by Shep Gordon
I loved the house. I couldn’t believe I was standing in it, much less thinking of owning it. We asked if we could stay the night in one of the rooms. The people there were very nice. They told us the story of the house. It was called the Brown Mansion and was built in the early 1900s. Brown’s wife smoked cigarettes, which in those days women were not supposed to do. He finished the entire huge attic for her as a smoking room. In his older days Brown became very eccentric. There was a gun tower on the property, and he would stand up there shooting at airplanes that flew over. They also told us that Jay Anson had recently stayed there and written his book The Amityville Horror in the house. There was talk of the house being haunted by both Mr. and Mrs. Brown.
I bought the house. We didn’t go there for the first few months because I’d spent every dime on it and didn’t even have enough money left to buy a car. When I did get a car we drove up every weekend, Winona, Mia, and me. I was so proud of myself. When I drove onto the property I felt like a king. I told my parents that I’d bought a house upstate and they had to come see it.
“Where is it?”
“Copake.”
“You’re kidding. Is it near the lake?”
“It’s on the lake.”
“We met on the lake!”
My mother was in a rowboat, my father was on the shore, he saw her and fell in love, and they never separated from that moment. I had never heard that story before. They got to spend a lot of time at the house.
I don’t know if the house was haunted, but strange things definitely happened there. My mother, who was the straightest, most nonspiritual person you’d ever meet in your life, had her friends up there one night, and the card table they were playing on started moving. She never went back. Later, when Alice and Joe Perry got out of rehab at the same time and wanted to write some songs together, I let them use the house. They said that doors closed on their own, there were loud rumbling sounds from the basement even though they were alone, and things kept disappearing. They ran out after a night or two and never went back, either.
8
AFTER THE YEARS OF HARD WORK AND STARVING, the band was seemingly poised to take over the world. Instead, they were slowly falling apart. They scattered themselves around the Galesi mansion and lived separate lives. Alice spent much of his time holed up in the master bedroom drinking Bud and watching TV, while the rest of them complained more and more about falling into his shadow. When we brought in a mobile unit to lay down the basic tracks for Billion Dollar Babies, Bob Ezrin also decided to bring in a session guitarist to play Glen’s parts.
I understood why it upset the rest of the guys that Alice had become the star. They had all gotten into rock because they wanted to be stars. But they couldn’t all be the star. We had agreed that had to be Alice. We were on track to our goal of becoming millionaires. I couldn’t let their bruised egos derail us.
Alice was now an international celebrity, and the guilt by association was working both ways: other celebrities wanted to be seen with him as much as we wanted him to be seen with them. In the art world of the early 1970s no one was cooler than Andy Warhol, or more interested in the workings of fame and celebrity. When Alice and Andy were photographed together at New York clubs like Studio 54 or Max’s Kansas City, it made Alice look more acceptable to the art crowd, and Andy look cool to the rock fans. (For one of Alice’s birthdays, Warhol gave him a silk screen of an electric chair—the same electric chair Alice sat in when he was “executed” in his show.)
For the same reason, we really wanted to get Alice seen with Salvador Dali. Dali’s work had inspired Alice and Dennis when they were still students. Dali was a god to Alice, and Alice was as close to a Dali as the rock world had. Joe had much more to do with hooking them up than I did. He found out that Dali had a manager in Spain, and set up a meeting at the King Cole bar of the St. Regis hotel on Central Park South, where Dali and his wife, Gala, lived.
Gala swept into the room first. She was everything you’d expect Salvador Dali’s wife-manager-muse to be: a gaunt, striking, middle-aged lady in a black tuxedo, black silk scarf wrapped around her head, a black walking cane, trailing in her wake a half-dozen cherubic young boys in black silk outfits. They never spoke, just glided around the room like shadows.
Gala set the ground rules. “He is to be addressed always as The Dali. Money is not to be discussed at any time with him. When I say it is over, you leave.”
