Whatever Alice wants...

Alice Cooper came to Las Vegas as the guest of Barron Hilton in 1977 because his manager loved Las Vegas and Alice loved playing golf .

Each year, Mr. Hilton turned over the main ballroom of the Las Vegas Hilton, and hosted The Victor Awards Show where big Hollywood stars and professional athletes came together to raise money for The City of Hope.

There is only one Alice Cooper. He is one of the great musical talents and stars of our time. He was perfecting the art of 'rock opera' long before anyone else. His stage performances were pure theatre, and world famous for breaking all the rules.

But my job this particular weekend was to make sure that his appearance on the show and his stay at the Las Vegas Hilton went off without a hitch. So, my opening line was Whatever Alice wants", which meant keeping him and his 'entourage' happy. It was an easy gig...all he had to do was show up and give out an award. And play golf.

About 2 hours after they arrived, Alice was already on the golf course. As a guest of Barron Hilton, there was no trouble getting the best tee times. I am sure that few if any people there even recognized Alice Cooper the rock star.

The other two members of the entourage were his manager, Bob Emmer and his wife Sue. She was happy to go directly to the Las Vegas Hilton spa. Bob and I got to know each other. Alice was there to give out the award for Golfer of the Year, so we went over the schedule for his spot on the show.

Mr. Hilton hosted a private reception high atop the hotel with breathtaking views of Las Vegas which Alice and the Emmers attended. It was a chance to meet and take photos with the other presenters and sports stars.

It was amazing to watch how everyone wanted to have their picture taken with Alice Cooper. He 'worked the room' like a pro and talked to everyone. He was exactly NOT what any of us had expected.

There were a few 'requests' over the course of the weekend in terms of photos or adjustments to schedules. Without exception, the answer was always yes...and then he always added Whatever Barron Wants.

By the end of the weekend, it had become a running gag. We coined that phrase, which we still use to this day whenever we see each other.

But the 'Barron' had one more request of Alice before the weekend was over.

I was also working on a TV show called KidsWorld, which was a kid's version of 60 minutes where youngsters interviewed famous stars. Larry Einhorn was the Producer and Director of The Victor Awards...and KidsWorld. Small world.

So, enjoy Beth Einhorn's interview with Alice Cooper from 1977 in Las Vegas...it's what 'the Barron' wanted...

My First Hollywood Home - 4616 Cahuenga

I arrived in California on July 28, 1974 after a 4 day cross country drive and went directly to my first apartment at 4616 Cahuenga Boulevard in Toluca Lake.

A mutual friend of Fabian who was living in LA had found the place for me before I left New York. When I pulled into the driveway, my apartment was ready and waiting. It was a typical 'California' complex, 24 apartments encircling a big pool with palm trees. What I didn't know is that the people who lived there were anything but typical.

Don't get me wrong...it was great. We had Hollywood stars, a LAPD detective, a retired pit boss, two writers and a hooker. It's where I met my wife, and learned to cook. There were parties, dinners and a few earthquakes just to make life interesting.

My rent was $150.00 per month for a fully furnished one bedroom apartment. Universal Studios was down the street, as was NBC and Disney and Warner Bros. Toluca Lake was (and still is) home to hundreds of movie and TV stars.

We had our share of resident stars. Ben Murphy (photo on the left), was starring in the ABC hit, Alias Smith and Jones. A young actor, Bruce Boxleitner, who would go on to star in Tron, Babylon Five and How the West Was Won was my downstairs neighbor. But the real stars of the building were the resident managers, Roberta and Earl Kirk.

They held court poolside, regaling residents and visitors alike with their stories and opinions. Roberta did all of the talking...for the first few weeks I didn't think that Earl could talk. She started as an extra in the early Mary Pickford films, and then went on (as she told it) to run a Hollywood brothel and then as social secretary for Sunny Sund, the heiress to the Don the Beachcomber Restaurants. Earl was a pit boss for Ben Siegel. That's all I ever knew about him. He was the strong silent type.

