Face the Music: A Life Exposed (29 page)

The rules had changed. KISS clearly wasn’t going to continue as it had.

A
s the drama with Peter was unfolding during the first half of 1980, we were also involved in a drama with our record label. Casablanca was absorbed by PolyGram, and for some reason the lawyers of the new company hadn’t checked Casablanca’s contracts with a fine-tooth comb. PolyGram assumed they were buying KISS and Donna Summer along with the label, but we had a “key man” clause, meaning that in our case, the deal was predicated on the presence of Neil Bogart. And from what we heard, the same was true of Donna.

Now, we may have been in some decline after
Dynasty
if you gauged things by the tour—when we’d had to cancel some shows and witnessed the changing demographics of the audience. But the way PolyGram saw it,
Dynasty
had been a huge hit, and in addition to making the charts at home, “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” had been our most successful single outside the United States by far, hitting the top ten all across Europe and topping the charts in Australia and New Zealand. The label risked looking like idiots if they let us walk away—which we were entitled to do once they canned Neil. The situation could not have worked out better for us. PolyGram ended up giving us a new and very lucrative deal as a face-saving move. Negotiating a new contract under these disastrous circumstances for them proved extremely advantageous for us.

The truth was that up to that point, we hadn’t made much money—particularly if you compared what came in with what came to us. We found out later that KISS brought in about $100 million in merchandise sales in the three years between 1977 and 1979. Of that, the band members together took home less than $3 million. The overheads of Bill’s operation were eating our lunch. But again, at that point we still didn’t know enough about business to realize it.

We had credit cards, but we’d never seen actual money. Still, the idea of having a gold credit card was a big deal. My parents had never had credit cards. And since the bills went to Glickman-Marks, who took care of paying them, the cards lent a sense of unreality to the act of buying things. I had a little magical piece of plastic that allowed me to take things out of stores.

Now that we suddenly had a chunk of money from the new record deal, I decided I wanted to buy an apartment instead of continuing to rent. You didn’t get anything out of renting—you didn’t build equity, so in a case like mine it was pointless.

At first I wanted to look at places overlooking Central Park along Fifth Avenue. When I explained this to a real estate agent, she said to me, “I can take you to the places you want to see, or I can take you to the places that will let you in.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She started talking about “nouveau riche” and being an entertainer. She paused. Then she said the buildings along the park were owned by “blue bloods and old money.” She might as well have said, “You’re a Jew,” which I would learn was indeed unspoken grounds for being rejected by many of the prime buildings I was interested in. My agent had been through this before and knew the situation all too well.

“You mean, I can’t live where I want?”

She explained the system of co-op boards. In New York City, most buildings were jointly owned by all the inhabitants, and a board created by the joint owners had to approve any new buyer. It was different from condos, where you just bought the unit from the previous owner. Co-op boards could—and did—block applications to buy from people they didn’t want in the building. Jews and blacks were often those people.

Eventually I settled on a place on 80th Street and Madison Avenue, one block away from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I finally owned my own shelter, my home, my sanctuary, my refuge. It felt very different from renting.

The apartment was a duplex with three terraces. I had a music room, and on one wall I had tall glass-front built-in cabinets installed where I suspended and backlit all my collectors’ guitars—like a cross between the Bat Cave and a museum installation.

The bathroom had a tub as big and deep as a small pool. One day I was paging through
Penthouse
magazine and liked the look of the woman on the cover. I called Bill Aucoin’s secretary and said, “Find her.” A few days later she was in that massive tub with me. Cliché or not, there we were with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Not long after, my mom asked me whether I was seeing anyone special. I smiled and told her to pick up the most recent
Penthouse
. Needless to say, she was speechless at some of the very revealing shots. I have to say I loved her bewilderment at the debauched road I had taken. Over time, my mom grew accustomed to the shocks of my lifestyle and began to view it all with a resigned sense of humor.

