13

I STARTED GOING TO CANNES EVERY YEAR, for both the festival and the Moulin. I loved it. For me, Cannes was like no other place in the world. Business-wise, everything you did mattered. It even mattered where you stayed. The Hotel du Cap was the epicenter of lodging the way the Moulin was to dining. It was built as the palatial Villa Soleil in 1869 and became a hotel twenty years later. It’s one of the most elegant, luxurious hotels in the world, on some of the world’s prime real estate, twenty-two acres of lawn and garden just down the coast from the city, at the tip of the Cap d’Antibes, looking out at the ocean. It was a power statement to stay at the du Cap. If you didn’t stay there, you were nobody. If you couldn’t afford it, or couldn’t get a room, you lied and said you stayed there. Of all the people in the film industry, there are only twenty or thirty who have the power to green-light a feature. At Cannes, they all stay at the du Cap.

Carolyn got me my first reservation. During the festival they won’t reserve you a room for under two weeks. Most people are at the festival for only four or five nights. It doesn’t matter. You must book for two weeks. And they are very expensive rooms. When I went to pay the bill with my credit card, they informed me that they only took cash. They also charged me for three hotel dinners I didn’t eat. I ate all my dinners out. And three dinners at the hotel added up to something outrageous like $2,500.

I spoke to the guy at the front desk, who went and fetched the general manager, a Monsieur Arondel. He started out very polite.

“Mr. Gordon. I understand you are questioning the bill for these dinners?”

“Yes. I didn’t eat any dinner here.”

At that he turned frosty and, well, French.

“Mr. Gordon, we do not appreciate guests who challenge our bills. That is not what our guests do here. We do not prefer such guests. I understand you do not have cash. So I will allow you to pay by check. But you will no longer be welcome at this hotel.”

It seemed like an old-time shakedown to me. I had to stay at the du Cap when I was at Cannes. He knew that. He knew the hotel could get away with charging me anything the hotel wanted to, and threatening me with banishment when I dared to speak up. Because if you wanted to do major business at the festival, you did have to stay there. And it is a beautiful hotel. When you’re in the movie business, you get used to being squeezed by people in power positions. So you paid what the hotel said you had to pay. In cash.

The following year, I was worried that I really wouldn’t be allowed to book a room. I asked my friend Tom Pollock, chairman of Universal Pictures, if he could make a reservation for me.

“I can do better than that,” he said. “I got a room for De Niro, but he’s only going to be there for three days. I had to reserve it for two weeks. Fly on the Universal plane, the office will bring you the key at the airport, and just go use the room.”

I flew over, got the key, and went to the hotel. I hid my face as I passed through the lobby, so no staff would recognize me as that troublemaker from the previous year who had the balls to question his bill. When I walked into the room, my friend Michael Fuchs, the head of HBO, was there.

“Michael, what are you doing here?”

“Hey, Shep. I rented the room for the festival. Just got here this morning.”

“They charge you for two weeks?”

“Yeah.”

I cracked up. They double-booked the room. What a racket.

For years I financed all our pictures, five or six pictures a year, sitting in the lobby of the Hotel du Cap, scribbling deals on hotel napkins. After my very first trip to Cannes I had flown back with Jim Fifield. He was the head of 20th Century Fox Video. Later he’d be chairman of EMI and Capitol Records. We are good friends; I’m his daughter’s godfather. Jim explained that where movies had traditionally made virtually all their money in movie theaters, now in-store videocassette sales (DVDs were still a decade off) and TV pay-per-view rentals were very important secondary markets. Theatrical distribution was still critical, because if your picture got into X number of theaters, the people who bought those secondary market rights automatically calculated X number of sales and rentals, for which they paid you X dollars.

But theatrical distribution was in the hands of a few big guns, and a small independent company like Alive had no leverage with them. So it seemed to me that for us, controlling both the production of a picture and its distribution was the key. For example, if I could raise a million dollars to make a picture, and then guarantee that it would be in X number of theaters—which we could do if we distributed it ourselves—it would trigger strong secondary rights. We could then put that into making and distributing the next film.

