Daze of the Locust

By JAY COCKS

204 (count em!) stars fall on Radio City for a gaudy fund raiser

You heard it here first. Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton did not join in the chorus of Love Makes the World Go 'Round. They held hands. They stood right there, center stage, at Radio City Music Hall and even made nice. But they did not sing.

Joan Collins and Farley Granger were singing. Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon were singing. Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, Don Ameche and Alice Faye, Howard Keel and Jane Powell: all raised their voices in joyous song. But Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton were struck dumb, doing their best to look as if they'd just slid down a laundry chute into the Twilight Zone.

There may be worse nightmares, but there has never been one so well cast as Night of 100 Stars, Broadway Producer Alexander H. Cohen's 5 1/2-hour benefit for the Actors' Fund. It was a bad dream that will soon go public. The proceedings, staged before a large and increasingly stupefied audience last week, will be shorn of the technical glitches, gaping pauses and personal faux pas that lent the show a kind of desperate piquancy. Edited down for a three-hour ABC time slot, Night of 100 Stars will be sent out over the air waves on March 8 with a scenario jerry-built by 100 Stars Writer-Producer Hildy Parks, who with Husband Alexander Cohen conspires yearly to mount TV's Tony Awards show. Viewers delirious to watch Al Pacino, Leonard Nimoy and 34 others don white tie, topper and tails and kick a leg with the Rockettes will have to see them through the eyes of a young Rockette, sidelined by a twisted ankle, as she is comforted by an aged stagehand while the show goes on. And on.

The putative purpose of last week's occasion was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Actors' Fund, a showfolks' charity created in 1882 by such stalwarts as P.T Barnum and Edwin Booth, and raise money to build a nursing facility next to the Actors' Fund home in Englewood, N.J. The first 90 minutes of the show were a smooth arc of excitement and unapologetic razzle-dazzle: a lyric Try to Remember by Harry Belafonte, a monologue delivered at giddy white heat by Robin Williams ("What excitement backstage--everyone's standing around in little pools of Perrier"), a dingbat piano solo by Dudley Moore, and film clips of such stars as James Cagney, James Stewart and Bette Davis, who then showed up at center stage to greet one another and an S.R.O. audience of 6,000 who had paid from $25 to $1,000 for the privilege of waving back.

The glamour kept coming after that, but so did the trouble. There were technical foulups: Ed Asner and Elizabeth Taylor were momentarily trapped in the folds of a falling curtain, like big game in a tree trap. The pace slowed: "I can't read my monitor," James Earl Jones rumbled like an Old Testament prophet rebuking his flock. Most of all, the pretension showed: birthday candles were lit on a cake that looked like the Tower of Babel, as discomfited luminaries dished up decades of encapsulated world history in which the Actors' Fund got featured billing ("A Russian named Pavlov used dogs to study conditioned reflexes, and the Actors' Fund was 25 years old").

There were intimations of overkill behind the scenes as well, where the stars bedazzled one another. "My God!" exclaimed Alexis Smith, surveying a succession of knowns, almost-knowns and should-have-knowns. "After this I just want to go sit in a bus depot." Others spread out and socialized. "Hi, Bette," said Cleopatra to Jezebel. "It's me. Liz." "Liz?" said Bette Davis, unwilling or unable to acknowledge recognition, thus forcing an introduction ("You know--Liz Taylor") that probably would be superfluous in Bessarabia. By the time each of the 204 had been marched, swept and trundled onstage at least once, they were press-ganged for a finale onto a series of risers, where they gave the depleted audience a hearty hand for endurance as photographers snapped away and a television director announced over the sound system, "That's a good-night."

Not quite. The stars and members of the audience who held $1,000 tickets walked right up the middle of Avenue of the Americas on a four-block-long red carpet to the New York Hilton for a champagne supper and dancing.

Only in show business could a benefit to raise $2 million cost an estimated $4 million to produce--estimated because nowhere near that much was actually spent. Hotels donated rooms, airlines gave tickets, restaurants provided food, and seven limo fleets provided wheels on the cuff. ABC's reported $4 million payment for the TV rights handily defrayed the other production expenses, with enough left over from that, ticket sales and donations to get the nursing home under way.

But despite its advertising, Night of 100 Stars was no more about a nursing home or an anniversary than the Oscars are about merit. The real point of such occasions is fame. They may kindle generosity and inspire charity. But what they truly celebrate is celebrity. --By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by JANICE C. SIMPSON

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