"Don and Allan"

Pierce was called to Los Angeles by Don’s former drug dealer, Royce Newton, just hours after Don’s death. Royce is concerned that it was his cocaine that killed Don and he wants Pierce to find out the truth as to what might have killed him. Pierce sneaks into Don’s estate looking for clues. His search leads him to Allan Carr’s house- the producer of "Grease”— Don was the executive on the film in his early days at Paramount. Here Pierce learns that Don was influenced by gay culture and that Don had boasted of a homosexual relationship. Pierce also learns that one of the extras in Don’s disasterous flop- Grease 2- was under the care of one of Don’s Dr. Feelgood physicans. Perhaps she might provide some clues into Don’s death.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the ballad of Hollywood Shack and the Ridge Cage.
In Hollywood, Shack hit the big time and went to
make movies. From I Heart Radio, the Based on True
Events anthology, we chronicle true events in the Hollywood tradition,
that is to say, adhering to the facts as long

(00:22):
as the facts don't get in the way of a
good story. First up The Dawn, the Definitive Episode podcast
series on Hollywood producer Don Simpson, Episode two, Don and
the Fabulous Alan Carr. Don's foyer was filled with condolence flowers,
massive ornate, over the top flower arrangements typical for Hollywood.

(00:45):
The arrangement that stood out above all others were those
sent from Alan Carr, film producer of Greece. There were
tropicals like birds of Paradise and protea and palm fronts
and monstera leaves, and romance flowers like carnations and tea
roses and baby's breath. In the centerpiece was entium, a tacky,
plastic looking finger shaped flower that Pierce noted looked like

(01:08):
a penis on a platter. He chuckled to himself. Of course,
the flowers could only have been from the flamboyant, fabulous
Alan Car, at the time the only openly gay producer
in Hollywood. Pierce knew that Don and Allan had once
been close friends, having made both Greece and the sequel
Grease Too while together at Paramount, but Allan, like Don,

(01:29):
had been something of a recluse in his later years.
Visiting Alan Carr might not have seemed like the logical
next step to find out what might have happened to Don.
But to understand why Pierce felt a sense of urgency
to go see Alan Carr, we need to flashback to
two nights earlier. It was the night before the wake
at Morton's. Pierce had just arrived in town. He was

(01:50):
picked up at l a X by a young man
in a Lamborghini. The young man is Royce Newton, Don's
former drug dealer. It was Royce Newton that had called
Pierce to tell him of Don's death. Royce was very
strong out at the time. It was clear he was
upset about Don's death, not just because he had lost
a friend, but because he was a major cocaine dealer

(02:12):
who dealt cocaine to a famous Hollywood producer who had
reportedly died on a toilet reading a biography of Oliver Stone.
Royce was worried had his cocaine killed don He needed
to know, so Pierce flies to town. On Royce's done,
Royce picks up Pierce at the airport. Pierce has never
written in a two hundred thousand dollar car with scissor doors,

(02:34):
nor has he ridden with a drug dealer who likes
to drive really really fat. We are weaving down the
Pacific Coast Highway just north of Santa Monica. Pierre Royce
reaches his hand out of the car, clipping the plastic
medean reflectors Domino rally style as we passed Mercedes and
Maserati's at tremendous speed. A visual on Royce Pierce describes

(02:58):
him as Christians leader in Pump Up the Volume, Live Fast, Die,
Young Ray bans a black and gold patterned Versati silk
shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, acid wash cut off jeans.
Altogether a laughable sight in London, but somehow ineffably cool,
and the neon l a nightscape. I reached for my
tape recorder and am relieved to find it still in

(03:20):
my breast pocket, tucked behind that stolen photo of dawn.
I tried to engage Royce in pointed conversation, but he
cannot hear me. Against the wind. At a red light
somewhere past Jeffrey's, Royce offers me cocaine, clandestinely squirreled away
in the amulet necklace resting on his pectorals. Although I

(03:41):
admire the cunning and tradecraft, I demere Royce crudely shovels
and snorts two dollarps, spilling a third onto his jeans shorts.
He offers again, ro it will numb the pain. Royce
speaks in rapid fire coquette speech. What Rice wants is
proved that his drugs were not the reason Don died,

(04:01):
and since Don has always spoken highly appierced through the years,
Royce thought he was the man to call. Pierce is
privately touched by the sentiment. He takes the hit of cocaine,
failing to block out the obvious question in his mind, Royce,
did we just do the same coke you sold the
code that lightly took out Hollywood's most accomplished drug feed.

