Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: They Call Me Supermensch
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: Oct-45
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shep_Gordon * http://nypost.com/2016/09/17/shep-gordons-life-of-sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll-is-absolutely-amazing/ * http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/shep-gordon-talks-alice-cooper-bond-new-memoir-w442168 * https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/07/mike-myers-shep-gordon-documentary-film-pop
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Not listed in the Authorities LOC
PERSONAL
Born October, 1945, in Queens, New York.
EDUCATION:State University of New York, Buffalo, B.A., 1968; New School for Social Research, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Talent manager, Hollywood film agent, and producer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1945 in Queens, New York, Shep Gordon is a talent manager, Hollywood film agent, and producer who has worked with many celebrities, including Alice Cooper, Groucho Marx, Blondie, and Raquel Welch. In 2016 he published his memoir, They Call Me Supermensch: A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock’n’Roll. Gordon is also featured in the 2013 documentary Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, directed by Mike Myers. Gordon began in the business by working with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Alice Cooper, whose macabre stage persona Gordon helped influence. In addition to music, Gordon helped promote the modern interest in celebrity chefs and has represented many of the top chefs of the world. When the Food Network was first created, he helped Emeril Lagasse become a household name. He has even worked with his holiness the Dalai Lama. Gordon now lives in Hawaii.
They Call Me Supermensch provides a look into the entertainment industry of the late 1960s to the present from the point of view of manager, agent, and producer Gordon. He recounts how his purchase of a 1954 Cadillac helped create the image of a music manager when he took the band Alice Cooper as a client. Believing the band would never make it in the business, Gordon thought he would not have to do any actual work. He was surprised when Alice Cooper became big and made them both rich. Writing in Booklist, Ben Segedin commented that “Gordon’s entertaining memoir is full of anecdotes and plenty of celebrities.” Following his legendary career, the book explores Gordon’s working relationships with other celebrities: Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Blondie, Sylvester Stallone, Salvador Dali, Luther Vandross, and Teddy Pendergrass.
Describing his concept of compassionate business, which he discusses in the book, Gordon remarked to Melinda Newman in Forbes: “I tried to think in a way of not winners or losers. When you … move the marionette strings—you have a lot of choices. My choice was always to work with artists that understood if you leave a negotiation or contact with a positive feeling for everyone, … those people will be there to lift you back up.” Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer called the book an entertaining memoir in which Gordon warmly and graciously invites readers into his life. The reviewer commented that in these days when people feel compelled to reveal their faults and excesses, “it’s refreshing to find a story in which the search for meaning trumps the search for mischief.”
In an interview in Rolling Stone with Joseph Hudak, Gordon explained how he averted being a victim of his own success by meeting French chef Roger Vergé: “Bigger car, more jewelry, more blow up my nose, more beautiful women. But everybody around me was miserable. And dying. Jimi Hendrix, [Janis] Joplin. The people I knew, their knees would shake at dinner. They’d never look you in the eye. I was realizing I was becoming one of those people, and then I met Mr. Vergé and he was the first really successful man I met who was happy.”
A self-professed groupie to Vergé, Gordon credits the chef’s suggestion of his going to culinary school to learn the trade. In an interview in GQ, Joshua David Stein explained: “It was the first time in Gordon’s long career that he had wanted to do something, not make someone else known for doing what they did. And yet even this—the sudden urge to be a chef—was grounded in the desire to serve. Gordon credits his father, who worked in Manhattan’s shmata trade, with instilling this sense of selflessness. ‘He worked his entire life for my family,’ he says. ‘I realized writing this book that I’ve lived my life as I think he would have.’”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2016, Ben Segedin, review of They Call Me Supermensch: My Amazing Adventures in Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hollywood, and Haute Cuisine.
ONLINE
Forbes Online, https://www.forbes.com/ (October 10, 2016), Melinda Newman, review of They Call Me Supermensch.
GQ Online, http://www.gq.com/ (October 5, 2016), Joshua David Stein, review of They Call Me Supermensch.
New York Post Online, http://nypost.com/ (September 17, 2016), review of They Call Me Supermensch.
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (April 1, 2017), review of They Call Me Supermensch.
Rolling Stone Online, http://www.rollingstone.com/ (October 3, 2016), Joseph Hudak, review of They Call Me Supermensch.
Shep Gordon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shep Gordon
Shep Gordon at SUPERMENSCH screening.jpg
Gordon at the Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon screening at the 2014 Miami International Film Festival
Shep E. Gordon (born in October, 1945) is an American talent manager, Hollywood film agent, and producer.[1] Gordon is featured in a 2013 documentary, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, which was directed by Mike Myers.[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Life and career
1.1 Work
2 References
3 External links
Life and career[edit]
Gordon was born in 1945 in Jackson Heights, Queens.[3] He has developed a close friendship with the 14th Dalai Lama and accompanied him to a visit at UB in 2006.[4]
He obtained his B.A. in 1968 from the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) in sociology. He then moved to Los Angeles, California.[3]
He first gained connections in Hollywood by meeting Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Alice Cooper in 1968.[5] He quickly became Cooper's agent. Much of Coopers stage act and the band's overall macabre persona was influenced directly by Gordon, who created many imaginative and wild events to get Cooper PR in the papers, including throwing a live chicken on stage. Gordon subsequently later represented many other celebrities such as Anne Murray, Blondie, Teddy Pendergrass, and Luther Vandross.[citation needed]
He had a near-death illness with intestinal problems in 2013, but recovered.
