by Shep Gordon
One night after a number of drinks I said, “What about a sexy Raquel Welch in concert?” HBO’s broadcast of Raquel live in Vegas, the first music special on HBO, was the result. High five!
When I look back at my life, managing Groucho and Raquel were amazing moments in an incredibly lucky journey. Sometimes I think it was all a dream.
Thank you, thank you.
In 1974 I decided to quit smoking. I had a lot of people working for me or with me who smoked. I made them all an offer: whoever wanted to spend a month with me in Hawaii, we’d all go and quit smoking together. I was friends with Tom Moffatt, the DJ and concert promoter in Honolulu who had been behind Elvis’s concerts there. He knew all these great houses that Colonel Tom Parker had rented. I thought, Oh my God, I can sleep in the same bed as Colonel Tom Parker.
Carolyn Pfeiffer, Joe Gannon, and seven or eight others came to Honolulu with me. I don’t think any one of us actually quit smoking on that trip, but we had a great time. I got in with Steve Rossi, half of the comedy duo Allen & Rossi. He was a great guy but a party animal, and after a few days of hanging with him I realized I needed more seclusion if I was going to seriously try to quit the smokes. Tom Moffatt had a tour going to the outer islands. I asked if I could come along and sell T-shirts for him.
In those days you took a hydrofoil from Honolulu to Maui. It landed at Maalaea Harbor, a beautiful, serene place with yachts and pretty sailboats parked all around and palm trees waving and low green mountains behind it rising to blue skies. Hawaii is the youngest landmass on the planet. It has the innocence of a baby. It even smells like a baby. As I was getting off the hydrofoil, I put one foot on the dock—not even both feet—and turned to Joe and said, “I’m living here the rest of my life.” I had never been there before, and it felt like home. I saw the house I wanted on that trip, on Keawakapu Beach in Kihei, and bought it soon afterward.
The following year I moved out of New York. Winona and Mia came with me to Los Angeles. I got us a great little house at the end of a dead-end street in Bel-Air, with a huge rose garden, and a pool with a postcard view of L.A. But Winona and I broke up and gradually lost our connection. Still, I stayed in touch with Mia for about five more years. I’d get a letter or a call every now and again, and I always sent her money. Finally, I realized that the only times I heard from her were when she needed money. I suspected it was going to no good use, so I just stopped. If there are a few things I’d like a redo on, that would be one. I probably should have gone to her, sat down, and had a conversation with her. But I didn’t; I just stopped. I don’t have a lot of regrets, but that’s one.
Breaking up with Winona hurt. That was a new feeling. I had never been in that situation before, where I cared enough about a relationship that it could be painful when it ended. It’s something everybody goes through, but I think most people probably experience it when they’re younger than I was and in far less of a position to self-medicate with drugs and dating more pretty women.
I even bought myself a place where I could do that.
In the mid-1970s the three hottest rock clubs on Sunset Strip were the Roxy Theatre, the Rainbow Bar and Grill, and the Whisky a Go Go. The producer-manager Lou Adler, known for his work with Sam Cooke, the Mamas & the Papas, Carole King, and a long list of others, owned and ran the Roxy. Upstairs was a private club called On the Rocks, which you could only get into if Lou gave you a membership key. Lou gave keys to Alice, Raquel, Groucho—though I doubt he ever used it—but I never got one for myself. I’d go with Alice or Raquel.
One night I went there alone and they wouldn’t let me in. I called Lou and got his secretary instead. She conveyed his reply: “You’re not a member.” I said, “Tell him to make me a member.” Lou refused. That stung. Maintaining an inner sense of self-esteem, even now that I was successful, was always hard for me. Inside I was still Shep, the kid from Oceanside. Lou Adler was basically telling me that my clients were cool enough for his exclusive club, but I wasn’t.
This was another occasion for me to think, Don’t get mad. Accomplish your goal. I could have been really angry at Lou, but that wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. What was my goal? To have a private club I could get into. So I opened one.
