Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story

by Dave Thompson

  The Furniers made three or four trips back and forth between Detroit and Los Angeles, by which time the faithful Ford Fairlane had long since bitten the dust. Now they journeyed in an imported Ford Anglia, a tiny motor far better suited to the slow streets and short rides of its British homeland than to the wide open spaces of America. Cramped in the back, the kids entertained themselves as best they could; in the front, their parents just prayed for the journey to end. The day they made the journey for the final time, to take up permanent residence in the sunshine, everybody breathed a major sigh of relief.

  They could not have known that their travels were by no means over.

  Mickie, a trained draughtsman and electronic engineer, had already found work alongside brother Lefty at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Ellie took a job waitressing at Lawry’s restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, a fascinating slab of modernist architecture designed by Wayne McAllister (the eye, too, behind the first in the Marriott chain of hotels). Nevertheless, money remained tight, and home became a succession of the cheapest rentals they could find that were in striking distance of both work and school. One day Mickie returned home from a business lunch with Lefty and some associates, astonished at a bill that touched $30 – or, two weeks rent for the Furniers.

  For Vince, the paucity of spending money was simply one more childhood challenge to be overcome with as much ingenuity as he could muster. Which, considering his tenders years, was considerable. “If I needed a quarter to get something I wanted,” he told Spec magazine in September 1974, “I would steal a dollar from my mother’s purse, spend the quarter, and put the change in my sister’s dresser drawer where my mother was sure to find it. I wasn’t so stupid as to spend the whole dollar; I made sure there was money left over so my sister would be incriminated.”

  In Los Angeles as much as in Detroit, much of his money was spent on going to the movies. The golden age of American cinema was still going strong, still holding its own against the threat of television as the number one destination for families, teens or just kids out on their own, looking for a couple of hours’ worth of budget-priced entertainment. It didn’t even matter what was showing; at that age, in those days, a movie was a movie, and Vince devoured everything from the Rodgers & Hammerstein style musicals that lit up the screen in vivid Technicolor, through to the low-budget horror flicks that flickered for a week and were then shunted off to obscurity.

  He recalled those days for Famous Monsters magazine in 1999, how every Saturday one local theatre or another would present a 10a.m.–6p.m. succession of horror movies. Eight hours of thrills for just 30 cents. “We would go to see It Came From Beneath The Sea or It or Them! or It Came from Outer Space or something like that, and I used to just look forward to that so much. I always thought of myself as being a pretty average kid, because… [the theatre] was packed with kids my age. It seemed like whenever there was a full day’s horror bill, every ‘normal’ kid in Detroit was there watching them; I wasn’t the only one. It was great! Going to the movies was a full day. If you came out and it was still daytime, well – you didn’t really go to the movies. Even the local theatre had marble walkways and red columns and these huge Gothic chandeliers – and an usher who would wear one of those little box hats.”

  He was so fortunate, he realised later in life, to be a kid at a time when some of the greatest horror films of all time were emerging. But he was not afraid to look backwards as well. The theatre would often screen the old RKO and Universal classics from the thirties, and Vince drank them in too, filing every creature and creation away in his imagination, ranking the films by how much he loved them.

  Some movies he fell in love with, others scared him half to death and he fell even harder for those. Dracula’s Daughter was one favourite, but Creature From The Black Lagoon was the first one that sent him running out of the theatre in terror, the scene where the creature stumbles upon a hapless camper “and… pretty much takes his face off. I went running out of the theatre.” But of course he went running back in again for the next day’s performance, so he could find out what happened. Another unforgettable thrill was delivered by John Carradine’s The Unearthly: “That creeped me out too, where big bald Tor Johnson had no eyeballs…”

  But another influence was making itself felt on the family life, one that would impact on the adolescent Vince even harder than horror. Throughout their years in Detroit, the Furniers had regarded granddad Thurman’s religious enthusiasms with respect, but distance. They weren’t quite agnostic, but ask whether the family was Protestant or Catholic, and the answer would generally be a long silence.

  Perhaps it was the physical distance that now lay between father and son; perhaps it was simply the search for something in life to hang onto that might raise them above the scrimp and save of everyday life. But shortly after the family arrived in Los Angeles, both of Vince’s parents began attending the nearest branch of the Church of Jesus Christ, embracing the religion with a fervour that saw the entire tenor of their family life change.

  Mickie gave up his three packs a day smoking habit, and removed all traces of alcohol from the house. He stopped swearing. The entire family would be in church every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday and, when Saturday rolled around, the youngest Furniers would be in church again, cleaning it for the following day’s services.

  Like his father before him, Mickie started moving up in the church ranks. He developed an interest in missionary work, out among the Native Americans whose reservations all seemed to have been planted in the most inhospitable corners of the American southwest, and who lived, for the most part, in a state of poverty that would embarrass the Third World. Mickie’s mission took him into one of the most notorious reservations of all, across the state line into Arizona, to the San Carlos Indian Reservation, or Hell’s Forty Acres as it was more commonly and perhaps accurately known.

