Welcome to My Nightmare_The Alice Cooper Story Read online

  And too close.

  So we walk, again, the streets of suburban Detroit and we realign the thought. It is hard to believe that these quiet streets bred one particular bogeyman, one who stepped out of fiction to become reality, but one who then transformed that reality back into entertainment, to shift in the course of little more than two decades, from Public Enemy Number One, to nothing less than family entertainment, a fun night out for every generation, and a touchstone for everything that is self-perpetuating about America’s love of the showman.

  In the seventies, Alice Cooper was Lizzie Borden, Freddie Kruger and the Zodiac Killer all bound up into one, with a dash of demonic possession for luck. Today, and for more than 20 years before today, he is PT Barnum, Buffalo Bill, Hefner, Hughes and Howard Johnson’s, and Frankenstein. Everyone and everything that has ever asked what does America really want, and been able to answer that question successfully.

  America wants spectacle, America wants excitement, America wants pizzazz. But most of all, America wants a bogeyman, and it has always been lucky in that respect. Because one always comes along.

  In the mid-fifties, the bogeyman’s name was Elvis Presley, and when Alice Cooper was a little boy, seven, eight or nine years old, that’s who he wanted to be.

  Rock’n’roll was still an infant at the time, even younger than its young admirer, and Elvis was the baddest of the bad boys who were driving polite society into apoplexy. It didn’t help that he sang like a black man, at a time when even many American radio stations still exercised a colour ban, but his sound was only a part of the problem.

  His hair was greasy, his lip was curled, he looked cruel and insolent before he even opened his mouth. And the way he moved! ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Presley’s first American hit single, entered the chart just a month or so after Vince’s eighth birthday, beaming into a shaken nation’s living rooms with the television cameras focused wholly on the singer’s upper body to reinforce what the newspapers said about the rest of it; that he gyrated his hips with sexual abandon, and simply watching him move made impressionable young girls soak their seats.

  In an age when television and the movies were still tightly controlled by decency laws that were formulated in the thirties, where married sitcom couples slept in separate beds, and even a kiss goodnight could send a teenager down the rocky road to degradation, despair and death by a thousand STDs, Elvis Presley was more than the first rock star. He was the first Shock Rock star as well, a man who mumbled when he should have talked, who sneered when he should have smiled, and who may have loved his momma, but who left a trail of broken hearts regardless.

  Would you let your daughter marry the Pelvis?

  Alice talks about Elvis in his autobiography, the wryly titled Alice Cooper Golf Monster. “I would stand in the mirror and imitate him. The sneer. The swivel hips.” Even as a kid, he says, he was “a great mimic”.

  He probably was. He still is. But it was the mirror, not the mimicry, which he would grow to personify. The mirror that he raised to the world that wound around him, but whose ugliness seemed apparent to Alice alone. He admitted as much, too, when Life magazine journalist Albert Goldman confronted him about his stage show that had great swathes of responsible society up in arms, and much of irresponsible society enfolded in his arms.

  “People put their own values on what we do, and sometimes those values are warped. They react the way they do because they are insecure. They consider [what we do] shocking, vulgar… [but] people who are really pure enjoy it. If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, he’d do the same things as we do.”

  Goldman agreed. “Confessing fantasies most people’d rather die than reveal, Alice Cooper became the scapegoat for everybody’s guilts and repressions. People project on him, revile him, ridicule him. Some would doubtless like to kill him.” But Alice simply cackled. “Of course we’re in bad taste. There isn’t anything in America which isn’t in bad taste. That’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

  Not that he necessarily considered himself to be tasteless. Nor even rebelling. As he frequently remarked on other occasions, he simply took his own pop cultural loves… B-movie horror films, spy thrillers and Hollywood, kitsch magazines and Tales From The Crypt, all the stuff that enthralled almost every kid growing up in the American Fifties… he took them and he mashed them together with the wave of teen fantasies that succeeded that era, the pop of the British Invasion, the pulp of Roger Corman, the freedoms of psychedelia, and then he kept on mashing. He lived the life of a Marvel Comics superhero for years before he became one, and a horror movie superstar for years before he became one of those, either.

