Alice Cooper with Steven Gaines
ME, ALICE
INTRODUCTION
The first question most often asked of me, upon finding out that I am Alice Cooper’s father is, What do you think of your son’s image and tactics as a performer?
This is naturally a difficult question for me to answer to the satisfaction of those who are aware of the fact that I’m an ordained minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In answering the question, I must make it clear that Alice Cooper and I have nothing in common (except an occasional game of golf together), and that we live in two different worlds that are miles apart. I am a firm believer of the Christian teachings of Salvation: repentance, baptism by immersion, laying on of hands for the reception of the Holy Ghost, and stead-fastness in the faith during days of probation here on earth.
Alice Cooper was raised, as was my daughter, Nickie, to believe in God and His teachings through His son, Jesus Christ. As long as they were under my roof they had an obligation to go to church and participate in Scripture classes. After graduating from high school, they both went out on their own and moved into their own places and were not constantly reminded of religion and eventually drifted away from church attendance altogether.
Alice Cooper’s career started harmlessly as a spoof, but it soon began to generate an energy and interest that was beyond the average teenage rock and roll band. Any parent would probably be proud of an offspring that reached the heights of success, fame and fortune that Alice Cooper has. But in contrast to a feeling of pride is the disappointment of not realizing our dreams of his becoming a minister of the Gospel while he was under our jurisdiction. He only found his success after realizing that the norm does not attract attention as well as the bizarre. The weirder he became, the greater the demand for his services and the more he got paid. It seems to me that he became entrapped in his obligations as a box-office attraction, and it was impossible for him to stop when it became clear there was millions of dollars to be made by following this course.
Ironically enough, during the short times we are together I detect in him a longing for something that he does not now possess. Perhaps it is the knowledge that he is a creation of God and that he knows someday he must submit himself to the things he was taught as a child.
His close friends in show business tell me that he is an actor of high degree, and his rebellious image is only a show and from time to time his religious longings emerge and come to the top.
Am I dreaming, or suffering from wishful thinking that after all this decadence there will emerge from this dynamic personality a servant of God who can be as influential to the youth of the country for good as he has been for the adversary?
God willing, this is my prayer for him.
CHAPTER 1
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
