Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  “You know, Deb, I don’t know. I think I’m going to try and see what happens with me and Lydia.”

  “I understand,” she said. “I love you but I’m not in love with you like I’m sure Lydia is. I’ve had the greatest four months of my life with you, but if you don’t come back, I get it.”

  It was time to leave my mansion. I had ordered two limos, and we came to a fork in the road off Beverly Hills Drive. I was going one way, and Deb was going the other. I looked out the window at her and she turned back and looked at me. I threw her a kiss, she waved back, the cars split away, and I sat back and thought, Oh, my God, I can’t believe I’m losing the most beautiful woman in the world.

  So I went back to Connecticut and I tried, but I just couldn’t get Deb off my mind. Even our dream house in Greenwich didn’t look as good to me now as when we had bought it. Lydia and I fell into our old routine and started doing a lot of blow again, and eventually we fucked, but I think she could tell I wasn’t into it.

  On September 18, record-industry history was made when all four of our solo albums were released on the same day. They were a mixed bag for sure. My album reflected my musical tastes—Motown-inspired R&B with horns and black backup singers. Paul’s was more the English Zeppelin sound that he liked. Ace’s was his typical Hendrixy thing, and Gene’s was the most bizarre, almost a pop album. He later wrote that his intent was to piss off KISS fans and push it in their faces that their musical tastes were one-dimensional and his weren’t. That’s how crazy we all were then.

  To placate our egos, Neil had shipped each of the albums platinum. But collectively the albums sold what one KISS album would have, so the resulting returns destroyed Casablanca’s bottom line. Two years later, Neil was forced to sell the company.

  On the heels of that disaster, our movie finally aired on October 28, 1978. We were incensed that the movie ads all featured Gene with the rest of us in the background. That was just a symptom of the state of the band. Five years in, we were blowing things out of proportion. We were fried and miserable from all the albums, all the touring, all the things we had been through.

  All of us were ultimately embarrassed by doing that movie. The reviews were uniformly horrible. The L.A. Times called it “a four-star abomination. A five-minute idea for a cartoon, disguised as a two-hour movie.” We actually got a lot of hate mail from fans after that movie. Maybe my feelings about the movie weren’t so crazy after all?

  What had happened to the tough New York City kids who had clawed their way to the top? Now we were on the cover of 16 magazine. Gene had totally gone Hollywood. He was dating Cher, and then he dumped her for her best friend, Diana Ross. Paul was still searching for Paul, so he was just buying bigger and bigger apartments in New York and decorating them.

  I just didn’t want to do this anymore. We had become a fucking Barbie doll–selling lowlife piece-of-shit merchandise band. We didn’t even play our instruments well anymore. We’d just go out there with our makeup on and act like fucking clowns and rake in the money. Everything became money, money, money. Who doesn’t want to get rich? Especially when you get there making music, doing something that’s fun. But the fun was gone. Now it was just putting out product and touring all the time and not even being able to en with Lydia wasd ever joy the fortune we were making.

  A lot of this was Bill’s fault. He owned the merchandising company that handled all our products, and he was getting 50 percent of the proceeds from the merch. It’s one thing to sell T-shirts: Every rock band did that. But lunch boxes? Dolls? It always amazed me that our songs were so filthy, all about sex and partying, and now we were selling stuff to children. Even Paul couldn’t understand why we were selling kids’ lunch boxes. He had a lot of disagreements with Gene over the merch. Bill and Gene would get together and the next thing we knew we were selling KISS My Ass toilet paper. People weren’t coming to see our music anymore. It was more like a trip to see some Disney act.

  Between 1977 and 1979, we grossed over $100 million from the merch alone. No wonder Bill was able to get an apartment in the Olympic Towers. We had two whole floors in our office building on Madison Avenue, one floor devoted to cranking out KISS product. I’m sure some people would say, “You’re a fucking asshole. I would cut my balls off to be a comic-book hero.” But I really wanted to stay true to my rock ’n’ roll rebel roots. I always thought of us as the Stones or the Beatles. Not the Monkees.

