Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Shep introduced me to Janis Joplin by the pool one day. She had played the Monterey Pop Festival the year before, and was just beginning to face the hurdles of stardom. Janis warmed to me immediately, probably because of my clothes.

“Did you ever see tits like these, man?” she asked me one day at the pool. Her breasts were covered with a layer of suntan lotion and sweat. I told her they were the best tits I had ever seen and she found the hysterically funny. Everybody was so spaced out on drugs at the Landmark that people found strange things very funny all the time.

“You wanna sleep with these tits, Cooper? Maybe these tits and another pair, too? Does that scare you, man?” she hacked out between gales of laughter.

I told her I loved tits. I told her they were my preference.

“You’re kidding. All you guys say you like chicks, but when the lights go out you’re all sucking cock. That’s all right, though. When the lights go out all the chicks are sucking cunt.”

It was two or three weeks later (Janis had been in and out of the Landmark and on the road) when I saw her again, this time very anxious to set her straight about my sexuality.

“Listen, baby, I didn’t mean to upset your ego or anything,” she said.

“It’s absolutely cool with me if you ball other guys, man. I mean after all….”

“No, I mean it. Honestly. All of us are straight. We all like girls. That’s all there was in Phoenix. WE brought the only faggots out there with us.”

Janis eyed my skinny body from behind eyes that looked like the bottom of shot glasses.

“I’ll give you a chance to prove it. You come by my room tonight and I’ll give you a chance to prove it.”

I never got to sleep with Janis, but along with Jim Morrison, Janis had one of the greatest influences on my drinking habits. She got me off wine and onto Southern Comfort, which was eventually to lead to Seagram’s VO, my constant friend and traveling companion. I did go to Janis’ room that night and many other nights, but all we ever did was polish off bottles of Southern Comfort and laugh. Then in the midst of a drunken slur she’d excuse herself and ask me to leave. I always left right away, without much questioning, because I sensed some sort of panic settling over her at those times. (Anyway, she could beat me up — she was a lot bigger than me.)

I would run into her sometimes when she was stoned on heroin, her eyes dull mirrors, her body limp and ashen white. She’d be stumbling down the hallway being held up by a friend and I would rush off in the other direction, too depressed by the sight to face her.

One night I was in her room while Janis pretended to read my tarot cards, impishly predicting a tragic future “for a strange boy with a girl’s name,” and I saw a suitcase sail by her second-storey window. When I told her, she laughed and said I was drunk. Ten minutes further into my murky future there were two feet dangling outside the window and we both jumped us as the feet kicked in a pane of glass. Janis ran up to the window and started tugging on the feet, yelling, “Oh, you fucking bastard, get out of here!”

I ran up the firesteps and banged on the door to the apartment above Janis’. Three guys from the Ohio State football team opened the door, dressed in their underwear. The room behind them was a mess. One bruiser immediately pushed down very hard on my right shoulder with his hand and said, “Whataya want?” I told him somebody was dangling out a window, but I must have had the wrong room. He slammed the door on my face.

I rushed back down to Janis’ where I was going to look out the window expecting to see somebody lying dead on the pavement. Instead Janis and the dangler were sitting on the bed swigging Southern Comfort. Four other panes of glass had been kicked in and Janis pulled him through the window. He was holding a dirty, bloody towel to one foot which was leaking blood into the Landmark’s wafer-thin blue carpeting.

I don’t know how or why that scene occurred at the Landmark. An evening at the Landmark was filled with chaotic segments of wonder: a girl giving birth on the sofa in the lobby, drowning in the pool, rape, sodomy demonstrations. All of this, for me, was pervaded with the presence of Susan Starfucker and her daughter Eva. Eva, the child of the nameless rock musician, was a dolt. I usually get along well with children — we have the same sensitivity — but I couldn’t warm up to Eva. She was a red-faced, cranky four-year-old, who had the misfortune of being brought up at the Landmark Hotel. Eva, when she wasn’t throwing temper tantrums, spoke with the vocabulary of a ten-year-old and painted her fingernails Groupie Green.