Regarding "Party," Brandy said, "It's very low-budget, but Eric Roberts is fabulous." Erstwhile male stripper (in a TV movie) Gregory Harrison, who plays the ex-- lover who leaves Roberts when he finds out that his beau is HIV-positive, is "mostly fine, too." "Party" is a small film shot in L.A. in less than a month that boasts an agreeably eclectic cast that gathers together, among others, Olivia Newton-John, Roddy McDowall, Marlee Matlin, George Segal, Margaret Cho, Bronson Pinchot and, for good measure, Olympic diver Greg Louganis. Regarding these actors, Judell says they're not so bad, "but pale by comparison to the young things in Squall."

The film had Jeff Millar at the Houston Chronicle "really going." Said he, "Its first 105 minutes had me actively disliking the film, flat-out rolling my eyes. Its last 15 minutes had me right where the filmmakers wanted me, which was in tears. Although its red satin ribbon is just as shiny, it's not an official Hollywood AIDS movie like Philadelphia. Rather, it's a small film - each of its participants worked for minimum scale, and billing is alphabetical."

The film has Roberts' character planning to end it all with sleeping pills, but the first step is preparing a party. He invites loads of people, family and friends and his ex-lover, and tells them up-front what he's going to do at the end of the party. He jokes, gives away his possessions, counsels his gay teen-age nephew, forgives his long-absent father, then slips away with his ex-lover, who is there for him at the end. The film ends up having it both ways - making us feel doubly sorry for Roberts' character that he's going to die so horribly, then having him die while he still looks good.

Of course, pretty-death has sent people out of theaters happily sniffling since forever. Millar says, "The difference between this film and one that really engages AIDS (Longtime Companion, for instance) is the difference between attending an AIDS benefit at a fancy hotel and actually holding a bedpan for a patient at an AIDS hospice. One would have to be a stone not to be moved by the death of a guy not yet 40 - happy and productive and a fighter, and surrounded by those who love him, all of them weeping. So you'll cry. I did. But 15 minutes after it was over, the sadness was gone. As tragedy, It's My Party is Chinese food: It's filling for a time, but it doesn't stay with you."

People praised Roberts, saying he "gives a strong, angry performance laced with bitchy, occasionally abusive sarcasm. It's My Party is similarly unflinching and filled with gallows humor. When, late in the evening, Roberts puts Dolly Parton's 'I Will Always Love You' on the stereo, the tearful guests plead with him to take it off. He responds by playing it over. It'll be a long time before I can hear that song and not think of this movie."

The Bay Area Reporter agreed, saying the film was "a heartfelt three-hankier in which Roberts and Harrison give potentially career-saving performances."

Roberts himself said, "If AIDS can cross over, I certainly hope this movie can. I hope my redneck buddies back home in Georgia will see it, because if they do, they'll cry, and if they cry, they'll remember."

What we remember most is that Eric, brother of megastar Julia, was once one of the most promising hunks on the Hollywood scene. What went wrong? Kathryn Harris, writing for De to u r, remembers, "In Manhattan, armed with Shakespeare's iambic pentameter in his back pocket, and O'Neill's expressionism in his front, Roberts made waves in off-off-Broadway theater before settling in on the television soap 'Another World.' Then, at 21, his seductive physique and swarthy good looks drew attention in 'King of the Gypsies,' a film remembered today primarily for Paramount's ambitious and expensive starmaking ad campaign. Bare-chested and amply muscled, with right hand extended and clutching gold chains, he stared down from thousands of one-sheets across America, accompanied by the ominous tag-line, 'It's ALMOST his time.' Although the film was a disappointment his performance earned a Golden Globe nomination. Since then, he has appeared in more than 30 movies, and for a while, it was his time. Critics exhausted every superlative in praise of his performance in 'Star 80' (featuring a great long shot of Eric's naked butt), notices were similarly strong for The Pope of Greenwich Village, and he received an Oscar nomination for Runaway Train. In his Broadway debut, relieving John Malkovich in Lanford Wilson's Burn This, he took home a Theater World award. But despite the accolades, Robert's career has been one hell of a bumpy ride, with more setbacks and restarts than his publicists would probably care to mention. He has sunk several times into such obscurity that people started to remember him more for his blood ties to his sister Julia, or for the bad-boy image which hung on him throughout the '80s like an unbecoming suit, than for his work."

When he was very young he came under the wing of a man (whom Roberts declines to identify) with an excellent eye for discovering new talent (he found Sissy Spacek in the Village, playing guitar under the name of Rainbow; he discovered John Heard, Peter Weller, the list goes on). He stayed with the man for 12 years and, Roberts says, "he fed into every artist's weakness: 'You be the artist, no matter what that entails, and I'll pick up the pieces.' And what that gives you, especially as a very young guy, is free range to not act necessarily well. I burned a lot of bridges, got a lot of bad habits." He does not wish to discuss what bad habits those were.

