Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

After nearly three hours the other guards returned to the room and informed us we were being held because of non-payment of our hotel bill. I told them it was impossible, that I knew for a fact that bill was paid before we left the hotel that morning. “Not the whole bill,” they said. “You left a day before your reservations were up and you owe another day’s rent.”

We were even more outraged than before. Holding forty-five people at the airport for a hotel bill! The accountant refused to make a check or produce a credit card. He said he’d rather go to jail than pay them any money. We figured they want a couple of thousand dollars for nothing. When the guards showed us the bill it turned out they only wanted $841! It just wasn’t worth the aggravation. We took the money out of our own pockets and paid them.

By the time we got on the AC-II it was noon, and we had been up for six hours trying to get packed and leave. We were exhausted and furious. I can’t begin to tell you how much of an ugly hassle it was to be held at the airport without a passport — how frightening is was. When AC-II started to taxi down the runway Libert got on the PA to do the ball scores, and you never heard so many dirty words in your life. Whew! Was that a filthy ball score. All the venom we wanted to release at the authorities at the airport came exploding out. We screamed! We all yelled dirty words at the top of our lungs as the plane whoosed us out of there. We laughed all the way to London, and it didn’t stop there.

While we were on the plane we had one of the dancers dress in the cyclops costume. When we arrived at Heathrow this nine-foot creature stepped off the plane with us. The people in immigration loved it. The customs agents played the whole thing like it wasn’t happening. The cyclops used an Alice Cooper backstage pass as his passport and customs agents called him Mr. Clops and welcomed him to the country in the name of the Queen.

By the time I got on the air to do the Russell Hardy show I was as hot as a pistol. It was the best TV show I ever did. Hardy and I loved each other from the start. I asked Hardy to marry me and he looked shocked. “Oh, I heard about you on weekends,” I told him.

By the time we got to the Savoy and checked in again my head was spinning. I stretched out on the bed and put on the television set and there was my picture on the screen. As the sound came up I heard the announcer saying that a hotel owner in Munich had called a press conference to announce that I had stolen towels and ashtrays from his hotel. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A hotel owner who calls a press conference? What was this, Hollywood or something? And why would I steal ashtrays? What am I going to do with them? Put them in my limousine? In my jet? I don’t even smoke!

Then the phone calls started coming in from New York:

“I heard you guys got busted for stealing shower curtains!”

“Hey, you guys are up to your old tricks, huh? Wrecked a German hotel, did you?”

Well, that really brought me down. Grumble, grumble and dark clouds. A depressed Alice Cooper is no fun to be around. I felt so awful. I felt even worse when I heard that the story had been picked up by all the wire services and that the next day it was bound to the network news in the States. My manager and I decided not to go back to Germany again for the rest of the tour. I didn’t want them to play with my head anymore, so we cancelled the last two German dates. That wasn’t any solace, though. I had already been put in the middle of another international incident.

I was so down that I was shining my shoes with my chin. I lay in bed like a dead fish. All Frankie would do is taunt me, “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” He kept walking in and out of my bedroom every two minutes. “Ha-ha! Ha-ha!” At one point he stopped in front of the bedroom mirror and looked at himself. I could tell he was thinking about going bold, and just as he was about to let out another “ha-ha!” I said, “Frankie! You’re going bold!”

I don’t know what it was, but somebody might have just as well hit my funnybone with a sledge hammer. It 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.