Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  I knew that Bill had been pressuring them to give me another chance. The Unmasked tour was about to begin, and the last thing they needed was to find a new drummer.

  “Ace, I don’t want to play with the band no more,” I said. “I’m burnt out. I love you, but I can’t be with them anymore. I’m going to get my own band. You should do the same, you’re miserable.”

  “I’m telling you, Cat, I can talk them into it.”

  “Don’t talk them into anything. I don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore.”

  But I had to admit I kind of liked the idea of going to rehearse with them again. I really wanted to get back at them for all the times that they’d put me and my music down. I had learned some new stuff from Chapin and I wanted to shove it down their throats.

  The day of the rehearsal, I arrived at the SIR studio carrying an attaché case and a music stand. I was going to play this out to the max. Instead of the fun-loving, clothes-shedding Catman, they were going to see a new, improved, serious Peter Criss. I set down the attaché case, opened it up, and took out some pieces of sheet music. Then I set up the stand and put the sheets on it.

  Before I left my house, I decided that I wouldn’t show any emotion, any vulnerability to them again. I wouldn’t lose my temper, I wouldn’t scream, I wouldn’t crack jokes. I had never been so serious my whole life, and it really freaked them out. I was extremely locked into myself from the blow. They didn’t know what to make of me.

  “Okay, should we proceed?” I said, and I began to sabotage that rehearsal for spite. I really think that they were sincere about giving me another chance. If I would have played well, I’m sure they would have said, “Let’s go for it again.” They didn’t really want to lose me and all that money that was lined up. Maybe they thought by firing me, they were scaring me straight. I don’t know. But I did know that I hated them even more after they fired me.

  The music stand and the sheet music were props to bust their balls. I couldn’t read music that well yet. I had only been studying for three months. But Chapin had taught me how to play some really hard beats that were jazz-oriented, so I broke them out. They tried to join in but they were lost.

  “Can’t you follow me, you assholes?” I said.

  I’m surprised that they played with me as long as they did. I was expecting them to say, “Hey, you fucking bastard. You want to be crazy, we’re leaving.” But they stayed thereem 0em #888888 inset; padding: would ever for an hour or so, until they were finally fed up and left. At the time it felt like I was throwing my life out the window, but who’s kidding who? It really had been over for a long time already.

  So I was out of the band. We began a series of negotiations, and I wound up retaining my 25 percent interest in the band. It was a really great deal for me, and I imagine it must have driven Gene and Paul crazy to have to share that money with me. Although I was no longer officially in the band, we kept up the pretense that I was still a member and I was listed on Unmasked as the drummer. I remember that Chris also had me come to a big meeting with PolyGram, the company that had acquired Casablanca, where I had to pretend that I was still the drummer for KISS.

  The reality of my departure finally hit me the day that we shot a video for “Shandi,” a song on the new album. When I sat down at that mirror and started applying the makeup, it struck me that it would be the last time that I would be the Catman. Even though I had prayed to get out of that situation, it still hurt. There’s a scene in that video where we’re walking with our heads down and it reminded me of the Beatles during Let It Be. They knew it was over when they were filming that, and so did we. There was a really strange vibe on the set that day. Everyone seemed so down. When we finished, they rushed to the dressing room and took their makeup off in record time. Ace and Paul walked out without even saying good-bye to me. Gene was still in the room when I sat down in front of the mirror.

  As Gene was getting ready to leave, I saw that his bass guitar was propped up against the wall.

  “Hey, Gene, can I have your bass? I’d like to have something to remember the band with,” I said.

  “You really want it?” he said.

  I nodded yes.

  “Yeah, you can have it,” he said softly.

  After he left, I sat alone in front of my mirror. Random thoughts started racing through my head. Where did all the years go? Am I making the right decision? Can I ever make it big again like this? And then I just felt so bad that they had left me sitting here alone, like a piece of dirt. My three brothers in arms. I cried so hard that all my makeup washed off my face. For the last time.

