Shep Gordon - Supermensch

Full transcript: Shep Gordon on London Real

5:33 This is London Real, I’m Brian Rose. My guest today is Chef Gordon, the American talent manager, Hollywood film agent, and producer. You’ve managed the rockstar Alice Cooper for nearly 50 years, as well as Blondie, the Gypsy Kings, Pink Floyd, and fostered the career of Jimi Hendrix, Luther Vandross, and Groucho Marx. You’re also responsible for creating the celebrity chef culture and business of today. You’re featured in the documentary film Supermensch, The Legend of Chef Gordon, directed by your friend Mike Myers, and last year published your memoir, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list.

6:04 Your mantra is create history, don’t wait for it to happen. Chef, welcome to London Real. Nice to be here. Great to have you, London. What does this town mean to you?

6:14 I’m curious when someone comes here, what are some of the memories or things that you associate this town with? London really significant in my career, because this is really where Alice broke. This was the purest break of Alice. He was unknown, and we were able, we had made enough headway in America that we had the resources to tell the story we wanted to tell, and we knew what our story was. Our story was that parents would hate Alice, and we were able here to have the resources to hire PR people who could put that out.

7:03 By the time we came here, we had a record company who could put it out. Luckily for us, there was a government that was very reactionary, so where it was beyond our wildest dream, although it was our probably biggest dream, would be to get banned in England, because if you’re banned for what we were trying to do, that’s the highest place you can get to. And a lady named Mary Whitehouse brought up in Parliament, banning Alice, and made the front page of the papers, and he exploded, so it’s always been a great city to us.

7:42 Was that common knowledge that if you got your artist banned, they would make it, or was that something that only Shep knew, or you and Alice knew? I think, you know… Because that’s guerrilla marketing, really. Yeah, we wanted to eat. We were hungry, and our skill set was sort of limited.

8:07 At that time, the band was very much like a dolly painting and music that had a very limited appeal for the pure music of it. But the social phenomenon of it, of five guys named Alice Cooper, wearing dresses, doing things that parents hated, that was a cultural revolution that we were riding away with. And part of that cultural revolution, like for every generation, is children do what parents don’t want them to do. You know, I can remember in my life, walking past my kid’s bedroom hearing rap music for the first time, and I opened the door, and what is this crap?

9:00 And as soon as I said it, I said, oh shit, this is going to be the biggest thing ever, because that’s the way it goes. Every girl in the world wears pink because none of the parents ever wore pink. It’s everywhere, and it’s just the way humans grow up. So for us, that was a much more identifiable path to success and being able to buy lunch than making records that appealed to these kids. That was tougher for us, that was a hard thing to get.

9:34 So the political and social part of Alice was really what drove the machinery in the beginning, and England was the perfect test tube. And there was a film, the Beatles would come out of here, the Stones, there was a rock and roll infrastructure. So I got to a guy named Derek Taylor, who was the, he talked about it, the fifth Beatle, he was their publicist. And I was able to have that conversation with intelligent people who knew what I was talking about.

10:09 This was back in 70, and I said, he said, tell me about Alice Cooper. What is Alice Cooper? And I said, well, our goal is to get every parent in the UK at breakfast to say to their kid, if you go to an Alice Cooper concert, you’re grounded for a month. I said, how do I do that? And he said, well, let’s talk about it.

10:34 And I said, well, is there anything, in America we had the Ed Sullivan show. And I’m a big student of history. And Elvis Presley really broke nationwide because of the Ed Sullivan show. He went on the Ed Sullivan show. Every family got around the TV every Sunday night to watch Ed Sullivan.

10:56 And they announced that they wouldn’t be showing his hips. They only showed the upper half of his body because it was too sexual. And every parent turned off the TV. They didn’t want their kids to watch it. And Elvis exploded overnight.

11:11 And it was his manager who said, I’ll only put him on the show if you won’t show his hips. So that was engineered. Right. So that was in my brain. So I said to Derek, is there anything like the Ed Sullivan show?

11:25 What does every family sit around and watch? And he said, BBC Breakfast News, they watch it for traffic and they watch it for weather. And it’s on every family during breakfast when all the kids are going, it’s on at every house. That’s all you got to work with. So I went home that night.

11:44 In the morning I got up, I watched the TV, an amazing amount of helicopter traffic reports. Like every five minutes was a traffic report from a helicopter. So I came back into Derek and I said, you know, I have this picture of Alice who just did where he’s naked and his genitalia are covered by a snake. A big bow or something. I remember that.

12:05 Yeah. So like if I wanted to back up traffic, where would I go? And he said, well, probably the most traffic at rush hour in the morning is Piccadilly. There’s this roundabout. So I said, can you find me a driver, let’s blow this thing up and break down the truck at Piccadilly and get the helicopter to show a naked Alice on the traffic and have the families having their coffee.

12:32 Oh my God, this is disgusting. A guy named Alice. Naked Piccadilly. So we broke it down twice. And that’s when Mary Whitehouse tried to ban us.

12:43 You never thought that was going to come. Never thought that was like the greatest. I said of flowers every day, that was like the greatest thing ever. Did you ever think you went too far? Because we get banned.

12:53 Can’t go too far. Two days later we sold out. We were at Wembley, which we’re back at in a few days. Two days, first time I think in 37 years. When we played Wembley last night, the ticket price was £1.50 because we just made a t-shirt up for the original ticket.

13:12 So England was, and it had, it was the only place in the world with paparazzi. They didn’t exist. There was no system in the early days in America or anywhere else to get out your story in a picture and control it. Here they had Fleet Street. It was called Fleet Street.

13:32 And Fleet Street was all these photographers. Guys like Terry… Sorry Terry, I can’t remember your name, but he’s a genius. Like independent photographer. Yeah, who you could call up, like I would call up Terry.

13:48 And I’d say, I need Al, I have a new album coming. I need a shot around the world. What are we going to do? And one time he’d say, fly to London, bring that Cyclops with you, and come through customs. Al was holding the hand of the Cyclops.

14:04 Because in those days there was no problem. So we flew to England. We got off the plane. We walked, the guy put on the uniform. Al walked out with his hand.

14:12 That picture went everywhere in the world. Then we got back on the plane and went home. Or two years later he called him up. I needed it again. He said, do you have a swimming pool?

14:22 I said, yeah. He said, get a shark. Get a plastic shark. I’ll be there in two days. So he came out and he put Alice in the swimming pool with the shark.

14:32 And George came out that week. And we made news week and time and people we made everywhere. So you’re hijacking the media. You ride the wave. You just ride the wave.

14:44 George was going to be a wave. Make Alice the face of that wave. And make Alice the face of kids angst. Just like the Who did. Except they did it through their song, but My Generation.

14:59 It’s classic for, I mean it’s just Frank Sinatra was a doper. No one would listen. Your parents told you not to go see him. That’s the way the world works. Same thing works in a restaurant. Exactly the same.

15:14 You go to a restaurant now that’s hot. And many of them don’t take reservations. They have communal tables where you sit with other people. Could you imagine when we were young going to a communal table? Would there be anything worse in life?

15:31 No. And waiting in line to do it. And waiting in line to do it? We hated it. So they love it.

15:37 Okay. It’s everything in the, that’s the way it works. Like marketing basic DNA. I think it’s the kids who don’t rebel against their parents that end up being the ones who kill people or do something crazy. It’s a natural evolution of that separation from your parents.

15:57 So as a marketer I could see that. And it was very easy for us to take advantage of it because that was the way it leaned anyway. And no one else was doing what you were doing. Nobody else was really consciously doing it. They were doing it unconsciously hurting themselves.

16:19 So, you know, Jim Morrison would fall off the stage. So he was so fucked up that kids loved him. Because, you know, they had that image where Janis Joplin was a drunk. And Rolling Stones, I remember my parents saying, they read that one of them urinated on a gas station. If you go see them, you know, Alice got thrown out of school for growing his hair long like the Beatles.

16:48 Thousands of kids in America got thrown out of school for wearing their hair like the Beatles. So, you know, it’s just part of life. Right, but you made a conscious decision to do it as opposed to Jim Morrison who was enjoying himself. And what do you remember about that gig in Wembley back in the early 70s when Alice was there? And how has this place changed and how have you changed?

17:13 Yeah, it’s interesting question. It was a really good gig. I don’t remember it specifically, the gig. I remember everything leading up to the gig. My memory is sort of isolated.

17:26 But I remember it was really exciting. But in those days, it was all moving so fast. It was such a, and there weren’t resources. You know, think about $1.50 as the top price for Wembley. Wembley held, I think, 12,000 people in that configuration, maybe 10,000 people.

17:45 So the gross was 15,000 pounds, the gross. So an artist would make maybe 5,000 pounds. Hotels, trucks, because you still don’t need all that stuff. You got to eat, you got to sleep, you have to get there. So life was a constant hustle to get to the next thing, have enough money to pay this, do that.

18:10 That was sort of my focus. So once the show came, my job was I’m backstage on the office trying to figure out how to bounce a check on somebody while they’re doing the show. So you didn’t have anything to lose. You were like, let’s go. We had nothing to lose.

18:26 And that probably is why also you can make those big bodacious bets. And you said earlier, you can never go too far. You can’t go too far. I mean, you can go too far in things in life. I don’t think you can’t.

18:37 With what I was doing with Alice, you couldn’t go too far. I mean, we could have hurt somebody that we would never do. Right. But never anything too audacious. Yeah, you couldn’t get too out there.

18:47 The more out there, the better. And this press helped you back in the States as well. Yeah, not as much as we would have thought, but it did. Okay. You, still working with Alice, almost 50 years, 47 years.

19:00 Fifty years. Fifty years working together. All on a handshake. Can you talk about that concept of just doing business on a handshake and do you think everybody should do business that way? Yeah, no, it’s, you know, my entire career with my artists, I never signed contracts.

19:23 But I never would do business with a third party for my artists without a contract, unless I really knew them well. So I think for what my job was and the way that I wanted to do my job, I couldn’t have them obligated to be with me. They had to be with me because they trusted me and believed me. And I was very cocky in my abilities. And just dance to a different drummer, you know.

20:02 I love the resources and the lifestyle my business gives me, but I was never willing to compromise for the money. And that’s really what you have a contract for. Right. It’s when that moment comes when, you know, it’s not working and you still want to get paid. In my case I didn’t.

20:20 I was very happy. You know, I didn’t have many artists I ended with, but when I did I didn’t want to. I had a, maybe a false ego about I don’t need to take it. You know, I just, so it got in the way. It always felt to me like it got in the way.

20:38 I would hear so many artists talk about, I’m mad at your shit, I have three more years with him. He’s, I never wanted to be that guy. You know, you don’t want to be with me, just tell me. It’s all good. It’s all beautiful.

20:52 Because a contract, in your opinion, makes you make the wrong decisions at the wrong times. It can. I mean, what it does too is it also brings in more lawyers and I was very, I didn’t like the whole lawyer thing. And aggravation, I wasn’t in this for aggravation. You know, I went through one lawsuit early in my life with Alice’s record company, and that’s not what I’m on the planet for, is to go, you know, do that stuff.

21:15 So anything I could do in my own personal life to avoid it, I was really happy to not have that cloud the issue. Okay. And then that effect was to build long-term brand value by making those right decisions in the moment. For that moment and not because you had to be there. Right.

21:34 And what I did really outrageous stuff with all my art, you know, that they wouldn’t let me do it. It’s pretty nuts. So I wanted them always to feel free like they could just, you know, because not everything works. You only hear about the stuff that works. I put so many people in positions.

21:52 Oh, my God. You said the key to your and Alice’s relationship was that you both, well, he gave you the opportunity to fail. Yeah. And that was a big thing. Big thing.

22:05 Can you explain that concept? I think you can’t, you almost, I don’t know anyone who’s been successful who doesn’t have the, who hasn’t failed and had the ability to fail. And I think, you know, for safe doesn’t work in marketing, in what I do, you know, which is smoke and mirrors to some extent. When I say that, you can’t sell something that doesn’t work. If Alice didn’t have talent, it would have gone up and come down.

22:46 You can’t make shit out of Shinola, as they say. And I love Shinola. What is Shinola, by the way? Shinola is a new brand, the watch brand. It was a shoe shine.

