They Call Me Supermensch Read online

  Joe Greenberg and I stayed friends all the way through school. Joe was handsome, cool, and a little bit of a scoundrel. So of course the girls found him irresistible. Every woman he wanted to fall in love with him did. I was the opposite. I was convinced I was not attractive or cool or interesting to girls, which made me terribly shy and inhibited with them. I loved women and was as horny as any college boy, but being with women never came easy to me. I hardly dated, barely kissed a girl, and my inexperience made me even more gun-shy.

  At the end of senior year I found I was three credits short of a diploma and could not graduate on time. Marty Kriegel’s close friend David was teaching a summer course. I made a deal with him to get those credits without going to class. Instead I went to Acapulco. It was the first summer I had ever gone on a real summer vacation.

  I loved Acapulco. Ever since my great summers at Long Beach I have always been drawn to warm weather, blue skies, and beaches. The hot spot was Carlos’n Charlie’s, a Mexican restaurant that has grown into a chain with something like fifty locations now throughout the Americas. The emphasis was all on fun—fun food, fun drinks, fun atmosphere. I met a guy there named Rubio. I had a bag of peyote, so he was very nice to me. He explained to me that Acapulco was full of gigolos who serviced the tourist women. They mostly slept on the beach and didn’t accept cash from the women, only clothes, jewelry, and meals—especially meals at Carlos’n Charlie’s.

  I decided to become a gigolo. I was probably the worst gigolo in history. No one invited me to dinner or gave me jewelry. I ran out of money pretty quickly. I still had some of the peyote, so I’d swim out to a raft in front of the Hilton and take some of that. One afternoon a really nice girl swam out to the raft. Susan told me she was a teacher from Brooklyn. I told her I was starving. She took me to a Big Boy for a hamburger. She did that every day for the rest of the summer. Very nice girl. Five or six years later, when I was managing Alice Cooper, the guitarist Glen Buxton introduced us to his new girlfriend. It was Susan. I’d never gotten her number and hadn’t been in touch since she was buying me those hamburgers. We were rehearsing at the Fillmore East in Manhattan. I went out and bought fifty hamburgers and brought them back for Susan. It was the least I could do.

  When I returned to Buffalo at the end of the summer, David said, “I can’t give you a grade. You never came to class.”

  “You know I never go to class,” I said.

  He said, “I can’t help it. I have to fail you.”

  “I can’t tell my parents I failed because I was in Acapulco instead of here,” I said. “They’ll kill me.”

  He wouldn’t budge. I called Marty, and he said, “Meet me at his office.”

  We sat together across the desk from David, who said, “Marty, what can I do? He didn’t even attend a class. How can I pass him? It’s not right.”

  And Marty said, “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”

  David went pale. After a moment he sighed. “Okay, I’ll give you a D.”

  “Make it a B,” Marty said.

  David said, “Will you settle for a C?”

  “Take it, Marty!” I said.

  When we left the office, I asked Marty what that was about. He had arranged for David to pass his required German course for his Ph.D., even though David did not in fact sprechen any Deutsch. He owed Marty. With that little bit of extortion I graduated and got my diploma in February 1968—and learned my first coupon lesson.

  I headed back to New York. So did Joey. After four years as roommates and best friends we fell a little out of touch for a while as each of us tried to figure out what he was going to do now. I still didn’t know. I’d heard about the New School for Social Research, in Greenwich Village. A cousin of mine owned a clothing factory in Manhattan’s shmata district called Divine Garments. I thought maybe he’d give me a day job and I’d go to night school and try to figure myself out. I took an apartment on Sixth Avenue in the Village, a sixth-floor walk-up that I shared with the guy who had sold me my first pot back at Nathan’s.

  Divine Garments was a strange place. They made backless suits and dresses for corpses to wear in open-casket funerals. I spent a lot of time around people who were grieving for lost loved ones. I was very appreciative for the job, but I can’t say I liked it, and I sure couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life toiling away in the Garment District. Night school wasn’t working for me, either. I couldn’t be a student anymore. Then some recruiters from California’s juvenile probation system came to the New School. I thought maybe I should get on my white horse, go to California, and save some kids. I had my degree in sociology, and it sounded like they could really use the help. Governor Ronald Reagan had declared war against hippies like me. Also, a girl I had a bit of a crush on had moved to San Francisco, and a friend of mine, Richie Lawrence, had moved to Los Angeles to be a TV producer. California was the hippie Mecca, the place a lot of young people were flocking. I felt like it was calling me, too. I’d go to San Francisco and wear some flowers in my hair, as the song said. So I applied for a job as a probation officer at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, south of L.A., and was accepted.