(04:23):
Pierce arrives at the beachfront colony Point Doom or Point
Doom d o O m as Don liked to call
it as you knew you were doomed to a decadent
last weekend once you arrived. Malibu at the time was
a twenty seven mile coastline with no hotels and nothing
to attract the travelers dollar. And that is just how
the rich and beautiful residents prefer it. In the days

(04:45):
of the old studio system, the studios loaned outset designers
to construct beach bungalows. More stars like Clara Bow and
Ronald Coleman and Barbara Stanwick could host their trysts and
illicit parties cloistered away from the public and the press.
In the nineties, the ONNY catered to the likes of
drug dealers like Royce Newton. Pierce follows Royce into his

(05:05):
beach front rental. There's a party going on, the kind
of party that seems to have been going on for days.
For a moment, everyone starts as Royce and Fierce center.
I feel those days, if microvac didn't already out me
as an outsider, my age certainly does. I'm a decade

(05:26):
there senior and Lyne he could have fathered. I fear
quite a few of them. I attempt to decline a
cup of orange hazy drink called hunch punch, poured from
a crystal bowl into red plastic cups sipping. Royce casually
mentions Julia is upstairs, Julia being the legendary Julia Phillips,

(05:49):
the first woman ever to win an Oscar for producing.
You can imagine what a trip this is for a
Jewish girl from Great Neck. Tonight, I get to win
an Academy Award and mean Elizabeth Taylor in the same moment,
Thank you so much. Joya was high on three volume,
two joints, a diet pill, a few hits of coke,
and a glass and a half of wine when she
accepted the award after winning for the sting she produced

(06:12):
Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not
a bad stretch for any producer, let alone the only
woman in the Hollywood Boys club of Oscar winners. Pierce
was excited. He knew Julia and Don had been good friends.
They even dated for a short time. She even wrote
about it, describing Don in her memoir, I have a
real weakness for ape like men, maybe because I like

(06:34):
that physically they remind me of exactly what I'm dealing with.
Don and Julia were ying and Yang. Julia was the
queen of the art house film and Don the king
of the blockbuster. They were both Olympian talkers who loved
nothing more than to get high on coke and talk movies. Pierce,
a bit queasy from the hunch punch and Ross's coke,
wanders off in search of Don's old friend. The layout

(06:58):
of the home appears. Laboring the door after door, opening
into empty rooms. I hear what I think a coyotes howling,
a surreal sound, as I remind myself I'm at the sea,
and then I distinguished the sound blood curdling human screams.
Pierce opens the door to the master bedroom. It is

(07:20):
lit by the blue glow of the television and little else.
What he finds in the water bed, a circular monstrosity
in the center of the room is not Joya Phillips,
but a petite, naked woman with large breast implants. I've
searched for a sheet or tow to swaddle her. She
screams louder. The music from the living room has died down,
replaced by a stampede of footsteps. Royce enters, followed by

(07:43):
the hosts. He knows her intimately. Her name is Autumn Western.
Autom Western was Royce's ex girlfriend. She's toasted, says a
particular in a chilly monotone. There are compression marks on
her temples. Pierced becked now, as the marks could only
have come from electroshock therapy, It's clear that Pierce wasn't

(08:05):
supposed to open the bedroom door and see Autumn Weston.
Royce enters and not so politely asks Pierce to please leave.
We come out of the flashback to present day. Pierce
has returned to the Beverly Motor Lodge by way of
Rocket video on Labraya to rent Grease one and Grease
two Deacon, the latter most notable for being the flop

(08:39):
that led to Don's firing as an executive at Paramount.
What sparked his interest to rewatch the movie was a
nagging sense that he had seen Royce Newton's ex girlfriend,
Autumn Weston in the film. On a hunch, he sought
to connect the dots to the condolence flowers in the
foyer from the producer of the Grease films, Alan Carr
and the actress Adam Weston. His hunch proved right. Pierce

