They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  He came out clean and sober, and stayed that way for a couple of years before falling again as hard and far as before. Eventually he’d have to hit rock bottom, the way they say true addicts do, before he really quit.

  11

  IN 1977 I STARTED A WHOLE NEW JOURNEY. I got into producing movies. I did it as a favor to a friend.

  It started on a terribly sad note, when Carolyn’s baby Lola, our Billion Dollar Baby, died in her crib, which happened more often then than it does now. Carolyn worked out of her apartment in London, and just couldn’t bear to be there anymore. She asked if I might have a spot for her at Alive. Of course I said yes. I loved Carolyn and there was no question that I would make a place for her in my company and give her whatever she needed to recover and be happy. She started out helping to manage artists, then said that what she really wanted to do was make movies.

  Okay, I said, then we’ll make movies. First, though, we had to learn how to do that. Despite her experience in the film world, Carolyn had never made a movie. I had only done some video and TV. When I asked her who might be a good teacher, she thought of David Puttnam, a British producer. He and his partner Sandy Lieberson had made some terrific films, including Performance, the Nicolas Roeg movie starring Jagger, and Ken Russell’s Mahler and Lisztomania. Later David would make Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, and Local Hero.

  We met up with David in New York and he agreed to go in with us. We formed Alive Films. David was the chairman, and Carolyn worked with him. It was a very small, independent film company, something that didn’t really exist in America at the time. The first movie David wanted to make was called The Duellists, with a screenplay adapted from the Joseph Conrad novella The Duel, about a pair of officers in Napoleon’s army. I didn’t read the script; I wasn’t involved on that level at all. What I did was put up some cash—I think it was a quarter of a million dollars—for overhead.

  David set up a meeting at Paramount Pictures to see if they’d give us the money to make the movie. A fellow named David Picker was running Paramount at the time. Wonderful man. His father was one of the founders of United Artists. He said, “I love Carolyn. I’ll do anything for Carolyn. I’ll give you a million dollars, just don’t embarrass me.”

  As we walked out of the office I asked, “Was that good?”

  David said, “Good? Are you kidding me? This is probably the first time in the history of the studios that they didn’t even want to see a script. We just got a million dollars for nothing.”

  He hired a director—some guy named Ridley Scott. This would be his first feature film. And they cast Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as the two officers.

  One day, a couple of weeks before shooting was to start, Keith called me. We’d known each other peripherally. Apparently we were fronting some money for him to take fencing lessons. But he was getting worried because he hadn’t heard from us about his travel arrangements to France, where the movie would be shot. About three days before Keith was supposed to leave, David called me from London.

  “We have a problem, Shep. We’re two hundred thousand dollars short on the budget. We need that much more to start making the movie.”

  “Well, where are you going to get it?” I asked. He was the producer, after all.

  “Do you have it?” he asked.

  “No. What have you been telling Keith? He thinks he’s leaving in three days.”

  “Shep, when you make movies, you never tell anybody the whole truth.”

  Really? I was a pretty successful businessman by then, and that’s not how I ever conducted things. I called up Keith and told him the truth: “We have two more days. I’m going to try and figure this out, but I’m not in a position to put up the money myself. I just didn’t want to call you five minutes before you’re supposed to leave.”

  He was in a panic. I didn’t blame him. Then I woke up the next day to see in the news that there had been a sterling crisis in England, and the pound had been drastically devalued overnight. The new exchange rate meant we were instantly $200,000 richer. We started shooting the next week.

  We finished the film in time to enter it in the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. David and Carolyn went. I didn’t. I was still so green at this business that I even forgot to have my name put in the credits as one of the producers. We won the Best First Work award. It was Ridley’s first movie, our first movie, total cost $1.2 million, and we won. Man, were we proud. We were convinced we were going to waltz back into Paramount and be handed a ten-picture deal. We called the studio to set up a screening for David Picker and the other bosses, because they’d never seen it. That’s when we were told David had just been fired. That’s Hollywood. Two new guys were taking over. One was Michael Eisner. The other was Barry Diller. They set up a screening for two weeks later.