  I went first to San Francisco, where the girl now had a boyfriend. I stayed in a commune there for four or five nights and found communal life was not for me. So much for flowers in my hair. From there I hitchhiked to L.A., where I slept on Richie’s floor in his studio apartment in Hollywood. For a while I sold the Los Angeles Free Press on Sunset Boulevard and ate the fantastic white-bread hamburger sandwiches from Greenblatt’s Deli. I’d also go to Griffith Park for the free lunch the hippies handed out every day.

  My parents had given me a few bucks, which I used to buy the old car I drove down to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall one morning to start my new job. Los Padrinos was a way station for juveniles being processed for court or for transfers in the California Youth Authority system. I didn’t have a clue what that meant. In my mind I pictured it like something out of the old movie Boys Town. The kids would be basically good boys who’d only gotten in trouble with the law because they were poor, and I’d be the kindly Spencer Tracy father figure who helps them straighten out. But Spencer Tracy wasn’t tripping on acid when he showed up for work the first day, with long hippie hair and a Pancho Villa mustache. I did have the presence of mind to hide the strip of blotter acid I had brought with me from New York in the trunk of the car. Reagan was governor, which meant that I was working for him, and Reagan hated hippies, druggies, college students, and just about anyone else who wasn’t clean-cut and straight-arrow.

  I was at Los Padrinos so briefly that I honestly have almost no recollection of the place except that it looked and felt pretty much like any other grim penal institution. The uniformed guards were all tough, crew-cut cop types who took an instant dislike to me. They gave me a perfunctory orientation, a locker, and a uniform. Then a couple of them led me out to a fenced-in field where I was supposed to supervise a softball game. One of them said to me, “Don’t worry. All you gotta do is watch ’em.”

  The kids were all tough-looking, mostly Hispanic. Everything about their body language and their cold stares told me they could not have cared less who I was or what I thought I was doing there, but I felt a need to explain and ingratiate myself with them. I said something along the lines of, “Listen, guys, this is the luckiest day of your lives. Look at me. I’m not like those other guards. I’m here to help. All I want is for you guys to do good and be happy and get out of here and have a productive life. I’m going to do everything I can to help you get through this. I know what it’s like to be trapped in a room.” I didn’t mention I’d been trapped in a room by a mutt named Skippy.

  They just stared. No reaction at all. I wasn’t even sure they understood English.

  “Okay, fellas. Let’s just play ball.”

  That’s what they wanted to hear. They fanned out in two teams and started to play. For a few minutes they were just like any teenagers on a ball field, and I relaxed a little. Maybe this wasn�
�t going to be so bad.

  Then they stopped playing. And started to make a circle around me and move in, those hard looks still on their faces. It was like something out of West Side Story, only these kids weren’t Broadway dancers playing gang members, they were the real deal. One of them shoved me from behind. Then another punched me in the face. Then a kid whacked me on the shins with a bat. None of the blows were really hard. They weren’t actually beating me up, which they could easily have done. They were just testing me, showing me what was what. Still, it was pretty frightening. I looked around, over their heads and their cold stares, and discovered that those other guards had left me out there alone. I’m sure they knew what I was in for. I’m sure they liked it.

  I started yelling for help, and gradually they sauntered out to the field and broke it up. There was an eerie calm to the way they and the kids all went through the motions. No one was much bothered, except for me.

  “What the fuck?” I asked one of the guards.

  He shrugged. “Happens every day here. This is what we do.”

  “I guess you guys don’t want me here.”

  He snickered. “Good guess, Barbara.”

  Barbara? The contempt everyone in this place felt for me—the guards, the kids—hit me like a train. Whatever I had been thinking this job was going to be like, this wasn’t it. I went inside, took off the uniform, walked out to my old car, and drove away. I hadn’t lasted four hours.

