Kiss and Make-Up (33 page)

At the party I spent some time—and made some time—with a few gorgeous women, and then I ran into Richard Perry, a record producer I knew who had produced everybody from Rod Stewart to the Pointer Sisters. Perry introduced me to a girl named Shannon Tweed and her sister, Tracy Tweed. Both of them wore stiletto heels and corsets, and both of them were formidable—well over six feet tall. You can imagine the effect. I was devastated by Shannon in particular and did everything to try to woo her. We talked for a while. At first she wasn’t interested, but after a while she came back around to talk with me. Then she took me to the library, where a secret door behind a bookcase opened into a passage that led to a wine cellar below. She sat down on a table in there, and I remembered thinking this was clearly an invitation.

But five minutes went by without any sex, and then ten minutes. I remember just being lost in conversation with her. She came from Newfoundland in Canada, and I came from Israel, and we started talking about the strangeness of America, and how we both felt like fish out of water. After that we went upstairs, not having fully consummated our first meeting. On the way out she gave me her number and said, “Call me.”

After meeting Shannon, I lost interest in the other new friends I had made that night, including Miss February.

I went back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and all that night and the next morning I tried calling the number. She had given me a wrong number. A guy answered. He’d never heard of Shannon Tweed. I couldn’t figure it out. Eventually I decided that I had been taken for a ride. Then as I was watching television in my single room at the hotel, I saw a photo being pushed under my door. I got up and looked at the photo. It was a black-and-white headshot of Shannon. Then I looked on the back, and there was a handwritten note—“I’ve never been so insulted,” it said. “If you took my number, why didn’t you call me? Next time be a man and don’t start anything you’re not going to finish.” It was that kind of letter. And on the bottom it said, “If you still have the guts, here’s the phone number.” The number
was different from the number she had given me the day before—only one digit different, but that’s enough. I called her up immediately and said, “I say what I mean and mean what I say, and you gave me the wrong number.”

“The wrong number?” she said. “Don’t you think I know my own phone number?”

“I’m just saying that the last number is different,” I said. She was angry at first, but eventually she relented. I went over to see her and was overtaken with passion and lust. I thrust my hand under her sweater and then kissed her deeply. She didn’t seem to mind, and we became acquainted very quickly.

Soon after that I called up Diana to tell her about Shannon. I didn’t want her to hear about it from the tabloids. I explained to her that I had met this girl and wanted to spend some time with her and see how that relationship went. She wished me the best and told me she hoped I was happy. Diana has always had the grace and class that I wish all women had.

About three weeks later, Diana and I spoke again. Right off she asked, “Are you still with Shannon Tweed?” I said yes. I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going. Then Diana dropped a bombshell. “You know,” she said, “she’s my sister-in-law.” Unbeknownst to me, Shannon’s sister, Tracy, had secretly married Diana Ross’s brother, Chico.

Soon enough, I moved into Shannon’s Los Angeles apartment. She was everything I never knew I wanted in a girl. She had her own career. She had acted on television shows and starred in dozens of movies. She didn’t seem to want anything from me, and she was drop-dead gorgeous.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Shannon had just come out of a relationship with Hugh Hefner and had lived at the Playboy Mansion with him. She’d wanted a career and he’d wanted her there, so she moved out. She had also graced the covers of
Playboy
a number of times, and her portrait hung, I’m sure, on many walls around the country.

As soon as we met, I told her everything. I told her I never
wanted to get married, to her or anyone else, ever. I told her I never wanted to have children. I told her I was afraid of commitments of any kind and that I wanted to be free to pursue my ambitions, whatever they may be, without having to check in with someone. She was okay with all of it.

In fact, she said, she wanted the same thing for herself. I was hooked.

I told her my philosophy, that I’d found the whole idea of marriage and commitment to be faulty at best and, in my opinion, obsolete and impractical. A major thing wrong with marriage is that traditionally one of the two getting married is a man, and men aren’t cut out for marriage. A second problem is that someone other than the one who gave birth to you, your mother, is going to dominate you. My mother stopped asking me where I was going, who I was seeing, and when I was coming home decades ago; I would be damned if I let anyone else ever have that right.

Despite my posturings, I was scared. Shannon disarmed me because everything about her was so honest. There were no games, no hidden agendas. If that isn’t enough, Shannon was and continues to be the most striking woman I have ever seen in my life.

I wanted us to work. I also wanted to feel safe. I wanted everything. I wanted the goddess and I didn’t want to have to grow up just yet. So at first I lived with her in her apartment. I didn’t want to plant any roots too deeply. But by the end of the first year I learned how to drive, at the age of thirty-four. I bought my first car, a Rolls-Royce, and decided to buy a place to live with Shannon. I bought a home on two acres in Beverly Hills, and paid cash.

