Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

Before we finished dinner they brought another birthday cake out of the kitchen and we automatically started singing “Happy Birthday Butchie.” The waiter brought it to our table and Frankie blew out the candles, then summerily tossed it at me and Sellers. But the cake didn’t say “Happy Birthday Butchie,” it said, “Happy Birthday Elaine” and it belonged to a lady celebrating her sixty-fifth birthday at the next table. Was she pissed! We wound up buying her and everybody else in the restaurant a birthday cake and got to sing “Happy Birthday Butchie” fourteen times.

Valerie Perrine fell in love with Frankie. She couldn’t get over his blue eyes and kept pulling on his beard saying, “Frankie, tell me a bedtime story.” The table quieted down and Frankie began: “Once upon a time there were three bears and they were all horny. The poppa bear said, ‘Let’s go get us some hookers…”

By the end of the story the bears had committed incest, and sodomy with Little Red Riding Hood, and baby bear turned out to be gay. Valerie’s eyes widened like pie plates and Sellers was choking on his food.

When we all said goodbye that night, Sellers told me he could always tell Alice Cooper’s limousine from the laughter inside.

That’s a nice compliment, but it wasn’t always like that.

We weren’t always on top. We didn’t always laugh.

This is how it all started….

CHAPTER 2

I believe one day they’ll find a chemical substance in people who are entertainers, a chemical substance that drives them to entertain, to be different, to be more. That chemical makes me play the game. It makes me want to be the most individual person in the world. If I even start to become close to what everyone else accepts as normal, I have to change it.

You see, the most important thing in the world is to be selfish about yourself, about where you are in life and who you are. It makes for healthy competition. In order to become the ultimate individual in this society you have to care a lot about yourself. Professionally, I am first is my credo. This is my life, and I must come out on top, getting the things I want, when I want them. On a personal level I m exactly the opposite. A sure touch. An easy sell. They have to watch me so I don’t give my shirt away on the street. I don’t know how to say no to anybody about anything. I worry about being selfish on a professional level because I don’t like to hurt people, but that’s a responsibility you take on if you ant to keep the public’s eye.

Who am I? I’m a villain. An anti-hero. If I was a kid, Alice Cooper would be my hero. I always liked villains. I adored Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. I always wanted Godzilla to completely wipe out all those Japanese in Tokyo. I always rooted for the wolfman to gobble up the girls who roamed misty parks in London. For me the villain was the hero, the underdog. I understood the villain. I understood the problems the Boston Strangler faced. Was W. C. Fields a good guy? He was a philanderer, and he hated little kids!

The most important thing about my whole life is to be the most different. I always had to do the opposite of what was expected. I refuse to be a blur that passes through everyone’s life. I refuse to be anonymous. The world must know I’m here. Maybe that’s megalomania, but I fear mediocrity more than death, and it’s my fear of mediocrity that made me do things differently than anything anyone ever expected.

It’s not the way I started out. There was every good reason that I might have grown up Mr. Anybody with a regular job, wife and three kids. From the moment my mother spewed me out (February 4, 1948) I was the world’s biggest goody-goody. Mr. Square. Straight and narrow. I led the most unsophisticated life in the world.

I was born Vincent Damon Furnier in a hospital they call the “Butcher’s Palace” in Detroit and I was lucky I made it out of there because a lot of people didn’t. They didn’t do such a bad job on me, except that I was born with eczema (which means I looked like a two-day-old pizza stepped on by football cleats), and infantile asthma. The asthma was hereditary, but I think the eczema was a sign, like the mark of Cain. My dad, Ether Moroni Furnier (a Mormon name), also had asthma. The Furniers brought these bad tubes with them all the way from France, where in some distant way I was related to General Lafayette (the French will all be delighted to know.)