  As confused as I was by the band’s direction, I was equally confused in my personal life. Deb had left L.A. to go to Paris to do some modeling. I called her in Paris and she said she missed me, but I could tell that she wanted to just get off the phone and that bothered the hell out of me. One day I was hanging out with Lydia in our house and we were doing coke and ludes and I finally came clean about my affair with Deb. I don’t think this was a revelation to Lydia. She knew.

  The real revelation was about to be mine.

  “I’ve been having an affair,” Lydia admitted.

  I was shocked. Apparently Sean had introduced her to a guy named Mickey, the bass player of a band called Angel, which had a contract with Casablanca. Sean had let them conduct their affair over at his apartment.

  I wanted to kill Sean. This was his way of getting back at me because he didn’t like Deb and he was close to Lydia. But to set her up with a guy in a shit band like Angel? I could understand if he was in Zeppelin, but she was fucking someone beneath my status to make me look like a jerk.

  A few days later I called Deb and asked her if she would like me to come out to Paris. She thought that would be great. I didn’t know it then, but Deb had been fucking some rich guy from Germany whom her aunt had set her up with. He had just dumped her and bought her an expensive Rolex as a good-bye present. Schmuck that I was, I went to Tiffany’s with Chris Lendt and bought her a nice wedding ring that she could wear so we would feel married.

  Chris was not so keen to see me go to Paris. But when I was insistent, he decided to go with me. I was happy to have him watch over me: I really liked Chris. Casablanca had an arrangement with a Parisian record label, and whenever we went over there they had the local guy hook us up with drugs. I guess the guy confused blow with heroin, and instead of getting a package with some blow, they delivered some pure China White from Marseilles to my hotel. How cool was this going to be, doing China White in Paris? I never expected to do heroin again, but I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to do some legendary China White direct from Marseilles! Being the lunatic that I am, instead of doing matchsticks I started snorting whole lines. All of a sudden I got incredibly high and incredibly sick at the same time. I threw up a number of times, and then I delusionald ever started scratching all over.

  Deb came back from her photo shoot.

  “What the fuck are you high on?” she asked.

  “Blow,” I lied.

  “You’re not acting like you’re on blow. You’re nodding out.”

  “I got a little heroin,” I admitted.

  “I hate that shit. Please dump it down the toilet.”

  Hey, I paid five grand for that shit. It wasn’t going down the toilet. I promised to only do a few hits every now and then. Bullshit. I did it every chance I had. It was the greatest high ever.

  We had a great time in Paris. Deb was working most days and I had nothing to do so I just roamed the streets, stopping at small cafés to drink wine. At night we’d party and hit the discos. On her days off, we’d go shopping for clothes.

  Chris left to go back after a couple of weeks and we moved from the hotel to an apartment that the modeling agency had. It was in a pretty seedy neighborhood. Next thing I knew, I was running around with underground Parisian guys. Between these guys that I met at a drug bar and the two musicians who lived above us, I started doing dope with all these wild guys. We’d drink brandy and snort heroin and then go out to seedy jazz clubs and listen to music.

  When Deb’s job finished, we flew back to New York. I had called Gene from Paris and asked him if I c
ould crash at his Central Park pad since he was in L.A. with Cher. Gene said, “Abso-fucking-lutely. Stay as long as you want.” Despite being an egotistic Machiavellian control freak and sex maniac, he really could be nice when he wanted to. At one point of my life I really loved Gene, a lot more than I ever loved Paul or Ace. Underneath everything, I really felt then that Gene had a heart, and that one thing I could always count on was Gene telling me the truth right to my face. Little did I know.

  So we moved into his penthouse that overlooked the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. One night Stan and his wife came over to visit. We were all snorting and drinking and carrying on, of course, and while I was talking to Stan, Deb and his wife were watching Gene’s huge Advent projection-screen TV. There was a movie playing and Warren Beatty was up on the screen and I overhead Deb telling Stan’s wife that she had slept with Beatty at Hefner’s mansion. I was told that Beatty had a cannon between his legs—that was one of the reasons why every woman in L.A. wanted to sleep with him. I looked over and Deb had her hands about a foot apart and it was obvious she was demonstrating how hung Warren was.

