They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  Teddy said, “Well, what kind of show do you want me to do?”

  I said, “I want you to do a show that gets every woman in the house so horny that they all jump on me, because I’m the only guy out there. You’re a sex magnet, but you’re singing at them. You need to sing to them.”

  And as I said it, in the heat of that moment, I heard a concept. It was right there, fully formed. Teddy was very macho and manly, and women found him extremely sexy. Women made up a large part of his audience, and he got them really worked up. Any husbands or dates who happened to come along with them were pretty sure to be rewarded for it later that night. My idea played off that. Teddy Pendergrass was going to perform “for women only.”

  Once again, everybody thought I was crazy. How could you keep men out? It had to violate some sort of civil rights laws. And once again, I just put my head down and steamed forward. I knew instinctively that it would work, and it would get Teddy a ton of press. I hedged the legal issue by deciding that though the ad would say that tickets were only available for women, we wouldn’t actually refuse to sell a ticket to any man who wanted to buy one. So we weren’t barring men, we were just discouraging them. I also didn’t want Teddy to appear to be too arrogant about it. He would not say in public, “I’m only letting women into my show.” It took a while, but we came up with a beautiful ad that struck just the right tone. It featured a stuffed teddy bear with a note attached: Come spend the night with me. Love, Teddy. We were consciously evoking Elvis: “Baby, let me be your loving teddy bear.” Sexy, but also romantic. And just to drive it home, we would hand out chocolate teddy bear lollipops to the ladies to lick during the show.

  Teddy’s For Women Only tour hit five cities, from New York to L.A., and was massively successful. The press stepped right up and started calling him the Black Elvis. When he bought a big house outside Philadelphia they even compared it to Graceland. (He bought it from the Philadelphia-based TV host Mike Douglas, who would later show up unannounced and drive friends around the property, showing them where he used to live.) Over the next few years Teddy was the top-selling male vocalist in R&B. We had the greatest time. I loved being around him, loved going on the road with him. We went to boxing matches together, Ali fights, Sugar Ray fights. I got to know all the NBA greats through him—his best friend was Dr. J, Julius Erving.

  Working with Teddy gave me some of my deepest satisfactions as a manager. There was Alice, but Alice goes way beyond being an artist I manage. Alice is like a body part to me. Strictly as an artist’s manager, my relationship with Teddy was the most rewarding and involving. Partly that was because I could really get in his face and tell him exactly what I thought. That’s very hard to do without upsetting your relationship in some way. And with celebrities, who get used to being pampered, stroked, and lied to on a daily basis, it can be really damaging. Especially when what you say to them goes to the core of what they do. Teddy was not a prima donna that way. He and I had what we called “don’t be a schmuck” conversations. He’d see me coming after a show and groan, “Oh shit. Is it ‘don’t be a schmuck’ time?” I would proceed to tell him exactly what I thought, and why. Not attacking, but also not having to package it the way I had to do with other artists. He didn’t listen to me every time, but there is no other artist I could be that open and honest with.

  One of the wildest times with Teddy came when he was booked to play two shows one night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The shows sold out well in advance. The audience for the first show was predominantly women, and with them came every pimp in Harlem, taking their ladies out for a good time.

  When Teddy left the stage at the end of the first show, he refused to go on for the second one. He absolutely would not go on, and he wouldn’t tell me why. We went back and forth about it for a while, and then he simply walked out. Black Elvis had left the building. Which was packed with a sold-out crowd for the second show. Whom I was supposed to tell that the show was canceled. And that there was no money on hand to pay them refunds, because we had sold out both shows days in advance, so the money was already in the bank. They’d have to come back tomorrow after the bank opened.

  That was not a conversation I wanted to have with an auditorium filled with sexed-up women and pimps. I called Bert Padell, my business manager, at home. It was about nine thirty.

  “I need $87,500 in cash delivered to the Apollo in the next fifteen minutes,” I said.

