Face the Music: A Life Exposed

by Stanley, Paul

  Oh, no.

  I wanted validation. Instead, I had to explain to her all the details about the car, how the 320SL was the same body and interior as a 500SL but that it had a six-cylinder engine instead of a V-8, which made no difference for the way she used her car around town. But as I began to explain all this, I suddenly changed my mind.

  I could explain. I could apologize. I could change the order. But it didn’t matter. It was ruined.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  Happy birthday.

  On the way home from another tour leg where Pam joined me, she told me she had lost her engagement ring. I couldn’t believe she could lose a five-carat diamond, but she started sobbing. “Don’t worry,” I told her.

  I’ll just get a new one.

  The day I picked up the new ring from the jewelers, I spotted Pam and her parents driving down Beverly Boulevard. I flagged them down. I couldn’t wait. I got out of my car and went over to hers to show her the ring.

  She looked at it and said, “Oh, the setting isn’t what I expected.” I felt deflated.

  Don’t I ever get the cookie? Don’t I ever get the pat on the head?

  There was a lot of sexual temptation on tour, amplified by the way things were going with Pam. When it came to sex, I was an alcoholic, and touring was an open bar. But if my marriage wasn’t going to work out, I wanted to be clear on why it didn’t work. What was true of the band—and the reason I wanted to try to make an album with the original four guys—was true of my marriage: if I was going to walk away from something, the most important thing was to know I did everything I could to try to make it work. I didn’t want any lingering what-ifs. I didn’t want my marriage to end and wonder whether part of the reason was because I had cheated. So I didn’t. I would have hated myself. It would have confirmed my worst feelings about myself.

  It was depressingly familiar territory. Dysfunction in the band, dysfunction at home, feeling lonely, and hating each day for the mess I had created.

  55.

  At the end of 1998, I got a call from my agent at CAA, the talent agency that represented us. “Are you interested in theater?” he asked me.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Well, you would have to audition.”

  “What for?”

  “Phantom of the Opera.”

  Wow! Phantom!

  “Absolutely! Where and when?”

  I realized immediately this was a case of “stunt casting,” that is, bringing in somebody from a realm other than Broadway or the legitimate theater world in order to spur ticket sales. My fame got me the audition. But I wasn’t insulted. This was Phantom! The masked musician whose hideous deformed face was revealed. The show that had taken my breath away in London ten years before. Phantom!

  Even so, I wouldn’t have agreed to audition if there had been conflicting plans for the band. But we would have a big block of free time once the Psycho Circus tour ended, and it would be a long time before I would think about making another album. A very long time indeed.

  The audition was for the Toronto production, which was then in its tenth year. If I made the cut, I would take over the role in May 1999. The Psycho Circus tour ran through the end of April, and then we were pretty much off until 2000, when we would go back out for a Farewell Tour that was already in the works. Who knew what would happen after the Farewell Tour? Musical theater was an avenue I now wanted to explore—I might need a second act soon enough.

  KISS had the month of January 1999 off before playing the Super Bowl pregame show on January 31. The audition was scheduled to take place in New York, since all principals in the show had to audition and be signed off on by Hal Prince and his staff, who did the casting worldwide. Rock star or not, they weren’t going to jeopardize a billion-dollar franchise.

  I spent weeks practicing the three songs that were required for the audition. Playing the Phantom meant so much to me that I also wanted to try to control the audition situation as much as possible to give myself the best shot. I realized the singing would be only one of the determining factors in getting the part.

  When I finally went to the audition, I walked in and made small talk with the staff. I flirted a little with the woman who was there to sing the role of Christine with me. People were sitting at desks like judges at the Olympics, as if they were waiting to hold up numbers after I sang. I spoke to them, made some jokes, and, knowing I would get only one chance, waited until I felt comfortable and ready.

  Don’t blow this.

  When I finished a full audition of songs and scene blocking, I knew I had nailed it. Sure enough, my agent called me soon after to tell me I’d been offered the role.

  To make it official, I did a press conference after the Psycho Circus tour resumed. As I talked with reporters on the conference call, the same thoughts kept going through my head:

  I’m fucked. I can’t get out of this now.

  It would be a trial by fire, because there was very little time between the end of the KISS tour and my Phantom debut. I had muscled my voice through the audition, but could I really do it night after night?

  I had to learn the entire show while on tour. I memorized the melodies and lyrics during downtime and off-days, and I tested myself during KISS shows. I sang songs on the side of the stage whenever I had a break—like when the other band members had their solos. I figured that if I could still focus in the midst of complete bedlam and chaos, I really knew the material.

  KISS wrapped up the Psycho Circus tour in Mexico City; right after the show I cut my hair and headed up to Toronto. Rehearsals started immediately at a studio used by theaters and the local ballet company. When I walked in the first day, the only person there was the show’s musical director. He seemed like a bit of a tight-ass, and it was clear we were from different musical backgrounds. I was pretty sure he saw me as somebody without any pedigree coming in to desecrate the theater. The first thing he said was, “Where’s your script?”

  “I memorized it,” I said.

