Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley never got along too well during their KISS days.
Now they’re trading shots in print.
In his new book, “No Regrets,” Frehley calls Simmons a “sex addict” who had trouble with women before he became a rock star, while Simmons responded in the New York Post by calling Ace a “drug addict and alcoholic.”
“I believe Gene is a sex addict, in much the same way I am an alcoholic,” Frehley, a Bronx, N.Y., native, wrote in the book. “If you’ve been with only one or two women (and had to beg for whatever you got off them), it must be intoxicating to suddenly have groupies falling all over you.
“You go from getting laid once or twice a year to getting laid a hundred times by a hundred different women. We all have our issues and vices, and I saw Gene’s behavior affect him and the band sometimes in a negative way.”
Frehley added: ““[Gene] would [bleep] almost anything. Short, tall; plump, svelte; attractive, merely tolerable.”
The result?
“[He] seemed to live in a state of perpetual infestation,” Frehley said of Simmons’s battle with lice.
Simmons, whose mother, Flora, is a Hungarian Jew who survived the Nazi concentration camps, had his own probems with Frehley during the band’s heyday.
In his autobiography, Simmons wrote that Frehley once got dressed up in a German Nazi SS uniform and knocked on Gene’s hotel room door and yelled at him in a German accent.
“Fact: Ace has been a drug addict and alcoholic for 35 years,” Simmons told The Post. “Fact: We love Ace and wish him all the best.”
(The above photo on the left features me and my brother in-law, Jeff, with two original KISS members, Simmons and Paul Stanley, along with two replacements for Ace (Tommy Thayer) and Peter Criss (Eric Singer.)