  Founded in 1871, the San Carlos reservation was home to half a dozen different Apache tribes, two thousand square miles that amounted to the tenth largest reservation in the country. Not all of it was desert; the vast and beautiful Ponderosa Forest is a part of the San Carlos Nation, but of course that brought its own dangers and hardships. There were no gaudy gambling casinos or cut-price smoke shops on the Native American horizon in those days. Families lived so far below the poverty line that an abandoned car was considered a happy home, and as each family inevitably grew, so would the car, extended outward into fresh “rooms” with cardboard, sticks and mud. A good wickiup, as these constructions were called, could withstand most of what nature threw at it, but still the Furniers could scarcely believe their eyes the first time they caught sight of one.

  It was certainly a challenge for anybody minded to try and improve the inhabitants’ lot in life, but Mickie threw himself into his calling. Less than two years after he uprooted his family for a new life in California, he announced that they were moving again.

  They were heading north again, this time to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, close to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ. There, Mickie continued to emulate his father’s rise through the Church hierarchy, while furthering his studies at the church. Then, in 1949, the family returned to Arizona for a time, then back out to California, and then to Arizona one final time, just in time for Vince to enter Junior High School.

  Except he didn’t.

  Mickie had landed a job at the Goodyear Aerospace plant in Phoenix, Arizona. He had found them a home in a nearby trailer park, and every weekend, the family would drive out to the reservation to do whatever they could for the people there. It was following one such visit, the July 4th weekend of 1961, that Vince, hitherto healthy as a horse, began violently throwing up.

  Early thoughts that he had caught the flu were quickly dispelled; now his parents were asking whether he’d maybe been bitten by any one of the myriad poisonous critters that also called the reservation home. He was always grubbing in the dirt with the kids he met there; he could have been stung or bitten by anything from a sco
rpion to a black widow spider, to one of the 18 different species of venomous snake that Arizona is host to.

  The boy shook his head. Nothing like that. Besides, his illness did not follow the course of such a calamity, and neither was there the telltale mark, somewhere on his body, that would suggest such an attack. What he could produce was copious quantities of a foul-smelling green vomit, and that was when his parents knew it was time to seek medical attention. It no longer even mattered that the ensuing medical bill would probably push them into debt for months to come.

  Blood tests confirmed what the examining doctor suspected from the moment he clapped eyes on the boy, and no doubt everybody wondered how an 11-year-old boy could have suffered a burst appendix two days earlier and not been totally incapacitated there and then. Somehow, however, it had happened and now Vince’s entire body was awash with peritonitis. Every internal organ had been affected, his very blood was thick with poison. When Vince’s parents asked for a long-term prognosis, the doctor told them that there probably wasn’t one. The boy maybe had a 10 percent chance of survival. If he was lucky.

  Rushed into surgery, the doctors extracted four and a half quarts of poison from Vince’s system, “enough… to flatten an army”, the boy later bragged, but still he wasn’t out of the woods. Every day when his parents visited, he seemed thinner than before and by the time his ordeal was over, their six-stone son had lost something like one third of his body weight.

  He was physically altered, too. His spine had curved, and when he stood up, the beginnings of a hunchback were plain for all to see. Antibiotics had caused his hair to fall out. He looked as though a good wind would not simply blow him over, it would probably snap him in two. And it would be three months before the hospital would even consider discharging him. But he survived, and his parents’ religious faith grew even firmer every time they looked at their own walking miracle, the boy who came back from the brink.

  Clearly, they marvelled, God had great plans for their son.

  Chapter Two

  See My Lonely Life Unfold

  In spring 1962, still scarred and scrawny from his hospitalisation, 14-year-old Vince Furnier resumed his school career, enrolling at Squaw Peak Junior High on N 34th Street, Phoenix.

  He was still weak. At home, his mother fed him steak and liver to try and build him up, then packed him off to school begging him not to get into a fight. A simple blow to the stomach might just tear him wide open before the doctors had the chance to complete their work; a year on from the initial attack, Vince would return to hospital to be opened up again, this time to remove the scar tissue. The resultant scars reminded him of a shark bite he had seen in a magazine some place, so that’s what he told people it was, a souvenir from his days spent surfing in Los Angeles.

  He was not a shy kid. So many years spent moving house, and the incessant social life that revolved around his church activities ensured that it was easy for Vince to make friends, while eyes and ears that always aimed to stay one step ahead of the crowd saw him readily build a reputation as the class clown. But he could bend himself to study, too; he excelled at art and English, and the teachers seemed to enjoy him.

  “I was a good student, and I did well at school,” Alice wrote in Spec magazine. “I went out of my way to be charming and funny in the classroom. Not wise-guy funny, but nice funny. And I was known as a great diplomat. I could talk my way out of any fight, and I could talk my way out of just about any situation that came up.”

  He was also a peacemaker, defusing difficult situations in class with a well-timed joke or humorous remark, a gift that certainly placed him in the teachers’ good graces – to the point where his extra-curricular entertainment value was often enough to win him a higher grade than his actual class work merited. “Maybe I was lucky, but I enjoyed school. I’m naturally competitive and I like performing, and I always found a way to work those qualities into my everyday routine.”

