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WHO AM I?
Itās a valid question. If youāve read anything else Iāve put out into the world, you may think you know my story. Lord knows I love talking about myself. But if youāve heard it before, you need to hear it again, this time in a new context. In this book, Iām going to tell you the story of how I achieved power. And Iām going to tell you how you can do the same. You too can be powerful. So strap in and prepare for the ride.
Iām Gene Simmons. You know, that weird guy who always sticks his tongue out. I cofounded KISS, Americaās #1 gold-record-award-winning group of all time in all categories. In some circles, Iām kind of a big deal. And I recognize and understand that, humbleness be damned.
But I wasnāt born Gene Simmons. Thatās not even my birth name. I created Gene Simmons. I gave myself that name. My name is part of the destiny that I created for myself. Similarly, a prime minister isnāt born the prime minister. The president isnāt born the president. A CEO isnāt born a CEO. The pope isnāt even born the pope. Powerful people attain power by making certain choices and by possessing the desire to be something bigger. Granted, it also takes a lot of luck and being in the right place at the right time. There are many factors that you canāt controlāyour background, your place in history, your environmentāand these things will either help you or hold you back. But they are your circumstances, not your destiny. And you have no choice but to roll with them. In the end, it is up to you to make your own destiny. It is up to you to enter the ring with your fists up. And to train. Hard.
So who am I, really?
I was born in Haifa, Israel, on August 25, 1949. This was a tumultuous time in the world. People were still recovering from World War II, the war that was supposed to end all wars. More than sixty million people had been killed, and millions more were seriously injured. My own mother, FlorĆ”, was a victim of the war, by virtue of the fact that she was Jewish. Her family was from Hungary, and when she was just fourteen years of age, they were all shipped off to the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Two of her brothers had escaped to America right before the war, but of the family members who had remained in Europe, only my mother survived.
After the war, my mother immigrated to the newly formed State of Israel, which became an independent country on May 14, 1948. She met teacher and carpenter Yechiel Witz, and they married. I was born a year later. As a child I was unaware that there was constant conflict with neighboring states that didnāt want Israel to exist. At age four, I didnāt understand why my father had to dress up in a uniform and go out to the road, machine gun in hand, to hitch a ride for what I later learned were the front lines. Israel is such a small country that you could literally get into a taxi, or hitch a ride, and be at the front lines of a war zone within an hour or two. My childhood was happy, as I remember it. Once I got older I would learn how difficult those early years were for my family. But as a child I did not know what I was missing.
We didnāt own a television; I had never seen or heard of TV. We didnāt have a bathroom; we had to go to the outhouse. I had never heard of Kleenex or tissues or the idea that you could use something once and then throw it away. We didnāt even have toilet paper. We used rags that my mother would cut from a larger piece of cloth we no longer used. Those rags were used to blow our noses, to clean things, and, yes, to wipe our behinds. And then my mother would wash those rags and reuse them, again and again. She never threw anything away. And maybe that explains why, to this day, I will wear a shirt or a pair of jeans until it tears and falls off me.
By the time I was old enough to start going to public school in Israel, my father had left us. I didnāt understand it at the time, but my mother was with me and, it seemed, she was all I needed.
One day, we received a CARE Package. CARE (Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere) was an organization that sent food and goods to people in underdeveloped countries. To my knowledge, we had never received mail of any kind, much less a big box addressed to my mother. We tore open the box, and inside, we found things I had never seen before. There was a sweater. It was too big for me, but nonetheless I wore it every day, proudly. It had holes in it, and my mother would occasionally sew the holes back up. There was also a big can of peaches. I had never seen or heard of peaches. In Israel, we had cactus fruit that grew on the hill behind our small one-bedroom home, which was riddled with scars from artillery fire from neighboring countries. We didnāt have a can opener, so my mother used a big rock to punch a hole on one side of the can. Once sheād opened the can, she offered me a swig of nectar. To this day, I vividly recall it as the sweetest taste I had ever experienced. It was thick and seemingly unnatural. Fruit didnāt taste like that. And neither did cake, the few times weād had any. And perhaps my first experience with that can of peaches explains why I have an insatiable sweet tooth to this day.