(09:03):
learned that Autumn Weston had an uncredited role as a
background player in Michel Peiffer's Pink Lady Posse in Greased Too,
which was produced by Alan Carr and overseen by donn
at Paramount. The question was how did it all connect?
In a bit of DejaVu, Pierce found himself in front
of another magnificent Golden Triangle estate, this one in Benedict Canyon,

(09:25):
just one canyon over from Dawn, where Don's estate had
traces of decadence and vice, Alan Carr's estate screamed excess.
It was once the old Bergman estate, where a married
Ingrid Bergman had a torrate affair with her husband's house guest,
Roberto Rosselini. Pierce introduced himself to the housekeeper as a
dear friend of Don Simpson. This time there was no

(09:47):
need for code switching shenanigans to talk his way on
to the premises like in a Raymond Chandler novel. Pierce
had quickly become accustomed to taking advantage of the lag
time between the housekeeper finding the owner and the precious
seconds available to survey the surroundings. He moved quickly down
the hallway, finding an entertainment room designed completely in pink.

(10:07):
It was called the Olivia Newton John Room. There was
even a sign engraved in copper to let you know it.
He felt like he was inside right l high, singing
and dancing to Shamala Malama Ding Dong. He wanted to
linger and take it all in, but he had a
job to do. He followed the music, leading to what
looked like stairs to the basement. When he reached the

(10:29):
bottom of the stairs, he found himself standing under a
giant disco ball over up dance floor, surrounded by waterbeds
and shag rocks. Pierce had heard of Alan Carr's wild
seventies disco parties, the only party in town where the
movie stars and the rock stars would intercept, where gaze
and straits hung out together and sexual identity was fluid.

(10:51):
The parties rivaled the Playboy Mansion, but instead of Playboy bunnies,
Alan Carr had the Twinkies, young buff gay men nucat
down looking to make it in showbiz. The finest Twinkies
were hands selected as boyfriends for the ballet dancer Rudolph Nuriev.
While Nuriev was being entertained downstairs. Upstairs, on the pool deck.

(11:13):
Champagne was flowing and cocaine was served on platters. Alan
was the hottest producer in town, and Don was the
man Alan credited forgetting him the green light. Pierce, here's
a voice call out, Hello there, He spies cameras on
the ceiling. How long was Alan watching him? He suddenly

(11:34):
felt flush. He tried to exit the room, only to
find Burly security guard had blocked the door. Alan's voice
again comes over the speaker. Wizard of Ozley, Everyone from
Mick Jagger to Kilprit Godfrey has danced in his discotheque.
Pierce now has the opportunity to shake it, alongside the
grates who have come before him. Pierce begins to fear

(11:57):
he might be held captive inside an Egyptian discotheque on
a Beverly Hills estate unless he follows orders to shake it.
He has only one dance move, a sort of spread
leg Saturday night fever homage. He repeated the moved maniacally,
like a robot who's been short circuited. He wasn't half that,
judging by Allan's response. Pierce identifies himself now and Carr

(12:21):
replies he stopped talking to the press in nine Pierce
asks if he might speak to him about Don Simpson.
Alan falls silent a long beach and then instructs the
security card to bring him upstairs. A god leads me
through rooms painted in reds and purples, filled with lalik
and Baccarat crystal and zebra rugs and boor Selino mirrors.

(12:46):
The decor becomes even more sparkly as we draw nearer
Alan's master bedroom. Alan is on the balcony as Santa
Ana Breeze blows up his caf down, revealing his bare calves.
Alan is very short and very fat, easily weighing over
twenty stone as a saying that success doesn't change you,

(13:07):
it amplifies you, Alan all the more so. Before I
could even sit down, Alan wants to know if I
have a tape recorder. He forces me to take it
out of my pocket. I set it down in front
of him. He presses play. Alan Carr in interviews, sounds
like this. Listen, Let's face it, Hollywood is not dead.