  A timeline of Alice Cooper’s recent career would bullet point any number of achievements in the nineties and beyond, from writing a theme for A Nightmare On Elm Street, to writing a graphic novel with Sandman’s Neil Gaiman, and onto musing on the possibility for running for elected office in his adopted hometown of Phoenix. And in every single instance, it was simply a matter of reality catching up with the dreams he’d created at some point in the past. Most celebrities live out their careers to the sound of ever-diminishing achievement, the deeper into the future they delve. Alice Cooper never fell into that trap, because he’d already predicted what would happen long before.

  Of course he did. How could he not have? He was the bogeyman, after all.

  Naturally Alice wasn’t Alice when he started; wouldn’t, in fact, become Alice until he was staring his twenties full in the face. To the friends and family who watched him grow, he was Vince, Vincent Damon Furnier (pronounced Fern-ee-ay) to be precise, a scrawny child born on Wednesday, February 4, 1948, and named for his Uncle Vince in the first part, and the writer Damon Runyan in the second.

  It was not a great news day. The Detroit papers, like those across the rest of the American north-east, were dominated by the bitter weather that had been snarling travel and traffic since Christmas, and showed little sign of letting up. Across the oceans at the tail end of India, Ceylon was finally shrugging off British rule to become the independent nation of Sri Lanka, but that had little resonance in Michigan, and neither did many of the other big stories of the day.

  The Supreme Court was preparing to rule on whether or not it was constitutional for religious education to be entered into the school curriculum (it was not), and the Democrat President Truman was fighting the threat of sundry Southern party members to secede and form their own breakaway party. The Soviet Union was rattling its sabres over what it saw as American attempts to divide Europe, militarise Germany and move against the Communist bloc.

  But Detroit itself was booming as the city’s automotive trade continued celebrating the return of the male workforce from the war, and America in general began to ease back into a peacetime that promised wide open vistas of opportunity and movement, both of them predicated on the motor car. A gallon of gas cost 16 cents, a new car hovered around the $1,200 mark. Wages were rising, inflation was falling. It was a great time to be alive; a great time to be an American.

  Not such a great time to be the newborn Vince Furnier, though. In the 1976 autobiography Me Alice, he mourned, “I was born… in a hospital they call the ‘Butcher’s Palace’ in Detroit and I was lucky I made it out of there because a lot of people didn’t. They didn’t do such a bad job on me, except that I was born with eczema, and infantile asthma.” The former, he would overcome. The latter would become one of the driving factors in his young life, as his parents sought a climate that would not send their son breathless to the emergency room every time the barometer dropped.

  Vince’s family were a mixed bunch. On his father’s side, the Furnier side, descent was traced back to the Huguenots, the wave of French Reformed Protestants who were persecuted out of their homeland at the end of the 17th century, and whose diaspora took them all across the globe. Some did not stray far; England, Switzerland, the fledgling Dutch Republic and Prussia all welcomed (or otherwise) the Huguenots to their shores. Others found their way to what is now South Africa, b
ut what was then a tangle of fledgling territories still seeking their own identity from a confusion of English and Dutch overlords.

  But the hardiest ones moved to North America, to another jumble of colonies that were searching for cohesion, but whose politics (if not their actual policies) already seemed to offer a haven from oppression. Vince’s Furniers were among them, and they seem to have made a mark.

  A seventh cousin of the Furniers, family tradition insists, was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, the French-born aristocrat who fought for the republicans against the monarchy during the American Revolution, then effectively switched sides and fought for the monarchy against the republicans during the French uprising. A man of changing political convictions, then, but he was a feather in the genealogical cap that the young Vince never tired of. You could even see the family resemblance, he said, in portraits of the great man, in the sharp, high cheekbones and straggling dark hair that were family traits.

