They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  Mazet handed him the keys, like he was a valet, and the theater manager ushered us into the concert. While we enjoyed the show, the cop backed the Mercedes out of the lobby and parked it out front for us.

  In the mid-1980s Alive Films evolved into Island Alive Pictures. That’s a complicated story I’ll explain later. Island Alive was producing some great films. In 1985 two of our movies earned Oscars: a Best Actor for William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (the third movie we screened at Cannes) and a Best Actress for Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful. So we were pretty hot at Cannes. If you were a player there, it was a tradition to throw a big party. I decided to throw my first big party at the Moulin.

  I spoke to Vergé. I knew it would be a lot of work for him. I always had to be careful what I asked him for, because very rarely would he give me a no.

  “I want to throw a private party for fifty or sixty people in the Moulin during the film festival. Would you do that for me?”

  “It will be difficult,” he said. “But for you, I would of course do anything.”

  I had the best possible venue. Now I needed a celebrity cohost to draw the other celebrities—guilt by association again. I thought of Michael Douglas. We had met in a funny way. Phyllis Somer, a former model I was dating, invited me to go to Santa Barbara with her for a party at Michael and Diandra Douglas’s house. The Oceanside kid in me thought, Michael Douglas, wow. Then Phyllis called and said, “There’re no rooms in Santa Barbara.”

  I decided that wasn’t going to deter us. I went out and rented a big black rock-and-roll tour bus, just for the two of us. We drove up to Santa Barbara and pulled into Michael’s driveway.

  When Phyllis introduced us, Michael asked, “Where are you staying?”

  “In your driveway,” I said.

  “What?”

  I walked him outside and showed him the bus.

  “Jesus!” He laughed. We went into the bus, and in a little while half the party was in there.

  Michael and I drank some cognac. He has so much life in him; he’s so available and easygoing and funny. We clicked right away.

  Michael Douglas had just come through a frustrating period in his career and was on an upswing.

  “You know, Mikey,” I said, “these chefs are all great artists. But nobody gives a shit about them. They’re treated like garbage. Look at Vergé. He’s the best chef on the planet, even his peers say so, but he can barely earn a living. We need to help our fellow artists make more money. They should all be stars like you guys are. I’m going to throw him a dinner party at his place. All the biggest stars in Cannes are ready to kill to get into these parties. It’ll be fantastic. Why don’t you cohost with me?”

  It was a gigantic success. Everyone came. I mean everyone—the world’s greatest stars all had their assistants call to get invitations. Everybody at the festival buzzed about it the next day.

  That’s how we started hosting special annual dinners at the Moulin for fifty, sixty invited guests. It was the most sought-after invitation at the festival. Every producer, director, and movie star in Cannes wanted an invitation. Only the top players got one. Every table was a power table. The next morning at breakfast, every conversation was about who was at the Moulin last night, who sat with whom. Lots of movies got funded at those dinners. It was great for Island Alive’s prestige, good for Michael’s profile, and fabulous for Vergé. If he’d spent a million dollars he couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity. Once they’d eaten at the Moulin, every big name in Hollywood was a Vergé fan. To them, he was the superstar, and the Moulin was hallowed ground. A true win-win.

  My company always paid the bill. And it was always a big one, fifty, sixty thousand dollars, depending on the wines. After a few years, Michael said to me, “This year I’m paying.”

  “Mikey, believe me, you don’t want to do that.”

  “No, man, I’ve had a great year,” he said. “I’m back in action. You’ve done it every year, Shep. I’m taking care of the bill this year.”

  “Absolutely not. You’re not paying this bill.”

  “If I’m not paying the bill, I’m never coming again.”

  When the bill came at the end of the dinner I grabbed it. It was, I think, $56,000. He tried to snatch it from me.

  “Mikey, you can’t do this.”

  “Shep,” he insisted, “I’m paying the bill!”

  So I let him take it from me. And watched a slight look of shock cross his face when he read it.

