From Scratch Page 10

  Shep was not one of the marginal television personalities who came knocking on Reese’s door for a crack at TVFN. This was an entertainment industry veteran who believed that TVFN could become a launching pad for a new kind of celebrity. The network fit in with everything he had been building toward since a warm May night on the French Riviera in 1983.

  On that night, Shep had been sitting in a bustling restaurant with Timothy Leary, one of the fathers of LSD, and G. Gordon Liddy, the infamous Watergate coconspirator. They, along with opera star Luciano Pavarotti, Clint Eastwood, and Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, had made the short drive from the Cannes Film Festival to Moulin de Mougins, a renowned three-star restaurant built into the stone foundation of a sixteenth-century mill. Shep had coproduced the documentary Return Engagement, which was debuting at Cannes. It followed Leary and Liddy as they toured the United States debating the state of American culture.

  Leary and Liddy went way back. In 1966, when Liddy was an assistant district attorney in New York, he’d prosecuted Leary twice on drug charges. On this night at the restaurant, Leary had tapped out lines of table salt onto the white tablecloth, pretending they were cocaine. Liddy came out from the men’s room, and saw him hunched over the lines with a franc note tightly rolled up under one nostril, pretending to snort them. “Timothy, what are you fucking doing?” the ex-military man shouted. His voice boomed through the Moulin de Mougins and a tense hush descended over the dining room. Into the pause strolled the restaurant’s head chef, Roger Vergé. Shep was hypnotized by him as he approached the table; Vergé’s chef’s whites gleamed with an internal brightness; he had an aura, as if he had been plugged into a socket, and yet he also seemed as serene and detached as an enlightened monk.

  Vergé was well-known among foodies for his Cuisine de Soleil, which focused on the fresh flavors of the Mediterranean. Shep had come to Moulin de Mougins for the scene, not the cuisine, and had never heard of him. Vergé arrived at the table, his combed-back silver hair and brush-style mustache immaculate, and spoke in a calm, measured tone, English clear under a French accent. “Is everything okay?” the great chef asked, looking unblinkingly at Shep, the one who seemed less inebriated than anyone else.

  “Yes, yes, fine. Er. Just a little joke,” Shep said.

  “Very well,” Vergé said, nodding at the party, then striding back through the hushed dining room. Leary brushed the salt aside, Liddy picked up a scotch, the situation calmed. Shep’s attention stayed focused on Vergé. What a beautiful man, so happy, Shep thought, watching the chef chat with patrons on the other side of the room. “The way he talked to us was so calm and beautiful and purposeful. Right now in this room, all of Hollywood is here, but he is the guy. All the attention is on him, and yet he is so peaceful.”

  Shep was a fan of the Kung Fu television show. The main character, played by David Carradine, was a devoted student of a blind martial arts master. The master called the student Grasshopper, and schooled him in the ways of staying centered and strong, no matter what was happening around him. The Hollywood crowd at Moulin de Mougins was sweating, their knees jumping under their tables with cocaine energy. For years Shep had been more interested in what he was putting in his nose than what he put into his mouth. Now he felt his own heart pounding, and in that moment, he realized he was becoming a member of a club that he did not want to join. Bewitched by Chef Vergé, he made a decision: I need to learn how to get to that joyful, peaceful state amidst this chaos. I have to be this guy’s Grasshopper.

  There had never been anything comforting to Shep about food. His father was a quiet accountant and his domineering mother had focused her love on his more promising brother. The meals served in his emotionally cold home triggered no warm associations, and as an adult, a meal of macaroni with ketchup and Sara Lee pound cake for dessert suited him fine.

  Shep had started his working career with a series of odd jobs, at one point toiling in the shipping department of a company that made clothing for corpses. After losing his job as a probation officer in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, he was lounging with a college friend in the pool at the Hollywood Landmark hotel, a famous hangout for rock bands. Jimi Hendrix was also in the pool. The guitarist spied Shep, whose hair was nearly as kinky as his own, and, according to the story Shep has entertained people with for years, he said, “Are you Jewish?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be a manager.”

