Bruce Cudd truly got his job as Peter Allen's assistant through the back door—he was having an affair with Allen's boyfriend, Gregory Connell! 'I was the other man,' Cudd admits. 'We were asleep at a friend's house and Peter walked in. There was a tense year or two there where we probably weren't the best of friends, but when Gregory became ill [from AIDS] Peter and I became very close and I ended up working with him.'
Currently working for the Los Angeles Opera, Cudd's had a hand in several Allen tributes since his death in 1992, most recently a GMHC event in New York City.
LF: So you and Gregory were having an affair when you met Peter! Did they have an open relationship at the time?
BC: Very open. Gregory, I think, in the beginning would have preferred they be monogamous, but Peter could never really be monogamous. They always loved each other, but the last five or six years together was more of a partnership. There was some antagonism back and forth, it wasn't always peaches and cream.
LF: Did YOU sleep with Peter?
BC: When I first went to work for him he said 'let's just all be sure to not sleep together.' I loved Peter as a friend, but never had sexual feelings for him.
LF: How would you characterize Peter?
BC: His motto was, if it's not fun we're not going to do it. We traveled the world, and his favorite thing to do other than performing was to eat in a great restaurant after a show, we always were in wonderful exciting places around the most exciting people. He attracted very sophisticated fun-loving interesting people and he was exactly that.
LF: And his sense of humor ...
BC: Very sophisticated, dry and instant. It's probably the thing I loved most about Peter. He was so right-on with his humor, and clever with words, he was a great storyteller. So many of his songs like 'Don't Cry Out Loud' or 'Tenterfield Saddler.' They're great stories and he was a great storyteller. That applied to his humor too.
LF: Did he have opinions about closeted gay performers like Liberace?
BC: Yeah, but not so much about Liberace. We talked about Rock Hudson. Peter and Joan Rivers were doing an AIDS benefit on Fire Island the weekend [Rock] announced his illness or died. Peter said that Rock's had to be so closeted all these years, but the conspiracy to keep him closeted [continues]—his manager and close friends were coming out and still claiming it wasn't AIDS. Peter was really against the closet and thought it was a bad thing. But he lived through the times where pretty much to be successful you had to be closeted.
LF: What sort of gay following did he have? And how did gays feel about him?
BC: He always had sophisticated [fans] which included a lot of gay people but didn't have a big gay following. He was so gay it turned off a lot of gay people. They were scared ... it brought out feelings about themselves that they weren't ready to face in those times.
LF: What were Allen and Minnelli like when together?
BC: I was with them the last time they were together, which was up in her apartment, she cooked dinner for us. That's a picture. You could see that at one point in their lives they had shared a lot, they had a great time together. When their eyes met the electricity and feeling, it was incredible to see. I'm not trying to paint a pretty picture—that's how it was.
LF: Can you share an anecdote that epitomized Allen's sense of humor?
BC: One of the funniest memories I have was that dinner at Liza's. It was Peter, Liza, Billy Stritch, Ellen Greene and her husband and Desi Arnaz, Jr. and his wife. It was quite a group, especially considering Desi was Liza's boyfriend right after she and Peter split. So there's Liza cooking and Billy came in and said to Peter, 'after dinner would you play 'I'd Rather Be Falling In Love?'' Peter had adema—it's caused by AIDS and he had KS and one of the tumors made his arm swell up to about four or five times its regular size. So of course he couldn't play the piano and held out his arm and goes 'oh Billy, I just couldn't play.' So we had dinner, everyone retired to the livingroom and Billy sat down at the piano and lo and behold hammered out Peter's song! And at the end, Billy hit a bad note on the piano, there was a little bit of a pause, and Peter goes 'well, that F-sharp is there but I chose not to play it.'
