By Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Lovingly retained in the bowels of all newspaper libraries and, I imagine, in thousands of crammed scrapbooks throughout the world, is a certain photograph of a certain man in the prime of his very special life - a man who has become a hero to the uncertain and the simplistic, to the doubting and the desperate, to the young and the restless. Originally known as Chaim Witz, then as Chaim Klein, then as Gene Klein, this man is now revered as Gene Simmons.

In the photograph and against a backdrop over which the word KISS is spelt out by versicoloured light bulbs, Gene is hunched. He is plucking a bass guitar shaped like a medieval axe; his jaw juts out, canines exposed; his face is painted white, his lips are black, and black demon wings flare over his menacing eyes. Perhaps to disguise what appears to be a receding hairline, an inverted black triangle is painted on his forehead, and his steel-wool hair is pulled back into a Shinto top-knot. He is wearing the kind of glittering rocket-shouldered jacket Joan Collins made famous, a jewelled and bulging cod-piece, black stretch-fit pants, and a gargantuan pair of foil-wrapped platform boots in the shape of dinosaur paws. Understandably, he does not look agile. The effect is odd. He looks possessed. In short, he looks completely mad.

This is the man for whom so many have haunted the lobby of the Melbourne Hilton for so long. It can be said that many KISS fans look like nothing so much as water-tower snipers. They worship Gene because he is the man they would all be if they only had the courage to confront the world in foil-wrapped boots in the shape of dinosaur paws. They see him as a man who could stick chips in his nostrils and never get busted; a man who is rewarded with approval for boasting of “fucking [his] brains out” with “over” 3000 women [now allegedly 4600 - ed]; a man who can, with a flick of his tongue, tie knots in lengths of industrial tubing. They see him as the man who needs no dad. He is, in fact, the dad of their dreams - a wild man, nothing like their real dads who browbeat them and force them to eat broccoli. Gene doesn't care if they eat broccoli; he wants them to eat pussy .

The subsequent KISS ALIVE WORLDWIDE tour is, the press release will tell you, a “100% sellout”. Whether this “sellout” is ideological or financial is not specified. That which is specified follows: KISS hysteria is sweeping the globe! Over ten million people have bought tickets! Four Madison Square Gardens shows sold out in less than an hour! Tickets in Chicago sold out in six minutes ! KISS will use over 44 pounds of theatrical makeup on the tour! The stage production will require over 1.8 million volts of electricity! 228, 334 feet of cable will be needed! More than 151,00 guitar picks will be used! Over 41,500 guitar strings will be played! In the interests of showmanship, musical excellence, and Ibanez shares, frontman Paul Stanley will smash 350 guitars into pieces! And Gene, well - Gene will breathe fire and regurgitate 158 pounds of “blood” in 26 countries.

I ride the elevator to the eighteenth floor, where I will be interviewing this man, a man who named his first band “Wicked Lester”. I sit in an empty lounge, light a cigarette, and wait. And wait. He is an hour late. Punctuality cannot be expected of Gene, a man who has so much sexual energy to expel. Well into my third glass of water, I hear a noise and look up. It is Gene. He has a face like a bag full of chopped liver. He is very tall and broad. His dyed black hair looks like the aftermath of a bushfire. It is two o'clock in the afternoon and the man is delirious, he is exhausted.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” he says, “but I was up all night fucking.”

His voice is very deep and he speaks very slowly. He is accompanied by his macro-goon, a walking planet in high-tops. Staring at me, Gene becomes intense. Intensity is to Gene as the ukulele was to Tiny Tim. He makes a long, low, rumbling sound and suddenly grabs a fistful of my hair. “Mmmmmmmnnnnn …” he murmurs as he evaluates its texture, “long hair.” The macro-goon, who has undoubtedly heard this spiel before, mindlessly gazes out of the window at the empty Melbourne Cricket Ground. “Nothin' goin' on in this place,” he sadly says. Gene's stare becomes liquid. “Gooooooood,” he decides. “You have thick lips.” I am uncharacteristically unresponsive. I am scared that if I respond, he may attempt to mount me. He leans down to slowly - very slowly - run his hand up the shin of my boot. “Mmmmmnnnnn …” he again murmurs, holding my attention with what I imagine he thinks is a seductive expression, “I like boots.”

