They Call Me Supermensch

by Shep Gordon

  Celestino Drago, Drago Centro, Los Angeles

  Alfred Portale, Gotham Bar and Grill, New York

  Jonathan Waxman, Michael’s, Los Angeles

  Jeremiah Tower, Stars, San Francisco

  Norm Van Aken, Norman’s, Orlando

  Michel Nischan, Heartbeat, New York

  Mark Tarbell, Tarbell’s, Phoenix

  Roger Vergé, Moulin de Mougins, Cannes

  To me, one name was missing. There’s a story behind that.

  Sometime earlier, Jim Fifield had taken over as head of EMI Records. He loved New Orleans, and Jazzfest was the same weekend as his birthday, so he invited George Greif and me to come celebrate with him and his wife, Betsy. My job was to pick our restaurants. I asked Bob Krasnow for suggestions.

  “You have to go to K-Paul’s, right in the French Quarter,” he said. “Excellent Cajun food. Paul Prudhomme is the executive chef.”

  I didn’t know Paul yet, but Bob did. He got him on the phone, told him we were coming, and made reservations for both our nights in New Orleans.

  We flew down in EMI’s jet. The first night we walked to K-Paul’s. When we got there the line was very long. I left the others at the end of it and walked up to tell the girl at the door who we were. She looked at me like I was speaking Martian and informed me that no one jumped the line at K-Paul’s.

  Things were not off to a good start. We waited a good thirty minutes, shuffling forward one step at a time, getting sweaty and cranky in the humid heat of a New Orleans evening. When we finally got in, the place was mobbed and loud. They put us at a long family-style table with a bunch of tourists. This didn’t improve our mood. We were big shots, or so we thought.

  We ordered appetizers and drinks. I downed my Cajun Bloody Mary in a few gulps and managed to get the waitress’s attention.

  “Can I get another one of these?”

  “You can only get that with an appetizer.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you want another Bloody Mary you have to get back on line, be reseated, and order another appetizer.”

  I kept my cool. Don’t get mad, I told myself.

  “Is Chef Paul here tonight?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  I told her to go tell him that Bob Krasnow’s friends were in the house and could he please make an exception. Prudhomme himself came out of the kitchen—and told me that if I wanted another Cajun Bloody Mary I had to go back on line, etc. Don’t ask me why.

  George exploded.

  “That’s it. Get me out of here before I throw everything on the floor.”

  We left.

  The next day was Jim’s birthday. When I asked where he wanted to go for dinner, he said Commander’s Palace, the famous, historic place outside of the French Quarter in the residential Garden District.

  George blew up again.

  “It’s a tourist trap. They drop them off by the busload. I will not eat where they unload them from buses.”

  On top of that, we found out that we had to wear sport jackets. I’d have to go buy one. George always wore a sport jacket, but he threw a fit about that, too, and said now he definitely wasn’t going.

  I said, “Well then, you’re eating alone. Jim wants to go, and it’s his birthday, and I’m going with him.”

  So we got a car and drove out to the Garden District. Commander’s Palace is a big, old, wood-framed place, facing a small cemetery. There were in fact tourist buses outside. George grumbled and fumed. We walked up to the maître d’—another maître d’ straight out of Central Casting. He was in a tux, standing at a little lectern, looking down at his reservations list through half glasses. He never made eye contact with us as he informed us our table wouldn’t be ready for forty-five minutes, but we could wait at the bar. By this point George was punching me in the back.

  Another guy in formal attire collected us. At Commander’s Palace you walked through the kitchen to get to the bar. As we did, a cook on the line caught my eye. He was a guy with a wide, friendly mug, flipping something in a pan over a hot stove. He grinned at me. I smiled back. He dropped the pan, wiped his face, hustled over to me, and gave me a hug.

  “Hey, man,” he said, like we were old pals. “They got you hooked up?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “They told us it’s going to be a forty-five-minute wait.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You like champagne? Come with me.”

  He led us to the bar, ordered a bottle of a nice champagne, and then vanished back into the kitchen.

  “You know him?” George asked me.

  “Never saw him before.”

  “So who does he think you are?”

  “I have no idea, George.”

  “Well don’t say a word. Whoever he thinks you are, you are.”

