by Tommy Lee
I retaliated by putting a blow-up love doll on Nikki’s door with a sign that said “Welcome sailors,” and posting notices all over the hotel inviting single men to his room. Then Nikki pulled out all the stops: While I was sleeping, he spent several hours gluing an entire room service tray to my door, sticking on every plate, napkin, utensil, and even filling a glass with Elmer’s glue so that it looked like milk. Then he doused my whole door with hairspray, set it on fire, knocked, and ran back to his room. Mick was always too smart for anyone to pull pranks on: he covered the hallway leading up to his room with flour so that he could track the footprints of anyone who dared to mess with him.
That year was probably the best time of my life. Everyone was on new territory creatively and just having stupid, harmless fun. Mick had never worked with a second guitarist, Nikki had never worked with a second lyricist, and the band had never written songs through just jamming. We couldn’t wait for Mötley fans to hear what we’d done. We thought we had really made an intelligent Mötley Crüe record, with a lot of commentary on the kooky shit going on in the world, from the Rodney King riots in L.A. to the latest fury over music censorship.
The last song I wrote for the record was called “Uncle Jack,” which was about a relative of mine who had sexually molested my brothers and sisters. Just as we started recording, he was arrested and charged with statutory rape and sexual assault of twenty young children, all of which he had documented with pictures. But two months later, he was let out of jail because the wardens and the court were worried that the other inmates were going to kill him. So now that he was free, where did he find a new job? A Catholic elementary school.
As we were finishing the record, my mother called and told me he had been arrested again. While teaching at the Catholic school, he had moved in with a woman and her two sons, aged eight and three. She worked at night and he worked during the day, so he spent most of his time unsupervised with them. After just a few months, the woman he was living with was killed in a car accident. When her ex-husband moved back into the house, he discovered that the guy had been sodomizing both boys. I was livid when I found out that he was still destroying all these people’s lives, so Nikki said, “Why don’t you want to write a song about it?”
I wanted to release the song as a single and donate the money to centers for abused children. We were ready to make a difference and show the world that Mötley Crüe was still a circus, but a circus with a heart.
When we finished the record, we went on a press tour. Everywhere we traveled, fans went berserk. In Milan, a group of contest winners attacked me and starting tearing off pieces of my clothing for souvenirs. I looked over at Nikki. “Get ready for it, Crab.” He beamed. “It’s going to be like this all the time.”
It was a perfect time for a midlife crisis. I had just turned thirty, which didn’t seem that old. But all these younger rock bands were appearing and I was beginning to feel like a dinosaur. On top of that, I had just been kicked out of the band I had spent the last ten years with and I had left my wife. Ever since Sharise and I had moved into a huge mansion in Simi Valley to raise our daughter, Skylar, our fighting had escalated, most memorably on my birthday when she caught Robert Patrick and me talking with a future porn star named Lenay at the Roxy and hit me in the nose with a glass, which started a complete ruckus that ended with both of us kicked out of the club.
I had begged Doug a long time for help. I told him that I was having a lot of problems, between my wife and my confusion over feeling aged out of rock music at thirty. I explained to him that I was badly in need of help. If the band was upset at me for missing rehearsals, I wanted them to understand that it had nothing to do with them. I loved Mötley Crüe. I would have done anything for them.
I don’t know if Doug ever told the band about our conversation. Because the next thing I knew, after our fight at rehearsal during the rainstorm, Doug was calling my house and saying, “The band doesn’t want you around anymore. I’m willing to release you from your management contract tonight, if you want.” I was stunned. I expected that we’d cool off for a week, then I’d get a call from Nikki and we’d start working together again. I just muttered, “Okay,” and hung up. I didn’t know what else to say.
If Doug had been more than a yes-man, he could have saved the band. All he had to say was, “Come back and let’s talk about it. We will get you a counselor and talk about your problems.” Clearly, what I was going through wasn’t a drinking problem, but a mental problem that was leading to drinking and skipping rehearsal. But instead, he called and fired me and told me not to speak to anyone in the band. That was it. What could I do after that kind of treatment? I had two choices: I could kill myself or I could go to Hawaii with a stripper and get over it. I chose the latter.