I am extremely fortunate in that Gene appears to approve of both my features and my apparel. The only aspect of me that he finds distressing is my lack of bulk. He pinches my arm through the jacket and frowns. “Too thin ,” is his verdict. Later, when I asked him why he has jumped from his chair to peer down my shirt, he will reply: “I want to see your tits.” These have his approval, but the rest - well, the rest needs work. I am too scrawny. Gene likes his women to look like WOMEN. Gene likes nothing better than to grab great handfuls of thigh, of breast, of buttock. Gene's fantasy must be to suffocate under the blonde tonnage of Anna Nicole Smith. His partner of a decade, a former Playmate Of The Year and soft-porn queen, is built like one of the better suspension bridges. Gene wants his women to explode from their fish-net body-stockings, he wants them to burst out of their boots, he wants them to quiver beneath him like swimming pools filled with blancmange . No starving waifs for Gene. He ain't no faggot.

We walk into an executive boardroom and sit down. There are vases of delicate lilies, mirrors, tastefully framed prints. Gene almost looks uncomfortable, but this discomfort is immediately mastered. He is wearing a light and shiny black Nike wind-jacket, a jacket unzipped to reveal the rolling hills and forested dales of his 45-year-old chest. His skin-tight pants are unpalatably worn at the crotch. “They stretch both ways,” he explains, suddenly boyish, as he offers me a feel of the versatile fabric. “Very thin, very comfortable. I can just pop them into the washing machine.”

His big and pointy cowboy boots are black and made from python skin. His many rings (embossed with spiders, snakes, etc.) are all presents from devotees. Around his neck and hanging from a thick silver chain, a lock with the skull and crossbones in bas-relief. A silver hoop punctures each earlobe, and crusty remnants of the previous night's eyeliner sugar his eyelashes. The way in which Gene presents himself is not only a statement, but a very astute marketing ploy. It must be said that Gene The Demon King has never been a dum-dum.

“The things,” he says as he pours water from a jug into a glass packed with ice-cubes, “women are fascinated by are beautiful yet trivial . The whole world of it - fashion, make-up, all of it. A rock band should make sure that its male following pays complete disregard to the female point of view. If the core of your audience is female, the clock [of your popularity] is ticking and it's over before it's begun, because for them it's fashion. There's no loyalty. There is no loyalty.” He takes a careful sip of his water and eases back into his leather chair.

I light a cigarette and point out that fashion and make-up are pretty much the bases of his success. After all, where would Chaim Witz be today without the greasepaint demon wings and dinosaur paw boots? Hasn't KISS always been a case of clever marketing? Pausing, he places his glass on the table and smiles with his eyes. “In which case,” he says, “it's a very good story. In which case, you have something to write about. In which case, if it weren't so, you wouldn't be here talking to me. ELLE is all about fluff, anyway. Faggots who design clothes, the eternal search for beauty. You don't even pronounce the last letter of its name , so what the fuck is that ?” He kicks his pointy boots up onto the chair opposite him. “It's a complete waste of time. That French stuff! Smoking cigarettes backwards and wearing little berets … you're fucked. Eating frogs' legs … as soon as you get into that French world, oh boy !”

He is not pleased. The concept of marketing is one Gene would prefer not to publicly explore. KISS have, after all, sold 75 million albums (albums with names such as Love Gun, Lick It Up, and Kiss My Ass). Gold, platinum, multi-platinum - KISS have done them all. Were it to be made obvious to KISS fans that their vaudevillian idols were primarily in it for the money, Gene could find that KISS comic books, KISS transistor radios, KISS back-to-school books, KISS jeans, KISS garbage pails, KISS dolls, KISS Bally pinball machines, KISS bubblegum cards, KISS jackets, KISS albums, and the 4.5kg book KISSTORY would not shift as many “units” as he would wish. Given this, it seems interesting that he doesn't even feign enthrallment with his music.

His old pal, Paul Stanley, recently said: “We must have hit upon something sonically, because every time [our new] songs come on, my balls jiggle.” Gene's balls, it seems, jiggle to a different drum. “I get satisfaction from music,” he shrugs, “but music is not the be-all and end-all for me. I'm no Mozart or Beethoven. I don't have that kind of passion. I don't live, breathe, and dream music at all . If it wasn't music, I'd do something else. Other [musicians] lie because they have to toe the line A lot of people say things they think others wanna hear.” He fixes me with the danse macabre of his eyes. “It's like seducing a woman - tell her what's inside of you, and even if it's disagreeable, she will respond to it more.”

Adroitly, he has steered the conversation back to his favourite topic. Gene can talk about women for hours. Sexual modesty is not a blot on his escutcheon. He describes his “appetite” for women, as if they were thickshakes or cheeseburgers. He expounds on his admiration of their “intelligence”, and yet is essentially indifferent to what they say. “The word ‘no',” he says, slowly arching his left eyebrow, “means nothing to me. It is just another step towards ‘yes', and ‘yes' means everything and ‘no' means nothing. To this day, I get rejected - all the time - but it means nothing. All it means is that they just don't see my greatness.”