Those are the deals I cut at the du Cap. For instance, I would meet up with Andre Blay, who ran Embassy Home Entertainment in America, and sell him what was called an output deal. This meant I would guarantee him that I would put, say, five movies a year in X number of theaters. He would block-buy the video rights to that entire output for X dollars. That frontloaded us a lump of money for the films.

We became a model for this whole subculture of younger people who wanted to do what we did. One of them was Harvey Weinstein. I’d known him since he and his brother started out producing rock concerts in Buffalo. They formed Miramax in 1979 and started out distributing concert films. He would come to Cannes and try to get into the game, but it was a tough game to get into. I don’t know if I can say I mentored him, but I did try to help him out and give him tips, and when Miramax got to be really successful in the 1990s, it was to a significant degree because they followed in our path.

I only actually stayed at the du Cap a couple of years. Then Vergé said, “Shep, you must stay at the Moulin with me.” After that I would book a room at the Moulin, and one for George Greif. We slept until late morning, then went down in our bathrobes. One of Vergé’s sous chefs made us breakfast. That sous chef was Daniel Boulud, long before he became a world-renowned chef himself. He made incredible breakfasts and we became good friends.

One day I said to Vergé, “You work hard during the festival. I work hard. When it’s over, why don’t we get a bunch of our friends together and take a bus trip somewhere beautiful? Go drink wine and eat food and have fun.”

He agreed. He lived for food, wine, making people happy, and service. I just presented him with another avenue to do what he loved and share it with our friends.

We both invited people. I found us a great touring bus that belonged to Team Porsche and came from Germany with a driver named Adolph. It was big, black, shiny, and new, ominous-looking with its opaque black windows. Inside it was all high-tech and luxurious from its leather couches and seats to its dining area to the private compartment in the back. It was like a rock-and-roll touring bus, but without the beds.

On the last day of the festival for the next five years we loaded up that beautiful bus and took off on an excursion. We went to Burgundy, Champagne, Italy’s wine country, Cognac, and once to Hungary, to visit these amazing caves that hadn’t been opened in years, where they stored a great Hungarian after-dinner wine. The trip was usually six or seven days. It was a different mix of people each trip, but the core group was Vergé and me; George Greif; César the sculptor; and François Mazet, the famous, flamboyant race car driver, one of the group’s heroes.

On these trips I first observed how in Europe a great chef like Vergé was revered the same way a great rock star or great sculptor was. People in Europe understood that they were all artists, just working in different media. Gradually, I learned the history behind the rise of Vergé and other chefs to this status of recognition.

The French had always appreciated the culinary arts. But it was only with the creation of nouvelle cuisine in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the chef rather than the institution became important. Before then, great dining was always identified with a place, usually a hotel restaurant: the Savoy, the Ritz, the Plaza. Pretty much the only chef whose name was well known was Georges Auguste Escoffier, back around the turn of the twentieth century. In the late 1880s, Richard D’Oyly Carte, famous for producing Gilbert & Sullivan, opened his new Savoy Hotel in London, and brought Escoffier and a Swiss hotelier named César Ritz to run it for him. When they left a decade later, Ritz opened the Hotel Ritz in Paris and the Carlton in London. They were the most elegant and opulent hotels in the world—the adjective ritzy comes from this time—and Escoffier had what were considered the world’s best restaurants. Escoffier was the first to get the British to eat frog legs; he called them “Cuisses de Nymphe a l’Aurore,” Thighs of the Nymph of Dawn. He was so important to Ritz’s business that Ritz named the restaurant the Escoffier Room, the first time anyone invested in making a chef a known entity in his own right.