I grabbed the first chick I could find, a porn star named Savannah, and took her to Hawaii. She was a gorgeous platinum blonde with soft, perfect curves. Despite the fact that a million guys were jacking off to her movies every day, she was extremely insecure, like a lost little girl. With the band out of my hair, I couldn’t see any reason to stay sober, so we brought all the pills and coke we could carry with us. After staying up for four days straight at the Maui Hilton, Savannah took one pill too many and dropped to the floor convulsing. I called an ambulance and followed her to the hospital. I’d never seen anyone look so beautiful and innocent while lying overdosed in a stretcher.
When she returned to the hotel the next day, we picked up right where we had left off and started partying again. But I was older and for some reason not only could I not get as fucked up as I used to, but I couldn’t recover as quickly. By the time I returned to L.A., I was a mess. I flew to the clinic in Tucson again to dry out. Savannah sent me a different porno picture of herself every day, until the sober police found my stash and busted me. By the time I completed treatment, she was dating Pauly Shore.
Several years later, she asked me to be her date to the Adult Video News porno awards in Las Vegas. I told her I’d go with her, but at the last minute blew her off for another girl. A few days later, they found her dead in her garage. She had disfigured herself in a car crash that day, then gone home, pulled out a Beretta, and shot herself in the head. She had a lot of other problems in her life then, and I knew the reason wasn’t because I had stood her up, but I felt terrible. Where most of the girls in her line of work are just gold diggers, she was never like that. She just wanted somebody to love her.
Savannah was the beginning of my descent into Hollywood Babylon. I hadn’t really hung out on the scene since we all lived together in the Mötley House and ruled the Strip. We thought we were on top of the world, and, though we were far from it, we were much happier in our ignorance. Hollywood ten years later was a different place.
Leaving Sharise and Skylar in our Simi Valley house, I moved in with Rob Lowe, who had a bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills. We had become friends because we were both attending Monday night sobriety meetings for celebrities, which was probably the most clichéd place a pair like us could meet. We were a tabloid dream team: the bad-boy lead singer from Mötley Crüe and a preppy actor sex symbol who had just been busted in a videotaped ménage à trois with a sixteen-year-old girl. Since Rob and his girlfriend had recently broken up for obvious reasons, the two of us went crazy. I’d take him to the Rainbow to have his pick of rock groupies and he’d take me to decadent film parties at huge mansions in the Hollywood Hills and Bel Air. Our place was always full of chicks, just like the Mötley House used to be, except this place was clean. On weekends, I’d get to play with Skylar, which I needed as much as she did because it was my only break from the vortex of abandon that Rob and I were being sucked into.
After six months, Rob’s bachelor life ended when his former girlfriend moved back into the house. By then, I had found a manager, Bruce Bird, who put me in the studio with Tommy Shaw and Jack Blades to write a song for the soundtrack to a Pauly Shore vehicle called Encino Man. That pretty much blew Nikki and Tommy’s t
heory that I didn’t care about music anymore, because they hadn’t even released a thing yet. I kept that insult in mind when I sued them for 25 percent of their future profits and five million in damages. It was the gentlemanly thing to do, my lawyers said.
My attorney also closed a four-million-dollar deal for me at Warner Bros., where Mo Ostin said: “You know what we should do? We should take Vince and that other rock kid we’ve got, David Lee Roth, and put them in a band together.”
“But dad,” his son Michael protested. “They’re both singers.”
I still didn’t really know what to do with myself. I had no home and hadn’t put together a real band yet. So I moved into the plush Bel Age Hotel. They let me park my three Ferraris, Rolls-Royce, and motorcycle there (I told you I was going through a midlife crisis) and gave me full run of their restaurant, the Diaghilev, after hours.