  You can imagine what he said back. When I insisted, he told me to get myself down to the Lower East Side, to a certain restaurant that I won’t name, which featured cuisine of a certain nationality I won’t identify, and ask for a certain guy. He’d give me the money. I had my driver rush me down to this restaurant, I met the guy, and he handed me a brown paper bag stuffed with cash. We head back uptown, I’m starting to relax a little, thinking a real crisis has been averted—and the car breaks down ten blocks from the Apollo. So at 10:15 P.M., this white boy from Oceanside is running through the streets of Harlem, clutching a brown paper bag stuffed with $87,500. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. But I got there, put the money in the box office, and we were able to pay back all the ticket holders. The night ended peacefully. Just another night in the life of an artist’s manager.

  The next day Teddy told me why he wouldn’t go back on. While doing the first show, he’d seen a gun in the audience. That was not too surprising, considering the number of pimps in the crowd. But Teddy was scared it was the same person who had killed Taaz Lang, coming to wipe him out, too. I couldn’t really blame him for not going back out there.

  One other time, in 1982, Teddy canceled a sold-out show in England. Again he wouldn’t give me the reason, he just refused to go on. I pleaded with him: “Teddy, you sold out in a day. These are working people. They all have jobs. They all had to get babysitters. They’re sitting there waiting for you. Just get out and do the show.” He wouldn’t do it.

  The next month, Teddy was in a horrendous car accident in Philadelphia. He lost control of his Rolls and crashed it into a tree. His passenger, Tenika Watson, walked away with some bruises and a chipped tooth, but Teddy was trapped in the wreckage while it took rescue workers forty-five minutes to cut him out. It was not at all certain that he was going to live.

  When I found out about the crash, I flew to Philadelphia overnight and met up at the airport with Danny Markus, my partner and good friend, and we drove straight to the hospital. Teddy’s mother, Ida, his girlfriend, Karen, and his assistant, Sedonia, were there. The doctors informed us that Teddy might survive, but he had severed his spinal cord, and if he did live he would remain paralyzed below the chest for the rest of his life. He would never walk again, never have the use of his arms and hands. They also said that from their years of dealing with quadriplegic cases, they were convinced that the patient had to be told immediately.

  They led us into the room, which I remember as a sort of white void with Teddy in the middle of it, on his back on a kind of table-bed, with ugly clamps to keep his head still. His eyes were open.

  A doctor said, “Teddy, do you recognize these people? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  Teddy blinked once. We proceeded to tell him he wasn’t going to walk again. We told him that he was in the right place for rehabilitation, to try to stay strong, that we loved him and were with him one hundred percent—all the things you say in a situation like that. In the middle of it some nurses came and flipped him over, which they had to do every ten minutes, so for the last part of it he wasn’t facing us anymore. I couldn’t even imagine what was going through his mind. Teddy was the top R&B singer in the world, and might never be able even to speak again—if he were lucky enough to live. The day before he’d been the king of the world, the sexiest man alive, strong, virile, macho. Now he would never walk, would never feed himself again, would be lifted in and out of a wheelchair forever. I can’t believe how many times my journey keeps bringing me back to friends in wheelchairs.

  It was horrifying. I loved that
man, still do, and I can’t describe how sad it was to see him like that. I think in some ways it was the beginning of my not enjoying what I did for a living anymore.

  Still, it was time for a reality check. Teddy had no financial resources. He’d spent every dime he made. He had kids with different women. It was really not clear that he was going to live. I doubted it. And even if he did, he would certainly not be able to provide for his family. My job at that moment was not to feel sorry for him, but to get to work making this terrible situation as bearable as I could for him and them.

  Every type of media wanted to photograph him, video him, do an interview with him. I decided he absolutely should not be seen—and absolutely would not want to be seen—in that condition. We had to save every bullet we had in the gun for one big shot at resurrecting his career, if and when the time was right.