Escoffier retired, and died in 1935. After that, there were no really well-known chefs until Vergé, Paul Bocuse, and the Troisgros brothers, Pierre and Jean, completely renovated French haute cuisine as “nouvelle cuisine,” a lighter, fresher, less sauce-dependent style. They organized themselves as the Association de la Grand Cuisine Française, identifying nouvelle cuisine not with a place, but with themselves. A really smart Belgian promoter and marketer living in Paris at the time, Yanou Collart, had a lot to do with spreading nouvelle cuisine around the world, and making Vergé and the others celebrities throughout Europe. She urged food critics to go taste their food for themselves and, if they liked it, to tell their readers about it. She’d arrange for movie stars or other celebrities to come to the chefs’ restaurants, where she’d make sure there was a photographer or gossip columnist on hand to capture the moment. (So she was practicing my trick of “guilt by association” before I was.) She was also the first to arrange for them to go on tour, introducing their cuisine and wines.

So, by the time I met Vergé, he was as famous and loved in Europe as César Baldaccini or Mazet. Vergé and Mazet had a long friendship going back to when Vergé cooked for Team Ferrari, which bought a big double-decker bus and put a kitchen in the bottom so Vergé could make meals for the drivers at all the Formula One races. I loved Mazet. When he got married, George Greif and I flew to Paris to be surprise waiters and serve champagne at his wedding.

After we decided each year’s destination, Vergé would plot out the details of the journey. As we left the Moulin, Vergé would serve us cheese and crackers and a bottle of wine. As the French countryside slid by he’d say things like, “Oh, Shep, look out the window.”

“Yes, Mr. Vergé. Very pretty.”

“You see this little farmhouse?”

“Yes, Mr. Vergé, very nice.”

“You know this cheese, it was make by this farmhouse. Mr. Gateau. He is third generation of making cheese. He send over this cheese in morning for us.”

That was the nature of the entire trip. Vergé had friends all along the route. We ate at their restaurants, drank at their vineyards. They were always very excited to have a Vergé, César, and a Mazet walk into their spaces all at the same time. Vergé had César do a sketch in pencil for each place we visited. Vergé himself brought aprons and signed books. For a week we rolled from one beautiful space and excellent meal to another. One restaurant had an entire truffle menu. And every piece of foie gras and every truffle they had in the place came to our table, because Roger Vergé was in their restaurant. Out came the oldest bottles of wine from their cellars, and they wouldn’t let us leave until we drank twenty, thirty bottles.

I can remember only one night that went a bit off the rails. In Umbria, Giorgio Lungarotti invited us to his winery. Since the 1950s, the Lungarotti name was famous for raising Umbrian wines to the level of art. When we got into the little medieval town of Torgiano, where the Lungarotti winery was, it was late at night. We took a very narrow street to a beautiful fifteenth-century hotel where we were all staying for the night, then headed to a late dinner with Lungarotti. Vergé always organized everything on these trips. For example, we always, always ate at one table. Always. Our group was pretty large this time. In addition to our core group we had picked up a couple of César’s sculptor friends, the restaurateur Paolo della Pupa—maybe fourteen of us in all. It was late, around eleven o’clock. We were the only people in the restaurant.

As we entered, I saw they’d set two tables for us.

I asked the maître d’, “Could you please reset those two tables to one table? We always eat at one table.”

“Mr. Lungarotti said it is two tables,” he replied.

“Well, could you tell Mr. Lungarotti we always eat at one table?”

He went off, came back, and said, “Mr. Lungarotti says it must be two tables.”

“Really?” Now I saw there were name cards. Vergé’s table had what Lungarotti must have thought were all the heavyweights at it. My table was George, me, Paolo della Puppa, and a couple of others.

To miss a night eating together, which was what the entire journey was about, was a big deal to me. Lungarotti walked in, wearing a suit and tie. He walked right past our table without saying a word, then greeted Vergé and everyone at his table and sat with them. The waiter brought them olive oil and bread. I saw that it was a different olive oil from the one they brought us. Theirs was in a beautiful square bottle; our bottle was round. I asked the waiter, very politely, “Could we get a bottle of that olive oil?”

He went over, whispered to Lungarotti, came back, and said, “I’m sorry. It’s only for that table. It’s a special bottle just for them.”

