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.