I became Roberta's pet project. She took me around and made all the introductions in Toluca Lake. Breakfast at Patys, lunch at Lakeside. Yes, there actually is a small lake right next to the famous Lakeside Country Club. Because it was so close to the studios, it was a who's who of Hollywood. Errol Flynn, Walt Disney, W.C Fields, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby all lived there. Going to the post office on Riverside Drive usually meant running into Jonathan Winters.

I was living and breathing Hollywood, and I was as obnoxious as a 22 year old know it all could be. I lived on the second floor, but paid to have an extra phone jack installed by the pool so I didn't have to run upstairs every time my phone rang. Not that it rang that much anyway.

Here are two of my favorite stories from those years.

The Girl Across the Pool.

Betty Evans lived directly across from me overlooking the pool. I was there about two weeks when one night she came home early and closed the curtains to her apartment. About two hours later, 4 guys came walking up the stairs, knocked on her door and went into her apartment. My imagination took over. What in the world was going on in there?

The next morning I went straight to Roberta. It seems as though Betty was a great cook, and she had formed a food club. These 4 guys paid her to buy and cook them dinner once a week. My illusions about Betty were gone. But I still didn't know what she did. She kept pretty much to herself. Then one morning she emerged from her apartment wearing a girl scout uniform. Betty Evans ran a cooking club for 4 single guys and was a professional girl scout. I was in Hollywood for sure!

The First Hollywood Manager
Mike and Gert Froug lived in the rear apartment, which was part of the old Weddington Mansion. Roberta introduced me, and I spent many days (and a few dinners) with them soaking up stories about early the golden days in Hollywood.

Mike was Mary Pickford's business manager. He was an accountant by trade and met Pickford early in his career. We would sit in the kitchen telling me stories about how they built Pickfair, working with the studios, the whole thing. I could kick myself for not getting a tape recorder. It was amazing to hear. Without really knowing it, he created the concept of the Hollywood manager. He told me how once signed Dick Powell as a client by getting him to autograph a piece of paper that turned out to be the signature line of a cashier's check for $50,000.

Mike was 80 and still sharp. He could sit down with a pad of paper and add a row of numbers 8 across and 8 deep in his head. Some people can say they've seen it all, Mike was one of the few who started it all.

When my father came out to visit, we had dinner with Mike and Gert. I thought my Dad would enjoy Mike's stories about Hollywood. Upon hearing that my Dad was a furrier, Gert came out with an old Lambskin coat and asked my father what she should do. My father, who was not known for his tact, suggested that she cut it up and use it as a cushion for the toliet seat.

I loved my first Hollywood home at 4616 Cahuenga...and it only took me about 4 months to learn how to pronounce it.

PS. The apartment is still there, although the pool is gone and the rent is now $1500. Sometimes, I really miss 1974.

Rusty in 5.....

Every Saturday morning, my father would drive me 10 miles to Freeport at 5am. That was the only way I could get to WGBB, where I was the Saturday morning news announcer.

It was a pretty simple job and I loved it. First, I'd check the AP and UPI wire machines for national and regional news stories and the local weather. Then I'd check the morning edition of Newsday or the Long Island Press for coverage of local high school & college sports. I got the scores and then add my own descriptions like; Baldwin Smashed Great Neck 17-8, or Long Beach High squeaked by Rockville Center 6-5. I had 5 minutes twice an hour. The only thing they really showed me was how to rip the paper off the machines.

My next radio job came a few years later while I was going to University of Nebraska at Lincoln. I worked weekends as a DJ for the local country-western station, KECK-Proud Country. I knew nothing...nothing...about country music. But I knew how to run a board and had a good radio voice and delivery.

The program director selected the records to play. They were all color coded. Red songs in the first 15 minutes, Yellow songs in the 2nd segment and so on. A song would be playing on the first turntable, I was cuing up the second song and picking out the third song while reading over the ad copy. And we had to keep a live FCC log of everything we did. You really appreciate the value of 5 seconds when you're on live radio.

