by Shep Gordon
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Okay, then you have to cover my ass. I’m new here. If the guy dies after I’ve written a million-dollar check to him, I have to have something in my files that shows we expected him to live.”
“Got it.”
“Now, is there any legal way to get out of this album deal?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have a soundtrack clause.” (I always included one after Alice’s ordeal. Thank you, thank you.) “We can do one soundtrack album that’s not on PIR.”
“But if he’s not going to live, I’ll never get a soundtrack,” Bob said.
“I’d say that’s probably true,” I replied.
“Okay. Then what I need is a script for a movie, and I need a tape of a song. If you can get somebody who sounds like Teddy to sing it, that’s even better. Then I’ve got those things in my files to justify giving you the money if the guy dies.”
Okay. One song, one script. I can do this.
I had recently started managing another great R&B singer, Luther Vandross. Luther had started out on Sesame Street, and had sung backup for stars from Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler to Carly Simon, Quincy Jones, Roberta Flack, and Chaka Khan. He was one of the vocalists on David Bowie’s Young Americans, and arranged the famous backing vocals on the title song. His first solo album, Never Too Much, went double platinum in 1981 and earned him two Grammy nominations, and that was just the start of an amazing solo career. We worked together for almost fourteen years, piling success on top of success.
Our relationship was very different from the one I had with Teddy, or Alice. I never got to know Luther as well as them. We didn’t like or dislike each other. Our relationship was almost entirely on a professional level. People in my office did the hands-on work with him. We lived fifteen minutes from each other in L.A. yet in the whole time I managed him he never once came over to my house. I always thought that one of my best services to my clients was in helping them shape their stage acts, but Luther preferred to do it himself. He never let me see a show until he was satisfied it was working.
I did get to know him well enough, however, to know that he could be a real diva, difficult to handle and easy to offend. I got my first lesson in this early on. He was scheduled to perform at a big music awards show. Three hours before the show, I got a call from the guy who handled him for me that he was refusing to go because his pants didn’t fit right. I called Luther and tried to talk him into it, but he was adamant. I knew one of Luther’s dreams was to have Bob Mackie design clothes for him. Mackie did all the other divas—Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, Ann-Margret—and Raquel, which was how I knew him.
I said, “What if I could get Bob Mackie to drive with us in our car and fix your pants on the way to the show?”
“You can’t do that,” Luther said.
“But if I can, will you go?”
Luther agreed. I hung up and called Bob. Unfortunately, he was out of town. But he put me in touch with his partner, Ray Aghayan, who was famous himself, and Ray agreed. We picked him up, he fixed Luther’s pants in the limo, Luther did the show, and Ray designed most of his clothes from then on.
After my meeting with Bob Krasnow, I asked Luther if he could quickly record a song sounding like Teddy. He came back with a tape, of terrible audio quality, of a song called “Choose Me.”
I took the song to Alan Rudolph; by then we’d worked together on the Leary-Liddy movie, Roadie, and Alice’s music videos. I told him the story. “I need a script, quick. I’m never making the movie. I’ll get you a few dollars for it if I actually get the million bucks. But I gotta have it and I gotta have it fast.” He wrote the movie Choose Me.
I took the script and the tape to Bob Krasnow, and he gave me a million dollars.
As it turned out, Teddy lived, so Bob never needed the insurance of the script and the tape. But he earned an enormous coupon with me by taking that risk.
Teddy started to get better. His voice came back. I can’t even imagine how hard that was for him, the courage and strength he showed. We decided to record a new album, Love Language, which he was now free to do with Elektra. We proceeded very carefully and took our time on it. Now it was 1985, and I had put a lot of thought in how best to bring Teddy back to his public. I had seen that Teddy’s target audience—and I don’t mean this in any demeaning way—was a middle-aged, probably overweight, black woman who worked as a clerk or a secretary in an office. She came from a gospel background. And her favorite fantasy was a romance with Teddy Pendergrass. She felt that Teddy was part of her life. Then he’d had this tragic accident, and she had not seen or heard one thing from him, not one word or photograph, in nearly three years. It seemed to me that my job was to make sure that the first image she saw of him now, the first song she heard him sing, brought her back into that love relationship with him for the rest of her life. She’d love him more than she ever had, would want to hug him and help him and do for him.