Since I was hanging out drinking all the time anyway, I decided that I might as well do it in my own club. So me and some buddies bought into a snooty Beverly Hills nightspot called Bar One, which was conveniently across the street from the hotel. It had a five-star restaurant on one side of the room and a bar and dance floor on the other. The paparazzi were always lined up outside trolling for celebrities. Pretty soon, I forgot about Mötley Crüe. There was too much at Bar One to distract me.
It was a great place to meet people. I’d have dinner with Sylvester Stallone, or make out with Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty in the private back room. I watched Gone With the Wind for the first time with Shannen at my house, because she was supposed to play the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell, in a movie, though all I could think about was putting my dick up her ass because we were on the couch and the thing was practically lying in there. We ended up as good friends, and I let her husband of five months, Ashley Hamilton, play at the club. After Shannen, I had a few dates with Vanessa Marcil, from General Hospital. We went to see Les Misérables or something. Then I met Christy Turlington at the bar and took her to Las Vegas for the opening of a casino. I happened to run into Tommy Lee there, and we sort of nodded heads and exchanged a smile. At the time, Christy was on my lap and I was teaching her how to play roulette, but nothing ever came of it because I got so fucked up that I passed out and some friends had to carry me up to my room.
As soon as I returned to L.A., I met a Playmate and actress named Pamela Anderson at Bar One. It turned out that her brother had washed some of my sports cars because he ran a car-detailing service. Pam was on Home Improvement at the time, so she took me on our first date to see Tim Allen’s stand-up routine. Pamela was dating a lot of people, and so was I. Since I was shooting a video for a solo song I had recorded, “Can’t Have Your Cake,” I put Pamela in the clip along with Skylar and three girls I was dating at the same time, though none of them knew it. I guess I was trying to make the point that sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too, though I’d soon find out that wasn’t true at all. After a few more dates with me, Pamela moved on to Bret Michaels of Poison and I got started on a Playmate jag.
In the current Playboy issue, the centerfold had listed as one of her ambitions: “Someday I want to marry a rock star.” That same month, Hugh Hefner was having his annual “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party, at which everyone has to show up in sleep attire—lingerie for the girls, bathrobes for the men. I put on a silk robe and boxer shorts and drove to the party in my Testerosa. My mission was straightforward and simple: I walked into the party, found the centerfold, and said, “I’m your rock star.”
She was wearing a white teddy with stockings and looked unbelievable. She looked at me and smiled.
“Come on, we’re wasting time,” I continued. “Let’s get out of here.”
We left the party and went to Bar One with our bedclothes still on. By the end of the night, she was so smashed she was dancing on the pool table in her negligee. I took her back to the hotel and tried to take her up to my room. “No,” she screamed. “I want to drive the Ferrari first.” I sighed and gave her the keys. She pulled out of the hotel, drove onto Sunset, then turned south on San Vicente Boulevard. As she began to turn onto Fountain, she suddenly gunned the gas. I guess she wanted to see how fast the car could accelerate, but you don’t do that when you’re rounding a corner. The car spun a full 360 degrees and slammed into a truck crossing the intersection. The truck knocked the car into a northbound lane on San Vicente, and my centerfold freaked out and tried to speed away. She made it about five feet before she plowed into a van, which completed the devastation of my Ferrari.
She crawled out of the car in her underwear and staggered to the curb. I walked out, looked at the smoke rising from the scrap heap that was once my pride and joy, and started cursing her out, calling her every name I could think of as I stood there with my boxer shorts flapping in the wind. She burst into tears, crying until the police showed up and hauled her off to jail for DUI. She looked ravishing in the leather backseat of the cop car, handcuffed in her lingerie with her blond hair a tangled mess, her face streaked with makeup. Another cop car drove me back to the Bel Age. I changed my clothes, bailed her out, brought her back to the hotel, and finally got laid. We were so bonded by the events of that night that we dated for a little while after that, and I learned that she wasn’t actually the kind of girl who destroyed everything she touched. She just destroyed everything she touched that belonged to me.