  Meanwhile, I thought about who I could get to jump in quick, set up a trust fund, and earn a lot of goodwill from it. We had a very good sponsor relationship with a beer company. They more or less agreed to set up some sort of a charitable foundation for quadriplegics, which would include some financial help for Teddy and his family financially. I went to sleep thinking that maybe I had it solved.

  When I woke up the next morning, all the newspapers had the story that Tenika Watson, the woman in the car with Teddy, was really a man.

  We never heard one word from the beer company ever again. I never really got the story on Tenika until very recently. Teddy and I never spoke a word about it. There was nothing to be gained from it. A lawsuit was filed for Teddy against Rolls-Royce, charging that the engine and hydraulics had failed, so the steering went out. It was settled out of court. The story I heard was that Teddy had met Tenika in a bar after a 76ers game. He had gotten Dr. J to take his date home, while he went off with Tenika. It was a very rainy night, and he was driving on a very curvy road. At some point while he was driving he put his hand between her legs, felt a penis, freaked out, and crashed the car.

  I believed that for two decades. In 2014, I told it to Oprah Winfrey. We’re friendly acquaintances. She has a beautiful upcountry farm on Maui. We see each other at social functions and once were in a group on a trip to Africa. Oprah had her staff find Tenika and did an interview with her. It was the first time Tenika had ever spoken publicly about that night. It turns out that she had the full sex-change operation five years before meeting Teddy, so the penis story was false. According to Tenika, Teddy simply lost control of the Rolls on the slick road.

  After the beer company vanished I had nothing. No sponsor, and not much hope of finding one. The prospects of Teddy’s ever being able to perform again and earn new money seemed very dim, if he lived at all. I wondered if he might have any previously unreleased tapes lying around. His mother let Danny and me into the house. In a couple of days of rooting around with the family we did in fact find enough tapes for a new album.

  So far, so good. But this is where the story turns really dark and twisted. I’m sure other players who were involved in this stage would tell different versions. I can only tell it as I experienced it.

  Kenneth Gamble was a member of the Nation of Islam, and in my dealings with him and Huff I became convinced that they really didn’t like white people, and particularly despised me. They paid Teddy very little for recording his albums. Apparently the Chitlin’ Circuit mentality applied as much to record labels as performance venues. They were old friends of Teddy, so he never let me go after them to get him better pay. Yet he paid my fee as though they were paying him well, so I don’t know if he ever made any money on his albums.

  All my dealings with Philadelphia International Records were very, very tough. Anytime I wanted to do anything for Teddy, it felt like they did everything in their power to obstruct me, to undermine my relationship with him, to go behind my back and turn him against me. One of several shots across my bow came at a point where Teddy’s material was getting really weak. His last couple of albums hadn’t sold as well as the previous couple. I was representing James Mtume, known simply as Mtume, the hottest songwriter in R&B. He had written a great many top-selling and Grammy-winning songs for artists like Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Stephanie Mills, and others. Mtume loved Teddy and was excited by the idea of working with him. But Gamble and Huff did not publish Mtume’s music, and the majority of the tracks on Teddy’s albums were songs they’d written and published.

  I got them to agree to a meeting in Philadelphia to discuss it. I got Mtume to agree to drive down from New Jersey. I called Teddy and said, “I need your support if I’m going to pull this off. I don’t need you there for the whole meeting, but I need you to show up when I call you, and to back me up when you get there. I don’t care that Kenny and Leon are your great friends. You need a hit. I need you to have a hit. I’m not in this to lose. I’m in this to win.”

  He agreed. Danny and I took a train down from New York and got to the meeting site, the office of their lawyer Phil Asbury, at noon. We sat there until one, and then two, then three. It was not like Mtume not to show up, but there were no cell phones in those days so we couldn’t check up on him. At 5 P.M. a guy stuck his head in the door and shook it.

  Asbury put his hands flat on his desk and said, “Well, I guess that takes care of that. He’s not coming.”

  Danny and I went home. I called Teddy and said, “I don’t know what happened. I guess he wasn’t interested.”

