They Call Me Supermensch Read online

  I called Alice and said, “I have some good news and some bad news.”

  “Give me the good news first,” he said.

  “You know that skylight you wanted in the bedroom? No problem.”

  “Great,” he said. “What’s the bad news?”

  “The house burned down.”

  He thought I was joking at first. He went on to build a completely new house on the site and lived there for most of the 1970s.

  Living in Benedict Canyon made Alice a neighbor of one of his biggest heroes—Groucho Marx. Groucho was in his eighties and frail, Alice was a rock star in his early twenties, but they hit it off. Like me, Alice had been a huge Marx Brothers fan ever since childhood. He had watched the movies dozens of times and could practically quote them line for line.

  Groucho had insomnia and would call Alice at one in the morning and ask him to come over. Alice would get on the bed with him and they’d watch TV until Groucho fell asleep—both of them wearing Mickey Mouse ears. It was the cutest thing you ever saw. Groucho chewed on a cigar, Alice worked on a six-pack of Bud, and they watched old movies.

  Alice respected Groucho as a living legend, a comic genius, and a virtuoso entertainer. Once he got to know Groucho the man, he adored him even more, and felt very protective of him in his old age. Groucho treated Alice like a son. He liked Alice so much, he started calling him “Coop,” which had been his affectionate name for his friend Gary Cooper. They went places together all the time. They sang a duet of Groucho’s signature song, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” at a birthday party for Sinatra. Alice took Groucho to the Polo Lounge for his eighty-sixth birthday. I thought their odd-couple friendship was really, really sweet.

  I first met Groucho one night when Alice called and said, “Can you come over to Groucho’s house?” I was really nervous about meeting him. I was twenty-two, and as I said, like Alice I’d been a Marx Brothers fan all my life. They made me and my dad laugh so many times. I felt I owed Groucho so much. I found them on the bed, watching TV. We made a little small talk until Groucho fell asleep and we left. The next morning Alice called and said, “You notice there wasn’t a nurse last night? He requires around-the-clock care, but he can’t afford the night shift of nurses anymore. Can you see if you can put his business back together?”

  Erin Fleming, a part-time actress, was Groucho’s assistant. She had started out as his secretary, mostly to answer fan mail, and at some point moved in. When they appeared together on Dick Cavett’s TV talk show, she said, “I’m Groucho’s secretary.” And he cracked, “This is the euphemism of the year.” He was in his eighties, she was maybe thirty, and he wanted the world to think she was assisting him with more than the mail. When he was alone, he’d slump over like a marionette with its strings cut. But when she walked into the room, he’d perk up right away.

  Erin hired me. I never really had a conversation with Groucho about being hired. I brought in a guy named Bill Owen, who worked for me in L.A., and positioned him in Groucho’s house to be the point man. We looked into Groucho’s financial affairs and they were a mess. He had to be wealthy, but nobody seemed to know where the money was. We found a bunch of freeloaders on the books, whom Groucho was paying for doing nothing. We weeded them out.

  I concentrated on finding him more income sources. I was really proud of the first deal I did for him. In London, at the end of the block-long Savile Row, was a top-class men’s tailor shop called Blades. When you walked or drove down Savile Row you looked right at their big display window. I licensed them Groucho’s image for a sweater they displayed in that window for years. I wear one in Supermensch. We also helped get the episodes of his old TV show You Bet Your Life back on the air, which took some doing. Almost everyone who appeared on that show was an actor who came under Screen Actors Guild rules, which meant you could syndicate it but you’d lose money unless you cut deals with the actors or their estates to reduce their SAG rates. A lawyer had already outlined the strategy and started making the phone calls, and we helped execute.

  In 1972 A&M released the album An Evening with Groucho, a live recording of a one-man show he did at Carnegie Hall. TV show host Dick Cavett introduced; Groucho told family stories and jokes, and sang a few of the classic old songs from his films, with Erin singing backup and Marvin Hamlisch on piano. Albums actually made money in those days, so I thought we should ask A&M to give Groucho an advance against potential future earnings, which we could use to pay for nurses. A&M stood for Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, the label’s founders, both industry legends. Erin knew Moss and got us a meeting. To me, Moss was larger than life, a guy from the Bronx who had made better than good. I was feeling particularly small and insignificant as we arrived at A&M’s offices, which were in the beautiful old Charlie Chaplin Studios at La Brea and Sunset.

