Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  On September 13, my divorce was finalized. Lydia got a lump-sum payment of $1 million. She got the house in Greenwich, all the new furnishings, the stereo, the Mercedes. I left everything behind, even all my personal photos. I knew I was wrong for what I’d done to her, and the least I could do was to let her have everything to help assuage the pain. Little did I know that years later she would cause me so much hurt by publishing a coffee-table book full of the photos and personal items.

  That same month, Bill’s contract with the group was expiring. Marks and Glickman were egging on Gene and Paul to get rid of Bill. Bill had let KISS’s success go to his head and he expanded his business, signing lots of new clients. We were jealous that he was spending a lot of time with his other clients, especially since we were probably the only ones to generate income for him then. I also think that the coke was making him paranoid, so he didn’t want to be around us.

  Marks and Glickman arranged for a showdown with Bill in Fort Wayne. They all flew in along with our lawyer, Paul Marshall. We booked the conference room at the Holiday Inn. We all sat around and listened to a litany of things that Bill was doing poorly. All these Judases like Howard Marks, who Bill brought in, and Paul Marshall, who was originally Bill’s lawyer—everyone was reaming him, and Bill just sat there and took it.

  Of course, Gene and Paul realized that Bill was being hung, so they jumped in and made sure the rope got pulled extra hard. They started in with how much more Bill was making than us, how Bill was going to have to give it up or get out, how Gene and Paul agreed with Marks and Glickman and Marshall. Ace and I were quiet, but I couldn’t keep still any longer.

  “I don’t agree at fucking all,” I piped up. “Maybe some of this is true, but how can all of you forget how we got here in the first place? You forget whose credit card we lived off. Boy, it’s easy to forget now that we’re all sitting here nice and fat and rich.”

  I looked over to Glickman an came to me” ayld Marks.

  “Life is nice, huh, that we made you motherfuckers so wealthy and now you’re telling the guy who started all this which way the door is? If he goes out that door, I’m fucking right behind him because I’ll quit this band. If Bill goes, I go.” This time I really meant it.

  Bill looked at me and smiled. What did I care? I was dying to leave the band. I figured that if I went with him, he’d manage me and get me a band. Regardless, he deserved my loyalty.

  Then Ace said pretty much the same thing. He suggested that we renegotiate some of Bill’s fees and percentages, and Bill agreed to do that.

  Marks and the others had probably planned for this all along, because they opened up a new book and started reeling off proposed changes to Bill’s contract. It was sad because now they were dictating to Bill what his job would be.

  We resumed the tour, and it was torture. Every night, despite my drug abuse, despite my desire to be anywhere else than on that stage, the high point of the show was my drum solo. I’d go crazy, taking out all my frustrations on those skins, and I’d end up hitting a huge Chinese gong. The audiences would go wild. But during the solo, the other three would take a break in a special dressing room constructed under the stage and laugh and make fun of my solo. They wouldn’t acknowledge, “Wow, our drummer is kicking ass.” It was more like, “What the fuck is he doing up there?” Once in a while Ace would compliment me on my solos, but never once did those other two fucks say, “You were really hot tonight.” But why should I expect them to give me a compliment when they never had in the past?

  I was out of control. So I began to sabotage the show. I was wrong. I was an asshole. Cocaine does not allow you to make good decisions. I certainly should never have taken my troubles out on the fans, I know that now. But cocaine is an evil drug. I wouldn’t dream of staying at a Four Seasons hotel now and throwing the TV through the window. I couldn’t fathom picking up a lamp in the room and smashing it into the mirror. When you’re addicted to drugs, you do bad things.

  In retrospect, bringing Deb on tour was a big mistake. By then we were fighting. In the middle of the night you’d hear glass breaking and furniture being overturned. She was a drama queen, so she’d rush out into the hallway half naked and everyone would come out to get a look, of course.

  “He’s going to kill me,” she’d scream, and look for a shoulder to lean on. Usually it was George Sewitt, the tour manager. I started calling him Mr. Shoulder. It was always drama: the Playmate and the Rock Star.