22:57 It was a shoe polish. Okay. And it just became a saying, you can’t make shit out of Shinola. Right. So the talent was there, eventually, with Alice.

23:08 But you do smoke and mirrors, which meant you’re still, you’re a showman. Yeah. Okay. But you have to have that opportunity to fail to be a great showman. Yeah, to do stuff.

23:16 I mean, you know, I think I tell, and I don’t know if I tell it in the movie or the book or something, the canon story with Alice. Yeah. But that’s such a classic example of, so it didn’t work. It was, how am I putting it, you know? I can tell for your audience.

23:32 Yeah, tell us the story. Because that’s a perfect example of this. Yeah, it’s a perfect example. So I booked for Alice’s first stadium show. 60,000 people.

23:43 Pittsburgh Three Rivers Stadium. And this was big at the time. Not many people were doing it. No one had ever played a stadium. The Beatles had played Shea Stadium.

23:50 Wow. That was it. 60,000. Yeah. 1972, we did the biggest tour.

23:56 There’s a book out about the tours of 72. We were the number one tour, Led Zeppelin number two, The Who was number three. Wow. So this was his moment. It was a frenzy.

24:06 Every town we went to, they tried to ban us. The City Council would try and ban us. Every town we went through, the ASPCA would show up to demand we didn’t use a snake or not kill a chicken. Well, that’s animal protection units. Yeah.

24:20 So we had picketers. Okay. More free press from the show. No, no, no. So that’s why it was gigantic.

24:25 Okay. And this is why it’s hard for you to remember things. Yeah. Because it was just so crazy. Crazy.

24:30 The pedal was to the metal. It was crazy. I’d be going to City Council meetings, Binghamton City Councils that pleased Mike Chase. Because you’re loving every minute of it. But I wanted him to turn us down.

24:40 Okay. Because if they said yes, that was horrible. Okay. So we booked the first day at him, and I’m thinking, okay, what would Alice Cooper do at a baseball stadium? We’d have to do something that nobody else would do.

24:57 It’s Alice Cooper. Right. Because it’s not obvious what he would do in such a big crowd. Yeah. What would he do at a baseball stadium?

25:03 On stage was what? Well, we were chopping up baby dolls, getting executed. Getting electrified at that point? At that point, I think we started hanging them. Hanging them?

25:14 Yeah. With the gallows. He told a story on Marin about hanging, and the hanging went wrong. Yeah. Oh, God.

25:20 Yeah. But thanks to you. Yeah. Yeah. Oops.

25:26 Oh, my God. What can I do? Wait a second. Baseball stadium. I’m going to shoot them out of a cannon.

25:32 Across the stadium. So you’re just a mad scientist in the background. You’re just kind of spending quiet moments. A lot of dope. Taking some acid.

25:39 Taking some acid. And just being alone, probably, and thinking with them. Alone a lot. And just coming up with these brainstorming things. And getting, you know, trying to go as far out as I could and look back.

25:49 So I would look back and I’d, okay, we’re in the baseball stadium. Hanging is small. You know, in those screens or anything in those days. Right. What can I do that’s big enough?

26:00 What do I do that’s big? Visualizing the whole thing. I’m in the stadium. It’s the end of the show. Can’t do fireworks at that time.

26:07 They wouldn’t let them in stadiums. What do I do big? Wait a second. What if I do this gigantic drum roll? You know, get like 20 drummers.

26:18 Get them in a cannon. Make it really dramatic. Huge blast. Shoot them out across the stadium. And have them show up at the other side of the stadium.

26:29 Like triumph. But that’s what Alice Cooper would do. Have you seen this in a circus? Circus, yeah. Madison Square Garden in a circus.

26:36 They shot the… Okay. They used to shoot the midgets out of the cannon. All right. So there was a guy who had built my props for me at Warner Brothers Film Studios.

26:47 We were Warner Brothers Records. Okay, so you could just go to the film studio and say help me out. They hooked me up. So I go to the guy who built our gallows. And the guy with the little half glasses at a desk.

26:57 The drafting desk. Maybe 65. I was 20. And I, Bob, whatever his name was, said thank you. The gallows was fantastic.

27:08 Thank you so much. It was really great. I said, you know, Alice is going to be doing a baseball. He doesn’t even look up at me. He’s like, oh, thank you.

27:14 Alice is going to do a baseball stadium. I was wondering, do you think there’s any mechanism we could shoot them out of a cannon across the stadium? And he says, what period cannon? I said, what period cannon? And I said, what do you mean?

27:30 He said, you know, Confederate, World War I, World War II. I said, anything that will shoot them out. And now I’m thinking to myself, oh, my God, I got this made. And he goes to a drawer. And he literally pulls out a blueprint for a cannon to shoot Alice across the thing.

27:46 So he’s built two props for us already that both work. So in my brain, I don’t even think there’s a possibility it’s not going to work. Done. I go back and see Alice. I said, here’s what we’re going to do.

27:58 I’m going to shoot you out of a cannon. He said, you can’t shoot me out of it. He said, no, I’m going to shoot you out of a cannon. It’s fantastic. The guy at Warner Brothers said, really?

28:06 Am I going to fly it? I said, no, no. It’s a magic trick. I got it covered. It’s going to be great.

28:11 And he trusts you, so it’s cool. Yeah, it’s going to be great. But I had learned very early in our careers, we couldn’t get anywhere in LA. We had this theory if we could get parents to hate us, but we couldn’t even figure out how to get anyone to hear about us to get parents to hate us. OK.

28:33 It’s weird sometimes in your own town. Yeah, but there was no, we didn’t have money. We didn’t have a PR person. There were a million bands trying to make it. Everybody came to LA to try and make it in those days.

28:45 It was 68, 69. What can I do to piss off parents? I got it. I’ll put them on stage naked, and I’ll get them arrested for indecent exposure. And that should make the newspapers.

28:57 Five nude guys on Sunset Strip get arrested for being naked. Maybe we’ll get some space. So I go to the guys and I tell them, really? I said, I got you covered. So we get these clear plastic suits.

29:10 Maybe I’ll last $200. And no underwear. And I go to a place called The Experience. I give the guy $50 to let Alice play. And he gets on completely naked.

29:23 There’s maybe six people in the room who all leave. And in those days, there were no cell phones. It was a phone booth. If I go to a phone booth, I call 911. And I’m in a club, The Experience, on Sunset.

29:35 I have my 14-year-old girl with me here. This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. There’s five naked guys who are all fags on the stage. Because in those days, I got the police. You said that word.

29:48 And they got all… Oh, no, they went crazy. They were on stage. My daughter, this is the most disgusting thing. And hold on, sir.

29:57 And I could hear her beep. Is anybody near? And I hear sirens. I put the phone down. I come out.

30:06 The police come running into the club. The clear plastic had fogged up from the heat of their bodies playing. He couldn’t see anything. So the police left. So that night, I learned to have to rehearse.

30:19 That was my lesson. Okay. What a great lesson. That was my lesson. Cheap lesson.

30:24 So I put three shows together to rehearse the canon. Okay. How big’s the canon? 40 feet long. I think it was five-ton.

30:34 It had its own 40-foot truck. Gigantic. And the first stage we played, because a baseball stadium, we could build a big stage, but it was Flint, Michigan, and a theater. I think the whole stage was 42 feet. So it went straight.

30:50 And the way I staged it was lights go out, torches get lit, the drummer goes to a snare drum around his neck, Alice goes in the canon, crawls in the canon first. Once he crawls in the canon, the lights go down, the things… And he’s marching towards the canon, up the steps, because it’s high. To the fuse. While that’s happening, Alice is crawled out and he’s being driven around to the back of the hall.

31:29 Because the gag is it’s a dummy. You give it enough time to get around, you shoot the dummy, and then he appears. And it’s far distance. He has to be driven over there. So he gets in.

31:44 They light the fuse. Huge explosion. The spotlight hits the front of the canon. The dummy comes out maybe two inches. Like it flops down.

31:59 Alice can’t see it, but there’s no reaction from the audience. And now he’s up there, and there’s nothing. Nobody’s turned their head around to even see it. He goes back, he said, did that work? And I said, maybe the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

32:14 I said, what are we going to do? And I made the rookie mistake of advertising. See Alice get shot out of the canon. I was so sure this guy was going to pull it off. So now we’re on the air.

32:24 I had the whole city where I sold out 60,000 people. I said, what are we going to do? I said, I’ll figure it out. I go to sleep. I’ll figure something out.

32:32 So you recover from that show. There’s nothing you can do with that show. There’s nothing you can do. So I would go back to the hotel. In the hotel, they have fire extinguishers and glass on every floor.

32:43 So I open one up and I take it out, and it’s a foam one. Turn it upside down, you get white foam. So I get the crew. We pick up every fire extinguisher in the hotel. And Alice shows up the next day.

32:54 What are we going to do? I said, I got it. It’s going to be fantastic. You get on it. I said, I put two little balls down on the side with air.

33:02 It’s now a giant penis. The canon is a penis. Now it’s a penis. You get on it and masturbate it. Lick it.

33:08 Love it. Just go crazy on it. Make love to this thing. And this foam’s going to fly out like 200 feet. Cover the first 30, 40 rows and come.

33:18 It’ll be fantastic. And he really? Trust me, it’s going to be fantastic. So I get to the end of the show. He gets on it.

33:27 He’s rubbing it. He’s licking it. He worked so hard. It drops out one inch. There isn’t a person in the place who has any idea what he’s doing or what we’re doing.

33:36 But this is how he can see it. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I said, you have no idea. I was watching. It’s worse than you can even imagine.

33:45 What are we going to do? And he’s not getting mad at you. Oh, no. Never one second of anything. You said you’ve never had an argument with him.

33:53 We’ve had disagreements, but not one. He never, never, never one second of what are you doing in me here? Anything. What are we going to do? I said, I’ll figure it out, but I’ll figure it out.

34:04 Back in the hotel room, get the LSD out. Back in the hotel room. What the fuck am I going to do? Excuse me. What am I going to do with this thing?

34:12 We’ll show it the next day. He says, what are we doing? And I said, well, you know that little overnight bag that I had your assistant take? And he said, yeah. I said, I have a feeling.

34:22 I’m not sure, but I have a feeling the cannon’s going to blow up tonight when you’re in it. And you may have to spend the night in the hospital. He said, you’re kidding. I said, I’m not kidding. He said, am I going to get hurt?

34:34 And I said, I don’t think so, but I can’t guarantee 100%. I have no other choice. It’s the only thing we can do. I said, we’ve got 60,000 people. And he said, what are we going to do?

34:44 I said, I’m going to blow you up. You’re going to go to the hospital. We’re going to do a news conference from the hospital back to Pittsburgh, saying there may not be a show. There may be a show. And then you’re going to go do the show, but you’ll do it from a wheelchair with blood and nurses and doctors.

34:58 And we’re going to pull this thing off. It’s going to be fantastic. And we did. And the show went off. We took two of the roadies, and we dressed them as doctors, and they did a news conference outside the hospital.

35:11 And it worked. The headline the next day was that only Alice Cooper would go from the hospital bed to do the show in a wheelchair for the city of Pittsburgh. So it was better than the cannon ever could have been. Ever could have been. But when you live on the edge, you’ve got to fail sometimes.

35:36 Right. And hope it’s not publicly. But I’ve had a few. But you know, when I did For Women Only with Teddy, every person in his life thought of the firemen. Record company.

35:50 Your career’s over. Radio stations will never play you again if you say these concerts are for women only. Right. It’s Teddy Pendergrass back in the day, and you said we’re going to do women only concerts. And everybody.

36:02 His lawyer said, I’m going to resign if you do this. It’s a civil rights issue. You’re never going to get over this. I had everybody. Promote is freaking out.

36:11 And Teddy just was saying to me, is it going to work? I said, this is going to work. This is going to work. And he said, go for it. And he just stood up to everybody.

36:21 But I think if I had had a contract with him, it might have been different. Okay. Maybe you would have made a different decision? No, I think he would. He might have made it.

36:30 He would have felt that he had to do it. And when you have to do it, it’s weird. They all came to sort of expect it from me. Okay. How did the women only shows come?

36:39 Greatest thing ever. I was trying to think about that this morning. I was like… Oh, my God. It was the greatest thing ever.

