They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  Now, I was not in any way a foodie. I was less interested in reading the menu than in observing the crowd. On any given night it’s the crème de la crème. You might be looking at royalty or aristocrats. This night, some exiled African dictator, a giant man—it might have been Idi Amin, I wasn’t sure—held court at one table. Because of the festival, some of the world’s biggest stars were there. I remember Kirk Douglas, Luciano Pavarotti, Clint Eastwood, James Coburn, and Anthony Quinn, as well as Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America.

  I sat and observed the ballet as four waiters with white linens on their arms carried large, covered platters to a table, then removed the covers in unison. It was the first time I had seen anything like that in a restaurant. I mean, I’d seen it in movies, and I’d been to expensive restaurants where they did something similar, but with nowhere near the well-practiced precision and grace. This Monsieur Vergé was intriguing me more and more. He was producing the meal the way I produced a show, everything precisely organized, everything as scripted as one of Alice’s concerts. And he made each and every person in the place feel like a king or queen. Since the tables were round, everyone was equal. No one sat at the head, no one was served first. My business and my life were all about service to others, which often meant making them feel all right about themselves. It was obvious that Vergé took great care to do just that for his clientele—all his clientele, no matter who they were.

  Despite the excellent food and elegant presentation, no one else was paying their food much attention, either. They were too busy looking around at each other, and admiring the theater of it all, the presentation. We had Tim Leary and G. Gordon Liddy at our table, and everyone was checking them out, too.

  After we ordered, Liddy got up to find the bathroom. Leary got a prankish look on his face and said, “Don’t say a word.” He opened a salt shaker and poured out six neat lines on the ivory linen tablecloth. They looked exactly like lines of cocaine. When Liddy came back, Leary had rolled up a bill and started to lean over the table like he was going to snort the lines.

  “Timothy . . .” Liddy and I both hissed. Leary leaned back and grinned, and we all relaxed for a second. Then he stood up and began to bang on his glass with a spoon. Loudly, repeatedly, until the whole dining room fell silent and every set of eyes was on him. I wanted to slide under the table.

  “Hello, everyone,” he said. “Some of you may know me. My name is Dr. Timothy Leary. I’ve been arrested many times in America for using drugs. When I cross borders it’s very difficult for me to bring drugs with me. But I was able to sneak about a hundred hits of acid into France.”

  He reached inside his sports jacket and produced a sheet of paper, presumably blotter acid.

  “But I need other drugs to maintain my life,” he went on. “I’m sure that in this room there are people with sleeping pills and people on diets with speed. So I would love to come around and introduce myself and trade you acid for your pills.”

  Then he actually began to go around from table to table, while a whole lot of powerful and celebrated people sat there looking outraged, aggravated, squirming, puffing on cigarettes. It was insane.

  At that moment, maybe sensing that the tenor of the evening had shifted from serene to surreal, an elegant gentleman glided into the room. His white jacket matched his pure white hair and mustache. He was the calmest, most beautiful, quiet pool of light that I had ever seen in my life. Everyone in the room stared at him.

  It was Roger Vergé. I felt the entire balance of power in this room filled with the rich and famous focus on him. Their faces lit up. James Coburn leaped out of his chair and hugged him. Coburn had been Vergé’s very first guest at the Moulin when it opened in 1969. Coburn had been filming in Monte Carlo, and on a day off, while driving through the village of Mougins, he saw a very old inn with a restaurant sign and pulled in. They served him lunch, and he decided that the food, the inn, and Vergé and his wife were so charming that he rented one of the six small rooms upstairs. He stayed two months. Vergé always called Coburn his first “guest.” He called all his patrons guests, not customers. That’s worth repeating: guests, not customers.

