realized a man was watching me. With great bravado I looked up, walked over to a can opener and opened the can. I ate a piece of tuna with my fingers and sized up the intruder: blond, impish face, sleepy and glassy eyes. I offered some tuna to him and he said, “I’m too drunk to swallow.”
His name was Ashley Pandel, and he was not the host but just another interloper making the rounds of Los Angeles parties. He understood immediately what I was doing, went straight to the refrigerator and got out the eggs. “You should always take eggs,” he said. “The protein is good for you.”
“It’s too hard to sneak eggs out,” I said. He seemed baffled by this for a moment, then he belched and stumbled backwards a step. “No, there are lots of places for eggs.” He held two and looked around his jeans and T-shirt for a good place to secret them. The kitchen door opened and we were joined by a couple in their early thirties who busily went to the cabinets and found a supply of paper cups and napkin with familiar ease. Ashley took the eggs and hid them under his arms in his armpits. He stood there blinking at the people with his arms hoisted a few inches away from his sides like he was about to levitate. By the time they left the kitchen we were both laughing so hard that he cracked the eggs, and yolk was running down the sides of his shirt.
Ashley Pandel became a regular at our house on the hill and a close friend of the group. Although we would drift apart the coming year, he would rejoin our group of merry men in 1971. As my personal publicist he became responsible for much of the press and press reception that Alice Cooper was given through 1974, when he retired from rock and roll, richer than ever, to open Ashley’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue in New York, where he nightly throws baccanalian brawls for the rock industry with eggs under his arms.
Shep and Joey finally got us a job, which was a small miracle in its own way. They knew nothing at all about rock and roll. They were learning as they went along, and not quickly either. This first booking was at an army base in Denver. As much as Shep swears he did not get the idea out of Gypsy, he billed us as “Alice Cooper and the Hollywood Blondes.” He actually hired four topless go-go dancers from a strip joint to go out to Denver with us and dance on either side of the stage.
I couldn’t believe Shep and Joey would subject us to the kind of reaction we knew we’d provoke at an army base. We were seething. Shep thought the topless go-go dancers would balance out the show; if the army guys hated us they’d still have tits and ass to look at. I was so drunk when we got to Denver I couldn’t even stand straight. After two minutes of playing the army guys were on their feet shouting, “Stop it! You stink! Go Home!” and I yelled, “What do you want from me? What do you want from my life?” hanging on my microphone stand for support.
Except for an odd club date here and there, we spent our days lolling about the glamorous new house waiting for stardom to pop in on us, or partying at the Landmark Hotel. There was always something extraordinary going on at the Landmark, always a mystery to unravel, an adventure to be had. The Landmark was primarily a rock and roll hotel, a very hip place to live just on the brink of shabbiness and notoriety.
The carpeting in the hallways was worn out, not by people going to their rooms, but by people wandering, stalking the corridors of the hotel like a tunnel of love. Fresh young women would arrive there every day. They were usually from the suburbs, round-hipped girls with ex-husbands and unused passion who wanted to explore the thrilling mile-a-minute world of rock and roll. These girls were sucked into the Landmark like they were being ingested into a huge machine, into the lobby where they checked in, and then, within two months, pulled from apartment to apartment, getting whatever life-force they started with draining out of them by the powerful and magic natives who lived behind the closed doors.
The Landmark was a gold mine if you were postpecting for heavy egos, heavy personalities, heavy drugs and heavy sex. People sold everything from marijuana to cut-rate airplane tickets there. It was scam city. Hustlers row. It attracted all sorts of restless people on the make, by the hotels’ very demands “transients.” Janis Joplin lived and died there. The Chamber Brothers lived there. The Jefferson Airplane stayed there. Somehow, for a summer, the Ohio State football team lived there. (Maybe they said they were the Ohio State football team so they could get laid. It sure did help.) And eventually I lived there, too.
If you did not allow yourself to get drawn into the draining whirlpool of the hotel, if you had no need for any of its attractions except for pure amusement, the Landmark could be fun. Indeed, it was wonderful. Susan Starfucker kept a one-room apartment there where she raised her child. Susan did not like the bedroom I had, down in the dungeon, and even though I had contributed my coffin to the band’s prop department and now slept on a real mattress, Susan wanted me to stay with her, at the Landmark, where her daughter was.