  Carolyn, David Putnam, Ridley, and I went into that screening room very excited. We were sure they were going to love us. Ridley was already staking out his position for his next movie. The lights went down. Nobody said a word. We heard the door open behind us. Still nobody said a word. The movie started. When it had been running maybe fifteen minutes, a guy behind us called out, “Lights!” The movie stopped and the lights came on. Two guys were sitting behind us. They were about our age, mid-thirties, but otherwise they couldn’t have looked more different from us. They looked like corporate suits, and they had that corporate suit attitude, deadpan and hardass. One of them stood up.

  “I’m Barry Diller,” he said. “This is Michael Eisner. We just took over the studio. We came from ABC TV, and the one thing Michael and I have in common is, we don’t like art house movies. We’re not going to release this. But very nice to meet you.”

  And they left the room. Paramount never did a real release of the picture. After their reign at Paramount, Diller would go on to create the Fox Television Network, and Eisner would run the Walt Disney Company for twenty years.

  Now it’s 1979, and my life is like a carnival ride. I’m dividing my time between L.A. and Maui. Carolyn and I are growing our movie company. I’m managing Alice and an expanding roster of performing artists, and have a growing staff to help me do that. I still have Carlos’n Charlie’s, and still bring women home from there. I’m drinking, drugging, partying.

  One night I let a married friend of mine bring a girl up to my house in Bel-Air. When I came home they were in the living room. She was a gorgeous blonde, Marcy Hanson, who had been Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for October 1978. She invited me to a party at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills a night or two later. I was so excited. Me, Shep Gordon, at the Playboy Mansion!

  To start with, Hef’s estate was incredible. The house is enormous, sprawling, all Gothic arches and turrets, like a medieval castle. And the grounds were beautiful, with a tennis court and a pool that was fed by a waterfall and a sauna and peacocks wandering the lawn. And then there were the women. It was Pajama Night or Lingerie Night or something, and hundreds of beautiful women were there.

  Marcy took me to the famous grotto, a man-made cave of carved rock with steam rising off Jacuzzis and hot tubs, romantically lit, like something out of Disneyland if Disneyland wasn’t for families. Marcy and I got undressed and soaked and got to know each other. When we were ready to get out, our clothes were gone.

  I said, “Hey, somebody stole my clothes.”

  Marcy laughed and explained that while you were in the grotto, staff took your clothes and pressed them for you.

  We went for a walk on the grounds and came to a big, hollowed-out tree with a mattress in it, and that’s where we made love for the first time. Now it was after midnight and I was hungry. Marcy said she could eat, too.

  I said, “Great. Where should we go?”

  She smiled at me again. “Oh no, Hef keeps kitchen staff twenty-four hours a day.”

  So we went up to the mansion and a chef came out, took our order, and cooked us some eggs.

  The whole experience overwhelmed me and swept me away, and in no time Marcy and I got ma
rried. It wasn’t something I thought through. Like a lot of other decisions in my life, it was just what I did at that moment. I was in my early thirties. Maybe after the previous few years of sex with strangers from the club I felt ready to settle down.

  I sold the party-hardy house in Bel-Air and bought us a beautiful mansion on a gated property on Oakmont Drive in Brentwood. It was designed by the great African-American architect Paul Revere Williams, who designed homes for a lot of Hollywood celebrities, like Tyrone Power, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, and Bert Lahr. James Garner and Zubin Mehta were our neighbors. Our first week there, around three in the morning, Mrs. Mehta called. I had a dog I’d rescued from the pound. Marcy loved dogs, so I thought I’d try to get over my fear of them. He had dug under the fence, swam through the pond outside the Mehtas’ bedroom, come in the bedroom, and jumped into bed with them soaking wet. He did that three more times, until I felt so mortified I gave him up. A few months later I found a note from them in the mailbox. They missed the dog and hoped he was okay!