  3

  I DROVE UP THE FREEWAY THAT NIGHT and took the exit marked “Hollywood,” because that was where Richie’s place was. But it was late and I didn’t know if I could test our friendship by sleeping on his couch anymore. I had some cash on me and decided it would be better to stay in a motel. I drove along busy, six-lane Highland Avenue until I saw a motel vacancy sign. It looked like a fleabag, which I figured meant I could afford it, but the rooms were too expensive. I continued along Highland until I got to a place where the right lane was right turn only, onto Franklin Avenue. The lights and all the action seemed to be back on Highland, but I kept going.

  A few blocks farther along I saw another vacancy sign. It was the Landmark Motor Hotel. That was the night Janis punched me. The next day I was hanging at the pool with her, Jimi, and the others, and my new life’s journey began.

  I should note here that as clear as my memory of meeting Janis and the others at the Landmark is to me, my partner Joe has a very different recollection of the sequence of events—a story I’m sure he’ll tell sometime. Alice always says that if you remember the sixties and seventies, you weren’t there. I am the perfect example. Things I remember couldn’t have happened, and things I can’t remember have been proven to me to have happened. Joe, Alice, and I agree on the most important points, though.

  The Chambers Brothers and Paul Rothchild spent the most time at the Landmark. The Chambers Brothers had a house in Watts where their mother lived, but kept a room two doors down from mine. Paul lived at the hotel permanently, and Jim Morrison often came to visit. Janis had a room downstairs, Room 105, and came and went as she toured around. Sadly, that was the room where she would die of an overdose in 1970. Jimi was in and out. Creedence Clearwater Revival regularly stayed there when they came to record. All the English groups who came to L.A. on tour or to record stayed there, unless they had a lot of money, in which case they stayed at the Continental Hyatt in West Hollywood, better known as the Continental Riot House for the wild times Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and other bands had there. But not many had any money at that time, so they stayed at the Landmark.

  It was a different time. Rock music wasn’t the corporate industry it would become in the 1970s. The artists weren’t the giants they became. They weren’t Mount Rushmore. They were just a bunch of young people struggling to make it. They were a great group of friends and in some ways a family to me. They’d all gather down by the pool in the afternoons, talk shop, and sometimes they’d jam and sing. The leader of the jams, if he was there, was always Arthur Lee of Love. He would give out the harmonies, say, “Why don’t you come in [with vocals] here?” They all looked to him to guide them. That was interesting, because to the public, the rest of them were all much bigger stars, but among themselves they all really respected Arthur.

  With all those rockers at the hotel, it was a Mecca for groupies. You could sit at the pool and see these girls come into the hotel and work their way around the balconies, moving from Hendrix’s room to Morrison’s room to Bobby Neuwirth’s and so on. Occasionally I’d get to be with one myself, just by being there. The first groupie I was with, I was so naïve I thought, Wow, this girl really likes me. And then she was two doors down the next night. Oh, maybe she didn’t like me that much. But at least I was no longer a virgin.

  There were all types of groupies. A lot of them kept lists of the guys they scored, and had competitions. In a class by themselves were the GTO’s, Girls Together Outrageously. They were at the Landmark all the time. Seven pretty, insane young girls who all called themselves Miss Something—Miss Christine, Miss Pamela (Pamela Des Barres, who wrote a couple of widely read books about the groupie life), Miss Sparky, Miss Mercy, Miss Lucy, Miss Sandra, and Miss Cynderella. They originally called themselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company. Frank Zappa suggested the name GTO’s when he turned them into a singing group and produced their first and only album, Permanent Damage. They made themselves indispensable around the hotel. They would do anything anybody needed: buy clothes, run errands, cook meals. They used to cook me meals, and it was colors you never saw before in nature: weirdly green-and-yellow food, purple-and-blackish stuff—unbelievable. But they were very sweet, and they did anything you needed, just to help.

  One day we were all down at the pool and looked up to see a clothesline full of ladies’ underwear hanging in the sun outside a room near mine. Was it some new groupie phenomenon? No—the Ice Capades had come to town and the skaters were staying at the hotel. That was one of the most exciting things that ever happened there for Willie and Lester Chambers and me.

  I started doing business with the musicians at the Landmark within a few days of getting there, but it wasn’t music business. I had brought quite a bit of acid with me that was left over from my days of dealing it back at college. LSD came in such tiny doses that you could fit thousands of hits on a sheet of blotter paper or in a vial.

  I found Jimi by the pool and asked him, “Anybody here take acid?”