  Jimi beckoned over a couple of members of the soul group The Chambers Brothers, who were also living at the hotel and who had just had a hit with the eleven-minute psychedelic song “Time Has Come Today.” The group in turn introduced Shep to Alice Cooper. Shep became Alice Cooper’s manager and helped the lead singer develop his Prince of Darkness act. Shep had him make public appearances with a boa constrictor wrapped around his shoulders and packaged one of his albums in paper panties. And it was Shep who threw a live chicken onstage at a 1969 Alice Cooper show in Toronto, an infamous incident that cost the bird its life.

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  For the next eight years after Shep’s encounter with Vergé, Shep cohosted an annual party during Cannes at Moulin de Mougins, with his friend, actor Michael Douglas. He became friendly with Vergé, and each year after the film festival, Shep would host a ten-day trip with the chef and a group of friends to a region of France that the chef selected; Cognac one year, Burgundy the next. Vergé was part of a posse of French chefs loosely represented by a French agent who would bring them to the United States to help promote their cookbooks and restaurants, and every time Vergé came to the States, Shep traveled with him. Whenever Vergé would offer a cooking class or do a demo on TV, Shep was there, eventually learning enough to assist in the kitchen.

  Shep became such an epicure that, wherever he traveled, he would find the best restaurants. In 1986 came a crucial meeting that seven years later would help Shep become a key figure in the evolution of the Food Network. He was in New Orleans, where he had heard about a new chef cooking at Commander’s Palace. At the front desk his party was told the wait would be forty-five minutes, and they were led out toward the bar past the kitchen.

  As he would the night Julia came to dinner, Chef Emeril Lagasse demonstrated amazing instincts about when to rise to an occasion, spotting Shep’s group and coming out of the kitchen.

  “Ayyyy! Brother!” Emeril, twenty-seven, bellowed to Shep.

  Shep had never met the chef, but he had enough savvy to go along with it when Emeril said, “You’re having trouble getting a table? I got it covered.” He led Shep and his group to a prime table on the balcony and carried their plates of food to the party personally.

  As the meal wound down and Emeril sat down with them, Shep asked him, “Who do you think I am? Because I’ve never been here before.”

  Shep was underestimating Emeril’s instincts. Emeril knew a group of big spenders when he saw them. Emeril admitted he didn’t know Shep. “You know,” he said, “once a month or so I pick somebody who’s coming through the kitchen, and I give ’em a ride. And you’re the guy I picked. What do you want to do after dinner?”

  “Well, we’re going to go see the Neville Brothers.”

  “You like Cognac?” Emeril asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Emeril took out a bottle of 1952 Cognac, emptied it into paper cups, and they all piled in a cab to see the Neville Brothers at Tipitina’s.

  Shep began earning a reputation for bringing together the culinary world with Hollywood. Most of America still viewed anyone who worked in a kitchen as someone with about as much status as a lawn care professional. Even Wolfgang Puck, one of the first to be labeled a celebrity chef, could find himself treated as “the help” in certain circles. In 1990 Shep ran into Wolfgang at a charity event in Hawaii. The chef told Shep that he had flown in alone, coach class, although the promoters had promised him first class, with two hundred pounds of food. No one wa
s at the airport to meet him, and when he arrived at the hotel where the dinner was to be held, there was no room in the refrigerator for the food he’d loaded into two taxis at the airport, and no prep cooks to help him. Wolfgang was given a dolly and told he could use it to wheel the food over to the hotel next door, which would hold it. The next day before dawn, one of the most famous chefs in America was alone chopping food, for which he was not being paid, and was fantasizing that it would be better to be a famous French chef: Maybe someday if I am as big a chef as Roger Vergé, Wolfgang thought, I will be treated like a human.

  Shep knew the Frenchman did not have it much better. He had accompanied Vergé to a hotel in Arizona where the chef was to cook for a charity gala. The night before the event, the two friends tried to have dinner in the dining room. The maître d’ sent them away, informing Vergé, “The help is not allowed to eat here.”