  When the organization finally acknowledged that I was no longer a member of the group, they used the stock excuses: creative differences, desire for a solo career, et cetera. You never read, “We threw Peter out of the band because he was a mad drug addict and he fucked up.” That would come later.

  But at the time, PolyGram was fine with me leaving the group, and they gave me a contract for a solo album. They had also bought out Neil and owned Casablanca, so Marks was able to negotiate a very lucrative new contract for KISS. All this meant that I wasn’t hurting for money. I had no idea how much I was worth, but it was more than $10 million for sure. I remember that Deb and I went out to the Four Seasons with Marks one night and he made the huge mistake of bragging to her about how well-off we were.

  “Your husband is richer than God,” he told her. “You guys will never be broke.” He was drunk.

  This was not the right thing to tell a woman who spent money like she could. I never had the head for business and money management, and Lydia had taken care of our finances since we’d first been together. So I made the mistake of putting a twenty-year-old girl who graduated from the Hugh Hefner School for breakfast” ayl Wayward Women in charge of our fortune. And Deb had graduated with honors. This was a woman who was into Charles Jourdan shoes. I never imagined that there were women paying $2,000 and up for a pair of shoes that consisted of a piece of lace and a heel. Deb introduced me to the world of Rolex and Cartier and Halston couture. I spent a ton of money on a custom-made white lynx coat for her. I would never do that now, because I’m not into hurting animals, but I thought it was cool at the time. I had her wear it to visit my parents in Brooklyn on Christmas Eve one year, and my mother hated it.

  “What are you, movie stars?”

  By then my mother was talking to me again. Well, yelling at me.

  “This is Brooklyn. You got a Mercedes outside, your wife is wearing a white fur coat. What’s happened to you?”

  I began working on Out of Control, my first post-KISS album, even before the announcement had been made that I had left KISS. After years of hearing Glickman and Marks constantly telling me I was out of control, I thought I’d give them a sly shout-out. Stan Penridge, my longtime musical partner, came up to my place at the Claridge House, and we wrote all day. We’d get a bottle of red wine, roll a couple of joints, and go to work. Sometimes we’d write for fifteen hours straight. And the time that we weren’t writing, we’d sing Lennon-McCartney harmonies for the hell of it. It was incredibly liberating to make my kind of music again.

  When we had a bunch of songs, I was ready to record with Vini Poncia again, but something came up and Vini couldn’t do it. He suggested I use a friend of his named David Wolfen, who had worked with Stevie Wonder and Barbra Streisand and had produced Dusty Springfield and Paul Anka. He wasn’t exactly chopped liver.

  The songs were heavier than the stuff I had done on my KISS solo album. It was like going back to my roots and pulling out Nautilus and the Sounds of Soul and adding some British metal to it. I thought the fans would love it.

  We went up to RCA Studios on Forty-eighth Street, where Elvis had recorded a lot of his early stuff. Imagine how excited I was to record in that same big room where Elvis had done his classic tracks. Stan and I put together a great street-sounding band with a Young Rascals–New York sound. They were all white Italian kids, but their harmonies sound
ed soulful. I was so in love with them I was going to take them out on tour.

  David Wolfen had come up with a song for me called “By Myself,” which really was about me starting all over. “For once in my life I got a chance, I’ll take it / I’ve waited so long, and baby this time I can make it by myself / Starting over again.” We were going down that road looking for another “Beth.” Who wouldn’t want another People’s Choice?

  The sessions went well, and it was time to come up with an album cover. Originally I wanted to put my face on the cover, since nobody had seen it all those years in KISS, but Bill and Howard Marks thought it was too soon to expose my face. So I wound up designing a cover that featured a jukebox blowing up and shooting out all these 45s, and one of them was “Out of Control.” I also had an artist draw Deb, and we put her in the lower left-hand side of the frame, running from the exploding jukebox. It had a real pop-art Warholian feel to it, and Deb looked great.

  We could have put an actual photo of Deb naked on the cover and the album wouldn’t have sold. I could have written contemporary versions of “Yesterd simultaneously.

