I shot at Clouseau. He slumped behind one of the Savoy’s plump sofas and I knew my dart had found its mark. I heard him whining quietly, “My tush… my tush… He’s got me in the tush… damn that Cooper…. I kneeled for a better view and watched groveling under the furniture as he sank his teeth into the barrel of his dart gun in frustration. He pressed his body tightly to the floor for cover and began to creep toward me.
I lobbed a Budweiser can into the air, and it strategically landed two feet behind him. Clouseau flipped over onto his back, firing at the Bud twice, giving me enough cover to make a dash from behind the television set. When Clouseau saw me steadily advancing he fled on his hands and knees toward the bedroom.
“Cooper, you swine!” he growled, but before he managed to pass the room service cart I hit him again, and again, and again, using only my view in the Regency mirror behind the bar as my aim. Clouseau fell flat on his belly, this time a rubber-tipped dart lodged firmly in the middle of his forehead. He panted as he lay on the carpeting. His eyes narrowed as they focused on a piece of lint. A maniacal smile came to his face. He held the lint up to the light and squinted at me.
“A clue! I have found a clue, Cooper! You are finished! I shall have you thrown in a dank, dark cell in Norway filled with rotting whitefish! Then I, Inspector Clouseau, shall take over forever as Alice Cooper! Then I shall have a life of wine, groupies and song!”
“Peter! Alice!” Frank Scinlaro shouted in his babysitter voice. “Hey, you two nuts, you through playing games yet? I’m starving. Let’s go out to dinner before we fall on our faces.”
Sellers looked up at Frankie, all 215 pounds of smiling, bearded, New Jersey Santa Claus, sidekick and traveling companion. Sellers stared hard into Frankie’s twinkling blue eyes. Then he belched.
During dinner Peter insisted he wanted to change places with me on part of my tour. This was September of 1975 and I was on the eve of the European leg of a worldwide “Welcome To My Nightmare” tour. I had been on the road for seven months at that point in the United States alone, zigzagging relentlessly across the country with a crew of forty-fve people, including dancers, carpenters, electricians, roadies, publicists accountants and as sorted feminine pulchritude. At that point I would have switched with Sellers for a show, but only if I could play Inspector Clouseau in a movie.
Later that night after dinner I lay in bed, my eyes closed, a grin on my face, a bulging blonde in my arms, and I tried to fathom all the things that had happened to me in the past year. In the last month. In that day alone. I could hardly believe any of it was real. Yet it never stops. My life seems to get more fantastic all the time. One day is zanier than the next. Take the European “Nightmare ‘ tour for instance.
The very next morning I was up early for a press junket. A press junket is one of the most grueling — and sometimes boring — aspects of touring. I had to appear in five cities in one day all over England, which included eight individual interviews and four press conferences. That means fielding at least five hundred questions for starters. So at the first light of morning I packed an overnight bag, and we drove out to the airport, where I expected to find a baby Lear Jet. Instead there was a shaky Piper Cub waiting for me that looked like somebody had just made it out of a hobby kit. The wings weren’t even on straight. I couldn’t believe the plane would make it to all those cities in one day. Chances were it would turn into a pumpkin by nightfall. We spent so much time climbing and descending, going up and down, avoiding turbulence, bumping and dropping that I still get queasy at the sight of an elevator.
I brought my guns and darts along with me on the plane for entertainment. Before we left for Europe Frankie and I went to a toy store and brought six hundred darts and thirty-five guns to take along with us. When you’re on the road day after day for months, little toys like that help break up the monotony. Whenever the plane landed for an interview, I’d come out shooting. Five or six journalists would be waiting at the airport, and the first thing I did was bob them on the belly with a rubber-tipped dart. Talk about ice-breakers! All the staid, serious English journalists melted. Then they were given their own gun and allowed to shoot back. You had to see these guys in suits, crawling around the floor of the airport lounges like Hopalong Cassidy trying to get a good shot at me. It was so much more interesting to shoot it out than talk it out.
At the third stop and tenth gun fight we picked up a photographer who stayed with us for the rest of the day. In between snapshots and gun shots the photographer managed to slug down a few real shots. By nightfall and the last city he was a smashed shutterbug. I couldn’t figure out how he could focus. All day long he had been insisting I put on an English business suit and bowler hat so he could take a photo of me in it. I told him that was the corniest idea I had heard since last year, when a photographer asked me to do the same thing — and I did it.
