Julie Andrews vs. Alice Cooper
A short story
Alice fingered the scales of his boa like a rosary and shook his mop of death-defying black hair in disbelief as he read the letter again.
“As legal counsel for Julie Andrews, whose aim is to preserve the wholesomeness, integrity and pristine musical memory of Richard Rodgers who retains the original 1959 rights to the song ‘My Favorite Things,’ we are serving notice of copyright infringement of parts of your 1973 song ‘Halo of Flies.’
“Ms. Andrews contends that you borrow significantly in at least one passage from the song, without crediting her or Mr. Rodgers, thereby in a dark and sinister way subverting the clean, wholesome message of a song popularized by the famous actress and singer in The Sound of Music, and beloved by millions over the years.”
Mr. Rodgers, Alice thought, suppressing a chuckle as he pictured the famous composer dressed as the children’s TV personality.
The letter went on to cite the damages Julie Andrews was seeking and other legal mumbo-jumbo. It also emphasized a passage in “Halo of Flies” in particular as being a creative ripoff:
“Ms. Andrews contends the following passage,
‘Daggers and contacts
And bright shiny limos,
I’ve got a watch
That turns into a lifeboat’borrows largely, in metre and rhythm, from such beloved lines as,
‘Raindrops on roses
And whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things….’”
The letter included more legalities as well as a ‘cease and desist’ order.
“Fuckin’ bitch!”
“Alice! You’re going to scare Christopher,” Sheryl Goddard said of the snake her husband named after the horror actor Christopher Lee.
“Sorry, my pretty ballerina. Give me a little skeletal kiss and forgive me,” Alice asked his longtime wife.
Sheryl backed off for a second, eyebrows raised. Alice realized he had gone back into character again. He found himself doing that a lot these days, forgetting himself and becoming Alice the ‘shock rocker’ — the showman on the stage, the one being interviewed by a reporter or answering questions on his radio show, “Nights with Alice Cooper.” He wondered if forgetting his true self was a sign of early dementia.
Alice’s mood darkened and he flung the letter to the ground.
“More money for the lawyers who have their own circle of hell along with pimps and mimes,” he said, again going back into character and paraphrasing one of his own songs. “I don’t understand why creative people do all the work and then we have to fork over our money to settle these pesky lawsuits and make these Gucci Goombah lawyers go away. It’s like paying off the Mafia! And what’s with filing a lawsuit for a song recorded in the early ’70s? Isn’t there such a thing as a statute of limitations?”
Sheryl smiled and let him rant. Her beaming face could melt his iciest thought and bring out a warm smile which is what Alice was doing now.
Alice then turned his face away and his smile darkened to a frown as he went back to petting Christopher. He stared into the fire he had lit and planned as part of a romantic evening with Sheryl, a plan that was ruined when he opened the letter.
“Why don’t you tip-toe upstairs and I’ll be up in a bit,” he told the ballerina who stole his heart when she entered his life and joined his stage act 40 years ago. Alice forced a smile as Sheryl went up to bed.
It’s not like Alice was unfamiliar with lawsuits and threats. When you’re a celebrity, it comes with the job. Sometimes, you have to pay these people off to make them go away. Like the fanboy who tried suing the rocker, claiming he stole the title for his album Alice Goes 2 Hell.
Earlier, Alice recorded Welcome 2 My Nightmare, a followup to the 1970’s classic album Welcome to My Nightmare. The fanboy, Claudio D’Andrea — Alice still remembered the name — tweeted the rocker should also reprise his Alice Cooper Goes to Hell concept album and suggested the title.
After Alice did in fact record the followup Alice Goes 2 Hell, which was already in the works before and independently of what Claudio contended, he was served the legal notice and had to agree to a financial settlement out of court.
As annoyed and angry as Alice was at the allegations in the lawsuit, he had to admit the fanboy was cleverly creative in coming up with #Halooflies as part of his social media campaign against the musician. It had been a brutal campaign, with Internet strangers creating memes about the aging rocker, ridiculing him over his ‘mommy’ infatuation with older women like Julie Andrews and the resurfacing of an old video of him appearing on an episode of the 1970’s TV show The Snoop Sisters about an elderly mystery novelist and her sister who solve real crimes. The viral campaign made the news, around the same time as the negative publicity Alice received following an interview about a so-called “death pact” he made with Sheryl which he had to clarify.
