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. . . .