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Unmasking Alice

"I think I've created a monster" says Vincent Furnier with a sigh. Vincent, or "Vinnie the Boss" as he is called on his present tour through the United States, is much better known as his alter-ego-creation: Alice Cooper.

"Only the kids realize that Alice is a character I've invented for the stage. Many people believe I eat live chickens for breakfast! I couldn't even hurt a fly — they should come see out mini-zoo sometime. I love animals. Had an albino tarantula as a pet once. And then there was the Snake, of course. Well, I had to give her away, it got just a bit too complicated with all the other animals in the house. Some of which would definitely eat others. Live or otherwise..."

Alice's hotel room is littered with beer cans, candy wrappers, remnants of a Chinese dinner (brought in from a restaurant outside the hotel) and an ever-present television.

Twenty thousand have come to see his show, "Welcome to My Nightmare" at Madison Square Garden, creating a demand for tickets so great that Alice had to break his rule of not selling seats behind the stage.

The tattered red leotards have come off. So had the grotesque black eye-make-up, revealing a handsome and sensitive face, a person, not a character. Propped on two pillows from his bed, the Coop sits in casual black dancing tights and an "Exorcist" T-shirt, one of a whole collection he has accumulated during his tour, the latest addition a T-shirt a kid took off to give to him a couple hours earlier at the Garden. It had a Christ-like painting of Alice's face and caught his roving eye as the kid was jumping up and down in the front row.

"I get a lot of presents from my fans," Alice says. "Some include Instamatic flashbulbs that hit me in the head and smoke bombs that scare the stage crew..."

A show like "Welcome To My Nightmare," involving four dancers and more changes and props than any of his previous shows, is an nightly health-hazard. Alice's newest injury — he is normally not at all accident-prone — is a nasty gash suffered during the sequence with a long, sharp sword. The bandages didn't even make it through half the show and the audience in the first few rows could see Alice wince several times when the dancers roughed him up, oblivious of the cut. "Ah well, that's how biz," shrugs Alice. He is right when he assumes that most people thought it was a fake injury...

Is it all worth it?

A very definite "Oh, absolutely!" is his answer. "I love to entertain people. Get reactions from them. Shock them and please them. I've been into productions since I was a child. I love attention and I always was a show-off. Which doesn't make me an actor, obviously. I never went to acting school. All I have learned, I've picked up from watching television. Some of the old movies are like specialized courses. And besides, I pick up an incredible amount of information on any subject, you name it. Want to ask me something about soya beans?" (Alice always wakes up at the crack of dawn, even if he goes to bed very late. Since the TV never gets turned off, it is on when he opens his eyes and usually presents him with the farmer's report from around 5 am! Cindy happily sleeps through all that. She's by now used to it, after seven years of being the Coop's "old lady."

"This show," Alice continues, "is very special in many ways. It is not really a concert, but a multi-media-mix of theater, ballet, film and music. Total entertainment. Whereas "Billion Dollar Babies" represented teenage terror, "Welcome to my Nightmare" is something everybody can identify with. We all have had nightmares at one time or another. I've actually had so many that they triggered the idea for the show."

Alice become Steven, a small boy asleep in his bed, dreaming. Nightmares: Distorted masks hang on his bedboards, bats and other creatures whisk through the air, his oversized toy chest releases his friendly toys turned into monsters: the most frightening a cyclops mutant of his teddy bear (very cleverly designed by the people who make animated figures for Disney World). In a dance sequence with four skeletons, Alice, in white tux and top hat, does a Fred Astaire routine. "He's a very good friend of mine, living not too far from us in California," Cooper tells us. "Unfortunately I'll never be able to dance like him, but then — nobody does... I've learned a lot, though, during my pre-show training in dance and timing and jumping and I'm still improving, with the help of Eugene who exercises with me every day. That's very hard, because many times both of us really don't feel like it and then he's got to convince me that I'd rather stretch than sit. A tough job. Usually he gets me with promises of a great massage afterwards. He's terrific!"

So is everybody involved with this tour. The 30-40 man entourage traveling with Alice from city to city is like a big family — to use an old cliche, which happens to be true in this case. They all work hard to make it happen every night. The stage crew wears T-shirts saying "Welcome to OUR nightmare." Watching the precision and know-how displayed in setting up the complicated stage every night (it takes two hours), one can't help but be impressed.

The two years of preparation for this "Nightmare" were not wasted. Alice doesn't have to worry about making back the money invested — all his own this time — roughly $400,000. "I'd like to be honest" he says. "Of course I'm in it for the money, too. This is America... But if I make money, I want to have fun doing it. And I want my audiences to have fun. The nicest thing in life: FUN. It's contagious." As witnessed by the thousands who are catching some of it across the nation. Hello goosebumps — bye-bye sweet dreams. Welcome...