Gene Simmons has disputed details from late KISS guitarist Ace Frehley’s account of being rescued from drowning, telling Behind The Curtain that the bandmate he pulled from a pool was not Frehley at all.
Frehley had written in his memoir about two separate incidents in which Simmons saved him from drowning. The first involved a hotel pool, and the second an overflowing hotel bathtub. Simmons addressed the accuracy of these stories in the interview.
“I’m going, well, you know what? It was 99% accurate,” Simmons said. “But what 1% wasn’t accurate?”
“I said, well, it wasn’t you,” he continued. “It was Peter Criss. You were passed out on the side. You didn’t even know it happened.”
Simmons made these comments while discussing Frehley’s retelling of the rescue incidents from his memoir.
Frehley published his memoir “No Regrets” in 2011, in which he credited Simmons with saving him from drowning twice: once in a hotel pool and once in an overflowing hotel bathtub. According to Simmons, Frehley called him after years out of touch to ask him to read a chapter of the book before it came out. Simmons said the rescue was real, but that Frehley had simply written himself into Peter Criss’s place in the story.
In the early days of KISS, the band was opening for bigger acts and could not afford separate hotel rooms. Simmons shared a room with Frehley because Criss could not stand being with Ace. When Simmons found Frehley unconscious in the bathtub, steam hung from the ceiling as hot water ran under his nose, and a high-powered boom box was perched nearby where one tip would have electrocuted him. It was Criss, not Frehley, whom Simmons pulled from the water that day.
Frehley described the bathtub rescue again in a 2020 interview with Loudwire, saying Simmons broke down the door and pulled him out. Frehley passed away on October 16, 2025, leaving Simmons’s account as the final public word on what actually happened during those dangerous moments on the road.