  A few minutes later, our friendly cook came back to the bar. He picked up our bottle and said, “C’mon, bring your glasses.” We followed him upstairs to a table overlooking a terrace, obviously one of the “A” tables in the restaurant.

  “You want to order?” he asked. “Or do you want me to give you a ride?”

  “Give us a ride.”

  After he went off, George said, “We better order some expensive wine. Because sooner or later this crackpot’s gonna find out you ain’t who he thinks you are, and then we’re outta here.”

  That didn’t make a lot of sense, but okay, we ordered a very expensive wine.

  The cook reappeared with some waitstaff and served us our first course. He kept doing that throughout our meal, accompanying each course. We were getting hysterical wondering who he thought we were to deserve such personal service. By the time he brought up dessert George couldn’t contain himself any longer.

  “Sit down for a minute,” he told the cook. The cook sat. “Okay,” George said, “who do you think this guy is?”

  “I don’t know,” the cook said. “Who is he?”

  “Then why are you doing this?” George cried.

  The cook looked around at us and said, “You know, I’ve been cooking here a long time. I cook the same dishes every night. It gets a little boring. They’re not even my recipes. So once a month, I pick some people coming through the kitchen and take them on a ride. I really enjoy it. When you guys came through, he had a good smile.” Meaning me. “So I picked you.”

  How cool was that? We high-fived him.

  Then he said, “What are you doing now?”

  “I’d like to try to get into Tipitina’s tonight,” Jim said. “The Neville Brothers are playing.”

  I had tried all afternoon to get us in, but it was Jazzfest and booked solid. In New York or Los Angeles I could have gotten us in no problem, but I didn’t have any New Orleans connections.

  “I got you covered,” the cook said. “I’ll write you a note that’ll get you in.”

  We thanked him. Jim paid the bill with his EMI credit card. As we were getting into our car, the cook knocked on a window and said, “You guys like cognac?” He showed us an old and obviously expensive bottle of cognac, filled four paper cups, handed them to us, and wished us a great rest of the night.

  His name was Emeril Lagasse.

  By the time of the chefs’ meeting at Spago, Emeril had his own restaurant in the French Quarter, Emeril’s. I found him there and he joined ACR.

  After Emeril the number kept rising, until at one point we were representing something like one hundred chefs—everybody, basically. Once the word got around, my office received hundreds of letters and calls from people seeking representation. I got dozens of recipes a week from cooks all over the country.

  19

  TRAVELING WITH VERGÉ AS HIS GRASSHOPPER had opened my eyes to this world of the culinary arts and its artists. I saw that for world-class chefs cooking wasn’t labor, it was a labor of love. The more I observed how they worked, the more obvious it was to me that they had not monetized their value. They were mostly one-restaurant guys working six hours a night, and barely breaking even. No one opened a second restaurant. It wasn�
��t even a consideration. If they made guest appearances at other venues they still did it for free, thinking they had to do that because that’s why their restaurants were getting so hot.

  In my parallel life, my artists were getting more famous and rich every day. I had Luther Vandross making a quarter of a million dollars a night. There wasn’t a chef in America making over $100,000 a year. One essential difference was that my entertainment clients all had additional revenue streams from selling replicas of themselves and their work—albums, posters, T-shirts. With rare exceptions, a chef made all his revenue from his one restaurant.

  I didn’t see why selling an artist like Vergé should be different from selling an Alice. I pictured a world where chefs were celebrities, just like movie stars or rock stars. They would get paid fairly for their work. They would develop products and multiple streams of income. In a way, I thought, it should be even easier to mass-market food than music. There was a very big market for music, as we had shown with Alice and others. Still, not everybody loves music. But, as I said to a New York Times reporter once we had gotten the ball rolling, “Everybody eats. Not everyone listens to music, but they all consume food. Food is like software for the body. And these days, all software, like CDs, athletic equipment, and cosmetics, is celebrity-driven. Why not food?”