36:44 And we gave out. Explain Teddy to people so they know they know him. Teddy was the Black Elvis. He actually, his last show was in England before his accident. He was just on the edge of the Black Elvis.

36:58 Women went crazy for him. They went crazy. But his audience was basically an Afro-American audience. He hadn’t moved over to the white audience. And I wanted every white woman in the world to see what was going on.

37:14 So how do I tell the story of being a Black Elvis without being arrogant? How do you say that? How do you say it, you know? And so my first thought was, wait a second. Let me make the point by just being in a room, just letting women come in the room.

37:34 So I have a snapshot. Women will say, holy shit. And then I said, well, how do I do that without being arrogant but being really sexy? And everything I tried, every time I put a picture of him in the ad, it was horrible. It was like this arrogant guy saying, I’m the coolest guy in the world.

37:54 And then one day it sort of hit me from a drunken news state of putting a teddy bear in the ad with a little note saying, come spend the night with me. Love teddy. Make it really soft and cuddly. And then we gave our chocolate teddy bear lollipops to every woman so they could lick him and chew him and eat him. During the show.

38:18 And they sold out and they were fantastic. Really defined who it was. Because it was like a cult around those shows and word spread. Were you at those shows? Oh yeah.

38:28 What were they like? They were frenzied. Because the women was watching. New York was really interesting because all the pimps were outside. So it was really weird.

38:38 It was almost threatening. There were a lot of guys who were a little pissed off. But it was a lot of fur coats, a lot of big hats. Because their girls were watching? No, because they dropped their girls off.

38:52 And they were sort of pissed. That’s intense. All the other ones were just normal shows. And what was it like on the inside with the frenzy? Pantheys on the stage crying, screaming, people taking off bras.

39:07 Because their men weren’t watching them. They could do whatever they want. It was all women. They had one of the greatest times of their lives. They could let loose.

39:15 It was like kidding me. So tell me, how does a nice Jewish kid from Long Island get into the entertainment business? I have no idea. Mine was completely by chance. For my artist, everything is very planned.

39:34 For me, nothing at all. I’m not a music guy. It wasn’t like I have to be in the music business. I probably haven’t listened to an album in 30 years. It’s just not my thing.

39:50 I became a manager because it was a cover for selling drugs. I went to LA as a probation officer. And it lasted one day. And in college, I was a dealer. And I checked in on a motel at night.

40:09 After my one day as a probation officer, I heard a girl screaming. I thought, I had just come from a jail. I was at Los Padrino’s juvenile hall, which was a jail. That’s where I was assigned. So maybe she was getting raped.

40:25 And I ran down to help her and separated her. She punched me. She was actually making love, not getting raped. And when I went down in the morning, it was Janis Joplin. And she was sitting with…

40:39 Can she punch? Yeah, pretty good. It looks like… It cut my lip. She was sitting with Jimi Hendrix.

40:45 And the Chambers brothers. And Jim Morrison. I think a couple of guys maybe from Creedence Clearwater. And she introduced me. And I was very embarrassed at first.

41:00 But then my mind said, oh my God, this is the greatest customers in the world for my drug dealing business. How lucky did I get? Because they consume a lot and know people that do. And have money. And they live in the same place I live.

41:15 I had checked in that night. So they became customers. And we all became friends. And one point Jimi Hendrix… I was, as you said, a middle class Jew from Long Island.

41:27 And Hendrix said to me, or Lester Chambers said, I started making some money. I’ve maybe been there seven, eight weeks. Started making some money. What were you selling? I was selling acid.

41:39 Just acid? Just acid. Maybe some hash. Okay. Basically acid.

41:44 Started making some money. Didn’t have transportation. Saw her on a street somewhere for $800 or $600. A 1954 Cadillac Limousine Black. It was the one with the tail.

41:58 And I bought it for some crazy reason. And I had a partner, Joe Greenberg, and the two of us bought it. And when Jimi said it, he said, what are you going to tell the police? Where you got the money to buy a limousine if they stopped you. You going to tell them you’re a drug dealer?

42:15 And they said, no one ever stopped me. I’m a middle class Jew. They don’t stop middle class Jews. And he said, well, us, they stop. And he said, you need a front.

42:26 And he turned to Lester Chambers and he said, do you still have those kids in your basement from Phoenix? And Lester said, yeah. And Jimi said, would you give them $10 a week if they say you manage them and then you have a front? And I said, yeah, absolutely. So Lester walked in and said, I found the Jew to manage you.

42:43 It’ll give you $10 a week. And that was Alice Cooper. And you didn’t even want to manage it first. I loved the fact that everyone walked out on them and they weren’t known because I wouldn’t have to work. They were a front.

42:59 I didn’t want to abandon them. I didn’t know what a manager even did. And when they brought me a second act, they brought me Pink Floyd. Jimi brought in Pink Floyd. And he said, you’ve got to have more than one act.

43:12 This is the greatest manager. He’s going to get you gigs everywhere. When they left the room, Jimi wanted a gig. That’s how much I knew. So I don’t know.

43:28 It was amazing. What was Jimi like? Jimi was great. He was happy in his own world. I got to know the Chambers brothers the best.

43:40 They were the most successful. Jimi just wanted to be with a girl and get a buzz and play his guitar. Chambers brothers, those were the ones that I really interacted with. Even to this day, Lester, I like to think is a really good friend. I know his kids.

43:57 I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them. How much did the drugs affect the culture then, as in it was kind of an LSD and maybe a marijuana culture before the cocaine came in? Did it change how people related to each other? I would say the biggest change was the awareness that there were consequences. None of us had any awareness of consequences.

44:18 It was all fun and game. Keith Moon would get so drunk he couldn’t walk. That was funny. None of us ever thought about livers, dying of alcoholism, drunk driving. Same thing with sex.

44:33 There was no age. Sex was the – there were no consequences. Nobody – we knew it OD’d on drugs. You got too high. You got a little fucked up.

44:46 I think the biggest change came when we all started to say, holy shit, there’s consequences to this. There were real consequences. That was probably at the end of the 70s. For me, it was the biggest change. I abused past that point.

45:05 But I think that’s when the mood changed from it becoming a whim to a way of life. Is that because the drugs got harder? I don’t think because people started dying. For us, it was all a joke. It was a big party.

45:29 Then all of a sudden Janice died at the hotel. And then Jimmy died. Then Jim Morrison died. Then Jimi Hendrix died. Then all of the people who were sitting in the room getting high with you are not there anymore.

45:42 Holy shit. We did this to ourselves. And that’s when I think the light bulb sort of went on. And it was about that time when harder drugs came into. So I don’t think it stopped people.

45:57 But it moved them from joyful drugs to a race to do more drugs. Does that make any sense? I don’t know if that even makes sense. So there was a race to do more drugs as in those late 70s. It was something else.

46:15 It wasn’t a happy thing anymore. Everybody was so happy in the 70s. It was just a happy group. There’s been movies about that. I think it was maybe the movie Hotel California about the Eagles.

46:26 I was just talking about how the drugs, the LSD and marijuana, was more about let’s be happy, let’s come together. And the cocaine was more about it’s about me, it’s about me. And then the music changed. I mean, do you subscribe to that? Or is it not that simple?

46:37 I don’t think it’s that simple, but definitely. You know, generally everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Cocaine was a very difficult drug. It was the first one that was really addictive.

46:49 And then alongside of it, the heroin was there. You know, marijuana never was really addictive, acid was never addictive. Robitussin, people would drink if they wanted to go in that direction. But cocaine, heroin, they became victims rather than perpetrators. Did Jim Morrison die of a heroin overdose?

47:10 No, drunk. It was drunk. I believe he was drunk. The thing with the problem with cocaine is that sometimes you don’t know it’s addictive and it’s got a psychological side and then you just lean on it all the time. But in some ways it’s worse than heroin because it’s like not as obvious or you’re not shooting it and you’re probably seeing it just kill people.

47:28 I mean, they’re all tough. Heroin was the only drug that I couldn’t tell if someone was on it. Okay. I had really good friends who for 20, 30 years were heroin addicts who I had no idea. Wow.

47:46 And I could pretty much, I’m very in tune to that stuff, but at least I guess I’m not but I like to think I am. Right. And that’s one if you have resources and can afford good stuff for whatever reason you choose to do it. That’s the one that seems you can hide. Cocaine you can’t hide.

48:04 Right. Everybody’s jumping in nuts. Yeah. But heroin you can hide. You probably lost people to that too.

48:14 Everything. It’s dangerous. You have a, I think sit your clients down or at least you used to in the beginning and said, fame is it’s going to kill you. You have this whole kind of a talk and you know you’ve seen Janis go and Jimmy go and Jim Morrison go. Can you tell me what you tell people and what you mean by that?

48:32 Yeah. What I would tell them is that if you’re sitting in this chair in front of me it’s because you are an overachiever that you’ve really given up just about everything in your life to get famous, to get to fame. It doesn’t happen for anybody naturally. So I know just because you’re sitting in the chair my filter system is pretty good. And the one thing I can tell you is that whatever drove you to want that fame so bad isn’t going to get fixed by the fame.

49:18 Whatever that hole is that’s driving you, it’s going to be there. And after you get enough times of 20,000 people telling you you’re great the moment’s going to come when you’re going to have to look in the mirror and you’re going to have to face it. And sometimes it will kill you. Sometimes it will wound you. Sometimes maybe you’ll deal with it and get over it.

49:44 But I know that you don’t get to this place without having an amazing amount of lack of self-worth that drives you to get other people to tell you how great you are. And it doesn’t solve whatever is driving you for that. It’s not going to give you. So that’s just the way it is. It doesn’t mean you stop what you’re doing, but be aware of it.

50:14 I’ve seen people survive. Alice did rehab a couple of times and came through it. Michael Douglas, good friend, rehab a couple of times has come through it. I don’t know of any examples of people who have become really famous who haven’t taken a hard fall. Not because of the fame itself, but because of the motivation that drives them to the fame is usually some empty self-worth issue because the amount of rejection you have to go through to get to the place of an Alice or a Michael or any of these people is unnatural.

50:55 The rejection is overwhelming on a constant basis until you make it. And even after you make it, the rejection. Every actor, no matter how big they are, is scared they’ll never get another movie. It’s that thing. So that was my caution to everyone.

51:12 I’m not going to solve your problem. I’m going to get you famous. I have nothing to do with what haunts you at night. Does the fame magnify those problems? I think it takes you to an end road where you finally realize you can fool yourself thinking that getting 20,000 people to Florida is going to give you self-worth.

51:32 But at some point when it gets big enough and you become famous enough, you’re going to have that moment of realizing it’s not, and that’s when it’s dangerous. That’s when the overdoses, that’s when the constant drunk, that’s when it becomes really dangerous. So when you look at someone like Janice, that’s clear as day to you, what was happening? So she’s on stage. It’s a combination of self-worth.

51:58 Why are they applauding me? I’m worthless. At the same time wanting it and being confused by it and driving harder on it. The rejection, when you see a famous person, you only see the fame. The rejection that they have to go through on a daily basis to get to the point that they’re at where you’re aware of them is overwhelming on every level.

52:27 Now we’re starting to, it’s coming out sexually with women. But just think about the women’s stories talking about what happened to them when they went to see a producer and they keep going back to see the producers. Now who does that in life? Only because you’re driven. That’s what we get you to keep going back.

52:55 I bet you it happened to a hundred times to some of these actresses. Yet they go back. That’s an unnatural, that’s unnatural. That’s something driving you that’s weird. And that’s the path of every star is rejection.

53:20 I used to tell young kids when they would come to me, like my parents, my friends, kids or someone, embrace every rejection because it’s getting you one closer to what you want. So embrace the rejections because it’s like every movie is a ten year script process. They tell you the same thing with every guru. If you’re in the public eye, it’s constant rejection, manipulation. People would want sex, want this, want that, want something, faking, fooling, using power, false God, all that nonsense.

54:04 So something drives you to accept that because you never know if you’re going to make it or not. And then now when you make it, you’re playing in front of 20,000 people, yes men coming up everywhere. You have the money now to do whatever you want. You’re the same schmuck in the mirror. And you look in the mirror.

