They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  Then I had a thought. Vergé ran the French Pavilion restaurant at Disney World in Florida, and I had never visited him there. I asked Winona if the kids would want to go to Disney World.

  “Are you kidding? They’d love it. And I would love it!”

  Flying to New York to pick them all up, I was nervous about meeting the kids for the first time and started thinking of a way to break the ice with them. I figured I’d do something radical and funny with my appearance. I landed, drove out to the house, and rang the doorbell. Winona opened the door, with all four kids standing there. Their eyes went wide and round as saucers as they gazed up at this big Jewish guy . . . in a Rasta wig. It worked. They started giggling and laughing.

  “It’s Grandpa Shep!”

  I liked the sound of that.

  What I had feared would feel awkward and strange felt familiar and comfortable right away. Not that we were a conventional family in any way. I still spent most of my time in L.A. and Hawaii. But we carved out a lot of time together as a unit. Summers, vacations, holidays, weekends. My good friends in L.A. and Hawaii adopted the kids whenever they visited. Alice and Sheryl’s three kids loved playing with them. On Maui, Tom Arnold would come over to the house to play pool and other games. They took to calling Don Nelson—the former Boston Celtics star and coach—“Uncle Donny” because of how much time he spent with them at his house just down the beach. My celebrity friends who were constantly at my home spoiled them with attention. A few times the kids and Winona spent a whole summer with me. I took them to Disney World, to Europe, even on tour with some of my artists. They had their own bus, “The Kids’ Bus.” We had lots of fun and did a lot of bonding, even if it was unconventional and intermittent.

  In Hawaiian culture there’s a concept called the hanai family. Everybody raises everybody’s children. It’s like one big kibbutz. It only recently occurred to me that what I did with Mia’s kids was kind of a hanai family. I never thought about “adopting” them in any formal, legal way. I just hanai’d them. They needed somebody, and there I was, and it just felt natural. I never questioned it.

  One day when she was around twelve, Amber called. She was going to start eighth grade in a few weeks.

  “Grandpa Shep, I decided it’s time for me to leave here.”

  I said, “You’re not happy?”

  She said, “No, I’m very happy. It’s just time for me to leave.”

  “What does that mean, Amber?”

  “I looked up a school in Hawaii where I could board and be near you. You don’t have to say yes. There’s a school in California. If you don’t want me to come there, I’ll go there.”

  This from a seventh grader. I said, “Amber, I don’t think there’s any school here that has boarding.”

  She said, “No, I looked it up. It’s on the Big Island, in Waimea. It’s called Hawaii Preparatory Academy.”

  I googled it and said, “You’re right. Okay, I’ll call you back.”

  I hesitated. I knew if she came she’d be my responsibility full-time. I still didn’t feel ready. But another part of me was really excited. I flew to the Big Island. Driving to the academy, which is roughly forty-five minutes from the airport, you go up the Waimea mountain canyon, into mist, and there are rainbows everywhere. Beyond gorgeous. The school is at the foot of the Kohala Mountains. I drove through white picket gates, Bonanza-style, then up a very long driveway through an amazing postcard campus of horses in rolling green pastures and kids running and playing. Idyllic.

  When I met the admissions lady she instantly told me it was way too late to enroll Amber for the coming semester.

  “Oh, that’s really too bad,” I said. “I’d love her to be here. She’s African-American, without parents . . .”

  Her antennae shot up. “Could she be here in time?”

  I didn’t know it then, but that decision was one of the greatest breaks in my life. Amber got to come stay with me every weekend. Suddenly I was going to PTA meetings and getting acquainted with her friends and their parents and her coaches and teachers. Amber was a wrestler, the first female wrestler at HPA. At first she wrestled guys—probably not my greatest parenting. I went to many of her matches. At the time, I became friendly with Kris Kristofferson. His son wrestled, so we started going to Kauai together to watch our kids’ matches. It gave me this great new rush of pride to watch Amber wrestle, feelings I had never experienced before. I felt like a real dad. For the first time, I got to really feel like a full-time participant, not an occasional visitor. I loved it and I loved her. I loved the problems, too, and the ordinary parent-daughter moments that would arise. Like when Amber wouldn’t let me come with her into the drugstore, because she was buying tampons for the first time. Those kinds of moments were so great, so intimate and sweet. And she was my buddy. I’d been living alone all this time. Now I had someone to go have dinner with, go see a movie with. Someone I loved.