I had no idea of who these singers were, and almost got fired my very first day. I was on the air for about two hours when I saw a song that I liked, Drift Away. For some reason I thought it was the Dobie Gray version, but it wasn't.

I wish I had an air check for what happened next...

" It's 45 right now in downtown Lincoln, looks pretty clear for tonight so all you guys and gals headed out to the Circle Barn on L Street should have a great time. We've got more great country music for you right now on 1520 AM KECK-Proud Country Lincoln Nebraska with...

Drift Away...."

By Narvel Felts??????

I started to laugh really hard and couldn't stop. Live. On the Air! Narvel Felts? You've got to be kidding! What happened to Dobie Gray? I hit the button and the song started. And so did the calls. The first was from my boss. It went downhill from there, but thankfully I didn't get fired.

Later that year when KECK held their annual Proud Country Festivalat the Lincoln Arena, I meet Narvel Felts. Nice guy. Naturally I didn't mention a word about our 'first meeting'.

That night I had the pleasure of introducing a young 16 year old singer in one of her first appearances. She was nervous, and I stood backstage with her dad and sister.

The song was Delta Dawn, and the singer was Tanya Tucker.

A Body Slam for Robocop

I have worked with a number of 'characters' in my career... Spiderman, Darth Vader, The Chipmunks...even PacMan.

But putting together a national promotion for RoboCop was one of the more unique experiences in my life.

In the late 80's and early 90's professional wrestling had become dominant in sports entertainment. Working with Jan Keane and her team at Orion Pictures, we created the ultimate RoboCop tie-in promotion.

It was the perfect movie promotion. We wanted access to their vast cable audience, and they wanted a movie star who could get in the ring!

It took months of discussion, negotiations and meetings in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Turner owned World Championship Wrestling with huge wrestling stars like Nature Boy Rick Flair, Sting, Lex Luger, Sid Vicious and The Undertaker.

Finally we agreed on a venue and started to put the promotion together. It would be one of their biggest live and PPV (Pay Per View) events of 1990- Capitol Combat!

First, we needed to get the RoboCop costume and the stuntman willing to do the job, since we all knew that Peter Weller was never going to do this. So we hired one of the stuntmen from the film and got one of the actual 'costumes' from filming. They had a number of suits built, but we couldn't use the close-up suit because they didn't 'walk' and the arm movements were limited.

We went to Atlanta to tape the TV spots and meet the Turner and WCW executives. They gave us a tour of their wrestling school, and we met Sting. No, not the singer...the wrestler.

Talk about first impressions...what do you say to a guy with a full face of make-up, bright blonde hair in spikes who is wearing black spandex tights? Try it sometime...small talk with a professional wrestler ain't easy unless you're a fan.

A few short weeks later it was on to Washington D.C., and the surreal world of live professional wrestling. The Turner and Orion press departments had done a great job of building excitement for the appearance of RoboCop in the 'squared circle'. The stadium was sold out, and the PPV orders were breaking records.

We arrived the day before for rehearsals. That's right, rehearsals. Each wrestler has a storyline to follow, and they work out their movements in the ring in detail. They had signals, the ref's help and it's all staged for the cameras and the audience for maximum entertainment. It was like watching a rehearsal for a Soap Opera, but with lots more makeup and supplements (wink and a nod).

The wrestlers arrived by limo in designer suits and diamonds. They certainly didn't look like Wall Street bankers, but it was all business. We worked on the storyline, and how RoboCop would enter the show. Not all of them liked the idea, but the hardest part was getting the stuntman to be able to climb into the ring wearing the costume.

Another difficult problem was his size. RoboCop in a theatre is 30 feet tall, in real life he's 5'8". Against a 6'6 wrestler he doesn't look that menacing. Some quick thinking and a few blocks of dry ice solved that problem...and we made sure that nobody got too close.

I had never been in a stadium that was that loud. It was like standing next to a jet engine at full throtle..the entire night. The fans were unbelievable. It was fully choreographed frenzy the likes of which I had never seen. The matches were amazing to watch. And they roar from the crowd just added to the excitement.