Roberts says, "What happened is from '78 to '86 I was completely proud of my movie resume, but it didn't seem like it mattered to anybody in the industry. So I cashed in and said, forget this quality shit, I'll go for quantity. I made 30 movies from then till now and became a wealthy B-movie star. I kept trying to get back to quality, but with Final Analysis, everybody took it as 'Eric, you're playing another crazy person' - it didn't matter about my nuances. And then comes 'Party' and it's a quality piece. It pulled me back around about why I do what I do. I plan to stick with this program now."

Roberts said he was offered "no money" and no time to prepare for the movie - someone else had backed out of it but his wife Eliza convinced him to seize the project because of the script and the people involved, especially the noted gay writer/director Randal Kleiser (famous for those loving shots of Christopher Atkins in Blue Lagoon.) Eric says, "In fact, the most constant direction I got from Randal was, 'Eric, not so fruity."' (Viewers will note Kleiser clearly gave the opposite advice to Bronson Pinchot.) Randal based his script on his reallife experience at losing his own longtime companion to The Plague.

For his role, Roberts didn't have to search too far for an intimate acquaintance with the suicide urge. After a serious car accident in '81, he ended up in a coma for three days. "I'd hit the left side of my head so hard," he explained, "that the right side of my body stopped functioning. I was always very athletic and had a great memory, but after the accident I had no memory or hand-eye coordination. I gave myself a certain amount of time to get a certain amount of well or I was going to off myself. Because it's a frightening thing to be brushing your teeth, put your toothbrush down, rinse your mouth out, and not know where your toothbrush is. What drove me on my recovery was my anger about not being able to do things. I was 25 and was just getting over that angry-youngman stage and it reignited it for quite a while.''

He claims there was a whole decade in which he lived oblivious to his fame. "It was my own fault," he says now. "I kept myself unaware." But, he says, "The films were out for all of five minutes. They weren't blockbusters. I only did what I consider to be quality work for about my first eight or ten films. I would do them as a labor of love. And then as I approached my thirties, it wasn't as much fun as it had been, because of those times you have to wait in between, and if its not a hit, it doesn't matter anyway. It doesn't matter how good you are if you're not in a hit." But, thanks to home video, he managed to keep his name before the public. "I was also painfully shy," he claims. "It wasn't up until about 1988 that I started to communicate with people properly. I was a very late bloomer in that aspect of myself, partly because I had a childhood stutter."

"Nowadays," Harris notes, "his controversial behavior seems to have been redirected in the name of diplomacy, a timely tactic in a business rife with volatile and fragile egos." "Yeah, you have to be well-behaved, " Roberts confirms. "You have to pick your battles and decide what you want to go out on a limb for, or they think you're a big, difficult prick. I used to fight over everything. I was so young. I was passionate about everything. My tolerance is enormous now."

Obviously. Take a look at Eric in It's My Party, especially the loving, lingering kiss of Harrison. Says Harrison about the sequence: "I was long past any awkward feeling about kissing or caressing Eric. I really felt a deep love and could hardly wait for that scene. After mooning over Eric, I had all these feelings that had been building up." It had been rumored that Eric insisted on doing the kiss in just one take, but now says, "We did it many times, as I recall." Further, he says, "Gregory's a great kisser. And I will always call Gregory Harrison my boyfriend."

Eric's wife was the one who insisted he do the role: "Everybody but my wife told me not to do it: 'It's about a homosexual who's dying of AIDS.' But to me, yeah, it was about a guy who was homosexual, and he was dying, but (sighing) God! - it was about a love affair gone south, it was about a family that was dysfunctional, and it was about a man who was really special - an artist who was very talented, very bright. It was a great role and a great script. That's all I needed.

"This is the first time I had to sleep with a man to get the part. Actually, the only time it ever occurred to me was the day that Greg and I had to kiss. I realized that most of the people involved with this film were homosexual and all there on the set with us. And there's me and Greg, kissing.

"After Gregory was cast, I was at home learning my lines, understanding the background of certain scenes. I felt I had to decide the characters' sexual orientation with each other. Greg is a very Ivy League guy in a sport coat. If you took all the bones out of his body, he still wouldn't look relaxed or feminine - ever. So I decided without discussing it with anybody that he was the pitcher and I was the catcher."

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Excerpted from The Best of the Superstars 1997: The Year in Sex, Edited by John Patrick, one of a series from STARbooks Press, a foremost publisher of high quality erotic tales. Information about STARbooks offerings can be found at your local book store or by mail from STARbooks Press, P.O. box 2737-E, Sarasota, Florida 34230.

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