  Just by entering the room, Vergé had calmed everyone down. Everyone was smiling again, relaxed. Watching Vergé, I sensed his inner peace and happiness. It was something I had only read about. Joseph Campbell had said, “Follow your bliss.” But where do you find your bliss? I had no clue yet, but I knew by now that money, success, fame, sex, and drugs—all the typical American keys to happiness—weren’t doing it for me. This man had clearly found his bliss. What was his secret? I flashed on the seventies TV show Kung Fu, in which David Carradine was “Grasshopper,” student to Master Po, played by Keye Luke. Po doesn’t teach Grasshopper kung fu just as a way to fight, but as a way of life, a spiritual path. It was very clear to me that if I didn’t change my life soon, didn’t find someone who could lead me down some new path, then I was going to become like everybody else in this room. And I decided right there and then that this man, this serene pool of light, was going to be my new mentor, my Master Po.

  So when we were done with dinner and everybody else went off in the car, I stayed and waited while the restaurant cleared out. Vergé came out of the kitchen to have a quiet drink with a stocky little bald man at the bar. I watched for probably fifteen minutes before a waiter came over and asked me in very broken English, “Mr. Vergé he ask you are not waiting to him?”

  I said, “Yes, I am. I would like to talk to Mr. Vergé.”

  The waiter gave a little nod toward Vergé, who waved me over. He stood up politely and introduced the man with him as Pablo, who lived next door to the restaurant. Pablo was stocky and bald, and I was sure he was Pablo Picasso. Someone had told me he lived nearby and that the Moulin was his favorite restaurant. That’s the way I told this story for years—until I found out that he’d died a decade earlier.

  Drunk, nervous, I asked Vergé, “Sir, can I speak to you privately?”

  “Certainly,” he said, calmly, politely, in a strong French accent.

  We went a few steps away from the bar and I launched into it.

  “Well, um, I was a guest here tonight and the food was amazing and everything was amazing and I had a movie in the film festival and in America they have this TV show with the Grasshopper and I’m gonna really be in trouble if I don’t find someone to be my teacher, so can I be your Grasshopper?”

  “I don’t know what you are speaking of,” he said, because of course he didn’t.

  I tried again. “I just want to hang out with you. Is there some way I can hang out with you?”

  “Are you a chef?” he asked. When I said no, he went on, “Well, I am but a simple cook. If you want to work in my kitchen, I would be happy to let you work in my kitchen, but you must be a cook.”

  He thought I was a foodie who was hitting him up for a job. I didn’t want to work in his kitchen, but he was being so nice I said, “How do you become a chef?”

  “You go to school.”

  He wrote down the names of two schools: Marcella Hazan’s School of Classic Italian Cooking in Bologna, and another in the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.

  I folded the slip of paper, thanked him earnestly, and left. I was indescribably happy and excited. A new journey was beginning, a new path opening, just when I needed one. I had no idea where it was leading. Never in my life had it occurred to me to go to cooking school. But I was eager to start.

  The next day, I remembered that Joe Gannon and his new wife, Beverly, were planning to honeymoon in Italy that year, and had enrolled in Hazan’s school. So many opportunities appear in my life just when I need them. They agreed to let me join them, and we all attended cooking school together in Bologna. Later that year I flew to Bangkok and took the course there.

  In May of the following year, 1985, we returned to Cannes with another Alan Rudolph film, Choose Me, starring Keith Carradine and Geneviève Bujold. (I will tell the strange tale of how that cam
e about later.) I went back to the Moulin, had another sensational meal, and waited for the place to clear out. When it did, I found Vergé at the bar again, sipping a drink just like a year before. When I said hello, it was clear he didn’t remember me. Why would he?

  “Last year I asked you if I could hang out with you. You told me to go to these cooking schools, and I went to both of them.”

  “Oh,” he said, obviously caught a little off guard. “That is very nice.”

  I said, “So now can I work in the kitchen with you? I can stay after the festival.”

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “I am leaving for Bangkok after the festival. I am cooking there.”

  “Well, then can I come to Bangkok with you?” I asked.

  He laughed, and then said graciously, “Certainly, if you wish to.”