  After Amber went off to Arizona State University, Keira came to the academy and spent four years there and with me. Then she went to the University of Hawaii.

  Having Winona visit in the summers was interesting, too. Sometimes it felt like we’d been married for thirty years. We always had a great time together. I had three bedrooms, so she stayed in a separate bedroom, and all four kids would stay in another bedroom, and I was in mine. When we traveled, we would take a room with an adjoining room for the kids. But we didn’t have a sexual relationship.

  Being in a parenting role with Amber and Keira made me very happy. I loved putting them first, ahead of my own wants. It felt like the purest way to be of service to other human beings, that instinct I must have inherited from my father and honed in my relationships with Vergé and His Holiness. That they weren’t my own kids made it feel even more pure. At some point, I realized that parenting these kids was what I really enjoyed doing the most. And I had somebody to cook for, even if all they wanted was mac and cheese. It had real meaning, life-altering consequences. It wasn’t like what I did with the rest of my life. It was bigger.

  Sometimes one of my friends would say, “You saved those kids’ lives.” I always answered, “No, they saved mine.”

  18

  A PHONE CALL FROM VERGÉ IN THE EARLY 1990S set me off on yet another new journey. He was coming to America to cook dinner at a series of one-night events. A big hotel chain was throwing a dinner party in Palm Springs, California, at their newest location. They were billing Vergé’s work as a million-dollar dinner for their best corporate clients, to introduce them to this new product. Then he was going to Santa Barbara to cook at Michel Richard’s restaurant there, then Citrus in L.A., then to San Francisco, and from there to the Highlands Inn in Carmel, for a series called “The Master Chefs.”

  This was not his first time doing one of these trips. As far back as 1972, Yanou Collart had brought Vergé, Paul Bocuse, and Pierre Troisgros to L.A. for the first time. They were supposed to cook a special dinner at a restaurant called Ma Maison. Yanou got Danny Kaye, one of her large coterie of Hollywood friends, to present the chefs. He was not only a fantastic entertainer but also a gourmand and a pretty good chef himself. The chefs discovered they couldn’t cook their planned meal in Ma Maison’s kitchen, so they ended up preparing it in the home of none other than George Greif. That was how George knew Vergé before I did. Yanou got the chefs written about in magazines like Food & Wine, Gourmet, and Bon Appétit, which until then had been all about how to stuff a picnic basket or roast a turkey, not about individual chefs.

  Almost no one was paying them for these appearances. Not Yanou or anyone else. They did it for food and lodging. The idea was they were getting exposure for their restaurants and any product lines they might have. Just as African-American artists put up with the Chitlin’ Circuit because it was a way to promote their albums.

  America didn’t have enough interest in fine food in the early 1970s for Vergé and the others to get much recognition outside a small and elite circle. But they did start to influence a generat
ion of young American chefs—Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Larry Forgione. As Chuck Berry is to Mick Jagger, Roger Vergé is to them. In the 1980s they helped America develop its own food culture. All across America young chefs began opening their own places and getting some notoriety. In L.A., Wolfgang opened his first restaurant, Spago, in 1982. In New York, Larry Forgione started An American Place in 1983 and Alfred Portale opened Gotham Bar and Grill in 1984. In 1987, Charlie Trotter’s opened in Chicago.

  So you’d think that by the 1990s Vergé would be treated like visiting royalty when he came. I was about to find out different. When he told me he was coming, I said, “Let me be the road manager. Let me do what I do for my acts. I’ll check you into the hotel, come prep with you, work the gig with you, and collect the money.” It would be the first time I ever experienced how these places treated him when he came there to work.