There was also a Bugs Bunny book, where Elmer Fudd was constantly chasing the rabbit. I had never heard of Bugs and didnāt recall much of the book until we immigrated to America and I started seeing Bugs Bunny cartoons on television. Because my mother couldnāt read or speak English at the time, she would just look at the pictures in the book and tell me a story as if she were reading from those pages. On many nights, I would sometimes wonder why the story in the book kept changing. There were other wonders in that CARE Package too. Iāll never forget it. Somewhere out there was a kind, anonymous stranger whoād sent the box to us.
My takeaway from that experience is that we all must give back. We must. My story and my motherās story are not the only tales of heartache and poverty. It continues today. So much of the world trudges on, in the same conditions or worse, as wars are being fought for nothing. Because of hatred, racism, and tribalism. And children continue to go to sleep hungry. And thatās partly why Iāve always been so driven. Iāve always wanted power, but not so much for myself or for attaining material wealth. (I donāt have much use for material things. I simply donāt shop. I canāt. I start to sweat when someone comes up to me in a store and asks me if I want help. I canāt even order a coffee at Starbucks.) Instead, power for me is about the ability to fulfill your dreams, to support your family, and, most important, to give back, whether itās through using my success to create jobs or my celebrity to bring awareness to a good cause.
The charities Iām involved with are incredibly important to me: Mending Kids, which sends doctors around the world to perform free operations on children who would otherwise be doomed to a life of pain or death; the Shriners Hospitals for Children, the charitable branch of the Shriners organization that performs operations on children in America free of charge; the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which is devoted to preventing pediatric HIV and eliminating pediatric AIDS; Matter, which sends shiploads of medicine, canned goods, and more to areas of the world in need; the Starkey Hearing Foundation, which sends free hearing aids to families around the world; and, of course, the Wounded Warrior Project, which supports our vets.
Why do I give back? Because I believe that we should all try to make this world a better place than when we came into it. Thatās my motivation for giving back. Whatās yours? Maybe itās that you want your mother to be proud of you. Maybe you want God to give you the thumbs-up for being a good person. But really, you should be doing it for yourself. Because you could just as easily have been born in a Third World country, watching your child go to sleep hungry each night, or worse. Iām aware that this isnāt the sort of language I use in my pop culture job. But this is where I get to clear the air and bare my soul. For you. For me.
When I was eight years old, my mother told me that we were going on a trip, and I was excited, to say the least. We took the bus from our home in Tirat HaCarmel to Haifa, and I found myself standing next to my mother in a large office, at the end of a long line of people. Ahead of us stood a uniformed man behind a big desk, in front of a multicolored flag I had never seen before. The flag was red, white, and blue, with a field of stars in the corner. And surprisingly, the man in uniform motioned for us to move forward, so we walked to the front of the line. He began asking my mother questions in broken Hebrew, but it was clear to me that the uniformed man and my mother couldnāt fully understand each other. (At home we spoke Hebrew and Hungarian, my motherās native language. I also knew some Turkish and Spanish, and my mother had learned German in order to survive in Nazi Germany.) He asked her if she spoke English. The answer was no. He asked her if she spoke other languages. And sadly, my mother had to admit that she spoke German well enough, despite the pain it caused her to recall it. The uniformed man asked her some questions in German and my mother answered them.
What happened next, I will never forget as long as I live. The uniformed man asked my mother to raise her hand to swear allegiance to America. And because my mother had never before sworn an oath in this way, she was confused, and she raised her entire arm . . . in a Nazi salute. I suppose that must have been the image sheād seen in her younger years in the concentration camps. And that blessed man quickly came around from behind the desk over to where we were standing and pushed my motherās arm down to her side.
He smiled at us and said, āYou will never have to do that ever again. Youāre going to America.ā And my mother cried. She still does at the mere mention of the experience.