Though I was falling for Shannon more deeply every day, I was still cautious. I had read too many horror stories of relationships turning ugly—lawyers, alimony, lawsuits. I wanted no part of it. I would rather live alone for the rest of my life than have anyone dominate me or in any way expect payment for having shared my bed. That seemed to be the way everyone else lived their lives. People got married, then they got divorced and hated each other.

Statistically, marriage doesn’t work. Divorce often happens within a few years of marriage—at a rate as high as 75 percent in
some parts of the country. Men are miserable, women are miserable, and both are trapped. When a couple splits up, often the man has to pay his ex-wife 50 percent of what he makes—before taxes, which is lunacy. The highest tax rate around is 48 percent, and in return the government gives you the armed forces, free schools, social security, and nationwide infrastructure. Your ex-wife gives you a few years of companionship for her 50 percent. My mother gave me life, and she’s not getting 50 percent!

It seems to me to be a lose-lose proposition. When a man marries a woman he promises to stay with her and support her until he’s six feet under. And he’s not supposed to be attracted to or be with another woman for the rest of his life, from his twenties, say, until his death. He takes this oath in front of God, his wife, and all assembled. Everyone lies about their ability to fulfill these promises, but they go through with it anyway. And when the marriage is over, a man had better be able to reach deep in his pockets. Who invented this system? The devil?

A picture of the woman I met at the Playboy Mansion in 1984—Shannon Tweed.
(photo credit 13.3)

Despite my strong feelings about marriage, I still wanted to make a relationship with Shannon work. To say my life changed drastically when I bought that Beverly Hills house is to put it mildly. I had never had a driver’s license before—you don’t need one in New York. Taxis are everywhere and if you have a car, you need a lot of luck finding a space to park it in. And you never know if the car will be there the next morning.

I had a tennis court in California but I’d never played tennis. I had a swimming pool, and, although I could swim, I never went swimming. Between tours, my sleeping habits changed. Where once I had a lot more in common with nocturnal creatures, now I had a beautiful six-foot Playmate to wake up next to. Someone I wanted to bring breakfast in bed to. Someone I cared about.

My neighbor next door was Donna Mills; on the other side, Kate Jackson. A few doors down lived Cher. Later on everyone sold and moved away. I stayed. I liked it. I felt I was home, for the first time.

This level of intimacy made me want to share everything with Shannon. I started talking about everything, about how I was straight, had never been drunk, but that I had chased a skirt or two in my day. I even told her about the photographs. I had always felt, if I had been with a girl, I wanted a picture of the experience. I had had literally a few thousand liaisons and had taken photos of almost all the ladies. I told her she needed to know about me. No secrets. I remember putting all the pictures on the table and letting her go through them. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t understand it. But, most important, she wasn’t judgmental. She has always been like that, as long as I can remember. I didn’t know much about Shannon’s life until we started living together. I didn’t read
Playboy
, although I had obviously seen the magazine at friends’ homes. I wasn’t aware, until she showed me, how many times she had been on the cover and inside. Perhaps some men would have a problem with millions of others looking at nude photographs of the woman they are with,
but I was actually proud of the fact. Nudity to me isn’t an issue. Violence and drugs are. As far as I am concerned, if everyone had more sex there would be less violence.

Shannon was the girl of my dreams. She kept getting more and more beautiful. She never asked me where I was going. She never asked me when I was coming back. When we were away from each other I would call every day without fail. Not because I had to or because it was expected—that would never have worked for me. I did it because I wanted to.

(photo credit 14.1)

The year 1985
saw us solidify KISS, with a lineup consisting of Bruce Kulick, Eric Carr, Paul, and myself. We had another platinum seller with
Asylum
, and we were doing it all without makeup and without the original lineup. We’d had new business management who had taken over Bill Aucoin’s duties from 1982 on, and that relationship had run its course as well. We let them go and hired Larry Mazur as a consultant. We were hesitant to employ new managers—they wanted too much money—so for all intents and purposes we were self-managed.

At this time
Runaway
came out—to generally favorable reviews—and I immediately got another movie offer.
Wanted: Dead
or Alive
was to be directed by Gary Sherman and would star Rutger Hauer. I was slated to play the villain. When I arrived on the set the first day of shooting, I was introduced to the crew and to Rutger. He came over, shook my hand, and right there in front of everyone took my face in his hands and kissed me full on the mouth. The crew laughed their heads off. I was stunned.