  Later Mtume told us he had gone to the meeting. They had put Danny and me in one office, Mtume in another, let us all sit there all afternoon, then told each side that the other hadn’t shown up. And to top it off, they told Teddy that none of us showed up.

  That’s the kind of relationship I had with Gamble and Huff.

  Given our history, I did not want to take these tapes we had found to PIR. I wanted to get Teddy as much money as possible. Walter Yetnikoff had succeeded Clive Davis (who had succeeded Goddard Lieberson) as the head of Columbia. I knew him; he was an old Jew from Brooklyn. Columbia was doing fantastically well as the label of Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones. I figured he’d be sympathetic.

  “I’d give you a million dollars for this, Shepseleh,” Walter said. He always called me Shepseleh, a friendly Yiddish version of my name. “But I can’t. Legally I can only pay PIR for Teddy’s music. You’ve got to get them to agree that I’ll pay them and they’ll pass the money to you.”

  I knew that if I was going to get Gamble and Huff to agree to let a million bucks flow through them, I had to put on a hell of a show. I got Teddy’s mother, his girlfriend, and his kids to go with me to the meeting. I explained to Gamble and Huff that this money was solely for a trust fund for Teddy and his family. I wouldn’t touch a penny of it. Teddy and his family really, really needed this.

  Gamble and Huff agreed. I handed over the tapes. Yetnikoff said he sent them a check for a million dollars. I don’t know if it was in line with Teddy’s deal, but the family did not get the full amount.

  So now I was really freaking and really pissed off. But here it comes again: Never get mad. I had to dissociate myself from my emotions, keep a clear head, and accomplish my goal. I went back to Columbia. I was told privately by one executive that if Teddy filed a lawsuit against PIR, it would stop payments to all of their other PIR artists until it was resolved—because their deal was built around Teddy. If I could get Teddy to serve notice, it would free them up to pay Teddy a million dollars, because they would save six or seven million in the interim by not having to distribute other acts (that they were losing money on). But no one could know that we were told to do it.

  So I went to see their outside lawyer, Paul Marshall. I had never met him, but he was a legend in the music industry. His firm represented several of the giant labels, as well as some giant acts like the Beatles. I went to his office on Fifty-Seventh Street. The whole time we spoke he sat on a couch smoking cigarettes and tipping the ashes behind it. He explained that there could not be any written
record whatsoever about my deal with Walter; I would just have to operate on trust.

  Fine. Now I had to go to Philadelphia and get Teddy to agree to initiate a lawsuit against his good friends. I explained that if he would sue PIR, I could get him a million dollars. I asked him if he was willing to go through with this. He still couldn’t speak at this point. It was still one blink for yes, two for no. He blinked once. I brought in a court recorder, we read him the paperwork, he blinked once again, and we filed notice of a lawsuit in his name.

  A week went by.

  Two weeks went by.

  Three weeks went by.

  No check for a million dollars appeared. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. I felt the planet dropping out from under me. I shot straight over to Paul Marshall’s office. As I started to tell him what his client was doing to Teddy Pendergrass, he actually said to me, “Teddy Pendergrass . . . Teddy Pendergrass . . . I know that name from somewhere. . . .”

  Game, set, match. They had me. I had nothing on paper, no recourse whatsoever.

  I left Marshall’s office in a state of shock, and went straight to the office of Bob Krasnow. Bob had just been named chairman of Elektra a couple of weeks earlier. Bob was a really good friend. Not a business friend, a friend friend. When I got there I broke down and cried.

  “Bob, if I had a million dollars I’d put it up myself,” I said. “If I had a property I could mortgage for a million bucks I’d do that. I cannot walk back into Teddy’s room and tell him I got him nothing, after he put so much faith in me that he sued his good friends. I’ll rob a bank first.”

  Bob heard me out, then said, “Listen, Shep. I’m going to help you out here, but you’ve got to help me. Is he going to live?”