  Erin and I waited a short while, then Jerry Moss rolled into the room in a wheelchair. I didn’t know if he had a permanent condition or had just had an accident or something; he is only about ten years older than me. Erin hugged him.

  “Listen, guys, I’m on my way to the hospital,” he said. “I’m getting back surgery today. But I figured it was important, and I love Groucho. So what are we meeting about?”

  Nervously, I said, “Mr. Moss, thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I got involved in Groucho’s financial affairs, and we’re looking for ways to get him some income to pay for the health care he needs at this stage in his life. We’re wondering if—”

  Out of nowhere, like a tiger exploding out of the underbrush, Erin started screaming at him. “You motherfucker! You’re fuckin’ stealing from him, you cocksucker!” And on and on, raging like a madwoman.

  I was shocked. I didn’t know her well and had no idea where this was coming from. It was one of the most insane things I’d ever seen. He let her scream like that for maybe thirty seconds, then turned to me and said, “Shep, can I see you outside?”

  I followed him to the outer office.

  “So what’s this about?” he said, remarkably calm under the circumstances.

  I explained that I’d gotten involved through Alice, that we were looking for ways to pay for night nurses, etc.

  “I’m really sorry this happened, Mr. Moss. I had no idea. This is the last thing I wanted.”

  Now, this is the kind of mensch Jerry Moss is. He pulled out a checkbook and right there and then wrote Groucho a personal check for a significant amount. I was so moved and touched. Then, as he held it out to me, he got a little glint in his eye and said through a crooked smile, “There’s only one thing I ask.”

  “Name it,” I said.

  “Don’t bring her back!”

  Jerry has a coupon with me that goes all the way back to that day. I will gladly pay it back for the rest of my life. I will do anything I can do for him at any time. That’s what a coupon is. More than that, I had a feeling that day that we’d become good friends, and we did. I found him a house in Maui, so we became neighbors. I helped to organize the wedding of Jerry and his beautiful wife, Ani, in the heart of Maui. A few friends attended, including Herb Alpert and his wife, Lani. Herb blew a conch shell we found on the beach. I arranged for a helicopter from the Kapalua Hotel to bring in champagne, caviar, and a picnic dinner. A few years ago Jerry asked me where I’d like to go for my birthday. He has his own plane. I said Bhutan, and he and Ani flew me there.

  The rest of Erin’s story, unfortunately, is a sad one. When Groucho died in 1977 she fought a big court battle with his family over the estate, and lost. The mental instability she flashed in Jerry’s office grew more pronounced over the years. She would be periodically institutionalized in the 1990s, sometimes living on the street in between, and she killed herself with a gun in 2003. Still, she did a lot of good things for Groucho in his final years, and he was very happy to have her around.

  At some point Groucho got curious about Alice’s act, which he’d seen something about on TV, so Alice invited him to a concert in L.A. Alice’s stage show was as elabora
te as we could afford to make it by then. It was theatrical and cinematic as much as musical. I loved it and pushed for it, because I loved theater and still didn’t care much for the music. Alice did “Dwight Fry” in the straitjacket. For “Dead Babies” he chopped up baby dolls with a hatchet and lots of fake blood. It was my idea, even though I had to turn my head for that part of the show. As I said, I feel faint at the sight of blood, even if I know it’s fake. If I cut a finger I have to get down on the floor and put my feet up above my head for a few minutes. That’s why I wanted it in the show. I figured that if it freaked me out it had to have an effect on the audience. Alice says it was his idea to start performing with a huge boa constrictor curling around him. I’m sure I approved even though I’m very frightened of snakes. I have never touched a snake in my life. We also staged a choreographed knife fight inspired by West Side Story. It ended with the band dragging Alice to the gallows and hanging him.

  Erin brought Groucho. Wearing earplugs, he watched the fake blood, the mock hanging, the snakes, all of it, and loved it. After the show, a reporter asked him what he thought and he said, “Alice is the last chance for vaudeville.”