  I went over to my bag, picked up my trusty nickel-plated .38, and walked back over to them.

  “That was your boyfriend?” I asked, nodding toward Beatty on the screen.

  “No, no,” Deb lied.

  “I heard what the fuck you said.”

  I fired the gun and the bullet went right through Beatty’s head on the screen, through the screen, and into the wall. Now there was a huge tear in Gene’s projection screen. I bought a brand-new screen and had the office send people over to switch them out, plus I had a guy come over, remove the bullet, and patch up the wall.

  On January 3, 1979, my attorney served Lydia with divorce papers. By then Deb and I had moved into an apartment in the Claridge House. We had just begun to decorate this empty apartment when Deb started missing home. She came to me” ayl hadn’t been home since Paris and she wanted to see her parents. So she left me with all the clothes I had bought her in Paris and went home. I was in that empty apartment all alone, doing coke, and I began to get paranoid. It seemed that the calls from Deb were getting fewer and farther between.

  One night I got really wasted and I called Lydia. “Can I come up?” I asked. She said, “Sure.” I was mad that I hadn’t heard from Deb for a couple of weeks. So I drove to Greenwich and one thing led to another and we started having sex. She gave me a blowjob like she never had in the past. Someone once told me, “Lend your wife out and you’ll get her back better.” There must be something to this, because Lydia was not the same woman in bed.

  I spent the night there and I started thinking, You’re gonna give this up? But I was still crazy about Deb. When I got back to the city, I tracked her down at the Playboy Mansion and then I found out that she was staying at Dave Mason’s mother’s house. When I met Deb, she had just broken up with Dave Mason. In fact, he had written his hit song “We Just Disagree” about her. She told me that she was madly in love with him.

  I put two and two together and realized that she was seeing him again. Finally she called me and asked me to send her stuff back to L.A.

  “Why, you’re not coming back?” I asked.

  She hedged. “Yeah, I’m coming back, but I’d like to have my clothes while I’m out here.”

  One night I got whacked out and I called her.

  “I’m gonna send your clothes back—my way. I’m going to throw them out the fucking window. They should make quite a splash falling twenty-five floors, especially all those nice shoes you got in Paris.”

  She went ballistic. “Don’t you fucking dare do that!”

  “You want to get this stuff, you get on a plane and come here and get your stuff. I’ll send you a ticket.” She flew back and we patched things up, but it was never easy.

  While all this was going on, KISS was in the studio making another album. I had told Bill that I would quit the band unless Vini Poncia produced the next KISS album. I was excited to work with Vini again, but Paul immediately went to work on Vini. They started hanging out, Vini moved into Paul’s apartment, and Paul poisoned Vini against me.

  Vini had snorted up a storm of blow while I was doing my solo album, but now he claimed to have turned into a saint. “I don’t do drugs,” he said. I began to hate him because he had turned against me. Or maybe the coke just made me think he had turned against me. I felt that I had fought to get Vini this gig, and now I was getting thrown under the bus.

  I hardly contributed to Dynasty at all. We recorded “Dirty Living,” a song that Stan and I wrote about the drug scene in New York in the seventies, and that was the only cut I played drums on. They got Anton Fig to play on the rest of the album, but I didn’t feel betrayed; I was happy they got him. I didn’t really want to play with them anymore.

  The feeling was mutual. Paul started auditioning other drummers to take my place on the tour. Kenny Aronoff came down and played with them, and he later told me that it was maddening to work with Gene and Paul. Carmine Appice, Tico Torres: They jammed with a few really great drummers, but no one could take their Machiavellian tactics.

  The e exchanged pleasantries and would ever cruelest blow of all was Paul’s attempt to write a contemporary hit for Dynasty. He came up with “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” KISS’s first out-and-out disco track. What little credibility we had left was flushed down the toilet when we did that. Ace was totally incensed. “What’s with this fucking disco shit?” he asked me. “We’re a fucking heavy metal band. Why, because it’s in now, we gotta do disco?” That song has since been cited by MTV and VH1 as the worst thing that KISS ever did.