  In the year between my two conversations with Vergé, I had learned that we had a mutual friend, George Greif. George had been managing music acts since the 1950s—Barry White, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lord Buckley, Stan Kenton, New Christy Minstrels, José Feliciano. He and his partner Sid Garris had started their own record label and opened their own club in L.A., with no liquor license so they could let a younger crowd in for what he called “unsupervised fun.” In the 1970s he gave George Harrison a tour of Lord Buckley’s former L.A. home, Crackerbox Palace, inspiring Harrison to write his song with that name. He mentions “Mr. Greif” in the lyrics.

  Greif was a larger-than-life character. He always wore a big felt fedora on his head and a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He was boisterous, witty, irreverent, a bon vivant, and extremely generous with his knowledge, which was extensive. He could also be a bit of a pain in the ass when he got on a roll, but he was so funny I didn’t mind. I loved traveling with George and took him with me everywhere I could.

  I called George and asked if he wanted to go to Bangkok. When I told him I was going with Vergé, he told me he’d been a fan for a few years and said, “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’m in.” He met us there.

  My friend Dennis Marini had traveled from Maui to Cannes with me, and I invited him to come along, too.

  Since Vergé was guest-cooking at the Oriental Hotel, we rented the Oriental Suite on the top floor. It overlooked the Chao Phraya River and had enough bedrooms for the three of us. The hotel provided Vergé with a small room of his own.

  Our first night there, Vergé asked me, “Shep, you are having a tuxedo, oui?”

  “No. Nobody else has one either.”

  “But you will be going to dinner tomorrow with Princess Zarina Zainal of Malaysia. You must have wear the tuxedo, you see.”

  We hired a seamstress to come to our suite in the morning and fit us for tuxes. In Thailand they can make them in hours. That evening we went out for the dinner. When the princess arrived, the whole dining room rose to their feet. Princess Zarina was very pretty, very elegant. Her security guards led her over to our table and then withdrew. She sat between me and George. She was refined but warm, with a stunning smile. She and I engaged in some small talk.

  Then George, who was already pretty lit, intruded. “Princess, excuse me. Have you heard the Schmuck Joke?”

  She didn’t flinch. “No, I don’t believe so.”

  I squirmed. I had heard George’s Schmuck Joke a thousand times and couldn’t believe he was about to tell it to the princess of Malaysia.

  “A wife tells her husband, ‘You are the biggest schmuck I’ve ever met in my life. You do everything like a schmuck. You walk like a schmuck. You talk like a schmuck. You eat like a schmuck. You dress like a schmuck. You comb your hair like a schmuck. If they had a contest for World’s Biggest Schmuck, you’d come in second.’ She lets that sink in, then says, ‘Ask me why you’d come in second.’ Husband rolls his eyes but says, ‘Okay, why would I come in second?’”

  George jumped to his feet, leaned over the Princess, jabbed a finger in her face, and yelled, “‘BECAUSE YOU’RE A SCHMUCK!’”

  The whole room held its collective breath for a few seconds of startled silence. Then the princess’s security guards came running at us. They didn’t hear the joke, they just saw this loud American looming over the princess, jabbing his finger in her face and shouting. The princess, to her enormous credit, was unfazed. She waved the guards away with a smile. She was one of the guys. Who knew? We have stayed friends all these years. When Supermensch came out, she friended me on Facebook!

  Over the next four days, Vergé and I spent a lot of time together, hanging out and exploring Bangkok. One morning we went upriver to check out the markets. When I was playing with this little knife I really liked at the fish market, Vergé bought it for me. It cost a quarter. He teased me about that for years. I still have the knife; now that Roger is gone, it has even more meaning for me.