Work[edit]
Gordon has worked on numerous film productions, typically as a producer. These include The Duellists and Kiss of the Spider Woman. He then created one of the first independent film production companies in the U.S., Alive Films.[citation needed]
Gordon was instrumental in bringing the modern wave of celebrity chefs into existence. He represented many of the top chefs of the world at a time when they were not known in popular culture, and, when the Food Network was first created, he brought many of them to the same, including Emeril Lagasse, helping to make them all the household names they are now [6] He owns multiple restaurants.[citation needed]
Shep Gordon’s life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll is absolutely amazing
By Larry Getlen September 17, 2016 | 6:59pm
Modal Trigger Shep Gordon’s life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll is absolutely amazing
Mike Myers and Shep Gordon Splash News
When semi-retired artist manager Shep Gordon married a raw food chef three days before his 60th birthday, he arranged to have his honeymoon on “an extremely exclusive resort on a tiny, remote island” in Hawaii that usually plays host to just one or two couples.
When Gordon’s wife’s laptop broke, he called the front desk for assistance, and a “repairman” showed up several minutes later.
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On his honeymoon, Gordon once ran into Apple genius Steve Jobs.AP
It was Steve Jobs — the resort’s other guest.
Jobs fixed the computer and, being a raw food enthusiast, joined the couple for dinner the next few nights.
For most people, this would be an outlandish, once-in-a-lifetime tale. For Gordon, it was just another day in his charmed life of random celebrity encounters, as revealed in his new memoir “They Call Me Supermensch.”
Gordon, who was born in Queens in 1945 and raised in Oceanside, L.I., went to the University of Buffalo, but rarely attended classes, and began selling marijuana in his sophomore year. Twice while in college he smuggled pot across the U.S./Mexican border, after driving there in the Mustang convertible he bought in part with his bar mitzvah money.
The first time, after meeting his connections and getting the pot, he was taken to meet a rancher, who brought out a horse.
“[They] explained to me that once it got dark, I was going to ride this horse across the Rio Grande back into the States with my bag of weed. I had never been on a horse in my life. They said, ‘That’s all right. The horse knows what to do. He’s done this plenty of times.’”
That’s exactly how it happened. The horse rode him and his bag of weed across the border to safety, he disembarked with his merchandise and went to his car, while the horse turned around (presumably) for Mexico.
By 1968, Gordon was broke, unemployed, aimless and homeless in Los Angeles. Driving one night, he saw a sign for a motel called the Landmark, and took a room.
Feeling dejected and lost, he took a hit of acid and sat on the balcony. Around midnight, he heard a woman’s scream, and thought he saw a woman being raped by the pool.
But when he went to separate the two people he saw, the woman punched him in the mouth.
“We’re f–king,” she said. “Would you please leave us alone.”
The next day, a group was hanging out by the pool, the woman among them. She told the story, getting a big laugh, then everyone introduced themselves.
“She was Janis Joplin,” Gordon writes.
“Lounging on pool chairs around her were Jimi Hendrix; Lester and Willie Chambers of the Chambers Brothers, who had the hit song ‘Time Has Come Today’ … and Paul Rothchild,” who produced albums by Joplin and The Doors. Jim Morrison was a frequent visitor.
Given the star power, groupies — including the infamous GTOs, led by Pamela Des Barres, then known as Miss Pamela — were a constant presence.
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Shep Gordon (right) poses with Raul Esparza and Mariska Hargitay in 2014.Getty Images
“You could sit at the pool and see these girls … moving from Hendrix’s room to Morrison’s room and so on,” he writes, noting that he lost his virginity to one of these groupies. At 22, “I was so naive I thought, Wow, this girl really likes me. And then she was two doors down the next night.”
Gordon, along with a friend, became the hotel’s LSD and marijuana dealer, and they were so successful within a few months that they bought a limo.
One day by the pool, Lester asked Gordon how he would explain owning the limo to the police if asked, and Gordon realized he needed a cover — a profession that looked legit.
“You guys are Jewish, right?” Lester said. “Well, then you should be managers.”
Gordon and his friend agreed.
As it happened, Lester had a new “band of freaks” from Phoenix staying in the basement of his home in Watts. Someone at the pool, possibly Hendrix, suggested having Gordon manage them.
The freaks were Alice Cooper and his band.
At the time, Cooper played average-at-best psychedelic music and used horror-type gimmicks, and the hippie audiences of the time couldn’t stand them.
For Gordon, this was the ideal situation.
“To me, Alice Cooper seemed like the perfect band to manage,” he writes, “because from what I could see they had no chance of ever making it, so I wouldn’t have to do any work.”
But Gordon would change this attitude soon after. He quit dealing drugs in 1969, dedicating himself to the music business, and pledging with the band that they wouldn’t stop until they became millionaires.
Inspired by acts like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, Gordon decided that Alice Cooper had to be the band who parents hated, and began arranging stunts to make it happen.
He hired a seamstress to create see-through plastic suits for the band. Arranging a small club gig, he had them take the stage in these suits, with nothing underneath. As the set began, he called the police, saying, “My child is in this club and the band is onstage naked. This is horrible.”
But his plan — to have them arrested for indecent exposure, garnering lots of press — was foiled when the heat in the club fogged up their plastic suits, making them opaque. The police showed up, saw the band appear fully clothed, and left.
His work paid off when the band’s 1972 album “School’s Out” reached No. 2 on Billboard, and the following year’s “Billion Dollar Babies” hit the top spot.