  When Alice read that quote in the paper the next day, he said, “Wow, that’s exactly what it is.” I thought so, too. It had not occurred to us before then, but vaudeville was the perfect frame to put around what we were doing, a big, freewheeling spectacle of nutty, offbeat novelty acts. Groucho had seen it before we did.

  Every couple of weeks a bunch of us went to Groucho’s house for dinner. After dinner everybody had to give a little performance for him. Apparently it had been a tradition in the Marx household when he was growing up. Groucho insisted it be something you wouldn’t usually do. If you were a singer, you had to dance. Alice told a string of one-liners once. If you wanted musical accompaniment, Jeff Bridges might be there to play guitar, or Marvin Hamlisch or Bud Cort at the piano. (Bud was the young actor in Harold & Maude. He often came over to watch TV with Groucho, too.) When it got around to me, I always read contracts to musical accompaniment. Groucho would let me go for maybe thirty seconds before calling, “Get out of here!”

  Groucho never turned off the shtick. A group of us would be out somewhere, and he’d turn to me and say, “You’re Shep?”

  “Yes, Groucho.”

  “You’re my manager?”

  “Yes, Groucho.”

  “Funny, you don’t look like a crook.”

  Or we’d be sitting in a restaurant and he’d say, “It’s been five minutes and you haven’t sued anybody yet.”

  Sometimes I still can’t believe that I got to work with Groucho Marx. I can’t say I ever developed a close friendship with him, like Alice and Bud Cort did. I don’t think I ever sat down for a one-on-one conversation with him. I was always too much in awe to talk. And I wasn’t trying to develop a career for him at that point in his life. My job was to maximize his assets, and I was proud and happy to do it.

  7

  ALICE’S FOURTH ALBUM, Killer, came out toward the end of 1971. It got to number 21 in Billboard. Love It to Death had peaked at 35, so we were climbing, but we still had a way to go. The rock critics were coming around by then to the music, but they still mostly hated the stage show. They were all sixties people, and their favorite bands were still playing on bare stages in jeans and T-shirts. But I didn’t care about the rock critics. I wanted to get all the parents in the world hating Alice Cooper, and the parents weren’t reading Rolling Stone or Creem. Rolling Stone meant nothing to us. We had to jump over the rock media and get Alice in Newsweek and Time and BusinessWeek and the newspapers and tabloids and evening news, all the places where the parents would see him and be revolted by him.

  That’s how I came up with the idea of wrapping panties around the vinyl in the packaging of Alice’s next album, School’s Out. It started because I read a story about a big shipment of paper panties being confiscated by U.S. customs officials at the port of Baltimore, because they violated something called the Flammable Fabrics Act. That you couldn’t bring paper underwear into the country struck me as hysterical. Then, when we were designing the jacket for School’s Out, we decided it should look like an old-fashioned wooden school desk, the kind where the top flipped up and there was space underneath for your pencils and rulers and such. The album would go in there, and we were thinking about what to put in there with it—something a bad kid would have in his desk. Someone suggested a switchblade, but obviously we couldn’t do that. Someone else said bubble gum.

  I remembered the panties. What was the coolest thing a seventh-grade boy could be hiding in his desk? What if we wrapped paper panties around every copy of the LP that went out? Parents everywhere were sure to hate us.

  When I told Warner Bros., they said it would be too expensive and they’d never sell enough records to recoup the cost. I said fine, I’ll pay for it. They still said no. In those days I didn’t take no for an answer. Once I had set a goal, there was no such thing as no.

  There were only two companies making album jackets in those days: Ivy Hill Lithograph, and Album Graphics. In most cases, they had exclusive deals with the record companies. For example, Ivy Hill did all the album jackets for Warner Bros. Records. Album Graphics really wanted to do business with Warners, but they couldn’t get in the door. I said to them, “I can get you in the door. Alice is their biggest act. They won’t let me do the panties because of the price. Here’s what they want to pay. Can you do it for that?” They agreed.

