Behind-the-Scenes Story on AIDS Benefit Spawns $10-Million Suit

Part of Michael Anketell’s job as chairman of AIDS Project Los Angeles’ fashion show fund-raiser was to garner publicity for the annual style spectacle.

He did just that late last year when a magazine published a gossipy chapter of a book he was writing about his decade-long involvement with the highly popular event, which draws some of the biggest designer names in the fashion world.

But AIDS Project Los Angeles was decidedly unhappy with the buzz--so unhappy, in fact, that it slapped Anketell with a $10-million lawsuit, condemning his story as a wildly inaccurate and defamatory tale that would drive away donors.

A dishy retelling of behind-the-scenes events at the organization’s 1993 Calvin Klein show at the Hollywood Bowl, Anketell’s magazine account--and the group’s reaction to it--highlights the love-hate relationship between the AIDS community and the glitzy, celebrity-studded events many AIDS charities rely on to survive.

A master of lavish benefits, APLA has long been a magnet for criticism that it devotes too much energy and too many dollars to extravaganzas like its fashion night and annual Commitment to Life show.

Anketell, a one-time AIDS Project board member who originated the idea of the fashion benefit, says the organization is bringing out the big guns to quash the bad press and kill his unfinished book, for which he has yet to find a publisher.

“Most of what I write about was very public,” said Anketell, clearly stunned by the lawsuit. “Just the ostentatiousness of some events was very public.”

The shows have offered far more than beautiful models trotting up and down runways in the latest impractical styles. Walls of tens of thousands of freshly cut roses, faux snowfalls, rooms upholstered in fabric--such are the flourishes that have helped make the night a major L.A. happening.

In the excerpt about the Klein show published last November in POZ, a national magazine for people with AIDS and HIV, Anketell, 47, portrays himself as a lone voice of reason in a sea of self-indulgent excess.

By Anketell’s telling, Klein and his crew were obsessed with prodigal trivia that needlessly drove up the cost of the show, fussing over everything from the color of the chicken to be served (skinless to preserve a neutral tone) to the napkins (they had to be real linen).

Anketell also derides the event co-chairs, who included such entertainment industry heavyweights as David Geffen and Barry Diller, claiming that they did little to sell top-priced tickets and obtained “100% marked-down seats for themselves.”

It is the bad-mouthing of some of AIDS Project’s major donors that seems to have driven the organization to the courthouse in demand of $10 million from a man who has the AIDS virus and says he couldn’t pay $10,000.

In its Superior Court lawsuit, which was filed in late December but has only come to light in recent weeks, APLA says that contrary to Anketell’s version, the various co-chairs contributed heavily.

Diller “paid for a $10,000 package of tickets,” the suit states, while Geffen--who has given well over $1 million to AIDS Project Los Angeles over the years----”presented APLA with a check for $250,000 the very week of the event” and additionally underwrote some $10,000 in expenses for the Tina Turner performance that topped off the evening.

The seriousness with which the group is taking Anketell’s story puzzles some.

“The book seems comical,” said Jolie Shartin, until recently an APLA media relations specialist who helped publicize the fashion benefits. “How could you be a freeloading major donor? Isn’t it an oxymoron?”

“It seems to me,” she added, “that focusing on Michael Anketell and the fashion event is smoke and mirrors for much larger problems going on at the hierarchy of APLA . . . that have been going on for a long time.”

AIDS Project board members counter that it would be foolish to let the honor of their donors go undefended.

“When you’ve taken the time to cultivate these people around an already controversial issue--AIDS--and then you have the most generous donors blasted and defamed in the press by an event producer who was a board member of the organization, what’s to keep them from saying, ‘I don’t need this’? . . . They’ll just donate to breast cancer,” said board vice chairman Kevin James, one of the attorneys representing the organization in the lawsuit.

“We’ve had people who were the subject of the magazine article calling and screaming,” James said, declining to say who had called.

Underlying their anxiety is the agency’s fear that the success of new AIDS drugs is diminishing donor enthusiasm.

One of the largest AIDS service agencies in the nation, AIDS Project Los Angeles recently cut its budget from $20 million to $19 million, laid off 20 employees (Shartin among them) and eliminated another 10 unfilled positions.

In addition to demanding $10 million in damages from Anketell, APLA claims he still owes the agency $90,000 in ticket receipts from the 1996 fashion event, his final one. Anketell denies the charge, which he says did not surface until after the POZ piece was published.

Anketell volunteered his efforts for years until the group started paying him a $40,000 annual consulting fee in 1993 to organize the fashion show. Most of the money was used to cover expenses and pay assistants, he said, leaving him with about $8,000 a year for himself.

He appears to see no irony in his mocking critique of events in which he played a major, ongoing role. “I was and I wasn’t” overseeing the shows, he said, blaming excesses on designer demands and interference by board members.

The fashion extravaganza has traditionally been among the costliest of the agency’s fund-raising events. Board Chairman Dana Miller says show expenses have averaged about a third of revenue, sometimes much higher, as in the case of last year’s event featuring designer Todd Oldham.

In that case, Miller said, production costs ate up almost half the show’s income. Anketell said he doesn’t know the final figures, but estimated that the expense was much greater.

While Miller dismissed Anketell’s claims of board meddling in the fashion shows, he conceded that they have been too costly.

This year, Miller said, the show will not cost the agency anything. It is being entirely underwritten by Gucci and Tom Ford, the featured designer.

At the same time, Miller suggested that it would be folly to think that the organization could get by without splashy fund-raisers. “That’s naive. That’s not in keeping with Los Angeles.”