So this time I said, “No thanks. Let’s try something else, something different.” But he kept insisting, and the drunker he got the nastier he got. Just as we were saying goodbye to him on the airport runway, he stuck a half chewed cigar in my mouth and asked for a last picture. Then he turned to one of the sweet little English girls who does my publicity and said, “Take off your blouse so I can get a shot of your tits with Alice Cooper.” She thought he was kidding. She gave him a wan smile and looked anxiously at me from under her blond bangs. The photographer grabbed her by the shoulders and ripped open her blouse. For a split second we were all so startled nobody could move. I took the cigar he gave me and shoved it into his open mouth. He bent over and sputtering and spitting pieces of tobacco, and I kicked him so hard in the behind he fell face first in the muddy runway.
Frankie was shocked! Nobody had ever seen me lift a pinky before! Frankie put his arm around me and said, “If I had to do that, champ, I would have murdered the guy.”
Our day was scheduled to end in Glasgow, Scotland, where the following morning I was supposed to represent the United States in the Glen Eagles Golf Tournament. I was so exhausted by the time we arrived at the Glen Eagles Country Club I didn’t even eat dinner, and when I woke the next morning it was raining and cold. I hadn’t even started touring yet and already I was beginning to fell like an opened can of dog food. I was paired with Tom Weiskopf for that morning’s game and I was really heartbroken when I had to cancel out. Golf is my passion. I think about playing golf all the time. That’s what Alice Cooper fantasizes about — not killing chickens. And representing the United States in a tournament like Glen Eagles was a great honor — more fun than getting a gold record, let me tell you. But I was too dragged out to make eighteen holes in the rain and sent my regrets. I went to meet Weiskopf at the eighteenth hole when it was over and chatted with David Foster and Christopher Lee for a while.
Then we rushed off to meet the AC-II, an F-27 Electra jet that the “Nightmare” touring party traveled on throughout the world. The AC-II was waiting for me in London and we took off immediately for Stockholm where my first show of the tour was scheduled for that night. Frankie was so excited that everything he did went wrong all day. He dropped ice on the floor and then slipped on it. He leaned on a chair, and it splintered under him. We were rushing to get to the concert and he used my shaving cream as his under-arm deodorant. He was so hassled he didn’t even laugh at first. Not until he rushed towards his bedroom with gobs of shaving cream under his arm and stepped barefoot into a used chef’s salad on the room service tray.
We performed at Tivoli Park that night and gave a great performance, as usual. Kids all over the world loved the “Nightmare” show, and it was a pleasure to do it for them. The entire cast and crew were tremendously hardworking people. Successfully transporting a Broadway rock show on the road with you all over the world is a small show business miracle all in itself. We were in rehearsals for four months in Los Angeles before we ever set foot on a stage and the final product shows the results.
It wasn’t even hard for me to get into the Alice attitude. It used to be grating, a difficult transformation, but now I just flip myself onto Automatic Pilot and out comes Alice, just like a Marvel comic book character. I choose nightmares as a concept because it was a universal theme — kids everywhere had bad dreams. Some people wake up screaming, Alice Cooper spends his nights that way. The show begins with Alice dressed in torn red leotards and black suspenders, asleep in a Gothic four-poster bed that rolls out towards the audience in foamy white clouds. For the next seventy minutes I lead the audience through a nocturnal world of bad dreams and good music. I battle life-sized black widow spiders who sting me on a twenty-foot web that’s pneumatically spun across the front of the stage. We put the Rockettes to shame with a chorus line of skeletons. I also do a ballet, and get attacked by nine-foot cyclops who rises from my toy chest and drags me around the stage until I do him in. The climax of the show — and you have to see it to believe it — begins with a movie of me in a misty cemetary. I wander among the tombstones, never noticing the monsters from the stage show lurk closely behind me on the screen. I came upon a huge neon tombstone with a frightening inscription, It says “Alice Cooper 1948-1975.” I smash at the neon and it splatters to pieces. I smash at it in slow motion, again and again. The monsters grab me and shove me kicking and screaming into a coffin where they nail on the lid and I burst out, out of the movie, off of the screen and onto the stage. I actually pop out of the film — an unbelievable effect — and all the nightmarish creatures follow me out onto the stage where we do a rock and roll Busby Berkeley dance number, jumping back and forth between the film and real life.
We brought the house down, and the next morning at the AC-II we learned that we broke the house record set by Paul McCartney; 18,000 kids!