The trolls got down and dirty and personal, even dragging the name of his 95-year-old mother Ella Mae Furnier into the virtual mud. It drove Alice — born Vincent Damon Furnier to the son of a minister and Ella — furious.
There were other legal threats during Alice’s long career, including ones ignored and now dead and buried. But he never had to contend with another musician claiming his work as her own. It felt…different, personal.
To tell the truth, Alice couldn’t even remember much from the ’70s, a creative explosion of a time certainly but one that occurred during his Budweiser-bingeing and drug-hazed days. He didn’t remember how he came up with those lines in “Halo of Flies” but he fondly recalled Kachina, his first snake. It was on the cover of that album, Killer.
Julie Andrews! Why, he used to watch that loveable English actress and singer in The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins with his mum as a teen. He even developed a little bit of a crush on her as a grown man in the 1970s, seeing her in movies like 10 and especially S.O.B. where she exposed her breasts.
That crush is over though and Alice decided it was time instead to destroy Julie Andrews. Time for him to become hard-hearted Alice and seek revenge.
“I will smash her halo of lies!” Alice said, not realizing he was speaking out loud to no one but Christopher.
Julie Andrews politely dismissed her publicist and settled down to some tea in her comfortable home after frolicking outside with her dogs, running her fingers through their fur and letting them loose in her leafy London yard. She lit a warm fire and stared into it. She gently blew across the surface of her Earl Grey and reflected on recent events.
It had been a good year. A good last few years, actually.
She had recently turned 84 and still looked pretty good. She felt healthy. A new memoir was out and was getting good press and strong sales. Her fans still adored her.
Professionally, after years of doing mostly voiceovers and small parts, she was front and centre again in the TV series Bridgerton. Julie Andrews was still family-friendly fare, appearing in Disney films and animations. A few years back, her celebrity star shone brightly when she made a guest appearance at the Oscars with Lady Gaga who sang a medley from The Sound of Music. According to news reports at the time, some 21 million people tuned into the ceremony and it was the “most tweeted moment of the night.”
Certainly, these were much more pleasant than the dark days following a botched operation on her throat to remove some nodules on her vocal chords. The surgery left Julie Andrews with a raspy voice, unable to achieve her famous four-octave soprano again, and she sued the medical team at Mount Sinai Hospital. They settled for an undisclosed amount in September 2000.
Oh, how she missed her voice!
There was no tarnishing the icon though — a woman famous as the “honorary nun” of The Sound of Music and loveably eccentric English nanny in Mary Poppins — despite that one appearance in husband Blake Edward’s S.O.B. Julie sipped her tea and smiled, remembering that moment when she ripped off the top of her red dress in the movie scene set in hell — an image that sent shockwaves among her loyal fans. They soon forgave and forgot, especially after she won her Oscar in Victor/Victoria, also directed by Blake.
Julie Andrews jiggled her head as if she was shaking an Etch-a-Sketch picture of Blake, her dearly beloved husband who died almost 10 years ago. This wasn’t a time for tears, only English tea and proper business.
Like this business of the Alice Cooper lawsuit. Julie Andrews admitted to her publicist that she felt a bit queasy about the plan. It wasn’t in her nature to put on publicity stunts like this. S.O.B. aside, her career had always followed the prim and proper path.
But her handlers convinced her that the suit would make waves. It would “get her in the news again” and “keep her brand up” just as her acting career was surging again and she released her memoir. Julie Andrews turned down another stunt — appearing on Dancing with the Stars — by telling her handlers, “Imagine me at my age twirling, twisting and twiddling about and falling on my arse before the cameras and millions of my fans!”
But she became resigned when it came to launching the Alice Cooper lawsuit. Maybe that was an age thing too, giving in rather than putting up a fight?
She barely knew anything about the rocker. He wore makeup — these funny black squiggly lines around his eyes and mouth — and did bizarre things on stage like wrap himself with a boa constrictor and faked his own beheading. She even remembers snippets of some Alice Cooper songs, including one sweet melody about women bleeding.
Beyond that, he was invisible. So why did she feel guilty about targeting a nonentity like Alice Cooper in an attempt to boost her career? Well, she reminded herself after taking another sip of tea, because we’re British and that’s just not something that we do.
“My Favorite Sick Things: An Evening with Alice Cooper.”
