Alice Cooper - Me, Alice - The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

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 much 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.”

Within two years Alice Cooper had become an international phenomenon. My fame had transcended my craft. I was the biggest act in the world, and I felt I owed it to the public to come up with the biggest of all possible shows. I really wanted to do something that was more than just sheer entertainment. I wanted to do a show that was an observation, too, that made a comment about the world I had seen in my travels.

Every city I saw was the same, striving for total decadence. Every teenager in the world wanted more possessions, more stereos, sports cars, telephones and TVs. I knew seventeen-year-old kids in Greenwich and Bel Air with their own Rolls-Royces and drivers. The public was fascinated with my wealth and how I spent it. Overindulgence and affluence were the cornerstones of my life-style. It was why people loved me, and why people ripped me off, too.

No matter what the question, money was the answer: “Do you want to bring that snake into this auditorium?” — $166 in German marks. “Do you have the special papers to bring the guitars through customs?” — $500 cash. “Mr. Cooper’s suitcases? We’ll find them within the hour. What do you mean he’ll miss his plane?” — $50 and a bottle of VO. Everybody had questions for us. “Billion-Dollar Babies” was supposed to be the final answer.

The object of the “Billion-Dollar Babies” tour was to pull a show business coup based on the concept of greed. We wanted to blitz the public with a single tour and album of such overwhelming proportions we could retire afterwards. The basic plan was to release a Billion-Dollar Babies album followed by a swift, hard tour across the country, playing as many dates in the largest halls in as short a time as possible. We would have a chance of propelling the album to number-one position and gross nearly $6 million on the tour. In the end, “Billion-Dollar Babies” stood to gross $20 million. In the end, we tried to play sixty-two concerts in fifty-nine cities within ninety days. In the end, it wrecked us all.

We tried to record part of Billion-Dollar Babies album at the Morgan Studios in London. We invited Harry Nilsson and Marc Bolan by to join a session, but by the time the evening was over all we had was four hours of unusable tape and a L 300 bar bill. We finished recording on a mobile unit at the Cooper mansion in Connecticut and at the-Record Plant in LA and New York. The album cover was quite an extravaganza. It was shaped like an overstuffed wallet, snakeskin, naturally. Inside there was a billion-dollar bill, wallet-sized photos of the group, and a strikingly handsome sleeve jacket printed with a picture taken of us by David Bailey in his London studios. We made special arrangements with the FBI and the Treasury Department to have a million dollars in U.S. cash flown to London for the photograph. We posed in white satin suits, surrounded by dozens of white rabbits and green money, holding a little baby in Alice Cooper makeup. The album included “Elected,” which was already a best-seller, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” my ode to the press, and several songs that became Alice Cooper classics, including an infamous version of Rolfe Kemp’s “Hello Hooray.”