  Shep started scheming. Since meeting Vergé, he saw chefs as great popular artists who were not getting their due, just as African-American musicians once were forced to follow the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit to promote their music, playing for free in clubs across the country. Shep, whose roster of clients included Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Vandross, was part of a generation of promoters who got musical artists of all colors paid handsomely for gigs. Shep decided he was going to break up the Chitlin’ Circuit for chefs. He began arranging for chefs to cook backstage at concerts. When Sammy Hagar, a Shep client, was Van Halen’s lead singer, Shep arranged for the Southwestern cuisine pioneer Dean Fearing to cook for the band backstage before a performance in Dallas. Shep invited a local disc jockey to the dinner, knowing the DJ would brag about the meal on the air the next day, injecting Fearing with rock-and-roll chic. By providing the still-lowly profession of chef with Hollywood-style marketing expertise, he blazed a trail that many would follow to vast profit in years to come.

  In August 1991, Shep, back in Hawaii, arranged for a dozen local chefs who had gathered for an informal conference at the Maui Prince Hotel to come to his house to meet Vergé and Fearing. Until that time, restaurant and hotel menus in Hawaii had been ruled by gummy French-influenced dishes such as Steak Diane and Lobster Thermidor—a dish made from a crustacean caught in cold waters six thousand miles away. Vergé and Fearing pushed the Hawaiian chefs, who included Roy Yamaguchi and Alan Wong, to align themselves with the new culinary movements on the mainland started by restaurateurs who bought from local farmers and celebrated local specialties. The chefs listened raptly, and from this meeting, the Hawaii Regional Cuisine movement was born. The next year Shep invited journalists and celebrities to a launch party for the movement at Schatzi on Main, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Santa Monica restaurant, and hired a former Miss Hawaii to dance the hula.

  A month later, a group of chefs, including Jonathan Waxman, formerly of Chez Panisse, Larry Forgione, whose An American Place pioneered New American Cuisine on the East Coast, and the Cajun genius Paul Prudhomme, attended the annual American Wine and Food Festival in Los Angeles, a modest annual event hosted by Wolfgang to benefit Meals On Wheels. The chefs spent an extra night or two at the Four Seasons Santa Barbara Biltmore for an informal confab of culinary stars. Forgione, Waxman, Fearing, Prudhomme, Jeremiah Tower, Alice Waters, Robert Del Grande, Jimmy Schmidt, Bradley Ogden, Mark Miller, and others agreed that their generation of American chefs had achieved fame never before known. But not a one of them was getting rich. Wolfgang was doing the best. He had just opened a Spago in Las Vegas, but he was hardly on easy street, and even a chef-businessman like him was expected to push his own dolly into banquet kitchens. Did Bruce Springsteen have to lug his own tower of amps into a stadium?

  As the group lounged on the Biltmore’s famous patio overlooking the Pacific Ocean, an idea began to take shape that they ought to band together in some way, form an association of culinary stars that could push for higher fees, decent hotel rooms, and better overall treatment. Shep was suggested as someone who would be perfect to represent such a group.

  It took until the next year’s L.A. festival in September 1992 for much to happen. Shep was at his office when he received a phone call from Wolfgang. “Shep, will you come to lunch tomorrow at Spago? I want to discuss some things with you.” When he arrived, he saw more than twenty of the most famous chefs in the country. The restaurant was closed and they sat in chairs facing him as if he were a teacher in a classroom. The chefs told him they wanted what big-time musicians had, killer representation. Would he do it?

  Shep understood them immediately. This, he thought, was what he owed his master, Vergé. Grasshopper’s powers had grown and were now being called upon. He told them he’d do it, and started discussing how: endorsement deals, appearance fees, licensing food products that carried their names and were sold in supermarkets. Shep told them his favorite line about the beauty of life once the checks from licensing deals start flowing in: “You don’t get rich from working. You get rich from going to your mailbox.” He had done this with Alice Cooper albums, lunch boxes, and T-shirts, some of which he owned a percentage of himself.