My bedroom was amazing, too. When you walked in you saw a black lacquered chest of drawers, and stretching from that all the way to the ceiling was plate glass etched with branches and birds, lit from below—it was a room divider. My bed was on the other side of the glass. And above my bed was a huge mirror that kind of flowed out of the etched glass. I spent a lot of time looking up at that ceiling mirror and remarking on how great life was. When I saw myself lying next to a beautiful woman, I thought,
Hey, that’s me! That’s me in bed with that gorgeous woman!

One night I was lying in bed with the woman from
Penthouse,
watching a documentary on TV about the 1970 Kent State shootings during a campus demonstration against the Vietnam War. She started getting kind of frisky and I pushed her away. “Hang on,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“This is important,” I said.

“That really happened?” she said.

Since I was choosing the women I spent time with based on a single criterion—their looks—I had to expect them to act within the boundaries of who they were. And the fleeting sense of fulfillment I felt looking up at the ceiling did make it easier to be at home rather than on the road. For a time, at least.

I started seeing a lot of women around town. At one point I was seeing two different chorus girls from the show
Sugar Babies,
a Broadway musical starring Mickey Rooney. I took my father to the show one time, and we went backstage to meet one of the girls. She was nearly six feet tall, exotic and ravishing. As we walked out I said to my dad, “She’s really hot, isn’t she?”

“She seems like a nice girl,” he said.

“She’s not a nice girl,” I said. “She’s just hot.”

For him, sex appeal and sexuality had to be tempered, sanitized, and neutered. I had found a different point of view and wanted him to know that I reveled in the raw honesty. I had come to grips with the fact that sometimes there
was
nothing more to it. This woman wasn’t nice. She was just very hot. And that was plenty.

One morning a woman called me, and after we had talked for a few minutes I said, “That was a really great time last night.”

And she said, “Yeah . . . who do you think this is?”

Oops
.

Another time I went to pick up a former
Playboy
Playmate at a new apartment she’d moved into. When I rang the doorbell, a different woman I’d been seeing answered the door. They had moved in together and decided not to tell me. They thought it was hilarious. Believe me, if you saw these two, I was lucky to be the brunt of the joke.

I was seeing quite a few women at the same time, and went through a period of sending women flowers when I was screwing someone else. If I spent the night with one woman, I’d send flowers to another. It wasn’t insincere exactly, because I wasn’t making any pretense of being exclusive with any of them, but I wanted them all.

I was living a triple life. There was the Starchild. There was me without the makeup—the perceived me, that is. And then there was the real me, who, despite fame and adulation, still felt insecure. There was a reason I spent most of my time in my apartment, sometimes with women, often alone. Some people took me for snobby or aloof, but the truth was, I was still shy and insecure. It wasn’t that I didn’t
want
to talk to people and make friends; it was that I
couldn’t
.

I still had just one ear and was deaf on one side. I still shrank back in social situations. I didn’t know what was going to happen with my band, which was the only support structure I knew.

Now what?

The neighborhood around my new apartment had quite a few shops and galleries specializing in art nouveau antiques. I had liked colorful Tiffany glass lamps since I was a kid. My parents used to buy old furniture at junk shops and refinish it. Some of it they kept, some of it they sold. And over our dining room table at home hung a glass lamp. It was just an ice cream parlor lamp, but people called any colored glass lamps Tiffany lamps back then. When I moved up near the Metropolitan I spent time enjoying the museum’s collection of real Tiffany glass.

One day as I walked past the Macklowe Gallery in my neighborhood, a Tiffany lamp in the window made me stop in my tracks. I still didn’t have any furniture in my place beyond the bed and my vintage guitars hanging in the glass-fronted cases lining the wall of the music room. But I went into the gallery to see the lamp up close. The price tag said $70,000. I bought it on the spot and carried it the two blocks home. When I got home, I put it down in the middle of the empty living room, on the wall-to-wall carpeting, and plugged it in. I lay down on the floor and stared at it for hours as the sun set and the stained glass glowed brighter in the gathering darkness. Here I was in my own place with this beautiful lamp.