  Where Vince did differ from his school friends was in his social life, and the fact that he didn’t really have one. His illness played a part in that, of course, but so did his family life. “Being the son of a minister, my whole social life was based around the church and the people who were connected with it. On Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays there were church-related events, and that was my entire social life for years and years.”

  He didn’t even care much about girls, even as he watched his friends begin to take their first hesitant steps towards the opposite sex. He was far more interested in building his model airplanes and watching the Little League baseball side.

  He had moved on to High School by now, enrolling at Camelback High for a couple of weeks before transferring to the newly opened Cortez High, home to the state High School baseball champions. Of course Vince applied for a trial, and although it was no surprise to discover there was no place for him on the team, he later admitted to being crushed by disappointment.

  His sporting ambitions would soon find a fresh outlet, however, and this time it was one at which he would excel.

  High School brought out another natural ability, this time for drawing and painting, a talent that quickly allowed him to cross the unspoken barrier that traditionally exists between first-year freshmen and their elders. Now he was hanging with an art class sophomore, Dennis Dunaway, collaborating on visions that they had just discovered to be mutual. One summer break, he and Dunaway were hired to paint a mural. Hired, for money. “Now we both considered ourselves working artists,” Vince reflected.

  Vince and Dunaway were inseparable. Salvador Dali was a mutual hero, and so was James Bond, still a storybook character in those last years before his adventures hit the big screen. On television, the pair gravitated to the same kind of fare that obsessed them at the movies.

  It was the heyday of John Zacherley’s Shock Theater, a long running movie slot whose eponymous host appeared clad in an omnipresent undertaker’s cloak. His wife, known only as My Dear, and his lab assistant Gasport, would be on camera too, stooging Zacherley through his introduction to that week’s classic horror film, or even joined him in interrupting the movie, cutting away during random scenes to depict the trio in some unearthly situation. Vince and Dennis never missed an episode.

  They were fans, too, of Freddy the Ghoul, broadcasting his own brand of horror-themed slapstick on local Phoenix TV every Saturday afternoon, and aloud, both boys would wonder precisely what qualifications you required to land a job like that. Imagine being paid to host old horror movies on television. “Even today,” Vince continued in that Famous Monsters interview, “that would be a pretty cool job.”

  For now, it was enough to transfer his interpretations of his favourite horror moments into his school work. He got into the Dadaist and Cubist schools of art, he devoured comic books and he studied surrealism, then combined them all into his work. Sometimes, his art teacher would recoil at the sheer macabre nature of the boy’s work, but there was never any questioning his technique or vision, and Vince’s ideas began fermenting further. He would become an artist, not in any one field but across many, taking the myriad themes that his fascinations planted in his mind, and making his living from re-creating them in whatever medium that was to hand. Dunaway was alongside him every step of the journey.

  Like Vince, Dennis Dunaway was a relative newcomer to Phoenix, Arizona. He was born on March 15, 1946, in Cottage Grove, Oregon, back then a tiny farming community to the south of Eugene. He was the eldest of four children, a clean cut kid – “classically coiffed”, he called himself – but he was already something of a hero at Cortez High. The year before Vince arrived, Dunaway was a member of the High School’s legendary “Undefeated” cross country team, and clocking his new friend’s tall, thin frame, he and another runner, John Speer, moved quickly to recruit Vince to the same outfit. With coach Emmet Smith sharing their enthusiasm, Vince was in. As an artist and a sportsman, the missionary’s son was slowly carving out his niche in the world of High School.

  Vince still
speaks proudly of his accomplishments as a long distance runner. One of the first freshmen ever to make Cortez’s varsity crosscountry team, he became a Letterman in September 1962; that is, one of the select band of proven athletic stars who earned the right to wear a sweater with the school’s initial painstakingly hand sewn onto it by a proud parent. Even better, by his senior year, he was sporting no fewer than four stripes on his sweater, and that “meant a lot. The toughest senior guys in school usually had only two stripes, because they generally only lettered in sports during their last two years.”

  Vince was ultimately destined to take the school’s 24-mile marathon record, adding to the accomplishment not only by achieving it in 105 degree heat, but also by being the only runner to complete the race. But home again, he was in the bathroom when the exertion, in the form of heatstroke, finally hit him. He collapsed to the floor, and though he was out cold for just moments, he awoke to find blood everywhere and his nose broken enough that its distinctive hook was now even more pronounced. It was the crowning glory to his athletic career, but it was also very much its last hurrah, too. Another fascination had made its way down the turnpike as Vince, Dunaway and Speer moved through High School, one that would turn the three boys’ heads more thoroughly than any of their other interests.

  Pop music had been a sickly beast for the last few years. Back in 1955, 1956, when Vince was mimicking Elvis in the mirror, rock’n’roll had seemed destined to rule the world forever. But it was a false dawn. Death (Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran), imprisonment (Chuck Berry), shame (Jerry Lee Lewis), alcohol (Gene Vincent), religion (Little Richard) and the draft (Elvis himself) had seen to that.