54:23 And now you have to go inside and now try to fix that broken kid. And Shep is saying this is what I was talking about. And that makes it even more impossible to do that with all those circumstances. And so some people pull it off and most don’t. Everybody takes a fall. Some get back up.

54:42 So you’re in the entertainment business, you’re in the business of slowly killing people. Does that bother you sometimes? That part of it’s never really bothering me because I do it. You’re going to die. And they’re complicit. They want it.

54:59 Everybody’s going to die. Bring your dream alive. But be aware of it. Be aware of what you’re doing. That was my job, was to make them aware of it.

55:10 If after I tell you that you want to take the ride, that’s your choice but I’m not going to take you on the ride knowing where it’s ending without telling you where it’s ending. And no one ever refused the ride. Ever. Of course not. How are you enjoying the ride of fame?

55:33 I’m really enjoying it. At first it was very difficult. You were a very behind the scenes man before this. And I have gigantic self worth issues. I mean I have gigantic overwhelming self worth issues.

55:48 Okay. Can you explain? You know I’ve never done the hard work to really try and figure out why. But if I had to talk in front of a hundred people today by myself, head to toe I’d be filled with sweat. I remember the first time I ever did a public talk was I had to introduce a Dalai Lama.

56:09 And I wore a green suit. And by the time I got up to do the introduction it was black. Like the sweat had turned all like gigantic. So I only do moderated talks. Okay.

56:25 Rather than deal with the issue. For me, of why, why am I like this? Why do I have? I just, for me it’s easier to say, okay it’s there. How do I get around it?

56:39 I only do moderated talks. Moderated talks I love. Like doing this. Yeah. I love them.

56:44 Easy. Yeah. But we have to be up in front of stage. You believe that is a self worth issue that makes you nervous. Completely.

56:49 Okay. Oh. It’s like, what else? I mean it’s so obvious. If you’re standing in front of 500 people and you’re sweating from head to toe and nervous and stuttering, what else could it be?

57:00 It’s the only thing that changes your thought about yourself. Right. You know? So when I, when my name that’s super mentioned in the movie, I heard people would say to me, I hear they’re doing a documentary. What’s the name?

57:16 And I couldn’t even look them in the eyes. I’d go, super mentioned the legend of Shep Gordon. Like that. And. Because you didn’t think you were super.

57:26 Yeah. No. It’s very tough. That’s a tough, that was really tough for me. And then when we started showing the movie, I would, I got so much attention.

57:35 That was really tough. And then it turned somewhere. And it, it, I changed. It didn’t change, but I started to accept it as this love from people. And it really, I do these things now and I’m ten feet tall.

57:51 I get, I’m so filled with their love. Right. That it’s, I’ve turned to be, I’m really proud of it now. Okay. And now it’s very, now I can, I really look you in the eye and I’m proud that I can see the effect that has on people.

58:04 Right. So first you maybe felt like a celebrity and you didn’t know why people are stopping me recognizing that. Yeah. I still don’t know why, but I see the effect that has on them. And then.

58:12 And I’m really joyful about that. Okay. You’re making it about them, not about you. Yeah. If it was about me, I’d still be a nerd.

58:18 I remember when I heard your movie coming out years ago and I was like, Mike Myers is making a documentary. That was weird in itself. Weird, yeah. And then I’m like, about who’s this guy? Yeah.

58:29 And so it was such a weird project. But he got you at a, he got you at a nice low moment, right? Yeah. Can you just speak a little bit about how and why that happened? Yeah.

58:40 The mic was great. I met Mike first on Waze World. Right. And. I’m doing business with him.

58:46 I had to do business with him. I had to be, I want to put this, I had to be less than honest with him. Which is not necessarily my style. He wanted Alice in Waze World. And he wanted one of his hits, School’s Outer 18.

59:09 And in those days, if you had a soundtrack record, radio always played soundtracks. It was Rocky and Saturday Night. You know, soundtracks were gigantic. If you had a movie behind it. When I got the call, I said, I need this for Alice.

59:27 And then I saw the thing, and it’s at school. That’s why I talked to the producer. And I said, what about a new song from the album? He said, absolutely not. Mike said, no new song.

59:36 It’s got to be that song. So I said to myself, well, if I stretch this out long enough, he’s got no choice. So I just, I would take two days to return a call. I would just do stuff that wasn’t in my character. And it got to be about five days before shooting.

59:58 And I said, well, that was my moment. So I called up, and I said, listen. I’m not going to work. We got to do Feed My Frankenstein. They called me back.

1:00:10 Mike is furious. He’s not going to do it. He wants to meet you immediately on the set. I had never met him. I went down to the set.

1:00:17 And I walked in. I said, listen, I lied. I’m Alice’s manager, Chef. I just want you to know, eyeball to eyeball. I lied to you.

1:00:23 You say that straight up. Yeah. Have you used this technique before? I hadn’t before, because I don’t usually lie. OK.

1:00:29 But I said, you know, my job is to take care of him. And I need Feed My Frankenstein, the new single in the movie, where the movie doesn’t have value to us. But I know what you want. I know you want schools out of 18. The scene in the movie where he’s playing is maybe five seconds.

1:00:51 Give me that five seconds, and I’ll give you the song for free for the end credits, if you want. And he thought about it for a minute and said, OK, I’m in. For free? You didn’t have to do that. That was a good deal for him.

1:01:03 So then I didn’t see him. A couple of years went by, and the movie had huge impact. The record was a mid-sized hit because of the movie. And I’m not worthy. It became, you know, part of the culture.

1:01:17 Part of Alice’s brand. Yeah. And so a fella named Rob Roth, who was the director of Beauty on the Beast on Broadway and had directed some of Alice’s shows as a big fan, called me up and said, Mike Myers is at the Four Seasons.

1:01:35 Oh, great. So I called the Four Seasons. They didn’t have a register, but I know the people there. So I got his alias, and I wrote a note and sent it over to the hotels I was doing. I don’t remember if I was opening Planet Hollywood that way.

1:01:51 For some reason, I had Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Whoopi Goldberg at the house. So I sent him a note, and I said, do you want to come over? In Hawaii. Yeah. I said, do you want to come over for dinner?

1:02:03 And Whoopi and all are going to be there. And he got the note. He was like, get this guy out of his body. I got to go see him. And he came, and they were there.

1:02:12 And we started a little bit of friendship. Mike is keeps the fences around them pretty good. He has to. He’s so janky. Everybody wants a piece of him.

1:02:26 Is that true about any Hollywood star? More than most. His impact has been, his characters are so strong that they all want to play off it. They all want an Austin Powers moment or a Wayne’s World moment. Everybody’s got a story.

1:02:41 So he then called me up, said he was coming back to Hawaii, that I know a place he could rent. And I got him a place next door. I had a guest house next door, so I gave him my guest house. And that started this really nice relationship. And Mike is an avid reader and historian.

1:03:04 He knows military history probably better than our four-star general. He’s a real student of everything. And he loved my stories. So we started to get this rhythm. And then he lost his father, and he came over for about a month and spent some time with me.

1:03:23 But this rhythm started where he would come to the house, and on his hand, he’d have an ink name. They’d go, okay, Charlie Chaplin. And I would tell him a Charlie Chaplin story. Okay, Albert Finney. You can’t have an Albert Finney story, and I’d tell him a great Albert Finney story.

1:03:40 And I think in three or four years, there were probably two or three names I didn’t have stories for, but I made them up. Not to disappoint them. And he kept saying, we’ve got to preserve this stuff. We’ve got to document this. These are the greatest stories.

1:03:56 And because of my self-worth stuff, the last thing I really wanted was, you know, I really like my quarter, Mike. Thank you. It’s beautiful. But he was really insistent. He pounded away.

1:04:09 And a lot of people through the years had been pounding at me to do it. But I didn’t really have a desire. And I ended up in the hospital. I had flatlined a couple of times and came out of it. I was alone in the room.

1:04:24 There was nobody in the room. I was just coming out of the fog, and the phone rang, and it was Mike. And he said, how are you? And I said, I have no idea. I haven’t seen the doctor yet, but I’m alive.

1:04:37 And he said, well, before you see the doctor, I have a question. I said, you want to do the movie now? And I was feeling so sorry for myself. I’m like in this empty room with these tubes coming out and all this shit. Yeah, yeah, let’s do the movie.

1:04:54 And then about three or four weeks later, I called him up. I said, did we talk? He said, yeah. I said, did I say do the movie? He said, yeah.

1:05:03 I said, I didn’t mean it. I was really drugged down. He said, too late. I staffed up. And he spent the next year and a half of his life and his own money putting it together.

1:05:18 I must like you a lot. Amazing. Real love letter. I mean, I’m very humbled by it. It’s really beautiful.

1:05:23 Is he returning all the great things you did for him? Because you really gave him a place to be when he was having a tough time. Is it that? I think, I mean, it’s hard for me to get into his brain, and I think it’s a story he wanted to tell about a good side to Hollywood. I think the other stuff was frosting on the cake.

1:05:56 That’s my sense, anyway, because he kept going there. You know, the title, Superman. And it’s like a love letter. I mean, it’s so wonderful to have someone who loves you that much. Yeah.

1:06:09 It’s amazing. Really amazing. It is. It was that process you said at first, hard being a celebrity, but you’ve kind of made terms with it, and now you see that the love is in the room. Yeah, I love it.

1:06:19 It makes everybody better. Yeah, I really love it. Great way to reframe that. Yeah. You could have not done that.

1:06:24 Yeah. I mean, that’s a pretty good accomplishment. No, no. And I love being on stage in a moderated talk. Okay.

1:06:31 I come to life. Okay. I’m more, it’s amazing, and I love to listen to myself what I’m saying, because I don’t know the questions beforehand. Okay. And it’s also like psychotherapy for me, because I don’t really delve into myself too much.

1:06:46 So a lot of these things, they make me look inside to give the answer, because I try and be always honest with the audience. Right, right. So it’s been really fun. It’s been really great. Why the book?

1:06:59 The book came about exactly the same way. Everything’s knee-jerk. I went through a book signing for Roy Choi, a great chef from L.A., who I have the utmost respect for. Real groundbreaking chef, right? Groundbreaking guy.

1:07:12 He’s amazing. He’s really, really amazing. It’s so hard to be in that chef moment that’s happening right now and not have your focus be $100 meals for rich people to really care about feeding people who can’t afford it. And he really cares. And that’s what the art form is.

1:07:41 So anyway, I love the guy. And you have a lot of time for people like that. Yeah, that’s what I have time for. I don’t have time for the other stuff. You have a term, I think, that you said they have a lot of aloha.

1:07:51 Can you explain that term? And am I getting it right in that context? Yeah, a lot of compassion and joy and thankfulness. And looking out for other humans. Looking out for other humans.

1:08:07 So he came up. Yeah, so I went through the book signing and Anthony Bourdain walked up to me. And I’m a groupie. I love meeting powerful people who’ve done something. There’s always something to get from them.

1:08:22 So Anthony came up and I’m a huge fan. He was like, hey, wow. And he said, man, I’ve been trying to meet you. He said, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. And I said, well, in what way?

1:08:35 And he said, well, you made the chefs famous. And I made myself famous by beating up the famous chefs. He said, I want to do your book. I said, I’m in. And that was it.

1:08:49 And that was it. Then you had to write a book. Yeah, then they found me someone to help me write it. And then that was really my first psychotherapy. Doing the book was the first time I really, the first pass I didn’t go deep and it just didn’t work.

1:09:08 So I threw it out and I did a second pass on it where I at least tried to figure out some, Mike always said in the movie cause and effect that that was his goal for the movie, was to figure out cause and effect. That was his, so that’s what hit me on the book. And at times it was painful, but it was a good exercise. Painful because you’re trying to relive those memories or trying to figure out why you made them. Figure out, yeah, motivation.

1:09:39 Why you did the things you did. Or why other people did. I think for me, a lot of the pain was my childhood, which was a difficult time for me. So going back to it and having to relive it in my brain was powerful and poignant and a little painful. My relationships with women, going back and looking and trying to, when I was looking, I never tried to understand it.

1:10:09 So there were all those things in life that maybe didn’t play out the way I wanted to, but I never thought about them. I had to go back and dive in deeper, really trying to tell. But I’m glad I did it. You’re kind of a father figure to Mike, I’m guessing, in some ways. I think so, yeah.