At the height of Cooper’s megastardom, Gordon decided that Cooper should be seen with his great inspiration, Salvador Dali. Gordon’s partner, Joe, arranged a meeting with the artist and his wife/muse, Gala.
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Salvador Dali poses with his wife GalaGetty Images
The first time they met, at the St. Regis hotel where the couple lived, Gala “swept into the room first.”
“She was everything you’d expect Salvador Dali’s wife-manager-muse to be: A gaunt, striking, middle-aged lady in a black tuxedo, black silk scarf wrapped around her head, a black walking cane, trailing in her wake a half-dozen cherubic young boys in black silk outfits,” Gordon writes. “They never spoke, just glided around the room like shadows.”
“Gala set the ground rules. ‘He is to be addressed always as The Dali. Money is not to be discussed at any time with him. When I say it is over, you leave.”
After The Dali joined them, his wife ordered him a cup of hot water. The Dali then “very slowly and purposefully drew a small jar of honey” from his pocket, “placed it on the table, and deliberately unscrewed the top,” writes Gordon.
“It was brilliant theater — you couldn’t not watch. Then he lifted the jar six inches above the cup, tipped it slowly, and a slow-motion stream of honey poured toward the hot water. Meanwhile, with his free hand, he drew a pair of scissors from his other pocket. He used them to cut the stream of honey. Alice, Joey and I gaped.”
Dali — who, for reasons Gordon never understood, called him “Mr. Blemly” — created a hologram of Cooper that took six months, leaving time for more crazy encounters.
One time, Gordon called on Dali at his apartment, and the artist answered the door “sitting in a wheelchair, even though he could walk perfectly. He was wearing the skin of an entire bear, from head to claws to tail, and holding an open umbrella. Another living Dali painting.”
With great talent came great ego. The few times they all had dinner together, “The Dali paid the bill for us all by signing his napkin. It was how he paid for all their meals.”
“‘My friend Picasso, so silly, he had only coffee and biscuits in Paris and he signed the whole tablecloth,’ he said both times. ‘I have whole meals and I sign just the napkin.’”
One of Gordon’s more challenging assignments came when the head of Columbia Records asked him to consider managing singer Teddy Pendergrass. Gordon wasn’t interested, but met the singer as a favor, with plans to discourage Pendergrass from hiring him.
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Gordon once managed Luther VandrossAP
Somehow, this led to Gordon challenging Pendergrass to a drug-off to see who could handle their drugs better. A record company gave them a two-bedroom suite at the Regency Hotel, and Gordon “had a beautiful wooden briefcase made and filled it with every drug known to man.”
“Teddy and I went head-to-head there, drinking and drugging … when he collapsed after two days, I was still standing. I called a friend at Columbia, who came over and took a picture of me standing over Teddy with my foot on his chest.” When Pendergrass came to, he and Gordon shook hands, and Gordon became his manager.
The two became close, and when the singer was paralyzed in a 1982 car accident, Gordon was there with his family when they told him he’d never walk again.
But not every client was family like Cooper or Pendergrass. When Gordon managed Luther Vandross, it was strictly business, and he considered Vandross a diva. And when singer Anita Baker opened an arena tour for Vandross, it was the meeting of two divas who despised each other.
At the beginning of the tour, Gordon sensed he’d “have to keep these two apart if there were going to be any shows at all.”
His solution? He had a plywood wall built in the backstage corridor at MSG so “when Anita came out of her dressing room Luther wouldn’t have to see her.”
But this didn’t stop Baker, who simply walked another way around, stood in front of Vandross’ dressing room and “started taunting him like a little kid. ‘Hey, Luther, I’m out here!’”
Modal Trigger
So, for the rest of the tour, Gordon had an impenetrable brick wall built between their dressing rooms in every venue, at a cost of $20,000 a night.
In addition to managing musicians, Gordon went on to produce films, conceive the idea for Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo tequila brand, and help ignite the celebrity chef genre by representing the likes of Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck. The nerdy kid from Long Island was also briefly married to a Playboy Playmate, and dated Sharon Stone for several years. Mike Myers even directed a 2013 documentary, “Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon,” paying tribute to his story.
Today, the 70-year-old lives in Hawaii (he and the vegan chef who met Steve Jobs divorced), and is retired except for his continued management of Cooper. While his book is chock full of adventures, Gordon, the nebbishy kid from Long Island, still has trouble seeing himself as the adventurous type.
After Gordon first viewed the documentary on his life, Myers asked what he thought.
“Just do one thing for me,” Gordon replied. “Take me to lunch someday with this guy Shep.”
Shep Gordon Talks Alice Cooper Bond, Legalizing Pot, Creepy Fan Mail
Guru-like manager to rock stars, celebrity chefs discusses inspirational autobiography 'They Call Me Supermensch'
Guru-like manager Shep Gordon recalls his exploits with rock stars and celebrity chefs, as detailed in his new book 'They Call Me Supermensch.' Bob Gruen
By Joseph Hudak
October 3, 2016
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It's easy to dismiss the oft-told story of an Alice Cooper audience tearing apart a live chicken as apocryphal. But Shep Gordon, Cooper's manager for nearly 50 years, swears it happened. "The show was outdoors at a place called Varsity Stadium in Toronto, and there were feral chickens," he says of the 1969 incident. "I didn't bring the chicken, but I threw it [onstage]." With that, Gordon breaks into his unmistakable laugh, noting the irony of telling the fowl tale at the Music City Food and Wine Festival, where he's just finished signing copies of his new memoir, They Call Me Supermensch: A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock 'N' Roll.