  But then there was this beautiful moment when he looked up at me with a huge grin and said, “You will never know how happy I am that I can pay this.”

  You get to see somebody’s true character through their choices. And Michael’s choices are always to do the right thing, every second of every minute of every day. Just a remarkable man. I’ve never had a better friend, or known a human I respect more.

  After we had hosted a few of these dinners at the Moulin, I said to Michael, “Why don’t we bring Vergé to L.A. and throw a dinner there? We’ll invite a Hollywood A-list, and really try to get across the idea that great chefs like Vergé are great artists who aren’t getting the respect or the money they deserve.” I thought we should do it in Los Angeles, rather than in, say, New York, because for everyone in Hollywood the high point of Cannes was already dinner at the Moulin. I knew if we put out an invitation in L.A., we would get a turnout that would blow everybody’s mind. Everyone would want to know who this Vergé was and why all these amazing people gathered in one room for him. Then I took the idea one step further. Why not put all these celebrity guests in white cooks’ jackets, so that they’re tacitly showing their respect to the culinary arts? Which led me to think, And why don’t we do for Vergé what he does for us? Why don’t we serve and be the staff for the party?

  We threw the first one at my house. Vergé cooked, Michael was the head waiter, and I was the head sommelier. We served sixty guests—a Hollywood who’s who, people like Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, James Coburn, Anthony Quinn, Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Wes Craven, the heads of all the studios. Michael and I and other staff bringing plates around to all the tables, pouring their wine. Being of service.

  I paid for it all. I was making rock-and-roll money, movie money—money was of no importance. I felt that Vergé had saved my life without saving my life. He probably wasn’t conscious of it, but meeting him and being in his presence had been the turning point of my life. So I felt a great debt to him and was honored to help him get the respect that he deserved. I always paid for everything around Vergé anyway. In all the years I was with him I never let him put his hand in his pocket, ever. He never paid for a hotel room, a meal, anything. He shared with me what he had, and I shared with him what I had. It was a great exchange.

  My favorite moment of the evening came after dinner broke up at around eleven. Most of the guests went home, but Michael, Jack Nicholson, Danny, and a few others hung around. I went to sleep. Around one thirty I woke up and went into the living room, and the only person left was Jack. He was leaning up against the wall by the door, obviously with a good buzz on.

  I said, “Hey, Jack, how you doing?”

  He said, “Oh man, come here.”

  I went over to him.

  “Shep, tell me something,” he said. “Which one of us has to go home?”

  We did a few of these dinners, and they were all great events. Vergé was very pleased. He was a proud man, he always enjoyed having all of Hollywood come to him at Cannes, and to have them all gather to honor him in Hollywood itself brought him great joy and satisfaction.

  I still love to throw dinner parties at my house in Maui. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I apply everything Vergé taught me about the art of doing it correctly. The goal is to make every single guest feel as good as you can. You focus completely on them. It’s never about what you want. It’s all for them. For example, if your guests are young people, give them bright lighting, because they want to see and be seen. For olde
r people, use soft lighting. The round table is very important. It creates a sense of equality. Nobody is at the head of the table; nobody is more important than anyone else at the table. If you have enough servers, serve everyone at the same time, the way I first saw Vergé’s staff do at the Moulin.

  At my parties, there are often celebrities. If you’re a celebrity trying to relax and enjoy your meal, you don’t want other people gawking at you and bugging you for an autograph. At my house, you will never be asked for your autograph. I try to invite people who maybe have never met each other but would like to. Vergé taught me that if you have a guest whom everyone else at the affair wants to meet, leave an empty chair at each table. Then that someone can go around from table to table. And there’s no doing business at my house. If I hear somebody starting to talk shop or hustle another guest, I get right over there and end it. It’s not about business. Business is what you do elsewhere at other times. This is all about living the moment, enjoying the moment, being thankful for the miracles of good food and good friends.

