Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  We had labored unnecessarily under a self-imposed concept. It turned out there had been no need. Few missed Peter—and Ace wasn’t one of them. “I don’t want this to get back to Peter, but I’m glad he’s not here,” Ace said one night. “He got me all worked up—I’m having a whole lot more fun now.”

  With Eric back in the band, Ace actually started socializing with all of us again. He liked Eric on all levels and loved playing with him. We had band dinners again and hung out together in Japan and Australia, where we added additional concerts into April 2001. Everyone got along better than ever. And in concert, Ace played the best he had since 1996. The vibe was great—until the last show in Australia on April 13. Ace had a rough show that night, and in some ways he was never the same again.

  The plan was to say farewell in Europe after that, but we had trouble pinning Ace down. He would say yes and then change his mind. Eventually, he dropped completely out of sight. Nobody could get ahold of him, not even his lawyer. Finally he showed up for a meeting to discuss another proposed European farewell, and he was shockingly thin. Over the years he’d had a tendency to blow up and then get skinny again, careening back and forth depending on what he was ingesting at the time. But now he looked like he was going to die. And it was obvious that he was out of it. “My God, Ace, how’d you get so thin?”

  “Yoga,” he slurred.

  The shows never got booked.

  58.

  With the European farewell canceled, I had the time I felt was essential for me to help support Evan through the traumatic upheaval that lay ahead for him. After having it looming in front of me for a year, the time had finally come for me and Pam to divorce.

  The way I see it, we shared equally in all that happened. We chose each other, and from the very start we rarely met the other’s needs or expectations. We chose poorly. Pam was a beautiful woman who was emotionally unavailable to me, which was a familiar dynamic. I was once again drawn to a challenge, seeking validation where it wasn’t going to be given no matter what I did or didn’t do. As for Pam, I know she felt minimized by my fame and success, although I’m sure she had hoped it would have the opposite effect on her. It was all futile and pointless; that was the lesson learned. We had been brought together to create and bring an extraordinary child into the world and then to parent him without compromising him in our divorce or separate lives. We accomplished that admirably, and I will always be grateful to Pam for her commitment in making that our priority.

  Still, I had no idea how painful it would be.

  Pam and I sat at the dining-room table with Evan, who was six, and explained that Mommy and Daddy weren’t going to be together anymore. “We’re still going to be your mommy and daddy, and we still love you and will always be there, but we won’t be living together.”

  He burst into tears.

  I told him that yes, it was horrible, and that yes, Daddy cried, too. I never tried to minimize what he was going through. I tried to acknowledge the pain and share it.

  Strangely, during our separations, Pam and I had been building a house. I’d found a spectacular piece of property in Beverly Hills with unobstructed views of the ocean. By the time all the red tape had been taken care of, plans had been drawn up and approved by the city, bids for the construction decided on, and actual ground broken, our marriage was descending into crisis. But the work was in full swing by that point and was best left to continue. At the time of our divorce, the house looked complete on the outside, but it was just a shell—as incomplete as our relationship.

  As Pam and I began the divorce process, it knocked me off my feet to find that the person I’d seen as my partner now saw me as her enemy. I had faith in Pam because of what she had told me years ago—about not wanting anything if things didn’t work out between us—and since in my mind this wasn’t going to turn into a typical Hollywood scenario, I hired a very civil and reasonable lawyer. But then I found myself sitting in a conference room in a mediation office, facing her and her attorneys and her forensic accountant advisor, feeling like I was having surgery performed on me without anesthesia.

  Finally I said, “There must be a misunderstanding here, because Pam would never go along with what you’re proposing.”

  Pam looked at me and said, “I know exactly what they’re saying. This is business.”

  My jaw dropped.

  My mind raced back to the unsigned prenuptial agreement and Pam’s declaration that where she was from, your word was your bond. Apparently, now she was from Beverly Hills, a place where words and bonds were quickly forgotten. Evan was never an issue. He was my son 100 percent, and I would pay all his costs and expenses through adulthood without hesitation. Additionally, I had offered Pam a $2 million house and told her I would pay her expenses for five years and fund any classes she might want to take to prepare for the future. I didn’t expect her not to want anything, of course. But I was shocked when the mediator asked her what she wanted and she said, “I want the same as he has.”

  What!?

  I had gambled my future because of this dream that I believed in, and she wanted the same as I had? How could she rationalize something like that? An astute attorney later told me, “I’ve never met a woman who thought she got too much.”

  But the law was on her side. To be in a room and have no control over my destiny was a situation I had never been in. I just had to sit there as people sliced pieces off of me.

  At some stage, my lawyer said, “You might have to sell the house.”

  “Absolutely no way,” I said. About that one point I was adamant. The house meant more to me than its monetary value—it was the culmination of all my decades of hard work and my surgically repaired body—in addition to the shoulder work, my knees and hip were wrecked. It represented the freedom I had worked my entire life for.

  “I’ll do whatever I have to,” I said. “That house is mine.”

