Chapter fourteen I can't begin to explain how badly I feel when an album doesn't sell or tickets to see one of my concerts don't sell. It has nothing to do with money at this point - it's a matter of rejection, of being jilted. I know it's not a logical way to feel, but then again I'm not exactly living in a logical world. Take Wembley Pool Auditorium for instance. There was no apparent reason that we shouldn't have sold out Wembley Pool Auditorium. We just couldn't figure it out. We hadn't played a London date in six months and "School's Out" was the number-one single in Great Britain that June. Wembley Pool only held 8,000 people, and we had sold less than half three days before the concert. Shep and I went to Warner Brothers' London headquarters to try and figure out what was wrong at Wembley with Derek Taylor. Derek was in charge of special projects for Warner Brothers and had long been a rock and roll legend for his publicity work with the Beatles. He and Alice Cooper were great lovers from the start. He delighted in a project he could really sink his teeth into, and the urgency of the concert being only three days away made selling 4,000 tickets all the more exciting for him. Derek got busy on the phones. He called the Warner Brothers film division and had them blow up a photograph of me, dressed only in my favorite boa wrapper around my crotch, to a nine-by-twenty-foot billboard. Then he rented a twenty-two-foot semitractor and had the poster mounted on the side of the truck - that same aftemoon. They sent the truck out into the streets past Buckingham Palace and Parliament, but except for a few complaints from policemen, nothing happened. Derek alerted all the media that it was out there, but not one lousy photographer showed up. We just couldn't understand how London could ignore a twenty-foot naked photograph of me parked in front of Buckingham Palace. We all got into a Bentley limousine and drove to Piccadilly Circus, where the truck was circling. There was a horde of American tourists gawking at it on the street. I waited in the back of the car while Shep and Derek went out to have a few words with the driver. By the time they got back across the street a terrible thing happened. The truck broke down right across the middle of the intersection at the beginning of the afternoon rush hour. A lot of people got out of their cars and yelled at the poor driver in the truck, who shrugged and waved his arrns. In a few minutes the police came and a committee of people crowded around the truck trying to get it going. Derek got on the car phone and had his assistant Mandi Newall re-call all the TV and radio stations to tell them to get their asses to Piccadilly Circus. But there was no rush. The truck was still there two hours later causing the worst traffic jam London had seen since the blitz. The picture of the stalled truck and billboard appeared in almost every paper the next day and Wembley Pool Auditorium sold out by the following evening. Truly Cooperesque. But the party at Chessington Zoo was scheduled for the afternoon of the concert. If we had brought Hollywood back to LA at the Ambassador Hotel this time we were bringing LA to London. Chessington Zoo was a small park with a circus tent, not a typical place for a party. No less typical, though, than the fact we were serving only alcohol. I can't imagine how we forgot to order any food. Alcohol in the afternoon is usually never served at press parties, especially in England where journalists get ripped when there's any free booze around. I can't say we blamed them. I didn't get to the party until an hour after it started, and the moment I got out of my limo I knew I was going to have fun. People were drunkenly stumbling around the zoo talking to animals in their cages. Mike Bruce was caught balling an English girl behind the baboon cage. A lady reporter from the Manchester Guardian was complaining to Shep that Neal Smith kept goosing her. There was one point when I looked around at the guests and everybody was holding a bottle of champagne in each hand. It was the most surrealistic thing. People probably thought they were having a dream. One lady with a flowered hat and little black handbag climbed into the bear cage and cuddled next to the bear for half an hour before she was discovered. She probably didn't know she was there anyway. Her husband was very similar to the bear. (They get along famously and have three cubs and a daughter.) At an Alice Cooper party everybody has the license to go off the deep end for a while. Picture three hundred Keith Moons and you've got the Chessington Zoo party. There was a juggler and fire-eater for entertainment in the tent, and then Dave Libert went to the center of the ring and announced an Alice Cooper special, the amazing "Sheila the Squealer," a Soho stripper. Sheila's slow peel got the crowd to their feet, if somewhat crookedly, and when she finally exposed her boobs, which were tattooed Alice Cooper the audience started lobbing beer cans in the air and screaming. Sheila looked like she was having the time of her life until she got company. Up in the stands the spirit of exhibitionism was also moving an American girl named Stacia. Everybody in rock and roll knew about Stacia and her 48-inch tits. That's 96 inches of bust. When Stacia unstrapped her boobs and danced through the crowds to the floor she stole the spotlight from Sheila. Sheila started slapping at Stacia's tits and yelling, "Get out of here! Put your clothes back on! This is my gig!" Up in the stands a man dropped his pants