14

AS INVOLVED AS I WAS IN THE MOVIE BUSINESS AND CANNES, I continued to be as busy as ever managing musical artists. In fact, our roster just kept growing. Blondie, the Pointer Sisters, Kenny Loggins, Stephanie Mills. My relationship with one singer in particular gave me some of my highest highs and lowest lows as a manager. My work with him also had a big, weird impact on the movie side of our company. It’s a complicated tale with some fantastic twists and turns.

It starts back in 1975, when the soul group Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes put out what became my all-time favorite song, “Wake Up Everybody.” It’s such a beautiful, hopeful song. I still listen to it all the time and it always lifts me up.

The Blue Notes were on Philadelphia International Records (PIR), the soul machine founded and run by the producers and songwriters Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who were also responsible for the success of the O’Jays and other big R&B, soul, and disco artists. Although Harold Melvin was the group’s founder, the star was the drummer and singer, Teddy Pendergrass. Although I liked the song a lot, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was Teddy singing it. I think I just assumed it was Melvin.

Teddy left the group for a solo career that year. His manager, Taaz Lang, also became his lover. One night in 1977, as she was getting out of her car, she was gunned down execution-style. Her murder has never been solved.

I got a call from Goddard Lieberson, the head of Columbia Records, as well as the executor of Groucho’s estate. Columbia distributed PIR. He asked me if I’d be interested in managing Teddy. You did not say no to Goddard Lieberson. I agreed to go see Teddy perform in Philadelphia and meet him afterward. It was in a small theater, maybe fifteen hundred seats. A lot of them seemed to be filled by women, who seemed to love the show. I did not. I thought it was really hokey. Teddy had an album that was climbing the charts, and he seemed really cocky to me, really not authentic. He was wearing these long white capes, surrounded by dancers and backup singers, a really corny production. But when he sang “Wake Up Everybody” I realized for the first time that it was his voice on the record I loved so much.

I went backstage afterward, and there was a traffic jam outside his dressing room of Jewish managers, most of whom I knew, lined up to get an audience with him. It was like a cattle call for guys auditioning to handle him. I didn’t want any part of it and went home. About a week later I got a call from somebody at Columbia asking what I thought. I said I hated the show, loved the artist, didn’t meet him. They asked me to please try again. He was talking to some managers they didn’t think were right for him.

So I went down from New York. Outside Teddy’s building was a white Rolls with TEDDY license plates. I took the elevator up to the penthouse, and a gorgeous girl wearing what was almost lingerie answered his door. Then I met Teddy, who was the most beautiful thing in the world. A dazzlingly handsome, very virile, very macho man. It was obvious why his audience was predominantly women. Still, all I wanted to do was get this meeting over with, go home, and get back to my life. So I said the most outrageous thing I could think of to say to a guy like Teddy, figuring that would be the end of it.

“Listen,” I said. “There are not a lot of things I’m sure of in this life. One thing I know for sure is that you are not qualified to judge which one of us Jewish managers is the better bullshitter. That’s what we do for a living. We talk, you sing. I was backstage a few weeks ago and saw that you had the best of the best lined up to pitch you. There’s no way for you to know who’s better for you and who’s worse, who’s going to deliver and who’s not. But another thing I know for sure: I can get higher than you, I got better women than yours, I can get drunker than you, and when you fall down I can take the cash out of your pocket and make sure it’s safe.”

I figured Teddy was going to throw me out of the building. Instead, he said okay, let’s make a date and find out. Now I had to make good. But I had that high tolerance for drink and drugs, so I knew I had a fighting chance. One thing I’ve always done is to try to make every moment special for whomever I’m with, so I had a beautiful wooden briefcase made and filled it with every drug known to man. A record company, maybe Warner Bros., gave us a two-bedroom suite in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. Teddy and I went head-to-head there, drinking and drugging and fooling around. When he collapsed after two days, I was still standing. I called a friend at Columbia, who came over and took a picture of me standing over Teddy with my foot on his chest. We sent it to Goddard Lieberson. In his memoir, Truly Blessed, Teddy wrote: “Who’d imagine I’d be out-partied by a white boy from Oceanside, Long Island? But I was. And it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. We shook hands and that’s been our contract ever since. No paper. His word was enough.”