  We went first to Palm Springs. Vergé was the absolute focal point of the million-dollar weekend. When I checked us in, the receptionist asked for his credit card.

  I said, “No, this is Mr. Vergé. He is doing the event.”

  “We need his credit card for incidentals,” the receptionist said.

  Incidentals?

  After that I went to his room. They had given him this tiny, piece-of-shit room. I went back to the front desk and said, “There’s something wrong here. I can’t put him in this room.”

  “That’s the room,” the receptionist said, deadpan.

  I upgraded him. I figured I would take care of it later.

  The event went beautifully. When it was over I said to Vergé, “We have to check out tomorrow, so who should I see to pick up your check?”

  “Oh no,” Vergé said. “I do not get paid for this.”

  I said, “What?”

  He said, “Shep, they are very nice people. And they will send business to my restaurant.”

  I had assumed that since they were basing a whole millionaire weekend on his appearance, of course they were paying him.

  I checked out, brought the car around, and found that Vergé was not there. He was always on time. I went in to the desk and asked.

  “Oh, they brought him down to the pool for a photo session.”

  I found him at the pool, holding up two bottles of wine for the photographer. Renaissance owned a wine company, and that’s what he was holding. Vergé had his own Vergé Wines. Why wasn’t he holding, say, one of each? I took the publicity person aside and asked her.

  “We’re doing a piece for Bon Appétit, and we want Mr. Vergé to have our wines in his hands in the shot.”

  “Are you paying him for this?” I asked.

  “Oh no.”

  I called Vergé over. “What are you doing? You have your own wines. If you’re going to take a picture it should be with your own wines.”

  He said, “But, Shep, they are very nice. . . .”

  I was starting to get a little bit crazed. If someone had tried that with Alice I would have stopped the shoot and destroyed the film.

  Next we did two engagements at Michel Richard’s. He had actually offered to pay Vergé $2,500. Then he decided that was too much and he was going to give Mr. Vergé only $500.

  “I thought you had agreed to $2,500,” I said.

  He said, “Well, I thought he was going to do a different thing. . . .”

  After that we went to Puck’s restaurant, and Wolfgang’s manager stiffed him completely. On top of that, we had brought a box of Vergé’s books and they had all sold, but the staff wouldn’t give him the money. It took a year, but Wolf finally had them pay Vergé for both.

  When we got to the Highland Inn, I took Vergé’s luggage to his room and found that it was next to a garbage dump. I told them we needed another room; they told me they don’t have one, because they were booked solid. I could not put him next to the garbage dump, and I was not going to sleep next to the garbage dump, either, because this was not a room anybody could sleep in. I found a hotel down the road and booked two rooms. What I told Vergé was that the Highland wanted him to be in a nice spot but had run out of rooms so they were paying for him to stay at this other hotel.

  The Highland was in fact sold out, generating maybe a quarter of a million dollars, all because Roger Vergé was there. At the end of the event I asked him whom to see for his check.

  “Oh, Shep,” he said, “I wouldn’t accept money. They are nice people.”

  Roy Yamaguchi was cooking the next night at the Highlands. I knew Roy from Hawaii. I got Vergé to spend one more night so we could try Roy’s food. I made a reservation at the Highlands’ restaurant in my name. We got dressed up and went back to the restaurant where Vergé had just been the star chef, and as we approached the maître d’, he turned white. He asked us to go to the bar. We went and sat in the bar.

  About ten minutes later, the maître d’ called me outside.

  “Mr. Gordon, I have a very serious problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I just spoke to the owner. I tried to get the rule changed, but he won’t change it.”

  “What rule?”

  “Employees of the hotel cannot eat in the dining room. I can serve Mr. Vergé in the bar. I cannot serve him in the dining room.”

  I was ready to explode. “How is he an employee when you didn’t pay him? We even paid for our own rooms.”

  “Well, technically he is an employee for us. I’ll comp the meal, I’ll do anything you want, but I cannot let him in the dining room.”