Bob Ezrin read the words out loud that Alice scrawled in black ink on a white napkin. “There should be a ‘u’ in Favourite.”
Alice ignored the Canadian record producer’s comment. He was excited about his latest musical concept and eager to work on another project with Ezrin, his…um, favorite musical collaborator.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s, well, very Alice,” he said. “The devil, as you know, will be in the musical details.”
Alice smiled. Outside, the chill winds of late October and Halloween — which was another one of his favorites; his favorite time of year — swirled leaves into a whirlwind against Ezrin’s tony Toronto home.
His arms moving through the air like an orchestra conductor, Alice tried to paint a picture of the stage show that was in his mind. At this point, he only had scraps of musical ideas that he hoped Ezrin would help turn into a polished finished product, like he did with so many albums including his twin Nightmare enterprise. First, he wanted Ezrin to ‘see’ what it would look like on the stage.
It was Alice’s latest theatre of the macabre. Always a champion of the villain in rock and roll, Alice saw the show as the ultimate Good vs. Evil production: Julie Andrews vs. Alice Cooper. “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes” vs. “guys in black leather with silvery codpieces.” Snowflakes vs. spider’s webs. Mary Poppins vs. No More Mr. Nice Guy.
The settings: An English garden, with perfectly trimmed hedges surrounding Venus flytraps and black widow spiders in snake-infested flowerbeds. Mountains in the background too, the Bavarian Alps of The Sound of Music. And a creepy old London manor.
The characters: A choreographed dance troupe of umbrellas dripping with blood, floating Mary Poppins with heads a-popping like Pez dispensers, cute little kittens with oversized whiskers being frogmarched toward the guillotine and roadies dressed as tomboyish Marias mountain-dancing in their free-spirited nun’s habits.
Of course, there would be the Alice Cooper Crazy Chorus. He had used these choir-like voices to great comic effect on a few songs over his career and could not resist the temptation to bring them back. They were, after all, among his favorite things in the whole world. Like a Greek chorus, they would comment on him as moral judges of his conduct.
“I haven’t developed the chord structures, melodies or motifs yet — musically — and I only have a few lyrics I’ve been toying with but what do you think of the concept? Will it work?”
Ezrin put on his fake Yiddish accent, “Vell goy, mebbe ve can do some backwards masking to achieve ze proper Satanic effect?”
“Bob, I’m conjuring some scary shit out of my creative mind. This is no time for fun,” Alice said. He then burst out in laughter along with Ezrin who said, “Well, I can see the potential here Al. Give me more details.”
Alice went on to paint a picture of his dark art in Ezrin’s mind. He explained the plot setup: Alice as an infant — a Billion Dollar Baby who grows up with his dark daydreams and fiendish, feverish nightmares. He becomes an artist, conveying those sick scary things onto canvas, and achieves worldly success until one patron becomes his nemesis and vows to take him down and burn all his work. She’s modeled after Julie Andrews, a giant dressed in her nun’s habit on stage and accompanied by two little demon sidekicks who go by the names Riot and Falcon. They help strap Alice in a straitjacket and drag him toward the guillotine.
That’s when Alice turns the tables with help from his kittens and throws her down instead beneath the steel blade.
“Whaddya think?”
“Ella Mae Furnier?” Ezrin said. “You named the Julie Andrews character after your mom? And your grandkids, Riot and Falcon — you made them demons?”
“Keeping it all in the family. Keeping it real, man,” Alice said. “And here’s the best part. I’m thinking of bringing Christopher Plummer into the act and having him narrate a part. Y’know, like Vincent Price did on my Nightmare. Plummer’s one of your countrymen and people remember and love him from The Sound of Music.”
The guillotine scene takes place in a creepy sanitarium after switching from an English garden, Alice explained. “I’m walking down a long, dark corridor inside this Gothic building in London and open the door to a room. In the end, I take Julie’s, er Ella’s, head in my hands and put pennies on her eyes as I lay it down into a crib. I become like the little boy Steven again from Welcome to My Nightmare.”
“This is what your creative mad genius has spun off, all from a lawsuit?”
“I have to feed my Frankenstein,” said Alice, slipping back into character and adding more details and characters.
“And the guy from the Hotel Trivago commercials? What’s he doing in there and why chop off his head?”
“I don’t like him.”
“Mmhm.”
