Makeup to Breakup (37 page)

I started seeing him twice a week. Our relationship immediately blossomed and I wound up taking lessons with him for two years and we’re close friends to this day. He had some unique teaching methods. He didn’t like the way I read scripts, so he had me reading every sign I saw as I drove. And it worked. I was getting better. After about a month, John thought that I was a natural. Which was just as well, because Tom had sent over the script and I was supposed to shoot my scenes in a few weeks.

My character was a quick-tempered lowlife wise guy who would do anything for a buck. We began by shooting my action scene out on the ball field. Tom wasn’t there for that, but he did show up for my first scene in Oz. I was sitting in the cafeteria eating lunch when Dean Winters came up to me. His character had just killed a man, and he wanted me to rat out another guy who was innocent. He was going to slip me some money to help him.

My big line was, “You never even farted in my direction and I’ve been here for three years, now you want something from me?” My acting teacher told me that I should deliver the line just staring at my food until I say the word
fart,
and then look at Dean. Then go back to looking down at my food. a picture of my daughter9 when

Sure enough, they rolled the camera and I was a nervous wreck. I rushed all my lines.

“Relax, Peter, just tell the story,” the director said.

So we did another take, and when I got to “fart” I delivered the line just the way John told me to. Tom Fontana’s face lit up. He knew that a coach had to have told me how to deliver that line.

For my next scene, Tom paired me with Ernie Hudson, the great character actor who played the warden. I went in and squealed on the innocent guy and convinced the warden that my conscience had been bothering me. We did it in two takes.

“Good job, my man,” Ernie told me. “For a guy that’s just coming into
the ball park, I think you got a career here.” Ernie and I bonded off the set, and became very good friends.

I got knocked off in the next episode. I try to renegotiate with Dean to get more money, and he tells me to meet him in the library. Then Dean tells the guy I squealed on that I was a rat. This character was played by Tommy Waites, who was in
Miami Vice
and
The Thing
. Great actor. Tom gave me scenes with three of the best actors on the show.

I’m in the library and Tommy’s character comes in, slams the door, and stabs me in the neck with a pen. They had a tube going up my shirt so when the pen hit me, blood went spurting everywhere. I fall down and the guards rush in and take Tommy away.

“Take him to the infirmary,” someone says. That was a signal that they might bring my character back: I may recover. But I told Tom that I might have to go back out with KISS. Later on, in the final season, someone asked, “How’s that Montgomery guy doing?” And the other guy said, “He ain’t going to sing no more.”

Fontana told me that he had used everything I had told him when we first met in his restaurant in building my character. When I told him all the stories about how Gene and Paul fucked me over, he had me go to the warden because I couldn’t keep it inside anymore. And when I told him that the pen was mightier than the sword with these guys, and I had been fucked over so many times by signing bad deals, he had me bumped off with a pen. And of course in the end I wasn’t going to sing anymore.

Acting in
Oz
was a great accomplishment. I practiced and practiced and was able to learn six pages of a script at a time. That’s a lot of words to learn and deliver. I remember coming home from the taping with Gigi and feeling so proud. I had hit a home run, I didn’t fuck up once, and sitting there in the limo I was exhilarated: It was one of the best feelings of achievement I’d ever had, next to playing Madison Square Garden.

Gene publicly maintained that I was a part of KISS even after I left the group after the farewell tour. It wasn’t like they were doing so well without me. In February 2002 they played at a Lane Bryant fashion show. In March they performed at a nudist resort in the West Indies. By then Ace’s contract was running out, so he refused to do that show. And when it ran out, he left KISS for good.

Just after the New Year in 2003, I got a call from Doc. KISS was going to Australia to perform with a symphony orchestra and it was going to be recorded for a CD and DVD. They wanted me to play. Jesus, it just doesn’t end with these guys, I thought to myself. I had heard that Paul had been divorced after the farewell tour and his wife had taken hi,” Ace said. “ wanted to ” ayism to the cleaners. I really liked Pam. She was a pretty girl from Texas, much too hot for Paul. Her father was a high-ranking military man and her family were builders. Pam was smart, and they had a son together, but you could see that she and Paul weren’t in love. There was a distance that you felt when they sat together. Part of it was because Paul was possessive and insecure. When they were apart, he’d call her every five minutes.