  He looked at me like I was nuts. I told him, “I may be a mutt in a kennel of purebreds here, but if you tell me what you want, I’ll give it to you.”

  He sat down at a piano and we started working, just the two of us.

  It was the hardest work I’ve ever done. Six hours a day. I went home every night slumped in the back of a taxi, exhausted emotionally and—because of the demands of singing a different way and the physicality of the role and the staging—physically. I’d be damned if I was going to go in there and turn the show into the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This was a big, legit show with tremendous history, and I wasn’t going to do a rock version of it.

  Almost immediately I saw some problems navigating certain vocal passages. I had to figure out the breath control to make it through lines I hadn’t written. I guess without thinking about it, when you write songs, you write what you can sing. Now I was singing lines that involved things beyond my experience, things that weren’t intuitive.

  With just a few weeks to go before I had to take the stage, I decided I should reach out and get help. I had never had much luck with vocal coaches before, because they generally tried to completely change the way I sang—they used a cookie-cutter approach and gave rock singers stilted, pseudo-operatic voices, disregarding what anyone had built naturally. You often hear those voices in bands that sing about slaying dragons and other mythological pap. After meeting another one of those typical coaches, I asked the musical director of the show for a recommendation. He suggested Jeffrey Huard, the previous musical director of Phantom.

  Jeffrey was very encouraging and supportive. “They hired you because of the way you sing,” he said. “Your voice is terrific, and we don’t want to throw away the engine. We’ll just fine-tune it.”

  From that point on, during the morning hours before rehearsals, I worked with Jeffrey on my technique and comfort. He took me through exercises and scales and helped me with the phonetics and word pronunciation of musical theater.

&n
bsp; As I worked on scenes at rehearsals every day, I wore a T-shirt and jeans and a cape, and they handed me things to use as props. Here’s a broomstick—it’s an oar. Here’s a cardboard box—play it like it’s an organ. If I could turn those things into the objects they were supposed to be, that reality would only be reinforced once I was onstage with the actual props in hand.

  The Pantages Theatre, where the show was staged, was a beautifully renovated space with an orchestra pit and a marquee out front—with my name on it. It was all about to happen! But days before opening, when we started to rehearse key scenes in the theater with the orchestra, I suddenly had problems because I couldn’t hear on my right side. I hadn’t realized my deafness would be so difficult to deal with. The orchestra was far enough away and I was singing loud enough that it was very hard to hear the monitors and stay with the orchestra. But I found I caught on pretty fast after I looked like an idiot a few times.

  Toward the end of the theater rehearsals, a couple of women from the theater company came to watch. When I finished the final act, they were in tears.

  That’s a good sign . . .

  Well, either that or I’m horrible.

  I’d been told that the role of the Phantom was the loneliest role in the show, because most of the time when the Phantom was onstage, the rest of the cast was off; when the Phantom was offstage, the rest of the cast was on. You rarely met anyone else. And then it was opening night, and I was waiting in the wings ready to do my first scene, standing behind a mirror.

  The only way out of this now is to do the show. When I leave, it’s going to be after the curtain comes down.

  There was no editing, no second takes, no cutting to a different camera. This was it. I used the techniques and visualizations that Jeffrey had helped me with, and even though I wasn’t as good as I would get as the show went on, I didn’t fall on my face. As I settled in, I loved it. I loved giving something this level of concentration and trying to immerse myself in the character—despite a few devil horn salutes I saw in the audience that first night.

  Then came the moment in the production that had caused me to gasp the first time I saw it—when Christine rips off the Phantom’s mask. I cringed as she took my mask off to reveal the horrid makeup beneath. I knew this scene. It was the scene I had feared my entire life: scrutinizing eyes staring at Stanley the one-eared monster. Betrayed and exposed.

  But then . . .

  Christine tells the Phantom his face “holds no horror” for her. It’s in his soul that the true distortion lies.

  When she finally makes herself available to him, it is the Phantom who recoils and is unable to hold her.

  When I performed in KISS, I was constantly interacting with the audience, bringing them to a certain level of excitement, leading them, cajoling them. Now I ignored the audience. People in the theater had to buy into what I was doing, and I couldn’t get them to do so by winking at them. For me it came down to abandoning the audience and abandoning any sense of performance and just being that character and finding the truth in that moment. That was why the show that night—and almost every night thereafter—ended with me completely sweat-soaked. And in tears.

  After that first night, the cast was great to me. I know they appreciated my dedication. Suddenly I was captain of the team, and everybody wound up hanging out in my dressing room. This may have been stunt casting, but as the shows sold out—eight of them per week—I was helping to keep hundreds of people in work.

  My parents came to see the show early on, and I felt as if doing theater validated me in their eyes. No matter how ambivalent I felt about my parents, I realized in that moment that ultimately their approval was something I wanted. And when they saw me getting a standing ovation from a sold-out house, it felt terrific.

  Gene came to see me as well. It wasn’t his cup of tea, but he seemed astonished. When he came to my dressing room after the show he said, “Where did you learn to sing like that?”

