For 15 years, Ace Frehley’s version of the story went unchallenged. In his 2011 memoir, No Regrets, the Kiss guitarist credited Gene Simmons with saving his life twice — once after he fell into a hotel swimming pool and again after he passed out in a bathtub.
Now the bass guitarist is offering his account, and he says the late electric guitarist got one important detail wrong: The bandmate Simmons pulled from the pool, he says, was drummer Peter Criss, not Frehley.
Simmons recounts both incidents on a new episode of EPIC Event Center’s Behind the Curtain, in what is believed to be the first time he has publicly told his side of either story.
According to Simmons, Frehley called him after years out of touch and asked him to read a chapter of No Regrets before it was published. “Tell me if it’s true,” Frehley said, “because I don’t remember all this stuff.”
The chapter described a tipsy Frehley diving into a hotel pool before Simmons, a former lifeguard, swam out to rescue him. Simmons hauled the guitarist from the water, turned him over and pumped the water out of him. Frehley’s book places the incident at a hotel in Atlanta.
“In essence,” Simmons says of the account, “saved his life.”
But when Frehley asked whether the story was accurate, Simmons told him it was — with one significant exception.
“I’m going, well, you know what? It was 99 percent accurate,” Simmons recalls. “But what one percent wasn’t accurate? I said, well, it wasn’t you. It was Peter Criss. You were passed out on the side. You didn’t even know it happened.”
In Simmons’ telling, the rescue happened, but Frehley mistakenly took Criss’s place in the story. The anecdote has appeared in print since 2011, making Simmons’ identification of Criss a new twist on a familiar piece of Kiss history.
Simmons also revisits the second incident Frehley described in No Regrets — a near-disaster involving a hotel bathtub during Kiss’s early touring days.
The band was opening for bigger acts and couldn’t afford separate hotel rooms. Simmons shared a room with Frehley, he explains, “because Paul couldn’t stand being with Ace.”
One night, Simmons went down to the hotel bar. A roadie soon came looking for him with a worrying report: fog was pouring from beneath Frehley’s door, the door felt hot to the touch, music was blaring and no one was answering.
“I hope he’s not passed out or dead,” Simmons remembers thinking.
The door was forced open, revealing steam hanging from the ceiling and Frehley unconscious in the bathtub. Hot water was running “right under his nose,” Simmons says, while a powerful boom box sat nearby. Had it tipped into the water, Simmons suggests, the consequences could have been fatal.
“Kids today have no idea what a boom box is,” he adds.
Simmons and the others carried Frehley to the bed, but the guitarist rolled off onto the floor in the darkness. The next morning, Frehley woke up asking what had happened the previous night — and why the hotel-room door was broken.
It wasn’t the first time Ace nearly lost his life.
Frehley had previously recounted the bathtub incident in No Regrets and in a 2020 interview with Loudwire, saying Simmons broke down the door and pulled him from the tub. Simmons’ new account adds details about the steam, the boom box and the roadie who alerted him to the situation.
The episode closes with a farewell to Simmons’ former roommate. Frehley died on October 16, 2025, at age 74.