When Robo walked down the gauntlet to the ring, the wrestlers scattered in all directions and everyone went absolutely crazy.

It was perfect.

PS. The smoking rules in theatres were different then, and the distribution team at Orion put out a special 'no smoking' policy trailer for theatres months before the release. If you missed it then, enjoy it now.

The Rocky Screening

I loved working in Television. It wasn't until 1976 that the thought of working in the movie business even crossed my mind.

But it did one night at a special screening for a new movie called Rocky.



Rogers and Cowan was the #1 PR firm in Hollywood and was led by the founders Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan. Henry brought clients like Ford to Hollywood, while Warren and his team represented every major Hollywood star. Tom Wilhite worked in their TV department and we had worked on a couple of projects together. They always had stars to book, and we always needed stars to appear on shows.

I called Tom on a regular basis to book KidsWorld, which was a kid's version of 60 minutes. Each week, a star was interviewed by a 12-15 year old kid. The show ran for almost 7 years, and it was great fun.

One day Tom called me to pitch a new young actor named Sylvester Stallone. And he pitched hard...but he was unknown and we needed recognized names. He told me about this new movie, and the next day I got an envelope with the name ROCKY emblazoned across the back.

I had never been to an 'Academy Screening' before. It was at the new theatre on Wilshire. Tom was at the door and the theatre was packed. I took my seat and waited for the film to start.

120 minutes later, over 1,000 people were standing up, yelling and applauding wildly. I had never seen a reaction to a movie like that before...and haven't seen one since. It was amazing. They didn't want it to stop.

The audience made their way down to the lobby of the theatre and that's when I started to notice the people around me. They were movie folks. And unlike the TV people I was used to, these men and women were different. But in a good way. There was this subtle elegance and self assurance that just filled the air while they were waiting for the movie makers to come down the grand staircase.

And then the lobby erupted even louder than before. It was a movie coronation, and Sylvester Stallone was the new king. That night he had become a movie star in front of my eyes.

I knew I was witnessing something special, and I stood there watching the spectacle and celebration around me. That was the moment that I knew that this was where I wanted to be.

A footnote. I never booked Sylvester Stallone for Kids World, and years later worked at MGM on Rocky V...but to this day I have never met Sylvester Stallone.

Oh My Godzilla

I never had more fun working on a movie that I did on Godzilla.

For the most part, marketing movies is a long and hard process. It takes months…there are always problems…and you seldom get what you want. Godzilla was exactly the opposite. We secured the rights to the movie and got everyone (marketing, sales and production) in a room together and came up with a strategy. It was done in a matter of weeks with a real team effort from everyone at New World.

Understand that this was a Godzilla movie dubbed for the the US market…bad lip sync, toothpick models and a small man in a rubber suit. You know…everything you'd expect a Godzilla movie to be. But the ‘big guy’ was coming back to the big screen, and we had to make sure that people knew it.

Only the hard core Godzilla fans knew that Raymond Burr was in the first Godzilla movie. We put together a small cast and shot a few new scenes with Mr. Burr. We used footage from two other New World classics, The Philadelphia Experiment and Def Con 4 .

Most importantly, we wanted to make sure that the audience had a good time, so my wife Jill had a great idea and we put ‘Bambi Meets Godzilla’ on the head of the film. If you haven’t seen this, you’re in for a treat.



Next, we were faced with a monster of a PR challenge... so we decided that it was time to put Godzilla on the road. We made arrangements to bring in the actual costume from Japan. Godzilla may look 100 feet tall on film, but as costume he barely broke 5' . And the suit was 100% rubber, which means that it was very very heavy. We hired a small stuntman (which is not the easiest thing to do). After he fainted in the costume during rehearsals, we threw in an extra oxygen tank to make sure he didn't collapse live on national television.

