Kiss and Make-Up (24 page)

In retrospect, I realize I should have been more aware. But I was oblivious to that kind of thing, because I hadn’t had any real relationships, and because the whole jealousy thing was foreign to me. I wasn’t accustomed to having conversations about how somebody else felt. I’m an only child. My mother came from incredible hardship;
she was in the concentration camps, the worst tragedy of the twentieth century. I grew up relatively poor. I was happy if I had something to eat. For me, that was the beginning and the end of everything. If I wanted companionship, I’d get companionship. If I was tired, I went to sleep. Life was good, simple, and straightforward. Still, at first with Cher it was neither simple nor straightforward. I called her from the hotel and said that I was going to New York to work on a record, and that I would call her when I got there. “Fine,” she said. “I can’t talk to you now.”

On my way to New York, and after I arrived, I was still thinking about her. There were other girls in my life, of course, girls I had seen before and would see after, but Cher was on my mind a tremendous amount. During the day I kept calling her, under the pretense that I wanted her to sing on my record. We would speak for hours on end and I found her fascinating. Our conversations usually got personal pretty fast, though. Early in our relationship she had me talking about this situation with Kate, and how she was angry that I had given attention to another woman. This seemed fair to me. It made sense. It was reasonable. And most of all it was compelling to me. There I was in New York with plenty of other women. My old life was back. Except that it wasn’t back at all—part of me was thousands of miles away, with her.

One night while I was in the company of a beautiful young woman, the phone rang. It was Cher, and before I knew it, we were talking again. She wanted to know when I was coming back to California. She wanted to know when we could sit down and talk about the record. So then we started talking about us again—about Cher’s feelings, about what she wanted from me. It was a strange situation made stranger by the fact that there was this beautiful girl in the other room waiting for me. I liked this girl. But there was something about the woman on the other end of the phone, this woman I hadn’t been sexual with yet, that I couldn’t ignore.

In New York we were working on a new greatest hits album,
Double Platinum
, and specifically on a new disco version of “Strutter.” This was Neil Bogart’s idea—he wanted to mix his two biggest properties, which were KISS and disco. It was pretty much the same
song except for the drum track, which was added on later. I didn’t care for the version and didn’t really have much to do with it. At any rate, right when we finished recording the new version, I told the other guys that I had to leave. I was going out to California to see what was happening with the Cher situation. If you had known me at any time before that, you would have been sure that the guy standing in front of you in the studio was an impostor. Leaving without putting the final touches on a song and flying off to see a girl just wasn’t something I did. But I was new to this relationship thing.

Cher met me at the Los Angeles airport in jeans and a T-shirt. At the time that was still one of the major differences between the coasts. California had already gone causal: it was all about dressing natural and looking natural. In New York, if you had money, you showed it on your back: silk shirts, leather pants, all those kinds of things. No one wore jeans and T-shirts except for bums. New York was the Dolls. L.A. was the Doobie Brothers.

From the airport we took a limousine back to her place. I must have expected things to accelerate immediately, must have expected there to be some activity in the car. But she threw me a curve: there was no sex in the car. Just cuddling and holding hands. There was just this kind of giddy sensation that wasn’t like anything I had ever experienced before. When we got back to her house, it was more of the same—hot chocolate, giggling. I had my suitcase with me, and for all intents and purposes, and before I knew it, I moved in right then.

Within the KISS world, the fact that I had gone to California was causing some ripples of discontent. For starters, Ace and Peter didn’t like it. They thought it meant they were a secondary priority, that something else was more important to me, and they felt threatened by it. Interestingly, some of the fans felt the same way. It was similar in some regard to what happened with the early British bands: managers routinely suppressed information about the band members’ steady girlfriends, and in some cases even wives, because those realities didn’t harmonize with the way fans wanted to see their pop idols. This situation was roughly equivalent: KISS fans
wanted to see us as hard-working, tough-living New York musicians, reviled by critics, aggressively outside the rock establishment. The idea that one of us was living in California with a huge pop star—a huge television star—wasn’t immediately accepted.

The one person who understood my situation (even though, at first, he didn’t approve) was Paul. He had gotten a taste of California over the years, whenever we had stopped there to record or tour, and when I went out west to live with Cher, he started to see Cher’s sister, Georgeann. They got along so well that I thought they were going to get married. It didn’t happen, but it wasn’t because Paul was against marriage in principle. He had always wanted to get married, always wanted to have a monogamous relationship and children.

Life with Cher was a real adjustment. To start with, I had a whole new group of friends. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. They were more like acquaintances—mostly people Cher was close to, from Dolly Parton to Kate Jackson to Jane Fonda. At first I felt quite awkward about that situation, because the idea of celebrities hanging out with celebrities always struck me as a bit odd.

Slowly, though, I got more comfortable. The fact that they were actors and not musicians helped. For one thing, actors could put a sentence together. That’s a huge difference. That’s their business. They communicate and look you in the eye. And they were able to appear in public without being seen as freaks. Being in KISS, by contrast, didn’t prepare us for the social world. We didn’t have very good people skills because we were so sheltered. Nobody even knew what we looked like without makeup. And we hardly ever saw people except in hotel rooms because we were always hiding from the paparazzi.

