ability, Kleiser and Carr mulled other possibilities, including *The Partridge Family’*s Susan Dey, Deborah Raffin, and toothy singer Marie Osmond, who became the front-runner until she objected to Sandy’s transformation from good girl to bad girl and dropped out in protest.

The high-living Allan Carr with his star, in Malibu, 1977.

Photograph by Peter Borsari/© 1993 Borsari Images.

Carr then zeroed in on Olivia Newton-John, the blonde, Australian, country-lite singer who sat across from him at a dinner party at Helen Reddy’s house one night without realizing she was auditioning. Carr gushed to Newton-John that she would be perfect for the role, but the singer—who had made her film debut in 1970’s Toomorrow, an English science-fiction bomb—put on the brakes. “I was very anxious about making another film, because my music career was going well,” Newton-John says, “and I did not want to mess it up by doing another movie that wasn’t good.”

Kleiser wasn’t convinced, either. “I remember meeting her for the first time at that party and thinking, Well. ‘Have You Never Been Mellow?’ How is that going to work? How is she going to become this slut?”

But Travolta saw what Carr saw. “She had a brilliant voice, and I didn’t think there could be any more correct person for Sandy in the universe,” he says, believing the casting was equivalent to “putting Taylor Swift in that role today.” Travolta was determined to get her the part. “I never let up on it,” he says. “I insisted that she be met and that we cast her.” But Newton-John voiced other concerns—she couldn’t do an American accent; she wanted a screen test to measure her chemistry with Travolta; she worried that, at 29, she would look considerably older than her 23-year-old leading man. One by one, they were all addressed. Carr re-wrote the part to make Sandy Australian; he gave her a screen test, which she aced (“There was great chemistry” with Travolta, she says); cinematographer Bill Butler used soft lenses to turn back the clock.

Meanwhile, the rest of the cast fell into place. Jeff Conaway, who had been in the stage production and would go on to star on Taxi shortly after *Grease’*s release, would play wisecracking wingman Kenickie. Lucie Arnaz read for the part of Rizzo but was usurped at the last minute by Stockard Channing, a talent client of Carr’s who had been anointed Hollywood’s next big thing after co-starring with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in 1975’s The Fortune, only to see her career go nowhere. “It was like ‘What the hell?’ because that’s the thing about the business: you go in and you’re the hottest girl in town, and then two years later you’re in the tank,” Channing recalls. “And this was one of those ebb-and-flow moments, which Allan was aware of. So he just threw me into it.”

At 33, Channing was the oldest of the principal actors cast. Concerned that his Rydell High kids looked more like their parents, Kleiser ended up administering what he called the “crow’s-feet test” during auditions. “I would get up close to them and see if they had any crow’s-feet around their eyes, and that would show they were beyond the surreal age that we had determined would work,” he says. “High-school kids could not have crow’s-feet.”

“Allan showed up on the set with a brown pencil and started dotting freckles on my nose so I would look younger,” Channing adds. “I said, ‘I don’t look younger! I just look dirtier!’ ”

It was in other roles that Carr exhibited his bedizened showmanship. Elvis—who would die in August 1977, while Grease was being shot in Los Angeles—was rumored to be a possibility for Teen Angel, but the role went to Frankie Avalon, who turned out to be terrified of heights and almost put the kibosh on the whole “Beauty School Dropout” number when he realized he had to descend a slippery three-story staircase with no railings. “I get really frightened and panicky with this,” Avalon recalls. “After the second take, I said to Randal, ‘You got to cut. I can’t do this.’ ” (Kleiser put mattresses on either side of the staircase as a solution.) Steven Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford, was cast as Tom Chisum, the lunky football jock, but “right after the dance rehearsals, he vanished,” Kleiser recalls. Carr enlisted Lorenzo Lamas, the 19-year-old son of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, to step in—with one notable change. “They told me they had to dye my hair a lighter color, because I was six two and bulky and they did not want me to look like a T-Bird,” Lamas says. “So they sent me to Rodeo Drive to dye my hair blond.” He laughs. “I would have dyed it purple to be in that movie.”

A cavalcade of old-school stars—Eve Arden (replacing Lynde as the school principal), Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, Joan Blondell—filled out the Grease roster. Then Carr once again threw a Molotov cocktail into the works by casting Harry Reems, the porn star who became famous as the recipient of Linda Lovelace’s oral talents in 1972’s Deep Throat, as Coach Calhoun. “It was the 70s, and at that time it was sort of anything goes,” Kleiser says. “The sexual revolution was happening, and porn stars were becoming somewhat accepted in media. I didn’t think it would be a problem. But Paramount did.” The studio axed the Reems idea, and the role eventually went to Sid Caesar. Guilt-ridden, Carr gave a devastated Reems $5,000 out of his own bank account as an apology.