  Peter came, too. He showed a side of himself I rarely saw anymore. We went out for sushi after the show, and Peter was joyous and beaming, saying how proud he was of me. Every once in a while he would show flashes of warmth—whether it was at the beginning of the band or at the beginning of the reunion tour—but his insecurity usually kept him too defensive and isolated to be warm and open. On that night, in a context away from the band, a context that didn’t threaten him, I guess, it was truly enjoyable to be around Peter. He felt like an old friend for a change.

  My son Evan came, too. I was worried that he might be scared—he wasn’t yet five years old, and the face I revealed when the mask was torn off was grisly. So I had him come to my dressing room at the Pantages Theatre and watch them put my makeup on when the show was in previews. I wanted him to know it was still me underneath. I think it unnerved him a little.

  Revisiting the stage of the Pantages Theater in Toronto, where I starred in Phantom of the Opera from 1998–99.

  At one point he looked at me and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

  “It’s still me,” I said. “It’s just makeup. And I love you, too.”

  I had done something similar before the Psycho Circus tour. I figured at age four Evan was finally old enough to see a show, but I worried about him seeing me in makeup without warning. I took my makeup box home before the tour, and we played with it together. I showed him how I put on the star and showed him photos of me in full regalia. I wanted him to connect the dots before he saw me like that at the show.

  After Evan saw me in Phantom, he started to sing the songs. I got him his own mini-me outfit, with mask and cape, and he strutted around and sang.

  Every night when I occupied that character, I tapped into things buried deep inside me.

  The mask. The hidden facial disfigurement.

  It haunted me.

  The Phantom had it wrong. Christine recoiled in horror not at his face, but at his soul.

  Was it possible that the Phantom was . . . in a way . . . me?

  The mask. The hidden facial disfigurement. Why had I never confronted the birth defect I had covered for my entire life? Why had I cowered in fear of it? Why had I let it keep me from sharing myself with people, from embracing people—from embracing the fullness of life?

  The mask. The hidden facial disfigurement.

  Was the problem really in my soul, too? And if so, could I exorcise it?

  56.

  I was supposed to have been the second-to-last Phantom before the show closed after its ten-year run in Toronto. But things went so well that the theater bought out the contract of the actor poised to replace me and had me take the show to the finish line in October 1999.

  I enjoyed the pressure of knowing some people wanted me to fail, and of changing the minds of others who thought I was some bozo ruining their favorite show. Of course, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. One night during a scene where I was hooded and singing “Point of No Return”—a hushed moment, with just the Phantom and Christine onstage—I went absolutely blank. I was walking toward her, singing solo, and I forgot the words. I knew from rock concerts that people notice your reaction to mistakes more than they notice the actual mistakes, so I just kept singing—in gibberish. Eventually my mind cleared.

  After the show I went to see Melissa Dye, the great-looking woman with an incredible voice who played Christine. Melissa was a joy to work with, and her support and friendship made the whole experience that much more fun. Plus there was something between us that under different circumstances, I definitely would have pursued. “Wasn’t that unbelievable?” I said to her.

  “What?” she said.

  “I was just singing nonsense during ‘Point of No Return.’ ”

  Melissa looked confused. She hadn’t noticed.

  Other people in the cast told me that they’d had similar experiences and sung about chickens or ducks—whatever came into their heads.

  Before shows, the staff often dropped off letters that had been mailed to me at the theater company’s
office address. I liked to read them. One woman wrote that she had seen the show many times—it was her favorite musical—and that her sister had recently bought her tickets for her birthday. When she found out I was playing the lead, she had been disappointed. She was expecting the worst but was completely won over when she saw the show. And she wanted me to know that.

  Another letter—the one from the woman who worked with AboutFace—changed my life. The woman, Anna Pileggi, wrote that when she watched me play the Phantom she had the impression that I identified with the character in a way she hadn’t seen in other actors.

  Wow.

  It was true, of course, that I identified with the character—the mask, the hidden facial disfigurement—but how did she figure it out? I rarely mentioned my birth defect to anyone, and these days I had the surgically created ear where earlier there had been the stump. It felt as if Anna had pulled aside a veil and seen the real me. She knew my secret.

  The woman’s letter went on to describe AboutFace, the organization that helped children with facial differences. Would I have any interest in learning more about the organization or perhaps even working with them?

  I called her.

  Her connection to young people struggling with facial abnormalities struck me immediately.

  She didn’t know my secret, of course, though I quickly told her about my microtia and the surgeries I’d had. She had just seen something based on her work—perhaps she had recognized the pain of reality in the way I played the role.

  She described some of the programs her organization undertook. Eventually she asked if I might be willing to talk to kids and their parents about my experiences.

  Here, perhaps, was a way to help heal my soul.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Speaking about my birth defect would have been impossible when I had been in the midst of pain and turmoil. My life had evolved, however, and I was now in a better position to be open. I suppose I could have gone to speak to the kids and just offered a cheering up from a so-called celebrity. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to just speak to the kids; I was going to reveal something about myself. This was an opportunity for me to gain something by sharing with them what I had been through.