Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

“I’ll get into this for one thing,” Shep said. “I want to make a million dollars. Then we’ll get out. I don’t care what you sound like or what you look like, I think you can do it. If you want to make a million bucks you’ll have to stick with it for as long as it takes and as hard as it gets. Okay?” It was okay with me.

Frank Zappa and Herbie Cohen were furious when we told them. Who the fuck was Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg? Where did we pick up these two shyster New Yorkers? Why them? Why not Herbie Cohen?

Shep and Joey ruled Zappa and Cohen off limits until we signed the contracts. No phone calls. No socializing. Not even with the GTOs. Either we signed correctly, with a third part protecting us, or not at all — a heady attitude for a rock group who just a month before were desperate enough for a contract to sell themselves into bandage. Most important was we learned that Zappa and Cohen were not friends, but business associates, and had to be dealt with that way. It was the first commandment of the music business: Nobody is your friend.

In early October of 1968, a week before we were supposed to sign the Zappa contract, Shep moved us into an enormous glass and stucco Spanish style house on Quebec Street in the Hollywood Hills that was owned by John Phillip Law. Five bedrooms, gleaming kitchen, dining room, study and heated swimming pools. Shep said nobody wanted to connect with a bunch of losers, and if we were going to be pop stars we had to appear to live like pop stars — at least from outside. The rent, a big $350 a month, was going to be paid out of our $6,000 advance.

Law owned several houses in the hills, all of them rented and tended by his caretaker, Jack Crow. Crow, Shep warned us, treated the houses like they were his children, and one broken window or scratch and we’d get heel. Crow was waiting for us the moment we got there. He was a tall, hefty man in his late forties with tweezed eyebrows. It looked like he was wearing his mother’s nightclothes.

“Hi, hi, hi, kids,” he screamed. “It’s Jack! Jack! Who are we?”

We introduced ourselves, grinning from ear to ear. Jack grabbed my sequin top.

“Lovely. Lovely! Have you seen the tops they got in at the Bandit Boutique on Crewshaw?” He pulled the top up and grabbed at my right nipple, squealing in delight. I slapped his hand away. I knew better than to haul him off and smack him, or even raise protest about my sexuality or why we looked the way we did. Nobody, especially fags, believed me. So I relented and allowed Jack to give me a wet smack on the cheek and help us move in.

Jack was very upset that we lived on a twenty-dollar-a-week allowance and didn’t have bed sheets or dishes or food to put in the refrigerator. He dashed away in his car and came back a half hour later with bags full of groceries and made us all ham and cheese sandwiches with big glasses of milk. Later the night he came by with an odd set of dishes he collected from other rented houses.

Jack was always worried about us not eating. There was never any food in the house, and it drove him crazy. Every day he brought us lunch or dinner and bawled us out for spending our allowance on booze instead of food. He pinched out sides and behinds and hit ribs and bare buttocks and ran out of the house clucking about rickets to get another carload of food.

Zappa was about to begin a national tour and demanded the contract be signed immediately. The last hitch was that I was only twenty years old and Zappa insisted that all our parents consign the contracts with us. We arranged a pilgrimage from Phoenix to LA.

I called home and told my mother and father that we had a $6,000 recording contract, and they were incredulously happy. Then we told them we had managers, two guys from New York, Shep Gordon and Joey Greenberg. They hit the ceiling. Gordon and Greenberg? From New York? Everybody’s parents had the same reaction right down the line, exploding on the other end of the phone in Phoenix like champagne corks. They were outraged by the thought. Gordon and Greenberg? That was like giving it away. Our mothers and fathers rushed to LA in a frenzy. We were so proud of our new house, and they were horrified. “Where did all this come from?” they wanted to know. “Suddenly you’re living in a house with a swimming pool! This is convenient! Where did you dig these two guys up? How do they pay for this house? What do they do?”

They refused to sign the contract. There we were, in our strange clothing, chasing them around the huge house with a contract and a pen so we could become rock stars. Rock stars! And they wouldn’t sign the contracts!

We settled in the kitchen around the only table in the house, possibly for some rock soup — I don’t remember — and tried to finesse their signatures. My father was in the middle of telling me how he was not going to “be party to my signing my financial independence away” when the kitchen door flew open. Jack was standing there in a muu muu with two large brown bags of groceries.