  As far as Gene and Paul were concerned, all they had to do was control Ace’s and my craziness and the band would continue to rake in the money. It was all about control. And in October, Gene and Paul learned, on national television, that Ace and I would no longer be controllable.

  We took a break from the tour to fly to New York to tape The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. Doing shows like this usually intimidated Ace, so he started drinking champagne hours before the show.

  “Hey, Cat, you want a little champagnio?” He had his own name for everything. So we both started drinking water glasses full of bubbly. We emptied a bottle and Ace opened another one.

  Meanwhile, we were putting on our makeup. Paul was in front of his mirror, fluffing up his hair. He must have used at least five cans ; font-weight: normal;s” of Aqua Net, the cheapest hair spray, before every show. I’m convinced that Paul alone is responsible for global warming.

  On the other side of the room, Gene was finishing his makeup and starting to make monster noises. He’d stare at himself in the mirror and Ace and I would look at each other and say, “Gene’s going away.” That’s what we called his transformation.

  In the middle of this madness, Bill came in with a bottle of vodka. So Ace started gulping vodka along with the champagne. You can’t mix vodka and champagne. By the time we walked out on that set, we were wobbly as hell.

  But we loved Tom Snyder. We felt like this was the ultimate—he was even cooler than Carson. So he started to ask us questions, and Ace all of a sudden picked up Tom’s teddy bear that he kept on the set and started customizing it with his wristbands.

  “What are you doing to that teddy bear?” Tom asked.

  “It’s a space bear now!” Ace proclaimed.

  Tom was astonished that Ace was so lively: His producer had told him that he’d be lucky to get Ace to open his even mouth once. But Ace was drunk off his ass and he was hilarious, and Gene was getting more and more pissed off. At one point Tom asked us who our audience was, and Paul answered that he once looked out his hotel window and saw parents with kids and twenty-year-olds and older people, all in line for our show.

  “And if you saw our show in Bombay, you’d see cows in line too,” Ace cracked.

  The more Ace and I cut up, the more Gene was fuming. Every time Ace mentioned drugs, Gene quickly cut in, “He’s kidding.” Paul seemed really pissed off too.

  When Tom asked me what my hobbies were, I said that I had a gun collection.

  “Toy guns,” Gene interjected.

  “No, I collect guns. I shoot them at a range, I’d never shoot an animal,” I said.

  Then I said that gangsters fascinated me, and if I could go back in time I’d love to be Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson.

  “In the movies,” Gene cut in. He was so concerned about one of us saying something real, something he couldn’t control.

  Even Tom picked up on it. He turned to Gene.

  “So you’re the guy who keeps it all straight?”

  “He’s the mother,” I said.

  “He’s the mother superior,” Ace added, and we all cracked up. Except for Gene and Paul, who were fuming.

  “Everybody’s got a fantasy and we’re all good guys. You know what I mean?” Gene had to have the last word.

  “Tell me what you were doing at four this morning,” Tom suddenly asked Ace.

  “No. I don’t want to be arrested,” he said, and we all cracked up. Except for Gene and Paul, of course.

  For the first time in KISStory, Ace and I had hijacked an
interview from Gene and Paul, and the result was hilarious. When the show was over, Tom came back to our dressing room, but Ace had passed out on the couch.

  “Great show, guys,” he said. “Everybody on the staff is still laughing.” He shook our hands. “And tell Ace when he wakes up that I love him. He was great.”

  Maybe the Tom Snyder appearance em with Lydia wasd ever boldened me, I don’t know. But I certainly wasn’t going to take the same shit I had taken for years from Gene and Paul. On December 8 in Shreveport, Paul humiliated me in front of the audience in the same way he had done many times before. That night, in front of a packed house, Paul turned toward me in the middle of a song and he lifted his arm in an exaggerated gesture to tell me to slow the tempo down. What that says to everybody in the arena is that I’m the one fucking up the band.

  He may have had a point. My coke dealer was at the show that night, and we were doing blow in my room before the show. So maybe he was right. I was a little edgy and probably playing a little too fast. But his exaggerated gesture was a slap in the face. And now he was waving with both hands, gesturing to slow it down.