  I ended up buying Pam a sixty-eight-hundred-square-foot house, sight-unseen, that she chose in a gated community. It was important to me to have Evan nearby to make it easier for him to go back and forth between us. I almost felt guilty about the house that she said was “just okay” until I actually saw it. The place had a tennis court and a pool and was beautiful.

  When it was all settled and I was home one night—alone, without Evan—I collapsed to the floor in my empty house. I was devastated. There was a voice to the pain that came from deep inside—a guttural sound from someplace that you never reach at other times. It happened several times; I would just buckle over and sob, and this sound would come out.

  I felt a sense of failure even though I knew—at least in retrospect—that the marriage had been doomed from the start. We had failed to see that marriage should be the confirmation of a great relationship as opposed to a way to fix the problems of a relationship that wasn’t great to begin with. It should never have happened—though I wouldn’t trade a minute of it because Evan became a part of my life through the relationship.

  I thought back to my own childhood and something my mom used to say: “Nothing bad ever happens.” I hated hearing that back then. But now I understood what she really meant: Everything leads to something else. Evan was a gift from God, and having him come into my life was worth whatever it now cost me in pain—or dollars.

  In fact, the thing that hurt the most was the fear that I had betrayed my son. I had vowed never to hurt him. Yet I couldn’t protect him from this. The most horrific realization was that I wasn’t going to be able to see him every day. That I couldn’t be with him whenever I wanted. Or whenever he wanted.

  In the wake of my divorce, people in the same situation told me that I needed to go out and start dating. You know, “You need to have a life, too.”

  No, I don’t.

  I saw other people go that route, based on one rationale or another, but at the end of the day, I saw it as selfish—it didn’t take into account what was best for their children. My child was going through incredible trauma, and my only concer
n was to make him feel safe. Bringing other people into the equation because I wanted to have company or get laid would be insane. How selfish could you get? The only thing that mattered at that point was Evan. My decisions would have a huge impact on him. I wanted to spend all my time with him, talk with him about whatever was on his mind. I bought a book called When Children Grieve that helped explain how children process and deal with grief and loss. I studied it.

  One afternoon I was sitting outside my house thinking about all of this when one of the guys who had worked on the house came by unexpectedly to fix something. I didn’t know him beyond a nod of “hello” here or there. But he must have known what had happened and seen how distraught I looked, because he came up to me.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m overstepping my bounds,” he said, “but I can see what you’re going through. I know you’re going to think that I’m crazy, and that this won’t be true for you, but I got divorced, and it felt like the world had ended. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just want you to know that I’m happily married now to the most amazing woman and have the most fantastic life now. And you will, too.”

  Just as he predicted, the first thought that went through my head was, You’re crazy. I had no band. I was divorced. I had betrayed my kid.

  What the fuck am I going to do now?

  Through this period of intense pain, I still had few people to talk to or confide in. Divorce for me was something very solitary. Gene was on his own journey with his own way of protecting himself, his own armor. Therapy continued to be a haven for me, a place where I could talk honestly and express the stupidest, craziest thoughts. One of the things that therapy always did for me was to allow me to see that I wasn’t as nuts as I feared I was—that my reactions were normal, or rather, that there was no such thing as “normal” despite appearances to the contrary.

  Perhaps the person who helped me most of all was Michael James Jackson, the producer we had used for Creatures, Lick It Up, and Animalize. He’s very intellectual and well-read and seems to see life in a more multilevel, complex way than most people. He knew I had been an art student and had noticed me sketching all the time during downtime in the studio. One day he said to me, “You need to paint.” I was taken aback. “You need to get some of this out and explore some of it by painting,” he continued.

  The idea resonated with me. Soon Michael gave me some art books to try to inspire me, including a coffee-table book on Mark Rothko.

  Finally I went out and bought some supplies—canvases, brushes, a pallet knife. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I was determined to give it a try. The first time I set things up and started to paint, it was like an out-of-body experience. I watched my hand move without thinking, and when it was done, I had a self-portrait.

  I felt a sense of relief and satisfaction. So I started another one, and another. I suddenly had a need to paint.

  Painting was like stream of consciousness with color. A purging. It allowed me to explore emotions without words. And then, in a sense, I could step back and look in the mirror—to see what was going on in my life or how I was feeling. It was almost like an exorcism. I would exhale and sigh when I finished a canvas; I had a sense of having gotten something out of me.

  Eventually I realized I hadn’t heard that guttural sound in a few days, and then I hadn’t heard it in a few weeks. I licked my wounds and moved forward.

  I started cooking a lot, too. It was important to me that Evan see that he and I could be self-sufficient. Not to mention that I wanted to feed him healthy meals and give him the calm and stability of eating together. I learned to make chicken parmesan and pancakes, I learned to prepare different types of fish and vegetables, I mastered the waffle iron and the muffin tin. My meatballs became things of beauty.