  I went into the bar and said to Vergé, “I love you so much that if you ever make a deal for yourself again, with anybody, for anything, I am going to choke you to death! I can’t take the embarrassment of these deals you make. I love you too much to see you treated this way.”

  I got on an airplane. I was managing Kenny Loggins then, and he was playing on the Big Island of Hawaii for a corporate event. Wolfgang was there to cook for it.

  When I met up with him, I told him how Vergé had been treated by his staff. How could he let his staff give such shabby treatment to the man who had inspired him? And so on.

  After a while he put up his hands and said, “But Shep, this is the only way we know. This is our lives.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  He said, “No chef expects anything different. We know how we get treated. Nobody expects anything. I go somewhere, they tell me they are going to pay me, but I don’t expect to get paid. Let me tell you the story of my weekend here. They promised me two first-class tickets to come over and cook, plus a suite for five days. Three days before I came over, they called me up and said, ‘We can’t get some of your food, so could you bring it over with you? We’ll reimburse you.’ So I brought a hundred and fifty pounds of food with me for this big banquet. On arrival, I get off the airplane, and there’s no car. I call up the hotel and they say, ‘Oh, the cars are all busy. Jump in a cab.’ So I jump in a cab, with the hundred and fifty pounds of food. I get to the hotel and ask them to get the food to the refrigerator. They say, ‘We don’t have any refrigerator space for you. But we can arrange for you to store your food at the hotel next door. We’ll give you racks and you can walk it over there.’ So I put the food on the racks and walked who knows how far, maybe a half mile, to the next hotel. Then I had to get up early in the morning to walk the food back to the hotel. Oh, and by the way, the tickets were not first class. They were coach. But what was I going to do? I had a hundred and fifty pounds of food with me already at the airport and I can’t disappoint all those people who are coming.”

  I watched Kenny do his show. Kenny Loggins, by the way, got $150,000, and twenty-three airplane tickets, ten of them first class, and two weeks at the hotel.

  A week later I was back in L.A. and Wolf called me.

  “Can you come over for lunch? I really want to talk with you.”

  I walked into Spago, the old Spago, and there were maybe thirty-five of the greatest chefs in the world gathered there. Alice Waters, Dean Fearing,
Paul Prudhomme, everybody. I was stunned.

  They all wanted to talk to me. Boiled down to its essence, what they said was, “Help us, Shep. Now you see how poorly we’re treated. There isn’t one of us who can afford a private school for our kids. Please do for us what you do for Alice Cooper and these other people.”

  That was the day I started my agency, ACR, Alive Culinary Resources. I said to them, “Let’s think of ourselves as a union, rather than this as an agency. All I want you guys to do is say, ‘No.’ Just direct the calls to me.”

  So now I was managing chefs. I did it all pro bono, because they weren’t making anything. It was really an investment of time and money for me rather than something that generated income. I did it because I had come to love these chefs and what they created and I could not stand to see them continue to get shafted.

  I framed it as a company designed to bridge the gap between the public and the world’s most sought-after chefs by booking them for events. For starters, our who’s-who roster of master chefs included:

  Wolfgang Puck, Spago, Los Angeles

  Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Berkeley

  Daniel Boulud, Daniel’s, New York

  Dean Fearing, Mansion on Turtle Creek, Dallas

  Michel Richard, Citrus, Los Angeles

  Lydia Shire, Biba, Boston

  Stephan Pyles, Baby Routh, Houston

  Mark Miller, Coyote Café, Santa Fe

  Larry Forgione, An American Place, New York

  Jean-Louis Palladin, Jean-Louis, Washington, D.C.

  Robert Del Grande, Rio Express, Houston

  Joachim Splichal, Patina Restaurant, Los Angeles

  Nobu Matsuhisa, Matsuhisa, Beverly Hills

  Pino Luongo, Coco Pazzo, New York

  Paul Prudhomme, K-Paul’s, New Orleans

  Jimmy Schmidt, Rattlesnake Club, Detroit