  Nobody else, with the possible exception of Yanou Collart, was thinking about chefs this way. And even she doubted I could make chefs long-term celebrities like movie stars or rock stars. My peers in the entertainment industry thought I was nuts, too. I turned down representing Van Halen to manage Emeril Lagasse? Had Shep finally lost his mind? But now that I had the end of the road in my mind, I wasn’t going to let anyone else’s doubts stop me. I had always grown by setting myself new challenges. They thought I was crazy when I took on Anne Murray. They thought it was a stretch when I decided to work with Groucho and Raquel Welch. But stretching is how you grow. I knew I had to build the highway to get there, just like I had for Alice and my other artists. That’s always been my method. If you can see the goal, no matter how distant it might seem at the start, it makes it easier to start creating the path to it.

  Not that getting there is easy. I had worked myself nearly to death getting Alice there, and getting chefs there wasn’t going to be any less demanding. But having the goal in sight makes each step on the path easier to figure out, and every bump and pothole in the road more manageable. Instead of being defeated by challenges, you think, Okay, how do we get around this so we can continue the journey? One day and one step at a time, but always knowing where you ultimately want to be.

  I decided the first step was to raise public awareness—to give the public all the hints and all the pictures they needed to experience chefs as great artists and celebrities, just like other celebrities they knew. Everybody wants to be around a celebrity. From my experience early on with Alice and then with Anne Murray, I knew that one easy way to make somebody look like a celebrity is to get them seen with already established celebrities. Putting Alice next to Warhol, putting Anne next to Alice. Guilt by association. By this point I knew a galaxy of movie stars and music stars I could put my chefs next to. All I had to do was find the picture frame and put them all in it.

  A good opportunity came along in January 1993, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held that year at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. L.A. was my turf, and rock and roll was my game, so I thought it shouldn’t be very hard to get one of my chefs hired to do the big ceremony dinner. I decided that Dean Fearing was the guy. Dean was a humble, funny, down-to-earth gentleman. And he was a huge music guy. When he wasn’t cooking he was playing his guitar. He loved the idea of cooking for everybody in the music business.

  I made a reasonable deal. I simply asked what they could afford to pay him. They said $2,500, and that’s what we took. The key was that they were paying him. A first step.

  Dean was ecstatic. But it wasn’t going to be easy. He’d be cooking for more than 1,400. And he’d have to work with the hotel’s kitchen staff. Kitchen crews always hate when a chef comes in from outside. The Century Plaza was a union hotel, and the union wasn’t happy about an outsider coming onto their turf for this big event. Normally the hotel’s banquet chef would cook for an event like this.

  When we walked into the kitchen the day of the event, not a smiling face greeted us. The banquet chef took us into his office and started out with, “First of all, we should be doing this dinner. But you’re here, so I will give you a couple of people to help you. We’ve ordered all your food, but you’ll have to put it together.”

  “A couple of people” turned out to be one guy—a dishwasher—to help Dean prep all those meals. Dean didn’t seem fazed. As a chef he’d seen this before. He got to work prepping. In the middle of prepping, he heard some familiar music and couldn’t resist wandering out to the ballroom. Cream and Bruce Springsteen’s band were doing their sound checks, and Dean got to be the only one in the hall listening. Later that afternoon I pulled him out of the kitchen again to meet Joe Perry, Eric Clapton, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt.

  As Dean labored away all afternoon, the hotel staff softened and came to his aid. The banquet was a triumph. It was not only Dean’s first paid gig, but he got to cook for all his music heroes. When he got his check, he went back home and immediately bought two new guitars. ACR and the hotel came out winners, too. And it was a groundbreaking moment for chefs everywhere.

  We kept on booking big-exposure events. I booked Wolfgang as executive chef for the Grammy Awards dinner at the Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles. It was part of the contract that he got an on-camera appearance. More guilt by association; put Wolf next to Sammy Hagar and it elevates Wolf in the public eye. I booked Dean again, to cook for the Independent Spirit Awards in a hotel in Santa Monica. The money kept getting better, and the excellent exposure transformed their careers.