1:10:32 Did you think about your father figures and when you’re back to your childhood? Yeah. Do you think that’s been a lot of your life looking for those people? I think it’s gigantic, yeah. I mean, writing the book for me, The Revelation, was remarkable.

1:10:47 For me, the big takeaway was I loved my father. I loved my father. The kind of love that, you know, people probably only have for their fathers and mothers and kids, and I don’t have children of my own, so I don’t know. But, you know, I could think of just the happiest moments of my life would be having my head on my father’s shoulder watching TV. I loved them.

1:11:15 He was a very quiet man. He rarely spoke. He was very passive with the world. Never drove a car. That was too aggressive for him.

1:11:29 A very gentle soul. And I always thought of him. I would feel sorry for him that he was so weak, that my mother would bully him, that he didn’t have any life whatsoever. I maybe met one of his friends once. We’d get up early, take the train to the city, get back home late at night.

1:11:53 The only thing I ever would see him do for himself. He never bought clothes. He never spent a dime on himself. He’d take me to play golf once a week, and I always thought of him as this man that I loved so much, who was so weak. And writing the book, I realized he was the strongest human I had ever been around in my life.

1:12:14 He sacrificed everything for us. He gave up. It was after he passed away that I found out who he was. And I found out that he had this big, fat, full, rich life before a family. And it took everything he had to provide for us and to deal with my mother, who was very tough.

1:12:36 And I can remember, I would think of it as weakness. Now I realize strength. I would say to him, how can you let her treat us like this? And he would say, would you like me to leave and you’d be alone with her? And I took that as weakness.

1:12:53 And it was only later, writing the book, I’d go, oh my God, he gave up 24-7. For me, everything he liked in life. He was a handball champion. He never played handball. I never knew he played handball.

1:13:08 I found all those trophies and pictures. He had these cards made up that said, him and one friend that I met, and that said, men for hire, we come with beer kegs. A card. My dad, I never thought even like, I couldn’t remember having to make a love to my mother. He was the most passionate, you know?

1:13:30 So that, for me, that was like this gigantic take away of like, oh my God. I saw everything differently. And you judge yourself for judging him. And then I started to realize, wait a second, I’m living his life. Maybe that’s why I’m a manager.

1:13:50 Why do I live their lives instead of my life? I never tried to understand what my rhythm was, you know? Why didn’t I get married until I was 60? I was living 30 artists’ lives and raising their kids and doing it. You know, I was being of service.

1:14:08 And what was his attraction to service? I never really understood what was my, I always talked about it. You know, I met Mr. Virgé. I loved him because he was of service, his holiness of service.

1:14:23 But I never related it to my parenting, the way my father raised me. He was completely of service to us. I never had a selfish second. Like, not a second. Pretty wild.

1:14:40 So that was a gigantic revelation. And a positive one, it also has some bumps to go there as well. And really made me proud and understand more of who I am. And really proud of it. That I could somehow keep his flame alive.

1:15:03 And probably the reason you didn’t have kids to be of service, or maybe because you saw a family unit that also maybe not functional. Scared of it in some ways. I’m sure that’s a big part of my self-worth issues. Isn’t that dynamic? I haven’t dug that far enough to get there.

1:15:23 I hope you do, you know. I think there’s some interesting things there. If you can find reasons to do that, you know. But that’s a fascinating way to look at him so differently. Yeah, completely flipped.

1:15:37 Didn’t happen on the first pass of the book, it only happened on the second pass. When I started to really try to look at my life without the blinders of having to live the life. I was angry at him for being so weak. Why don’t you save me? That’s what a young man would think.

1:16:03 So I had this love for him, but this anger and this sadness for him. That he had no life. Where he had the richest life he could possibly have. He was doing what he wanted to do. You mentioned Virgé there in the same kind of sentence.

1:16:23 Yeah, he was sort of my father figure. He became my… After my dad died, he sort of became my father, I would say. Like maybe I am to Mike. Right.

1:16:36 Mr. Virgé became to me. Can you tell us about him and why you call him Mr. Virgé? Tell us about that relationship and him.

1:16:46 Mr. Virgé was an amazing human, first and foremost. Him and the Dalai Lama are the only two people I’ve ever met who live in that place. A chef by profession, acclaimed, started nouveau cuisine with two other chefs. Which was the first real chef movement.

1:17:11 The first time that a chef came from behind the kitchen. Up until then, restaurants were known for their name, not for the chef’s name. The restaurant was the star. He started this wave with Paul Bocuse of nouveau cuisine. So he’s sort of the godfather of the culinary movement.

1:17:33 Maybe like Chuck Berry is the godfather of rock and roll in some way. Serious early pioneer. And everything else is based on him. Like Chuck too. Everything is based on him.

1:17:48 And I met him when I was a young whippersnapper. I was maybe in 1977, 1945, I was 30 years old. Probably needed some stability in your life. I was way too successful. Like way too successful.

1:18:16 A lot of blow. Driving a Rolls Royce. Had married a playmate. Had at the hottest nightclub in L.A. Was managing Racquel Welsh and Groucho Marx and Alice Cooper and Blondie.

1:18:35 Maybe 20 major acts and knew I was headed for trouble. I was having a great time in the moment. You know, moment by moment was like fantastic. Most beautiful women. I had everything.

1:18:53 But when I pulled back from the moment, I really, you know, Jimmy had died, Janice had died. I was headed for that wall. There was no question about it. I was sweaty all the time. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

1:19:08 The cool guy was wearing a Coke spoon and had a pinky ring. I was rocking and rolling. And that day won the Cannes Film Festival, my first movie. Which is nothing. Which is crazy.

1:19:24 It’s like the world is conspiring against you to try to kill you. Like crazy. Success. Your first film wins Cannes Film Festival. So funny because I get taken.

1:19:33 I did it for Paramount Pictures. Ridley Scott’s first movie. Called The Duelist. And Albert Finney. Keith Carradine and Albert Finney.

1:19:45 Circle. Albert Finney. It was very funny last night I met Anthony Quinn’s son, who’s a sculptor. And the first person I saw when I, so I got, we win the Cannes Film Festival. Paramount Pictures takes us to a restaurant in the mountains on the outskirts of Cannes.

1:20:10 And we walk in and the first person I see is Anthony Quinn. It’s like, Anthony, holy shit, Anthony Quinn. And then James Coburn’s next to him. Pavarotti. Barbara Streisand.

1:20:25 Clint Eastwood. Everybody’s in this room. It’s like wild. But nobody’s sort of looking at their table. Everybody’s sort of looking around.

1:20:35 A lot of knees are, including mine, are, you know. And I’m looking around the room and I’m saying, oh my God, I’m one of them. I’m becoming, that’s right where I’m headed. And then all of a sudden in the room, I walk this guy dressed in white. White hair.

1:20:57 Very handsome. And Anthony Quinn and James Coburn stopped talking and they both went over to grab him and hug him. The whole room became sort of quiet. Everybody’s, you could tell he’s the power guy. Everyone’s looking at him.

1:21:11 I’ve always been attracted to power. Fame and power is very attracting to me. I see this guy and he’s like a, like the calmest pool of water has walked into this hurricane. And the whole room comes down for a minute. And everybody stands in line to come over and say hello and, wow, I said, people, who is this guy?

1:21:35 He said, he’s the chef and he owns the place. And I was a macaroni and ketchup guy. And cereal-y cheesecakes. I would sit in front of the TV. Smoke and join, pound in the macaroni and ketchup.

1:21:50 So I do nothing about chefs or anything. But the second I saw him, I said, this is the guy who can save my life. He’s got the power. He’s got the fame. And he’s calm.

1:22:01 And he looks happy. This guy. He’s sober. Holy shit, how did he figure this out? So I got time to leave.

1:22:10 I said to the guys, I’m going to grab a cab home. And in my mind, I’m meeting this guy. I want his formula. That’s who I want to be. I don’t want to be them.

1:22:23 And so I went over to him. And he didn’t speak English well. I was completely fucked up. And I said, hello, I want to be your grasshopper. There was a show called Kung Fu that had the wise man in the grasshopper.

1:22:38 Yeah, great shit. And I said, I want to be this grasshopper. And I said, this is TV show. And he said, well, I do not know from this. Do you cook?

1:22:49 And I said, no. And he said, well, if you learn to cook, you can work in the kitchen with me for a day or two. And I said, how do I learn to cook? And he wrote down a couple of names at cooking school. Marcella Hanson in Italy.

1:23:04 Charlie’s cooking school in Thailand. So I went to both schools. And I came back the next year. I had a movie again the next year. And I showed up at the restaurant.

1:23:14 I’m here. And he had no idea who I was. I mean, absolutely no idea. And he told me, go to these cooking schools. And he let me work in the kitchen because I work in the kitchen.

1:23:26 And he said, I’m really sorry I’m going to Bangkok to do a promotion right after the film festival. And I said, can I come with you? And he looked at me like I was completely insane. But he’s so gracious and so of service and so beautiful. What if you would like to?

1:23:45 Of course. And so I went and started our relationship. And I was his grasshopper. And I was very lucky. I had a movie maybe the next 15 years in Cannes.

1:24:00 So I would, at the end of the trip in Bangkok, I said, listen, Mr. Virgé. Because by then we had started to get a little friendship. He started to understand what I did, although he didn’t know who Alice was. Everybody knew Raquel.

1:24:15 And I said, listen, I have resources. I just really want to be around you. I hope you don’t take that the wrong way. I said, what, what? I’m going to be in Cannes every year because I think I’ll have film.

1:24:29 Why don’t we take a trip? I’ll get a bus. And let’s put a couple of your friends on the bus, a couple of my friends on the bus. I’ll pay for everything. And let’s go for a week and eat and drink because I knew that’s what he liked to do.

1:24:41 So we did that for the next 10 years. And it was a great group. It was César, the sculptor. In France, you get a César instead of an Academy Award. Yeah, yeah.

1:24:51 And Mazé, a race car driver, a couple other sculptors. And I’d bring some music people, guys, with me. Sammy Hagar came one year, a couple others. And we would go every year to one year Bordeaux, one year Burgundy, one year Champagne, one year Tokai and Hungary on this great bus, the Team Porch bus. And it really bonded us.

1:25:14 And then I started traveling with him. When he’d come to America, I’d meet him and I’d go across country with him because he thought it was like a rock star. He’d go do promotions. But he didn’t get paid. And because I was his grasshopper and because he was Chuck Berry, whenever we’d go to New York, every chef would come.

1:25:40 We’d go to LA, you know, Wolfgang, Nobu. They’d all be there, even though they weren’t anybody at those times. But they were the rising stars and they all wanted to meet the master. And I was this funny guy who took off his suit, his coat, and put it on the chair, took his chair out, opened the napkin, and put it on his lap. And then all of a sudden, they’d see me like the next year showing up with Sharon Stone, who I was living with.

1:26:05 Like, what is this guy doing? Is there something wrong? Why isn’t he pulling Sharon’s chair out? Sharon, who loved Virginia, he made me more than me. Really?

1:26:16 She could sense of something. No, no. Like, after we split up, I think three years in a row, she flew to the south of France at dinner alone on her birthday at the restaurant. Okay. No.

1:26:31 She got him, and she’s the one who introduced me to Dalai Lama. She was, okay. Yeah, she’s pretty special, Sharon. She’s got another sense. That’s how the whole cancer thing in Cannes started.

1:26:45 It was Sharon at Vergé’s restaurant. That’s where it started. You know, that big event every year? Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the big auctions?

1:26:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she’s always, that was done at Vergé’s restaurant every year. Yeah, a big tent outside. Getting great energy together, and things happen. Yeah, yeah.

1:27:00 And is your life kind of going on a different path now than Vergé’s in your life? Oh, yeah, completely different. Really? Yeah. You credit him for getting you off that ledge?

1:27:11 Yeah, 100%. Wow. He showed me a way to be happy, and that was a service, being a service. And cooking is by definition of service? Service.

1:27:20 Yeah, it happened to be his thing, but he was just of service. He showed you that his life was about service. Yes. And you saw that and followed his path. And then when I got to meet his holiness, the same thing.

1:27:30 And I started to see the people that were really happy, which is, you know, I want to be happy. It’s selfish. And the path to being happy is being of service, and it sort of worked. And the cooking, when I started cooking with them, I realized that that was, I found the passion. I never had a passion.