Newton-John as Sandy, post-makeover.

From MPTVImages.com.

In June of 1977, the film began shooting at Venice High School, in Los Angeles. Jim Jacobs, for one, was nonplussed at the location. “I was most disappointed that they filmed it in California, because it’s really mostly about the kids in the industrial cities in the East and the Midwest,” he says. “It’s not sandy beaches and the ocean.” He begged Carr not to sanitize the grit out of Grease. “Please don’t make it Beach Blanket Bingo,” he urged.

As always, Carr had other ideas.

Hot American Summer

In the stage production, Grease is the story of star-crossed Danny and Sandy, but it’s equally about the ethos of the street toughs and gum-cracking tarts who populate their high-school world. Carr guessed—correctly, it turned out—that what mass audiences would really want to see was the love story between Travolta and Newton-John, set amid a sea of creamy lighting and finned cars and augmented by a menu of new, radio-friendly pop songs. Devotees of the original, such as choreographer Patricia Birch (who had studied under Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille and was one of the original dancers in West Side Story on Broadway), watched as their beloved salty musical was frothed into a sweet milk shake. “I fought the palm trees,” she says, “and I lost.” (Birch’s son, Vanity Fair contributing photographer Jonathan Becker, was an extra in the movie.)

Four new songs were added at the last minute to the original score, including the title tune, written by Barry Gibb and sung by Frankie Valli. There was a new solo number for Travolta (“Sandy,” by Louis St. Louis and Scott Simon), and Newton-John’s longtime songwriter, John Farrar, wrote “Hopelessly Devoted to You” for her, as well as the duet “You’re the One That I Want.” “He came into my trailer at, like, six in the morning, because he had been up all night,” Newton-John says. “He played it for me and said, ‘What do you think?’ I went, ‘Oh, God, it’s amazing.’ It just had this fantastic energy.”

Ten of the Broadway show’s 20 original numbers were either reduced to background music or dropped from the movie entirely. Rizzo’s doleful “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” was almost another casualty. “Allan was very wishy-washy on the song,” Channing remembers. “He thought it was a downer.” But it survived and became the lone moment of gravitas in the entire film. “That’s how you know what’s inside this little person,” Channing had pleaded with Carr. “Otherwise she’s just all that surface stuff.” In the end, he agreed.

The biggest switch came with “Greased Lightnin’,” a showstopper for the character Kenickie in the stage version that was given to Travolta’s Danny in the film. “I have to be completely honest with you,” Travolta says. “I wanted the number. And because I had clout, I could get the number.”

Jeff Conaway (who died of drug-related causes in 2011) was, predictably, not happy at having his only solo taken away (“There was a vibe, but I didn’t have time to focus on it,” Kleiser says of Conaway’s pouting), and he wasn’t the only one. Birch had disagreed with the casting of Newton-John (“I thought it was kind of cuckoo to have an Aussie playing Sandy”), but she was absolutely livid about the “Greased Lightnin’ ” switch. “It’s Kenickie’s goddamned number!” she says. “I was upset with it, because I thought Jeff needed a number. John was very good doing it, but it should have been Kenickie—it was Kenickie’s car!”

Conaway eased his pain by seducing a parade of extras. “He was really feeling his oats,” says Channing, who got an actual hickey from Conaway during their on-camera make-out sessions. “We used to joke all the time, because his trailer at lunchtime was really rocking.” Barry Pearl, who played the T-Bird named Doody, concurs. “He made out like a bandit,” he says.

Los Angeles that summer was brutally hot, making the dance sequences—particularly the famous National Bandstand scene, filmed over five days inside an actual high-school gym with closed windows—particularly brutal. Michael Tucci, who played T-Bird Sonny LaTierri, fainted and had to be taken to the E.R. “We were dying,” says Didi Conn. “It was my birthday that week, and they got me a cake, and it was melting.”

Production was halted after Kleiser caught an infection in his foot from the filthy water of the Los Angeles River during the drag-racing Thunder Road shoot. He was resting in his trailer when Travolta walked in to give him a Scientology “touch assist.” Using his index finger, he touched Kleiser in various places as he said, over and over, “Feel my finger.” Kleiser would respond, “Yes,” and Travolta would answer, “Thank you.” This went on for an hour. “I was lying there with this fever and he’s poking me and poking me and poking me and I’m like, ‘Yes, I feel it.’ ‘Thank you.’ Then he left. The next day I was better, and of course he claimed it was because of the touch assist.”

The Stars Align

The sybaritic Carr, who never seemed to have a steady romantic lead in his own life, knew nothing if not how to have a good time. So it was little surprise that the set of Grease turned into something of a pajama party. “In a musical, if it’s not fun, it’s not going to work,” Travolta says. “The spirit of a musical is about play.”