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A companion piece to Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Mike Myers' inspirational 2013 documentary about Gordon's life, the book expands on his exploits as an artist manager (along with Cooper, he's overseen the careers of Teddy Pendergrass, Anne Murray and others), film producer and champion of the culinary arts – which is what brings him to Nashville. But it also serves as a how-to guide for living, as the soon-to-be 71-year-old shares tips for doing what he calls "compassionate business."
"Maybe there is something in my life that can have some meaning for other people," he says, "and meaning for me – because I have no idea what it's all about."
Does your book mirror Mike Myers' documentary?
Mike's a storyteller. He took the parts of my life and turned it into this beautiful heroic story and built in a lot of sympathy and some drama. What the film didn't do was deal with the failures. When I saw the movie, Mike was very nervous: Did I like it, did I hate it? I said, "You know, Mike, I'd love to have lunch with this guy."
Why do you think people connected so strongly with the film?
The hardest part of the documentary was accepting this outpouring of love that came after it. Some of it was self-serving, singers who wanted me to manage them. But then there was this whole world of people who were asking these really deep questions about how to be happy, and how to be successful and not hurt people. My whole life, I've always been very wary of anybody who thinks they know anything – because none of us do. What's life all about? How do you get happy? What's the right way to live? Those are big questions and they are questions that don't have answers. But that doesn't mean you can't live your life believing in something.
"Maybe there is something in my life that can have some meaning for other people," Gordon says.
You credit the French chef Roger Vergé with changing the course of your existence.
I would say the biggest influence on my life was Roger Vergé. I was at a point in my life where I was about to be a victim of success and meeting him pulled me out of that.
You mean the trappings of success?
Yeah, all fool's gold. Bigger car, more jewelry, more blow up my nose, more beautiful women. But everybody around me was miserable. And dying. Jimi Hendrix, [Janis] Joplin. The people I knew, their knees would shake at dinner. They'd never look you in the eye. I was realizing I was becoming one of those people, and then I met Mr. Vergé and he was the first really successful man I met who was happy.
To you, chefs are on par with rock stars.
Oh, yeah, they live the same lives. They change their clothes to go onstage; a chef changes to go in the kitchen. They have to play their hits: Nobu has to serve sushi, Wolfgang [Puck], a pizza. And as Alice has played "I'm Eighteen" 10,000 times, they probably cooked the pizza 10,000 times. But at the same time you have to give your audience new recipes, new songs.
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Courtesy Anthony Bourdain/Ecco Books
Emeril LaGasse was among your first "celebrity chef" clients, but his stardom didn't come easy. Can you tell that story?
Emeril was the star of the Food Network. It was just starting on the air and wasn't making money, but if it could get to a 1.0 rating, it was successful. And Emeril's show hit a 1.0 rating. He was having dinner that night with the new head of the network. She said, "Can I see you for a minute? We're thrilled that Emeril got a 1.0, but his contract is up and he's going to have to make a decision: does he want to be a TV star or be a cook?" And I said, "How does that translate?" She said the only way they were going to renew his contract was if he gave up his restaurants. I said, "You're paying him $250 a show. Are you going to give him a raise?" "Oh, no, we won't be able to give him a raise." I said, "Well, you're going to have a rough night." So Emeril and her went out to dinner, and I got a call from the restaurant that the police had come in. Emeril had thrown the table on her! Which he rightfully should have done.
What's the secret to your long-running relationship with Alice? It's an anomaly in show biz.
We started off so early in life, and we failed so many times and forgave each other and supported each other during the failures. We never had a contract. He's never asked me, "What am I making tonight?" Ever. And I've never said to him, "How are you going to sing the songs?" We do our jobs. We trust each other. It is a remarkable relationship. And we very rarely talk. There are times that a year will go by and we actually don't talk. He doesn't have a cell phone; he doesn't have a computer.
But you were here in May with him for the launch of the new tour.
Because it was a new show. I write the shows and direct the shows, so I stay with him until we break it. I stay until it works. I do my job.
How do you come up with some of the more outrageous Alice set pieces?
I smoke a lot of marijuana. And that's really what does it.
shep gordon, supermensch, shep gordon book, shep gordon movie, shep gordon interview, alice cooper, alice cooper shep gordon, shep gordon celebrity chefs, shep gordon dali lama, shep gordon mike myers
"It is a remarkable relationship," says Gordon of his partnership with Cooper. Wolfgang Heilmann
The most disturbing part of your book involves Alice, some fan mail and … semen.
[Laughs] I'll never forget that morning because I was so excited we were getting fan mail. Maybe this was the 25th letter we had gotten. I had just moved back to New York. I was downstairs and opened the mail there, and there was this little plastic baggie. I thought, "What is this?" Then I started to read the note: "I get so excited that I jerked off." Oh, no! He packaged it.
You'll be 71 in October. Is there anything else you want to do?
Two things. I spent 40 years on toilets in hotels blowing marijuana into exhaust fans. I'd like to try to make sure that generations after me don’t have to do that.
You're talking about legalization?
Yeah. To change the face of cannabis to something that is not about forgetting but remembering. It's the healthiest crutch you can use in my opinion. And it has these unbelievable qualities that people aren't allowing. Veterans not having access is criminal. They're committing suicide and this can help them. Kids having all kinds of fits. It can help them. There are real medical applications for it and that should be the face of marijuana. Recreationally, it's fine. But that shouldn't be the game.