  Neither was the Marquis the Furniers’ sole claim to familial fame. Even closer in time and bloodline was Thurman Sylvester Furnier, an evangelist who went on to become the President of the Church of Jesus Christ. Thurman was Vince’s grandfather.

  One of 10 children born to a gardener, John Washington Furnier (1838-1923) and his wife Emma (1846-1910), Grandad Thurman was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, on April 21, 1888, and lived to the ripe old age of 85, long enough to see his grandson become one of the biggest stars of the American stage. As big a star in that field, in fact, as Thurman was in his.

  The Church of Jesus Christ is one of the handful of churches that developed out of the Mormon church following the death of its founder, Joseph Smith Jr, at the hands of an Illinois lynch mob in 1844. To the outsider, it differentiated itself from its parent simply by truncating its name (the Mormons are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). But a deeper divide, of course, separates the two.

  The schism was caused by the bitter wrangling over who should succeed the fallen Smith. The Mormons elected Brigham Young, the President of the Church’s Quorum of Twelve; the Church of Jesus Christ (whose members are resolutely not Mormon, despite adhering to its holiest tenets) followed Sidney Rigdon, the senior surviving member of the original church’s governing First Presidency, and William Bickerton, one of Rigdon’s first converts following the break.

  It was Bickerton who organised the first branch of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1851, and who then led it to full incorporation in 1865. It was always a small church by many applicable standards; 150 years on, worldwide membership is estimated at a little over 12,000 folowers, with just 3,000 of those living in the United States. There were fewer still when Thurman Furnier was ordained a pastor on January 3, 1915, but his passage up the ranks was swift. In 1916, he became an evangelist, charged with taking the Church’s message out of the pulpit and into the countryside, and on October 7, 1917, four months after he joined the United States Army, he was elected an Apostle.

  Married now to Vince’s grandmother Birdie, Thurman had two children, eight-year-old Lonson and six-year-old Vincent “Jocko” Collier, when he joined the army on June 5, 1917. A third son, Clarence, was born in 1918 and finally the future Alice Cooper’s father, Ether “Mickie” Moroni Furnier, arrived on March 26, 1924.

  By now, Thurman was working in the automotive industry; Detroit was America’s motor city, and Thurman could not escape its grasp. He worked as a payroll clerk at one of the factories, but his religious beliefs were never far from the surface as he continued his rise up the Church hierarchy. Indeed, by the time he reached the pinnacle, when he was elected President on April 11, 1965, he had served in every position in the church.

  It flourished, too, beneath his guidance, frequently being described at least as the fastest growing of the various offshoots from the original, and Thurman Furnier’s eight-year Presidency played its own part in broadening its reach. How ironic it was, then, that while the old man’s grandson remained silent about his own religious upbringing, on the other side of the century-old schism, a singing, dancing, Mormon family called the Osmonds, were proselytizing as furiously as they turned out hit records. For Vince, dinner at his grandparents’ house must have been fascinating.

  The Furniers were a close family, and when Mickie married a 21-year-old Tennessee girl, Ella Mae McCartt, in 1946, his folks were never far from view. Young Vince grew up listening to Uncle Jocko spinning yarns about the pool hall he’d started up using the winnings from his prizefighting days, and almost all of them turned out to be true. Nobody seems to remember why people started calling him Jocko, but the nickname stuck and if Ether hadn’t christened his firstborn Vincent, Jocko himself might have forgotten his real name.

  Mickie’s oldest brother Lonson, too, had long since surrendered his birth name. He was now Uncle Lefty and he had long since left Detroit for a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Pasadena, home to both America’s space program and the early years of its atomic development. But his nephew knew him well enough to remember him as a tuxedo-clad playboy whose California social life at least took him into hanging-out range of actresses Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. For a kid who knew nothing more of the world than he gleaned from the streets of Detroit, and his weekly visit to the Saturday morning movies, Lefty was glamour personified.

