Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

The station wagons turned into limousines, which turned into jet planes, which turned into hotel rooms. One day instead of returning to Pontiac we flew to New York. Two hours later a long line of black cars drove us through the gates to our new home: a 42-room mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Ann Margret had just vacated the estate the month before, and I spent the first week searching every room, hoping she had left underwear behind so I could wear it on stage. What a prize! Discarded Ann Margret underwear! There was a ballroom the size of a football field and enough suites and sitting rooms and kitchens not to have to see the other guys in the band for days at a time if we didn’t want to. That’s as if we had days at a time to try.

The road separated me from Cindy for months. We started to play at least fifteen dates a month for the next two years, and with traveling time to and from gigs, I was away from Cindy a lot. I missed Cindy, but at the time I didn’t really mind being away from her, in a strange way. I was used to a life-style, of being on the road in bachelor company. If Cindy was the type of girl who needed to be with me constantly, I don’t think we would have liked each other for as long as we did. I was wrong in the end. Eventually my life-style and the road led to our break-up.

Warner Brothers sponsored our first press party at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that July. The Ambassador didn’t want to host a party for a rock group. They had allowed a rock group to hold a party there the year before and the Grand Ballroom had been wrecked. Shep told them they had misunderstood. Alice Cooper was a debutante, not a singer. He wanted to arrange for a “coming out” party for Alice, and the Ambassador was delighted to help. I’m sure the guests, who received engraved invitations to Alice Cooper’s coming-out party, were just as confused as the hotel when they saw it.

The party was fashioned after the movie Hellzapoppin. People still talk about that party. Nobody expected it. It was a revival of the old-time Hollywood shindig, the good old LA publicity stunt. People like that because it makes them laugh. Guests were greeted at the door by two men in gorilla suits. The Cockettes, a troupe of drag queens from San Francisco, wore full beards streaked with glitter. They were the cigarette girls and they sold cigars, cigarettes and vaseline. We hired the two worst bands in LA to play music and a three-hundred-pound black woman named TV Momma sang “I Love You Truly,” topless, with her breasts hanging to her waist. But the hired people were no stranger than the guests. Every greak and weirdo in LA gate-crashed. I saw people I hadn’t seen since the Hullabaloo Club. Sergeant Garcia even showed up. When I was introduced to Jack Nicholson he shook my hand gingerly, but he gave me a big smile. “I don’t exactly understand what’s going on here, but it’s all right with me.” One of the gorillas carried Rod McKuen into the room and chased Richard Chamberlain through the kitchen doors, which he was very peeved about because he said it made him look foolish, which it did. Ahmet Ertegun, the president of rival Atlantic Records, even showed up because he couldn’t believe the rumors he heard about the group were true.

Rumors quickly turned into legends, and our next was the snake. My first snake was named Kachina. She was a nine-foot-long boa constrictor, not very big as far as they go, and she was the sweetest snake you’d ever want to meet. A girl gave her to me as a gift in a hotel in Florida. Using Kachina in the act didn’t seem to be a more important idea than any of the other props at first. One night I brought her up on stage with the feathers and fire extinguishers. When I took her out of her box and held her up in the spotlight I thought a bomb had gone off in the audience. There was an explosion of sound. Kachina whipped her body around, clutching to me, reeling from the vibrations of the noise. The crowd surged forward, hypnotized. She was so powerful up there!

I never understood what the big fuss was about snakes. I always liked them. They were common in Arizona, and I grew up thinking of them as nice, clean pets — you know, they look slimy but they’re so clean you could eat off their backs. Kachina liked being up there on stage with me. She was very docile and friendly. She never once even gave me a little squeeze. She did however pop herself into my open mouth one night, right in the middle of a note. Instead of spitting her out I just closed my lips and sucked on her head. I could feel her little tongue darting across the roof of my mouth, French kissing me back. It was a friendly, warming experience.