We were even more outraged than before. Holding forty-five people at the airport for a hotel bill! The accountant refused to make a check or produce a credit card. He said he’d rather go to jail than pay them any money. We figured they want a couple of thousand dollars for nothing. When the guards showed us the bill it turned out they only wanted $841! It just wasn’t worth the aggravation. We took the money out of our own pockets and paid them.
By the time we got on the AC-II it was noon, and we had been up for six hours trying to get packed and leave. We were exhausted and furious. I can’t begin to tell you how much of an ugly hassle it was to be held at the airport without a passport — how frightening is was. When AC-II started to taxi down the runway Libert got on the PA to do the ball scores, and you never heard so many dirty words in your life. Whew! Was that a filthy ball score. All the venom we wanted to release at the authorities at the airport came exploding out. We screamed! We all yelled dirty words at the top of our lungs as the plane whoosed us out of there. We laughed all the way to London, and it didn’t stop there.
While we were on the plane we had one of the dancers dress in the cyclops costume. When we arrived at Heathrow this nine-foot creature stepped off the plane with us. The people in immigration loved it. The customs agents played the whole thing like it wasn’t happening. The cyclops used an Alice Cooper backstage pass as his passport and customs agents called him Mr. Clops and welcomed him to the country in the name of the Queen.
By the time I got on the air to do the Russell Hardy show I was as hot as a pistol. It was the best TV show I ever did. Hardy and I loved each other from the start. I asked Hardy to marry me and he looked shocked. “Oh, I heard about you on weekends,” I told him.
By the time we got to the Savoy and checked in again my head was spinning. I stretched out on the bed and put on the television set and there was my picture on the screen. As the sound came up I heard the announcer saying that a hotel owner in Munich had called a press conference to announce that I had stolen towels and ashtrays from his hotel. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A hotel owner who calls a press conference? What was this, Hollywood or something? And why would I steal ashtrays? What am I going to do with them? Put them in my limousine? In my jet? I don’t even smoke!
Then the phone calls started coming in from New York:
“I heard you guys got busted for stealing shower curtains!”
“Hey, you guys are up to your old tricks, huh? Wrecked a German hotel, did you?”
Well, that really brought me down. Grumble, grumble and dark clouds. A depressed Alice Cooper is no fun to be around. I felt so awful. I felt even worse when I heard that the story had been picked up by all the wire services and that the next day it was bound to the network news in the States. My manager and I decided not to go back to Germany again for the rest of the tour. I didn’t want them to play with my head anymore, so we cancelled the last two German dates. That wasn’t any solace, though. I had already been put in the middle of another international incident.
I was so down that I was shining my shoes with my chin. I lay in bed like a dead fish. All Frankie would do is taunt me, “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” He kept walking in and out of my bedroom every two minutes. “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” At one point he stopped in front of the bedroom mirror and looked at himself. I could tell he was thinking about going bold, and just as he was about to let out another “ha-ha!” I said, “Frankie! You’re going bold!”
I don’t know what it was, but somebody might have just as well hit my funnybone with a sledge hammer. It started me laughing. In five minutes we were both doubled up on the floor, holding our stomachs and roaring. What a crazy day.
Sellers called in the middle of this and suggested that we all go out for dinner. By the time Sellers showed up we were feeling good and rosy, so rosy that Frankie fell into a garbage can on the way to the car.
We went to the St. Lorenzo restaurant where we met up with Valerie Perrine, a new pal of mine, and my old pal, Richard Chamberlain. Midway through dinner Sellers dropped his napkin and instantly became Clouseau. He bent over to pick it up off the floor and put his face into Richard’s plate of spaghetti and came up dripping white clam sauce. Then he mistakenly used Valerie’s skirt instead of a napkin to wipe his face.
Before we finished dinner they brought another birthday cake out of the kitchen and we automatically started singing “Happy Birthday Butchie.” The waiter brought it to our table and Frankie blew out the candles, then summerily tossed it at me and Sellers. But the cake didn’t say “Happy Birthday Butchie,” it said, “Happy Birthday Elaine” and it belonged to a lady celebrating her sixty-fifth birthday at the next table. Was she pissed! We wound up buying her and everybody else in the restaurant a birthday cake and got to sing “Happy Birthday Butchie” fourteen times.
Valerie Perrine fell in love with Frankie. She couldn’t get over his blue eyes and kept pulling on his beard saying, “Frankie, tell me a bedtime story.” The table quieted down and Frankie began: “Once upon a time there were three bears and they were all horny. The poppa bear said, ‘Let’s go get us some hookers…”
By the end of the story the bears had committed incest, and sodomy with Little Red Riding Hood, and baby bear turned out to be gay. Valerie’s eyes widened like pie plates and Sellers was choking on his food.
When we all said goodbye that night, Sellers told me he could always tell Alice Cooper’s limousine from the laughter inside.
That’s a nice compliment, but it wasn’t always like that.
We weren’t always on top. We didn’t always laugh.
This is how it all started….
CHAPTER 2
I believe one day they’ll find a chemical substance in people who are entertainers, a chemical substance that drives them to entertain, to be different, to be more. That chemical makes me play the game. It makes me want to be the most individual person in the world. If I even start to become close to what everyone else accepts as normal, I have to change it.
You see, the most important thing in the world is to be selfish about yourself, about where you are in life and who you are. It makes for healthy competition. In order to become the ultimate individual in this society you have to care a lot about yourself. Professionally, I am first is my credo. This is my life, and I must come out on top, getting the things I want, when I want them. On a personal level I m exactly the opposite. A sure touch. An easy sell. They have to watch me so I don’t give my shirt away on the street. I don’t know how to say no to anybody about anything. I worry about being selfish on a professional level because I don’t like to hurt people, but that’s a responsibility you take on if you ant to keep the public’s eye.
Who am I? I’m a villain. An anti-hero. If I was a kid, Alice Cooper would be my hero. I always liked villains. I adored Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. I always wanted Godzilla to completely wipe out all those Japanese in Tokyo. I always rooted for the wolfman to gobble up the girls who roamed misty parks in London. For me the villain was the hero, the underdog. I understood the villain. I understood the problems the Boston Strangler faced. Was W. C. Fields a good guy? He was a philanderer, and he hated little kids!
The most important thing about my whole life is to be the most different. I always had to do the opposite of what was expected. I refuse to be a blur that passes through everyone’s life. I refuse to be anonymous. The world must know I’m here. Maybe that’s megalomania, but I fear mediocrity more than death, and it’s my fear of mediocrity that made me do things differently than anything anyone ever expected.