Chapter One

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.