  That house was immense. I don’t think I lived there long enough even to walk into half the rooms, because it soon became obvious to Marcy and me that our hasty marriage had been a mistake. We worked at it for eight or nine months, then got it annulled. I never heard from her again until Supermensch came out and she wrote me a beautiful letter from Galveston, Texas, where she ran a bed-and-breakfast, and we had a really sweet phone conversation.

  After the annulment went through, I sold that house and bought Alice’s Benedict Canyon place from him. He and his wife, Sheryl, moved to Phoenix. The house was listed on all the maps to the stars, so people used to ring the bell all the time, hoping that Alice Cooper would answer the door. I put up a sign:

  ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE.

  GO BACK AND GET A REFUND.

  I didn’t have my dog anymore—sort of a relief—but I had a cat, the Sensitive One. He must have learned something from the dog, though, because he also went next door to get cozy with the neighbors—Mr. and Mrs. Cary Grant. I went over to their place and rang the bell. When his assistant answered the door, I could see through to the backyard, where Cary and the Sensitive One were hanging out together, obviously enjoying each other’s company. Cary had retired from pictures a decade or so earlier and was in his late seventies, I think.

  I went out there and said, “Mr. Grant, that’s my cat.”

  His wife Barbara—his fifth and last, almost half a century younger than him—was out there, too, and said to me, “You can’t take the cat away from him. That cat has brought him back to life.”

  So Cary Grant and I agreed on joint custody of the cat.

  Maybe both my pets knew that in L.A. you don’t meet your neighbors, and they were trying to do something about it. The Alice house was almost at the end of a long, windy road. There was only one more house past it, where the road dead-ended. I lived there for five years and never met the neighbors in that house, though once in a while I’d catch a glimpse of this pretty young woman going in or out.

  This went on for years. I would keep that house as my L.A. residence until 2000. The day I left, my moving van blocked the road, and those folks couldn’t get out. They sat in their car and honked for maybe twenty minutes, and then finally rang the doorbell. It was Ric Ocasek of the Cars. I was really good friends with him and his very pretty wife, Paulina. We had gone to dinner three or four times while I lived in that house, and never knew we were next-door neighbors until this moment—when I was leaving.

  When I first got there, Elton John was still on the street as well. He moved out, and the house was bought by a pornography company that shot a lot of videos there. Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, also lived on the street.

  Only in L.A. Sometimes my life there felt like I was living in the Hollywood Wax Museum.

  12

  WHEN CAROLYN HAD COME BACK FROM CANNES IN 1977, she’d told me about an incredible dinner party at “this great place in the mountains.” It was a Michelin three-star restaurant called Le Moulin de Mougins, up in the hills outside Cannes in a refurbished, sixteenth-century olive mill. “Shep,” she said, “you have to go to Cannes and the Moulin. Everyone goes there. It’s very cool.” She described the spectacular setting, the amazing nouvelle cuisine, and its owner, a famous French chef named Roger Vergé.

  I had never heard of him, or his restaurant. Or nouvelle cuisine. Food didn’t matter to me much. I was a burger-and-fries, macaroni-and-cheese guy. But I was intrigued for some reason, so I filed it away in my head.

  After that we made a couple more films with Hollywood studios. One of them was Roadie, a rock-oriented thing starring Meat Loaf, with small parts in it for some of my artists and friends, including Alice, Debbie Harry, Ray Benson, and Roy Orbison. We did that one for Warner Bros. Neither Carolyn nor I liked working with the studios, making movies by committee, dealing with the alpha dogs in Hollywood.