1:27:52 I don’t listen to music. I don’t watch movies. I don’t really read much. So I didn’t have a passion. My passion was drugs, you know?

1:28:00 Got a blind moment, thick of toot. And then I found cooking through him, and I really found my passion, my meditation. And so it changed my life first in that way by finding a path to happiness. It wasn’t drug and manipulation and power related. It wasn’t self, it wasn’t exterior, which is what all that Hollywood stuff is, you know, one more academy or whatever, one more.

1:28:30 It was interior. It was being of service, being proud of who you are. So it changed my life personally that way. And then it changed my life professionally when I realized that these guys really were gigantic stars who needed help. Who really, really needed somebody to help them.

1:28:54 And it was the… I had developed these skills with the music guys, and it was really just moving the skills over to a different set of artists. And it was clear to you, like night and day, these guys are not being paid, appreciated for their talents. Like every art. Yeah, that’s the history of every art form.

1:29:14 Is that it’s… Okay. It starts off as rape and pillage, and then they get power in movies that became united artists, where the artists stand up and take the glory. Interesting. And so you saw it and went and spoke to him and said, okay, we need to make some changes.

1:29:36 What did you think? Yeah, I got really upset with the way he was treated. So I told him I would help him, that I would handle him for him. And the next day I ran into Wolfgang Puck and mentioned it to him, and he told me that they were all treated worse than Virgé. And I said, you’re kidding me.

1:29:52 And at this point, nobody was… I don’t think there was a chef in America making $100,000. Nobody had two restaurants. There wasn’t a chef with two restaurants. Nobu had Matsugi’s chef.

1:30:03 Wolfgang had one Spago. Larry Forgione, American. Alice Waters had one. They all had one. And they had no way of getting to their audience outside of the restaurants, which is what you need to create an art form.

1:30:20 And I remember the first day I said to him, you know, if there weren’t record players and MTV and radio stations, Michael Jackson would be a wandering minstrel. And that’s really what you guys are now. So we need to develop highways. We need to get you broadcast. We need to get you into stores.

1:30:40 We need ways for people to touch you when they’re not in your restaurant, you’re not physically there, or you’re never going to really be artists. You’re just going to be day laborers. So you have to kind of scale their message to many more people. You have to get the technology to jump in. So TV Food Network was probably the biggest thing to change the game around.

1:31:02 Once you have broadcast, you have fame. Once you have fame, you can drive stuff. So that was my goal. Nobody made any money, so I did it all pro bono. It’s funny, I’m here in London, they’re filming the new Harry Potter.

1:31:19 And the producer is a film named Lionel Wigram. And he was an intern in my office who I made for the culinary division because there was no money. But he wanted to. He didn’t want to. He wanted to be in the movie business.

1:31:32 But I made him do that. I love that he’s doing Harry Potter now. Wow. So you spent 10 years, 15 years more with these chefs. Yeah, about 10 years.

1:31:42 I think it’s 92 I started the agency. I think I dropped that at 202. OK. So I moved to Chicago in 95. Charlie Trotter.

1:31:50 Yeah, Charlie Trotter was there. And I remember, I was in banking, but I remember watching Lagasse on TV. And I’m sure it had been on for a little while. But I remember, and it was this crappy kitchen. It was one camera that didn’t move.

1:32:02 And it was like before any of the pow. But I remember watching him and just being fascinated with him. And the essence of Emeril, and of course, Bourdain. Bam. Bam.

1:32:10 And Bourdain would make fun of him later. The reason of the essence of Emeril is because they couldn’t pay any of the chefs. So the deal I made was we would take a commercial. And I made products for each of the chefs. So I did spices for Emeril.

1:32:25 OK. So how do we sell the spices? Bam. So that was you. That was you.

1:32:31 Part of it. So he could make money off that because he couldn’t make money anywhere else. Wow. Wow. That’s fascinating.

1:32:38 And just to see what that’s become. Oh my God. But like you said, it’s like a paradigm shift. Once you see that, wait a second, they’re artists. They’re not laborers.

1:32:45 Right. Which is kind of what they were being treated as. And get them to take the power through the media channels now. They become in power. Yep.

1:32:54 Just sounds like, you know, I remember reading, it was a great book. I also gave all the guys that first meeting, the second meeting I gave. Mark McCormick, who started IMG, did a book about golf. His first client was Arnold Palmer. And when he started with Arnold Palmer, Arnold would play a tournament, win, maybe get $500, get in his car, drive all night to the next one.

1:33:16 And then Mark McCormick got ABC Wide World of Sports to broadcast golf. Now Arnold Palmer owns the golf courses. And that was what I said to the guys. If I can find someone to broadcast, just work for free. Because you will make so much money if we can get you on TV.

1:33:38 And I went to the guy who wanted to start a network and I said, I’ll get you all the talent for free if you do a cooking channel. You’ll have no talent cost whatsoever for the first five years. And that’s how it sort of happened. It was a guy who started CNN reshow and felt. Okay.

1:33:57 And he had gotten commitments from cable operators for a second channel. But he hadn’t decided what it was going to be. Now it’s such a huge industry. Ridiculous. I think there was a search the other day on the YouTube and social medias and food videos are the most popular thing out there.

1:34:14 They mesmerize people. Hard for me to compete with. Thank you. Jamie Oliver was a force. I think Jamie Oliver was the only client I ever tried this time.

1:34:24 Every other client in my life came to me. Okay. I never went to a client and said, Hi, I’m Chef Gordon. I want to manage you. When I saw what he did with that TV show…

1:34:35 The Naked Chef, his first one. No, no, no. It wasn’t that one that got me. Later. When he did the thing with the kids…

1:34:40 Okay, you have this too. I always said to the guys, We’ll get to a certain point and then it’s up to you and you have to get this thing of reason to live other than just you making money. And everybody was just trying to make money. And then I read about this show where he opened that restaurant 15. Right down the street.

1:35:09 And when I read that, I said, This is the guy. He’s got it. He’s got it. He figured it out. And I called up Alice and I said, Listen, I know this is crazy, but I’m trying to sign the chef.

1:35:23 He’s opening a restaurant in London. Would you fly with me to London for the opening? Because if you’re sitting with me, I know he’ll listen to me seriously. So we flew in. We went opening night of 15, which was amazing.

1:35:39 And the food was even great. It was amazing. And I met Jamie that night and I took some meetings with him. I think he came to Hawaii and he chose to not hire me. But I have huge respect for him.

1:35:52 He was really the first guy to really give this whole thing a reason to live. Good observation. And it’s interesting that you would fly Alison just for that evening. That sounds very old school, but you get kind of one chance to make that impression. Exactly.

1:36:09 And it needs to be… I wanted to know who’s serious. I said, I asked him to fly all the way over here just so you would listen to me. So I’m much serious. That would get my attention.

1:36:23 It was so incongruous for Alison to be at the opening too because he was gigantic. He was like a frenzy. So I put him in the disguise because I didn’t want to take the steam away from Jamie. I don’t think anyone else in the restaurant knew, but when Jamie came to the table, I had him take the wig off for the hat and he had glasses and a wig around. That’s crazy.

1:36:47 You had said about the chef movement that you kind of compared it to the Chitlin circuit. I was wondering if you could just explain to people what that was. The Chitlin circuit, I think in every art form there exists. There’s a time when the commerce part of the art is able to rape and pillage the artist part. I think now you see it a lot in galleries today.

1:37:14 Art galleries with painting artists. Where the art gallery will take 70% because they can’t. In the early days of Afro-American touring, the Motown days, when it started to become economically a big business, the black record companies developed this philosophy of life and partners. So if you were an Afro-American artist, you signed with an Afro-American record company, they would put you on tour to nightclubs that were promoted by radio stations or theaters that were promoted by radio stations telling you that the only way you can get your record played is to play for free for the radio station at this place.

1:38:04 So the artist would go play for free. The club would make money. The radio station would make a lot of money. The radio station would play the record because they played for free, which sold a lot of records for the record company who didn’t pay the artist record royalties. So that was called the Chitlin Circuit.

1:38:26 But they all wanted fame, and they’d give them… It was really famous. Everybody would give them rented cars for them to drive in. They filled us famous stories about the rented Cadillac. That was the perk.

1:38:36 That was the perk. That was the one perk. And that happened through the 50s, 60s. Yeah, for me, I became aware when I started with Teddy. I had heard about it.

1:38:46 I didn’t realize it really happened. Okay. But it was very organized. There was a group called the Black Promoters Association who were very powerful. They were the enforcers.

1:39:01 And they were tied up with Jesse Jackson’s home. So if you tried to break it, Jesse would come and pick at your show. Okay. So if a black artist went and didn’t play for free for the radio station or the club, there would be pickets outside. And people didn’t want to cross the picket lines.

1:39:21 And that was the boogie. And that’s just the way it went. And the same thing was in the chef business when I came in. The chefs were convinced. They would go do a benefit at a hotel where the car hopped.

1:39:37 You’d pull up in your car. You had to buy a ticket for the benefit. The car hopped got paid. The hotel employees got paid. The kitchen staff got paid.

1:39:47 The music got paid. The entertainer got paid. The printer got paid. Oh, the chef. No, that’s a freebie.

1:39:56 And they all were told when I would say to them, why would you do this? They would say just what the R&B acts would say. The R&B acts would say to me, it’s the only way I can get my record played. The chefs would say to me, it’s what I have to do to keep my restaurant busy. Just go out and spread the seed, which was complete bullshit, because they were in cities where nobody ever would come to their restaurant.

1:40:18 Right. And you busted up the Chitlin circuit. I busted up the Chitlin circuit. That’s a little dangerous. That was dangerous.

1:40:25 Doing the chef thing wasn’t dangerous. Nobody, they came after me verbally when nobody came after us physically. And the Chitlin people? They were different. Did you dodge any bullets or?

1:40:37 Yeah, yeah, you got a little hairy. Some of the incidents I can remember, the first time we played a white club with a Roxy in L.A., it’s a never black promoter. We got a lot of death threats for the FBI, so it secured us for the week. Teddy did a show at the Apollo right after that. Wouldn’t do the second show, and he never told me why.

1:41:06 Until years later, he saw someone pull a gun at the first show, and at that point he told me his manager before me had been shot to death. I said, whoops. Then he told you that. Yeah, then he told me that. It was like, whoops.

1:41:21 But you knew you were doing the right thing, so you felt… Yeah, I didn’t really care. At that point I didn’t really care. I didn’t care about your life too much. Yeah, I didn’t really.

1:41:29 I’ve always had this thing, you’re going to die. Do what you got to do. It’s finite. We’re all going to die. In the scope of our planet, whether you live 10 years or 100 years, it’s such a speck that do what makes you happy and do what you think you got to do.

1:41:45 And this to me was a no-brainer. This was, you know, as a Jew persecuted by Nazis. It’s like, in your blood, you’re not letting anybody persecute somebody else for some big group, for the black you’re going to take advantage of and go fuck yourself. Basically, it was my feeling. And Teddy stood up.

1:42:08 BBC’s doing a documentary on Teddy right now. Really? We’re really thrilled about that. I want that story to come out. People will know how brave he was.

1:42:16 That’s going to be great. Yeah. Speak of Natalia Loma. Just quickly, your relationship with him and you’ve cooked for him. Yeah.

1:42:24 I mean, talk about being of service to someone who’s being of service. Yeah. How did that happen? I got taken. I was in L.A.

1:42:32 I was going out with Sharon Stone. She asked my father to go see him. I didn’t really have a… I had had a flirtation earlier in my life. When I went to Bangkok with Mr. Vergier the first time, I had a lot of free time.

1:42:52 I didn’t really know him well. I was there sort of on my own. So I had a lot of time. And in the drawer, instead of a Bible, was a Buddhist text. So I would read the text, and it really interested me.

1:43:08 And when I came home, I had a college roommate who knew everything. So I called him up and I said, do you know anything about Buddhism? And he said, yeah. He was a student, so he said I actually taught Buddhism at a school. So he wrote me a beautiful like 10 page, which I still have a 10 page summary of Buddhism.