It was one of the luckiest days of my life, the start of a new and incredible journey. Teddy had some dates booked, so I went on the road with him to get a feel for it. The first one was in Hampton Roads, Virginia. I knew the building because Alice had played there. It was a big barn of a space, like a hockey rink, that seated six thousand. You had to put up your own stage and bring in lights and sound. When we got there Teddy’s equipment was set up onstage, but there were no lights, no PA, and no promoter. Around five in the afternoon a van rolled up and the guys unloaded a Shure PA, really small, like you’d use for a shopping mall event or a Holiday Inn lounge, and a few small lights on poles. Really bush league. But I was new so I didn’t say anything. A decent-size audience showed up, maybe three thousand people, and they seemed to have a good time anyway.

At the end of the show I found the promoter and said we’d like to get paid.

“Oh, we’re not paying,” he said, nonchalantly.

“What do you mean?”

“We didn’t do as much business as we hoped so we’re not paying.”

I said, “You’ve got to pay him. If you don’t, I can’t stop these guys from coming in here and killing you. They’ve got guns. If a stray bullet hits me I don’t mind. I don’t have any family. But you’re out of your mind. You’re going to lose your life for two thousand dollars or whatever it is?”

He had a ring on one finger. He took it off and gave it to me as payment.

I took it to Teddy and asked, “Is this how you normally get paid? I’ve got to change this. I can’t take twenty percent of a ring, and I’m not doing this for fun.”

That’s when I started to hear how things worked on the Chitlin’ Circuit, not just from Teddy but from Earth, Wind & Fire and other black entertainers. The Chitlin’ Circuit was the traditional name for the black touring circuit. It had been around since vaudeville, and it had always exploited and ripped off acts. What I saw that night was just the way business was done. The entertainers put up with it to promote their records, and because things could turn ugly if they didn’t. There was more than a little reason to believe that Taaz had been murdered because she crossed somebody on the Chitlin’ Circuit.

I sat Teddy down and said, “I can’t do it this way. I can either resign or I can break these motherfuckers, but I can’t do that without you.”

Teddy said, “Let’s go after them. I want to change it, too.”

I booked a small tour. The first date was the Roxy in L.A., for a number of reasons. One, I wanted to do a press launch. Two, I wanted Teddy to play in a white-owned building. I wanted to see what reaction we’d get in a venue where I had some control; L.A. was my town. Teddy worked meanwhile on changing his show from the cheesy affair I’d seen. He didn’t tell me how he was changing it, and our relationship was still too new for me to meddle.

As the date approached, Teddy and I both started getting death threats. Some came by telephone, and one or two on paper. Those were classics, like something from a movie, with the letters cut out of magazines and glued to sheets of paper. We contacted the police and the FBI. They never found out who sent them, but they took it seriously enough that Teddy and I had to decide if we were going to go through with this. We decided yes.

So he played the Roxy. The audience was almost all white. And the show was awful. He had gone completely in the opposite direction from his former show. This one had no razzle or dazzle at all. He just sat on a stool through the whole thing and sang. It was like he went from James Brown to Vic Damone. I thought it was horrible. When it was over I headed backstage with a full head of steam. I discovered that the women in the audience must have liked the show even with no show business in it, because a constant stream of them were going in and out of his dressing room. It went on for hours. I was still the new guy, and his bodyguards would not let me in. The parade of women went on until 2 A.M. When I could finally get into the dressing room I charged in there with smoke trailing from my ears.

“You motherfucker. Who the fuck do you think you are? I ain’t getting paid. I’m getting death threats. I risk my life to watch you sit on a fucking stool the whole show. Then I stand outside your dressing room until two in the fucking morning? Are you out of your mind?”

Teddy said, “Well, what kind of show do you want me to do?”

I said, “I want you to do a show that gets every woman in the house so horny that they all jump on me, because I’m the only guy out there. You’re a sex magnet, but you’re singing at them. You need to sing to them.”

And as I said it, in the heat of that moment, I heard a concept. It was right there, fully formed. Teddy was very macho and manly, and women found him extremely sexy. Women made up a large part of his audience, and he got them really worked up. Any husbands or dates who happened to come along with them were pretty sure to be rewarded for it later that night. My idea played off that. Teddy Pendergrass was going to perform “for women only.”