I got HBO to agree to shoot a special, based on the album’s release. We decided to do it at his high school gymnasium. I decided we didn’t want to hide the wheelchair or do anything gimmicky. We would deal with what we had. We left the gym stark. It was just Teddy and his wheelchair. The camera would start with a long shot, then slowly zoom in until all you could see was Teddy’s mouth, so that he was speaking directly to that secretary who had been waiting three years to hear from her Teddy. He’d sing the song I chose for the single, “In My Time,” a beautiful ballad in which he’d tell her, “I’ve lived and loved so much / Through each high and low . . . / After all that I’ve been through / I’m in love with you.”
I had it all set. The single, the album, the HBO special. Every bullet in my gun loaded for this one big shot.
And then I got a call, three days before the special and the single release, that Elektra was changing the single. They had decided to go instead with a duet Teddy sang with Whitney Houston. She was brand-new. Nobody knew who Whitney Houston was at the time. It wasn’t like she was a big deal who would add anything to Teddy’s comeback. The song was “Hold Me,” and Teddy’s first line was “I’ll hold you and touch you and make you my woman.”
Teddy couldn’t hold or touch anybody or anything. He was quadriplegic. I could not get through to anyone what a disaster this was going to be. Teddy’s first words to the fan who’d been waiting all that time were going to be a lie?
They had switched it at the last minute because they had another single coming out by a different artist that supposedly sounded too much like “In My Time.” It put me in a terrible position with Bob Krasnow, to whom I owed so much. Bob had just hired Bruce Lundvall away from Columbia Records to run Elektra. It was a very high-profile, prestigious hire. Teddy’s single and this other one were the first ones Elektra was putting out under Lundvall, and it was Lundvall’s decision to change Teddy’s. It would be very, very difficult for Bob to countermand Bruce at this early stage in their relationship. He would have been cutting him off at the knees on his first project.
Understanding that, I said to Bob, “Let me just buy Teddy’s record back from you.”
“I can’t do that to Bruce,” Bob said.
What could I do? It was one of the toughest bridges I ever had to cross, and I didn’t feel like I managed to create the right history this time. “Hold Me” went out as Teddy’s first post-accident single, and flopped. It was the lowest moment in my managing career. All that work, from both me and Teddy—all that careful planning to get to that moment—scuttled by someone else’s decision.
Then, as these things happen, another chance came for Teddy to make his triumphant return to the stage. Bob Geldof, Midge Ure, Dick Clark, and Bill Graham announced that they were staging the Live Aid concerts, to raise funds for famine relief, in two simultaneous locations, Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, on July 13, 1985. They would be the largest outdoor concerts ever, with the largest television audience in history. I called Teddy’s friends A
shford & Simpson and asked if they’d sing one song with him. They agreed.
Teddy was very scared to get out onstage in front of so many people and sing live for the first time since the accident. We got to the stadium and wheeled him to the ramp up to the stage, and he said, “I can’t do it, Shep. I’m just too scared.”
“Listen, man,” I said, “I love you, but I’m wheeling you up there. There’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t have to sing, but you’re going up there.”
I pushed him up to the edge of the stage. When Ashford announced Teddy’s name, the one hundred thousand people in the stadium roared. Teddy wheeled out there with a big, relieved smile on his lips, and tears in his eyes. He sang “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand”—admittedly, a song I might not have chosen, with those lyrics—and nailed it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the stadium by the end of it.
Teddy continued to record and perform. I stayed very close with him for maybe five or six years, then Danny Markus and Allen Strahl took over as his managers and remained so right until the end. Teddy’s strength and dedication were awe-inspiring. He struggled with his health for the next twenty years. He had cancer a few times. He had bedsores every day. Yet he never complained. He carried on with such elegance and dignity. Ida, who is a deep, deep churchgoer, was a pillar of strength for him. He continued to perform almost right up until he died, in 2010.