When I suggest that if “no” means nothing the question was irrelevant, he eyes me like a thousand-year-old lizard. “It's just a lack on their part of not recognizing what's good about me. Some guys feel that there's something wrong with them when a girl rejects them. The woman should have nothing to do with it. Nothing.” His expression changes as he watches me light another cigarette. “To me,” he says with some consternation, “smoking is what truckdrivers do. I've never understood the fascination women have with it. It's some kind of penis fixation. I keep telling them that they don't need to smoke - they can have my dick any time they want.”

While I am wondering how kindly the American Truckdrivers' Association would take to his suggestion that its members are fixated by penises, he continues. “When the band first went on tour,” he says, “I was astonished and amazed that there was an endless supply of women - endless!” There is an approximation of surprise in his voice. “Like somehow the tap went all the way to heaven and God was up there saying: It's all yours - have as much as you want ! I fel t… blessed.”

Gene may not always feel blessed, but he certainly feels whomever is within his reach. “I want to press your lip to see if it's as soft as it looks,” he says. My blood turns to ice as his index finger caresses my mouth. I am as still as Sam Neil was when the T-Rex pressed its snout against the windscreen of his car. “Oh, I could fuck that all night …” he purrs, digging his heels into the chair. And then, with a billowing sigh: “I'm romantic . To me, women are amazing life forms … complete contradictions. They cry when they're happy, they say no when they mean yes … they always smell good, always.” He shakes his head. “Even when they sweat, it's like the way a baby sweats; it's not like man … stink .” He pauses to deliver unto me a meaningful look. “With me, it's not so much sex - there's always a lot of kissing and holding and stuff. I look and am amazed by how different you are. I'm just like a little kid!”

At this point his publicist bursts in, her eyes moist. She breathlessly recounts the tale of the young cancer victim who had lost the will to live until Gene rang him and “returned” it. “His mother didn't have the words to thank him!” she says, all choked up. “She was crying! The whole family were absolutely beside themselves with emotion! It was like a miracle! ”

Saint Gene of the Bass Guitar has forgotten her before she has even left the room. “You know,” he casually says, “I could put a blush on your face like -“ and here he jazzily clicks his fingers, “that. I could fuck you on the spot. I could do you - especially with those -“ here he indicates my breasts, “like that.” I nervously light another cigarette. “Mmmmmmnnn …” he growls, “you need a man.” I am beginning to agree. A police man.

A catwalk model present at a party thrown by a woman for KISS in 1980 remembers Gene well. “The woman holding the party,” she chuckles, “was rumoured to run a high-class call-girl ring. Gene was with Diana Ross at the time. He came after me in a big way. I'll never forget his words: We'd have beautiful babies together...” Gene has never pretended to be monogamous. He refuses to marry the mother of his two children, Shannon Tweed, because he feels that it would be a “lie”. When I ask him why he is so promiscuous when he has a former Playmate Of The Year at home, he shrugs. “Why are all men?” he asks. I then ask him whether, in this age of AIDS, Shannon minds his forays into free love. “I think that all women mind,” he indifferently says. And then: “Shannon is beautiful. She is strong. She is superwoman.”

He has been publicly linked with many superwomen. Cher, Diana Ross, and Liza Minnelli have all dissolved before Gene's lizard-stare. The fact that they enjoyed relationships with Gene is more a reflection of them than it is of him. “Diana,” he says, “is beautiful. She is strong. Cher is beautiful. And strong. Liza is strong. And beautiful. I'm attracted to strong, strong women. I don't appreciate unintelligent women. I love women who don't define themselves by -“ and his lip voluptuously curls, “men.”

Gene watches as I stub the evidence of my penis fixation out in the ashtray.

“Fucking Miss Nude Australia last night - whatever her name is - was delicious,” he drawls. “It was beautiful. Romantic.” Later in the day I call the Queensland-based Miss Melinda Lee, otherwise known as Miss Nude Australia. There is an awful silence as she listens to Gene's allegations. And then, in a hurt and cynical voice, she says: “Guys are always saying that. Sex with Gene Simmons? In his dreams. I've never met the guy in my life.” Bewildered, I then ring Gene's publicist. “It, uh, may have been the runner-up or something,” she anxiously says. “ Gene wouldn't know. How did you get hold of Miss Nude Australia anyway?”

