Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Norma was convinced our house was haunted and thought it would be a great idea to contact one of the ghosts. I mentioned this to Merry Cornwell at the Cheetah, who said that Jim Morrison and David Crosby had been talking about having a seance for a longtime. I promised to find the medium if Merry arranged everything else, and asked Norma if she thought she could raise the dead for some rock stars.

The only reason we went to all this trouble, by the way, was to get to meet Morrison’s record producer, Paul Rothchild, who was one of the hottest names in the music industry. We would do anything to get a producer over to the house, and I always felt like Gale Storm on My Little Margie when I got involved in these schemes.

The night of the seance Norma came by, and we helped her spray paint a pentacle on the floor of the basement. Jim Morrison had already been told that the circle was inlaid marble in the basement and that the house had a national reputation for being haunted. Near midnight Morrison showed up with his producer, Paul Rothschild, David Crosby and Arther Lee, one of my favorite musicans.

For the next two hours Norma put on a fascinating show of summoning up a spirit and pretending to be possessed. It ran a little thin after a couple of hours, and Mike Bruce and I started giving each other peace signals in the candlelight breaking everybody up. Finally Morrison started scraping the paint off the floor with his boots and stopped the whole thing.

“This is painted! This pentacle is painted!” he started shouting.

“You guys shouldn’t have done this,” Crosby said to us gravely.”This isn’t the type of thing mortal people should fool around with.”

“But I’m not mortal,” I told him. “I’m actually a 14^th century witch. I died just last Good Friday again on the freeway…” But Crosby wasn’t listening, and Morrison had climbed out of the hole in the ceiling, past my coffin and outside, where he took off his boots covered with paint from the pentacle and threw them down the hill in a fit of anger.

I saw Morrison the next day on Sunset Boulevard talking to the hippies. He was still barefoot, and when he saw me I rushed over to him and explained about the night before. When he heard we went through all that craziness just to get to meet him and Rothschild he loved it. He called me “Lucy” (from “I Love…”) the rest of the day. He put his arm around me and we walked into a shoe store where he bought another pair of boots. After that we became much closer. When he was in LA, and I didn’t have a job, I’d go over to his house where there was plenty of food. We’d drink until we passed out, and I’d crawl under a sofa and sleep until morning. I remember waking up there one day and hearing somebody say, “Who’s the skinny guy in the beaded top under the couch?” Morrison said, “Oh, that’s just Alice Cooper.”

I cared little about food. I had no appetite when I was sober and what little money I had was too precious to spend on solids. By midevening though I’d get to dizzy from hunger and usually scrape together fifty cents to go to Canter’s delicatessen for a bowl of matzoh ball soup.

I met the GTOs at Cander’s for the first time. The GTOs were the first organized groupies and GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Only, and Girls Together Often. The five or six of them, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Suzi Cream Cheese, and Miss Lucy had started a rock band, but they were more of a mixed-media event than musicians. People just got off on them. They were a trip to be with. At the time we met, one of them was testing how far she could abuse her body with drugs. There was also a boyfriend who took so much amphetamine his bones had disolved, and he slumped in chairs like a rolled sock. Miss Pamela was a smiling open-faced girl who looked just like Ginger Rogers. I met Miss Christine, the GTO I was to fall madly in love with, across a bowl of shared matzoh ball soup. She was one of the skinniest girls I ever met, and she made me look muscular.

When she teased out her frizzy, mousy-brown hair, she looked like a used Q-Tip.