by Shep Gordon
I’ve seen what a stroke can do. Vergé had a stroke a few years ago. At first he was in a wheelchair—there it is again—but able to converse and feed himself. But his condition deteriorated gradually, until he couldn’t speak anymore, never left his room, and I don’t think he knew I was there when I visited. It was very sad to see him, and almost a relief when he passed away in June 2015. Wherever he went on to, it had to be a better place.
I’d rather they kill me.
Or at least I say that now.
In the early 2000s I woke up one morning in L.A. and decided it was time to retire. It wasn’t something I’d been thinking about or planning for at all. It was never a goal. Like so much else in my life, I just woke up and there it was. What am I doing today? I’m retiring.
I hear myself say “retire” now, which is interesting, because that word wasn’t actually in my brain at the time. I was still managing all these artists and chefs. I was still using drugs. I was not in a relationship. I was starting to feel the lack of a biological child in my life, as much as I love my kids. I had to do a couple of things for clients that day that I didn’t want to do. I had to say no to some people, and I never liked that part of my job. I realized that my income had hit a plateau, because I was never really good at running a business. I had twenty-five people in my office for whom I was making tons of money, while my income stayed exactly where it was.
What was it all for? What’s it all about, Alfie? I had no idea. I felt like I had spent my life living other people’s lives. I didn’t know if I had no personal life because I had been so very busy for so many years, or if keeping busy was just an excuse not to develop a personal life. Now I really wanted to figure that out, and the only way to do that was to get rid of any excuses. Given my health scares, who knew how much longer I had to find out?
I called Alice.
“Where are you?”
“In L.A.”
“You got anything going for lunch?”
“No.”
“Will you do me a favor? I’ve decided to call everybody this morning and resign. Will you come get me and take me to lunch so I can get really drunk when I’m done?”
I told Alice that I’d still manage him. That was a given.
I spent all morning calling other clients, explaining that it had nothing to do with them, only with me. I gave each of them the option of leaving the company or staying with the person in my office who was best able to continue handling them. I had no contracts with anyone that had to be broken, so that part was easy. I reached maybe half of them that morning. Almost all of them sounded happy for me.
Then I went back to Maui, ready to begin this “retirement” and figure out who I was. . . .
And discovered that I was the same person I’d always been. No big revelation, no Zen satori. I wasn’t happier than I’d been, but I wasn’t unhappy about it, either. You are who you are, I guess.
And anyway, people wouldn’t let me quit. When I decided I was sort of retiring, my friend Sammy Hagar decided I was not retiring. And Sammy can be very persistent. When I convinced him that I wasn’t managing artists anymore, he talked me into going to see Cabo Wabo Cantina, the restaurant in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, he opened in 1990. So I go, and in the restaurant there was a wooden barrel on the counter, which Sammy said held tequila that a local family had been making for him since 1996. I tasted it and it was fantastic, which gave me an idea.
“I really don’t want to do any more restaurants,” I said to him. “But if you want to have some fun, Jimmy Buffett has already laid out the highway for us. You know how he branded his Margaritaville tequila and distributes it all over the world? We could do that with Cabo Wabo tequila.”
Even as I was saying it a voice in my head was saying, Holy shit, now I’m going to have to work at this. And it was just me at this point. I didn’t have a staff anymore, didn’t have an office, nothing. But now I’m committed, so I need to figure out how to make this easy, fun, and, of course, win-win.
We spent the next six or eight months distilling the tequila, tasting it, refining it, designing the bottle and the label—a lot of steps. When we were ready I decided we should test-market it in Hawaii. I had one thousand cases shipped. By the time the tequila arrived, the Rolling Stones were coming to Hawaii to play a Pepsi convention on the big island. Ron Wood and I have been good friends for years and years, from back before he joined the Stones. He slept on my couch many a night. I piggybacked a couple of Rolling Stones concerts at Aloha Stadium onto the Pepsi convention. And I gave the band some Cabo Wabo Tequila, and they liked it. They were flying home in a private 747. I couldn’t resist asking Ronny if they’d agree to be photographed going up the stairs into the plane carrying bottles of Cabo Wabo. If the press asked, they were to say they really liked it, and it was only available in Hawaii, so they were taking some home with them. Ronny and the guys were very gracious and did it, and it made all the Hawaiian papers. We sold out one thousand cases in a heartbeat.