I think another part of the problem was that Pam met and married Paul during the years KISS were unmasked. She had never really seen him perform in makeup. I watched Pam when she came to the shows and I think she couldn’t handle seeing the Starchild up there slapping his ass and making out with himself. She would split in the middle of the show. After a while, she didn’t even come out to the shows and then Paul was living in Gene’s guesthouse, and then it was “See ya.” So Paul had a lot of money to make back.

So did I, actually. I had lost a lot in the market after 9/11. I hung up after Doc gave me the whole pitch and I thought, “Wait a minute. These guys just ripped me off for millions of dollars. We were feuding. Gene is calling me names in the press. Our fans had probably flipped out reading so much shit from Gene. Yes, no; I love him, I hate him.”

Then my lawyer called me. He told me that they were going to give me 25 percent of the proceeds from the album and DVD. I was going to make pretty much what they were making. Now, that was great. That album could sell. And the idea of playing with a sixty-piece orchestra hooked me right there. I would have paid my own money to go and play with sixty people.

So the deal was sounding better and better. Then I heard that David Campbell, the great conductor whose son is Beck, was conducting. So this was the chance of a lifetime for me.

I started working with Sandy Gennaro, a drum coach who had played with Cyndi Lauper. I wanted to be a walking metronome: I didn’t want to
embarrass myself in front of all those people. We worked for four months, eight hours a day, on tempo. Now there was no way that Paul would be able to complain about my tempo.

We rehearsed in L.A. I was having a great time, playing my drums with twenty percussion guys banging away around me. I was well oiled from the tutoring. Every fill had to be precise, every hit had to be precise; everyone was feeding off the drums. I was so up for playing.

And then Gene reared his ugly head. We were arguing about something and I casually said, “Look it, what does it matter? As long as I’m getting my one quarter of the album, it’ll all be good.”

“What?” Gene said.

“I’m getting an even share for this album,” I repeated.

“You are getting nothing for this album. You are getting a paycheck. Over my dead body will you see one fucking dime from this record,” he pronounced.

I went into shock. I called my lawyer and he assured me that I would be getting 25 percent. Of course, eventually I didn’t see a fucking dime from the record. I had been ripped off again.

I even got screwed at the show. Gene and Paul arranged everything for their benefit, so they gave “Beth” the wrong slot in the set and only gave me thirteen pieces instead of the full sixty-piece complement. But I did enjoy playing that show. There’s something about a woman spreading her legs with a cello in between them that is so hot. When they’re playing, their dresses bunch up way over their knees. One woman even played barefoot. I had a perpetu a picture of my daughter9 when al erection looking at those cello girls.

When all was said and done and we were back home in New Jersey, I told Gigi, “I can’t do this anymore. I want nothing to do with these guys.” Look at all the people they drove mad. Poor Eric Carr, the guy who first replaced me, was reduced to sitting in his hotel room naked with the blinds all drawn, drinking and refusing to come out. Bill Aucoin lost his whole empire on drugs. Sean went crazy. Howard Marks died a drunk. Neil Bogart died. They drove Mark St. John and Vinnie Vincent crazy. The list could go on and on. There was no way in hell that I would ever tour with those guys again.

And then Doc called. I didn’t want to talk to him, so I put Gigi on.
They were going to go out on tour again, and they wanted me to come out. Gigi started negotiating with Doc. He told her that they had tried to get Aerosmith to go out with them but it had fallen through, so this wouldn’t be a big tour. Naturally, they wouldn’t be able to pay me much money.

“Well, what kind of money are you talking about?” she said. “You can pay him at least twenty-five thousand dollars a show?”

“They’re not going to go for that, Gigi,” he said.

“Well, you disrespected Peter and treated him like a second-class citizen throughout the entire reunion tour,” Gigi said. “You didn’t give him the right merch money, you didn’t do a lot of things financially that you were supposed to do, and now you’re telling me that you won’t give him twenty-five thousand dollars a show? Doc, I’ve been to these shows. I see what kind of money you people make.”

They talked back and forth for a while until finally our lawyer told us that Doc didn’t want Gigi to call him anymore; he would only negotiate with the lawyer. “You’ve got to do this,” my lawyer told me. “You can walk away after this and retire.”