She took the elevator back up to their suite, and returned ten minutes later with The Dali. As I recall he was wearing an artist’s smock; at any rate, it definitely had very large pockets. After polite introductions we all sat at a table. The rest of us ordered drinks while Gala ordered a cup of hot water for The Dali. When the hot water arrived, The Dali very slowly and purposefully drew a small jar of honey out of one of those big pockets, placed it on the table, and very deliberately unscrewed the top. It was brilliant theater—you couldn’t not watch. Then he lifted the jar six inches above the cup, tipped it slowly, and a slow-motion stream of honey poured toward the hot water. Meanwhile with his free hand he drew a pair of scissors from his other pocket. He used them to cut the stream of honey. Alice, Joey, and I gaped.
The meeting was very brief. We asked if The Dali was familiar with the new, three-dimensional optical art form, the hologram. A guy named Hart Perry, who’d shot some pictures of Alice for New York’s WNEW TV, had shown us some. We wanted to know if The Dali would be willing to make a hologram of Alice.
The Dali went back upstairs. Joe, Gala, and I went for a walk in Central Park, with the cherubs floating behind us, and talked business. Gala informed us that The Dali would retain all rights to any work he produced, and we’d get two copies of it.
It took six months to complete the hologram. We didn’t see a lot of The Dali during the process. We had a couple of dinners with him and Gala at Trader Vic’s, the restaurant in the Plaza hotel. I loved Trader Vic’s, and its over-the-top Polynesian tiki bar decor seemed a perfect setting. (Sadly, when Donald Trump bought the Plaza a few years later he closed the restaurant.) Gala did most of the talking. For some reason The Dali started calling me Mr. Blemly. From then on, through our whole relationship, I was Mr. Blemly. I had no idea why; I still don’t know to this day. He’d just say things like, “Mr. Blemly, would you pass the egg rolls.” Both times, The Dali paid the bill for us all by signing his napkin. It was how he paid for all their meals. “My friend Picasso, so silly, he had only coffee and biscuits in Paris and he signed the whole tablecloth,” he said both times. “I have whole meals and I sign just the napkin.”
The most time we spent with The Dali was a very long photo session, probably six hours, shot by our friend Hart Perry. Alice had to be photographed meticulously from every angle for the 3-D hologram to work. The finished piece was a rotating, almost-life-size, three-dimensional image of Alice sitting cross-legged in a white silk outfit, wearing a million-dollar diamond tiara that the jeweler Harry Winston’s store loaned us for the shoot—complete with security guards. Alice is holding a small Venus de Milo statue, looking like he’s either about to sing to her or bite her head off. Behind him, The Dali suspended a plaster sculpture of Alice’s brain with a chocolate éclair in the middle, covered in little black ants—a signature Dali image. He called it all First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain.
Alice was overwhelmed by the experience of working with and just being around his idol. Every now and then when we were with The Dali he’d catch my eye and give me a look that said, Oh. My. God. Remember, we were just a couple of kids in our twenties, and this was one of the greatest living artists in the world. What was most awe-inspiring for us was that The Dali didn’t seem to make art only when he was painting or sculpting; he seemed to make his entire life, every minute of it, every word and gesture, art. That was the point of the scissors and honey. It was a living Dali painting. That was exactly what Alice Cooper had been trying to do onstage. Once I went up to the apartment in the St. Regis,
rang the bell, and The Dali answered the door sitting in a wheelchair, even though he could walk perfectly. He was wearing the skin of an entire bear, from head to claws and tail, and holding an open umbrella. Another living Dali painting.
What Alice and I always wondered—and we never really got close enough to The Dali to get the answer—was what happened when the apartment door closed. Was he the same in private as in public, or did he and Gala just become a normal couple behind that door? Were there two Dalis, the way there were two Alices?