I remembered Carlos’n Charlie’s in Acapulco, one of the most fun places I’d ever been. Since then they had opened franchises all over Mexico. I got Alice to fly to Acapulco with me and see if it was still as fun as I remembered. We were sitting there having dinner when a guy came to our table, whipped out a red bandanna, and started wiping out our ashtray. Since he clearly recognized Alice, I asked him, “You know who we can talk to about opening one of these clubs in L.A.?”
He sat down. “I’m Carlos Anderson. You talk to me.”
In fifteen minutes we had a deal.
Alice and I came back to L.A. and found out that Micky Dolenz’s dad had a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard he wanted out of. We rented the building from him and opened our Carlos’n Charlie’s. Upstairs I put my own private club, El Privado. In L.A., if it’s new and exclusive all the big names flock to it. We had Sugar Ray Leonard, Eddie Murphy, Hugh Hefner, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Saudi princes, and assorted other millionaires. And they attracted the hottest, wildest, loosest women in Los Angeles.
I felt like I was the king of L.A. I had the hottest club in town, I had the Rolls and the silk suits, I had all the drugs and sex I could handle. My little house in Bel-Air was the site of some of the hardest partying of my life. I loved it all. But I also knew that it was all superficial. Something was missing.
10
AFTER HIS BAND BROKE UP, Alice and I committed ourselves to making his solo debut the biggest, best, most spectacular thing he’d ever done. And I didn’t want Warner Bros. to get it. My relationship with Mo Ostin was the reason.
For a couple of years after all the back-and-forthing over “I’m Eighteen,” life rushed by in such a blur that I completely forgot that we had never seen the publishing royalties Mo promised me. When it hit me, I called him and asked him for the money.
“I can’t give it to you,” he said. “It’s in escrow. Herbie says it’s his, you say it’s yours.”
“Yeah, but you said you’d take care of it.”
“I am taking care of it, Shep,” Mo said. “But I have to do it the right way. It’s there, you’re covered, don’t worry about it.”
A while passed, and still no money.
“Mo,” I finally said, “you leave me no choice. I have to take it to court.”
“Yeah, you probably should,” Mo replied. “But don’t worry, I got you covered.”
All this time, Mo was becoming more than a mentor in my head, more like a father figure. I don’t think he saw it that way, but I did. I got to be friends with him and his wife. They had me to dinner. In some ways they became a surrogate family to me, since I was so detached from my own. This was all inside me. But it meant that when Mo said not to worry, he had me covered. It felt good and I believed him.
So now I brought my lawsuit against Straight Records, thinking that I had Mo in my corner. And Mo testified against me. It came down to me or his good friend Herb Cohen, and he backed Herb.
I was extremely hurt. It felt like such a betrayal.
I went to Alice and said, “This is personal. But it’s also professional. In the first place, anybody who stabs us in the back like this can’t really think we’re going to have a long-term career with his company. But also, I have to teach this guy that he can’t fuck with us like this.”
Once again: Don’t get mad. Accomplish your goal. I read our contract and saw that it granted Alice Cooper a one-time exclusion to record a soundtrack album on another label, if Warner Bros. was unable to obtain the rights. I knew that if we put out a soundtrack on a rival label—Columbia, say—Warner Bros. would sue. But at that point Steve Ross and his Kinney National company had bought three record labels—Warner Bros., Atlantic, and Elektra—and packaged them under the umbrella Warner Communications. I figured that if
we did the soundtrack for either Atlantic or Elektra, Warner Bros. couldn’t sue.
If we had waited around for some movie producers to come ask Alice to do a soundtrack, my idea might not have gone any further. But that’s not how I do things. I decided we would create the show and the soundtrack. I went to ABC TV and said, “We want to do an Alice Cooper special. Alive Enterprises will produce it. I’ll give it to you for costs.”
They jumped on it. Alice Cooper was one of the biggest acts in the world, and they were getting him for nearly nothing.
