(Los Angeles, Sept. 5, AP) Paul Vincent Carlisle, known to millions as “The Dancing Werewolf,” died this morning at his home in Malibu. He was 79. The exact cause of death has not been confirmed, but in recent years, Mr. Carlisle had been treated for pancreatic cancer, lupus, thrombosis, and clinical depression. He is survived by three ex-wives, seven children, and nine grandchildren.
“As a “voluntary lupinist” Mr. Carlise’s career and exuberant life inspired the ground-breaking Brian de Palma film “Blood Money” and a trio of lesser sequels: “Too Much Blood on My Hands,” “Days of Blood and Doses,” and “Blood Will Tell.” Collectively the films grossed 1.7 billion dollars world-wide, and serve as the basis for an entire genre of video games.
In all likelihood, however, history will remember Mr. Carlisle foremost as a dancer. His controversial and dynamic performances on Dancing With the Stars astounded viewers and led to accusations that he was a professional unfairly foisted among amateurs. Hirsute but sleek, virile but sensitive, exuding feline grace and canine assertiveness, Mr. Carlisle dominated the stage, embarrassed his critics, and galvanized audiences. “He was a natural,” said Gregory Hines. “A dancer’s dancer” opined Baryshnikov, “No—a dancer’s dream of a dancer.” Perhaps his highest praise came from partner, Mary Ann Haughton, a 27-year-old cosmetology student and single mother from Gary, Indiana. “He was a real gentleman,” she recalled. “He knew how to treat people. He was always, like, letting me shine and protecting me at the same time.”
Casting the famously temperamental celebrity for any role requiring discipline and cooperation was a gamble, but one that the show’s producer, Alvin Schwartz, met head-on. “Yeah, we knew Vinnie’s rep, but hey, life is full of chances and show-biz even more so. When something works, you get rich, when it doesn’t you get fired. Simple.” Purists and conservative media pundits derided Mr. Carlisle’s inclusion as an opportunistic stunt akin to shock theater. More than one celebrity contestant refused to dance against the Carlisle/Haughton power duo, including Danny Devito, who famously stomped off the stage crying foul and uttering anti-animal epitaphs. (Mr. Devito and Mr. Carlisle reconciled in later years, and the actor is slated to read a poem at an upcoming memorial service). Motives aside, Mr. Carlisle and Ms. Haughton’s electrifying performances are credited with reviving the DWTS brand and quadrupling the show’s ratings.
More recently, Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Schwartz collaborated on the short-lived but critically acclaimed reality series Biggest Losers of Ballet, in which obese contestants and their equally obese celebrity partners inspired each other to lose weight as they trained for the season’s finale—a live telecast production of Swan Lake. Vanity Fair described it as “pathological exhibitionism at its most poignant,” and “self-abasement raised to the level of art.” The New York Times punned it, “pound for pound the best reality show ever . . . hugely entertaining for all the wrong reasons.” It was sleeper hit and a financial fiasco.
Mr. Carlisle fell upon hard times after BLOB tanked, and his last film credit was a regrettable series of late-night informercials promoting an all-natural colonic cleanse.
It was an anticlimactic end to a full and dramatic life. At one time or other, Mr. Carlisle had been a writer, producer, celebrity chef, social activist, gastronome, and world traveler. His close friend, Sean Penn, praised his versatility: “Vinnie was a Renaissance Man in a Cro-Magnon age. An inspiration.” But behind each accomplishment lay an ominous shadow. His public battles with alcohol, drugs, and sex addiction kept his face on the front pages of the tabloid press for 30 years, and more than once, his sudden, insurmountable cravings for raw meat led to his incarceration. His extravagant lifestyle produced three humiliating bankruptcies. For much of the ‘90s, he was homeless, an experience he viscerally related in the second volume of his autobiography, American Carnivore.
Despite his many setbacks and rebounds, there remained one constant force in the varied life of “Vinnie” Carlisle: his advocacy for Lupinists, especially those in the entertainment industry. As he told the San Francisco Chronicle in a 2010 interview, “The only thing—and I mean this—the only thing that really matters to me now, is breaking the glass ceiling for huminals. We’ve had to live in the shadows for too long now.”
Nothing in Mr. Carlisle’s early years, however, offered proof of an advanced social conscience. Heir to a Boston Brahmin glue dynasty, the young Mr. Carlisle was groomed for the corporate boardroom. “There was just so much heaped on him at an early age,” recalled his sister, Martina Van Eepol, “All this responsibility. It was in the atmosphere of the house. Glue, glue, and more glue. It was enough for father—he was a glueman, like his father before him. But Paul Vincent had to chart his own path.”