Grandly showing off his production, Carr escorted a bevy of guests to the set, an eclectic mix that included Uri Geller, Rudolf Nureyev, Jane Fonda, and Kirk Douglas. During the filming of “Summer Nights,” Kleiser glanced up into the grandstand and spied the leading gay porn star of the era, Al Parker, looking on. George Cukor came and took in a rehearsal of the final number, “We Go Together,” with about 300 dancers and extras barreling down a football field and landing at his feet. Cukor turned to Kleiser. “Very spirited,” he said.

Through it all, everyone knew that Travolta, all slick hair and white teeth, was the glue holding Grease together. “There was an energy surrounding him unlike anything I had ever experienced,” says Dinah Manoff. “It wasn’t even lusting. It was being in the presence of something epic. I had never been around a charisma that was at its peak that way. I cannot describe it to you. There is no other movie star I have been around who carried around the energy he did in those days.”

Travolta had already wrapped Saturday Night Fever, which would be released that December. He asked some of the cast if they’d watch a preview. “I don’t know if it’s any good,” he told them. “I wish you guys could tell me.”

“And he meant it—he had no idea how good it was,” says Didi Conn, who attended the screening. “We flipped out. We said, ‘Are you kidding?’ It was part of this explosion around him.”

Randal Kleiser slates a shot.

Courtesy of Randal Kleiser.

Travolta was actually still coping with the loss of his great love, the actress Diana Hyland, who had died in his arms that spring, losing her battle with cancer. Suffering from insomnia during much of the Grease shoot, he phoned Kleiser at all hours of the night to talk. People published a sensational cover story about Hyland’s last days; the issue ended up on the set. Travolta, Kleiser recalls, “just went ashen.”

“It acted as a giant distraction for me,” Travolta says of doing Grease during his mourning. “It was probably the healthiest thing I could have done was to be in back-to-back movies, because I was very sad.”

Newton-John was battling her own demon—namely, how to pull off the transition from syrupy Sandy to the leather-and-spandex-clad hussy (she had to be sewn into her pants) who directs Danny to “Tell me about it, stud.”

“That was such a stretch, and something I was really worried about,” Newton-John says. “But when it happened, it was just this amazing feeling. It was very freeing. Not just for Sandy, but for me as well. Because I was always the girl next door. And then I got into that trailer with those guys and they put me into that outfit and the hair and I walked out to show Randal, and the whole crew turned around. And the look on their faces!” She laughs. “I remember thinking, Oh my—I’ve been doing this all wrong.”

“I thought it was the bomb,” Travolta says. “She was like Marilyn Monroe mixed with some motorcycle chick. The mix of that, I knew, was going to be outrageous. In the play it was a laugh. In the movie, it was like, ‘Wow!’ ”

Filming “You’re the One That I Want”—which Birch choreographed on the spot—“took seven hours, and we all stayed around to watch it,” Lorenzo Lamas says. “We were just ear-to-ear grins. That’s when we knew this was going to be amazing.”

“Visual Junk Food”

Released on June 16, 1978, Grease would shatter box-office records and go on to become an international phenomenon, confounding and irritating the entire industry. “We were not chic,” Channing says. “We were a high-school movie, and there was sort of this ‘Look at them making all that money.’ It was kind of resented.”

Not that the rest of the box office was dominated by highbrow fare: following Grease and its stunning grosses of $160 million that year would be Superman with Christopher Reeve ($134 million), National Lampoon’s Animal House ($120 million), and Clint Eastwood’s Every Which Way but Loose ($85 million). None of this translated to the Oscar race, where Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter would take home five awards, including best picture. Grease would be nominated for only one, for best original song for “Hopelessly Devoted to You”; it would lose to “Last Dance,” from Thank God It’s Friday.

While the industry may have been piqued by *Grease’*s commercial success, the film was cannoned by the critics. *Time’*s Richard Schickel wrote that Kleiser “doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about”; the Today show’s Gene Shalit called the movie “visual junk food.” The New York *Daily News’*s ever acerbic Rex Reed, writing a review so venomous it should have come with a warning label, said Grease “should really be covered on the obituary page,” that it had been made “by nitwits who haven’t the faintest idea what a camera is,” that its music was “atrocious,” and that Newton-John “sounds like a tone-deaf cow and makes a screen debut that has all of the charisma of rancid buttermilk.” Perhaps the biggest sting of all was the one administered by *The New Yorker’*s Pauline Kael, who called it a “klutzburger,” dismissing the entire film with one word.

The cast, including T-Birds and Pink Ladies.

By Dave Friedman.