And the other thing is I feel very proud of helping establish the culinary arts. But I think [chefs] really need to institutionalize into their fabric [the idea of] giving back. If your craft is feeding people, how can you feed just $200 dinners when everybody outside your restaurant is starving to death? To be a real art form, it needs real humans, and that's part of being a real human.
as running late to meet Shep Gordon at Charlie Palmer Steak in Midtown Manhattan for lunch. Not terribly late or fantastically late, just noticeably late. By the time I arrived, Gordon, sitting at a large circular booth hidden by foliage, had ordered and finished a half-dozen oysters. Their empty shells lay accusingly, hollows up, on a bed of ice.
But Gordon, perhaps the most famous unfamous man in the world, was unperturbed. He is accustomed to solitude. Half-Zelig and half-Svengali, Shep Gordon has shepherded the careers of pretty much anyone you ever heard of in the last century: Alice Cooper, Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross, Emeril Lagasse, Raquel Welch, Groucho Marx. A man who moved so much and so quickly must, almost by necessity, fly solo. Here was a man from whom much of today's culture emanated. Had Shep not sold acid to Jimi Hendrix back in 1968, would there be Electric Ladyland? Without Shep, Groucho Marx would most certainly have been forgotten. Had he not convinced Teddy Pendergrass to perform ladies-only concerts, millions of Americans, conceived as "Close the Door" played softly on the Hi-Fi, wouldn't be alive. Had he not become a manager as a cover for his illicit drug-dealing income, would Vince Furnier have transmogrified into Alice Cooper? And without Alice Cooper, there would be no Marilyn Manson, and without Marilyn Manson, Joe Lieberman would never have made a name for himself, at least not enough to get on the Gore ticket of 2000, which lost to a Bush. And without Shep Gordon, who convinced some dude named Emeril Lagasse that a chef ain't shit if he doesn't have merch, there would be no Food Network.
"It's very Forrest Gump, like so Forrest Gump it's ridiculous," Gordon says, laughing.
And yet there clings to him a resolute ordinariness. I'm not sure what, exactly, one might expect from so momentous a life: an aura, merit badges, scars, asthma, or something. He's just a regular guy, or as he likes to say, "Shep from Oceanside." And if he's proud of his quietude, that pride is too quiet to perceive.
Gordon is in town from Maui, where he lives, to promote his memoir, They Call Me Supermensch: A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock 'n' Roll. In the book, the à la minute finishing of which was the reason for my tardiness, Gordon reveals that as a boy, he spent many hours cloistered in the bedroom of his family home in Oceanside, Brooklyn. He was hiding from Skippy, a vicious mutt his mother had bought for his older brother Edward, who wanted to be a veterinarian. The dog loved his brother. But Skippy hated Shep (and Shep Skippy), and in the familial scrum of affection, the boy lost out to the family pet.
"In a bizarre way," he writes, "my life came to revolve around that dog."
Gordon was effectively banished from the common areas of the home. He spent hours alone in his room or out of the house, playing basketball until dark. Gordon is forthcoming about the upside—"I can get lonely, same as anyone," he writes, "but my ability to sit alone quietly for hours at a time, thinking, visualizing, would play a huge role in my successes as an adult"—but does not dwell on the psychic damage of the situation, which came not from the aloneness per se but the fucked-up hierarchy of his mother's love. Left unexamined, for instance, is how his relationship with his mother relates to his jarring objectification of women, though that attitude seems at least partially a product of the time (the 1970s), the drugs (endless), and the company (rock stars).
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“In a bizarre way, my life came to revolve around that dog.”
Gordon may have been sitting alone quietly, happily appreciating the residual brininess of the oysters and sipping a cranberry-and-vodka. But heavy on my mind now is the ghost of his mother, whose diminishing deleterious presence pervades the pages of his book and, no doubt, his life. Conspicuously left unthanked in the thank-yous, she is just one of many prodigal presences throughout the memoir: movie stars and legendary musicians, accountants and label men, drug dealers and chefs.
The cognitive dissonance of Shep Gordon is how normal the man seems for how abnormal, how utterly ahistorically aberrant and exceptional, his 70 years on earth have been. He probably has a lot more famous friends than most of us have friends at all. Many text him throughout our lunch. Later that night, they will be at the Shinola store to celebrate the publication of the memoir. The event is being hosted by Alice Cooper, but "I'm telling my friends not to come until late. It's going to be too crowded. Even Tony Danza is coming," Gordon says happily. "I haven't seen him in 30 years."
The party was fine, but the man had lived a life of endless fiesta. "This has been my worst food week I can ever remember in my life," he says. "Every night I have an event, and the places I want to go to are closed by the time it's over." Tonight his dear friend Nobu's restaurant, Nobu, is open late, and it will be to Nobu that Gordon will go. "Celebration at dinner," he says, "is the most important thing to me. I don't throw away any dinners. Life is too short."
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Nevertheless, when the waiter asks if we are ready to order, Gordon says, "I want everything." And he pretty much gets it. A 30-day-dry-aged steak arrives sizzling. A half-dozen more oysters and their smaller friends, clams, arrive on ice. Three bright green asparagus shafts are covered by a vinaigrette. Gnocchi is studded with swarthy black truffles. "Oh," he says, "Charlie [Palmer] told me I have to try the chicken, too." Palmer, of course, is a personal friend as well. "I told him he has to let me pay this time," says Gordon. "If not, I'll never eat here again!"