It would prove a circuitous and unpredictable route. Mr. Carlisle dutifully attended Andover Prep, scoring high marks in all subjects, especially math and chemistry, but later chose Cornell over Harvard, the first in series of filial heresies that culminated in a permanent estrangement from his father and disinheritance from the family fortune. His collegiate career was distinguished by its brevity. Mr. Carlisle always claimed that he left the university voluntarily; records indicate that he was in fact expelled for unnamed “grave offenses.”
Soon afterward, Mr. Carlisle came in contact with werewolves and gradually transformed into a lupinist. Neither of his three memoirs reveal exactly how that conversion occurred, and Mr. Carlisle often provided conflicting accounts. For example, in 1987, he told Le Figaro that he had been attacked by wolves while surreptitiously backpacking across then-Communist Romania. Just two years later, however, he intimated to David Letterman that his metamorphosis was the result of one-night stand with a young wolfress in Palm Springs. By the mid-nineties, he amended that version as well, claiming that he had actively sought out wolves in upper Ontario and had managed to ingratiate himself with a pack after months of privation, followed by an “apprenticeship of blood”—a term upon which he refused to elaborate. His physical alteration was, he insisted, merely symbolic of a deeper more fundamental revolt. As he explained to the late Larry King, “You gotta remember, this was the late 60s. Everybody was rebelling. It was in everybody’s blood. But it seemed to me they were rebelling in the most conventional ways—you know, smoking pot, living in communes and sleeping with strangers. So I decided to rebel against that too. I said to myself, if I’m going to let my hair grow, then I’m going all the way. I’m stopping at nothing.”
And Mr. Carlisle did just that. For most of the 70s he lived on the margins of society, working as a laborer by day—cab driver, short order cook, lumberjack—and reveling in his “real identity” by moonlight. His reputation spread by word of mouth, and no doubt profited by exaggeration. (Rumors that he maintained a “den” in Central Park were never verified, but persist.) For his part, Mr. Carlisle seemed—or sought to seem—indifferent to both his own notoriety and the nation’s malaise. “Vietnam, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Disco, Teheran—all that sh—t, it meant nothing to me,” he later told Barbara Walters. “I had my life, and it was a good life. If other people found something of value in it, fine by me. If they didn’t, f—ck em, I’d care.” By the end of the decade, he had evolved into a minor but extremely complicated folk hero—a combination of back-to-nature survivalist and counterculture misanthrope, lauded by romantics, revolutionaries, and reformers alike for his condemnation of what he called “rabid consumerism.” Writing in The Nation, Jacques Derrida compared him to Rousseau and Che Guevara. Joan Didion called him “Thoreau—with a bone to pick and fangs to pick it with.”
But it was not until the second Reagan administration that Mr. Carlisle conquered pop culture. He quickly embraced the new media age, frequently appearing as a guest DJ on the freshly-minted MTV, a move that some of his earliest admirers labeled a “sell-out.” Others claimed that his sudden and unexpected visibility was part of a comprehensive strategy to subtly pilot a younger generation toward Emersonian ideals. Either way, these were his salad days—both financially and personally. The first volume of his memoirs, alleged ghost-written by Jackie Collins, spawned a Broadway hit (directed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and still in production), while the de Palma films reaped huge profits at the box office. He appeared on every A-list from L.A. to London. Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bono, Andy Warhol, Winnie Mandela, Truman Capote, Dr. Ruth, Madonna, and most of the Kennedy clan sought and endured his tempestuous company.
By the lates eighties, however, Mr. Carlisle was regularly abusing cocaine, and his public appearances were increasingly embarrassing for himself and perilous to by-standers. In 1988, he was arrested at a Hollywood pet store for swallowing a live goldfish. The next year, while serving as an MC for the Oscars, Mr. Carlisle attempted an unscripted and unfunny joke about the incident and was boo-ed from the stage. Moments later he returned to the podium with an alley cat which he threatened to disembowel if anyone left the building or ended the broadcast. For the next three hours, Mr. Carlisle held an audience of fifty million hostage as he veered from seething hostility to maudlin remorse and all points in between. The monologue, which George Will described as “the strangest, and certainly the longest cry—or howl—for help uttered in the sordid history of Tinseltown,” finally concluded just before midnight, when a team of Israeli hostage negotiators, aided by a young therapist from Texas named Phil, convinced Mr. Carlisle to surrender. Hollywood heaved sigh of collective relief, but the cost, both personal and public had yet to be calculated. Melanie Griffith, whose Oscar acceptance speech Mr. Carlisle had both postponed and overshadowed, refused speak to him, to accept his apology, or to even say his name, referring to him thereafter as “that crazy doggy man.” Others took Mr. Carlisle’s self-lacerating mea culpa directly to heart, and celebrity self-reflection enjoyed a “moment,” however brief. “It sobered us up—all of us, said Robert Dinero. “We saw Vinnie down there on the stage with the cat, both of them suffering, both of them trapped in quagmire of existential pain, and it was like looking in a mirror. We didn’t know until then just how sick we all were.” David Lynch described the episode as, “our very own dark night of the soul,” and soon began production on a film (to date unreleased) about the incident. Others, naturally saw things differently. “It was cathartic,” gushed Peter Bogdanovich. “It was mesmerizing. It was sublime. I was sitting between Clint Eastwood and Bill Murry and we were all three in tears.”