Still, when I first arrived in California, I was walking around on shaky legs. With groupies I didn’t have to explain who and what I was. Suddenly I’m going around with Cher and being somewhat of a father to Chastity and Elijah, going on walks, having conversations. I remember once Cher woke me up early in the morning. We had moved to her Malibu home. I said, “What, what?” It must have been six in the morning.

“Let’s go running,” she said. I said, “Where to?” I put on my
leather pants and silk shirt and snakeskin boots. “You can’t dress like that,” she said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Well, you’ve got to put on these sneakers and shorts. Because we’re going to go run on the beach.”

“Why?” I said. I was dumbfounded. I mean, you didn’t do that in New York. Not in 1978.
Jog
was not even a word I knew. In New York it was always too cold to run, and where were you going to run, anyway? It was something you did when somebody was chasing you.

So we went. There I was, running alongside Cher in my snake-skin boots, and I could barely stand up because my boots were sinking into the sand. And out on the beach suddenly I saw Neil Diamond and then Barbra Streisand. It was like I was on another planet.

The bizarre thing about it is, they didn’t act the way you thought they were going to act. They were just regular people. On the other hand, KISS fans may be struck similarly when they meet me. You know, I’m the guy that spits blood and then it’s “Hello, nice to meet you.” They’re thinking,
Wait a minute, how come he didn’t drool blood?

I met Jane Fonda through Cher. Our interaction was brief. I was at the studio, and she came over to have dinner with me. In person she was more attractive than in her photographs or movies. She was bright and didn’t chitchat very much. She seemed interested in the whole KISS thing and kept asking questions about it. She also asked my opinion about a movie she had been working on and what I thought about the title,
The China Syndrome.
She told me what it was about. I told her I didn’t think much of the title. I said I preferred something like
What If …
The three dots following the
If …
would light up one at a time and start to cycle faster and faster with a beep being heard for each visual flash. The movie came out. It was called
The China Syndrome.

After a little while in California, I got distracted a bit from the rock and roll world. Even though I had always loved movies and wanted
to explore that field, I was still a guy in a band. I didn’t have a clue how to get into it, who the studio executives were, or what the structure was. But I started to get immersed in that world, mostly through Cher, who wasn’t yet a movie star but was trying to break into film. She had her TV show, first with Sonny and then on her own, and she had done huge shows in Las Vegas. She was at that point probably the biggest star in the country, or certainly one who could be counted on to sell magazines.

When we went to parties, I watched how people interacted with each other. I noticed how Cher was to certain people—very cordial, even though afterward she would tell me that she didn’t know who the person was. I thought that was bizarre, because in my experience, within the confines of a band, if someone came up to me and said, “Hi, it’s so nice to see you again,” I would say, honestly and straightforwardly, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember ever meeting you. Who are you?”

It took me a while to get accustomed to Los Angeles, not just because of the surreal fact of all these celebrities milling around, treating each other like ordinary people, but because there were new rules. The same kind of thing that had happened after the Tubes concert happened again and again. We had conversations about her feelings, about how she wasn’t sure how she felt, and so on. It was like a foreign language to me. I had never watched soap operas, partly because I never understood what everybody was so miserable about. In those shows everybody was good-looking. Everybody was rich. Everybody was healthy and young. And everybody was miserable. The promiscuous characters were berated and tortured for being alive and for not curtailing their natural lusts. The others were talking about their innermost emotions and needs and priorities. And eventually, everyone became promiscuous. It seemed absurd in every way. And then all of a sudden here it was in my own life: Cher telling me, “Here’s how I feel, and here’s what it means,” and asking me, “What did you mean by that?” and “How do you feel?” I had absolutely no expertise in communicating on that level. The first question I kept thinking of, over and over again, was
Why are we even talking about this?
If you want to be
with me, you are. And if you don’t want to be with me, you’re not. It’s simple, nothing you have to verbalize.

I was being related to in a different way, for the first time in my life. Mostly the girls I’d met didn’t have a lot of conversational skills, or they weren’t really interested in flexing those muscles. They were just excited to be there with me, whether we were backstage or in a hotel room. Granted, I’d see some of them more than once, but by and large, our relationships were purely sexual. With Cher, though, I had met somebody who could hold her own in conversation, who had her own feelings and her own points of view about everything.

For example, Cher had her own opinions about the women I had been with. I wouldn’t say that she was jealous, not exactly. I was a rock star and had been a rock star for quite some time, with a reputation for chasing skirt. As I have said, it was the only thing I could do on the road, since I didn’t drink or take drugs. The thing that threw Cher a little bit was the photography. Since 1976 or so, I had been taking pictures of the girls I had been with, sometimes film footage. I didn’t do it without their knowledge or compliance. In fact, most of the girls were thrilled about it. It was a hobby of mine, partly to keep things exciting and partly as a kind of documentary. There were so many girls—by the time I met Cher, somewhere in the neighborhood of a few thousand. At one point I told Cher about the photographs. It wasn’t to confess, because I didn’t feel guilty. I just wanted to share everything with her. She was shocked. She didn’t understand why I would want to do that. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t any stranger than any other road behaviors—drinking, drugs, and that kind of thing. In fact, it was quite a bit less strange, and it didn’t hurt anyone.