  Then we made Return Engagement. It was a political documentary directed by Alan Rudolph, who loved eccentric characters. We created and filmed a national debate tour of two infamous guys from the sixties and seventies: Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy. Leary, for those of you too young to remember, was a former Harvard psychologist and hippie guru who became the leading spokesman for LSD and popularized the mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Liddy was his opposite number, a former FBI agent turned prosecutor who busted Leary for marijuana possession, then was arrested himself as Richard Nixon’s ringleader on the Watergate break-in. Leary had spent three and a half years in prison, Liddy four and a half. Now they went on this highly successful college speaking tour, two old warhorses arguing about whatever popped into their heads—revolution, evolution, national security, LSD, prison, religion, abortion. They traded radical theories and nutty humor and outrageous insults, and the college kids loved it. They were still as opposed as comic-book rivals, but they began to like each other a little.

  We all flew over to Cannes together to have it in the festival in 1984. It was my first trip. I definitely wanted to experience the festival, but I also remembered what Carolyn had told me seven years earlier about that restaurant. I asked her to book us a dinner there, and we took Leary and Liddy along.

  Moulin de Mougins was just a ten-minute drive out of Cannes, but it felt like a different world. During the festival, Cannes is one long crazy party scene, crowds circulating everywhere, tourists and locals and celebrities and paparazzi all swirling around. As we drove up the mountain out of town it got rural and dark, really quickly. No crowds, no lights, very serene. We turned at a big sign that said Moulin de Mougins, and went down a very steep, very short gravel driveway that bottomed out in front of the old stone mill (moulin). A young valet in a bow tie and white shirt parked our car in the big gravel lot, which was already packed. This place was clearly popular. Carolyn explained to me that it was an inn, with six rooms upstairs and the restaurant on the ground floor.

  We walked through a glass door into a little vestibule that could maybe fit ten people standing. Behind the wooden counter was a maître d’ in a black tuxedo who was very lofty and formal in that way only a French maître d’ can be. He didn’t even look at you when he spoke. In fact, the whole staff was very French, straight out of Central Casting.

  As the maître d’ led us toward the dining room I noticed a little boutique off to the right, displaying small, one-of-a-kind antique objects—a beautiful old vase, a tea set, things like that. There were also products from the Moulin’s owner, Monsieur Vergé: cookbooks he’d written, bottles of his olive oil, mustards, Moulin aprons. We also passed the old mill, a large circular stone for mashing the olives.

  The decor in the main dining room beautifully balanced the formal and the rustic. It was mostly ancient stone and wood, with glass doors opening onto a garden terrace lush with gorgeous flowers. More flowers stood on the ivory tablecloths. There were maybe a dozen tables, and I noticed they were all were round. Original artwork hung everywhere, and I could see right away tha
t it had been chosen with care. I saw a Picasso—he had lived and painted very nearby from the mid-1950s on. And a sculpture by César Baldaccini, an inventive avant-gardist and probably the best-known sculptor in France at the time. They named the César du Cinéma, France’s equivalent of the Oscar, after him, and he designed the trophy. He and I would become good friends. I began to feel there must be something very special about a restaurant where the art and the artists all had relationships to the place.

  From the main dining room archways led off to others. There was seating for eighty and the place was full. I’d learn that it always was. This place was ground zero for nouvelle cuisine. Every time you went in there Japanese tourists were photographing every dish. Everyone was dressed to the nines, seated in soft lighting on chairs with linens draped over the legs. Two or three wineglasses stood at every setting, along with stylish silverware and plates with little painted flowers. There was a wood-glass-brass Lalique cheese cart, thick with fresh cheeses.

  We were seated at a corner table and handed beautiful menus bearing a soft, antique portrait of an older woman’s face. Carolyn told me she was Célestine, Vergé’s aunt. Célestine taught him about cooking when he was growing up in the 1930s. Every week, she took him to the market to show him how to pick the best food. If it was chicken, she’d check that everything looked healthy: comb, feet, gizzard, eyes, examining it like a doctor. She taught him the correct way to buy butter: if it was bright yellow, that meant the cow grazed on buttercups and the butter would be too strong.

  I was impressed again. How respectful and completely lacking in ego it was for him to honor his aunt this way.