Now it just so happens a guy from Wilson Daniels, the high-quality wine and spirits distributor in Napa Valley, was in Hawaii. I knew him a little through the chefs, and took him out to dinner. We made a deal right there at dinner for the prestigious Wilson Daniels company to be our national distributor. And we set it up so that Sammy and I took no financial exposure on it at all. Wilson Daniels would order, say, five thousand cases from us, at say $40 a case. (I’m making these numbers up because I honestly don’t remember the actual figures. But these are close.) They would give us a promissory note for $200,000. We’d take that to the bank. Then we’d order the five thousand cases from our Mexican distiller, who charged us $20 a case. The bank paid the distiller the $100,000. When the five thousand cases arrived at Wilson Daniels’s warehouse, they had ten days to pay us the $200,000. We’d use half of that to repay the bank, plus a small handling fee they charged us, and pocket the rest.
It was beautiful. Sammy and I were making money hand over fist, and never laying out a dime of our own cash. We had no office, not one employee, no overhead. I did it all from home. I even designed the ads myself. By the time I sold out my interest to Sammy, we were billing $30 million a year.
A few years into my “retirement” I got a call from a friend who wanted me to think about managing this new young raw food chef, Renée Loux. I said my usual piece about how I was retired, wasn’t managing chefs anymore, and on top of that didn’t particularly like the raw food diet, which emphasizes a lot of fruit and uncooked or barely cooked vegetables. Then I agreed to meet her anyway.
When I answered the door a few days later this beautiful reddish-blond vision was standing there. For me it was love at first sight. I was still thinking about getting married again and having children. I was also still my usual fumbling self around a beautiful woman, but I invited her to stay in my guesthouse and she accepted. Despite roughly thirty years’ difference in our ages we found we had a lot in common—she was even from New York—and had a wonderful time the next five days, walking and talking on the beach in the days, cooking together at night. I learned to like raw food, which my friend Tom Arnold says is when he knew I was in love. The fifth night we moved the relationship to a more intimate place, and on the sixth day she moved in.
Two years later we got married on the lawn, the sun setting behind us, sixty-five friends there to cheer us on. I was three days shy of turning sixty, and she had just turned thirty. I had joked, “We only have a small window of opportunity here. Let’s get married when there’s only twenty-nine years between us.” For our honeymoon, Fiji Water offered an extremely exclusive resort on a tiny, remote island. Usually there’s only one couple staying there, but this time there was one other guest. One day Renée’s laptop stopped working. I called the desk to ask for help. A few minutes later the computer repairman was at our door. It was Apple founder Steve Jobs, who was the other guest on the island. He got Renée’s laptop working, and she made him dinner for the next few nights. It turned out he was already int
o raw food.
When we returned to Maui I got to work managing Renée’s career. I got her a book deal and a television show. Meanwhile, I still really wanted children. We worked at it, but it didn’t happen. I thought we should seek medical advice; she felt that pregnancy should occur naturally or not at all. That and other issues gradually pushed us apart. After four years we split up. Like so many of the other women I’ve been with, we couldn’t stay together, but we’ve stayed friends.
22
I PICKED UP GOLF AGAIN WHEN I MOVED TO MAUI. I hadn’t played since freshman year of college. Soon I was playing four or five days a week. I never really took it seriously enough to get very good at it. For me it’s like it was with my dad, a way of bonding with friends. Michael Douglas and I have been on some epic golf trips.
