11

IN 1977 I STARTED A WHOLE NEW JOURNEY. I got into producing movies. I did it as a favor to a friend.

It started on a terribly sad note, when Carolyn’s baby Lola, our Billion Dollar Baby, died in her crib, which happened more often then than it does now. Carolyn worked out of her apartment in London, and just couldn’t bear to be there anymore. She asked if I might have a spot for her at Alive. Of course I said yes. I loved Carolyn and there was no question that I would make a place for her in my company and give her whatever she needed to recover and be happy. She started out helping to manage artists, then said that what she really wanted to do was make movies.

Okay, I said, then we’ll make movies. First, though, we had to learn how to do that. Despite her experience in the film world, Carolyn had never made a movie. I had only done some video and TV. When I asked her who might be a good teacher, she thought of David Puttnam, a British producer. He and his partner Sandy Lieberson had made some terrific films, including Performance, the Nicolas Roeg movie starring Jagger, and Ken Russell’s Mahler and Lisztomania. Later David would make Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, and Local Hero.

We met up with David in New York and he agreed to go in with us. We formed Alive Films. David was the chairman, and Carolyn worked with him. It was a very small, independent film company, something that didn’t really exist in America at the time. The first movie David wanted to make was called The Duellists, with a screenplay adapted from the Joseph Conrad novella The Duel, about a pair of officers in Napoleon’s army. I didn’t read the script; I wasn’t involved on that level at all. What I did was put up some cash—I think it was a quarter of a million dollars—for overhead.

David set up a meeting at Paramount Pictures to see if they’d give us the money to make the movie. A fellow named David Picker was running Paramount at the time. Wonderful man. His father was one of the founders of United Artists. He said, “I love Carolyn. I’ll do anything for Carolyn. I’ll give you a million dollars, just don’t embarrass me.”

As we walked out of the office I asked, “Was that good?”

David said, “Good? Are you kidding me? This is probably the first time in the history of the studios that they didn’t even want to see a script. We just got a million dollars for nothing.”

He hired a director—some guy named Ridley Scott. This would be his first feature film. And they cast Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as the two officers.

One day, a couple of weeks before shooting was to start, Keith called me. We’d known each other peripherally. Apparently we were fronting some money for him to take fencing lessons. But he was getting worried because he hadn’t heard from us about his travel arrangements to France, where the movie would be shot. About three days before Keith was supposed to leave, David called me from London.

“We have a problem, Shep. We’re two hundred thousand dollars short on the budget. We need that much more to start making the movie.”

“Well, where are you going to get it?” I asked. He was the producer, after all.

“Do you have it?” he asked.

“No. What have you been telling Keith? He thinks he’s leaving in three days.”

“Shep, when you make movies, you never tell anybody the whole truth.”

Really? I was a pretty successful businessman by then, and that’s not how I ever conducted things. I called up Keith and told him the truth: “We have two more days. I’m going to try and figure this out, but I’m not in a position to put up the money myself. I just didn’t want to call you five minutes before you’re supposed to leave.”

He was in a panic. I didn’t blame him. Then I woke up the next day to see in the news that there had been a sterling crisis in England, and the pound had been drastically devalued overnight. The new exchange rate meant we were instantly $200,000 richer. We started shooting the next week.

We finished the film in time to enter it in the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. David and Carolyn went. I didn’t. I was still so green at this business that I even forgot to have my name put in the credits as one of the producers. We won the Best First Work award. It was Ridley’s first movie, our first movie, total cost $1.2 million, and we won. Man, were we proud. We were convinced we were going to waltz back into Paramount and be handed a ten-picture deal. We called the studio to set up a screening for David Picker and the other bosses, because they’d never seen it. That’s when we were told David had just been fired. That’s Hollywood. Two new guys were taking over. One was Michael Eisner. The other was Barry Diller. They set up a screening for two weeks later.

Carolyn, David Putnam, Ridley, and I went into that screening room very excited. We were sure they were going to love us. Ridley was already staking out his position for his next movie. The lights went down. Nobody said a word. We heard the door open behind us. Still nobody said a word. The movie started. When it had been running maybe fifteen minutes, a guy behind us called out, “Lights!” The movie stopped and the lights came on. Two guys were sitting behind us. They were about our age, mid-thirties, but otherwise they couldn’t have looked more different from us. They looked like corporate suits, and they had that corporate suit attitude, deadpan and hardass. One of them stood up.

“I’m Barry Diller,” he said. “This is Michael Eisner. We just took over the studio. We came from ABC TV, and the one thing Michael and I have in common is, we don’t like art house movies. We’re not going to release this. But very nice to meet you.”

And they left the room. Paramount never did a real release of the picture. After their reign at Paramount, Diller would go on to create the Fox Television Network, and Eisner would run the Walt Disney Company for twenty years.

Now it’s 1979, and my life is like a carnival ride. I’m dividing my time between L.A. and Maui. Carolyn and I are growing our movie company. I’m managing Alice and an expanding roster of performing artists, and have a growing staff to help me do that. I still have Carlos’n Charlie’s, and still bring women home from there. I’m drinking, drugging, partying.