15
THE STRANGE TWISTS AND TURNS DON’T END THERE. About eighteen months after Alan Rudolph dashed out that script for me, he called me and said, “Shep, I need a favor.”
I couldn’t say no. He had a coupon. “What’s the favor?”
“I want to make the movie.”
“Alan, please don’t do this to me. You know I can’t say no.”
“I want to make the movie, Shep.”
So I had to make the movie, which meant I had to find a million dollars. Carolyn had a good friend, the godfather of her daughter, who had told her he’d like to come into the movie business with us. He was Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. Chris introduced the world to Bob Marley’s music. Steve Winwood, U2, and Roxy Music were also on Island. But Chris had a horrible reputation in the music business. Ahmet Ertegun called him the Baby-Faced Killer. Everybody, including Bob Krasnow, told me, “Do not go into business with him. You’ll love him. You’ll be best friends. If you fail, he’ll stay your best friend. But if you succeed, he’ll fuck you over even if he has to fuck himself to do it.”
But we had to make Alan’s movie. I had Carolyn set up the meeting. I told Chris, “I’m ready to make a deal with the devil, and everybody tells me you’re the devil. I need a million dollars to make this movie. You can’t have the soundtrack for Island; it’s going to Elektra. But I will build a movie company that you will be proud of and will make money. You will never have to put another penny in.” (Pretty cocky, Little Shep.)
That’s how Alive Films became Island Alive Pictures. Alan got to make Choose Me, starring Keith Carradine and Geneviève Bujold, with Luther’s fake-Teddy “Choose Me” as the theme song. Island Alive took off like a rocket ship. Carolyn and I put together a great team, with her as chairman. She was the only woman in the world at the time who could green-light a picture.
I was very grateful to Chris Blackwell. He never put in another penny, never took a meeting, never involved himself in any way after his initial investment. I felt I owed him and asked, “What can I do for you? You got any dreams, anything you need?”
“You know,” he said, “I have this one artist that I just can’t break. I know you’re really good at this. If you could help me that would be great. His name is Robert Palmer.”
Robert was an English singer who had been on Chris’s label since the mid-1970s, when his albums Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley and Pressure Drop came out. Over the years he’d moved around from one genre to another, from reggae to Boz Scaggs–style R&B to a New Orleans sound, but he had never been as successful as Chris thought he should. Now in 1985 he had another new sound, more pop and commercial.
I was flirting at the time with managing an all-female swing band in New York City, the Kit McClure Band. They had been getting great buzz in the city for a few years, had sold out clubs like the Ritz, then Cab Calloway heard them and toured with them. Being me, I thought I saw a win-win here. Why not pair Robert Palmer and this all-girl big band? One plus one might equal twenty. I took Chris to hear Kit, and he liked her and signed her to Island. We booked Robert and Kit at Radio City Music Hall and sold it out.
MTV was four or five years old at that point, and nobody put out records without videos anymore. It seemed a natural to shoot a video of Robert fronting an all-female band, but Chris and his director, the English fashion photographer Terence Donovan, didn’t think Kit and her band were pretty enough for MTV. They hired five models, put them in short, tight dresses and high heels, gave them instruments to “play” and taught them a few dance moves, and shot the video for “Addicted to Love.” If you remember the 1980s, you probably remember a long period when MTV seemed to run that video at least once an hour, every hour, ’round the clock. The truth is that Robert hated the idea, tried to talk Chris and Terence out of it, and if you look closely at the video, you can see he’s really not comfortable doing it. It didn’t matter. That video helped make him a big star for a couple of years. And it all started because I wanted to return a favor to Chris Blackwell.
So I thought Chris and I were really good friends. I always had great times visiting with him at his house in Jamaica. He’s always had great cooks, which makes sense, given that his family made their fortune in the spice trade. He’d stay with me when he came to L.A.