I got one chance to find out. When the Chromo-Hologram was completed, we arranged a major press conference in New York for Alice and The Dali to unveil it. We got all the print there, but we were really interested in TV for this one. This was 1973, and there weren’t a lot of TV news outlets. No cable to speak of, no YouTube, just the three major networks, their local affiliates, and a handful of prestigious TV “newsmagazines” like 60 Minutes. We were very excited when 60 Minutes and all three networks said they’d come.
The print reporters and 60 Minutes crew arrived. Then we were told there’d been a fire or a shooting somewhere in the city. The network and local news crews wanted us to delay the conference forty-five minutes so they could go cover that and then come to us. I had a choice to make. Do I let 60 Minutes leave, or do I try to stall them until the others arrive? I figured there was only one thing I could do that 60 Minutes could not walk out on—have The Dali speak.
I said to Alice, “I don’t know who lives behind the curtain, but I think we’re about to find out.”
Joe and I went to The Dali. I said, “The Dali, may Mr. Blemly speak to you?” I always had to ask permission.
“Yes, Mr. Blemly?”
We explained the problem. The Dali, who understood the importance of the media and celebrity as well as Warhol did, calmly replied, “The Dali will take care.”
He went out there and spoke for forty-five minutes. It was not possible that the newspeople understood much of what he said. It was kind of a Surrealist poetry.
“The Dali, the greatest artist. The Coo-per, the greatest artist. New York City, the greatest city. The hologram, the greatest art form. The Dali, The Coo-per, the world’s two greatest artists meet. . . .”
He rolled on that way until the news crews came in. The second they did, he said, “And thank you.” And left the stage. For me, it was a sign that he could in fact turn it on and off as needed, the way Alice did. It was certainly beautiful theater, and it worked. 60 Minutes stayed through the whole strange thing.
That was the last we saw or heard from The Dali. It was one of the highlights of Alice’s career. Today there are two Dali museums, one in St. Petersburg, Florida, and one outside of Barcelona, Spain. The hologram is on display at both. In 2013, when Alice had a concert in Tampa, he went to the Florida museum to help them celebrate the hologram’s fortieth anniversary. I was recently in Spain with Jerry Moss. We went to the museum and saw the hologram there. Wow.
The money kept pouring in. I did what young men did with money in the 1970s: I bought a lot of drugs. I did acid, cocaine, Quaaludes, pot, you name it. Yet the money kept piling up. We had almost a million dollars in the bank between us. Then Joey started to drift away. He was still my fifty-fifty partner, but things got very strained between us. Finally I said, “Obviously we should not be partners anymore. So why don’t we flip a coin. We’ll put the money in one pile, and we’ll put the business in another. Whoever wins the flip takes his choice.”
He won the flip, and he took the money. I kept the business. And that was the end of our partnership. We had been the best of friends, followed the same path together for so long, started the business, and made it work together. I can’t give him enough credit for how much of our early success with Alice was Joey’s doing. And now we were going our separate ways. It was very tough. From here on out it was just me.
Despite the interpersonal problems they were having, too, Alice and the band wrote and recorded their best album yet while they were at the Galesi estate. Billion Dollar Babies was their satirical take on their own fame and fortune. Everyone agreed it was the best collection of songs they’d ever put on an album. The baby on the cover wearing Alice makeup was Carolyn’s baby Lola. The album came out in February 1973 and went straight to number one in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other places around the world.
The band left the Galesi estate and went in all directions. Four days after the last of them moved out, leaving only Ron Volz in the apartment over the garage, the mansion burned to the ground. Holy shit. We were still on the lease. I got a call that Francesco Galesi wanted to meet with me at his Manhattan apartment. Alice says he has never seen me more scared. I put on a suit and tie. Galesi sent a car for me—a black Mercedes with darkened windows. The driver looked like Cato from the Inspector Clouseau movies. He did not smile or say one word to me as he drove me to Sutton Place on the East Side. The elevator opened right into Galesi’s giant apartment. I waited around for a while, then a beautifully handsome man entered the room. He looked like a mafia don from Central Casting, very smooth, in a suit that had to cost twenty thousand dollars. And he was not happy. He was more or less convinced that we had burned the house down, probably doing drugs. I didn’t get the vibe he was going to hurt me. I did get the vibe that he could harass me for the rest of my life if I didn’t make him happy in some way.