(13:27):
Movies are more glamorous than ever. I'm a big believer
in the business. He played the part of the lively,
flamboyant gay party boy. He knew just as Don did
that a producer needed a stick. For Alan. It was
to be known as the Fabulous Alan Carr, the first
openly gay Hollywood producer. But offstage, when he wasn't hustling
movies or charming his guests at his lavish parties, Alan

(13:50):
sounded like a completely different person, more sober. Matter of fact,
here's Allan talking about Don and making grease in Man.
In seventy six, he hired me to help markets outed
in a fever. The rough cut was a mess. The
studio wanted sizzle, and the filmmakers delivered main streets. Harry

(14:14):
Tiant's arguing over meat balls. It was depressing, downward magic
and post. Though he gave it sex, he gave a
collamour disco Rocky. We called it. Don delivered a dance picture,
and that's how I marketed it. It was a three
million dollar movie. Guess what we grossed towards a million.

(14:36):
Donna and I had brought back the movie musical in
the nineties seventies. I don't know about England, but over
here things were bleak. Jimmy Carter telling us to turn
off our lights to save on our electricity bill, gas
station lines around the block. Our movies were supposed to
reflect the mood of the country. But Donna and I said,
no would the country would be better off if it

(14:56):
reflected the mood of the movies, and we were right.
He would think a two million dollar hall would get
us a green light to make our next picture. But no,
Alan was speaking of his film Grease. That was my baby.
Danny and Sandy, and Rizzo and Kannaki, they were all
my babies. Don and I walked into Paramount. We sit
at Diller and ISAA now is the time for a

(15:17):
candy color musical set in the nineteen fifties, But they're
still stuck in Vietnam making slit your Risk neo realism.
They just green light another Cassavetti's movie. The film was
Mikey and Nikki, starring Cassavettis and Peter Falk, directed by
Elaine May. May shot over one million feet of film
three times that have gone with the wind, the budget
balloon to over four million. It was said that May

(15:40):
had hidden the footage during post production when Paramount tried
to assume final cut. Another low led money loser about
losers tired of losing because that's what was happening in America,
Razzo Rizzos and Travis Bickler's losers and sociopaths. And so
we come in and pitture Cotton, Candy, Chevlam and Dingdong.
You've got done with the hippie st of Co Beard

(16:00):
a real hustler, black leather, all bluster and showmanship. At
Alan Carr a gay man and owl glasses, known for
wearing caftans and blowing air kisses. And somehow together we
made a great team because we were really passionate, We
really believed in what we were making. So Don and
Alan went in and pitched the movie. They acted out

(16:23):
scenes with Don playing Danny Zuko and Alan playing Sandy.
They did the dance number, sliding across the floor, They
sang all the songs, and by the time they finished
Go Grease Lightning, that was a chilly silence in the room.
We might not get the green light here. My dream
is dying on life support right there on the floor
of Paramount, and I can't revive her. And then Don

(16:46):
says something I'll never forget. He says, you have to
trust Alan Carr's vision completely. Now, I've never made a movie,
and Don has only made one movie, Saturday Night Fever,
and he's telling his us is with complete certainty that
he has to trust Alan Carr's vision. And the reason

(17:06):
they have to trust him is because Alan is a
gay genius, not a genius. A gay genius, Alan, don Said,
marketed Saturday Night Fever by making John Travolta a gay icon,
unbeknownst to a heterosexual audience that love Travolta's heterosexual qualities
that were actually subversive gay qualities. That was the secret

(17:29):
formula gay subversion, Don said had been going on in
the movies since the talkies. Gay men like Alan had
been picking our John Wayne heroes are Peter laure villains
are Carrie Grant leading men. They've been choosing our clothes,
our music, our home decor, on and on and on.

(17:50):
It's a magnificent speech. And at the end they gave
us six million bucks and a green light to start immediately.
I tell them we'll come back six months later with
the box office and double Saturday in Fever. And that's
what it came in at four hundred million dollars. But
it wasn't about the box office. It was about family.