It didn’t matter a whit to Carr, who staged a series of gaudy premieres (at one, Rip Taylor, the host of television’s The $1.98 Beauty Show, threw confetti at passing cars) and hosted a starry dinner for the movie at Elaine’s attended by Woody Allen, Rita Hayworth, and Francesco Scavullo. And it certainly didn’t matter to the American public. The movie brought in $9.3 million its opening weekend, just behind Jaws 2, and would spend the next five weeks atop the box office; the soundtrack would land four singles in the Billboard Top 10 and sell 13 million copies in its first year alone, going on to become one of the top-selling soundtracks ever. (It’s still in the Top 10.) The film would remain the highest-grossing movie musical of all time until it was eclipsed by Mamma Mia! in 2008, but Grease still bests it domestically, $188 million to $144 million; worldwide, Grease has grossed nearly $400 million on its budget of $6 million. More than 123,000 different productions of the stage musical have been mounted around the world since its inception.

More than that, Grease was the apotheosis of the era’s obsession with all things 1950s. Movies such as The Lords of Flatbush (and American Graffiti, although it was set in 1962), sitcoms such as Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, records by Sha Na Na and the latest rockabilly revival group of the moment kept the decade of Watergate, gas lines, and polyester preoccupied with Eisenhower and Elvis. For all the campiness of looking back, the nostalgia was achingly real: the 50s were only 20 years past in the 70s, but they felt like the Pleistocene. Little did we know, in 1978, that the 1950s really were coming back, in the guise of Ronald Reagan’s America.

For Carr, the victory was sweet and temporary, proof that greased lightning rarely strikes twice. His proposed sequel, Summer School (which centered on the wedding of Kenickie and Rizzo), was never made, and in its place came 1982’s Grease 2, a critical and commercial disaster that simply flipped the original premise (greaser chick meets bookish boy) and starred an unknown ingénue named Michelle Pfeiffer. Its male lead was English actor Maxwell Caulfield, whom Carr cast after seeing him appear nude as a male hustler in an Off Broadway play.

But even before Grease 2 there was the Carr-produced Can’t Stop the Music, a 1980 Busby Berkeley-meets-disco train wreck so spectacularly awful that it helped inspire the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards, given out to the worst movies of the year. A tasteless brew of sequins, toilet humor, and writhing half-naked men, it starred the Village People, Steve Guttenberg, Valerie Perrine, and Bruce Jenner (in a half-shirt and booty shorts). For his director, Carr selected Nancy Walker, at that time best known as the acerbic Rosie from Bounty paper-towel commercials. The film was released just as disco was being declared dead. In one of her better career moves, Newton-John resisted Carr’s arm-twisting to star in it. “He was very angry with me,” she says. “He didn’t talk to me for a long time after that.” Instead, Newton-John opted that year to star in the musical Xanadu, which also proved to be a box-office disappointment—albeit one with a chart-topping soundtrack.

Carr eventually found more success with a Broadway musical adaptation of La Cage aux Folles, only to squander it all again when he accepted the task of producing the 1989 Academy Awards telecast and decided to open it with a production number featuring Rob Lowe and Snow White doing a duet to “Proud Mary”—arguably the most notorious and awful moment in Oscars history. Depressed, alone, and increasingly sullen (he suffered from wild mood swings), he largely faded from the Hollywood power scene and battled increasingly declining health caused by numerous things, among them compulsive overeating and the rampant use of cocaine and quaaludes. He spent two years in relative seclusion in his Benedict Canyon mansion—Norma Desmond with doughnuts—before a wan attempt at a comeback that never materialized. He died from liver cancer in 1999 at the age of 62. “Grease was the best thing that happened to Allan,” David Geffen would later tell Carr’s biographer, Robert Hofler, “and it was the worst thing.”

But with Grease he had started a party that, nearly 38 years later, with every screening, every high-school production, every karaoke sing-along to “Summer Nights,” shows no signs of dying down. On June 13, 1978, Carr threw his own lavish, private opening party for Grease at Studio 54. Dressed in a shiny satin baseball jacket that strained to cover his doughy frame, he laughed and hugged and awkwardly danced herky-jerky, his trademark oversize eyeglasses like two tiny windshields covering his face. At one point, he was thrashing about to A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie” with one of his “twinkies” and Grace Jones, who wore a flowing tunic and a cartwheel hat. “A man and a woman!” Jones exclaimed to him. “What more can you ask for?”

That same night, Carr had sat behind the wheel of a 1951 Frazer Manhattan convertible as it inched toward the entrance, a hussied-up Newton-John in the passenger seat. She hopped out, but he remained in the driver’s seat, glancing around in wonder at the spectacle he’d created. Twenty-four years after high school, Poopsie Solomon, rebranded as Allan Carr, had achieved one of his life’s dreams: he was finally one of the cool kids.

A reporter asked him how it all felt. “I’m ecstatic,” Carr said. “It’s everything I ever thought it would be and more.”