1:43:31 And the last paragraph of it was, now what you need to do is forget everything you just read. Your walks on the beach in the morning in Maui are the essence of Buddhism. And it really stuck with me. So when she invited me to see His Holiness, I said, hmm, I’m really curious about this Buddhism thing. I’m going to go with you.

1:43:54 We went and he was beautiful, but it didn’t make… I couldn’t understand a lot of it. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think I dozed off in the middle of the speech, which I ended up doing now every time I see him. I go to sleep.

1:44:05 It’s the best sleep of my life. Because I don’t know the scriptures and I don’t… I’m not a Buddhist. And I just… I get lost.

1:44:14 A lot of times he gets technical. But we went backstage afterwards because I was with her. And when he walked in the backstage, it was like I had just taken the best shower of my life. I never felt so clean from head to toe in my life before, just him walking in the room. He walked in.

1:44:34 And that was my thought, was like, oh my God, I’m like under the greatest waterfall ever. Because in Maui they have waterfalls. I always say it’s like a rebirth when you go in a waterfall. So it really got my curiosity and I got a chance to do the greeting line and look in his eyes for a second. I’m like, wow.

1:44:52 So it really had me and I flew back to Maui. And a couple of days later I walked in the bookstore. There were still bookstores. And there was a little poster on the wall that he was coming to the Big Island of Hawaii to do a teaching at a Dharma Center in like two months. And by this time I had already had a relationship with Mr. Verghe.

1:45:18 And I had just… I think this was probably… It could have been 92. It could have been right before. I definitely had relationships with chefs.

1:45:28 Chefs, the culinary world was becoming part of my life, whether I started the agency or not. I don’t remember. My story was coming so I asked Sharon to put me in touch with the person who had invited her. Turned out to be a fella named Richard Dorlo who was his ambassador to America. And he was very gracious.

1:45:47 I got him on the phone. And I told him that I was involved with the culinary arts and that I lived in Hawaii. And that I saw his holiness was coming. And I would love to present to him the bounty of our island. Rather than just come in and eat in a hotel.

1:46:04 That I would love for him to really see what Hawaii is about and eat our food and meet our farmers. And he accepted, which was amazing. And I now realize that they always say yes. I thought he actually… But he wouldn’t tell me what he likes to eat.

1:46:21 Because the Tibetans are very… They don’t… That’s just not their way. Oh, whatever you cook, you’ll be fine. And so I had this vision in my head of, you know, vegetarian meal.

1:46:34 But I did some research. And I called Marty, actually, because I don’t think there was internet. And I said, what did he eat in Tibet? And he explains to me about yak and that it’s in the mountains. And that they make everything out of this yak.

1:46:51 They make yak butter, from which they make yak tea. And they have yak meat. And I’m like, wow, great. How do I get yak? It’s really tough.

1:47:02 They don’t let it out of the country. So I had a friend who lived in Asia, and I got ahold of him. And he smuggled some yak butter out. Because I wanted… My thought in my mind was, for people who come to Hawaii, I usually made them chicken soup.

1:47:17 My grandmother’s chicken soup as a way to say welcome. And especially if they were Jewish, it was a really nice thread, you know? Show them it’s home. Yeah. Just make them feel like you’re caring, you’re thinking about them, you’re something reminiscent, and tie those geographical sets.

1:47:36 Anyways, I’m going to make them yak tea. So the first thing I bring them is yak tea and make them feel welcome. So this yak butter shows up, and it’s the foulest smelling stuff in the world. It smells like every dirty sock in the world. It smelled like my whole house, but I’m so proud of it.

1:47:57 And the one thing they said to me was that I couldn’t have any expectations. And they said, what do you mean by that? And they said, well, if you have an expectation that you’re going to meet them, you shouldn’t do this. If you have an expectation that you’re going to eat with, no expectations. That’s the only thing we ask.

1:48:18 Good advice in life. Yeah, good advice in life. So that was my thought, no expectations. I’m probably not going to meet them. I have my own self-worth issues anyway.

1:48:25 So I’m sort of happier I’m not going to meet them. But he’s going to have yak tea. I’m the coolest guy in the world because my ego is still fairly well cemented in my body at this point. I’m the coolest guy in the world. I’m going to give him yak tea.

1:48:45 And the first meal I find out about a week before he comes that he hates vegetables, which is all I planned on, that he eats beef stew at five in the morning with spaghetti and meatballs. So I made him this fit, but I had the yak tea and they came to me and said, please bring him his breakfast the first morning. And I said, you told me I wasn’t going to, they said, no, we’d like you to bring him breakfast. So they put me in a, they cover your mouth so you don’t breathe on his food.

1:49:16 And I’m now, I’m going, it was a bunch of steps up to his place and it’s still dark out. And like everything’s rattling on the tray because I’m so nervous. And I’m going to go, oh my God, I’m going into the Dolly Love. And I got the yak tea there and I’m so in between shaking and thinking how cool I am. You know, I am the coolest guy on the planet, giving him this yak tea.

1:49:39 And I knock on the door and come in and open the door. And he’s in the bathroom, but the door is open. His robe is down so he’s bare chested and he’s brushing his teeth. Big smile. And he says, oh, breakfast.

1:49:57 And he says, yes, you’re holiness. He says, oh, good, just put there. And then, and as he takes the sniff, I’m now, now I am the coolest guy in the world. He actually got it. He’s smelling, oh my God, I am so cool.

1:50:11 And he goes, oh, oh, yak tea? And now, I’m like, God-like to myself. Yes, you’re holiness, yak tea. And he says, oh, that’s why I leave Tibet. And I’m like, whoops.

1:50:28 And then we just had, it was a great week, cooked for him. And then he asked my whole kitchen staff to come in so he could thank him. It was beautiful. And that started my journey. So I then went to, I said to Richard, I would love to do this whenever I can.

1:50:49 And I ended up doing Manhattan and Trinidad with him. When we did Manhattan, the first million-dollar benefactor for the Dalai Lama Foundation came. And I knew her. So she gave me up. When I say gave me up, what are you crazy having him cook?

1:51:10 This is the greatest manager in the world. He should be part of your team. So they took my whites off and put me on the board. So I’m on the board of the Tibet Fund now, which is the government at Exile. And I get to sit next to him once a year and hold his hand there in the board meeting, which is pretty cool.

1:51:28 You like going in on the… Yeah, I love fame. I love power. I love all that stuff. Very attractive to him.

1:51:34 But you also like going in on the grasshopper level. Yeah, I’m a grasshopper. I’m of service. That’s what I enjoy. Makes me happy.

1:51:42 And I know there’s certain things I’m good at. So if you can get yourself out of the picture, you can really do nice stuff. And I’m so blessed that I have a chance to do it. Who would ever cook for the Dalai Lama? Oh, my God, it’s like I pinched myself.

1:51:59 Amazing. Amazing. What’s your life like today? Are you retired? Summer retired?

1:52:05 Basically the same life. I mean, I’ve retired professionally. About 12 years ago, I closed my offices. The only thing I do full-time at Dallas Cooper, I still manage him. He’s sort of a body part.

1:52:22 We can’t get rid of each other. But I still stay very active. I have a restaurant in Hawaii with Ray Yamaguchi. And I do projects and a lot of advising and consulting. I do when I wake up in the morning and something interesting comes along.

1:52:38 I have three of my adopted kids who are back in Maui. So I get a lot of… This is probably the most family I’ve ever had in my life is this point of the four-year-old great-granddaughter who lives on the island. So almost every weekend my guest house is some combination of the kids, which is fantastic. So I cook a lot.

1:53:03 I probably cook three, four nights a week. I have 50 people for Thanksgiving cooking. And why Maui? What is it about that? It played a big part in the movie.

1:53:13 Yeah. There’s something about you and… Yeah, I can’t… I went there by boat years ago. I put one foot on the island.

1:53:20 And I just knew I was going to live there the rest of my life. I turned around to my friend and said, I’m living here the rest of my life. Found a house that week. I’m in the same house. It’s got an innocence.

1:53:34 It’s like a young baby. It’s the newest land on the planet. And it’s got these trade winds that come. The smells are beautiful. I’ve always been attracted to innocence, too.

1:53:45 Even though I’m the least innocent person. But I love innocence. I mean everything. So it’s just like… Well, they didn’t have it when I moved there.

1:53:59 But now I think of it as charging your iPhone. Being a boy from Maui, I get a little shorter every day. And then I get home and yep. Back up. I’m back to full strength.

1:54:13 And you’re known for your generosity with your home and cooking for people. And I think Mike Wires was there charging up his batteries for long periods of time. It’s a good sanctuary. It works well. People have had weddings on your beaches there.

1:54:25 I probably had 20 weddings on the beach. You really open up your home to a lot of people. And people don’t do that these days, really. I don’t look at it. I sort of look at it that I’m the protector of the land, not the owner of the land.

1:54:43 I don’t look at it as mine. I really look at it as taking care of this thing. And sharing it with other people. I love to share it. That’s when it comes to life.

1:54:55 When you’re sharing it in such great adventures and great stuff. You mentioned earlier some of that Hollywood phenomenon. You’ve been in the entertainment business for so long and I haven’t spoken to anyone in entertainment in the last few weeks. And I kind of wanted to get your read on this kind of tidal wave of media we’re seeing now with Weinstein and all these other people. And is this something for you that was obvious that would happen sooner or later?

1:55:21 Was it surprising? Is this a phenomenon of the entertainment industry or others? I think, I mean, I’m shocked that it’s taken as unique. It’s sort of, you know, it’s the way of the world. It’s weird.

1:55:43 I mean, I don’t know how things happen. But in every religion it’s embedded. You know, as a Jew they make the women sit on one side and the men sit on the other. It’s like really weird in arranged marriages where the woman is sort of insignificant. I don’t mean that maybe not in their brain, but you see it in so many religions where, you know, Saudi Arabia, they’re just letting women drive.

1:56:18 What does that mean, letting women drive? They have, what does that even mean? So if you can say a sentence like that and people can understand it, what is the difference between not letting the woman drive and sexually abusing her? To me, there’s not that much of a difference. We live in a men’s locker room world.

1:56:45 Not just in entertainment, everywhere. In the world, to me. I mean, I’ve seen it everywhere. Working in restaurants, working in any medium. You go into any workplace and there’s locker room stuff happened.

1:57:02 So I think probably Hollywood is a higher concentration because the ring, so many more people want that ring that they’ll put up with the rejection, which we talked about a little bit. But you hear these actresses’ stories and they tell you, it’s not just Harvey, how multiple times they’ve gone on. Why would you keep going back for that? Because you want that ring so strong. And the power is held by a few people?

1:57:32 In everything. In everything. So I think it’s a global problem that I’m really happening, the focus is coming on, but I don’t know how you solve it. It’s so embedded in all the societies and all the religions. There’s this inferiority, superiority.

1:57:59 I mean, you’ve gone through civil rights area and those kinds of things. Do you see parallels? Do you see in 100 years that we’re going to, this will be over? I hope so. I don’t know a bigger question than I can solve.

1:58:09 Yeah, it’s hard to say. It’s really tough to say, but I think, you know, epidemic and everything, particularly in show business. Okay. Epidemic. And epidemic both ways.

1:58:21 Women to men, there’s so many powerful women in the industry, in the entertainment industry, and they do the same thing to the guys. You hear just as many stories like that, where they just castrate. Guys just cast, you know, take their masculinity right away, like powerful female executives. The same way male executives, they may do it in different ways, but it’s all about taking their power away, making them subservient, you know. So I’ve seen it, as a young kid, I’ve always seen every locker room growing up in every school of every gymnasium class.

1:59:00 Every guy goes through that locker room, and that doesn’t change, where it’s cool to be demeaning to women. It’s cool to show how much power you have. Oh, yeah, I delayed four times. That’s just some sick thing in our society somewhere. It’s a lopsided human power dynamic.

1:59:21 Yeah, it’s a lopsided human power dynamic. So it probably isn’t going anywhere for a long time. We’re just going to have to find ways to deal with it. That’s my thought, sadly, but I think that, for me, that’s a thought. I think it’s a much bigger problem than, you know, it’s the way we raise our children and what we teach them and how we teach them.

1:59:43 Quality doesn’t seem to be the major thing, whether it’s in color or race or gender. It’s what you can take advantage of. That’s the sad statement, I think, on it. When you think of the word successful, who comes to mind? You know, it’s funny, as you’re saying, I’m thinking of the third world, happy family.