Shep introduced me to Janis Joplin by the pool one day. She had played the Monterey Pop Festival the year before, and was just beginning to face the hurdles of stardom. Janis warmed to me immediately, probably because of my clothes.
“Did you ever see tits like these, man?” she asked me one day at the pool. Her breasts were covered with a layer of suntan lotion and sweat. I told her they were the best tits I had ever seen and she found the hysterically funny. Everybody was so spaced out on drugs at the Landmark that people found strange things very funny all the time.
“You wanna sleep with these tits, Cooper? Maybe these tits and another pair, too? Does that scare you, man?” she hacked out between gales of laughter.
I told her I loved tits. I told her they were my preference.
“You’re kidding. All you guys say you like chicks, but when the lights go out you’re all sucking cock. That’s all right, though. When the lights go out all the chicks are sucking cunt.”
It was two or three weeks later (Janis had been in and out of the Landmark and on the road) when I saw her again, this time very anxious to set her straight about my sexuality.
“Listen, baby, I didn’t mean to upset your ego or anything,” she said.
“It’s absolutely cool with me if you ball other guys, man. I mean after all….”
“No, I mean it. Honestly. All of us are straight. We all like girls. That’s all there was in Phoenix. WE brought the only faggots out there with us.”
Janis eyed my skinny body from behind eyes that looked like the bottom of shot glasses.
“I’ll give you a chance to prove it. You come by my room tonight and I’ll give you a chance to prove it.”
I never got to sleep with Janis, but along with Jim Morrison, Janis had one of the greatest influences on my drinking habits. She got me off wine and onto Southern Comfort, which was eventually to lead to Seagram’s VO, my constant friend and traveling companion. I did go to Janis’ room that night and many other nights, but all we ever did was polish off bottles of Southern Comfort and laugh. Then in the midst of a drunken slur she’d excuse herself and ask me to leave. I always left right away, without much questioning, because I sensed some sort of panic settling over her at those times. (Anyway, she could beat me up — she was a lot bigger than me.)
I would run into her sometimes when she was stoned on heroin, her eyes dull mirrors, her body limp and ashen white. She’d be stumbling down the hallway being held up by a friend and I would rush off in the other direction, too depressed by the sight to face her.
One night I was in her room while Janis pretended to read my tarot cards, impishly predicting a tragic future “for a strange boy with a girl’s name,” and I saw a suitcase sail by her second-storey window. When I told her, she laughed and said I was drunk. Ten minutes further into my murky future there were two feet dangling outside the window and we both jumped us as the feet kicked in a pane of glass. Janis ran up to the window and started tugging on the feet, yelling, “Oh, you fucking bastard, get out of here!”
I ran up the firesteps and banged on the door to the apartment above Janis’. Three guys from the Ohio State football team opened the door, dressed in their underwear. The room behind them was a mess. One bruiser immediately pushed down very hard on my right shoulder with his hand and said, “Whataya want?” I told him somebody was dangling out a window, but I must have had the wrong room. He slammed the door on my face.
I rushed back down to Janis’ where I was going to look out the window expecting to see somebody lying dead on the pavement. Instead Janis and the dangler were sitting on the bed swigging Southern Comfort. Four other panes of glass had been kicked in and Janis pulled him through the window. He was holding a dirty, bloody towel to one foot which was leaking blood into the Landmark’s wafer-thin blue carpeting.
I don’t know how or why that scene occurred at the Landmark. An evening at the Landmark was filled with chaotic segments of wonder: a girl giving birth on the sofa in the lobby, drowning in the pool, rape, sodomy demonstrations. All of this, for me, was pervaded with the presence of Susan Starfucker and her daughter Eva. Eva, the child of the nameless rock musician, was a dolt. I usually get along well with children — we have the same sensitivity — but I couldn’t warm up to Eva. She was a red-faced, cranky four-year-old, who had the misfortune of