Once again, everybody thought I was crazy. How could you keep men out? It had to violate some sort of civil rights laws. And once again, I just put my head down and steamed forward. I knew instinctively that it would work, and it would get Teddy a ton of press. I hedged the legal issue by deciding that though the ad would say that tickets were only available for women, we wouldn’t actually refuse to sell a ticket to any man who wanted to buy one. So we weren’t barring men, we were just discouraging them. I also didn’t want Teddy to appear to be too arrogant about it. He would not say in public, “I’m only letting women into my show.” It took a while, but we came up with a beautiful ad that struck just the right tone. It featured a stuffed teddy bear with a note attached: Come spend the night with me. Love, Teddy. We were consciously evoking Elvis: “Baby, let me be your loving teddy bear.” Sexy, but also romantic. And just to drive it home, we would hand out chocolate teddy bear lollipops to the ladies to lick during the show.

Teddy’s For Women Only tour hit five cities, from New York to L.A., and was massively successful. The press stepped right up and started calling him the Black Elvis. When he bought a big house outside Philadelphia they even compared it to Graceland. (He bought it from the Philadelphia-based TV host Mike Douglas, who would later show up unannounced and drive friends around the property, showing them where he used to live.) Over the next few years Teddy was the top-selling male vocalist in R&B. We had the greatest time. I loved being around him, loved going on the road with him. We went to boxing matches together, Ali fights, Sugar Ray fights. I got to know all the NBA greats through him—his best friend was Dr. J, Julius Erving.

Working with Teddy gave me some of my deepest satisfactions as a manager. There was Alice, but Alice goes way beyond being an artist I manage. Alice is like a body part to me. Strictly as an artist’s manager, my relationship with Teddy was the most rewarding and involving. Partly that was because I could really get in his face and tell him exactly what I thought. That’s very hard to do without upsetting your relationship in some way. And with celebrities, who get used to being pampered, stroked, and lied to on a daily basis, it can be really damaging. Especially when what you say to them goes to the core of what they do. Teddy was not a prima donna that way. He and I had what we called “don’t be a schmuck” conversations. He’d see me coming after a show and groan, “Oh shit. Is it ‘don’t be a schmuck’ time?” I would proceed to tell him exactly what I thought, and why. Not attacking, but also not having to package it the way I had to do with other artists. He didn’t listen to me every time, but there is no other artist I could be that open and honest with.

One of the wildest times with Teddy came when he was booked to play two shows one night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The shows sold out well in advance. The audience for the first show was predominantly women, and with them came every pimp in Harlem, taking their ladies out for a good time.

When Teddy left the stage at the end of the first show, he refused to go on for the second one. He absolutely would not go on, and he wouldn’t tell me why. We went back and forth about it for a while, and then he simply walked out. Black Elvis had left the building. Which was packed with a sold-out crowd for the second show. Whom I was supposed to tell that the show was canceled. And that there was no money on hand to pay them refunds, because we had sold out both shows days in advance, so the money was already in the bank. They’d have to come back tomorrow after the bank opened.

That was not a conversation I wanted to have with an auditorium filled with sexed-up women and pimps. I called Bert Padell, my business manager, at home. It was about nine thirty.

“I need $87,500 in cash delivered to the Apollo in the next fifteen minutes,” I said.

You can imagine what he said back. When I insisted, he told me to get myself down to the Lower East Side, to a certain restaurant that I won’t name, which featured cuisine of a certain nationality I won’t identify, and ask for a certain guy. He’d give me the money. I had my driver rush me down to this restaurant, I met the guy, and he handed me a brown paper bag stuffed with cash. We head back uptown, I’m starting to relax a little, thinking a real crisis has been averted—and the car breaks down ten blocks from the Apollo. So at 10:15 P.M., this white boy from Oceanside is running through the streets of Harlem, clutching a brown paper bag stuffed with $87,500. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. But I got there, put the money in the box office, and we were able to pay back all the ticket holders. The night ended peacefully. Just another night in the life of an artist’s manager.

The next day Teddy told me why he wouldn’t go back on. While doing the first show, he’d seen a gun in the audience. That was not too surprising, considering the number of pimps in the crowd. But Teddy was scared it was the same person who had killed Taaz Lang, coming to wipe him out, too. I couldn’t really blame him for not going back out there.