  “Come on, Bill. What did I do wrong?” I asked.

  He got up and closed the door.

  “I don’t want anyone to hear this, this is heavy,” he said. “They blackballed you. The record isn’t going anywhere, and they made sure of that. God forbid you should come out with your first record and it was a hit. They actually threatened to take a hike if your record did well. So the record company buried it.” Out of Control was released in Europe, but you could hardly find it at all in the States.

  By this time I was licking my wounds in my new mansion in Darien, Connecticut. Deb had gotten pregnant in the summer of 1980, and I didn’t want to raise my kid in the city. My mom was thrilled. I was going to settle down and live the suburban dream again. I wanted to move back to Greenwich. Greenwich was filled with artists, producers, directors, all the cool people.

  “Nah, you lived in Greenwich already,” Chris Lendt told me. “You should get something grander. I see you in a big mansion in Darien.”

  Let me tell you something about Darien. Darien was a place where Jewish weren’t allowed. They even made a movie about anti-Semitism in Darien called Gentleman’s Agreement starring Gregory Peck as a journalist who passes as Jewish to experience prejudice firsthand. And if you were black, forget about it. No chance. Darien was the ultimate in Waspiness.

  But Chris found us a beautiful hundred-year-old colonial house with more rooms than I could count and a guesthouse on four acres. It cost plenty, but that was no problem then. We moved in, and a few months later Deb went into labor.

  “I’m ready. Get the car, I’ll just throw on some clothes,” Deb said. I grabbed her suitcase, threw it into the car, closed the door, and ran around and got behind the wheel. And started driving. I was five minutes away from the house when I looked over and realized that I had forgotten Deb. So I raced back and she was standing in front of the house, stomach out to here.

  “Get out of the car,” she barked. “I’m driving.”

  I dropped her off at the hospital and went to park the car. Then it was time to wait. Each minute seemed like an eternity. Deb and I had taken Lamaze courses, so I was in the delivery room, breathing right alongside her. She hadn’t touched a cigarette or done any drugs while she was pregnant, so that helped me get clean too. So I was totally clearheaded when I saw the miracle of that little head pop out. They cut the umbilical cord and handed her over to me. I was thrilled. I had desperately wanted a girl. The nurse was cleaning her while I held her, and we put her in a nice swaddling blanket and put the little pink hat on her. I still have the little bracelet made of dice that spelled out her name. After a while Deb told me she was tired and that I should go home.

  When I got home, I cracked open a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and started calling all these people to tell them that we had a daughter. By the time I got to the fifteenth person on the list, I was ossified.

  “Weee jusssst haaaad a babbbby girrrrlll,” I said, and passed out.

  When I came to, it all hit me. I was a father. This was even breakfast” ayl better than playing the Garden. I had a healthy baby girl with an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous woman. Life was good.

  But having a kid didn’t derail our partying. After a while, someone brought over a gram of coke and we did it and before we knew it we were back to our stupid drug ways. We’d put the kid to bed and break out the blow and champagne. During the week I’d drive in and hang out at the KISS offices. Hey, it was still one-quarter my office, and Bill was managing my solo career. “Here comes the country squire,” people would say when they saw me in the halls. I’d hang around the office for a while, then go out for a martini and have lunch at the Four Seasons or the Palm. Deb would drive in with me and she’d shop and then lunch at the Copacabana. We were both living in a bubble: Rock star/Playmate. We had a part-time nanny and nothing else to do but shop, drink, get high, and throw parties. By then we had converted a dance room into a rec room with a beautiful 1920 nine-foot Medalist pool table, complete with leather pockets. We filled that room with all my gold and platinum albums, a nice wet bar, and mirrored walls.

  I never thought of the guys, I never missed the makeup, I never missed the touring. I felt like I had escaped from some prison.

