They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  Managing them was interesting. They really were gypsies. My defining moment with them came when I read in the paper that the new sneaker company LA Gear, which had just done a huge endorsement deal with Michael Jackson, was now looking for ways to attack the Latin market. The Gipsy Kings didn’t speak Spanish but they sang it, so I went to LA Gear’s ad agency. They got the idea immediately and made us a very big offer to participate in a multimillion-dollar campaign. The Gipsy Kings flew in and did a shoot at Venice Beach with the LA Gear Girls, who were all in T-shirts and white short shorts and LA Gear sneakers.

  The Gipsy Kings returned to France. I sent them the poster and asked for them to approve it. A week went by. Two weeks. Then they called me and said, “You better come over here.” So I flew over and drove a long way from the airport to this tiny village in the south of France, then followed their directions a little farther to where the Gipsy Kings lived. They had a huge-selling record and were selling out concerts everywhere. But they were still gypsies, and they lived in the modern equivalent of a gypsy caravan, three Airstream trailers under a bridge. The trailers were attached to Mercedes-Benzes, but still. I met the wives, classic gypsy women. It was all very polite and formal.

  Then the guys walked me into town to a pub, where they told me they couldn’t do the endorsement.

  I said, “What do you mean? You don’t think the poster is beautiful?”

  “Yes,” they said, “but if our wives see us with these women, they’ll kill us.”

  “But it’s just an advertisement,” I protested.

  “Yes, but all our wives will see is us surrounded by these pretty girls, and they’ll make our lives miserable.”

  So it never happened and we had to give back the advance we’d been paid. I thought that was a shame, but I respected their decision. We went on working together for years and did very well. To this day, guys looking for a little loving put their music on.

  I also continued to work with Luther, and he continued to be a diva. In October 1988, we were set to open a national tour called “The Heat,” with Anita Baker opening for Luther. We were kicking it off with five nights at Madison Square Garden. Anita’s agent was a fabulous guy named Oscar Cohen, a throwback to the old days. The agency he ran was supposedly owned in the 1920s either by Capone or a Chicago mob group. Oscar was a great guy, one of my favorites. On paper Anita and Luther were a powerhouse, dream-team duo. Anita was a great singer-songwriter who had just won a couple of Grammys and was very hot right then. So it was a very highly anticipated tour. But Anita could also be a hell of a diva.

  We sold out all five nights at the Garden. Oscar and I were walking down a corridor in the dressing room area on opening night. Anita came into the corridor holding a tray of cold cuts and cheeses, which I had sent her. I had thought it was a nice little gesture, but she wasn’t looking too happy about it.

  Without even looking at me, she said, “Oscar, do you know who this Shep Gordon guy is?”

  “This is Shep. I wanted to introduce you to him.”

  She glared at me and hissed, “I don’t accept anything wrapped in plastic.” Then she threw the entire platter of meats and cheeses on me, hitting me from head to toe.

  Luther just happened to be coming down the hall when she did this. And Luther and Anita already had history. The way I heard it, on a Budweiser show together the year before, she sang his song “Stop to Love.” She’d sung it on her solo shows, and left it in for this show with Luther. He got pissed that she did that—he was going to sing it, it was his song, and he felt she should have asked first. They still hadn’t resolved it.

  Now, Luther loved a good fight. When he saw Anita dump the platter on me, he pulled me aside and said, “I don’t want this bitch on the show.”

  Before I could respond, he continued. “I am going home right now. We’re not doing this show tonight. You tell her if I see her again, she’s off the show. It’s done.”

  Holy shit. We actually had to cancel the show. A sold-out Madison Square Garden show.

  I knew I had to keep these two apart if there were going to be any shows at all. The next day I had the Garden build a plywood wall in that corridor, separating their dressing rooms, so when Anita came out of her dressing room Luther wouldn’t have to see her. That night, she left her dressing room, went around another way, stood at Luther’s dressing room door, and started taunting him like a little kid. “Hey, Luther, I’m out here!”