and sprinkled all over the bleachers as people scattered to avoid the golden stream. Then he rushed down into the ring shaking his pecker at Stacia and Sheila, and chased them around the park. Then lots of people began to take off their clothes and bottles and beer cans were flying like rain. By the time the London police arrived the place looked like a bomb had blown off everybody's clothing. Total damages: five people arrested for indeceht exposure. We were the only ones with our clothes on - and we thought we were crazy. We looked like prudes! The following November we returned to Europe for another month-long blitz hot on the tail of another giant single, "Elected," which had been released in September in the United States and turned gold there only a month after. The Europeans really went all out for us our second time around. They couldn't have greeted us more warmly at Glasgow, where three hundred kids ran over the police barricades at the airport and tipped our limousines over. The average teenager in Glasgow actually drinks more than we do (see Guinness Book of Records, page 37.) I wanted to perform wearing only two scarves, one for each of the two big soccer teams in Glasgow, but the authorities made me put on my whole costume. In Paris we finally made it to the Olympia Theater, but the Parisians were just as hotheaded as ever. We started the show two hours late and halfway through the set some madman came storming up the aisle shouting in French and waving a flaming guitar doused in kerosene. He jumped up on the stage and yelled something at me and I yelled back, "Viva la France, up-a-your pants!" The audience cheered, which prompted him to throw his burning guitar at Glen. When he took a swing at me Shep himself rushed onto the stage and flattened the guy with one punch. Shep had to literally stand on the kid during the show until the police arrived and hauled him off. Never, at any time during all of this, did I have second thoughts about what I was doing morally because I was sure there was nothing wrong with it. I think the only time I got really shaken up was when word came to the Cooper Mansion that a fourteen-year-old boy in Canada had hanged himself and it was being blamed on me. They found a ticket to one of my concerts in his room and a Killer album. It was immediately made to sound as if I had inspired his death. What I needed to know the most was if I actually caused that boy to hang himself. Contrary to what you might believe, children are not that impressionable. I couldn't believe that any stable child would put his head in a noose or into a guillotine from watching my show or listening to my music. Not anymore than they would try running through a screen door or put a lit stick of dynamite in their mouths from watching cartoons on TV, all of which are far more violent than I ever could have been. If Alice Cooper was destroying anyone, he was destroying me. In looking back on it, it really wasn't fun in the beginning. I was a very big success, to be sure, but I was also a freak, an oddball, a joke. I was the horror of every mother in Toledo. "What's the matter with you, Herbie? You gonna grow up and become Alice Cooper?' There were still radio stations and record stores that banned my albums. There were other performers who wouldn't even speak to me. Steve Lawrence once stopped me in a restaurant to tell me that if I cut my hair I wouldn't have a career left. I liked getting rich and I liked the fame and I liked the fans and limousines arid private jets, but don't think that made me invulnerable to getting hurt. It bothered me every time I was criticized. I know, I know. I made my own bed, and I was being paid handsomely to sleep in it. But even if you're grossing $20 million a year, it begins to drive you crazy when you get called a degenerate. I was tired of being the rebel. I was tired of being thrown out of church. I made my point, all right. Now what? I drank. I drank to sustain the pressure, to buffer the hatred. To blot away the endless days and nights of travel and touring. I was treated like a criminal, and indeed, it made me feel guilty. I drank out of anger that it was happening to me and I drank out of fear it would stop. I was no longer an alcoholic, I was a drunk. I was a blubbering, stumbling drunk, drifting through days in a stupor. The year 1972 is just a puddle of VO in my head. I changed. I got loud and obnoxious. I thought that was what people wanted of me. I had to be Alice all the time. I wanted everybody to see how drunk I was wherever I went. I wasn't satisfied until I had caused a scene in public. I wanted people to say, "Boy, I saw Alice Cooper last night and was he drunk!" I was very aggressive, turning over tables and screaming, "I'm Alice Cooper!" I was so obnoxious I hated myself. I hated every minute of what I was doing and I was too drunk to stop and think about it. There are so many adjustments to go through in the rock business. It's easy for a pop idol to do himself in.You have all the money you need, so if your vice is cocaine or heroin instead of booze, you can kill yourself in a few months. As a rock star everything is done for you, so it doesn't matter how incapacitated you are. They treat you like an infant, and soon you begin to act like one. You never have to be sober enough to do your laundry or drive to work. Your life, your day-to-day existence, is part of a grand plan drawn up in an agent's office. There's a sophisticated organization behind you, arranging your life for you, waiting for you to pay off. And there's never