  We traveled a lot, even when Jenilee was an infant. When she was only a few months old we took her and the nanny to Barbados. One day I went out on a Jet Ski and lost control. It was dragging me all around the ocean. Eventually I felt somebody pull me out of the water and bring me back to shore. When I got the sand out of my eyes and got acclimated, I realized that Paul McCartney had saved me! He and his wife owned a house right around the bend from where we were staying. It turned out that Linda and I had a common friend in Eddy Kramer. The McCartneys were wonderful, down-to-earth people. Paul even did a little tap dance in the sand for Deb.

  I saw a lot of Ace in those days. He lived in Connecticut too, and he’d come over for marathon pool games. Or we’d go fishing. If he didn’t catch something, he’d get bored and pull out an Uzi and shoot the fucking fish. Around that time I met a man who would become my best friend for life, Eddie Mulvihill. We came together in the most unusual way.

  While living in Darien, I found a local YMCA that was like a freaking country club. It had an Olympic-sized pool, beautiful racquetball courts, the works. Ace and I were really into racquetball, so we joined up. We were gung ho at first, but then it got a little boring, although we still played so we could stop at a neighborhood bar. The owner always had coke and he was happy to share it with us so we’d go down to his office, lock the door, and snort away.

  One day Ace showed up at the Y for our game and pulled a huge bag of quaaludes out of his gym bag.

  “I got a great idea. Why don’t we play on ludes?” he asked.

  “Ace, do you know how fast that ball goes? We’re going to be playing in slow motion,” I said.

  He thought it would be great, so I caved and we both took two ludes. We entered the court, started volleying, and in no time the pills starting kicking in. I served the ball and it looked like it was going in slow motion. Boom . . . shing . . . Ace was waiting for the ball and it darted right by him and he swung about three seconds too late. Then the ball rebounded and hit him in the back of the head.

  Ace rubbed his head and picked up the ball. He started bouncing it and the simultaneously.

  “Ace, did you hit the ball?” I slurred.

  “Fuck the ball,” Ace said.

  We were just about to pass out when I rallied.

  “Ace, we’ve got to get up. They’re going to find us in here and revoke our memberships.”

  “You’re right, Cat,” he said.

  Somehow we made it back to the locker room.

  “Let’s take a sauna,” Ace suggested.

  “I’m not going into the sauna on two quaaludes,” I protested. “I’ll die in there.” It was true. Ace used to go into
the sauna straight and he’d conk out from the heat. We’d be in the sauna and he’d pass out. His towel would fall off his body and he’d be naked with his big schlong hanging down. His big balls would be sweating and his mouth would be open. He looked like a giant dead tuna. People would come into the sauna looking like, “What the fuck is that?” and they’d look at me and I’d shrug and they’d storm out of there.

  “Come on, you fuck, let’s get out of here,” I’d say.

  “Throw some more water on the coals,” he’d stutter.

  I’d drag his lifeless body out of the sauna and into the showers and blast him with cold water and he’d wake up.

  One day we went to my bar after the Y at about three o’clock in the afternoon and we sat and drank and snorted until closing time. When it was time to close, the owner locked the front door and me and Ace and a couple of other people who were in the bar kept drinking. Finally we heard a boom and looked over and Ace had passed out cold onto the bar.

  “What do you want me to do with him?” the owner asked.

  “I don’t know—put him in a booth. I’m not driving all the way to Wilton at this hour,” I said.

  All of a sudden, a guy who was sitting at the end of the bar piped up.

  “I’ll take him home,” he volunteered.

  “Who’s this guy?” I asked the owner.

  “That’s Eddie. Eddie Mulvihill. Great guy. Ace will be in good hands,” the owner said.

  “I’ll get your boy home safe and then I’ll come back and let you know he got home okay,” he said.

  Sure enough, he drove Ace back to his house. He rang the doorbell, Ace’s wife Jeannette answered it, and Eddie had Ace over his shoulder.

  “My name is Edward and I’m a friend of Peter’s and they were drinking together and Peter asked me to take Ace home. Where do you want him?”

  “Put him on the couch,” Jeannette shrugged. He dropped Ace on the couch and walked back to the door. ten grand of her own money, ed him

  “Nice meeting you,” he said.