Allee up! Long before she cowrote the stage musical of The Color Purple, Allee Willis was writing hit songs and making outrageous art. Meet the wildest artist of them all.

In a trippy house on a side street in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley lives the most wildly creative woman in America: songwriter, painter, kinetic sculptor, and larger-than-life personality Allee Willis. Don't bother knocking, though, because she's away right now, in New York City, helping to put the finishing touches on the musical stage version of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel The Color Purple, scheduled to open December 1 on Broadway.

To understand how Willis got here, you have to open your mind to a degree of inventiveness that's frankly a little scary. As she sits in her breakfast nook one afternoon before she headed to New York, the evidence of her artistic restlessness is all around. Her house-a 1937 structure once owned by MGM and used for studio parties--is an eye-popping museum of high kitsch and low culture.

"I live in my collection," she understates.

Willis herself is just as exuberantly off-kilter. Her good friends Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner so loved her trademark haircut--shoulder-length on one side, clipped on the other--that they gave it to a character named Kate in their hit play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. (Willis attended the show unaware of the homage: "When Kate walked out, I almost fucking died," she remembers.)

Willis is best known as a songwriter, having cowritten hits for the Pointer Sisters ('Re Neutron Dance"), Patti LaBelle ("Stir It Up"), Earth, Wind, and Fire ("September," "Boogie Wonderland"), and Pet Shop Boys ("What Have I Done to Deserve This?"), among others. Oh, and the theme from Friends--one of the best-selling TV themes ever.

But she was never just a songwriter. "At the height of my musical success I was selling about 10 million records a year, but I knew that I couldn't keep it up, 'cause I felt I was writing the same song over and over," says Willis. "No one understood why I was painting, why I was doing sets, why I got interested in technology. They viewed it as a threat to the music, that I wouldn't turn out enough songs."

All through the songwriting years, Willis was seeing music as just one part of a whole creative experience. She had visions of sculptures "dancing" to her songs, found mechanically minded collaborators, and started building motorized art pieces that grooved to her hits. At one point in our interview, Willis plays a video of soul man James Brown at her home, watching the motorized sculpture she built for "The Neutron Dance." What she's done is hilariously right. The piece consists of black dancers in perfect sync with the music. White onlookers are so rigid they're catapulted up into the sky, where they just ... spin.

Willis's parties were another kind of art. Starting in the '80s, Willis engineered legendary gatherings at the MGM house.

"It was the only place where I could do everything I wanted to do in one space," she says. "Here was the set; I would score them like a film; I would emcee them; I would plan games and activities. And everything was handmade, from invitations to props." The hostess was clear that these celebrity-studded gatherings were performance art, and she taped them all.

During the '90s Willis and her partner, animation producer Prudence Fenton, became entranced with the Internet. They spent years working on the interactive concept Willisville, inspired by the idea that the actions required to navigate a site could be enfolded in a narrative--an inspiration most video games now mimic. A decade ago nobody was listening, but what Willis learned has all gone into her bodacious Web site AlleeWillis.com (which she's still adding to). She has since consulted on characters and virtual worlds for Intel, Microsoft, Disney, and others.

Then there's "Bubbles the Artist," an alter ego specializing in colorfully primitive paintings. "I thought, How could I do art without having to be plagued as Allee the Artist was plagued by 'Are people gonna like it?' and all this stuff that really mucks you up? I thought, If I was a bad artist, I wouldn't think about it."

From the first auction, Bubbles was a hit. Jane Wagner even commissioned a full set of Ernestine ceramic dinnerware as a Christmas gift for Lily Tomlin. "You get to the bottom of the soup bowls and Ernestine's giving you the finger," Willis says. There's also a thriving Afro line.

Indeed, Willis's zest for all things African-American made her a natural for The Color Purple. Beating out 50 competitors for the songwriting gig, Willis is tackling the material with two friends and frequent collaborators: singer-songwriter Brenda Russell (whose "Get Here" was a 1991 hit for Tears for Fears discovery Oleta Adams) and songwriter-producer Stephen Bray (whose hits for Madonna include "Into the Groove" and "Express Yourself"). Among those vying for the job, "we were the unfamous ones," Willis says.

The play's tryout run took place in Atlanta this past summer. "It sold out every night," Willis says. "What was unbelievable was the mix in the audience--half black, half white; extremely rich society down to homeless people. Pimps ... Jimmy Carter."

And did the songwriters water down the lesbian love story between Celie and Shug, as Steven Spielberg did in the film? In answer, Willis moves to her home recording studio and plays a moving woman-to-woman love duet called "What About Love."

"In Atlanta we did special matinees for high school students," she says. "The kiss between Shug and Celie happens at the end of act 1, and then the big song. And each one of those audiences, they would kiss, and you'd hear, Ewww. But by the end of the love song, they would be cheering and screaming. It totally turned around. I hope anybody who sees it understands it's real love."

Willis makes clear that she's also speaking about her own happy 13-year partnership: "If you're lucky enough to find someone to help you cherish life, then that, to me, is what love is about."