  14

  AS INVOLVED AS I WAS IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS AND CANNES, I continued to be as busy as ever managing musical artists. In fact, our roster just kept growing. Blondie, the Pointer Sisters, Kenny Loggins, Stephanie Mills. My relationship with one singer in particular gave me some of my highest highs and lowest lows as a manager. My work with him also had a big, weird impact on the movie side of our company. It’s a complicated tale with some fantastic twists and turns.

  It starts back in 1975, when the soul group Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes put out what became my all-time favorite song, “Wake Up Everybody.” It’s such a beautiful, hopeful song. I still listen to it all the time and it always lifts me up.

  The Blue Notes were on Philadelphia International Records (PIR), the soul machine founded and run by the producers and songwriters Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who were also responsible for the success of the O’Jays and other big R&B, soul, and disco artists. Although Harold Melvin was the group’s founder, the star was the drummer and singer, Teddy Pendergrass. Although I liked the song a lot, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was Teddy singing it. I think I just assumed it was Melvin.

  Teddy left the group for a solo career that year. His manager, Taaz Lang, also became his lover. One night in 1977, as she was getting out of her car, she was gunned down execution-style. Her murder has never been solved.

  I got a call from Goddard Lieberson, the head of Columbia Records, as well as the executor of Groucho’s estate. Columbia distributed PIR. He asked me if I’d be interested in managing Teddy. You did not say no to Goddard Lieberson. I agreed to go see Teddy perform in Philadelphia and meet him afterward. It was in a small theater, maybe fifteen hundred seats. A lot of them seemed to be filled by women, who seemed to love the show. I did not. I thought it was really hokey. Teddy had an album that was climbing the charts, and he seemed really cocky to me, really not authentic. He was wearing these long white capes, surrounded by dancers and backup singers, a really corny production. But when he sang “Wake Up Everybody” I realized for the first time that it was his voice on the record I loved so much.

  I went backstage afterward, and there was a traffic jam outside his dressing room of Jewish managers, most of whom I knew, lined up to get an audience with him. It was like a cattle call for guys auditioning to handle him. I didn’t want any part of it and went home. About a week later I got a call from somebody at Columbia asking what I thought. I said I hated the show, loved the artist, didn’t meet him. They asked me to please try again. He was talking to some managers they didn’t think were right for him.

  So I went down from New York. Outside Teddy’s building was a white Rolls with TEDDY license plates. I took the elevator up to the penthouse, and a gorgeous girl wearing what was almost lingerie answered his door. Then I met Teddy, who was the most beautiful thing in the world. A dazzlingly handsome, very virile, very macho man. It was obvious why his audience was predominantly women. Still, all I wanted to do was get this meeting over with, go home, and get back to my life. So I said the most outrageous thing I could think of to say to a guy like Teddy, figuring that would be the end of it.

  “Listen,” I said. “There are not a lot of things I’m sure of in this life. One thing I know for sure is that you are not qualified to judge which one of us Jewish managers is the better bullshitter. That’s what we do for a living. We talk, you sing. I was backstage a few weeks ago and saw that you had the best of the best lined up to pitch you. There’s no way for you to know who’s better for you and who’s worse, who’s going to deliver and who’s not. But another thing I know for sure: I can get higher than you, I got better women than yours, I can get drunker than you, and when you fall down I can take the cash out of your pocket and make sure it’s safe.”

  I figured Teddy was going to throw me out of the building. Instead, he said okay, let’s make a date and find out. Now I had to make good. But I had that high tolerance for drink and drugs, so I knew I had a fighting chance. One thing I’ve always done is to try to make every moment special for whomever I’m with, so I had a beautiful wooden briefcase made and filled it with every drug known to man. A record company, maybe Warner Bros., gave us a two-bedroom suite in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. Teddy and I went head-to-head there, drinking and drugging and fooling around. When he collapsed after two days, I was still standing. I called a friend at Columbia, who came over and took a picture of me standing over Teddy with my foot on his chest. We sent it to Goddard Lieberson. In his memoir, Truly Blessed, Teddy wrote: “Who’d imagine I’d be out-partied by a white boy from Oceanside, Long Island? But I was. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. We shook hands and that’s been our contract ever since. No paper. His word was enough.”

