Gene Simmons Tells Unbelievable Party Story and Reveals His Most Starstruck Moment

Gene Simmons defines what it means to be a rock star, so when he joined Scott Ian for Thursday’s episode of “Never Meet Your Heroes,” he had to share some classic rock star antics.

The longtime KISS frontman was quick to preface his stories with the fact that he’s currently a married man with children. With that out of the way, he jumped into stories of his past exploits. Simmons started with a memory of being at a party at the home of a foreign politician. Simmons was approached by a striking brunette who offered to show him around the house.

“She takes me upstairs and closed the door, and I’m going, ‘Oh, this is fantastic, look at these old books,’ and she’s striking, but I didn’t know who she is,” Simmons recalled. “Just like those James Bond things, she moves one of those books or presses a button and all of a sudden there was a … I had never heard of ‘safety rooms,’ but, clearly, it was a safety room.”

From there, the two of them got to know each other intimately. But Simmons was in for a surprise when he made his way back to the party.

“She locks the door, and we became acquaintances very fast. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, David Bowie,” he said. “And then we both came out, she fixed her makeup, I ran downstairs. … And then I see her on the arm of, clearly, the guy who owns the house, and that’s when my heart started thumping like, ‘Somebody’s gonna shoot me!'”

Simmons also revealed the one time in his career that he was truly starstruck. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as well as he’d hoped when he approached the object of his astonishment.

“I had that moment when I met Sophia Loren, who to me was the epitome of woman, sexuality, and all that, but [also] this kind of ethereal quality. Her early movies, she just looked unearthly,” he said. “We were doing a TV show in Europe. She was also a guest, and when I came off, I was wearing the boots and everything, and I scared the piss out of her. She must’ve been in her late 70s, maybe early 80s, still looked great. I told her I had been in love with her since I was … Of course, she had no idea what was going on, she was just looking at the armor, the dragon things, and just overcome [with fear].”