Then his son Jesse came in the room. Jesse was a musician. I got out of hot water by saying I would help him with his career, which in fact I did for years.
We decided that the Billion Dollar Babies tour had to be spectacular, and now we had the funds to do it right. Joe Gannon had produced Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night concerts the year before, the first pop concerts ever to use a full Broadway-style production, with moving stage parts and theatrical lights and effects. I thought that sort of really grand theatrical approach was perfect for Alice at this point, and I paid Joe $25,000—a ton of money in those days—to make it happen. He constructed it on a soundstage at Warner Bros. in Burbank. It was incredible. Nobody in rock had done anything remotely like it. It had big steel towers and multilevel platforms and a Busby Berkeley–style staircase where each step could light up as Alice went up and down. Every available surface was covered in mirrors and metalflake glitter, so that when the big Super Trouper lights hit the set it was almost blinding.
The only problem was, we had not really thought through what it was going to be like hauling this massive production from city to city for weeks on end. Every night it had to be unpacked from the two semi-trailers we rented for it, loaded into the building, constructed, then torn down after the show and packed back onto the trucks, which had to haul ass to make it to the next city. It was a logistical nightmare and exhausting work. Early on, Joe and I were helping the crew lug the giant steel frames into the trucks after a show one night. I looked at him, both of us huffing and puffing, and said, “What the fuck did you get me into?” Alice loved the set, but the band didn’t particularly like having to work on and around it. They were constantly bumping into things or ripping their outfits on the metalflake-encrusted edges.
While the semis hauled the set and equipment from city to city, we flew in the Starship, the chartered Boeing 720 that all the big acts toured in at the time. The Starship is the jet in the background of rock photographer Bob Gruen’s iconic image of Led Zeppelin from the same year. All the conventional seats had been stripped from inside. When you walked up the ramp, you entered a lounge, with shag carpeting, a piano, and a full bar with a butler/bartender standing behind it. The main body of the plane was all plush couches and easy chairs, equipped with seat belts, and some private hideaway cubicles. There were TV monitors and a library of videocassettes, everything from Alice’s old black-and-white movies to Deep Throat, which had come out a couple of years earlier and launched the notion of “porn chic.” Alice felt uncomfortable watching porn and would usually turn away when the other guys had it on. In the rear were a small library-stu
dy and a private bedroom with a king-size bed and full shower. He spent a lot of time back there. I had hired the magician James Randi, aka “the Amazing Randi,” to play Alice’s executioner in the climactic guillotine scene. He loved touring with the band and kept up a constant burble of jokes and card tricks on the plane.
The tour went throughout Canada and the United States from March to June. Alice Cooper was the top-performing act in the world in 1973. We played to more than eight hundred thousand audience members, who together paid $4.5 million at the box office. When you added record sales, merchandising, and other income, Alice Cooper grossed $17 million that year. Considering how they started out, and what a very long shot their amazing success was, the guys in the band should have been ecstatic, but the bad feelings only grew worse. They were exhausted, they were sick of the stage show, and they resented Alice’s star treatment. Even Alice was getting bored with the routine.
In November of that year, Warner Bros. released the next Alice Cooper album, Muscle of Love. It was their second album in less than a year. That was how it was done back then: a constant treadmill of touring, writing songs, recording them, and touring some more. Recordings made the big money, not touring. The touring was to promote the records and boost sales. Tickets to rock concerts were priced to pack the hall—five dollars was tops. So depending on the size of the hall, after all the expenses, after everyone else got their cut of the proceeds, the band might make a few thousand dollars. This is a major reason bands started touring to larger and larger venues in the 1970s. It was an economic necessity.