Football as footnote

The Maxim Super Bowl party had it all. And it was all happening at once. Under a big top. In the middle of nowhere -- Did you see the longhorns? -- but not too far for the Hilton sisters. Or Janet Jackson. Or Jerry Bruckheimer. Or Kato Kaelin, for that matter. There was a circus where a field used to be, with a fire-eater, a snake handler, a sword thrower, contortionists, fortunetellers, aerialists.

But this wasn’t for kids. There was far too much cleavage for a G rating. The Beastie Boys’ “Brass Monkey” had everybody jumping, the girls in the cage, the girls in the red cowboy hats and short shorts, the girl gulping flames, the Coors Light twins, the juggler named Michelangelo in the sequined jester’s hat, even football Hall of Famer and CBS analyst Marcus Allen.

“This is like the culmination of everything,” said L.A. talent agent Bill Thompson. “It’s at the Super Bowl. Buzz Aldrin’s here! CNN is covering it. ESPN is covering it.... It’s like, ‘What?!’ ”

Maxim, the magazine for twentysomething guys who take their glossies with equal parts sarcasm and skin, has created a whole new genre of Super Bowl party, one with a budget near $1 million, a cast, a story line and a 250-person production team.

“Circus Maximus” was just one of the dozens of high-profile events in the Houston area this weekend. Playboy, Sports Illustrated, the “Girls Gone Wild” crew and Snoop Dogg all hosted parties; Jimmy Kimmel taped his show here; and MGM premiered “BarberShop 2: Back in Business.” But among competitive partygoers -- club kids from New York and L.A., agents, publicists, managers, record-label execs, aspiring actors -- Maxim’s Super Bowl bashes are the most talked about of the year. They are certainly among the toughest to get into. The stories of party crashers are the stuff of legend.

“This has become a gigantic industry schmooze-a-thon with as little to do with football as possible,” said Dan Parente, Maxim special-events producer.

Faux ranch

“Circus Maximus” was held Friday at the Regal Ranch, a worn-out place about 30 minutes southwest of downtown Houston on a stretch of highway dominated by auto-body shops and some grazing cattle.

It’s not a working ranch, but more the facade of one built in the 1950s for local dances. These days, it’s rented out for company picnics, conferences and foreign tourist groups hungry for “the Texas ranch-type thing,” says co-owner Carlos Martinez. That is, a barn, a saloon, a small rodeo ring, a string of faux storefronts painted to look like the Old West and a kitchen that offers up Frito pie (corn chips topped with chili, cheese and jalapenos). “It only works with Fritos,” says Martinez.

Maxim staffers chose this location as much for its character as for the freedom it affords. Unlike downtown Houston, where city officials have restricted non-NFL-affiliated signage and ordered law enforcement to keep a tight rein on crowds, Stafford actually modified its noise and zoning laws to make way for the magazine’s party.

Stafford, population 16,500, was a cotton and grain farming town until it got in the way of Houston’s sprawl. Today, the largest employer is a Texas Instruments factory. “This is probably the largest thing we’ve had out here,” said Stafford Police Chief Bonny Krahn.

Even after a year of planning, it was a long week for the Maxim team, which included two dozen publicists from Bragman Nyman Cafarelli; celebrity wranglers from both coasts; L.A. events producer Jeffrey Best and his staff; Fred Segal Beauty hair and makeup artists; the Sarasota, Fla.-based Nerveless Nocks circus (tent and performers); the Wagner Carnival crew that hauled a replacement Ferris wheel 220 miles overnight from Beeville, Texas; the Houston agency ELI Marketing; the whole Regal Ranch staff; and half a dozen other local companies that provided equipment rentals.

Rain -- the Houston-style soaker that turns a grassy field into a muddy swamp in minutes -- bedeviled the entire production. It started on Wednesday, even before the tent went up, and didn’t let up until late Thursday.

The night before the party, giant puddles collected along the dirt driveway where an 80-foot red carpet was supposed to go. The tent was leaking. The media tour was canceled. “The saturation of the parking lot is something we’re going to have to deal with,” Best told Maxim General Manager Andy Clerkson. The adjacent field was flooding.

In the next 24 hours, event parking was moved three times. (Ultimately, buses shuttled everyone from a nearby church parking lot.) It took three truckloads of dry dirt to soak up the puddles on the driveway, and crews laid sod alongside it to hide the mud beneath. By midday Friday, Wal-Mart had sold out of rain boots, thanks in large part to one Maxim staffer.

“It’s like we built a circus on a bog,” said Maxim’s chief event producer, and Andy’s wife, Carolyn Clerkson.