  It was good having George there to help us all bond. We enjoyed each other like old friends. Vergé must’ve felt at ease with me, because one night he told me something personal I never forgot. He said he was the son of a blacksmith, and that when he was a young man in his small French village, cooking was considered menial work. So when he dated a girl, he would never tell her he was a chef. Neither of us liked to talk about our private life, so I think this moment added something important to our camaraderie. It got me thinking about how chefs of Vergé’s generation were invisible to their culture. That realization would open another path to me soon enough.

  Before I met Roger Vergé, I thought bliss was basically wealth and power. But early in our friendship, I came to feel that true bliss was service to others and perfecting your compassion. Unlike so many people I knew then, Vergé always did everything in a selfless spirit of “How can I make your life better?” He was a genuinely humble gentleman; nothing he did was just about him. As a chef, he liked to say, “I try to give pleasure on everyone.” What made him the absolute happiest was cooking to please his customers and friends. Doing a service for others.

  What I saw in Vergé was that you could be successful and happy. I had only seen success and misery—the success that killed Janis, Jimi, and Morrison, and sent Alice to rehab. Vergé was the first person I ever met who had true success: he had mastered his craft, he had respect from his peers, and he was happy, always happy, because his true joy came from putting the comfort of others before himself.

  I responded to this on some deep and instinctual level. I never thought of it then, but I’ve come to believe that in some ways Vergé reminded me of my father, whom I loved wholeheartedly. I think he and Vergé, as different as they were, also had much in common.

  I’d spent my adult life up to then in show business and Hollywood, where kindness was considered a weakness. In Hollywood every dog was an alpha dog. Everything was a competition for who could bark the loudest and take the biggest bite out of some other dog. You were either top dog or you were a loser, and God help you because they’d tear you to shreds and never think twice about it. To this day, when I’m talking to anyone in Hollywood I have to consciously put on an alpha dog act. If you’re not saying, “You fucking fuck, I’ll fucking murder you,” they don’t hear you. They can’t hear you. And of course no one is ever happy. It doesn’t matter how much money, fame, and power they have. Because in that environment they’re anxious and frightened every minute of their lives. They have to be constantly vigilant and on guard, always protecting their turf, always looking out for some bigger, meaner, louder dog. It’s a miserable, stressful way to be, and it was the opposite of the way I wanted to live and act.

  Vergé was showing me another path—that seeding a little compassion and kindness every chance you get creates an abundance of happiness for all. It doesn’t have to be winner and losers. It can be win-win. You make other people happy, they make you happy. It’s very simple, and it’s probably the most important lesson of my life. It’s what I mean by compassionate business.

  As a young man I was always searching for happiness, but I didn’t have teachers. J
oseph Campbell said: “If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.” Campbell said you don’t have to get to heaven to experience bliss: you can grab it right now. He offered one simple, practical way to do that: go into a quiet room and do whatever makes you happy, for thirty minutes a day. Whatever makes you happy—listening to music, sewing, shouting—take thirty minutes out of your busy, hectic, modern-world day to do it. That’s following your bliss. Roger Vergé did what made him happy every day.

  Our hotel rooms in Bangkok had little books on Buddhism in them, the way American hotels always had the Gideon bible. I started browsing through. Like many other sixties college kids, I had read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, about seeking the enlightenment that brings inner happiness. My favorite Siddhartha lines were something like, “Seeking means having a goal. But finding means being free, being open, having no goal.” I also liked, “It is only important to love the world, not despise it. Not to hate each other but to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect.” That was how Vergé acted. That was how I wanted to be.

  I decided that if Buddhism embraced that idea, I wanted to know more about it. My college friend Marty Kriegel, who’s about the smartest person I’ve ever known, had gotten deeply into Buddhism. When I asked him if he could help me understand it, he wrote me a very long, very detailed, very Marty letter about it, basically a scholarly thesis on it. Marty’s an intellectual; I’m not. I would never really study Buddhism the way he did. But he said that was all right. At the end of his letter, he wrote, “But Shep, you don’t really need to know any of this. Your walks on the beach are what it’s all about.”

  I’m starting to understand that now.

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