One other time, in 1982, Teddy canceled a sold-out show in England. Again he wouldn’t give me the reason, he just refused to go on. I pleaded with him: “Teddy, you sold out in a day. These are working people. They all have jobs. They all had to get babysitters. They’re sitting there waiting for you. Just get out and do the show.” He wouldn’t do it.

The next month, Teddy was in a horrendous car accident in Philadelphia. He lost control of his Rolls and crashed it into a tree. His passenger, Tenika Watson, walked away with some bruises and a chipped tooth, but Teddy was trapped in the wreckage while it took rescue workers forty-five minutes to cut him out. It was not at all certain that he was going to live.

When I found out about the crash, I flew to Philadelphia overnight and met up at the airport with Danny Markus, my partner and good friend, and we drove straight to the hospital. Teddy’s mother, Ida, his girlfriend, Karen, and his assistant, Sedonia, were there. The doctors informed us that Teddy might survive, but he had severed his spinal cord, and if he did live he would remain paralyzed below the chest for the rest of his life. He would never walk again, never have the use of his arms and hands. They also said that from their years of dealing with quadriplegic cases, they were convinced that the patient had to be told immediately.

They led us into the room, which I remember as a sort of white void with Teddy in the middle of it, on his back on a kind of table-bed, with ugly clamps to keep his head still. His eyes were open.

A doctor said, “Teddy, do you recognize these people? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

Teddy blinked once. We proceeded to tell him he wasn’t going to walk again. We told him that he was in the right place for rehabilitation, to try to stay strong, that we loved him and were with him one hundred percent—all the things you say in a situation like that. In the middle of it some nurses came and flipped him over, which they had to do every ten minutes, so for the last part of it he wasn’t facing us anymore. I couldn’t even imagine what was going through his mind. Teddy was the top R&B singer in the world, and might never be able even to speak again—if he were lucky enough to live. The day before he’d been the king of the world, the sexiest man alive, strong, virile, macho. Now he would never walk, would never feed himself again, would be lifted in and out of a wheelchair forever. I can’t believe how many times my journey keeps bringing me back to friends in wheelchairs.

It was horrifying. I loved that man, still do, and I can’t describe how sad it was to see him like that. I think in some ways it was the beginning of my not enjoying what I did for a living anymore.

Still, it was time for a reality check. Teddy had no financial resources. He’d spent every dime he made. He had kids with different women. It was really not clear that he was going to live. I doubted it. And even if he did, he would certainly not be able to provide for his family. My job at that moment was not to feel sorry for him, but to get to work making this terrible situation as bearable as I could for him and them.

Every type of media wanted to photograph him, video him, do an interview with him. I decided he absolutely should not be seen—and absolutely would not want to be seen—in that condition. We had to save every bullet we had in the gun for one big shot at resurrecting his career, if and when the time was right.

Meanwhile, I thought about who I could get to jump in quick, set up a trust fund, and earn a lot of goodwill from it. We had a very good sponsor relationship with a beer company. They more or less agreed to set up some sort of a charitable foundation for quadriplegics, which would include some financial help for Teddy and his family financially. I went to sleep thinking that maybe I had it solved.

When I woke up the next morning, all the newspapers had the story that Tenika Watson, the woman in the car with Teddy, was really a man.

We never heard one word from the beer company ever again. I never really got the story on Tenika until very recently. Teddy and I never spoke a word about it. There was nothing to be gained from it. A lawsuit was filed for Teddy against Rolls-Royce, charging that the engine and hydraulics had failed, so the steering went out. It was settled out of court. The story I heard was that Teddy had met Tenika in a bar after a 76ers game. He had gotten Dr. J to take his date home, while he went off with Tenika. It was a very rainy night, and he was driving on a very curvy road. At some point while he was driving he put his hand between her legs, felt a penis, freaked out, and crashed the car.

I believed that for two decades. In 2014, I told it to Oprah Winfrey. We’re friendly acquaintances. She has a beautiful upcountry farm on Maui. We see each other at social functions and once were in a group on a trip to Africa. Oprah had her staff find Tenika and did an interview with her. It was the first time Tenika had ever spoken publicly about that night. It turns out that she had the full sex-change operation five years before meeting Teddy, so the penis story was false. According to Tenika, Teddy simply lost control of the Rolls on the slick road.