Extravagance

Maxim’s Super Bowl party has gotten more extravagant every year. It started in 2001 in Tampa, Fla., as a fundraiser for Holly and Rodney Peete’s HollyRod Foundation. The magazine’s U.S. edition had launched just four years earlier, and Andy Clerkson wanted to distinguish it from the other lad mags, such as competitor FHM. And what better way to reach American men ages 18 to 34 than with a presence during Super Bowl weekend?

“Basically,” said Clerkson, “it was, ‘We’re a brand-new magazine, we have to make an impact. Let’s fish where the fish are and throw a party -- celebrity-attended, tastemakers, the great and the good of Corporate America -- and let’s see if we can put some buzz around Maxim.’ ”

It worked. Magazine subscriptions have grown from a projected 700,000 to 2.5 million. Last year in San Diego, 800 people attempted to crash “Maximville,” the Super Bowl party constructed inside a former Wonder Bread factory to look like a mini-city, complete with a car wash, a convenience store and a high school gymnasium.

Magazine staffers compete to top each other’s party-crasher stories. There was the guy with the guitar slung over his shoulder saying, “I’m with the band.” Then there was the woman who arrived in a wheelchair and, when denied entry, stood up, folded the chair and stomped off.

Negotiators offer cash (as much as $2,400), vacations (an all-expense paid trip for two to Costa Rica), prizes (memorabilia autographed by Cleveland Cavalier guard LeBron James) and sexual favors. In New Orleans in 2002, scalpers outside “The Dark Side of Alice in Wonderland” party sold fake tickets for $1,000 each.

After that fiasco, Maxim did away with ticket sales. Now, the event is a reward for advertisers and a lure for celebrities and other VIPs who can help build the magazine’s brand and that of its corporate sponsors.

Wristbands, the only way in, are kept locked in a safe, and the guest list is so well-guarded that event producer Parente spent the four days before this year’s party staring at the 1,900 names on his laptop, double and triple checking each one’s reason for being invited.

Party ‘vignettes’

Nearly 100 models were hired to don western gear, Maxim-style -- short shorts, fishnets, boas, cowboy boots or stilettos, and cleavage, cleavage, cleavage.

They were cast in December by Gary Littlefield, a big, no-nonsense type of guy from a Dallas-based marketing company who inspired clenched-teeth smiles from Maxim’s New York team. During one meeting, Littlefield was talking so loudly on his cellphone that one of the circus performers glared at him, saying, “I’m having a Larry David moment.”

An hour before the buses arrived, Littlefield stormed into the saloon, ordered all the models to gather ‘round and lambasted them over a rumor that one model planned to get drunk at the party. “One drink -- you’re gone!” he shouted at them. “You. Don’t. Know. How. Important. This. Is!” The party was getting TV coverage all the way to Dallas, for crying out loud. “Am I going to hear any more talk about getting drunk?”

“Noooo,” they answered.

After the dress-down, pairs of women were assigned different “vignettes” throughout the party: dancing on a platform in the middle of one bar, writhing in a cage like circus animals, on a balcony over the funnel cake and Frito pie stand, and mingling among the crowd.

Around 9:30 p.m., packs of men of all ages began wandering into the tent, speechless at the sight of all that cleavage. They grinned and pointed, chucking each other on the arm. Some whipped out their disposable cameras and grabbed the nearest model for a photo. Others just stared. After a while, the party began to fill with other scantily clad women -- guests -- blurring the distinction between the ladies paid to entertain and those attending just for fun. Soon, it seemed that every guy felt a little bolder than he did back home. And why not? Everything about the evening said: Go ahead. It’s Maxim, “The Best Thing to Happen to Men Since Women.”

Buxom girls in cowboy hats greeted arrivals with shots of Maker’s Mark. There were banks of PlayStation 2 video games, and a mechanical bull ride. In the saloon, there were casino games -- poker, roulette, blackjack. Winners exchanged vouchers at the “General Store” for in-line skates, golf clubs, T-shirts, Maxim’s Hair Color Just for Men.

By midnight, the celebrities had arrived. Janet Jackson pitched camp in the saloon, surrounded by big guys in So So Def jackets. Under the tent, Adam Sandler slipped into a white leather booth in a far corner. Paris and Nicky Hilton practiced demure poses on velvet couches with Nicole Richie and actor Johnny Knoxville. On stage, the super group Camp Freddy (Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum, the Cult guitarist Billy Morrison and Donovan Leitch) blasted out cover tunes. At one point, Shelby Lynne was up there thrashing right along with them.

“It’s a party!” shouted a guy wearing an American flag shirt, a cowboy hat, a handlebar mustache and a lasso on his belt.

The party started breaking up around 2 a.m. The media had come and gone, and by then even the publicists were swigging beers.

Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly stood outside the tent with a tanned blond whom he nominated as Maxim’s next cover girl. He shook his head. His magazine was spending $1 million on its party the next night, he said. But Maxim had really outdone itself this year. “I don’t know how we’re going to top this,” he said.