“We can’t have the olive oil from that table?”

“No, I’m sorry. Just for them.”

That was it. I got up, walked over, and said, “Mr. Vergé, we are leaving. Not just the restaurant, but the hotel.”

“Oh, but Shep. There is not a hotel in two hundred miles.”

“Mr. Vergé, we are leaving right now. It’s different olive oil!”

He had no idea what I meant. I pointed out the different bottles. Vergé spoke a little French to Lungarotti.

“Oh, you cannot go,” Lungarotti said. But no apology, no one moving to set things right. So I led our entire group out of the restaurant and back onto the bus. After a moment Lungarotti sent a guy out to say okay, you can have the olive oil. We marched back into the restaurant. They made one long table out of the two, with two square bottles of the special olive oil.

My goal was to have us all sitting at one table, all with the same olive oil. I hadn’t really gotten angry, but I knew that storming out and leaving Lungarotti alone at his table would accomplish my goal: a beautiful evening, a great meal, and lots of laughs.

And it was the best olive oil I ever tasted in my life. No wonder Lungarotti was hoarding it. Before we left, we arranged for Paolo della Puppa to get the U.S. distribution rights. He built a career on exporting that oil. I still have probably twenty cases of those beautiful square bottles at my home.

One year we learned that César was scheduled for cancer surgery at the end of the trip. We were going to Italy and then back to Paris, where the bus would drop César at the hospital. I thought we’d need something to lighten the mood, so I walked into a porno shop in Cannes and bought blowup dolls for everyone. A black one, a Swedish blonde, an Indian one. When we got to the French-Italian border, an immigration official came onto the bus and saw all these blowup dolls lying around. He was concerned. But then he recognized César. Everybody in France recognized César.

Another Formula One racer, Clay Regazzoni, came on that trip. He’d been paralyzed from the waist down in a crash at the Long Beach Grand Prix in 1980, then came back and raced in the Paris-Dakar Rally using a special hand-controlled car. Paris-Dakar is the most demanding automobile race in the world, and here he was, a paraplegic, competing in it with all the other drivers. The French called him “the Animal” after that. Whenever people saw him, they’d scream, “L’Animal! L’Animal! ” He was the biggest pop star of our bunch. He brought no attendant with him. Yet he was the first up and dressed every morning, with the biggest smile you ever saw. We carried him into and out of his wheelchair and it never added one second to our journey.

When we dropped off César in Paris at the end of that trip, Mazet picked up a car there. Mercedes made custom vehicles for race-car drivers to use on the streets. They had eight wheels, a double set at each of the four points, in case a tire blew—because they all drove so fast on the streets. George, L’Animal, and I got into Mazet’s eight-wheeled Mercedes, and he proceeded to scare the daylights out of us with his driving. (Well, maybe not L’Animal, but George and me for sure.) He’s speeding around Paris like a madman. He has the car phone in one hand, speaking to Vergé, and a cognac in the other, steering with his knees, blasting a hundred miles an hour through city traffic, down one-way streets the wrong way, stopping for green lights, going through red lights. He drives that way any time, but now he’s also drunk. He’s laughing on the phone. “Hey, Chef, we are having a great time! I am driving the wrong way and people are going crazy! Why are you not with us, Chef?”

I was terrified. How could I get this crazy man to stop? Then I remembered that Jeff Kramer, Bob Dylan’s manager, had told me that Dylan was playing a concert in a Paris cinema that day.

“Hey, François, let’s go see Bob Dylan.”

“Perfect! We go see Bob Dylan!”

At the speed he was driving we got there in no time. I clearly remember seeing the exterior of the movie house rushing toward us. It looked just like one of the old, giant RKO theaters, with maybe a dozen glass doors flanking the ticket booth. Then Mazet driving up onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians. Then Mazet driving through the doors. Then us sitting in Mazet’s eight-wheeled Mercedes in the middle of the lobby, Mazet on the phone yelling, “Chef, we are in the lobby to see Bob Dylan! You should be here!”