  “I do. If it’s really good I might tell my friends.”

  It was really good. I started selling it to people at the hotel to support myself. Then I got some hash, which I traded for a type of excellent grass called Icepack, which came in extremely compressed, very hard one-kilo bricks. You could build a house with them. Joe came out to join me; we were roommates again, and partners. Within a couple of months we had built a very profitable business dealing. We bought a shiny black 1954 Cadillac limo, which the Chambers Brothers’ cousins slept in at night for a year or so, because there wasn’t enough bed space in their room. The Chambers Brothers were the ones who went out of their way to befriend us and make us feel comfortable. I can’t say I had a real relationship with, for example, Jimi or Janis, but the Chambers Brothers and I became family. We’re still good friends to this day; Lester’s kids come to visit and have dinner when they’re in Hawaii.

  It was because of the Chambers Brothers—and the drugs—that we got started in the business of managing acts. One day Joe and I were hanging at the pool with Lester, Willie, and Jimi. Lester asked us, “What are you going to say if the police come around and ask where you got the money for that limo?”

  I said, “What do you mean? Who’s going to ask?” In Oceanside cops never came to the door asking where you got the money to buy your house.

  “Where I come from in Watts,” Lester explained, “if you have a new watch you better be able to tell the cop on the beat where you bought it. Otherwise you’re going to have eyes on you. You don’t want eyes on you considering the busines
s you’re in. You need a cover. You guys are Jewish, right?” When we said yes, he said, “Well, then you should be managers.”

  We said, “Yeah, we should be managers!”

  We had a great friend from college, Roger Rubenstein, who managed the Left Banke (“Walk Away Renée”) in New York. We asked Roger if he’d let us say we represented the Left Banke in California.

  One day Joe and I walked into a clothing store on Santa Monica Boulevard. We were pretending to be the Left Banke’s managers. We met a girl who worked there, named Cindy, who said, “Oh, I have a brother in a band. You should meet them.”

  At just about the same time, someone at the Landmark, maybe Jimi, said to Lester, “Don’t you have that band of freaks from Phoenix living in your basement in Watts? Why don’t you tell them you found these two Jewish guys who manage the Left Banke and they’d like to represent them?”

  Lester said he’d bring them over.

  We had just gotten a new shipment of grass, and everybody came up to our place to try it. At one point I answered a knock on the door, and the five guys in this band were standing out there. When they tell this part of their story, they always laugh and say that the room was so thick with pot smoke they couldn’t see anyone. But as the smoke cleared there were Janis, Jimi, and Jim Morrison on the couch. Alice Cooper were a “band of freaks” all right. They all had really long hair—one of them down to his ass—and though they were all wearing dungarees, they also sported giant earrings and fingernails painted all different colors, like nothing I’d ever seen in my life.

  They were Alice Cooper: guitarist Glen Buxton, guitarist and keyboardist Mike Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway, singer Vince Furnier, and drummer Neal Smith—Cindy’s brother! They had started out together in high school in Phoenix, Arizona, calling themselves the Earwigs and lip-synching to Beatles records, “and we were awful,” Alice writes in his book Alice Cooper, Golf Monster. “Simply awful.” Then they learned how to play and became the Spiders, a typical mid-1960s rock band, except that they were already starting to play around with stage props, a big black spiderweb. They made a couple of singles that were local hits, then came to Los Angeles in 1967 to try to make it there. They were all around nineteen, twenty, a couple of years younger than me, and what they discovered when they got to L.A. was that every other rock band west of the Mississippi had the same idea. L.A. was crowded with bands, and there were only so many places to play. Since their music at that point was pretty much the same psychedelia every other band was playing, they needed to stand out in other ways. So they came up with their new band name, Alice Cooper. Since all the other bands wore jeans and hippie clothes, they started wearing their weird outfits. Vince Furnier wasn’t identified as “Alice Cooper” yet; the whole band was Alice at that point. But he was on his way. He wore runny makeup inspired by movies like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? And they started developing an increasingly bizarre stage act inspired by horror movies and the art of Salvador Dali, whom they had discovered in high school art class. Vince would use anything for a prop. He says that what they were doing was “stylistically a cross between an out-of-control freight train and a horrible car crash.” Nobody in mellow, hippie L.A. rock was doing anything like it.