  Also in 1993 I arranged a unique deal to team ACR, Time-Life, and Elektra Entertainment for a video series called Cooking Is Easy. We produced a three-videocassette boxed set, the first cooking series of its kind to feature a group of master chefs: Daniel Boulud, Dean Fearing, Emeril Lagasse, Pino Luongo, Michel Richard, and of course Roger Vergé. It was Emeril’s first time on camera; he was thirty-four and looked twenty. Cookbooks came with the videos. It all suggested that there was more to food than just eating—that it was bigger than just what was on your plate, it was about lifestyle, too. The spotlight was on our chefs. They were featured, not the food. Later I got Sony Records to produce a series of CDs called Musical Meals. They combine music and food, matching recipes by chefs with music to eat them by. Like linking Paul Prudhomme with music by Aaron Neville for a Sunday picnic of Cajun food. A CD that came with a recipe book by Emeril featured twelve songs by Buckwheat Zydeco. We sold CDs at all the chefs’ live appearances.

  Another huge breakthrough came in 1993 when Reese Schonfeld, one of the founders of CNN, launched the Food Network. Oddly, he was very vocal about the fact that he did not like chefs and did not like the culinary arts. His wife, who was the head of production, wasn’t too crazy about chefs, either. Now, I had been friendly with Reese before this, and I knew the Food Network was the answer for turning my chefs into celebrities. When I read that Reese was struggling to get it off the ground, I saw my opening. I knew paying the on-air talent was a big expense. If we offered them talent for free, they would not be able to resist. I met with Reese and made him the offer. All I asked in return was one free commercial per program for my clients’ products. He jumped at it.

  The results were Emeril Live! and Too Hot Tamales, featuring the Border Grill’s Mary Sue Milliken and Sue Feniger. With Mary Sue and Sue, the free commercial was for their dried chili peppers. With Emeril, his now-famous “Emeril’s Essence” spices.

  Both shows were very successful. The Food Network was on cable and the audiences were small. Still, it helped get across the idea of chefs as celebrities.

  I saw supermarkets as another
untapped income stream for chefs. If you walked into any shopping mall, almost every store was a chain outlet run by national buyers who shipped product to their locations. Foot Locker, Radio Shack, JCPenney—in every one, celebrities were driving the products. Cheryl Ladd’s line of clothes in JCPenney, Michael Jordan’s Nikes in Foot Locker, and so on. In the music store there were big posters and cutout figures of the bands to help move their records. In the bookstore, authors made live appearances to sell and sign their books.

  In supermarkets, the only celebrities with products to promote were Chef Boyardee, Mrs. Butterworth, and Aunt Jemima. I met with some supermarket people and asked where their biggest profit margin was. They told me it was in prepared foods. “We can sell an uncooked chicken for three dollars a pound,” one guy told me, “but if we cook it, we can sell it for seven dollars a pound.”

  I said, “Would there be any interest in selling Emeril’s barbecue chickens, using his spices? But I’ll only do it if you display his spices next to the chickens.” A supermarket chain called Frye’s in Phoenix took me up on it, and it worked like a charm. They sold their Emeril’s barbecued chickens by the truckload, and moved a lot of Emeril’s Essence as well. Bam!

  With the exception of Vergé and to an increasing extent Emeril, the chefs on my Alive Culinary Resources list were business relationships. We liked each other, but we weren’t neighbors, I hadn’t gone to college with them; they were clients. In Hawaii, meanwhile, my group of friends included a lot of chefs. We cooked together a lot, I ate at their restaurants, they came to my house. Although they never sat me down and said it, I knew that a lot of them were a little hurt that I wasn’t representing them, too.

  Like everything else in my life, a confluence of things made that happen. One was that Joe Gannon, my closest friend by that point, whom I’d worked with for years, was living in my house with his wife, Beverly. Joe was a bit at loose ends. Moving to Hawaii had taken him too far away from his Broadway and touring shows business. Beverly was a caterer; they had met on a Liza Minnelli tour. She was a wonderful cook and made some fabulous meals at my house. After maybe six months in my house we were having dinner one night with a few friends and neighbors and got to talking about how Joe and Bev could make a living in Hawaii (and move to a place of their own). She was such a good cook that three of us agreed right there at the dinner table to put up the money for her and Joe to start a restaurant. Dick Donner, a great movie director—the first Superman, all four Lethal Weapon films—who lived near me on Maui, and a friend from Las Vegas named Jennifer Josephs, and I put up something like fifty thousand dollars each. We would take no piece of the profits, just asked them to try and pay us back when they could.