The theater manager was running toward us, with a policeman, who was reaching for his pistol. The policeman yanked open Mazet’s door and looked inside the car. His jaw dropped.

“Mazet! L’Animal!”

He holstered his gun. And pulled out a pen and a notepad. And asked them for their autographs. I am not making this up.

Mazet handed him the keys, like he was a valet, and the theater manager ushered us into the concert. While we enjoyed the show, the cop backed the Mercedes out of the lobby and parked it out front for us.

In the mid-1980s Alive Films evolved into Island Alive Pictures. That’s a complicated story I’ll explain later. Island Alive was producing some great films. In 1985 two of our movies earned Oscars: a Best Actor for William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (the third movie we screened at Cannes) and a Best Actress for Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful. So we were pretty hot at Cannes. If you were a player there, it was a tradition to throw a big party. I decided to throw my first big party at the Moulin.

I spoke to Vergé. I knew it would be a lot of work for him. I always had to be careful what I asked him for, because very rarely would he give me a no.

“I want to throw a private party for fifty or sixty people in the Moulin during the film festival. Would you do that for me?”

“It will be difficult,” he said. “But for you, I would of course do anything.”

I had the best possible venue. Now I needed a celebrity cohost to draw the other celebrities—guilt by association again. I thought of Michael Douglas. We had met in a funny way. Phyllis Somer, a former model I was dating, invited me to go to Santa Barbara with her for a party at Michael and Diandra Douglas’s house. The Oceanside kid in me thought, Michael Douglas, wow. Then Phyllis called and said, “There’re no rooms in Santa Barbara.”

I decided that wasn’t going to deter us. I went out and rented a big black rock-and-roll tour bus, just for the two of us. We drove up to Santa Barbara and pulled into Michael’s driveway.

When Phyllis introduced us, Michael asked, “Where are you staying?”

“In your driveway,” I said.

“What?”

I walked him outside and showed him the bus.

“Jesus!” He laughed. We went into the bus, and in a little while half the party was in there.

Michael and I drank some cognac. He has so much life in him; he’s so available and easygoing and funny. We clicked right away.

Michael Douglas had just come through a frustrating period in his career and was on an upswing.

“You know, Mikey,” I said, “these chefs are all great artists. But nobody gives a shit about them. They’re treated like garbage. Look at Vergé. He’s the best chef on the planet, even his peers say so, but he can barely earn a living. We need to help our fellow artists make more money. They should all be stars like you guys are. I’m going to throw him a dinner party at his place. All the biggest stars in Cannes are ready to kill to get into these parties. It’ll be fantastic. Why don’t you cohost with me?”

It was a gigantic success. Everyone came. I mean everyone—the world’s greatest stars all had their assistants call to get invitations. Everybody at the festival buzzed about it the next day.

That’s how we started hosting special annual dinners at the Moulin for fifty, sixty invited guests. It was the most sought-after invitation at the festival. Every producer, director, and movie star in Cannes wanted an invitation. Only the top players got one. Every table was a power table. The next morning at breakfast, every conversation was about who was at the Moulin last night, who sat with whom. Lots of movies got funded at those dinners. It was great for Island Alive’s prestige, good for Michael’s profile, and fabulous for Vergé. If he’d spent a million dollars he couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity. Once they’d eaten at the Moulin, every big name in Hollywood was a Vergé fan. To them, he was the superstar, and the Moulin was hallowed ground. A true win-win.

My company always paid the bill. And it was always a big one, fifty, sixty thousand dollars, depending on the wines. After a few years, Michael said to me, “This year I’m paying.”

“Mikey, believe me, you don’t want to do that.”

“No, man, I’ve had a great year,” he said. “I’m back in action. You’ve done it every year, Shep. I’m taking care of the bill this year.”

“Absolutely not. You’re not paying this bill.”

“If I’m not paying the bill, I’m never coming again.”

When the bill came at the end of the dinner I grabbed it. It was, I think, $56,000. He tried to snatch it from me.