  He suggested that the chefs read a book by the sports marketing pioneer Mark McCormack, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: Notes From a Street-Smart Executive. In it, McCormack discussed how he and his company, International Management Group, transformed professional golfers like Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus from small-time earners who won big trophies into national brands who earned millions annually through endorsements, product lines, and appearance fees. The key, McCormack wrote, was the rise of sports on television. Starting in the early 1960s, the national TV networks began bringing golf tournaments into millions of homes every weekend, and it was McCormack who recognized the opportunities that opened up. He leveraged them into riches for a roster that included Joe Montana, Björn Borg, and many others. Crucially, the value of these athletes’ brands was not affected by how little the networks were paying for broadcast rights. What mattered was that Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, and the rest were blasted into living rooms every Sunday, burning their images into the minds of millions of viewers. Thanks to TV, Palmer earned far more money off the course than prize money on it.

  “Our interest and expertise had always been in developing income opportunities for our clients off the playing field, in establishing licensing and promotional relationships, and in managing them in a way that would provide those athletes with a steady income long after their playing days were over,” McCormack had written in his book.

  Chefs had not entirely missed out on the endorsement game. In 1976, Nouvelle Cuisine pioneer Michel Guérard was a consultant for a line of Nestlé frozen foods. James Beard did ads for Mouton Cadet wine and Omaha Steaks. In the early 1970s, Julia Child endorsed Cuisinart, and in the mid-1980s appeared in an ad for the California Winegrowers, for which she was paid $100,000. More typical fees for the time were the $10,000 Alice Waters and Wolfgang were paid for doing a phone company commercial. Nice, but not appreciably more than the rate a C-level actor would fetch for an advertising shoot.

  Shep acted fast. In November 1992, he formed a company, Alive Culinary Resources, and told reporters that he was moving into promoting chefs.

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  On November 29, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the founding of the agency under the headline “When the Road Is Rough for Celeb Chefs: Celebrity chefs supposedly went out with the ’80s. Not according to Shep Gordon.” Four months later, in March 1993, Florence Fabricant in The New York Times filed “The Man Who Would Turn Chefs Into Household Names”: “Shep Gordon, an agent in California, thinks chefs and restaurateurs should be treated more like rock stars and hopes to put their names in lights. . . .”

  Among the ideas Shep described to Fabricant were for chefs to sew patches with product logos on their coats, just like racing-car drivers, food festivals where the entertainment value of watching chefs cook would be “hyped,” chefs featured in People magazine, and what the reporter terme
d “a stretch-limousine lifestyle for chefs.” (Fabricant would soon have her own occasional segment on TVFN, appearing on Food News and Views on Wednesdays to recap her buy of the week. This never did lead to the production of FloFab posters or T-shirts. Then again, Shep never represented her.) He started delivering fast for the thirty-seven men and women in white in his stable. Dean Fearing was tapped to prepare the 1993 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner in Los Angeles, where Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Eric Clapton were served tortilla soup. Shep arranged for Wolfgang to make the Grammy Awards dinner in 1993. (Puck became the chef for the Academy Awards Governor’s Ball in 1995.) Then Shep made a deal with Time-Life Home Video for Emeril, Fearing, Pino Luongo, Daniel Boulud, Michel Richard, and Vergé to appear in an instructional cooking series. The chefs were paid about $5,000 each for three days’ work. With Sony Records, Shep produced a series of song compilations packaged with recipes. One, called Cocktail Hour, paired tunes by Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, and others with a recipe for spiced cashews with citrus-marinated chicken morsels by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, the photogenic young owners of the hot L.A. restaurant Border Grill.

  Shep was happy to flex his kung fu–dealmaker muscles on behalf of such noble men and women. In 1993, he used connections at Radio City Productions to help Forgione land a gig cooking for President Bill Clinton at a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee. The event’s printed program devoted almost as much space to Forgione as it did to the musical talent, Whitney Houston and Kenny G. The three-paragraph bio on the New York chef concluded, “A champion and reinventor of our national cuisine, Larry Forgione is a great American artist. His creations represent our culture’s past, present and future.” Such language may seem rote to a reader now, but in 1993, few of those who dined on the Roast Breast of Chicken with Monticello Style Soft Corn Pudding (summer compote of morels, leeks, Vidalia onions, and a Midwest caramelized chicken sauce) would have conceived of bestowing such a high-falutin’ description on a cook. An “artist”? many of them were likely wondering, and what the hell is a “Midwest” sauce?