Then we recorded the soundtrack, working with Bob Ezrin again. Dick Wagner, who had filled in for Glen on guitar, really stepped up as a cowriter with Alice, and they loaded the album with great songs, including the title track, “Department of Youth,” “The Black Widow,” and “Only Women Bleed.” I worked up my nerve and got a meeting with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. Jerry was another giant in the industry. They credit him with inventing the term rhythm and blues when he was a young reporter for Billboard. He and Ahmet Ertegun had run Atlantic since the 1950s, making careers for an incredible list of stars from Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Pickett to Led Zeppelin.
“Mr. Wexler,” I said, “I want to be honest with you. One way or the other, Warner Brothers is not getting the next Alice Cooper record. You’d provide me with a great insurance policy if you take it, and you’ll make a ton of money.”
Jerry said, “Play me something from it.” I played him “Only Women Bleed,” and he loved it.
“I’m in,” he said. He went to his bosses at Warner Communications and convinced them it was best to keep Alice Cooper’s next record in house. I’m not sure, but I don’t believe he and Mo ever spoke again.
So Welcome to My Nightmare came out on Atlantic, and went platinum in the United States and double platinum in Canada. Alice was still in a multiyear contract with Warner Bros., and would record five more albums for them before we could finally leave in 1981. But I felt we had made our point. It may have been like a flea biting an elephant, but it must have stung a little because they never messed with us like that again. For his part, Jerry Wexler went on to be a great friend and advisor to me, another mentor.
For the TV special Alice wrote a story around the songs, about a boy named Steven who can’t wake up from his nightmares. We shot it in Canada, with a Canadian choreographer and a Canadian director, Jørn Winther. That way we came under the Canadian content law and got a bit of a government subsidy for it. We were very excited to get Vincent Price to play the narrator. Price was another god to us, like Dali and Groucho. We knew him a little from when he and Alice were both on Dinah Shore’s show. When we did the album he had recorded his part at a different studio, so we didn’t spend time with him. Now I called his agent and got him to come to Toronto for a couple of days to be in the special. Alice and I were in awe. We addressed him only as “Mr. Price.” Then, on our first day of shooting a scene, over the loudspeakers we heard Winther say, “Hey, Vinnie, could you move over to the left?”
Hey, Vinnie? Alice and I practically melted into the floor with mortification. Mr. Price, though, was so cool that he just let it pass. We loved him for that.
I arranged for the Nightmare tour to start in Lake Tahoe, at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel, in December 1975. It was a way of announcing that this wasn’t just another rock concert; this was the new Alice Cooper, putting on a show. It was the first time a rock band played in a major Vegas-Tahoe casino, and the first time an American rock band performed live with a full orchestra. (The British band Procol Harum had done it a few years earlier.) And when Price agreed to be in that performance, it was the first time that I know of that a major film star performed onstage with a rock star.
We hired a 727 to fly some celebrities up to Tahoe for it. Of course we did that Alice Cooper–style. Our leading celebrity was a dog—the German shepherd from the new movie Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, a takeoff on the old Rin Tin Tin movies. The studio paid for the jet because they were having trouble getting press. We loaded everyone else on the dog’s flight.
The morning of the show we arrived for a rehearsal with the orchestra. The band had never played with an orchestra before. The conductor came over to me and said, “Can I get the charts from you?”
“What charts?”
“For the orchestra.”
As a former trombone player, I should have expected that they’d need charts of the songs.
“We don’t have charts.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just have one of the guys write out the chords. We’ll listen to the record and work it out.”
These were rock musicians. None of them could read or write music. I asked the conductor to give me a few minutes. In the dressing room I put five hundred-dollar bills in an envelope. I handed the envelope and a copy of the album to him and said, “Just make me look good.”
We worked it out that I conducted the orchestra for the rehearsal, while he observed and took notes, and then he did it for the show. Another first—me conducting an orchestra.
Since Won Ton Ton paid for the flight I figured he should have VIP treatment. I reserved him a table in the front row, with a dog bowl. As we were getting everything set up, security called me.
“We have a big problem, Mr. Gordon. It’s Won Ton Ton.”