(18:11):
It was about our movie, a little movie that could.
We actually had Elvis to play the teenagel the odd
before we started filming. Our favorite porn star, Harry Reens
was said to play Coach Calhoun. The studio replace them
with Sid Caesar. But those were the big swings we
were taking everybody. Everybody wanted to come to set. Jackie

(18:34):
O visited Kissinger, Nancy Sinatra, Florence Henderson. It was a
wonderful party. It was the best time in my life.
At this point, Alan and Pierce had been sitting for hours.
Pierce had become so engrossed in Allan's stories he hadn't
asked a single question. Pierce finally tried to ask about

(18:55):
Don but Alan abruptly changed the subject. There was a
shift in tone. Alan asked Pierce had seen his Oscars telecast.
He was referring to the nineteen eighty nine Oscars that
Alan produced. It was infamous for the opening number with
host Rob Low. Alan had hired Low fresh off his
sex tape scandal, in which Low picked up two girls
while in Atlanta attending the Democratic National Convention in the

(19:18):
summer of and videotaped them having sex with each other.
One of those girls turned out to be sixteen years
old and her mother found a civil suit against Low.
The only thing more embarrassing for Low than a sex
tape scandal was singing Proud Mary at the Oscars in
a duet with a Disneyland actress playing snow White. Left
the dwells behind, came to town City. I haven't worked

(19:48):
since the Oscars. That was the same year Don to
Days of Thunder. Neither of us recovered from that year.
Don lost the studio, millions of dollars. I embarrassed to
film industry in front of forty million people. Not sure
which was worth God love my show, A lot of
people did. It was the old guard that took me down,
just as they did done. Do you know what's worse

(20:09):
than being exiled from the very thing you love most
in the world, being exiled surrounded by the very things
that remind you of the very thing you love the most.
Every inch of this house is an artifact to my success, Pierce.
You don't know the sound of silence until you live
alone in a house like this. The quiet I have

(20:30):
now it's very hard to bear. There was a long silence.
Pierce waited for Alan to reveal more, but he had
drifted rambling on a variety of tangents, including the tragedy
of the actress Merle Obern, whose mother was twelve years
old when she gave birth to Merle, and how Merle's
horrible car accident left her permanently scarred, and how Merle's

(20:51):
determination to continue acting was both courageous and tragic. Alan
never tired of these stories of dash dreams. It was
only near the very end of their conversation that Alan
returned to Don. He mentioned a twenty anniversary for Greece
and the party he failed to attend. I couldn't bear
to return to Ride High again, Pierce made a mental note.

(21:14):
Alan didn't say he couldn't bear to see the odd
cast again, but rather he couldn't bear to see Rydel
High again, a fictitious high school that doesn't exist, but
in Alan's fantasy. Pierce would later analyze the exchange on
his drive back to the hotel, to speak of ryde
l High as if it were a real place. Gave

(21:35):
me a thought that was exactly what it was to Alan,
a real place. I knew instantly what all of Alan's
pain and suffering was about. Greece was a personal film
for Alan, where straight audiences like me, saw a campy
musical of high school romance. For Alan, the large scale

(21:56):
spectacle was built to mask a large scale all in
his heart. An innocent act of high school sweethearts holding
hands down the hallway wasn't an innocent act for Alan,
but a source of immense pain, knowing their normal would
never be his. A glance, a stolen kiss, the shared

(22:17):
experiences of romantic love, and loss of innocence. They were
all off limits for a gay high school boy, and
there was nowhere to escape. Now in the movies, not
in television, where the only gay TV character was a
straight character pretending to be gay, sashing across the screen
his affection in citing derision and eye rolling from his landlord,

(22:39):
Mr Firley. It was only a year earlier that the
American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its list of
psychiatric disorders. In making the most rose colored, ecstatic high
school experience he could possibly imagine, Alan had sought to
paint over his own experience. Pierce would replay the last

(23:02):
part of the tape back in his hotel room, and
of course Don understood my reservations not to go back
to write a high our park up when Alan makes
a connection with Don. Don fell in love with spectacle,
just as I had. That's why we became Showman, to
escape it all, to escape walk specifically, I ask, you

(23:24):
know Don Simson was the only person in the world
more gay obsess than I was. Pierce was now very confused.
He tried to get Alan to elaborate. Alan was quite
cryptic at first, quoting Orwell on Kipling. One has a
sense of being seduced by something spurious and yet unquestionably seduced.

(23:47):
Who seduced on was Don Gay? I never saw anything,
But have you spoken to Paul Paul Bartel? He always
said his one regret was having sex with Don when
he had the opportunity. Paul and Don co wrote a
movie together called Cannonball that Paul directed. They were sharing

(24:09):
a hotel together for the premiere of the film at
the Douxville Film Festival. Don told Paul about a homosexual
experience he had in high school and how he's always
been open to gay sex. Peter Biskin verifies Alan's recounting
of Paul's remarks in his book Easy Writer, Raging Bulls.

