Gordon Releases Memoir, Talks ‘Supermensch’

“Are you Shep Gordon?” he asked. “Yeah, I am,” the veteran artist manager replied. “Oh, man, I’ve wanted to meet you. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have a career!” Bourdain exclaimed, puzzling Gordon. Bourdain explained that by creating the “celebrity chef” and making a star of Emeril Lagasse, Gordon had helped him, too, by presenting him with a target for good-natured taunting that also generated a lot of press.

The star of CNN’s “Parts Unknown” is also a rock ‘n’ roll aficionado and had recently launched a literary imprint, Ecco, with HarperCollins publishing house. Gordon had just starred in an acclaimed documentary by SNL alum Mike Myers called “Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon.” It didn’t hurt that Gordon is also a trained chef. More on that later. Gordon and Bourdain both recognized an opportunity when they saw one and, of course, took it.

Gordon’s memoir, “They Call Me Supermensch: A Backstage Pass to the Amazing Worlds of Film, Food, and Rock ‘N’ Roll,” was released Sept. 20 through Bourdain’s Ecco. Rather than comprising a string of tales of debauchery and excess as many such efforts do – and fear not, for there are some – Gordon weaves a life story of luck, guile, ingenuity, curiosity, gratitude, and service to others into a journey that takes many side paths.

He is not afraid to amble down the road less traveled. He is, by Yiddish definition, a mensch. Many of Gordon’s most famous stories – from getting punched out by Janis Joplin almost on arrival in L.A. from college in Buffalo, N.Y., to working with Groucho Marx, to making Anne Murray a household name and, most famously, to making Alice Cooper the biggest star on the planet – are included, and told with gusto. Those stories, while certainly part of Gordon’s lore, don’t tell the full story of the man, or by themselves accomplish what Gordon set out to do by writing a book.

“[The book] was a reaction of people to the movie,” Gordon told Pollstar just before the “Supermensch” release. “People seemed to be touched so deeply and asked for a sort of life advice which I felt very incompetent in giving. I never really thought about any lessons from the way I lived my life.

“When Anthony presented me with that, I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a good opportunity to try to figure out if there is something in my life that other people can use that maybe can help them. And that was sort of my purpose in writing the book.

“For me, it was a great catharsis; almost like vomiting,” Gordon said. “Hopefully, people will get something out of it. I did find some common threads in a lot of my personal and business successes that maybe people can use. I hope so.”

Some common threads might be those attributes that helped Gordon book Alice Cooper on 1969’s Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival, in between John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band and The Doors, broadcast live in Canadian prime time, and arranging to cook for the Dalai Lama when the latter visited Hawaii.

Make history, don’t wait for it to happen.

“It’s a combination of luck and seeing the opportunity and having enough confidence to take advantage of it in a way that maybe you can get the desired reaction,” Gordon said. “I wanted to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and he was coming to Hawaii. I have a background in culinary arts and everybody has to eat. “So I sat and thought about what I could do to make his trip better, where people might actually listen to me when I make a request to meet him. If I’d just made a request to meet him, it never would have happened.

“I really wanted to be in his presence so I thought, ‘Hmm. Let me offer to feed him.’ Because that’s what I do. He’s coming to Hawaii to share what he does, let me offer to do what I do. They accepted it. I think a lot of it is the way I presented it. “It’s having the luck that he was coming to Hawaii, because that was really lucky, and then I acted on my impulse and tried to do it in an intelligent way that would get me a yes,” Gordon said.

“I used to always tell my clients that it’s really easy to get told no. If you want no’s, I can get them for you really fast. Yesses are tough.”

Gordon’s path to feeding the Dalai Lama was, in a way, another side trip from a side trip. He’d gotten into movie producing and launched Alive Films, initially as a way to help out a friend – much of his story is like that – and went to the Cannes Film Festival in France. That same friend had tipped him to Le Moulin de Mougins, a Michelin three-star restaurant in the hills outside of town.

The owner and chef, Roger Vergé, is credited with creating nouvelle cuisine and so impressed Gordon that the budding film impresario – despite the sideshow of Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy at his table – decided he had to meet and get to know the culinary artist he describes in the book as “the calmest, most beautiful, quiet pool of light that I had ever seen in my life.”

Vergé told Gordon that before he could spend time in his restaurant kitchen, he first needed to be a cook. In order to become “Grasshopper” to Vergé’s “Master Po,” Gordon enrolled in not one but two cooking schools: one in Bologna, Italy, and the other in Bangkok, Thailand. When he returned to Mougins, Gordon was a cook.

And he learned about not just food, but entertaining and creating an atmosphere, at the side of Vergé – the chops he needed to pull off an event like feeding the Dalai Lama. Gordon says his introduction to the Dalai Lama – which came through actress Sharon Stone – was transformative. He served for a time with the Dalai Lama on the board of directors for the Tibet Fund.