The enormity of Gordon's professional accomplishment and his long-term impact is hard to comprehend and difficult even to describe. That's one reason talking to him gives one the sense of missing something important. Words are both too far and too close to get the real picture. He is, literally, the Godfather of Everything and the Best Friend of Everybody.
Take, for example, how he knows Palmer, and Nobu, and Bourdain, whose imprint at Ecco published the book, a frank, artless, and thoroughly enjoyable chronicle of hard-partying, shrewd marketing, and auspicious meeting. The year was 1984, and Gordon was in the extremely successful film producer phase of his life, with Ridley Scott's The Duellists, starring Harvey Keitel in braids, and Roadie, starring Meat Loaf as a guy named Redfish, under his belt. He was in Cannes for the festival with G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary, the dueling subjects of Return Engagement, a documentary produced by Gordon's company, Island Alive Films. Liddy, Leary, and Gordon were eating at Roger Vergé's Moulin de Mougins, a 10-minute drive from the town center. Vergé was already famous in France, but chef famous, which was a much lesser type of fame back then.
Vergé was, in fact, the first celebrity chef. It wasn't that he was a celebrity, but that he served celebrities. The day Gordon, Liddy, and Leary had lunch there, they were joined in the dining room by Anthony Quinn, James Coburn, Luciano Pavarotti, and Clint Eastwood. Gordon was, by his own estimation, "pretty stoned and drunk."
At some point Leary decided to make a scene. He jumped up and declared he had smuggled in a hundred tabs of acid and would like to trade them for sleeping pills and other sundry narcotics. This was poorly received at the time, and a dick move. Leary's outburst toxified and alienated the room, which clammed up and seethed. (Gordon tells me he came away from the project "respecting Liddy but not respecting Timothy," and was "disappointed in his choices.") All of a sudden, in swept Vergé. "He was like a white light in a room of darkness." The chef, handsome and suave and all smiles, was an instant diffuser of bad mojo. Up jumped Anthony Quinn, then Coburn and the rest, to greet him. Gordon was smitten. Not only had Vergé the power to dispel darkness, but he was evidently important enough for the leading men of the era to rise for. "I've always been a little bit of a groupie," Gordon says. So Gordon told Vergé he wanted to be his Grasshopper, which made no sense to the elderly Frenchman unfamiliar with David Carradine's Kung Fu. Vergé told Gordon to go to culinary school, which he did, and come back, which he also did.
“Celebration at dinner is the most important thing to me. I don't throw away any dinners. Life is too short.”
It was the first time in Gordon's long career that he had wanted to do something, not make someone else known for doing what they did. And yet even this—the sudden urge to be a chef—was grounded in the desire to serve. Gordon credits his father, who worked in Manhattan's shmata trade, with instilling this sense of selflessness. "He worked his entire life for my family," he says. "I realized writing this book that I've lived my life as I think he would have."
By the 1990s, Gordon and Vergé were good friends. And Gordon realized that chefs were laboring under the same abusive circumstances he had encountered with Pendergrass on the Chitlin’ Circuit. "The Chitlin’ Circuit was very much like the chefs when I started with them," he says. "In the black music field, the artists were convinced that the only way they could continue to get hit records was to go play shows for the radio stations and the record company, basically for free, and that would keep them in the public eye."
Similarly, Vergé and other chefs of his caliber were frequently asked to cook for free. This enraged Gordon. "It was absolutely fucking insane." So Gordon began managing chefs, just like he did Pendergrass and Cooper. "It was so obvious to me that it was the exact same thing: They both have to do their hits. They have to write new recipes. They have to take their audience with them. They both wear street clothes to the gig. They both change backstage. They both go home after the show. But if they don't have products and media, they're just wandering minstrels with pots and pans."
The days of free labor were over. Merchandizing had begun. Gordon's roster of clients is, like so much about him, inconceivably major now: He started with, among others, Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, Daniel Boulud, Larry Forgione, Nobu Matsuhisa, Emeril Lagasse, Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, and more. It was under Gordon's watch that they turned from journeymen to celebrities.
Gordon is lost in the present (or perhaps just present in the present). But, as he asks the waiter to pack up the leftovers for me, my mind is still turning back to his childhood bedroom. Gordon has spent his whole professional life making other people feel special, and getting them to be treated thusly. Might that, I wonder, have something to do with that infernal hound? But Shep politely skirts vivisection. "I saw so many of my friends unscrew the jar and never get the top back on," he says. The waiter arrives sans check. He says, "Charlie wants to take care of you." Gordon smiles and says, "I had a feeling."
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OCT 10, 2016 @ 01:29 PM 906 VIEWS The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets
'Supermensch' Manager Shep Gordon On His New Autobiography, Alice Cooper And The Power Of Beyoncé And Jay Z
Melinda Newman , CONTRIBUTOR
I cover music -- and sometimes film.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Hollywood manager, agent and producer Shep Gordon participates in the BUILD Speaker Series to discuss his memoir, "They Call Me Supermensch: A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock N Roll", at AOL Studios in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
In 2013, the acclaimed Mike Myers-produced documentary, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, brought the life of one of the entertainment industry’s most visionary managers to the fore. Now Gordon tells his own version of his story with the autobiography, They Call Me Supermensch.
Gordon came to Los Angeles in 1968 and landed in the heart of rock and roll, instantly (and by sheer coincidence) falling in with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and, a short time later, Alice Cooper, whom he continues to manage today.