(24:30):
Back at the hotel, Pierce tries to make sense of
Alan's comments. Here you had a man who was eulogized
at his wake at Morton's as the epitome of heterosexual virility,
and who promoted that virility to millions of young teenage
boys and girls across America. Tom Cruise shirtless playing beach volleyball,
Richard gear lifting weights upside down in his underwear in

(24:51):
American Jiggelo. This was Don's unique vision of straight male
masculinity and that masculine, and he created Don's billion dollar empire.
And if let us suppose Don had been exposed for
his hidden or not so hidden homosexual experimentation, how would
Don be allowed to go on making his movies? The

(25:14):
industry would laugh him out of the room. Pierce now
recalls the laughter at the wake at Morton's in a
whole new light. Were they suggesting just that when they
chuckled over the images of a rugged down with his
shirt off carrying a firearm? Was Don's gay secret, if
it had any truth? Not so secret? And if so,

(25:36):
what did Don's sexuality have to do with Don's death?
Listen to the Don on the I Heart Radio, Apple

(25:58):
podcasts or where ever you get your podcasts disclaimers for
episode two. First, the scene where Don and Allan pitched
the Paramount brass On Grease did not happen as we
scripted it, but Don was instrumental in getting the movie made.
Don loved music was nearly as much as Alan Carr did.
He grew up in the nineteen fifties, a self proclaimed
greaser with a leather jacket. In Alan Carr, Don had

(26:19):
a partner who shared his love of the fifties. Alan
was considered a marketing genius. He had been hired to
run the Oscar campaign for The Deer Hunter and was
widely credited with revolutionizing how Oscar films would be marketed. Alan,
like Don, believed in his superpower of persuasion. He was
a great pitch man who could market a big idea,
no matter how absurd the big idea. Maybe this would

(26:41):
catch up to Alan when he made his epic musical flop,
Can't Stop the Music, or what his crew called Can't
Stop the Cocaine. The opening credit sequence of Steve Guttenberg
in tight shorts roller skating through New York is all
you need to see to know that Alan's vision was
off the rails, bonkers disclaimer to Don's Malibu drug dealer
to the Stars Royce Newton, the composite character who most

(27:01):
resembles Don's drug dealer Race Newman. Race was a good
looking surfer kid from Ventura who was widely considered the
top gun of celebrity coke dealers. He was so well
known that Johnny cochrane O J Simpson's lawyer, featured Race
as a key figure in his theory that OJ's wife,
Nicole Brown Simpson was a cokehead and that she owed
money to a Columbian cocaine cartel, a cartel that Royce
was said to have been working for when he sold

(27:22):
Nicole the coke Disclaimer three. Royce's girlfriend Autumn Weston is fictitious.
She did not play an uncredited role in Greece to
Autumn Weston is a composite based on a number of
actresses who were under the supervision of Don's real life
doctor Field Goods, doctor Naomi Frederick, and doctor Robert Gerner.
The use of overprescribed shock therapy was not uncommonly used
by these doctors. Will dig deeper into Don's doctor Field

(27:45):
Goods and the connection to Autumn Weston and Royce Newton
as the story progresses. Disclaimer four. Our composite character Pierce,
of course, never met the film producer Julia Phillips, but
Julia Phillips and Don did hang out at Julia's house
in Malibu during the Easy Rider Raging Bulls period where
all the major filmmakers and movie starlett's hung out sunbathing
topless outside of Julia's groovy pad at Trancus Beach. Don

(28:07):
was there, spending much of his time with Paul Schrader.
They would later work together on American Jiggilo. Julia and
Don were both Olympian late night talkers who loved nothing
more than snorting cocaine and talking about movies. Don thought
Julia was the smartest, wittiest, balsiest producer around. They had
a brief fling while hold up in a New York
hotel waiting for a meeting with Robert Redford. The fling,
if you can even call it, that, was short lived,

(28:29):
as was Jolia's career, where Don was able to sustain
a twenty year co cabin in the film industry, Julia
was out of the game by nineteen eighty after producing
The Sting Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
three of the great films of the seventies, and becoming
the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for producing.
Julia would never make another movie again.