After the beer company vanished I had nothing. No sponsor, and not much hope of finding one. The prospects of Teddy’s ever being able to perform again and earn new money seemed very dim, if he lived at all. I wondered if he might have any previously unreleased tapes lying around. His mother let Danny and me into the house. In a couple of days of rooting around with the family we did in fact find enough tapes for a new album.

So far, so good. But this is where the story turns really dark and twisted. I’m sure other players who were involved in this stage would tell different versions. I can only tell it as I experienced it.

Kenneth Gamble was a member of the Nation of Islam, and in my dealings with him and Huff I became convinced that they really didn’t like white people, and particularly despised me. They paid Teddy very little for recording his albums. Apparently the Chitlin’ Circuit mentality applied as much to record labels as performance venues. They were old friends of Teddy, so he never let me go after them to get him better pay. Yet he paid my fee as though they were paying him well, so I don’t know if he ever made any money on his albums.

All my dealings with Philadelphia International Records were very, very tough. Anytime I wanted to do anything for Teddy, it felt like they did everything in their power to obstruct me, to undermine my relationship with him, to go behind my back and turn him against me. One of several shots across my bow came at a point where Teddy’s material was getting really weak. His last couple of albums hadn’t sold as well as the previous couple. I was representing James Mtume, known simply as Mtume, the hottest songwriter in R&B. He had written a great many top-selling and Grammy-winning songs for artists like Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, Stephanie Mills, and others. Mtume loved Teddy and was excited by the idea of working with him. But Gamble and Huff did not publish Mtume’s music, and the majority of the tracks on Teddy’s albums were songs they’d written and published.

I got them to agree to a meeting in Philadelphia to discuss it. I got Mtume to agree to drive down from New Jersey. I called Teddy and said, “I need your support if I’m going to pull this off. I don’t need you there for the whole meeting, but I need you to show up when I call you, and to back me up when you get there. I don’t care that Kenny and Leon are your great friends. You need a hit. I need you to have a hit. I’m not in this to lose. I’m in this to win.”

He agreed. Danny and I took a train down from New York and got to the meeting site, the office of their lawyer Phil Asbury, at noon. We sat there until one, and then two, then three. It was not like Mtume not to show up, but there were no cell phones in those days so we couldn’t check up on him. At 5 P.M. a guy stuck his head in the door and shook it.

Asbury put his hands flat on his desk and said, “Well, I guess that takes care of that. He’s not coming.”

Danny and I went home. I called Teddy and said, “I don’t know what happened. I guess he wasn’t interested.”

Later Mtume told us he had gone to the meeting. They had put Danny and me in one office, Mtume in another, let us all sit there all afternoon, then told each side that the other hadn’t shown up. And to top it off, they told Teddy that none of us showed up.

That’s the kind of relationship I had with Gamble and Huff.

Given our history, I did not want to take these tapes we had found to PIR. I wanted to get Teddy as much money as possible. Walter Yetnikoff had succeeded Clive Davis (who had succeeded Goddard Lieberson) as the head of Columbia. I knew him; he was an old Jew from Brooklyn. Columbia was doing fantastically well as the label of Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones. I figured he’d be sympathetic.

“I’d give you a million dollars for this, Shepseleh,” Walter said. He always called me Shepseleh, a friendly Yiddish version of my name. “But I can’t. Legally I can only pay PIR for Teddy’s music. You’ve got to get them to agree that I’ll pay them and they’ll pass the money to you.”

I knew that if I was going to get Gamble and Huff to agree to let a million bucks flow through them, I had to put on a hell of a show. I got Teddy’s mother, his girlfriend, and his kids to go with me to the meeting. I explained to Gamble and Huff that this money was solely for a trust fund for Teddy and his family. I wouldn’t touch a penny of it. Teddy and his family really, really needed this.

Gamble and Huff agreed. I handed over the tapes. Yetnikoff said he sent them a check for a million dollars. I don’t know if it was in line with Teddy’s deal, but the family did not get the full amount.