Mr. Carlisle’s downward spiral continued.
His first wife, the model Alba de la Costa, whom he had wed in 1984, divorced him. Contract disputes with Warner Brothers soon followed. His dependance on fresh, raw meat continued, despite intensive therapy, including several unsuccessful stints at vegetarian boot camps, after which the People’s Werewolf quietly disappeared from view.
Five years later, he reappeared, a grayer, calmer, gentler version of his former self. He was clean throughout the second half of the nineties and managed to find work as a consultant on several HBO series, although the major Hollywood executives remained skittish—to their later regret. Closer to the Bone, the second volume of his memoirs, soon debuted at number one where it remained for 32 weeks and drew praise from such diverse readers as Bill O’Reilly, Bill Gates, and Bill Clinton. Opray Winfrey attested to its broad appeal: “I was stunned and humbled. I never imagined a book about a homeless werewolf could speak to me, but it did. But it was more than that. It exposed me to myself.” The narrative opens on the night of Mr. Carlisle’s meltdown at the Oscars and, following a litany of humiliations and epiphanies, concludes with an account of his volunteer work at a Lupinist halfway house. Along the way, the reader is yanked between Mr. Carlisle’s self-reflection and self-hatred, bewildered by his pithy Zen-like aphorisms and battered by his wildly profane tirades against societal norms. It spoke to a generation.
Mr. Carlisle met his second wife, the Swedish ice skater and gold medalist Inga Lund, in 1999. Mrs. Lund-Carlisle, an early advocate of vegetable theosophy (the controversial theory that every naturally-grown product offers its own “fundamental nutritional truth”) persuaded the world’s most famous carnivore to renounce meat completely and embark on a ten-year gastronomic odyssey. The couple abandoned Los Angeles and lived as nomads, scouring the farthest reaches of six continents to sample a bizarre array of plants and minerals. They ate lichens from Finland, algae from Swiss alpine lakes, honey from Himalayan bees, Patagonian toadstools. They even bought a small trawler to harvest their own seaweed. Soon, Mr. Carlisle was a new creature—transformed from a hoary and bloated flesh-eater into a sleek and radiant incarnation of mindfulness and clean living. “I finally got it,” he told NPR in a 2005 interview, “ I finally understood that ‘prey’ and ‘predator’ are the most harmful words in the entire English language. And that’s because it reduces everything to one or the other, and both are bad.”
While the personal gains were incalculable, the Carlisles’ attempt to market their lifestyle choices was an unqualified failure. The couples’ romantic chemistry, effervescent in a North Sea squall or a Mongolian yurt, proved volatile—an even dangerous—on the set their live cooking show. The two simply could not share a stove; sniping, invective, and insults comprised the daily menu, as audience members frequently dodged airborne kitchenware, including knives and red-hot skillets. Injuries, lawsuits and settlements came in tandem. For those watching safely at home, the couple’s antics were riotous entertainment, akin to professional wrestling; the recipes they touted, however, were, according to the late Anthony Bourdain, himself no stranger to exotic cuisine, “gastronomic malpractice. Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I loved Vinnie and Inga. Their hearts were in the right place. But you know, hand-washed kelp is tough to come by, even if you know where to look. And really, these days, who has room for a mud oven?”
The Santa Fe restaurant closed within a three months, and their cookbook, New Food for Old Souls, was universally remanded.
The Carlisles divorced in 2007, remarried in 2009, then split for good a few months later. They remained close friends until Mr. Carlisle’s passing. In an emotional interview with Connie Chun, Mr. Carlisle praised his former wife, “Inga saved my life. She brought me out of the slaughterhouse and into the greenhouse. I can never thank her enough.”
Unfortunately, without Ms. Lund’s support, the aging werewolf could not resist the temptation of flesh. After BLOB tanked, Mr. Carlisle turned once more to meat, drugs, and what his agent, Syd Lyman, described as “poisonous relationships with predatory females.” His infomercials became a go-to source for late-night comedians, and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service was no kinder. Forced to sell his Malibu mansion in 2015, he moved into a small trailer which he shared with his third wife, an aspiring dancer named Norma Kerpanski. Through all the vicissitudes of his multiple careers, Mr. Carlisle remained forward-thinking and positive. Just weeks before his death, he told Ellen De Generes, “It’s like they say, the journey is the destination. I was never into being any one thing for long. I was always more interested in becoming something new, whatever that happened to be.”
A private service is scheduled for the next full moon.