I said, “Listen, I worked this all out with hotel management. The dog’s allowed in. I need him here.”
“No, no,” they said. “The dog’s fine. But the trainer’s drunk and vomiting in the lobby!”
I had to get the hotel to find two dogsitters to be with Won Ton Ton during the show. Add to my manager’s resume: Obtains dogsitters.
To enhance the sense that this was a big event, I had an assistant start calling the hotel an hour before the show. For an hour you kept hearing over the loudspeakers, “Paging Mick Jagger . . . Paging Frank Sinatra . . .” So everyone in the hotel thought all these celebrities would be at the show. Who’s a star? Someone who attracts other stars. Guilt by association. Early on I used to hire people to crowd around the band in public, pretending to be paparazzi. Flashbulbs would be popping off all around them, but there was no film in the cameras. Film and processing were very expensive. This was just for show, to attract actual photographers. Who’s a star? Someone who has flashbulbs going off around them all the time.
One of the great Fleet Street figures Carolyn introduced me to, Terry O’Neill, totally understood guilt by association. Terry was the king of Fleet Street. He shot iconic portraits of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and on and on. When Welcome to My Nightmare was coming out, I called Terry and said I wanted to get Alice in Newsweek.
He said, “Do you have a pool?” When I said yes, he said, “Buy an inflatable shark. I’ll be out there tomorrow.”
I didn’t ask him why an inflatable shark. It was Terry. I trusted he knew what he was doing. I called Alice and said, “Come up here tomorrow and bring a swimsuit.” I sent a kid to the toy store to buy the shark.
The next day Terry had Alice get in the pool with the blowup shark and started shooting.
“Terry,” I asked, “why are we doing this?”
“There’s a movie coming out this week called Jaws,” Terry said, “and it’s going to be the biggest thing ever. The day after it opens, we’re going to send these pictures out.”
And it worked. Pictures of Alice and the shark hit every magazine and newspaper in the world. That was Terry’s genius. Whenever we needed press, I’d call Terry. We’d fly to London and arrive at the airport with, say, a guy dressed up in the cyclops costume from Alice’s show. In those days security at airports was far more lax than it is now. The cyclops from the Nightmare show would go through the passport checkpoint, and Terry would be there to take the shots. We’d turn right around and fly back home. Terry’s photos would be in all the papers the next day. Win-win. You couldn’t work with American photographers that way. You had to go to Fleet Street.
Alice hit the road for Nightmare
in March 1975 and toured it all over the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand for the next two years. Australia originally banned him in 1975 for being a “degenerate,” but a new government got elected and let him come in 1977. He did two hundred shows during those two years and they all sold out. The show was even closer to a Broadway musical this time. The set was huge and elaborate again, basically a stage version of the sets used in the TV show. There were dancers, the giant cyclops, a giant spider, and all sorts of props. Alice was entirely the star now—the set hid the band for most of the show.
Nightmare was a triumph, for Alice and for me. We proved that we were right. We never got mad, we just reached our goal of being millionaires.
As for the other guys in the band: Sadly, Glen passed away in 1997, just short of his fiftieth birthday. We all miss him. He was the James Dean of the band, always with a cig and a buzz going. The rest of us remain good friends to this day. Alice and the guys help each other in any way they can. They play and record together occasionally, and it’s always special. They were all there to be inducted together into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.
After Nightmare, there was no star in the world bigger or brighter than Alice Cooper. All sorts of other acts, like KISS and Elton John, were imitating Alice now, putting on lavish theatrical productions. But there was still one dark cloud. All through this period, Alice’s drinking got worse and worse. Periodically I would read him the riot act, and he’d clean up for a while, only to slip back into it. When the Nightmare tour ended, his wife and I staged an intervention, though they weren’t called that yet. We made him go to the Cornell Medical Center in White Plains, New York, where they locked him in for two months. It wasn’t the worst place to be shut in for two months. It even had a golf course. I still owned my house on Lake Copake, maybe an hour’s drive from the clinic, and stayed there so I could visit him almost every day.