On the twentieth of March, 1976, a young preacher’s daughter named Sheryl Goddard married a rock singer in Acapulco. Her own father performed the ceremony.
On Saturday the twenty-first of March, 2026, the same man stood up in front of 220 people at the Wrigley Mansion in Phoenix and did it again.
William Goddard is 92 years old. He married his daughter to Alice Cooper half a century ago, and he was the one who married them a second time.
There is no way to write that sentence so it sounds ordinary, so let’s not try.
She was auditioning for a tour
They met in 1975. Sheryl was a dancer, and she went out for a spot in the stage show for the Welcome To My Nightmare tour, which at the time was the most theatrical thing anybody in rock was attempting. Guillotines. Boa constrictors. A man in black eye makeup pretending to be executed in front of an arena.
She got the job. She married the guy.
That is roughly where most people expect the story to end badly, because that is what the seventies did to almost everyone in that position. Instead they are sitting on 50 years.
Here’s the detail that makes the whole thing click into place. Both of their fathers were clergymen. Hers, obviously, and his too. The man who invented shock rock, who has spent fifty-odd years on stage playing a villain, grew up in a preacher’s house. So did she. They came from the same kind of living room and then went out and built one of the longest marriages in rock music inside an industry that eats marriages.
What he actually says about it
Alice Cooper is 78. He was born Vincent Furnier in February of 1948, and he has said versions of this same thing for years, but the way he put it around the anniversary is the cleanest.
“People always say that marriage is hard work,” he said, “but Sheryl and I have the easiest marriage you can imagine.”
That’s a slightly outrageous claim, and he seems to know it. Everyone knows the received wisdom. Marriage is work, marriage is compromise, marriage is a job you clock into. He’s saying the opposite, on the record, at fifty years, which either means he isn’t paying attention or means something the rest of us should probably listen to.
The renewal itself
They did it at the Wrigley Mansion in Phoenix, which sits up on a hill over the city they’ve lived in for decades. 220 guests. A Saturday, the day after the actual anniversary, which is a very married thing to do: take the anniversary on Friday, throw the party on the weekend when people can actually come.
Hello reported the details as an exclusive, and the through-line in all of it is the father. Not the venue, not the guest list, not the music. William Goddard, 92, standing up in front of a crowd and reading vows to a couple he’d read vows to when disco was still climbing the charts and neither of these two people had gray hair.
Think about what that man has watched. He handed his daughter to a rock singer in 1976, at the exact moment that “rock singer” was the least reassuring phrase a father could hear. He had every reason to spend the next few decades bracing. Instead he got to stand there fifty years later and do the ceremony a second time, for the same two people, still married, still each other’s.
Sheryl is 69. She has been part of the stage show for most of those fifty years, which is worth pausing on, because it’s the actual mechanism. Most rock marriages fail on the road. One person leaves for eight months, the other person stays home, and the eight months does the damage. The Coopers just never separated the two things. She was in the show. She stayed in the show. Their daughter Calico has performed in it too.
So the man goes to work, and his wife is at work with him, and it has been that way since the seventies.
Fifty years is the whole story
The tabloid version of Alice Cooper is a guy with a python and a top hat. The real one is a man who got sober decades ago, who plays a great deal of golf, who has spent years raising money for a teen center in Phoenix, and who has been married to the same woman since 1976.
And on a Saturday in March, at the Wrigley Mansion, in front of 220 people, her 92-year-old father read them the vows one more time.
Fifty years apart, same man, same words, same two people standing in front of him.