In the summer of 1958, we arrived in New York and moved in temporarily with her brother Larry in Brooklyn (one of the two brothers who had escaped before the war). Soon thereafter, my mother started working in a sweatshop, earning half a cent for every button she could sew on to winter coats. She was lucky to clear $100 per week, working six days a week, from seven in the morning until seven at night. When my mother would come home at night she would collapse and watch TV with me. Before we went to sleep, we would watch something called āHigh Flight,ā which was shown on TV stations at the time as a sign-off at the end of the broadcast day (search for it on YouTube). I remember it as if it were yesterday: a U.S. Air Force jet would streak through the heavens, and a manās voice would recite a poem about flying with patriotic music in the background. The poem ends with: āPut out my hand and touched the face of God.ā And then the television would slowly fade to static. Once the TV was off, Iād look up at my motherās face and realize how hard sheād been crying. I wondered for years why my mother would cry when she saw the American flag. And eventually it dawned on me: she had seen so much misery, pain, and death in her life, and finally, she was in a country that allowed her to breathe free. And feel safe.
Now that Iām older, I understand. When I see the American flag going up a flagpole, I often find myself with tears falling down my face. Perhaps this story helps you to understand why people of my generation, especially immigrants, say corny things like āGod bless Americaā and mean it.
God bless America, indeed.
By the fall of 1958, my mother enrolled me in yeshiva, a Jewish theological seminary. I was there six days a week, studying from 7:00 A.M. until 9:30 P.M. Half the day was spent on studying the Talmud and Torah. The other half was dedicated to history, math, and so on. Once I got home from school, there wasnāt time for much else, other than watching a bit of TV before bed. And strangely, TV turned out to be my greatest early influence. I desperately wanted to learn all that I could about America. Its history. Its people. Its culture. I wanted to be American. And TV helped me to understand America. The language. The food. And the astonishing opulence. Everything was new to meāand exciting. It seemed that there were no limits. I saw cowboys from the 1800s. I saw monster movies. I saw a man with a cape flying through the air. And then I discovered comic books. Superman and Batman were mythological in what they could accomplish. I was hooked on all things American. My imagination soared, and every day I envisioned myself as a cowboy or Superman.
By 1960, a full year and a half after we first arrived in America, I was still known as Haim Witz and spoke English with a thick accent. Then I decided to change my name to Gene Klein. Klein was my motherās maiden name, and Iām not sure where Gene came from. Perhaps it was from watching one of my favorite TV westerns, Bat Masterson, starring Gene Barry. I also began to notice that the people in my neighborhood (Williamsburg, Brooklyn) didnāt sound like the newscasters on television, and the people walking the streets with me didnāt dress as well as them either. So as I was learning to speak English, I mimicked TV anchormen and thereby avoided the various New York accents. I didnāt know it at the time, but I was making decisions that would create a marketable product. And that product was me.
I took steps to rebrand myself, beginning with changing my name to sound more American. I worked hard to get rid of my accent. And yes, I took off my yarmulke (the skull cap that Jews of certain beliefs often wear). While I know that every race and creed has pride in its own unique culture, the real world works differently. Everyone is proud of his own culture, but we should communicate in a common language and uphold certain cultural/economic/political ideals. Maybe we donāt have to build a Tower of Babel to challenge God in heaven, but it sure would be a good idea if we could all communicate with one another. And in America, that means speaking English, regardless of our birth language.
Take a cue from the airline industry. Recently, when I flew on Singapore Airlines to Beijing, where they speak Mandarin, I noticed that the proud Singaporean pilots and the proud Chinese airport officials all communicated in English. Why? Because the airline industry has a business to run. It will use whatever language gets it the most money. English has become the common language, the lingua franca, and speaking English has become essential for communication, more important than waving your own flag/culture/language in other peopleās faces. And thatās a good lesson for you. And me.
Hereās the truth: You will be judged by others, whether you like it or whether itās fair. Every day, wherever you go. You will be judged by how you look. How you speak. How you present yourself. Itās not socially acceptable to say certain things publicly, and perhaps rightfully so. But privately, people are thinking all sorts of things. The law canāt control our thoughts (at least not yet). And itās up to you to be the best version of you. Or not. You are also free to be who you want to be, without making any compromises, and the rest of the world be damned.
But if you want successāand I wanted successāyou have to play by certain rules. For me, that meant playing by their rules. Not mine. And thatās because they owned ...