Amidst all this chaos, I quickly and painlessly completed my first album, Exposed, at the Record Plant with Steve Stevens of Billy Idol’s band on lead guitar (who had just left a group with Mike Monroe of Hanoi), Vikki Foxx of Enuff Z’Nuff on drums, Dave Marshall on rhythm guitar, and, on bass, Robbie Crane, who used to work sound on porn movies. Eventually, I fired Foxx and hired Randy Castillo, the crazy longhaired rocker who, since coming to my mud-wrestling parties, had made a reputation for himself playing with the Motels and Lita Ford, and, more recently, Tommy had hooked him up with Ozzy Osbourne.
While I was working on some drum tracks with Ron Nevison, we received an unexpected phone call: My manager, Bruce, had collapsed with a brain aneurysm. In our short time together, I had grown to love Bruce like a father. Ron and I walked to a nearby bar, loaded up on drinks while crying on each other’s shoulders, then went to the hospital to visit him. We arrived too late: He was dead. When a mutual friend, Bert Stein, heard what had happened, he offered to help out until I found a new manager. He never stopped managing me and, together, we bonded through more dark days and deaths than we ever thought could be possible in a lifetime.
WHEN I RETURNED TO THE STUDIO, someone brought in a Vivid Video porn star named Janine Lindemulder, who I started dating and later cast in one of my videos. Every model who appeared in one of my solo videos was someone I was dating.
As soon as we finished the album, I brought her and a friend of mine, a Penthouse Pet, to Hawaii to celebrate. One of them brought a video camera and, when we were all fucked up one night, set it up and taped the action. After the trip, I never saw either girl again until I took a trip to Palm Springs months later. They were both there, and dating each other. I had hooked them up. You’d be surprised how often that happens.
I didn’t think anything about the two of them until years later when, after the Pamela and Tommy home video leaked out, my tape was suddenly on the market. I thought that Janine had sold it for money, because I never had a copy. I was pissed at her, but refrained from suing her or calling her out publicly because I didn’t want to draw any more attention to the sex tape. Fortunately, I didn’t do anything, because I later found out through the tape’s distributor that the other girl had leaked it, which made sense when I finally watched the video, because her face had been blurred out.
After Palm Springs, I started checking out a club called Denim and Diamonds, where bikers and models mixed. And I decided that Bar One should have a night like that. We talked Jägermeister into sponsoring the event and bringing in the Jägermeister girls. I had never tasted Jägermeister before, so I had no idea
how potent it was. I don’t remember much of what happened later that night: I somehow walked outside, climbed on my Harley, and rode down the pavement into the door of the club. The place was completely packed, and, as I revved up the bike and cruised onto the dance floor, the wheels slipped out from under me and the bike hit the floor and slid into a row of tables. I landed on my back on the dance floor and passed out.
I woke up sick, embarrassed, and thankful I hadn’t killed anyone, or myself. I don’t think I’d ever been that out of control on liquor before. I lay in bed sweating and vomiting for two days with alcohol poisoning. That ended my midlife crisis. I couldn’t go on behaving like that anymore. I had to grow up and accept the fact that I was an adult with responsibilities, though of course that didn’t mean I still couldn’t have fun.
I moved out of the Bel Age and bought my own home, a huge Gothic-looking house called Sea Manor in Malibu. Not only did I need to get out of Hollywood, but I wanted a place that Skylar would enjoy. Visiting me in Hollywood was never much fun for her. I set up a room in the house for her with a little desk and a kiddie computer. She loved visiting the house, and every morning dragged me out of bed and onto the beach, where we’d make sand castles as tall as her and spend hours telling stories about the kings and queens and rock stars who lived in them.
In the quiet of Malibu, I also put together a new band to promote Exposed. The album had hit number thirteen on the pop charts, so we landed our first tour opening up for Van Halen. It was a humbling experience because I hadn’t opened for anyone in years and because I was touring with a band that had replaced its lead singer and was doing pretty well. Sammy Hagar, who was filling in for David Lee Roth, quickly became a good friend, and we put ourselves on a schedule of downing kamikazes before my show and margaritas before his. He ended up with the short end of the deal because he was always wasted before he hit the stage.