“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. 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