One night I let a married friend of mine bring a girl up to my house in Bel-Air. When I came home they were in the living room. She was a gorgeous blonde, Marcy Hanson, who had been Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for October 1978. She invited me to a party at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills a night or two later. I was so excited. Me, Shep Gordon, at the Playboy Mansion!

To start with, Hef’s estate was incredible. The house is enormous, sprawling, all Gothic arches and turrets, like a medieval castle. And the grounds were beautiful, with a tennis court and a pool that was fed by a waterfall and a sauna and peacocks wandering the lawn. And then there were the women. It was Pajama Night or Lingerie Night or something, and hundreds of beautiful women were there.

Marcy took me to the famous grotto, a man-made cave of carved rock with steam rising off Jacuzzis and hot tubs, romantically lit, like something out of Disneyland if Disneyland wasn’t for families. Marcy and I got undressed and soaked and got to know each other. When we were ready to get out, our clothes were gone.

I said, “Hey, somebody stole my clothes.”

Marcy laughed and explained that while you were in the grotto, staff took your clothes and pressed them for you.

We went for a walk on the grounds and came to a big, hollowed-out tree with a mattress in it, and that’s where we made love for the first time. Now it was after midnight and I was hungry. Marcy said she could eat, too.

I said, “Great. Where should we go?”

She smiled at me again. “Oh no, Hef keeps kitchen staff twenty-four hours a day.”

So we went up to the mansion and a chef came out, took our order, and cooked us some eggs.

The whole experience overwhelmed me and swept me away, and in no time Marcy and I got married. It wasn’t something I thought through. Like a lot of other decisions in my life, it was just what I did at that moment. I was in my early thirties. Maybe after the previous few years of sex with strangers from the club I felt ready to settle down.

I sold the party-hardy house in Bel-Air and bought us a beautiful mansion on a gated property on Oakmont Drive in Brentwood. It was designed by the great African-American architect Paul Revere Williams, who designed homes for a lot of Hollywood celebrities, like Tyrone Power, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, and Bert Lahr. James Garner and Zubin Mehta were our neighbors. Our first week there, around three in the morning, Mrs. Mehta called. I had a dog I’d rescued from the pound. Marcy loved dogs, so I thought I’d try to get over my fear of them. He had dug under the fence, swam through the pond outside the Mehtas’ bedroom, come in the bedroom, and jumped into bed with them soaking wet. He did that three more times, until I felt so mortified I gave him up. A few months later I found a note from them in the mailbox. They missed the dog and hoped he was okay!

That house was immense. I don’t think I lived there long enough even to walk into half the rooms, because it soon became obvious to Marcy and me that our hasty marriage had been a mistake. We worked at it for eight or nine months, then got it annulled. I never heard from her again until Supermensch came out and she wrote me a beautiful letter from Galveston, Texas, where she ran a bed-and-breakfast, and we had a really sweet phone conversation.

After the annulment went through, I sold that house and bought Alice’s Benedict Canyon place from him. He and his wife, Sheryl, moved to Phoenix. The house was listed on all the maps to the stars, so people used to ring the bell all the time, hoping that Alice Cooper would answer the door. I put up a sign:

ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE.

GO BACK AND GET A REFUND.

I didn’t have my dog anymore—sort of a relief—but I had a cat, the Sensitive One. He must have learned something from the dog, though, because he also went next door to get cozy with the neighbors—Mr. and Mrs. Cary Grant. I went over to their place and rang the bell. When his assistant answered the door, I could see through to the backyard, where Cary and the Sensitive One were hanging out together, obviously enjoying each other’s company. Cary had retired from pictures a decade or so earlier and was in his late seventies, I think.

I went out there and said, “Mr. Grant, that’s my cat.”

His wife Barbara—his fifth and last, almost half a century younger than him—was out there, too, and said to me, “You can’t take the cat away from him. That cat has brought him back to life.”

So Cary Grant and I agreed on joint custody of the cat.

Maybe both my pets knew that in L.A. you don’t meet your neighbors, and they were trying to do something about it. The Alice house was almost at the end of a long, windy road. There was only one more house past it, where the road dead-ended. I lived there for five years and never met the neighbors in that house, though once in a while I’d catch a glimpse of this pretty young woman going in or out.

This went on for years. I would keep that house as my L.A. residence until 2000. The day I left, my moving van blocked the road, and those folks couldn’t get out. They sat in their car and honked for maybe twenty minutes, and then finally rang the doorbell. It was Ric Ocasek of the Cars. I was really good friends with him and his very pretty wife, Paulina. We had gone to dinner three or four times while I lived in that house, and never knew we were next-door neighbors until this moment—when I was leaving.

When I first got there, Elton John was still on the street as well. He moved out, and the house was bought by a pornography company that shot a lot of videos there. Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, also lived on the street.

Only in L.A. Sometimes my life there felt like I was living in the Hollywood Wax Museum.