  “You want it slow, you’ll get it slow, motherfucker,” I said to myself, and I slowed the song down to a crawl. When I started slowing real down, he turned around again and faced me and gestured wildly with both arms: “Up, up, up.”

  I’m like, “Make up your motherfucking mind!” People in the audience could hear me screaming that at him. I just stopped playing. I didn’t care anymore, and Paul said, “We’re out of here, good night.” We went back in the room and yelled back and forth for a few minutes and then I think we went back out and did two numbers and left without a real encore. I was finished. Ace suggested we end the tour and go home. I refused to commit to any more shows until I talked to my lawyer. Then I told Paul that if he ever did that again, I would throw a drumsticknd stormed off

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It should have been a tip-off, but I was too stoned on coke to realize it. Along with two hundred other guests, I was waiting for Deb to come to L’Orange, one of the most exclusive and expensive restaurants in L.A., so we could make our wedding vows and then party all night. I started getting nervous when she was half an hour late.

  “Where the fuck is she?” I mumbled to Neil Bogart. “Maybe she’s not gonna come.”

  This conversation was taking place in the bathroom.

  “Here, this will help you out,” Neil said, and passed me a vial of coke.

  That conversation was repeated with Larry Harris, another Casablanca executive, and a few of my other friends. Each time I got the consolation prize of a vial. And each time I had to chase that electric feeling with a nice scotch.

  After two hours, Deb finally showed up. By then I was pie-eyed, but so was she. Her pupils were totally dilated and she was half in the bag.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was with Eileen back at the bungalow,” she said. I had rented a nice bungalow for us at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  “We opened a bottle of champagne and we foundI was so in love with Debor2">I wasn’t going to let a little tardiness spoil my big day. We had gone all-out for this wedding. Chris Lendt, who loved to do stuff like this, made all the arrangements, including getting a custom-made cake from one of the best patisseries in town. We began the festivities with a black-tie prewedding dinner for two hundred people at Regine’s in New York City. Once we got to L.A., I passed on a bachelor party and instead had a dinner a few nights before the wedding at Chasen’s, the legendary Hollywood restaurant. Chasen’s was my ultimate spot, because Humphrey Bogart used to be a regular there. At one point in the evening I decided to do my Fred Astaire impression, so I took off my jacket and leaped up onto the table and danced. The food went everywhere, but I didn’t care. I was living my Hollywood dream.

  The wedding itself was marred by an ugly incident involving my parents. I had seated my parents at a prime table in the front of the room. Deb and I were up on the dais. Between the salad and the main course, Deb’s mother and her aunt, who had married a very prominent Beverly Hills dentist to the stars, came up and sat down with us. They were both pretty bombed and just stayed there drinking and bullshitting. Somehow this bothered my mother.

  “How the fuck can they go sit up there and we can’t?” she fumed to my father.

  I could see that she was upset, so I went over to their table.

  “What’s the matter, Ma?”

  “This is bullshit. We’re leaving,” she said.

  “Where are you going?” I was in shock.

  I’d done everything to make my parents feel proud and special. I had put them up in the Beverly Hills Hotel in a nice suite. I wanted my folks to have fun, but fancy-schmantzy places like L’Orange made my mom nervous. She had bad teeth, so she always covered her mouth when she talked to “important” people. She and my dad were simple Brooklyn people. They felt out of place in this glitzy L.A. world.

  “We’re leaving. You’re not going to insult me like this. Come on, Joe,” she said, and got up. My father and grandfather and his wife sheepishly followed her out. My mother didn’t talk to me for a year after that incident.

  This was probably my mother’s way of not approving of the marriage. God knows, many of the people closest to me were horrified that I was marrying Deb. I should have realized that our relationship was incendiary from the start. We fought like cats and dogs. She would pull stunts like hanging naked from the balcony of my suite at L’Ermitage, drunk and coked out of her mind. I told my dad that story. “What are you getting into? A naked woman hanging from a balcony? What’s going to happen in the future?” he warned.