Then Carolyn and I heard from a fellow independent filmmaker we knew. He’d taken a job at one of the big financial houses, and his mission was to make investments in the film business. He wanted to buy into Island Alive. As I recall, he offered to buy 50 percent of the company for twenty-five or thirty million dollars, plus put up another twenty-five or thirty for productions. I thought this was fantastic. Running a movie company had never been my dream; it was Carolyn’s. This deal would mean I could step back and go out on a high note. She could keep making movies, which was her passion. And Chris Blackwell would make a ton of money on his original million-dollar investment. Life is beautiful.
I had him, Carolyn, and our prospective investor out to my place in L.A. The investor laid it all out for Chris, after which Chris said to me, “Can I get a minute?” We stepped away from the others.
“Shep, you’re going to hate me for this,” he continued. “But I’m a businessman. I take advantage of situations. I know Carolyn has a mortgage payment coming up and needs about $400,000. I also know that my vote plus her vote outvote you. So you have two choices. You can take $250,000 and give me all your stock. Or Carolyn and I will vote you out and you get nothing.”
I said, “Are you serious?”
“I wish I wasn’t,” he said, “but I absolutely am. I can’t help it. This is just who I am.”
I can’t say it was a total surprise. If you fail, he’ll stay your best friend. But if you succeed, he’ll fuck you over even if he has to fuck himself to do it. But I was still really hurt and pissed. I asked him to give me a few minutes alone with Carolyn. He went outside for some air.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her.
“You know what?” she said. “I’d rather lose the house.”
“Okay.” I called Chris back inside.
“Two things,” I said. “Number one, get packed. Number two, go fuck yourself. Be outta here in five minutes. You can wait for the cab out front.”
And that was the death of Island Alive. We went to court, had an arbitrator, split up the company, and disbanded it.
One more twist. In the midst of all this, I was in L.A., driving my white Rolls-Royce one day. A beautiful girl I knew had left me a CD of a group she had heard and loved in St.-Tropez. I was sitting at the red light right in front of the Whis
ky a Go Go and put the CD in. A gorgeous girl, like a 10.5, pulled up next to me. She started waving at me and called over, “The Gipsy Kings! How’d you get that? I heard them in St.-Tropez. Can I give you my address and get a copy?” Two weeks later another beautiful girl in another car did the same thing.
I knew nothing about these Gipsy Kings, but if all their fans were as pretty as these two girls I was definitely interested. I did a little research and found that they were a group of French gypsies—they sang in Spanish, but spoke French—who busked on the streets and on the beach at St.-Tropez and drew gigantic crowds. They had a French label but nothing in the States.
I was always looking for a way to honor Bob Krasnow’s coupon, to pay him back for what he’d done for Teddy. I called him and said, “Listen, I’ve got a tingle in my gut about this group. I owe you one. Let’s go check this out.” By this point my reputation was such that when I said I had an intuition, guys like Bob listened. We flew to St.-Tropez, liked what we heard and saw, and Bob signed them to Elektra, while I signed on as their manager.
Now I had to figure out how to put a gypsy flamenco group over in America. I’d seen the effect they had on pretty women, so that was the angle I pursued. I knew Paul Mitchell and John Paul Dejoria, whose hair care products were in every salon in America. I came up with a promotion where we’d bring the Gipsy Kings over for a six- or eight-city tour to promote their first Elektra album. In every city we’d offer all the hair salons with Paul Mitchell products in them free CDs, coffee mugs, and T-shirts—and we’d give them 50 percent of the tickets to the concert in their city, for them to give away to their most beautiful clients. My thinking was if half the house was beautiful women we’d have no trouble selling out the other half to guys.
It worked. Elektra released Gipsy Kings, their first LP in the United States—the one with “Bamboleo” on it—and it was a huge hit, eventually going platinum. Women loved them. Every guy in the country thought that if he played the Gipsy Kings for his girl he was going to get laid, and he was probably right. Paul Mitchell was cool and sexy by association with them. And their concerts were full of beautiful women, so I was having a good time. Everybody wins.