  One of my favorite things to prepare was a Brussels sprouts dish I invented myself. Even people who didn’t like Brussels sprouts—like Evan when he was a child—loved that dish. I cut the sprouts in half and pan-fried them with balsamic vinegar, dried cherries, and prosciutto, then finished them with parmesan cheese and lemon zest.

  I found great pleasure in cooking and serving food—in giving.

  Evan liked to help with the cooking. It was just the two of us in the house most of the time, but cooking together helped make the place feel like a home. A family home. Once when my dad was at the house and Evan and I were cooking and playing, he said, “Don’t you give him too much love?”

  “You can never give a child too much love,” I said. “You can only give them too little love. Love doesn’t make a child weaker, it makes a child stronger.”

  That was an odd one for my dad to hear.

  If I ever heard someone telling Evan not to cry, not to be a baby, anything like that, I made a point of telling Evan the truth that I had discovered: people who hide their emotions are weak.

  You find strength and peace by being open.

  59.

  After my divorce, I might as well have worn a hat that said NO DRAMA on it. That became a mantra. I didn’t want actresses and models; I didn’t want anyone whose sense of self or mood was subject to whether or not she got a part or did well at an audition. I now knew that the drama I had earlier mistaken for fun, exciting, and normal—a basic component of a relationship—was actually tumultuous, counterproductive, and unnecessary. Emotions, yes; drama, no.

  I wasn’t going to waste time, I wasn’t going to compromise myself or portray myself as something I wasn’t. I wasn’t going to second-guess people and try to be what I thought they wanted.

  No drama.

  I knew now that I should expect someone to love me for who I was.

  One night in late 2001, I met Michael James Jackson for dinner at Ago restaurant, on Melrose. A group of women sitting at the next table included Tracy Tweed, whom I had dated, the sister of Gene’s longtime girlfriend, Shannon. We said hello, and I went back to my conversation with Michael. Then another friend of theirs came bounding into the restaurant and over to Tracy’s table. I was absolutely captivated by her. I decided I had to talk to that woman. I was compelled as if by an unseen force.

  If there was ever going to be a moment that proved to me the existence of God—and I do believe there is a God—then this was it. Sure, some people might choose to call it luck. To me, luck is taking advantage of a situation God puts in front of us. The woman’s name was Erin. She was as tall as me and had a great laugh. And she was a practicing attorney.

  I called her the next day and asked her whether we could have dinner—either we could go out or I would cook for her on a night when Evan was with his mother. “If you like seafood, I could make swordfish with Dijon mustard and capers, maybe serve it with some pasta and, oh, I don’t know, maybe broccoli with garlic and lemon and olive oil?”

  She agreed. Apparently, her friends had already given her the green light. They told her it was safe to hang out with me. She went for the swordfish and came over to my house, where we drank wine and ate—and talked for six hours straight. My newfound love of cooking was paying off.

  From the moment Erin and I met, we were totally honest with each other. She knew what I was going through, and I was very clear about my parameters for a relationship. I let her see everything about me. But she was understanding and nurturing, and she wasn’t threatened by who I was or what I’d done. She was extremely bright and was confident in who she was. If anything bothered her, she told me about it; there was zero drama. We didn’t rush into a monogamous relationship, but on all levels, there was definitely a great attraction there.

  Meanwhile, there was a little burst of activity on the KISS front. In February 2002 we were scheduled to play “Rock and Roll All Nite” for the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The Sunday broadcast was supposed to attract something like a billion viewers, so even though it was a lip-sync job, we wanted to rehearse it beforehand on Friday and Saturday. Gene, Eric, and I all arrived as planned on Friday, rehearsed that day, and rehearsed twice
again on Saturday. Ace was still a no-show on Saturday, so we had to call Tommy, who was on vacation with his family in Hawaii. Poor Tommy had to fly in and stand by to fill in, since there was no way to know whether Ace would turn up in time. In the end, Ace did appear at the last minute on Sunday and perform the song with us.

  He was severely testing my low tolerance for drama.

  We’d also been asked to do a private gig in Jamaica about two weeks after the Olympics debacle. A Russian oligarch offered us $1 million to play for about three hundred people at his thirtieth birthday party. Ace wouldn’t do it. He was so paranoid by that stage that he thought the whole thing was a dastardly plot to get him out of the country so Gene, Doc, and I could have him assassinated. That way, we could replace him and not have a problem.

  Replacing him was easier than all that. If Ace didn’t want to go, Tommy could do it. End of story. Again, this was no mystery. Tommy had his own costume already, which was no secret to Ace; Tommy knew every song the band had ever recorded. I had no doubts about Tommy. We wouldn’t have had him suit up all those times if we weren’t confident in him.

  Without demeaning the role of actually being in the band, Tommy just shifted from one position to another. He was already part of the family. And now he took a step to the right—from being next to the band to being in the band. He was more equipped for the task than Ace ever was.

  The gig itself was strange. Everyone who wasn’t a guest had a gun.

  Eric and Tommy opened the door to spontaneity. With them, we could play a song we hadn’t played in ten years. They both had the knowledge and ability to spit out a song from any era of the band.