Kissing the ring

From his strangely tasteful Beverly Hills mansion, Kiss frontman Paul Stanley reflects on fear, fatness and fame.

By Rachel Louise Snyder

Oct 11, 2000 | Behind me a small fountain trickles softly as I sit at a wrought-iron table on a stone patio with ocher frescoed walls. Surrounded by ficus plants, I overlook a pool with a small cabana and a garden full of roses. Beyond the pool is a valley hinged with mountains. What is the frontman of Kiss doing with a pad like this?

"A home should be your sanctuary," Paul Stanley says of this place -- which happens to be his Beverly Hills abode. "The purpose of a house is to build something where you don't want to leave. That was the idea of this place."

Stanley and his fellow masked musicians -- Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss (plus some minimal personnel changes over time) -- have, after 27 years, decided to call it quits. Time to shed the platforms and revel in the afterglow of nearly three decades of defiance. Kiss, which Stanley calls a marriage of "rock band, superhero and athlete," defied the critics. For years it flouted the hacks who never stopped chiding the band for their over-the-top performances, their musical simplicity, their simple pleas to party and rock 'n' roll -- chiding them, in fact, for embodying exactly what rock 'n' roll types are supposed to embody.

Rock 'n' roll notwithstanding, it's hard to ignore the mountains, the roses and the trickling fountain all around me -- and so strange that all this comes from a man with a reputation for earsplitting, in-your-face, screw-the-critics, blood-spewing, spandex-wearing, guitar-screaming, pelvic-thrusting, ass-shaking, pyrotechnic-blazing, heart-thumping performances. Stanley refers to Kiss as a marriage of "rock band, super hero and athlete."

It isn't that I expected him to meet me in platform shoes and spandex -- I do understand the idea behind costumes -- but I didn't expect such ... unabashed normalcy. The normalcy includes a friendly wife, a spunky son, a feisty dog and a well-manicured lawn. When Stanley greets me in jeans, a white tank top and tennis shoes for our morning brunch, which he's snuck in before a pool party for his son and a concert in Anaheim that night, I am pleasantly surprised to be invited into this little slice of Tuscany.

"Coffee?" he offers. "Orange juice? Mimosa? Tea?"

Kiss have never been a critic's choice, but they've weathered the years. Their tours are consistently near sellouts -- their '96-'97 reunion was the top-grossing tour of the year -- and they've had nearly 30 platinum and gold albums. Still, they've received few awards, have been nominated for only one Grammy and find themselves with no place at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

Kiss's official accolades are of a different orbit: boot prints in concrete squares at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, a Hollywood sidewalk star and a death threat from a South American terrorist group. (It's not hard to envision Gene Simmons, aka "The Demon," beating his chest and screaming, "You want a piece of me?!" No offense to would-be revolutionaries, but I'd camp in Gene's bunker.) For a long time, even MTV spurned them. If they were politicians rather than rock stars, they'd be the Green Party blowing the big tickets out of the water. They'd actually represent the people. They'd have union backing.

Next Page: Fat, not big-boned

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