Kiss and Make-Up (23 page)

When Stan Lee and I met, I told him his real name was Stanley Lieber, and that Larry Lieber, one of the inkers at Marvel, was his brother, and that Cadence Industries owned Marvel. I knew his secretary’s name, which was Flo Steinberg. He was floored. We talked and found that we were kindred spirits. He had changed his name because he didn’t want people to know he was Jewish, as had I. The wings on my outfit were influenced by a character called Black Bolt that Stan Lee had created.

As the KISS comic book project moved along, someone came up with the idea of putting real blood in the ink. It wasn’t me—maybe it was Bill or Sean. We got into a DC3, one of those big prop planes, and flew up to Buffalo to Marvel’s printing plant, where they pour the ink and make comic books. A notary public actually witnessed the blood being drawn. The comic book, which was published in 1978, became Marvel’s biggest-selling comic book.

At around this time we decided to do another live album, a collection of material from
Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over
, and
Love Gun.
We did it partly at the insistence of the record company and partly to repay our fans for their loyal support: the first live album had helped to define our career, and a second would be a kind of bookend. In some ways we were crazy to even try, since 1977 was such an incredibly busy year—the Japanese tour took up most of March,
Love Gun
was released in June, and then
Alive II
followed in November. But we weren’t ready to go into the studio. We were squabbling over material. And even if we had been ready, it would have taken time to get into the studio. Because we didn’t want fans to feel cheated, we wrote new songs for one side of
Alive II.

The band flew up to the Marvel comics printing plant in Buffalo to add our blood to the ink used in the KISS comic book. We are with Marvel head Stan Lee here.
(photo credit 9.4)

When we finally went into the studio, Ace simply never showed up. We had to use other guitar players, like Bob Kulick and Rick Derringer. Ace was more furious than ever. “How could you do it without me?” he raged. How could we? Because these other guys showed up. This wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last, of countless times Ace would turn his back on the band. Regardless, even without Ace,
Alive II
went on to be another multiplatinum double disc set.

Midway through 1978 Hanna-Barbera, the famous cartoon producers, approached us about being in a movie. We had already been in
Howard the Duck
and in the Marvel comic book. We had an initial meeting, and they told us about the idea, and we shrugged our shoulders and said, “That sounds fine.”

The movie was shot at an amusement park called Magic Mountain, which had the biggest roller coaster in the world. We were literally never on a soundstage. The entire story took place in the park. The story was, a mad scientist was terrorizing visitors to this haunted amusement park. KISS helped to unmask the scientist and solve the mystery.

The director of the movie was Gordon Hessler, a director of action and suspense movies. He was actually very sweet about it. He would do a shot and ask us how things went. What did we know? They basically shot around us, because we were the stars. We took two hours to put our makeup on.

By that time Ace and Peter were miserable. KISS was on the covers of all the magazines but it was often a solo shot only of me. Sometimes Paul got a cover, but it was hardly ever Ace, and it was never Peter. This wasn’t anything I planned. The press picks up on whoever they pick up on. Ace and Peter thought I arranged and connived to keep them off the covers.

They still had their chance. We had two writers with us who were writing the script for
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
, and they wanted to get a sense of how everybody talked before they wrote the script. Ace in those days was noncommunicative. He didn’t say much. No matter what you said to him, he would make this parrot sound, “Awk.” Nobody understood it. And when he wasn’t making the parrot noise, he would mumble nonsense to himself—“Thirteen for a dozen,” or “I kills them all, one by one”—and then he would laugh. These phrases meant something only to Ace, and nobody had a clue what he was talking about.

When the script came in, Ace’s character never spoke. He only said “Awk.” Ace was furious. He wanted to know why they didn’t give him any lines. To their credit, they turned around and said, “What are you, nuts? You have never said anything to us except ‘Awk.’ We thought that’s the way you want to talk.” Ace said he had a lot to say. Well, he should have said it.