I started taking Chase golfing with me when he was six, and he grew up to be a much better golfer than I am. Alice and I have golfed together a lot, too. A lot of ex-alcoholics and ex-druggies play golf because it’s a great way to be addicted to something safe. Golf is extremely addictive. If you have an addictive personality, you’re probably never going to get rid of that part of your personality. It’s integral, chemical, hardwired in you. Rather than try to cut off that part of who you are, I think it’s better to embrace it and just shift the addiction from dangerous things like drugs and alcohol to something good, safe, and fun like golf. Why torture yourself every day, denying who you are? Embrace the fact that you’re an addict, and use it. Don’t run from it, don’t get depressed by it, don’t get eaten up by it. Use it. Say to yourself, I’m lucky to be an addict. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be such a good golfer! It’s another miracle.
One morning in January 2012 I drove out to the Kapalua golf course with Chase and Alice. Kapalua is about a forty-five-minute drive from my house, which is farther than we usually go, but the Hyundai pro golf Tournament of Champions had just been there and we wanted to go play while the course was still in tournament condition. For years I’d had a history of gas and irregular movements. This day I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in a couple of days, so it wasn’t abnormal for my stomach to hurt. I just thought it was gas. It had hurt a little the night before; I woke up in the morning and it was still there. By the fourth or fifth hole I was getting really uncomfortable. I put my feet up on the front of the golf cart while we were driving, to try to release the tension. At the ninth hole I said, “I think I’m gonna go home, guys.” They didn’t think anything of it. I rarely play eighteen holes.
On the way home I stopped at a pharmacy and bought some Gas-X. By the time I got home, my guts were starting to hurt a little more than normal, but still not so much that I thought it was anything but gas. Still, something must have shown on my face, because Nancy, my assistant, asked if I was okay. I made a couple of phone calls and then got in the Jacuzzi, hoping the heat would bring out the gas. After fifteen or twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi I realized this wasn’t going away; in fact, the pain was getting worse. This wasn’t just gas. It was sharp pains and dull ones, every kind of pain, rumbling all over my guts, getting more intense by the minute. I called the office on my cell, but Nancy had gone home by then, so I texted Chase, who had just come back.
“I think I need to go to the hospital,” I groaned, “and I don’t think I have time to wait for an ambulance.”
Chase helped me to the car and started driving to the hospital, which is in Kahului, near the airport. Normally it’s about a thirty-minute drive, but he was driving really fast. The pain was now so intense I was stomping my foot and punching the door and dashboard, which really worried Chase. He knew me as such a placid guy. Through gritted teeth I told him not to drive so fast, because if we were pulled over I was really fucked. But he was really concerned now and we pulled up outside the emergency room in twenty minutes. He jumped out and helped me inside.
I had asked Chase to text Nancy, so she was there waiting for us. We rushed past the other people in the waiting area and went straight to the admitting desk. I remember her asking me for my ID and my insurance card, and that’s pretty much it. I have a vague scrap of memory of lying on an examination table and looking up to see Nancy, Chase, and a nurse, a friend of Nancy’s who was running the emergency room. And that’s all I remember until I woke up in a hospital room days later.
Afterward I learned what heroic efforts Nancy had made while I was unconscious. For two days she was on the phone 24/7 with all my doctors in L.A., all my friends. They sent a plane over to get me, because half my friends and half the doctors said I needed to be brought to Los Angeles right away. The other half said no, I needed to be operated on right away, I’d die on the plane. Nancy had to make that decision. A tough decision to make for your boss. I would not have wanted the pressure. Meanwhile, I was lying there, blissfully unaware that I was dying.
Nancy finally said, “Do it.” So they operated on me in Maui. It was touch-and-go. I flatlined twice. Died on the table. I had suffered an intestinal infarction, colloquially known as “a heart attack of the intestines.” Just as the arteries to the heart can get blocked, so can the ones to the bowels. The lack of blood flow causes the lower intestines and colon to stop functioning. The doctors told Nancy that about a foot of my small intestine had died and had to be removed. I was extremely lucky. I’m told that four out of five people don’t survive.