I don’t know why I believed this guy. They had gotten the better of him on the Australian negotiations. I still didn’t know who owned my Catman makeup and what had happened to it. But Doc and my lawyer worked out a new contract based on this being a small-cities tour.

I was in L.A. rehearsing when Gigi and I went to Paul Stanley’s birthday party at his house. Everyone there seemed to be ecstatic. Gene and Paul were smiling from ear to ear, already counting their money. Doc was drinking champagne and getting plowed. Gigi started talking to some guy from Cleveland who seemed to be in the know and he told her that Tommy Thayer was going to play on the tour. She was dumbfounded and she came right over to tell me. I was furious. I had been told by Doc that Ace was going to be playing.

Then we got more news. We were sitting in the veranda area with Paul and his new girlfriend when Doc came over.

“What happened, Doc?” Paul asked, as if it was for our benefit. “How’d the phone call go?”

“I just got off the phone with Brian,” Doc said, all smiles. “We just signed the deal with Aerosmith.”

I grabbed Gigi’s hand and clenched it so hard I thought I would break it. Gigi had to restrain me, I was ready to get up and punch that fat fuck Doc in the face. They had screwed me again. I had signed my contract after they told me that it would be a small-venue tour and they swore they didn’t know who was going to be the opening act, so I had agreed to play for ten thousand dollars a night. Now we were going to play big venues and I was a nice chunk of change,itd ever getting none of the merch and a lousy ten grand a show.

We ran out of that party and got back to the hotel and Gigi called my lawyer.

“You are such an asshole!” she yelled. “What the hell did you do to us? Peter is so mad at me.”

I couldn’t believe that I was right back where I didn’t want to be. But I needed the money.

I was back in New Jersey getting ready to go out on tour when I got a call from Joe Perry, Aerosmith’s guitar player.

“Peter, we’re having trouble with the tour,” he said. “Ace ain’t coming. But we want the real KISS on the tour. Can you call Ace?” Joe asked me. “Maybe you can talk him into it.”

It looked like the tour might fall apart. Aerosmith’s drummer, Joey Kramer, didn’t want to get on the same stage with us: He thought we were just buffoons. But I wasn’t going to call Ace and beg him to come out on tour. As much as I felt betrayed by Ace, I still would have preferred having him play instead of Tommy Thayer. I hated playing that one show in Melbourne without Ace. And this was going to be half a year out of my life.

But I bit the bullet and went back to the rehearsals. At first they had talked about the opener alternating between us and Aerosmith, but now Aerosmith decided that we were going to open every show. If Ace wasn’t there, Aerosmith didn’t feel that they deserved to open for an imitation of KISS.

It was an interesting tour, but I missed Ace. Instead I had Tommy/Ace. Thayer just morphed into being Ace. He moved like Ace; he started coming into the dressing room and acting like he was a star, throwing his shit all over the place, ordering people around.

I would sit there while I was putting on my makeup and just ruthlessly bust his balls.

“You think you’re a rock star? You’re a piece of shit. You used to order my breakfast,” I’d say.

Gene would snicker because he didn’t have the balls to tell Tommy off himself.

“Like he’s earned the right to be called a rock star,” I’d continue. “He’s a stand-in for Ace. He doesn’t even have his own licks, and I’m supposed to respect this piece of shit?”

“Peter is complaining again,” Gene would say.

Sure, I was complaining. I grew to hate that guy. Tommy would come up to me onstage and I would look the other way. I didn’t even want to look at him, I despised him so much.

Then Tommy started sitting in on meetings with Gene and Paul that I wasn’t even invited to. Doc would call for a meeting and never once did he ask me to attend. Here’s a fucking punk ass-licker privy to more shit than me. It broke my heart. I laugh about it now, but it killed me then.

I even hated Tommy’s playing. He would play Ace’s leads perfectly, note for note. That was the problem. I loved the crudeness of Ace. Ace wore twenty-four million bracelets, skulls, and chains. He had a ring on every finger, one of them the same big skull ring that Keith Richards, his idol, wore. And when Ace played, you’d hear the jewelry jangling and slamming against the Les Paul. Ace was electrifying. But Tommy played like a schoolteacher, perfectly precise. That’s not KISS. KISS was a loose, great band. Now we’re perfect, all of a sudden. Now and then I’d fuck around and try something different and I’d get a look. It was the same fucking boring show,” Ace said. “s s” night after night after night.