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Alice Gang Beats Business Kings to Moneybags

Who's the biggest money-making couple in show-biz? Liz and Dick? Nope. It's Carly and James, who stands to clear a cool four million while the merry Burtons sob over a paltry three. What entertainment industry makes more money than television, professional sports and Broadway theater combined? Could it massage parlors? Nope. It's the music business, which raked in nearly two billion dollars for records and tapes and another $150 million for concert tickets in the last twelve months. And who brings home more bucks a year than America's highest paid executive, I.T.T president Walter Green? At least 50 rock stars and groups, all of whom hauled two million and six million smackeroos to the bank in the last year. Big business executives wept in their martinis when Forbes, the financial magazine, knocked the grey-flannelled airline execs off its front cover, replaced them with Alice Cooper, and revealed in a major story that: "The fastest way to become a millionaire these days in the United States is to become a big rock 'n' roll star." But Alice had a word of consolation for the Wall Streeters terrified that weirdos and hippies are taking over Fort Knox: "I have American ideals. I love money."

When panicky New York theater executives drove a stake through the heart of Cooper's long-awaited roadway debut last February by canceling plans for Alice At The Palace, they didn't kill the Coop's ambitions to ravage the Great White Way. Alice invited the master cinema gore, director Roman Polansky (Rosemary's Baby, and The Fearless Vampire Killers) top his tour's final date at Madison Square Garden in hopes of convincing the director to help create a show that even bloodless Broadway couldn't resist.

Alice's Gangland Hit

Sunset Boulevard has seen every variety of madness in the last decade, so a promotional stunt for Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits at the huge Tower Records Store on the strip challenged the most sensationalistic minds at Alice's Alive Enterprises to come up with something special.

It came to pass, late one afternoon recently, as a funeral procession in the gangland style of the thirties pulled up in front of LA's vinyl supermarket. In order were three long black hearses and two long black limousines, out of which stepped six suave young men dressed to kill... literally. The "hit men" pulled two caskets out of the hearses and solemnly marched them into the record store, followed at a respectful distance by a bleating mourner, carrying the head of Alice Cooper. Though the head was just the stage prop used by AC on the "Billion Dollar Babies" tour, reports have it that the scene induced a number of passersby into fits of uncontrollable expectoration, followed closely by spasms of frantic record buying. Doctors, consulted by concerned citizens groups, are waiting till the release, early this fall, of the movie "Good To See You Again, Alice Cooper," before making a final diagnosis.

Alice, meanwhile, has inspired gossip in the music biz circles with a frenetic round of commuting between recording studios in Toronto and hushed conference rooms in Tinseltown. For what? The world will simply have to wait to find out...