Aside from his tongue and foil-wrapped dinosaur paw boots, Gene is most famous for the boast that he has “done” over 3000 women. This is a big call, even for the most obsessive-compulsive old satyromaniac. Given the number of women he's “done”, I ask, hasn't he ever caught a venereal disease or seventy? For the first time during the interview, Gene stiffens. “No,” he replies very calmly as he pulls his nose. I question the veracity of his answer. “ No,” he repeats, “never. No crabs or venereal disease of … any kind. And I, uh, wear a raincoat.” I silently consider the kind of women who would gravitate towards Gene - the many metal groupies, the strippers, the raree-show divas. And not one of them gave him a venereal disease! The statisticians would have a field day. For some reason, Gene is becoming mildly discomfited. “You know,” he says, somewhat nonsensically, “I like my women to bathe.”

Surprisingly, Gene wants to change the subject. Pubic lice, it seems, are not terribly cool. He begins to discuss his legendary Polaroid collection, the one he keeps in “portfolios protected from oxygen”. “I wanted to take photos of [all my conquests],” he says with emphasis, “because I got the sense that it may not last forever. Every once in a while I take them out and look at them and it's beautiful. I don't think I'm weird. The only difference between me and the rest of the male population is that I don't go to newsstands and buy pornography. To me, pornography is just a pale second to having a real, hot woman in front of you.”

I wonder out loud at the effect of all this bragging and posturing on his six-year-old son and later, on his two-year-old daughter. Gene dismisses my concerns as ludicrous. “I mean,” he exclaims, “for God's sake! Their mom was a foldout - a whaddayacallit - Playmate Of The Year, whatever year it was! She makes tons of - I don't know, something like thirty - movies, and some of them are very steamy. And even though we don't sit there and, you know, watch them, I'm very open and so is she about human sexuality.” His face grows stern. “It's very healthy and should be that way,” he says in an admonishing tone. “When Nicholas was two or three, he said: Mommy, I have a penis and you have a vagina! It was very clear.”

An erotic prodigy, he admits his sexual awareness was premature. “I always wanted to fuck everything that moved,” he says. At the age of twelve, Gene was studying to be a rabbi at a theological seminary. He and his divorced Hungarian mother were living in a New York ghetto. “I remember looking out the window one day,” he says, “and there was this Spanish girl with long, black, THICK hair all the way down to her butt.” The young rabbi-in-training watched as this girl jumped rope, his eyes hanging out of his head. “Whenever she jumped,” he says with wanton relish, “it looked like her hair was slapping her butt, and it was the most remarkably erotic thing I've ever seen.”

He kicks his boots off the chair and neatly crosses his long leathery legs. “It was at that point,” he says, “that I thought: This is better than God! This thing moves, it's in front of me, it may as well be saying: This can be yours, Gene!” Unaware that his terminology (“this thing”, “it”) is that of a serial rapist, he continues his rhapsody. “And I remember that in sixth grade all the girls would come up to me and say: Do that strange thing! So I'd stick my tongue out and wiggle it, and they'd all start giggling.”

Curious to see this fabled tongue of his, I ask him to display it. Gene complies. A glistening purple thing the length of a baby's forearm rolls out of his mouth. It looks like a jellied eel or something that lives on the floor of the ocean. He rolls it back in. “I never knew what made them giggle,” he wonderingly says. “I thought: Gee, is it so strange?? And I'd look in the mirror and start wiggling and thought: What's the big deal? It's just my tongue! I figured it must just be funny. What I didn't know,” and here his eyes flatten to slits, “is that they were pressing their knees together for the rest of the day.”

It then seems logical, I say, to assume that he began KISS as a showcase for his tongue. “No,” he replies, perfectly sombre, “I was so in love with the Beatles. My mother thought they were silly-looking, and I figured that the more my mother hated something, the more I liked it.” Gene's mother, a Holocaust survivor, left her husband in Israel when her only child was six and moved with him to America. Her neglect of her son was an economic necessity, and could explain both his determined self-reliance and near-psychotic self-belief. “She worked from 7am to 7pm, six days a week, picking lint from jackets in a factory. She was paid fifteen dollars a week. We lived in a ghetto. But I always had jam and bread and butter, and with a glass of milk, I thought I was in heaven. And then,” he says with more excitement than I have seen him muster for music, metal molls, or his many millions, “I discovered peanut butter and I just fell in love ! Every day - morning, noon, and night - I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!”

“I believe in me;
I believe in something more than you can understand.
I don't need to get wasted;
It only holds me down.
‘Cause I got a will o' my own,
And the guts to stand alone -
Yes, I believe in me.”

When he has finished singing, he coughs ferociously. The macro-goon waddles in. I shake Gene's hand and thank him for his time. Once outside, I ask the lounge manager for her opinion of the man. Is it possible that his behaviour is simply a lucrative joke? Her eyes widen and she laughingly shudders. “Oh, no,” she says, “he's like that all day long. Trust me, it's for real. Hard to believe, isn't it?”

* Originally published in Elle

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