  The Dynasty tour began in June and ended in December of 1979. By then the cancer of our four solo albums had even infected the song selection for our concerts. I went ballistic when we started incorporating songs from the solo albums and not one of mine was picked. I threw a shit fit, so they tried to work out “Tossing and Turning,” but can you imagine musicians like Gene and Paul trying to play that? They had no funk, no soul. We actually tried it live twice and it was horrible. They put no effort into it at all.

  Ticket sales for the tour started very soft. We had new costumes now, studded with rhinestones. We were a caricature of ourselves. Someone should have taken us in the back like dogs, made us get on our knees, and put a bullet in each of our heads. We had gone totally Vegas. I looked like a trapeze star in my fucking new outfit. Gene began to believe his own hype. He gave an interview and said, “KISS has become rock ’n’ roll circus entertainment for the whole family. Rock ’n’ roll tried to create a generation gap, and KISS is bridging it. If the parents could swallow KISS, every other rock ’n’ roll band will be much more palatable. The rules of rock ’n’ roll no longer work with us, we’re a band unto itself.” He was out of his mind.

  Hearing shit like that just solidified my resolve to escape the madness. I was burnt out on KISS. I was sick of playing disco songs and selling Barbie dolls. Between the drugs and my marriage dissolving, I was a wreck. Ace was almost as bad with his drinking. Gene and Paul’s egos were cascading out of control. I don’t know how I made it through some of the shows on that tour with all the blow I was doing. I really believe that I had two angels looking over me, one on each arm—Double Deckers, I called them—to help me make it through the night. I’d be the first to admit that I played like shit that tour. How couldn’t I? I play from the heart. If I can’t pick up those sticks and play with feeling, then I can’t play with you. I didn’t have any feelings then, I was so anesthetized with coke. But even if I hadn’t been high, I still didn’t want to be involved with them anymore and my playing would have suffered.

  It was no secret that both Ace and I wanted to go out and have solo careers at that point. That was one end product of the solo KISS albums. Winning that People’s Choice award for “Beth” had definitely blown my head up a bit. I was delusional behind the coke and thought that I could start emulating Sinatra. Hey, he was a much better role mode
l than some disco diva!

  We were spending money like water on the show. We had five elevators onstage, the highest riser I’d ever used, fog machines, the works. Paul shot a laser beam out of his eye. My drum riser had the capacity to turn in all directions. Ace’s guitar would emit blasts that would shoot down elevated speaker cabinets. Gene was able to fly around the stage. We had really begun to believe our own hype.

  That balloon was punctured when shows started getting canceled ; font-weight: normal;s” due to poor ticket sales. When all these high-tech tricks began to break down, I saw it as a metaphor for the state of the band. In Lakeland, the first night, my riser wouldn’t go back so Gene, Paul, and Ace had to push it back.

  One night Gene’s flying contraption broke and he started being dragged back and forth along the stage like a rag doll. We all laughed so hard we pissed our pants. Gene was trying to stay in character and made his growling monster noises and flicked his tongue in and out, but it was clear that he was a puppet on a string. One night he got stuck way up in the air and we started calling him Mary Poppins.

  By the middle of July, Marks and Glickman called an emergency meeting of the band and management. We met at Carl’s office in Cleveland on a day off during the tour. Carl opened the meeting by informing us that we were losing a ton of money on the tour. To counter that, a plan was proposed that there be two shows. The A show would play in all the major markets. But a scaled-down version of the show, the B show, would play the secondary markets. This way we could save money. But the band thought that the idea of a B show was heresy. Bill backed us—he didn’t want to dilute the show at all.

  We compromised on costs by cutting Ace’s champagne. By then he was traveling with his own custom-made steel traveling bar, stocked with Taittinger. Ace agreed to pick up his own bar tab. But we wouldn’t think of changing to regular rooms instead of suites. And we wouldn’t touch the twenty-four-hour limos we all had. We were spoiled rotten.