  Luther went ballistic and threatened to kill the tour if he ever saw or heard her again. In the end, the only solution I could come up with, I’m not kidding, was to pay for every building we played to erect a brick wall separating the two of them. They went onstage separately, did their shows, and never saw or heard each other. It makes for a funny story now, but it was a nightmare then. It cost us twenty thousand dollars a night to keep those two dueling divas apart.

  Yes, Luther was a handful. But we did extraordinarily successful work together. It was deeply sad when he had a stroke in 2003, right after finishing the vocals on yet another great album. He struggled and died of a heart attack in 2005. He had just turned fifty-four. I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to work with such a great artist.

  16

  IN 1990, I GOT A CALL FROM CAROLCO PICTURES, another independent American production company. I had a lot of business with them. They were taking a new movie to Cannes that year, a sci-fi picture called Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and a pretty actress, Sharon Stone.

  “We have a jet going. Would you like to come with us?”

  “You bet.”

  I took a limo to the airport. It was the first time I’d ever been driven onto the tarmac, right up to a private plane. When I boarded Schwarzenegger was already there, along with other celebrities I knew. The plane itself was not impressive. The cabin was small and narrow, with crappy seats three across that barely leaned back a couple of inches. It wasn’t nearly as nice as my rock-and-roll bus. I asked a stewardess if it was a nonstop flight.

  “Oh no. We have to stop twice for fuel.”

  Oh man. This was suddenly sounding like a long and uncomfortable trip. Then, about halfway down the aisle, I saw there were two cushioned benches, on one each side, dividing all those horrible, narrow seats. I decided one of them was for me. I spread blankets and sweaters and stretched out like I was asleep. Other people were boarding. I opened one eye and saw Michael Douglas. He looked around and got the same oh-shit look I must have had when I got on board. He took one of those awful seats up near the front.

  I went up and greeted him. I asked him, “Mikey, do you have a manager?”

  “No,” he said. “I just have an agent.”

  I said, “Well, I’m going to show you right now what managers do. Grab your stuff and come with me.”

  We walked back to the benches and I told him to stretch out on the one across from mine. He grinned. “Very nice managing, Shep.” We both slept the whole way over and arrived very well rested, while Arnold and the others twisted and turned all night.

  I ended up hanging out a lot with Michael at the festival. One night Carolco threw a party for Total Recall at the Eden-Roc, one of the Hotel du Cap’s restaurants, and one of the most romantic places I’ve ever eaten. It’s in its own shimmering white building hanging out over the blue sea, with panoramic views of the Bay of Cannes. From the hotel you stroll down the grounds on a long cobblestone path that’s lined the entire way with fragrant rosemary bushes. It was the perfect setting for Carolco’s party, a formal affair for three hundred, everyone looking very elegant in their tuxes and gowns. The Gipsy Kings, whom I’d been managing for several years by then, provided the entertainment. I would have wanted to be there anyway, but that made it extra special.

  I found myself sitting and schmoozing with Michael, his friend Roman Polanski, and Mick Jagger. Over to one side, in a swirl of flashbulbs and jostling, Arnold and Sharon swept into the room. She was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, and right up my alley, a
trim, blonde shiksa. I elbowed Michael and whoever was on my other side, Roman or Mick, and said, “You guys are going to have to keep up the conversation without me. I’m leaving with her.”

  They laughed at me. I myself didn’t know what had gotten into me. It was kind of a locker room brag, which was not my style. But I was having such a good time, probably a little high, sitting with the kings of the world, and I got cocky.

  I spent the rest of the night failing to make good on my brag. Big shot as I was by then, I was still kind of shy around beautiful women, not a pushy guy, and she of course had a crowd milling around her the whole night. So I never saw my opening, and took a ton of shit from the other guys. “Still here, Shep? Didn’t work out?” Oh it was rough.