Alice continued, “Before the lights go out, the audience sees Steven transform back into me in a flash. The years have passed so quickly and it’s as if I’ve only lived a minute of my life,” he said in character again.
Ezrin smiled and closed his eyes. His memory flashed back in time through all the years that he had known Alice Cooper. He recalled the standout shows and the big hit records but he also remembered his demons: alcohol and drugs and how worried he was they would kill the rock star. He remembered the vulnerable Alice. Like a little boy, he would get bouts of performance anxiety — every artist experienced them — and he thought about aging and his health a lot these days. He feared losing Sheryl or her losing him. Alice, who put his crazy character out there in a very public way, nevertheless worried about the crazies on the street ever since Mark David Chapman etched his name in the history books when he took down John Lennon on a dark New York City Street.
Alice was a big star and a celebrity and he accepted the burden that went with it. But he was still human and he feared for himself as well as the loved ones who would mourn his loss. (And his fans too: “How many said, ‘I wonder what happened to Alice? How many shrugged, or laughed? How many cried?” he once asked in a song.) The Julie Andrews lawsuit and the trolls it exposed did nothing to allay his fears.
Ezrin was glad he was able to unleash his own creativity and make a comfortable living doing what he loved with some of the greatest rock musicians in the world and still be able to walk down a Toronto sidewalk unnoticed and undisturbed. But he felt for those he worked with and the burden that their celebrity placed on their shoulders. It was a strange symbiotic relationship with the artists, and he sometimes felt a bit guilty that he could enjoy his privacy and peace. Then again, that kind of anonymity would probably kill a guy like Alice Cooper.
“Y’know, we could riff off ‘My Favorite Things’ with some of the music. It’s in ¾ time, like a couple of tracks from your Nightmare album. We could blend those melodies into the main theme track of My Favorite Sick Things.”
“Sure. Why not borrow from dear ol’ Julie again? Let’s play with fire!”
“Leave this with me and let me see if I can come up with some musical concepts that we can work with okay?” he said.
Alice smiled and patted him on the back. “That’s the spirit, ol’ sport,” he said, in his best Gatsby voice.
Ezrin saw Alice out the door. “You know Al, you’re not 18 anymore.”
“And I still don’t know what I want, Bob.”
Death was unexpected and swift, leaving a serene smile on her face.
Julie Andrews had suffered nightmares over the years, remembering her stepfather’s attempts to rape her as a teen and also discovering that the man she thought was her birth father was not her father after all. But last night, after finishing her tea and one last snuggle with her dogs, she went to bed and only thought good thoughts.
She dreamed about waving her arms in front of those majestic mountains. She saw herself doling out dollops of sugar and singing to those adorable young children. On stage, there she was collecting accolades for her work. She heard her music on the radio again.
It was a peaceful sleep, her last. She heard her voice singing back to her, blocking out all the bad, and she remembered her favorite things.
Her death would deprive Alice Cooper his musical revenge. Or would it? He was, after all, a shock rocker who had staged outrageous acts before. People still remember the concert in Toronto so many years ago when a chicken was thrown out into the crowd which then tore it to pieces and threw it back on stage. He explained much later that it wasn’t part of the act: someone threw the chicken onto the stage and Alice, who came from Detroit after all and didn’t know anything about farm animals, figured it could fly so he threw it into the audience to watch it soar. It couldn’t and it didn’t.
Could he pull off “My Favorite Sick Things: An Evening with Alice Cooper” even after the sad news about Julie Andrews and get away with it? What would the trolls do with that? he wondered.
“This could make me a musical immortal,” he said, a whiff of hot breath coming through a sinister smile and into the flicking forked tongue of Christopher.
Bloodied and dazed, he dragged himself down a dark gas-lit, cobblestone lane and went through the front door of the Gothic manor. His nemesis was gone, true, but he had revived her on stage and the fans still loved him — until some didn’t and cornered him in a dark alley. He stumbled down a dark corridor inside the manor and went up to a door that had a sign above: ‘Nursery.’ He walked in and went up to the glass, looked down at the bluish little face with the blackened eyes and the beaded chain and crucifix wrapped around its tiny hands and the card that read, ‘Vincent Damon Furnier.’
The writer rested his fingers, pleased with himself. Then he put them on the keyboard again and added the final flourish, “#halooflies.”
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for more than 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
© Claudio D'Andrea 2019