When we did
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
, the rest of the band was incensed, because the newspaper ads usually showed a much larger photo of me. If they showed any other figures, they
were all in the background, and my face was four times the size of everybody else’s. Paul and I have always had a kind of brotherly competitive thing, and we had quite a bit of back-and-forth over the years. Paul would get slightly angry because he perceived that I was dominating the band too much, or vice versa. But the ads for the movie, and particularly those in
TV Guide
, really bothered Ace and Peter. They felt they weren’t as involved in the film as Paul and I were. We didn’t really have a choice. First of all, Peter had been involved in yet another car accident. He skidded four hundred feet before he crashed, and he wound up in the hospital. When he did speak in the movie, he was impossible to understand because of his thick Brooklyn accent. So his voice was dubbed by someone else. Even the simple matter of getting Peter and Ace in front of the camera didn’t always work out. Sometimes they went missing. They just didn’t come to the set. The only solution was to use doubles. For Peter, we had a fifty-five-year-old guy, and we put makeup on him. For Ace, an African American stunt double.

Making the movie wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t particularly fun. But like almost everything else we did then, it was a success.
KISS Meets the Phantom
was eventually shown on NBC at Halloween. Because the television ratings were so strong, AVCO Embassy released it theatrically outside the United States. When we toured Canada, I saw it at a movie theater. When we toured Australia, I saw it at a drive-in. That was very bizarre, because I had grown up worshiping Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and here we were running through a freak movie meeting Frankenstein and Dracula.

The problems kept surfacing, though. Most of them originated with Ace, who kept shooting himself in the foot, and Peter kept following right along. At one point Ace started saying, “That’s it, I’m leaving. I’m going to do my own solo record.” So Bill Aucoin said, “Look, don’t leave the band. Let’s all do solo records. Maybe what we need is time away from each other.” Everybody agreed.

T
he first time
I met Cher, it was 1978, at a party Neil Bogart was throwing for Casablanca. I didn’t really know any of the other people there—I knew some by face and by reputation, but not personally. At some point in the evening, I found myself talking to Cher. I introduced myself, and she didn’t believe that I was who I said I was. It turned out that her daughter, Chastity, was a KISS fan and had encouraged her mother to go to the party because she knew Gene Simmons would be there. But Cher apparently had it in her mind that she would be meeting Jean Simmons the movie actress. She didn’t make the connection.

At that time I was starting to think of ideas for my solo album, which I envisioned as a big production, with tons of guest stars and a circus atmosphere. I thought it would be great if I could get Cher to sing on the record.

There was a $25,000 reward for getting a picture of me without my makeup.
Creem
magazine did, but they didn’t know it was me because we just denied it. Here I am with Cher.

At the end of the night, I went over to her place. In the limo with us was
Welcome Back, Kotter’s
Marcia Strassman, who warned Cher about my wandering eyes. Normally this would have meant one thing and one thing only, but in this case it meant something else entirely. We were back at her place, and before I knew it we were talking about our lives, about where we had come from, about what we were like as children. All of a sudden I started to feel the presence of another person in the conversation. This was a strange feeling for me. She was smart, interesting, and funny. At that moment, at least, I set aside the thought of it turning into anything sexual.

Left to right: Bill Aucoin, Don Wasley, me, Cher, Billy Sameth, and Neil Bogart at the end of 1978.
(photo credit 10.1)

The night went on, and Cher made some hot chocolate for the two of us, and we kept talking about things—her life, my life, my record. I remember the hot chocolate because she put marshmallows in it, which I had never seen done. She seemed interested in the fact that even though I was a rock and roller, I could put a sentence together, and also in the fact that I was straight and had never been drunk. Cher had just come out of a relationship with Gregg Allman, who had a reported serious substance abuse problem. Cher herself was always antidrug.

Early the next morning—five or six
A.M.
—she drove me back to L’Hermitage Hotel, where I was staying. We parted and agreed to talk more about my solo record. I felt there was something brewing. Meanwhile I wanted to see if she was interested in going out that evening. She said she was going to see the Tubes, the rock band, in concert. “Great,” I said. “What time do you want me to pick you up?” She explained that she had already invited her friend Kate Jackson, who was in
Charlie’s Angels
at the time. I didn’t know Kate, but it was fine with me. We ate dinner, the three of us, and then afterward headed over to see the Tubes. Usually at a concert like this, I would arrive with the audience and leave with the audience. But this was different. When we went backstage, it was very awkward. Some of the Tubes were taken with Cher, so I sat in the corner and talked with Kate Jackson. Finally the backstage party was over, and we got in the car to go home. On the way back you could have heard a pin drop, and back in the house, when Cher finally spoke, she exploded. She told me that she didn’t take very kindly to being ignored, especially when I was coming on to her girlfriend Kate. I was speechless. When I tried to talk to Cher about it, she told me that she never wanted to see me again.