  The next morning I went to have breakfast with Michael. He was staying next door to the hotel at Jean “Johnny” Pigozzi’s house. Now, to say “Johnny Pigozzi’s house” does not begin to capture what a phenomenal place it is. The Cap d’Antibes coastline below Cannes is just about the most exclusive and expensive real estate on the planet. It’s seven or eight huge estates with fairy-tale mansions on them, owned by families like the Heinekens and the Pigozzis, who founded the giant automobile company Simca. Johnny is a photographer, a philanthropist, an art collector, a playboy—a very interesting and fun guy. His estate is just down the coast from the hotel, and I think larger than the hotel, too. He always has celebrities staying there. This time it was Michael and Mick, who is good friends with Johnny. The estate is like a dream, with wide lawns leading to cliffs overlooking the sea. The house, the Villa Dorane, was built in the early 1950s; later Johnny had the great Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass give it a lot of playful Modern accents. Inside Johnny displays the largest private collection of African art in the world.

  I met Michael down by the pool, which is near the ocean. Staff glided around, bringing us breakfast. Beautiful blue sky above, cicadas ringing in the trees around the pool, the ocean glittering out past them . . . Like a dream.

  And then Sharon walked up. Michael introduced us.

  “What a beautiful place,” Sharon said.

  “Would you like me to show you around?” I replied.

  Michael’s eyebrows shot up and he grinned at me, as though to say, Where do you get the balls? I didn’t know myself. I mean, I knew the estate about ten minutes longer than Sharon did. I just really, really wanted to be with her.

  We left Michael sitting there grinning and walked around the grounds. I pretended to know what I was talking about, and assumed that Sharon thought I was the owner. Later in our relationship I found out that she’d known I was bullshitting. One day she would say to me, “Are you just a schmuck, or do you really not remember that we met before that morning at Johnny Pigozzi’s?” The truth is I had forgotten—don’t ask me how—that I used to date her friend and L.A. roommate, the actress Angela Robinson, a very beautiful girl herself.

  Sharon, gracious lady that she is, did not bust me that morning at Johnny’s. It was the start of our ballet. We spent the next week or ten days together. She came with me to Dallas, where Luther had a show, and from there to L.A.

  We dated for the next few years. Sharon had a remarkable impact on my life, in many ways. She was funny, smart, beautiful—every box gets a check. For her, I think I was easy to be around. I don’t ask a lot of questions, and I’m not territorial in the least. She could relax around me. She was so smart and beautiful that a lot of men found her intimidating. By this point in my life I’d been around a lot of smart, beautiful women. I can’t say I had entirely gotten over my shyness around women. If she had not walked up to me and Michael that day, I would never have had the courage to call her. But that’s been true of all my relationships. I bumped into all of them. I’m very comfortable in the moment once it happens, but I’m not good at the pursuit beforehand.

  One of the things I loved most about Sharon was that she was always searching for how to make sense of the planet. One day she asked me if I wanted to go hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak. Through my friend Marty and my time in Thailand I had learned a little about Buddhism. Now I did a bit of homework on the Dalai Lama, asking friends, doing some reading—this was in the days before Wikipedia. I learned that Tenzin Gyatso was four years old when he was recognized as the fourteenth incarnation of the Tibetan Dalai Lama. China took control of Tibet the year after he was officially installed. He fled Tibet in 1959 and had been living in exile ever since, traveling the world. He was the spiritual and political representative of the Tibetan people, spoke out for compassion and human rights, and supported the Tibet Fund, a New York–based nonprofit that primarily aids the tens of thousands of Tibetans in exile. China repressed the people of Tibet and refused all overtures for their autonomy, while harassing the Dalai Lama and pressuring other countries not to let him come speak. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

  Sharon and I went to hear him speak at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a big gathering, but I was really interested in who was there: a lot of celebrities who didn’t seem to be there to be seen as celebrities, as I was used to. Still, I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, partly because of his strong accent, but also because of the content. My mind drifted and I was more interested in studying that crowd. Then we went backstage afterward, and when he walked into the room where we were I felt . . . different. I felt clean. It was overwhelming, this sense that just by being in his presence I was somehow cleansed. We joined the receiving line, and when I got to him he had this twinkle in his eye and giggled like a kid. He seemed so innocent. I am powerfully moved by innocence, maybe because in my work I have had to spend so much time dealing with the opposite of innocence. It’s why I love kids. It’s why I immediately fell in love with Maui. And now I was feeling it in him.