  Then there were the cousins. Very early on, little Vince realised that the survival of the Furnier family name had been nailed to his shoulders, and his alone. Two years older than he, sister Nickie Ann was the first in what became a veritable sea of femininity, as Ella Mae’s side of the family added their own offspring to the pot and left Vince with 13 cousins, “mostly girls”. He would fulfil his familial duty, too. Although he would ultimately change his name by deed poll to Alice Cooper, he waited until after the birth of his son, Damien Furnier.

  The past half century’s worth of redevelopment has rendered Lincoln Street, where Vince grew up, almost unrecognisable. A ragtag of single family homes that stretched out from Turnbull Street, the neighbourhood now lies in the shadow of the monstrous John C Lodge Freeway. But the nearby Wayne University’s Wayne State Stadium (now Tom Adams Field), home to the Wayne State Warriors football team, was just a walk away, while the predominantly Polish make-up of the family’s neighbours brought an air of central European exotica to the very air he breathed. The older Vince needs only to imagine the scent of pierogi or roulade to be transported back in his mind to Lincoln Street. That and the sound of bat on ball.

  If granddad’s religion and his uncles’ glamour were the high points of Vince’s family upbringing, his outdoor life revolved around baseball in general, and the Detroit Tigers in particular.

  The Tigers had represented the city since the side’s formation in 1901, and their early years remain a legend as they fielded the now almost-mythical Ty Cobb, and ran up three successive American League Championships between 1907 and 1909. Cobb retired in 1921, but the Tigers remained a powerhouse, taking the World Series Championship in 1935 and again in 1945, and being there-or-thereabouts for much of the time in between.

  By the time Vince was born, however, even that most recent triumph was beginning to fade from the memory and, while the side could still produce the goods, and boasted the all-but unstoppable Al Kaline, following the Tigers through the fifties meant being doomed to disappointment year after year after year.

  Vince and his father never gave up, though. If they weren’t listening to the game on the radio, they were outside emulating (and often surpassing) their heroes, and when the boy grew too old to be content with playing one on one with dad, he gravitated towards the local pick-up team that represented Lincoln Street in a kind of sporting gang war with its neighbours. Away from the Polish enclave of Lincoln Street, Detroit’s Irish, blacks and Italians had their own streets, their own teams, and baseball was their chosen battleground. Occasionally blood would be spilled, occasionally tempers would fray. But for the most part, internecine rivalries were taken
out on the diamond, and Vince Furnier flourished. Might even, if the breaks had been right, have made baseball some kind of career.

  But there was one drawback. His health, and the asthma that kept him balled up in his bedroom, breathless and streaming, almost as often as it allowed him outside to play. His frailties were particularly ruthless in the autumn and winter, and while his school friends were out in the inevitable snow drifts, Vince would be reduced to watching from the window, reeking of Vicks, or squinting over the plastic model aeroplanes and automobiles that he loved to build. And the only cure the doctor could offer, the only thing that might save the kid from a lifetime spent in sniffling suffering, was a change of climate.

  Uncle Lefty spoke up immediately. “Come out to Los Angeles and stay with me.” The family had already spent a season there when Vince was a toddler, and had seen the difference it made to the boy’s health; they had put down brief roots in Phoenix too, and seen the dry desert heat affect an instant improvement. Each time, however, money worries drove them back to Detroit to endure another miserable winter. Never poor, they were never exactly wealthy, either; like so many families, they simply got by on what they had.

  But in 1955, Mickie and Ellie Mae pulled Vince and Nickie out of Havenhurst Elementary School, and loaded them into the family’s old Ford Fairlane for the 2,300-mile, 36-hour drive to California, an exploratory mission that would ultimately find them moving there for good. And when they got there, an older Alice reflected, he experienced a defining moment. “My first taste of the big time.”

  Lefty lived in the San Fernando Valley, an address that left little Vince unmoved until they arrived there and, amidst the palm trees, sunshine and greenery that are everyday Los Angeles, he discovered his uncle’s swimming pool. He had never seen such a thing before, certainly not planted in the middle of somebody’s garden, and there and then he made himself a promise that he still remembers today. One day, he would have his own swimming pool.