In his fascinating book, Gordon shares tales of working and befriending everyone from Groucho Marx, Blondie, Salvador Dali, Luther Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass and Michael Douglas to the Dalai Lama, Emeril Lagasse, Raquel Welch and Wolfgang Puck. He also smuggled drugs into the U.S. and dated Sharon Stone.
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It’s to his credit as a storyteller that the latter titillating stories never overwhelm his tales of building some of the biggest careers in entertainment and singlehandedly creating the concept of the celebrity chef. (It's no coincidence that the book is on Anthony Bourdain’s imprint for HarperCollins).
The three most important things a manager does, according to Gordon: “Get the money, always remember to get the money, and never forget to always remember to get the money.” But as a human being, he found the two most important things are to say thank you and be of service.
I spoke with Gordon about some of his guiding business practices and and life lessons learned along the way.
Melinda Newman: The book almost serves as a love story between you and Alice Cooper. That’s probably the longest relationship in your life?
Shep Gordon: Oh, by far.
Newman: What has been the key to the relationship's success?
Gordon: I think it’s just great respect for each other. We’re very different human beings. If you made a list of 100 things, 90 of them we’re on completely different sides of the coin. Where we come together is complete respect for each other and for everything on the planet. I’ve never seen Alice raise his voice, I’ve never heard him curse. I can’t remember a bad thought that he’s had in 45 years and that’s pretty far out. We meet at that place. Our politics are completely different. He’s never smoked a joint in his life, I wake up and smoke a joint. He’s very Republican, I’m very liberal. His favorite thing in the world is to go to the mall. We share golf and we share a way with which we deal with life.
Newman: You bring up the concept of compassionate business in the book. What is that?
Gordon: I tried to think in a way of not winners or losers. When you do sort of what I do— which is mold the clay, move the marionette strings— you have a lot of choices. My choice was always to work with artists that understood if you leave a negotiation or contact with a positive feeling for everyone, [when] your career [is] on the way down, those people will be there to lift you back up. Every career that involves celebrity and fame has ups and downs, so it’s very selfish. The win-win is a true win-win because it’s a really selfish one for yourself.
Newman: What was the hardest part of your life to revisit for the book?
Gordon: My early years were the toughest part. I saw patterns of behaviors that were different than other people and I never chose to dig deep enough to see why because I woke up and went to sleep pretty happy. The book forced me to look deeper. The other thing is the whole drug period of my life. I got very lucky to get through it.
Newman: The part about your early family life was painful to read. You were coming to grips that you were not the favored child, a dog even gets preference over you. Your father, as much as you loved him, you portrayed him as weak, though you come around to a different understanding of him by the end.
Gordon: Completely. That was my biggest revelation. I mistook his strength for his weakness. The book was a great gift. Norman Lear’s [autobiography, Even This I Get To Experience] also slapped me around. He wrote so honestly about his relationship with his [parents], that I actually went back and rewrote that whole section after reading his book. If I had a billion dollars, I’d buy everyone on the planet that book. Who he is is just amazing.
Newman: Your two biggest teachers in your book aren’t business people, they are French chef Roger Vergé (accent) and the Dalai Lama, who teach you the joy of being of service. Is that the lesson you want people to take away?
Gordon: I think the most selfish thing you can do is be of service to the people around you and the planet. I don’t know any of the big questions and answers. I have no idea. So for me, it’s how do you stay happy during this bumpy ride we have on the planet and they’ve really appeared to me to have reached joy through service.
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 27: (L-R) Alice Cooper, Sheryl Goddard and Amber Williams attend as Alice Cooper, Shep Gordon and Shinola celebrate the release of Gordons Memoir, 'They Call Me Supermensch' on September 27, 2016 at Shinola Tribeca in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Shinola)
Newman: Another one of your rules is to create history, don’t wait for it to happen. You did that again and again with the acts you managed, such as wrapping Alice Cooper’s new album in women’s underwear. Is it harder to stand out now that everyone has a platform?
Gordon: I don’t know. I think in some ways, it’s almost easier. I don’t know Jay Z and Beyoncé and I’m so happy they’re back together, but that whole break up, I would have planned it exactly the way it happened.
[Editor's note: Jay Z and Beyoncé did not split.]
Newman: Would you have planned the whole 2014 elevator incident?
Gordon: Oh yeah, of course.
Newman: Do you think they planned the elevator incident?
Gordon: I have no idea, but if they didn’t, it shows you how you can get through the media because that really got through it. So whether planned or not planned, history got created.
Newman: Are they the greatest entertainers currently at creating their own history?
Gordon: Yeah, on so many great levels. They seem to do a lot of great charity work, they’re very kid friendly. They’re becoming royalty. They’re very elegant, smart, very much of today.
Newman: It seems like you were a few steps ahead of the rest of the pack when it came to new ideas. What was your secret?
Gordon: I always called it that you’d see a wave coming. I could see the chefs were going to be celebrities, the wave was there, the demand was there…The hardest thing to do in any kind of branding is to get demand for your product.Once you have demand, you can mold stuff. It was very obvious with chefs that there was a huge demand. If you had a million dollars you could buy your way into the Super Bowl, you could be the front row of Broadway and buy your way into any play, but you couldn’t buy your way into Le Cirque or Spago. The demand was so great that there was no avenue to take a shortcut. When you have that great a demand for what I do, which is selling art to people, it’s just a matter of focusing it and providing a way for them to touch it outside of locale.