Every plane flight we also get to hear the ball scores. Ball scores have nothing to do with sports, although there’s quite a lot of athletics involved. Dave Libert reads them over the PA at the start of each flight in his own inimitable way. Libert’s been the road manager for the Alice cooper organization for hundreds of years now, and touring wouldn’t be the same without him in any way, shape or form.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen and whoever else is up here with us,” Libert said, “fasten your seat belts and settle down for today’s ball scores!”
A cheer went up in the plane. People snapped Budweisers open. I raised my poker bet.
“We have a pervert of the year award to give away today. This goes to Easy Arnie. Easy Arnie managed to get a b.j. from a sixty-four-year-old chamdermaid ten minutes before he checked out of his hotel room. Take a bow, Arnie! What an animal, folks!
“And now for the ball scores. Last night there were 4 three-ways, 3 five-ways, 6 one-on-ones, and 2 one-ways with poor response. Once again, Jerry dated and fell in love with his own right hand last night.
“Quiet down in the peanut gallery, all you rock and rollers. I have a serious complaint here. Robin has been looking for her roommate for five days now. If Cheryl is anywhere on this tour, she hasn’t slept in her bed once. So if anybody of this birdy knows where she is, please report it to the nearest stewardess…”
It went on like that for twenty minutes every plane trip. There was nothing like the ball scores to start off a flight and put a smile on your face. Smiling is the key to touring. Smiling gets you along. We invaded the rest of Europe with a smile: Gothenburg (good wine there), Copenhagen (boring TV, beautiful women), Bremen (I opened the draps in my hotel in the morning, stark naked, and found myself five feet away from a factory where forty-five ladies where stitching at machines. They all waved), Boblingen, Ludwigshafeb, and then Vienna.
Vienna was interesting. First of all it was a fortuitous flight there; I won $600 at poker. Then, as I was leaving my hotel to go to the show, I met a guy who’s probably my biggest fan in the world [Our own Renfield by any chances? :-) ] I was on my way into the back of a white Mercedes limousine when an incredibly pathetic character stepped out of the shadows. He was hunchback, dressed in rags [I was right!]. His face was gray and grimy and I had no idea if he was young or old. He held up a photo album for me to see. I took it from him and opened it. It was filled with articles and photographs about Alice Cooper collected from all over the world and must have weighed five pounds.
“This is terrific,” I told him. “Thank you.”
He looked at me with great admiration and awe, but he was so terrified of meeting me he couldn’t even smile. I tried to talk to him but soon realized that the poor man was deaf and dumb, to boot. I swear I would have hugged him if I could have gotten my arm around him. I said, “C’mon, you’re with us,” and scooted him into the limousine.
I don’t think anybody could have had a better time than he did. He was at my side for the rest of the night and we even took him up on stage and let him watch the show from up there. He pumped my hand up and down when it was over and I stuck some marks into his pocket. Then he disappeared into the crowds.
Frankie and I rushed towards the rear door of the stage to leave the auditorium before the crush of people started outside, but it was already too late. There were at least five hundred kids waiting for me, standing in a clump around the limousine. We had to get out of the arena and into the car before the rest of the auditorium was let out. There were 16,000 very boisterous and happy kids about to leave that place and it wasn’t a good move to have to walk through them to get to the car. A wrinkled Viennese man with a big frown on his face stood guard at the door. He refused to unlock it for us. He wanted to count keys or people or something. We tried to explain that the crew and business people were still inside and they would handle the details. But the old man couldn’t understand a word of English. Every second we tried to make him understand the crowd outside got bigger by the hundreds. Finally Libert lifted him off the ground and the man’s little legs sup around like he was on a bicycle. Frankie broke down the door with his hand, and we made a dash for the limousine.
The kids had ripped my clothing but the time I got through the car door and Frankie came hurtling in behind me like he was blown into the car out of a cannon. We tried to slam the door behind us, but the kids kept sticking their arms inside. The car started to accelerate and Frankie’s traveling bag got tugged on just as the door slammed, trapping it outside the car. Riding out of the parking lot every last thing inside the bounced out onto the ground and the kids running after the car picked them up for souvenirs, including Frankie’s camera and watch.
“Oh Alice,” he moaned, “you won’t believe what those kids got.”
“Don’t worry about it, Frank. We’ll replace everything.”
“No. You don’t understand. That bathroom picture of you is on the roll of film in the camera.”