  Still, it’s not like I became a Buddhist that day. It was more like going to a nice concert, then you move on with your life.

  Sharon and I eventually went our separate ways, the way people do. We never had a bad word between us, no ugly scenes. We just went off on our different journeys. She’s still a good friend to me. She and her kids stay in my guest house sometimes. For years, I was always introduced as, “This is Shep. He used to date Sharon Stone.” It gave me this recurring nightmare. In the Jewish religion, when you’ve been buried one year they uncover your gravestone. It’s called an unveiling. In my nightmare, they unveiled my tombstone and it read:

  SHEP GORDON

  HE LIVED WITH HER

  One day in Maui I walked into a Borders, got a cup of coffee, flipped through some books, and checked out their bulletin board to get a sense of what was going on in the community. There was a patchouli-scented flier tacked up there about a three-day retreat the Dalai Lama would be doing at Wood Valley, the Dharma Center on Hawaii’s Big Island.

  It was 1994, and I had absorbed a lot of Vergé. I thought, I’ll feed the Dalai Lama. Then, as I always do, I started figuring out how to make that happen. From the Dharma Center in Maui I learned that if you wanted to do something for His Holiness it was called “an offering.” Sharon’s secretary gave me the contact info for Rinchen Dharlo, the Dalai Lama’s emissary in America. I called and said I wanted to make an offering of cooking for His Holiness, and Rinchen graciously accepted. Then, as I’d learned from Vergé, I started thinking about how to make this special for His Holiness. Somehow I got hold of his travel schedule and saw that it was a lot like a rock tour schedule. I thought it a pity that he was moving around so fast that he never got to really touch where he was. So if I was going to feed him, I would make it more than just a meal, and instead an experience created uniquely for him in that place and moment.

  First I asked my friend Piero Resta, the painter and sculptor, to paint a series of plates with images that would reveal themselves to His Holiness as he ate his food, and might make him smile. Piero painted one plate with an image of the Potala Palace, where His Holiness was raised, another with an image of Buddha, and so on. I was
friendly with several Hawaiian chefs by then, and they agreed to help out. I asked them to connect me with the people who grew the food we’d be serving, so that, when we served His Holiness eggs, he could look out the window and see the face of the farmer who’d raised the chickens. Every napkin was wrapped around 108 gardenia petals—108 is a special number in Buddhism—so that when he opened it the petals fell all over him. Cindy Dietrich, my go-to girl on culinary stuff, and her mom, Linda (who had been Miss Venice Beach), made white doves out of gardenias to hang everywhere. Every detail I could think up to make the meal unique.

  Meanwhile, Rinchen and the Tibetans were being so gentle and undemanding that I couldn’t get them to tell me what His Holiness liked to eat. Other people told me he was a vegetarian, so that’s what I was planning. Maybe two days beforehand, I found out that he had stayed in L.A. at the home of Fred Segal, the clothier. I called Fred’s chef and he told me, “Oh no, he doesn’t like vegetables. He eats meat. He likes beef stew at five in the morning, spaghetti and meatballs.”

  On my own, meanwhile, I had learned that all Tibetans grow up on yak butter. I have a friend, Ken Ballard, who has lived since the 1970s in Thailand and Bali and leads people on spiritual journeys throughout Asia. He sent me some yak butter. That jar sat in my kitchen smelling up the whole house for three weeks. It’s an extremely disgusting, rancid smell and gave me the dry heaves. It was like the house was filled up with thousands of dirty socks. I practiced making yak butter tea, a Tibetan staple.

  Because Wood Valley is very remote, out in the middle of nothing on the Big Island, staying at a hotel in Hilo or Kona wouldn’t have worked. His Holiness gets up at five in the morning, which meant that we’d have to be up at three or three thirty to get his breakfast ready. So I found a house to rent not far away, pretty primitive but nice, and with five or six bedrooms.