“Mikey, you can’t do this.”

“Shep,” he insisted, “I’m paying the bill!”

So I let him take it from me. And watched a slight look of shock cross his face when he read it.

But then there was this beautiful moment when he looked up at me with a huge grin and said, “You will never know how happy I am that I can pay this.”

You get to see somebody’s true character through their choices. And Michael’s choices are always to do the right thing, every second of every minute of every day. Just a remarkable man. I’ve never had a better friend, or known a human I respect more.

After we had hosted a few of these dinners at the Moulin, I said to Michael, “Why don’t we bring Vergé to L.A. and throw a dinner there? We’ll invite a Hollywood A-list, and really try to get across the idea that great chefs like Vergé are great artists who aren’t getting the respect or the money they deserve.” I thought we should do it in Los Angeles, rather than in, say, New York, because for everyone in Hollywood the high point of Cannes was already dinner at the Moulin. I knew if we put out an invitation in L.A., we would get a turnout that would blow everybody’s mind. Everyone would want to know who this Vergé was and why all these amazing people gathered in one room for him. Then I took the idea one step further. Why not put all these celebrity guests in white cooks’ jackets, so that they’re tacitly showing their respect to the culinary arts? Which led me to think, And why don’t we do for Vergé what he does for us? Why don’t we serve and be the staff for the party?

We threw the first one at my house. Vergé cooked, Michael was the head waiter, and I was the head sommelier. We served sixty guests—a Hollywood who’s who, people like Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, James Coburn, Anthony Quinn, Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Wes Craven, the heads of all the studios. Michael and I and other staff bringing plates around to all the tables, pouring their wine. Being of service.

I paid for it all. I was making rock-and-roll money, movie money—money was of no importance. I felt that Vergé had saved my life without saving my life. He probably wasn’t conscious of it, but meeting him and being in his presence had been the turning point of my life. So I felt a great debt to him and was honored to help him get the respect that he deserved. I always paid for everything around Vergé anyway. In all the years I was with him I never let him put his hand in his pocket, ever. He never paid for a hotel room, a meal, anything. He shared with me what he had, and I shared with him what I had. It was a great exchange.

My favorite moment of the evening came after dinner broke up at around eleven. Most of the guests went home, but Michael, Jack Nicholson, Danny, and a few others hung around. I went to sleep. Around one thirty I woke up and went into the living room, and the only person left was Jack. He was leaning up against the wall by the door, obviously with a good buzz on.

I said, “Hey, Jack, how you doing?”

He said, “Oh man, come here.”

I went over to him.

“Shep, tell me something,” he said. “Which one of us has to go home?”

We did a few of these dinners, and they were all great events. Vergé was very pleased. He was a proud man, he always enjoyed having all of Hollywood come to him at Cannes, and to have them all gather to honor him in Hollywood itself brought him great joy and satisfaction.

I still love to throw dinner parties at my house in Maui. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I apply everything Vergé taught me about the art of doing it correctly. The goal is to make every single guest feel as good as you can. You focus completely on them. It’s never about what you want. It’s all for them. For example, if your guests are young people, give them bright lighting, because they want to see and be seen. For older people, use soft lighting. The round table is very important. It creates a sense of equality. Nobody is at the head of the table; nobody is more important than anyone else at the table. If you have enough servers, serve everyone at the same time, the way I first saw Vergé’s staff do at the Moulin.

At my parties, there are often celebrities. If you’re a celebrity trying to relax and enjoy your meal, you don’t want other people gawking at you and bugging you for an autograph. At my house, you will never be asked for your autograph. I try to invite people who maybe have never met each other but would like to. Vergé taught me that if you have a guest whom everyone else at the affair wants to meet, leave an empty chair at each table. Then that someone can go around from table to table. And there’s no doing business at my house. If I hear somebody starting to talk shop or hustle another guest, I get right over there and end it. It’s not about business. Business is what you do elsewhere at other times. This is all about living the moment, enjoying the moment, being thankful for the miracles of good food and good friends.