So now I was really freaking and really pissed off. But here it comes again: Never get mad. I had to dissociate myself from my emotions, keep a clear head, and accomplish my goal. I went back to Columbia. I was told privately by one executive that if Teddy filed a lawsuit against PIR, it would stop payments to all of their other PIR artists until it was resolved—because their deal was built around Teddy. If I could get Teddy to serve notice, it would free them up to pay Teddy a million dollars, because they would save six or seven million in the interim by not having to distribute other acts (that they were losing money on). But no one could know that we were told to do it.

So I went to see their outside lawyer, Paul Marshall. I had never met him, but he was a legend in the music industry. His firm represented several of the giant labels, as well as some giant acts like the Beatles. I went to his office on Fifty-Seventh Street. The whole time we spoke he sat on a couch smoking cigarettes and tipping the ashes behind it. He explained that there could not be any written record whatsoever about my deal with Walter; I would just have to operate on trust.

Fine. Now I had to go to Philadelphia and get Teddy to agree to initiate a lawsuit against his good friends. I explained that if he would sue PIR, I could get him a million dollars. I asked him if he was willing to go through with this. He still couldn’t speak at this point. It was still one blink for yes, two for no. He blinked once. I brought in a court recorder, we read him the paperwork, he blinked once again, and we filed notice of a lawsuit in his name.

A week went by.

Two weeks went by.

Three weeks went by.

No check for a million dollars appeared. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. I felt the planet dropping out from under me. I shot straight over to Paul Marshall’s office. As I started to tell him what his client was doing to Teddy Pendergrass, he actually said to me, “Teddy Pendergrass . . . Teddy Pendergrass . . . I know that name from somewhere. . . .”

Game, set, match. They had me. I had nothing on paper, no recourse whatsoever.

I left Marshall’s office in a state of shock, and went straight to the office of Bob Krasnow. Bob had just been named chairman of Elektra a couple of weeks earlier. Bob was a really good friend. Not a business friend, a friend friend. When I got there I broke down and cried.

“Bob, if I had a million dollars I’d put it up myself,” I said. “If I had a property I could mortgage for a million bucks I’d do that. I cannot walk back into Teddy’s room and tell him I got him nothing, after he put so much faith in me that he sued his good friends. I’ll rob a bank first.”

Bob heard me out, then said, “Listen, Shep. I’m going to help you out here, but you’ve got to help me. Is he going to live?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Okay, then you have to cover my ass. I’m new here. If the guy dies after I’ve written a million-dollar check to him, I have to have something in my files that shows we expected him to live.”

“Got it.”

“Now, is there any legal way to get out of this album deal?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have a soundtrack clause.” (I always included one after Alice’s ordeal. Thank you, thank you.) “We can do one soundtrack album that’s not on PIR.”

“But if he’s not going to live, I’ll never get a soundtrack,” Bob said.

“I’d say that’s probably true,” I replied.

“Okay. Then what I need is a script for a movie, and I need a tape of a song. If you can get somebody who sounds like Teddy to sing it, that’s even better. Then I’ve got those things in my files to justify giving you the money if the guy dies.”

Okay. One song, one script. I can do this.

I had recently started managing another great R&B singer, Luther Vandross. Luther had started out on Sesame Street, and had sung backup for stars from Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler to Carly Simon, Quincy Jones, Roberta Flack, and Chaka Khan. He was one of the vocalists on David Bowie’s Young Americans, and arranged the famous backing vocals on the title song. His first solo album, Never Too Much, went double platinum in 1981 and earned him two Grammy nominations, and that was just the start of an amazing solo career. We worked together for almost fourteen years, piling success on top of success.

Our relationship was very different from the one I had with Teddy, or Alice. I never got to know Luther as well as them. We didn’t like or dislike each other. Our relationship was almost entirely on a professional level. People in my office did the hands-on work with him. We lived fifteen minutes from each other in L.A. yet in the whole time I managed him he never once came over to my house. I always thought that one of my best services to my clients was in helping them shape their stage acts, but Luther preferred to do it himself. He never let me see a show until he was satisfied it was working.