Life is grand
.

I became intoxicated by the idea that I could buy whatever I wanted.

Maybe buying fancy things can make me happy.

I would stroll Madison Avenue, see a pair of shoes in a shop window, and ask, “How many colors do they come in? Just give me all of them.” I was draping the scared little boy inside me in another image—projecting a big persona with a shell of fine clothes.

Once, I wanted to go in a jewelry store that had Rolex watches displayed in the window. At first, they wouldn’t buzz me in the locked door. Then, after they finally did, they were rude and condescending. After looking around for a little while, I pointed to a watch and asked, “How much is this one?”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” said the salesman, looking down his nose at me.

I pulled out my wallet—by this time we had that kind of cash in our personal accounts—and counted out that much in front of him. Then I said, “Guess, what? I’m not buying it. You shouldn’t treat people like that.”

U
nmasked
tanked in the States and we spent most of 1980 inactive. We didn’t have a drummer anyway. The single “Shandi” was a hit abroad, however, and we booked a tour of Europe and Australia for the fall. But before we could play live, we needed a drummer. Auditioning people was very strange.

We didn’t want big-name drummers. We wanted somebody to come out of nowhere. It wouldn’t have made sense to have Anton Fig or some other known commodity dress up as a black-and-silver giraffe or whatever.

Bill placed a cryptic ad in some music magazines, and we also spread the word. Bill started to get tapes and photos and bios and lots of phone calls. He went through the materials, and we periodically invited groups of potential replacements he had filtered to audition with us. We decided we didn’t want a drummer who played like Peter. The ones who made the best impression on us played what you might call “English.” They played on the backbeat, and whether they were playing double bass drums or not, they revered the same bands we did. Peter had enough trouble keeping time on a single bass drum and snare, so the idea of him playing two bass drums was out of the question. It wouldn’t have made sense in the context of what we were doing anyway. Using a double bass drum in rock came about as a way to emulate what John Bonham of Led Zeppelin managed to do with one bass drum. His foot was so fast that it took most drummers two kick drums and both feet to mimic it. We didn’t set out to find someone with a double kit, but we also didn’t want to impose boundaries or limitations on a new member. As long as we were getting somebody new, we figured we should be willing to move forward.

One guy who auditioned was a little stove repairman from Brooklyn named Paul Caravello. He was tiny, with a huge head of hair and no airs or attitude. The first thing he did was ask for our autographs. At first, I wasn’t blown away by his playing, but everybody else in the room, including Vini Poncia and Bill Aucoin, thought he was great. We brought the guy back for a second time, and he turned out to have a good voice, with the same raspy quality Peter had. He was also a quick learner.

We had found our guy.

Paul wanted to change his name, and we wanted him to change it, too—we didn’t need three Pauls in the band, since Ace also shared that name. His first suggestion was Rusty Blades, which we vetoed quickly. Thankfully, the name game was short-lived when his second suggestion was Eric Carr, a name that sidestepped any obvious cartoon rock star moniker.

He seemed like a good soul. Some of the other people who auditioned had acted like rock stars, thinking they would gain points for that. Eric was sweet. He eventually proved to be tortured in his own way, but he certainly was a much-needed breath of fresh air in the wake of Peter’s departure.

He had told us stories about repairing stoves—going to an apartment and opening up stoves to find all kinds of bugs and beasts crawling around inside—and we wanted him to know he wouldn’t be a second-class citizen in KISS. So once we told him he was in the band, we did two things to welcome him. First, we bought him a silver Porsche 924. I somehow became the guy who was supposed to watch over him and groom him, teach him. He approached me after he got the car. “Can I have it painted camouflage?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. I didn’t think he should take a sleek imported sports car and turn it into a circus mobile.

Then I took him shopping at a place called the French Jean Store. They sold—surprise—French jeans. I helped him pick out a new wardrobe—he’d need it since we were leaving for a European tour soon.