  It was one of the luckiest days of my life, the start of a new and incredible journey. Teddy had some dates booked, so I went on the road with him to get a feel for it. The first one was in Hampton Roads, Virginia. I knew the building because Alice had played there. It was a big barn of a space, like a hockey rink, that seated six thousand. You had to put up your own stage and bring in lights and sound. When we got there Teddy’s equipment was set up onstage, but there were no lights, no PA, and no promoter. Around five in the afternoon a van rolled up and the guys unloaded a Shure PA, really small, like you’d use for a shopping mall event or a Holiday Inn lounge, and a few small lights on poles. Really bush league. But I was new so I didn’t say anything. A decent-size audience showed up, maybe three thousand people, and they seemed to have a good time anyway.

  At the end of the show I found the promoter and said we’d like to get paid.

  “Oh, we’re not paying,” he said, nonchalantly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We didn’t do as much business as we hoped so we’re not paying.”

  I said, “You’ve got to pay him. If you don’t, I can’t stop these guys from coming in here and killing you. They’ve got guns. If a stray bullet hits me I don’t mind. I don’t have any family. But you’re out of your mind. You’re going to lose your life for two thousand dollars or whatever it is?”

  He had a ring on one finger. He took it off and gave it to me as payment.

  I took it to Teddy and asked, “Is this how you normally get paid? I’ve got to change this. I can’t take twenty percent of a ring, and I’m not doing this for fun.”

  That’s when I started to hear how things worked on the Chitlin’ Circuit, not just from Teddy but from Earth, Wind & Fire and other black entertainers. The Chitlin’ Circuit was the traditional name for the black touring circuit. It had been around since vaudeville, and it had always exploited and ripped off acts. What I saw that night was just the way business was done. The entertainers put up with it to promote their records, and because things could turn ugly if they didn’t. There was more than a little reason to believe that Taaz had been murdered because she crossed somebody on the Chitlin’ Circuit.

  I sat Teddy down and
said, “I can’t do it this way. I can either resign or I can break these motherfuckers, but I can’t do that without you.”

  Teddy said, “Let’s go after them. I want to change it, too.”

  I booked a small tour. The first date was the Roxy in L.A., for a number of reasons. One, I wanted to do a press launch. Two, I wanted Teddy to play in a white-owned building. I wanted to see what reaction we’d get in a venue where I had some control; L.A. was my town. Teddy worked meanwhile on changing his show from the cheesy affair I’d seen. He didn’t tell me how he was changing it, and our relationship was still too new for me to meddle.

  As the date approached, Teddy and I both started getting death threats. Some came by telephone, and one or two on paper. Those were classics, like something from a movie, with the letters cut out of magazines and glued to sheets of paper. We contacted the police and the FBI. They never found out who sent them, but they took it seriously enough that Teddy and I had to decide if we were going to go through with this. We decided yes.

  So he played the Roxy. The audience was almost all white. And the show was awful. He had gone completely in the opposite direction from his former show. This one had no razzle or dazzle at all. He just sat on a stool through the whole thing and sang. It was like he went from James Brown to Vic Damone. I thought it was horrible. When it was over I headed backstage with a full head of steam. I discovered that the women in the audience must have liked the show even with no show business in it, because a constant stream of them were going in and out of his dressing room. It went on for hours. I was still the new guy, and his bodyguards would not let me in. The parade of women went on until 2 A.M. When I could finally get into the dressing room I charged in there with smoke trailing from my ears.

  “You motherfucker. Who the fuck do you think you are? I ain’t getting paid. I’m getting death threats. I risk my life to watch you sit on a fucking stool the whole show. Then I stand outside your dressing room until two in the fucking morning? Are you out of your mind?”