anybody around to stop you from hurting yourself. That's because people are afraid. You're a star and you make millions of dollars and that intimidates them. Some people won't dare tell you you're killing yourself, and others don't think you deserve the consideration. People felt that I should have known better than to let myself depend so much on booze for backbone. If that was the only way I could handle it, well then, tough shit. In rock and roll, when it comes to self-destruction, everybody pulls down their hats and lets the chips fall where they may. Cindy even stopped nagging me about it. We were away from each other so often that she really didn't know what was going on, and she didn't want to know anymore either. When we were together she threatened to walk out on me a thousand times, but she never got up the courage. As long as I was working, who was going to rock a million-dollar boat? Shep did. On an ugly snowy morning in December of 1972 Shep insisted I have breakfast with him at the Americana Hotel. I hated the mornings. I vomited for a full half hour in the mornings, mostly a thick greenish material that my body poured out in buckets every day. I woke every morning fully dressed, with a bottle of VO in my hand, more often than not Glen Buxton in the same condition across the room. I had terrible headaches and shakes in the mornings and the only cure was more VO. I stumbled down to the coffee shop in the Americana an hour late. Shep is usually very lighthearted, even with bad news. He says whatever he has to say in a matter of seconds, very directly. But he was stony-faced and silent that morning. "What's a matter, somebody died?" I said. "No, man, but you're on your way," he told me angrily. I was so taken aback that he was talking to me in that tone that he could just as easily have slapped me in the face. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" he went on. "Will you take a look at yourself? You're like a completely different person. You've lost your whole personality. I don't even know you anymore. If you don't straighten out you won't be alive in a year. I'll still take care of you as a friend, but I can't manage you anymore. I can't be responsible for your death. If you're wasting your life and you're my friend, I can't stand it. I want out. I want to split now." I was shocked. He finished off by saying he hated the sight of me and then left the table. Cindy flew in from Los Angeles and met me at Kennedy Airport the next day. She was outside the Pan Am terminal when my car pulled up. We went through all the luggage on the sidewalk in front of the terminal and emptied it of all the VO. I gave it away to people who asked for autographs. Then we got on a plane to Jamaica, where Alan Strahl had retired the year before. Shep called him and told him I was coming down for a rest and to take care of me. Alan met us at the airport and stared at me strangely all the way to his house. He finally said, "You're so white. You look so sick." By late that night I had the shakes. By the time they subsided to tremors a day later I had uncontrollable waves of nausea and diarrhea. I was angry and melancholy for a week. Cindy fed me an allowance of beer - only six cans a day - to keep from collapsing completely. I shrunk. I must have lost twenty pounds in water. My bloatedness went away. My eyes were no longer puffy and the black and blue marks from falling down started to fade. But I had really done myself some damage. I was only twenty-three years old and I looked forty. That same month Glen Buxton was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. He'd simply OD'd on too rnuch alcohol with no rest and no food. They cut him open, drained some of the loose booze out of him, and tried to put him back together again. His pancreas was ruined. They warned him that if he ever touched another drop it would kill him. His stomach, his liver - none of him was functioning right. Glen was either on the wagon or in the ground. We were entering the twentieth month of our stardom flat on our backs, the full meaning of what we had accomplished, who we had become, first beginning to dawn on all of us. I managed to stay on the wagon - beer only - a solid month in Jamaica, and I can tell you that none of us ever mentioned alcohol once. In a month I was tan and felt much healthier, but I still had surprise attacks of nausea and diarrhea, and the shaking hardly stopped at all. I was waiting to board the plane at the Jamaican airport, tan, dressed in a white, double-breasted suit, holding a stuffed armadillo that I bought as a souvenir, when I got a terrible attack of nausea. Cindy begged me to try and control myself until we got onto the plane so I wouldn't have to find the men's room in a crowded airport. There's nothing more frustrating than looking for a bathroom while you're signing autographs. But I couldn't take the feeling any longer and I rushed headlong down a corridor, into a bathroom marked "Closed." It was brand new inside. The sinks still weren't attached to the pipes in the walls, and I dashed into a stall and threw up. When I regained my composure I picked up my armadillo and flushed. The toilet exploded all over me. The water spluttered into the bowl in great rushes, splattering my white suit all over the front. By the time we got on the plane Cindy was nearly crying out of embarrassment. People were shoving each other up the aisles trying to get away from me and the armadillo. The stewardess said to the other passeners, "How disgusting! Well, that's Alice Cooper for you."