“The movie makes it appear that it’s a much closer relationship than it is,” Gordon said of the Dalai Lama. “I don’t know if he’d recognize me walking in a room because there’s so many people in his life. But for me it’s been remarkable. There was a period of time when I still served on his board and he attended the yearly meetings. He doesn’t any more. But that was wonderful because, once a year, I knew I’d be in his presence.

“The Tibet Fund’s mission statement is to finance the government in exile and its needs. Things like Fulbright Scholarships for Tibetan kids are really wonderful. There’s a very dark side as well. People still escape from Tibet, basically walk through these snow-covered mountains and basically 80 percent of the ones that come through into Nepal have to have a limb amputated,” Gordon explained. “So we provide those services. The U.S. government actually provides the apparatus, whether it’s a leg or an arm. And Doctors Without Borders performs the actual surgery, though we supervise it and provide resources. That’s not a fun thing.

“There is nothing easy. But they stay joyous through it all.” The story of Gordon’s great friendship with Vergé, the influence of the Dalai Lama and work with the Tibet Fund also winds, through the theme of service, into the phase of his career that may have left some in the music business scratching their heads – but which also changed a culture. Through his friendship with Vergé, Gordon discovered in the early 1990s that chefs had no one looking out for their interests when they were invited to cook for or help promote events at large hotels and restaurants.

“When people said to me, ‘You’ve definitely gone over the edge; you need to be committed,’ was when I declared I was going to manage chefs. Nobody was making any money. At the time, I was at the top of my game and could have worked with any number of big, important artists and I said no, these are going to be bigger than rock ‘n’ roll stars. And people thought I was out of my mind. My good friends thought I had definitely smoked too much dope,” Gordon said, laughing.

An event with Vergé for Wolfgang Puck at Spago in Beverly Hills, Calif., revealed to Gordon just how badly his services were needed. After Puck explained to Gordon that chefs were rarely paid for appearances but expected to benefit from exposure, Gordon thought he owed a debt of gratitude, and he also thought of former client Teddy Pendergrass.

“I also did it because I was really enjoying these great artists and it felt very much like how the Chitlin’ Circuit was,” Gordon explained. “When I started working with Teddy Pendergrass I saw these amazing artists who weren’t being monetized properly, who were being abused and kept under thumb. I felt like I knew how to change that dynamic and I owed it to myself and to them to do it. In my whole life, if the only reason for me to do stuff is the economics, it would be a very sad and unhappy life. I never wanted a sad and unhappy life.”

So Gordon created Alive Culinary Resources, and refused to book his client chefs without fair compensation or suitable equipment and working conditions. For example, even the vaunted James Beard House did not have a stove for chefs to use to prepare the annual awards dinner. They had to cook and plate food elsewhere, get it delivered, cart it in, and hope it survived the trip.

“I put my foot down and said, ‘If there’s no stove, we’re not coming.’ That’s like booking Alice and telling him to bring a PA. Everybody freaked out and said, ‘You can’t do that.’ And I went ahead and did what is now the South Beach Food & Wine Festival (in Florida) with 40 chefs and they all had stoves. We did a video and sent it to all the buyers and said, ‘Now tell me they can’t have stoves.’ And we wouldn’t take a gig unless they supplied a stove for it. Made a lot of people really mad!”

Gordon is having the last laugh now. By giving the chefs tools to become accessible to the public through branded lines such as spices, cookware, clothing and videos, and convincing a fledgling cable channel called the Food Network to give Legasse a show, he’s had a hand in not only bettering the financial health of the culinary artists he’s come to admire, but literally helped to change the food culture. With success, for Gordon, comes gratitude. That means giving back.

Gordon recently spoke to graduates at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and reminded them that while they may leave CIA and start out with a $100,000 a year job, their predecessors – the Emerils and Pucks and Vergés – might have started at $15,000.

“‘You’re going to go into places where you’re gonna cook $150 meals for very rich people,’ I told them. ‘And if you think that was why all of us put all this effort in, to get you guys the platform you have, you are so off base. Just when you walk outside that restaurant, with the $150 meal, when you look to the left and you look to the right and you see that your neighbors are homeless, they’re hungry.

“‘And if you think your job is just to feed the $150 people, you’re going to have a miserable life.’ So that’s why I do a huge benefit for the Food Bank in Maui. I try to do a lot of stuff where I can get the culinary world involved, and all the chefs. When you present it to them, they’re always more than happy to step up to the cause,” Gordon said.

Karma has so far been good to Shep Gordon. He spends much of his time at home in Hawaii, where he hosted Bourdain for six days to film an episode of “Parts Unknown” that aired last season. And the author and his publisher – both cooks and rock stars in their own ways – will rejoin for another book event now that “They Call Me Supermensch” has hit the shelves. The duo comes full circle as Bourdain is to interview Gordon at the 92nd Street Y in New York City Sept. 22. It’s already sold out, according to Gordon.

“Everything he does sells out!” he said, laughing.