Newman: Is there another area that you see ripe for that kind of exploitation now?
I think you see it now in the cannabis industry. But I think there’s a very important part that has to change because it’s not the true face. The face of the cannabis industry to most of the public is stoners and that’s so wrong. That would be like the liquor industry only showing alcoholics. The real value in the cannabis world is for people who have real ailments who don’t want to take these downers they’re being given. It’s been proven to help veterans, children who are having spasms, depression, sleep…that’s the face of what this needs to be. Yes, there’s a recreational side, I’m a smoker, it’s a crutch that I enjoy. I don’t fall down from being drunk, the worst thing that happens to me is if I smoke too much I fall asleep with a smile on my face. If I had a young kid who was just going into high school or college and was looking for a profession, there’s something in that world that definitely is exciting and helpful.
Newman: What was your biggest disappointment in your career?
Gordon: It was a moment when I couldn’t get Teddy Pendergrass’s single out [after his paralyzing car accident in 1982]. The first words of the song are “I’ve been up and I’ve been down, but I’ve never loved like this before” and it was two years after the accident. Those were going to be his first words to his audience, which were from the heart, beautiful. And instead the record company changed it to a duet with Whitney Houston where the first words were “I want to hold you in my arms tonight” and he was a quadriplegic. So that moment for me was probably my lowest moment as a manager.
Newman: So not a financial disappointment?
Gordon: Financial never meant much to me. At the first level, I might say to myself that’s what I was doing it for, but that’s not what I was doing it for.
Newman: What were you in it for?
Gordon: I have no idea. I think to be of service. It’s wild. I look back at the choices I made, like not continuing my royalties after I left the artist. Every other manager always commissioned what they worked on and every artist would have been happy to pay me. I look back at the choices I made and go, ‘Those were really interesting’ (laughs) because I could be flying my own plane now.
Newman: While you had to have the money for the amazing adventures you talk about in the book, you seemed to always pick going for the experience rather than hoarding the money.
Gordon: Not even a question. It was always marbles to me. If I had enough marbles to get in the game, great. As a human on the planet, I think you have to know you’re going to have enough money for rent, food… at some level, it’s going to make you happy. But all the stuff past that, enjoy your life.
Print Marked Items
They Call Me Supermensch: My Amazing Adventures in
Rock 'n' Roll, Hollywood, and Haute Cuisine
Ben Segedin
Booklist.
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p15.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
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Full Text:
They Call Me Supermensch: My Amazing Adventures in Rock V Roll, Hollywood, and Haute Cuisine. By Shep Gordon. Sept. 2016.304p. illus.
Ecco, $25.99 (9780062355959). 791.
Mike Myers told Gordon's story in the documentary Supermensch (2013); now Gordon has his say Having landed at the Hollywood Landmark
Hotel, Gordon started selling drugs to such fellow guests as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Following his conspicuous purchase of
a 1954 Cadillac, it was suggested that he "manage" a band as a cover for his dealing. As Gordon explains, the band Alice Cooper seemed like a
good match: "They had absolutely no chance of ever making it, so I wouldn't have to do any work." Of course, Alice Cooper became huge, and
Gordon discovered that he actually did have a knack for promotion--he was responsible for the infamous chicken incident--making them both
immensely wealthy Gordon went on to successfully manage such stars as Groucho Marx, Raquel Welch, Anne Murray, George Clinton, and
Teddy Pendergrass. In the nineties, Gordon founded Alive Culinary Resources with the aim of securing rock-star status for chefs, making
Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, Dean Fearing, and Emeril Lagasse household names. Gordon's entertaining memoir is full of anecdotes and plenty
of celebrities.--Ben Segedin
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Segedin, Ben. "They Call Me Supermensch: My Amazing Adventures in Rock 'n' Roll, Hollywood, and Haute Cuisine." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p.
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761577&it=r&asid=ef744582924f9a7eb9d1be0f083b7d21. Accessed 4 Mar.
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They Call Me Supermensch: My Amazing Adventures in Rock ‘N’ Roll, Hollywood, and Haute Cuisine
Shep Gordon. Ecco, $25.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-235595-9
In this entertaining memoir, record producer and artist’s manager Gordon warmly and graciously invites readers to gather around him as he regales them with tales of his life in the entertainment and restaurant industries and the lessons he’s learned. As a child growing up in Oceanside, N.Y., he stays in his room, hiding from the vicious family dog, or watches TV with his father. By the time he gets to college in Buffalo, he starts to develop his own personality, and after playing a college prank, Gordon learns a lesson about himself he carries through his life in show business: how to create history, not just wait for it to happen. He picks up stakes and moves to California, where he slips into his career as an entertainment manager by using his relationship with rock bands as a front for selling drugs. Before long, he’s moved on to managing Alice Cooper and launching the band’s career, helping Groucho Marx put his business back together, reinventing Raquel Welch’s career, producing movies, and creating the high profile of chef Roger Vergé. Gordon admits he’s disorganized and a poor administrator, but asserts that he excels at getting someone else’s career off the ground. Gordon focuses on doing “compassionate business” in which everyone can be a winner, and he lives by one simple rule: “don’t get mad; getting mad only hurts; use that energy to accomplish your goal.” At a time when people feel compelled to revel in and share their excesses—and Gordon does share a few of his—it’s refreshing to find a story in which the search for meaning trumps the search for mischief. (Sept.)