  But pussy is like heroin. I couldn’t stop. And the makeup sex was extremely hot.

  The more I found out about Deb’s abusive childhood, the more I should have understood. Bill Aucoin used to say to me, “The whole picture is right in front of you. Look at her family. This isn’t Lydia, this is a whole different animal.” Sean was just as dramatic. “Peter, she is a cancer that is going to kill you.”

  “Yeah, but what a wonderful way to go,” I’d smile.

  Gene and Paul and Ace all attended my breakfast” aylwedding. But when it was time to go back into the studio to record the next KISS album, Unmasked, I was absent. I just had no desire to play with them. I was tired of the makeup, tired of playing the same old fucking songs. On top of that, now they were actually telling me how to play the songs. They brought in Anton Fig to drum again. The group was so fractured by then that Ace wouldn’t let Gene play on his songs. He played the bass himself.

  Now that my problem couldn’t be contained, it became an issue for the organization. Peter needed help. Where had they been five years earlier? Paul Marshall sent me to see a Dr. Feelgood, a psychiatrist whom his wife was seeing. All I got out of these visits was quaaludes, Valium, chloral hydrate, and Seconal. Not quite a recipe for the road to Wellville.

  I did take a first step toward confronting my problem when I was on my honeymoon in Rio. One day I said to Deb, “Maybe they’re right. I was a fucking jerk that last tour. I should get off this shit and straighten up and go back and give those guys another try.” So I stopped doing blow and I cut way back on the pills. I even started taking drum lessons with Jim Chapin, Harry Chapin’s dad. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe things could work out.

  A few weeks after I got back from my honeymoon, I got a call to come to the office because the guys had something important to discuss. I got there and the whole fourteenth floor was empty. It was like a ghost town. That was odd: It was usually a madhouse up there. I walked past the vacant desks and looked into Bill’s office, and it was empty. I got to our conference room, which had a nice bar and a huge round table and all our gold records on the walls. There they were.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “Ah, this is between us,” one of them said.

  They cut to the chase. They didn’t want me in the band anymore. I was too out
of control. I had lost my chops.

  “So you’re firing me?” Here I was about to tell them that I had cleaned up. I’d been straight for a month. I was taking lessons. I was really motivated. It’s not easy for Mr. Tough Guy to confess his feelings, but I was about to eat crow and ask to come back to the band.

  “Yup,” they said.

  “Well, I fucking quit!” I yelled. Now I was really hurt. I looked over at Ace, and he couldn’t look me in the face. Paul and Gene actually looked like they were gloating. I was furious. They got up to leave, and Ace was the last to exit.

  “Hey, Cat, I’m not happy about this, man, but you were out of control,” Ace said. This was the pot calling the kettle black.

  “I’m not crazy now,” I said.

  “I get it,” he said, and left.

  I was so stunned I couldn’t move. Then I just broke down and cried.

  “Where the fuck is Bill?” I said out loud. He was the best man at my wedding. I had saved his ass when he was getting canned. Where was Sean? If anyone loved me and eased any blows, it was them. Now, when I needed them, they weren’t here, and I hated them. They had betrayed me.

  I went straight home to the Claridge and I dialed my dealer’s number.

  “Bring me a couple of grams,” I said.

  Deb looked at me like “Oh, no!”

  I hung up, cracked op a picture of my daughterin” aylen a nice bottle of scotch, poured a drink, drained it, and poured another. I was right back in it.

  “Hey, you wrote ‘Beth,’ you could get another band together,” Deb said, trying to cheer me up. “You’re still a star, it shouldn’t be difficult.” She was clueless how hard it was to make it to the top of the ladder. But I knew. With each sip and each snort, I felt my world collapsing around me. Then I just started crying again. I had never felt so hurt in my whole life.

  A few weeks after that, Ace came by my penthouse.

  “Cat, I really can’t go on without you, it’s going to be a nightmare with these two guys,” he began. “Look, they’re willing to give you another rehearsal. If it goes great, you’re back in the band.”