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….
CHAPTER 2
I believe one day they’ll find a chemical substance in people who are entertainers, a chemical substance that drives them to entertain, to be different, to be more. That chemical makes me play the game. It makes me want to be the most individual person in the world. If I even start to become close to what everyone else accepts as normal, I have to change it.
You see, the most important thing in the world is to be selfish about yourself, about where you are in life and who you are. It makes for healthy competition. In order to become the ultimate individual in this society you have to care a lot about yourself. Professionally, I am first is my credo. This is my life, and I must come out on top, getting the things I want, when I want them. On a personal level I m exactly the opposite. A sure touch. An easy sell. They have to watch me so I don’t give my shirt away on the street. I don’t know how to say no to anybody about anything. I worry about being selfish on a professional level because I don’t like to hurt people, but that’s a responsibility you take on if you ant to keep the public’s eye.
Who am I? I’m a villain. An anti-hero. If I was a kid, Alice Cooper would be my hero. I always liked villains. I adored Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. I always wanted Godzilla to completely wipe out all those Japanese in Tokyo. I always rooted for the wolfman to gobble up the girls who roamed misty parks in London. For me the villain was the hero, the underdog. I understood the villain. I understood the problems the Boston Strangler faced. Was W. C. Fields a good guy? He was a philanderer, and he hated little kids!
The most important thing about my whole life is to be the most different. I always had to do the opposite of what was expected. I refuse to be a blur that passes through everyone’s life. I refuse to be anonymous. The world must know I’m here. Maybe that’s megalomania, but I fear mediocrity more than death, and it’s my fear of mediocrity that made me do things differently than anything anyone ever expected.
It’s not the way I started out. There was every good reason that I might have grown up Mr. Anybody with a regular job, wife and three kids. From the moment my mother spewed me out (February 4, 1948) I was the world’s biggest goody-goody. Mr. Square. Straight and narrow. I led the most unsophisticated life in the world.
I was born Vincent Damon Furnier in a hospital they call the “Butcher’s Palace” in Detroit and I was lucky I made it out of there because a lot of people didn’t. They didn’t do such a bad job on me, except that I was born with eczema (which means I looked like a two-day-old pizza stepped on by football cleats), and infantile asthma. The asthma was hereditary, but I think the eczema was a sign, like the mark of Cain. My dad, Ether Moroni Furnier (a Mormon name), also had asthma. The Furniers brought these bad tubes with them all the way from France, where in some distant way I was related to General Lafayette (the French will all be delighted to know.)
My grandfather, Thurmond, and his wife, Birdie May, lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Thurmond was a telegraph operator for the railroad in his spare time. In his full time he was a minister and president of the Church of Jesus Christ, which he presided over for sixty-three years until his death in 1974. My dad had two older brothers, Lonson, and Vincent, affectionately known to the Detroit bar circuit as Lefty and Jocko, who were dedicated church members until they were teenagers. Then they bolted, went into the “real world” and made Thurmond angry as hell at them. By the time my dad was a teenager he was out of it, too.
My mother, Ella, was from Tennessee, from a family of hillbillies named McCart who were one-quarter full- blooded Sioux Indians. Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and she turned to the Pentacostal church for solace. But when it came time to go up to the alter and “speak in tongues” the spirit never came to her. It was a form of religious impotency, I guess. She met my dad in Detroit at the end of the war. My older sister Nickie was born in 1946, named after the man who introduced my parents. I was named after Uncle Vince and Damon Runyon.
The year I was born my parents scraped together a little money and rushed me off to Los Angeles where the weather would be better for asthma, but before I was a year old the earthquakes and Republicans sent us scurrying back to Detroit for cover. I was able to stick it out for two winters in Detroit before my bronchial tubes started to go and when I was three years old we went off again, this time to Phoenix.
Phoenix was just a little tourist town at the time. My dad always said that if you went there with any money it was your fault and if you left there with any money it was their fault. They sent us home penniless after a year or so, and we braved it out in Detroit again for five years.
Havenhurst Elementary School was a drag. Mrs. Hainey, my fifth grade teacher, tried to teach me how to write longhand and crippled two of my fingers permanently. I also had an aunt who taught in Havenhurst named Verdie McCart, but she was killed by her son, Howard the Ax Murderer. They found her one day with an ax down the middle of her skull and Howard still standing there watching her rot. Verdie also had a grandson my age who I played with. He made his dog deaf by screaming dirty words in its ears.
I fell in love for the first time in the third grade with a girl named Karen Love, and I sent her a love letter that said, “I know you’re not the most beautiful girl in the world and I’m the best you can do.”
We were poor. My dad could never make ends meet. He took any kind of work he could get, driving a cab or selling used cars. He was a terrible used-car salesman, because he couldn’t lie. He’d always to the customer just what was wrong with the car and how far back the odometer had been turned. One month he made four hundred dollars and we celebrated for a week. When I was eight years old got one Christmas gift, an eight-dollar tan sweater. I remember always sitting in the back seat of a turquoise Plymouth from 1952 only because they were demonstrators and we could buy them real cheap. They all smelled like the fleabag in Toledo.
We were content, I guess, but far from happy. We were floundering, and even as little kids my sister Nickie and I felt it. Life was grating, like the lubricant missing to make things smoother. I knew something was wrong because my parents fought constantly, and I knew the insensity of their arguements was caused by something much deeper than the lamp I had broken of the size of my father’s paychecks.
My dad started drinking then, not that he was an alcoholic, or my sister and I were even aware of it until he told us many years later. But he needed to “have a little glow on” to help meet people in the used-car lot and deal with problems. He felt his life was slipping, that everything around him was a little out of control. So he kept a flask inside his jacket pocket, and when no one was looking he snuck into the men’s room and would take a belt to steady his nerves.