I woke up in a blank white hospital room. Nancy’s was the first face I saw. I felt this incredible sense of peace and ease. I had no pain—I was still on a drip, of course—and no idea of all the drama that had just ensued. I was feeling really blissful. And it occurred to me that I would have been just as happy if I hadn’t woken up.
The next day, I was beginning to feel pretty low and sorry for myself. It struck me as a bit sad that the first face I saw when I woke up was Nancy’s. She talks about this in the movie, because it struck her as well. I don’t mean that I was sad that it was Nancy, but sad that it wasn’t a wife or family standing there. It was an employee. And now even she wasn’t there. I was sixty-six years old, I was alone in my hospital room . . . and it was Friday the thirteenth.
That’s when Mike Myers called.
“Ready to say yes now?”
I really liked Mike. We had met on the set of Wayne’s World in 1991, at an important point in Alice’s life and career. The early 1980s had pretty much been one long lost weekend for Alice. In addition to the drinking he started smoking crack. The quality of his albums deteriorated. For a while he was so bad I couldn’t stand the heartache of being around him. He was terrifyingly malnourished and emaciated, sick in other ways, and always zonked out of his mind. I couldn’t pull him out of it. Nobody could—not me, not Sheryl, not his poor parents—until he decided to do it himself. Finally, he agreed to go back into rehab.
He called me from a hospital bed and I agreed to help him try to make a comeback. It was a long, tough climb. For a while I took most any offer that came his way, just to get him started up again. That’s how Alice starred in one of the worst movies I have ever seen, a horror picture called Monster Dog. I knew the producer, Eduard Sarlui, who ran Trans World Entertainment, a small production and distribution company. They shot it in Spain, with an Italian director and an entirely Spanish cast except for Alice, then dubbed it in English for the U.S. home video market. When they showed it to me and Alice, the voices were completely, wildly out of synch. I mean way out of synch—and no one had even noticed until we pointed it out. They just shrugged and released it anyway.
It was all up from there, but slowly. Alice put out a new album in 1986, Constrictor, on MCA, and went on tour for the first time in a few years. We billed the tour as “The Nightmare Returns,” and he worked really hard on it, staying on the road pretty continuously from the fall of 1986 through the spring of 1987. It worked—his old fans were glad to see him back, and younger fans were glad to see him, period.
In 1991, we got a call that Paramount was making a movie of Mike Myers’s “Wayne’s World” routine from Saturday Ni
ght Live. They needed a big rock icon to be in the scene where Wayne and Garth (Dana Carvey) fall to their knees and do their famous “We’re not worthy!” Alice was not only one of the biggest rock stars of all time, he could act, so it was an excellent match. They would shoot a bit of Alice onstage, and he’d get one song on the soundtrack.
When I met Mike, he was pretty set on the idea that the song had to be one of Alice’s giant hits from the early days, either “I’m Eighteen” or “School’s Out.” But Alice had a new album coming out, Hey Stoopid, and I didn’t see any point in his being in the movie if it didn’t feature a new song and help promote the album. You know, win-win.
Mike said no.
I was firm but not unreasonable with him. I said, “I happen to know that you start shooting in two weeks. You really don’t have a choice. Now, I read the script, and I see the band is only onstage for eight seconds. No one will remember anyway. He’s got a great song on the new album, ‘Feed My Frankenstein.’ Put that one on the soundtrack, and if you put ‘School’s Out’ in the credits, everyone will think that’s the song he sang.”
The movie came out in 1992, and “Feed My Frankenstein” is on the soundtrack, and it was a great moment in Alice’s career. Since then, I have never walked through an airport with him where he didn’t get a few dozen people going down on their knees and chanting, “We’re not worthy!” And it was the start of a beautiful friendship with Mike. After Wayne’s World his father died and Mike was struggling with grief. He came to my house for a weekend and ended up staying two months. I cooked for us both. It’s what I do. He’s the best audience for my stories. He loves hearing my stories. After a while he started saying, “You have got to let me get these stories on film. Let me tell your story. The story of a guy who created all this culture.”