Godzilla returned to NY, for a visit with Regis Philbin, who had just started his syndicated show, and then it was on to Times Square and a BBQ at Shea Stadium. But the fun didn’t stop there. We had put together a big deal with Dr. Pepper and they saturated TV with a huge (naturally) campaign to support one of the most obvious product placements ever filmed. We were shameless.

But for me, the best part wasn’t the 250 ‘beach patrols, or the Godzilla parties, or the merchandise or the classic poster or the 10 foot standee…it was the song.

My wife Jill is a terrific singer, and she had an old demo that I thought was just what we needed. And it was free. We laid down some updated instrumentals for one of the few movie monster love songs ever to have been re-recorded.

The campaign worked. We got tremendous PR, the promotional screenings were packed and the movie was a hit.

I Was Afraid to Love You, the love theme from Godzilla went gold! And I should know. It cost me $250 to have the record goldplated and framed for my wife.

Dress British

My life as a personal manager started at company in Beverly Hills called D'Blity.

D'Blity was an acronym for Dress British, Look Italian, Think Yiddish!

A group of very talented comedians from Chicago's Second City had come out to LA to claim fame and fortune. I was working at Columbia Pictures TV for Ed Fishman and Randy Freer on an NBC game show called The Fun Factory. We hired them for the show. They were very talented and funny writers and performers. It was a daytime comedy-game show. It was the first and last of the genre.

I was lured away by their manager...a smooth talking man named Stan Sirotin. I would come to find out later that smooth was the least of his issues. But I packed my bags and left game shows to become a manager. Personal management is a hard business. It's faith, compromise, baby sitting and full time problem solving. It is also a business of feast or famine, and the feast was about to end.

Stan was the expert. His wife Beryl kept the books. I was a manager and next door to me was Jerry Cutler. Jerry was part manager, part client and full time Rabbi for the Synagogue for the Performing Arts. If Jerry wasn't auditioning for a congregant, he was giving Bar Mitzvah lessons to Charlie Matthau. We were down the street from a Chinese take out place and a block away from the Friar's Club. It was a perfect recipe for disaster.

Stan fashioned himself as a real Hollywood deal maker. One minute he was helping negotiate a deal for a Johnny Carsey's wife (Marcy) for her first job at ABC as the Manager of Comedy. The next minute, he was renting Neil Diamond's house in Malibu. But Stan's greatest gift was also his worst. He didn't know how to tell a client that some jobs were better than others. He recommended everything. For Stan, it was 'all great' because there was a commission.

He talked Mert Rich into doing a local show on KNBC called The Busing Game. The title alone screamed...stay away. Not Stan. He bought the rights to a movie called Spade Cooley, because he was told that Dustin Hoffman was interested. They guy who sold him the rights was a producer of pornographic movies from the Valley.

And it went on like that for about 6 months. Each day was a new adventure, into Stan's own little Hollywood. The breaking point for me came one day when I looked out my window. Across the railroad tracks was the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Each day, one of the maintaince guys would come out and hose down the sidewalk. Nobody in LA ever uses a broom. Anyway, it pouring and this guy walks out in rain gear and an umbrella and starts hosing down the sidewalk.

It was time to go.

And I went from the famine to feast. Within a few days, I hired by Howard Rothberg who represented Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, Dom DeLuise, Larry Gelbart and Richard Dimitri. At D'Blity I couldn't get my calls returned...and literally the next week my phone didn't stop ringing.

PS. That small group from D'Blity went on to great success. Execpt for Stan. He had some legal troubles a few years later in Pasadena and the last anyone heard had moved to France.

The clients did much better. Mert Rich is an award winning TV producer and writer in Los Angeles. Marcy Carsey went on to become one of the most successful TV executives, and with her partner Tom Werner created some of the best shows on TV, including The Cosby Show and many more. Mitch Markowitz's writing career took off with movies like Good Morning Vietman and Crazy People, Dick Blasucci is the executive producer of MAD-TV, Bette Thomas directs feature films, and Doug Steckler became a big star on LA Radio.

And I moved to Seattle where it rains all the time.