I slumped back in the seat, visions of a new poster of me appearing all over Europe: Alice Cooper relieving himself at the Savoy in a surprise photo by Frankie Scinlaro.
That night at dinner we had another surprise birthday party for Butchie. Butchie was Frankie’s nickname when we wanted to bust his chops. Frankie hated being called Butchie, and we only did it to him in crowded restaurants. After dinner an enormous three-tiered Viennese chocolate cake was wheeled into the room, and we all started singing “Happy Birthday Butchie” to him. Frankie turned bright red when the rest of the restaurant joined in. Frankie almost got the cake on his lap — as planned — but he tipped it over on my lap before we could even finish singing. They don’t call Fast Frankie fast for nothing. Munich. Let me tell you about Munich. We were all crazy about the city. We never even make any money when we play there. It sometimes costs us money to play Munich, but we go just the same. We’ve all had great times in that city. We fell in love twice a night in Munich. I always thought that the whole reason we went to Europe was so we could have a party in Munich.
As long as we were going to play a city where we didn’t make any money, I figured we might as well do the show someplace different and interesting; the Circus Korona was the place. The Circus Korona is the home of European Circus, where Circus is still a great art. It’s the arena where only the best acts in the world are invited to play, and it seemed a terrific venue for Alice Cooper to play.
The night of the show I was leaving my hotel to get into my limousine and out from the shadows came a pathetic hunchback deaf and dumb man with a photo album of me. He was so cool. He played the whole scene all over again, as if he never saw me before. I said to him, “You don’t happen to have a brother in Vienna, do you?” We took him to the show with us again and to the party afterwards, too. It was so much fun to watch him a second time I hope he shows up in Chicago.
The show was terrific. The band played from a tiny little balcony a hundred feet above me and the Circus atmosphere really turned us on to giving an extraordinary performance. What the smell of sawdust won’t do to me! We even had a royal visitor come to see us. The Princess of Saxon turned up (whoever she is) with a lot of flag waving and fanfare and pomp and bowing. But I don’t think she enjoyed the show.
Later we had the party at Tiffany’s that we had all been waiting for. Tiffany’s is my favourite nightspot in Europe. It’s a fabulous restaurant and discotheque, and every girl in the place is prettier than the next. The food’s good, too. Fantasies about things like that never turn out to be as good as the reality, but we all had a ball at Tiffany’s. The party was everything we hoped it would be. We saw the very same girls we had dreamed about for the past three years, and it was like Shangri-La; they were still young and beautiful. Not a sagging tit in the bunch. We even got my hunchback friend a girl for the evening by telling everybody he was an important part of the show!
The next morning I woke up to the terrible news: I had to leave Munich immediately. We weren’t going to be able to spend another leisurely day and night in the city. I had been invited to appear on the Russell Hardy show, the British version of Johnny Carson, and it was important enough for me to fly to England for the taping. Without much groaning I packed my dart gun in my shoulder holster and we left for the airport to board the AC-II.
I was sitting in a private waiting room with the entire touring party, waiting for the authorities to finish a standard luggage search, when eight men in dull gray-green uniforms goose-stepped into the room. The second I saw those dull, gray-green uniforms and little gold eagles I knew I wasn’t going to like these guys. If I was in a Hollywood movie I would have dressed the bad guys just like that.
One of them marched right over to me and said, “Passport, please!”
“We’ve been through all that already,” I told him. “We’re just waiting for them to complete the luggage check.”
“Don’t ask questions. Just give us your passports.”
Another yelled, “Passport, please! Line up here!” We lined up and filed by their grey-green little eyes and turned over books. Some of them took guard at the exits and the rest left the room. We sat there, all of us, staring at the walls and wondering what was going on.
We knew it wasn’t a drug bust. There’s a house rule with us and that’s no drugs — booze only. (And plenty of it.) Libert went up to one of the guards and told him just that. He suggested that if it was because of drugs we were being held, they could tear the plane apart and not find as much as an aspirin. But the guards just stared straight ahead, as if Libert wasn’t even there.
An hour went by. Two. People started to crack from the tension. One of the crew members started calling the guards Nazis and insisted he be taken to the American Consulate. Libert was so frustrated he was running around like a chicken without a head.
After nearly three hours the other guards returned to the room and informed us we were being held because of non-payment of our hotel bill. I told them it was impossible, that I knew for a fact that bill was paid before we left the hotel that morning. “Not the whole bill,” they said. “You left a day before your reservations were up and you owe another day’s rent.”
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….