2:00:16 I think success in the first world is difficult. Success as a human. There’s so many bolders that have to move away. Whereas I’ll go to a third world country and see a family that has enough to eat, and this joy in their face is just… Success is joy for me, and joy seems to come from less is more.

2:00:51 And a struggle, too, sometimes? Yeah, I think everything’s a struggle. This is a tough journey, this life we live. Nobody escapes easy. But it’s what we have.

2:01:04 What keeps Shep Gordon awake at night? I’m having a difficult time now watching everything I believe in destroy through Trump and our president. And I’m having a really tough time realizing who my fellow Americans are and really sad that we all let them get to this place with such anger and hatred that we let the human condition in America go to this place that keeps me up. Scary, really scary. My mom’s from San Diego still, and she comes over and I can see it in her eyes.

2:01:50 She’s in her early 70s, and she’s a lot of pain. We can’t feel that over here. We see the tweets and then this. We live in a different world now in America. It’s divisive there.

2:02:01 It’s awful. It’s horrible, okay. It’s really hard, and it hasn’t even really started yet. But it’s horrible. I mean, it’s evil for evil’s sake.

2:02:14 It’s really hard to comprehend how evil and how purposely, just for the things that they’re doing are so evil, there’s no rationale for it. In many cases, it costs money. They’re taking 65,000 children this week off healthcare. It’s going to cost them probably 10 times as much for the emergency room visit for these kids. So it’s not a money issue even.

2:02:48 Do you want to make a point? Evil. Pure, pure evil. No more special education. They’ve eliminated special education.

2:02:57 How do you eliminate, how do you look in a mirror? These are evil things. These are like evil. It’s one bomb. They’re just pure evil, and it’s evil people doing evil stuff.

2:03:13 You have a president who’s proud of the fact that he’s grabbing women’s vaginas. That’s what he gets elected on. Did he grab somebody? This is evil for evil’s sake. You don’t even get, you’re not even getting sex.

2:03:28 It’s evil for evil’s sake. And that’s what the American people want. And that’s the scary thing for me. You know, I understand him because I’ve met a lot of bad people in my life. So I get it, and he has the perfect right to be whoever he wants to be.

2:03:45 And you can see the marketing at work. Yeah, brilliant. I mean, it works. It’s the ones that know better. They are condoning it.

2:03:54 It’s so Nazi Germany to me. And some of those people are your friends. And you’re like, wait a second. And I can’t talk to them anymore. Because they don’t want to hear it.

2:04:03 No. It’s in me. I mean, I hate that in myself. But I can’t deal with it. I actually can’t deal with it.

2:04:11 I mean, if someone starts being proactive about how great it is to get rid of health insurance, I can’t deal with it. Actually, I’ve ended a lot of friendships, which hurts me. I wish I was bigger than that. But it’s really weird. I mean, one of my first thoughts was when I moved to LA, I lived in Benedict Canyon.

2:04:40 I don’t know. It’s maybe too much geography. But when you go to Sunset Boulevard, I would drive into Hollywood. And in those days, it was one tall building. It was 9,200 Sunset Boulevard.

2:04:54 And you couldn’t see the building until you were a block away because the smog was so bad in LA, the famous smog. So you would drive, and then, oh, there’s a building. And then the Clean Air Act came in. And then they really started working on it and the Clean Water Act. And now you can see the building from a quarter of a mile away.

2:05:17 And that was my first thought the night of the election is, my grandkids are going to drive down that street and they’re not going to see the building again. That’s 40 years of work by people like me to get so you could see the building. And the first thing you did the first day, you got rid of the Clean Air Act. It was the first day. Clean Air Act gone, why would you get rid of clean air and clean water?

2:05:42 Pure evil. Just pure evil for evil’s sake. How are we going to get through this? I have no idea. It’s bigger than me.

2:05:50 Yeah, it’s way bigger than me. I have no idea. It’s a big test, you know. I mean, we’re seeing some hopeful signs. There’s another big election coming up next week in Alabama.

2:06:02 So we’re seeing some signs that are hopeful. But the realization that I have as a 72-year-old is that the destruction they’ve done to everything I believe in will never be able to be rebuilt by the end of my life. You know, it’s just not going to happen. Which is disconcerting. Which is really disconcerting.

2:06:25 I can’t imagine what like an Obama feels like, you know. Just all these years of decades of work pulls out of the Paris Accord for no reason. It has no effect. There’s nothing you have to do. It’s an agreement where you agree that you don’t have to agree.

2:06:45 So there’s no reason to ever pull out of it except evil for pure evil. Because it’s not like you have to do anything. The Paris Accord is all voluntary. So why would you pull out of it when every other nation who has stood beside you, who has fought for you, who have had their people die for you, why would you pull out when there’s no consequences to pulling out except destroying everybody else in the world’s feelings about you? Evil for pure evil.

2:07:24 It’s really wild. So how do you rebuild confidence with countries? That’s generations. You know, that’s all gone now. Where, you know, there’s nobody wants America on their side that I can see because you can’t trust them.

2:07:40 He’s beaten up everybody. It’s just, it’s insane. It’s evil for pure evil. I can only hope you look at this in 10 or 20 years and find out that it was in some way helpful. You know, that let us all wake up and realize, okay, this isn’t going to happen for 50 or 100 years.

2:07:58 But you know, you see this Harvey Weinstein thing and he got elected president on it. Yeah. It tells you where the society is. It’s a reflection of us. You and I look at it as a negative.

2:08:09 The bulk of Americans. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Oh, I wish I could have been him. And that’s really, as an American, that’s sad to know. Yeah.

2:08:18 We have a lot more work to do. We got a lot of work to do. Yeah. I had a guest in here named Kevin Kelly. I mentioned him earlier.

2:08:25 And he said, Brian, you’re only as old as the last time you changed your mind. That’s a great line. That’s a good line. And I was wondering, what have you changed your mind about in the last six months or 12 months or even a couple of years? I mean, besides.

2:08:37 Yeah, besides Trump. Embracing also your own family. Yeah, what have I changed my mind about? It’s an interesting question. Or making peace with some of your family.

2:08:47 Yeah. I don’t think a whole lot of stuff. Okay. I mean, I’ve seen very trivial transitions. A few years ago, I used to love plated food.

2:09:03 Now I really love food that I can throw a spoon. You know, if someone says it’s a four-course dinner, it’s like I run for cover. Whereas before, I used to run for it. But trivial. Very trivial.

2:09:17 So the street food aspect is more healing. Yeah. And the communal. Okay. I think that any change, I’m watching this more communal attitude in the world and enjoying it.

2:09:30 So diving in maybe a little more to it. I find myself now going to some of the communal table and talking to the person, which I never would have done before. Right. But no really big changes. I’m pretty much a creature of habit at this point.

2:09:45 Okay. And what would we be surprised to hear that Shep does in his spare time? Something that would be just out of the ordinary. We’d be like, well, never saw that coming.

2:10:01 I don’t know. I’m trying to think of what I’d do that would be. What would you do the first day, the first couple of hours when you get back to Maui? I pretty much have a rhythm that every day, I wake up early, get about 5 or 5.30, I get in the jacuzzi, watch the sun come up, have a joint, make some coffee, go do some work for a while, do my emails. Think about what I’m going to do for dinner when I’m in the jacuzzi.

2:10:31 That’s sort of my thought process. Am I going to cook? Am I going to go out? Then I do my emails, see where they take me, and then I take a walk for about an hour down to the Four Seasons Hotel, get a cup of coffee, and see who sits in the neighborhood. Come back again, do some more emails, and then usually go up to the golf course, play five holes, six holes, and then come back earlier from cooking.

2:11:01 If I’m not cooking, I’ll stay a little longer, have some drinks, read a little bit maybe, and then start my dinner stuff, and then I’m in bed by 8 o’clock. Maybe that’s the surprise I would say, if there’s anything surprising. Early meals you serve at 5 or 6 o’clock. Yeah, and I’m in bed by 7.30, 8 o’clock, almost every night, which nobody ever believed. But when they get there, they see it.

2:11:26 You’re just like, goodnight. Yeah, I leave my dinner party. Sounds like a pretty cool day, Shep. No, it’s real. I love the rhythm, and I have the kids there now.

2:11:35 There’s somebody I love or loves me around most of the time, and I have a lot of gifts. So I would say the guests fill up. How many can you have at one point? I have three bedrooms in my house, and then I sold my guesthouse to a good friend that he lets me use it. I feel like I have a little bit of Wild Jason that’s a ducass there in the house next door for Thanksgiving, and two of their friends who I don’t know are in my guesthouse for Thanksgiving.

2:12:05 I have to be a chef, so he’s going to help me do dinner. How many turkeys do you have to cook for 50 people? We have four turkeys and one smoked turkey. Okay. Just once it was a menu.

2:12:14 It’s going to be a good menu. Three types of stuffing. Sounds like a big night. It’s crazy. You know, Shep, I always ask everyone here just a couple questions at the end.

2:12:24 I want to ask you, if I gave you a mobile phone and you could ring the 20-year-old Shep Gordon, and I guess he’s still at Buffalo going to school at this point, not too excited about school, making some money on the side, selling some things. But if you could give him some advice from what you know now, what would you tell him? Do exactly what you did. Do exactly. I wouldn’t change anything.

2:12:48 Don’t plan it and just go. That would be my big… I don’t know how much control we have over it anyway. An illusion of control. Yeah, so enjoy the ride.

2:13:04 Okay. And give into it. On that same note, best advice you’ve ever received could be from a parent or a mentor, maybe Mr. Vergier, or something that just you remembered, maybe even in the entertainment industry. These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy.

2:13:25 Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meet-ups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show. Incredible advice. Shep, when I learn more about your story, and I watched a movie years ago, and I’ve heard you on all of the shows, and I can’t really get enough, but when you look at these circumstances, you tell it as if it’s sometimes like a Forrest Gump story, and then this happened, and then this happened, but in my opinion, you attract all this energy because of your energy, and this stuff isn’t coincidence.

2:14:07 It doesn’t add up. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people in this chair, and it’s not coincidence that you bring good energy into your life, I don’t think, and it’s not a coincidence that you bring Sharon Stone in your life, which brings you the Dalai Lama, which brings you these people, and I think it’s the way you look at the world. Even when you’re 30 years old with the coke spoon doing all the craziness, there’s still something good inside you. I think part of it is being a groupie.

2:14:31 Okay, a van. The journey to become powerful, successful is so difficult that there’s usually some gem of something in it, so I find it very rarely am I… I mean, there are times I’m disappointed, but usually if you can actually get into a conversation with someone who’s made a mark in the world, there’s something fascinating to take from it. There’s a nugget there. Yeah, there’s a nugget.

2:15:03 And it’s fascinating to me how you’re willing to just grasshopper up. That’s going to be a new phrase now. When it comes to Mr. Vijay or the Dalai Lama, and again, they said the perfect thing. Have no expectations, and because you didn’t, I would probably argue that’s what happens, and that’s probably about everything.

2:15:19 When you let it go, it all comes to that. Let it go, do things for the right reasons, and then just see what happens with that expectations and maybe watch all this wonderful stuff flow to you. I hope people are listening to that note because in my opinion, the book and your life is just an embodiment of that stuff. Anyways, I really appreciate you coming on. It’s been amazing listening to you talk about these things, and thank you for getting me.

2:15:42 Thanks for having me. I really appreciate that. And I can’t wait for the next book. Maybe you go… I can wait.

2:15:50 Maybe you go a little deeper back into Long Island and see what’s in there. If I had any one regrets that my dad wasn’t around for me to tell him that I had that revelation. Right, to do. I guess that’s the way it’s always… That’s the one thing I’d like to redo on.

2:16:07 Redo on. You could say to him, Dad, Thank you. Thank you. Instead of, I’m sorry for you. Right, right.

2:16:16 I lived my relationship, and I loved them so I’d do anything for them, but I lived in a place of feeling sorry for them rather than being overjoyed that he could do what he wanted to do. Yeah, that’s just a product of being young. Shep, on London Real, we say it’s about the journey, and I wish you well on yours. Come and see us next time you’re in London. Thank you.