When a Group of Silver Screen Vixens Dared to Stand Up to HIV Stigma
Guys and Dolls (and who would have turned 100 this year), is never listed among Hollywood’s early AIDS warriors. But she deserves to be.In 1983, press agent and off-Broadway producer Alan Eichler — whose YouTube channel is a wealth of stage, TV, movie, and music rarities — came up with the idea of organizing a star-studded fundraiser that wound up being the first theatrical AIDS benefit on the West Coast.Eichler, who had been a press agent for Hello, Dolly!
and Hair, was known for working with ladies of a certain age who he hoped to, and often did, restore to their former glory: Yma Sumac, Eartha Kitt, Patti Page.He also worked closely with Tom Eyen, the playwright and lyricist who, in 1982, enjoyed a smash with Broadway’s Dreamgirls.
In 1975, Eyen had written the camp play Women Behind Bars, a raunchy parody of prison exploitation films that served as a vehicle for plus-size Halston model Pat Ast and midnight movie star Divine, and a new production at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip in L.A.
was taking off with Adrienne Barbeau, Sharon Barr, and Lu Leonard.A friend of Eichler’s, a VJ at the gay bar Revolver, told him that a newly formed organization — which became AIDS Project Los Angeles and is now APLA Health — was having no luck attracting stars to call attention to the runaway AIDS crisis.“They weren’t able to get anybody to do anything — nobody wanted to be associated with the word ‘AIDS.’ Even the so-called gay stars like Bette Midler or Diana Ross, none of them wanted to be associated with that word,” Eichler recalls.This conversation led him to think about the resources at his own fingertips. “I thought, Here I am with these older stars.