  But Warners still turned it down anyway. That really pissed me off. Now, I knew a secret about a Warners exec involved in giving Ivy Hill its deal: he lived in a very nice house that he rented from Ivy Hill Lithograph. I went to him and said, “You’re not gonna fuck up my artist just because you have this nice setup with Ivy Hill. I’m going to give you up to your bosses if you don’t let me do this deal with Album Graphics.” Miraculously, Ivy Hill matched the price, and the world got just what it needed—an album wrapped in panties. Thank you, thank you.

  So I bought perfectly legal, flameproof paper panties in Canada, and Ivy Hill made the jacket and slipped the panties onto the albums.

  At the same time, I called up a friend of mine, Tom Zito, a big writer at the Washington Post. I told him I had a great story for him, if he could get it on page one. I explained that these panties were being shipped to Warner Bros. for Alice’s album, and if Customs found out they were going to seize them under the Flammable Fabrics Act. I gave him the shipment number and everything he needed. I bought an additional one hundred thousand not-flameproof paper panties made in France and had them shipped to Warner Bros. Records. It wasn’t a huge outlay of cash, just a few pennies each. When they came through the port of Baltimore, Customs confiscated them, and Tom was there to write the story.

  His article ran on page one of the Washington Post, with a headline about the “Largest Panty Raid in History,” explaining that the panties were supposed to be wrapped around Alice Cooper’s new LP, School’s Out, which was coming out that week. Other papers picked it up, and that’s how parents throughout the land learned not only that this outrageous Alice Cooper had a new album coming out, but that it was supposed to be wrapped in panties. How disgusting. It was one of my greatest PR coups.

  Warner Bros. was furious with me. They thought all the panties wrapped around the albums were flammable, and they were going to have to pull the albums from the stores and remove the panties. They’d be out millions. I let everyone know the truth—Warners, the distributor, the stores—and they all calmed down. It was win-win for everybody.

  I like telling this story because it’s a good example of my modus operandi: creating history instead of waiting for it to happen. In this case, I knew my goal was to get parents to read about Alice Cooper’s new album over breakfast and hate his guts. Okay, how to get there? Then I saw the article about the confiscated panties. Then—probably twenty-five joints and a lot of time in the Jacuzzi and alone in hotel rooms later—I made the connection. Al
ice plus panties equals lots and lots of angry parents. Every father in the land with a young daughter would be pissed.

  Once I had a path to my goal, I didn’t let anything or anyone deter me from following it. So when Warner Bros. didn’t want to use Album Graphics or pay for the panties, instead of just giving up I figured out how to make them do it—and I wasn’t above using a little nonviolent, gentle extortion on that exec to make it happen.

  That brings up another component that was very important to me: No one got hurt. I drew no blood. In fact, everyone came out a winner. It could have gone wrong, in a lot of ways. It could have all blown up on Alice or Warners or that exec or Tom Zito, but I put the extra work and time and money into it to make sure it all came out win-win. When you’re creating history instead of just reacting to it, you have that control. Visualize what you want the history books to say, then you can make it happen the way you want it to happen.

  This is where I feel very blessed, in a way, about my childhood, because it taught me how to be alone. Thank you, Skippy, you miserable mutt, for all that time I spent trapped in my bedroom as a kid, thinking, creating my own worlds in my head. Because it’s not like you just snap your fingers and things happen. It’s hours of work. It’s waking up earlier, maybe getting higher, not allowing distractions to deter you, and then working your ass off to reach the goal you set yourself.

  It all starts with the end, the goal. I always tell my clients the real value in me is that I can get a year ahead of you, see where there’s a pothole in our road, and figure out how you don’t fall into it. That’s what I do.

  Both the single and the album School’s Out shot straight up the U.S. charts. The album peaked at number 2 in Billboard, the single at number 7. It was time to break Alice in England. England was still considered the nerve center of rock music. London was rock Mecca. If you made it there the whole rest of the world opened up to you. And we wanted the world. I booked Alice in Wembley Arena, a ten-thousand-seat venue, for Friday, June 30, 1972. But England hadn’t really heard of Alice yet, and as the day approached we had only sold five hundred tickets. I knew I needed to get Alice’s name out to the British public in a big way, and quick, or we were going to flop.