I did get to know him well enough, however, to know that he could be a real diva, difficult to handle and easy to offend. I got my first lesson in this early on. He was scheduled to perform at a big music awards show. Three hours before the show, I got a call from the guy who handled him for me that he was refusing to go because his pants didn’t fit right. I called Luther and tried to talk him into it, but he was adamant. I knew one of Luther’s dreams was to have Bob Mackie design clothes for him. Mackie did all the other divas—Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, Ann-Margret—and Raquel, which was how I knew him.

I said, “What if I could get Bob Mackie to drive with us in our car and fix your pants on the way to the show?”

“You can’t do that,” Luther said.

“But if I can, will you go?”

Luther agreed. I hung up and called Bob. Unfortunately, he was out of town. But he put me in touch with his partner, Ray Aghayan, who was famous himself, and Ray agreed. We picked him up, he fixed Luther’s pants in the limo, Luther did the show, and Ray designed most of his clothes from then on.

After my meeting with Bob Krasnow, I asked Luther if he could quickly record a song sounding like Teddy. He came back with a tape, of terrible audio quality, of a song called “Choose Me.”

I took the song to Alan Rudolph; by then we’d worked together on the Leary-Liddy movie, Roadie, and Alice’s music videos. I told him the story. “I need a script, quick. I’m never making the movie. I’ll get you a few dollars for it if I actually get the million bucks. But I gotta have it and I gotta have it fast.” He wrote the movie Choose Me.

I took the script and the tape to Bob Krasnow, and he gave me a million dollars.

As it turned out, Teddy lived, so Bob never needed the insurance of the script and the tape. But he earned an enormous coupon with me by taking that risk.

Teddy started to get better. His voice came back. I can’t even imagine how hard that was for him, the courage and strength he showed. We decided to record a new album, Love Language, which he was now free to do with Elektra. We proceeded very carefully and took our time on it. Now it was 1985, and I had put a lot of thought in how best to bring Teddy back to his public. I had seen that Teddy’s target audience—and I don’t mean this in any demeaning way—was a middle-aged, probably overweight, black woman who worked as a clerk or a secretary in an office. She came from a gospel background. And her favorite fantasy was a romance with Teddy Pendergrass. She felt that Teddy was part of her life. Then he’d had this tragic accident, and she had not seen or heard one thing from him, not one word or photograph, in nearly three years. It seemed to me that my job was to make sure that the first image she saw of him now, the first song she heard him sing, brought her back into that love relationship with him for the rest of her life. She’d love him more than she ever had, would want to hug him and help him and do for him.

I got HBO to agree to shoot a special, based on the album’s release. We decided to do it at his high school gymnasium. I decided we didn’t want to hide the wheelchair or do anything gimmicky. We would deal with what we had. We left the gym stark. It was just Teddy and his wheelchair. The camera would start with a long shot, then slowly zoom in until all you could see was Teddy’s mouth, so that he was speaking directly to that secretary who had been waiting three years to hear from her Teddy. He’d sing the song I chose for the single, “In My Time,” a beautiful ballad in which he’d tell her, “I’ve lived and loved so much / Through each high and low . . . / After all that I’ve been through / I’m in love with you.”

I had it all set. The single, the album, the HBO special. Every bullet in my gun loaded for this one big shot.

And then I got a call, three days before the special and the single release, that Elektra was changing the single. They had decided to go instead with a duet Teddy sang with Whitney Houston. She was brand-new. Nobody knew who Whitney Houston was at the time. It wasn’t like she was a big deal who would add anything to Teddy’s comeback. The song was “Hold Me,” and Teddy’s first line was “I’ll hold you and touch you and make you my woman.”

Teddy couldn’t hold or touch anybody or anything. He was quadriplegic. I could not get through to anyone what a disaster this was going to be. Teddy’s first words to the fan who’d been waiting all that time were going to be a lie?

They had switched it at the last minute because they had another single coming out by a different artist that supposedly sounded too much like “In My Time.” It put me in a terrible position with Bob Krasnow, to whom I owed so much. Bob had just hired Bruce Lundvall away from Columbia Records to run Elektra. It was a very high-profile, prestigious hire. Teddy’s single and this other one were the first ones Elektra was putting out under Lundvall, and it was Lundvall’s decision to change Teddy’s. It would be very, very difficult for Bob to countermand Bruce at this early stage in their relationship. He would have been cutting him off at the knees on his first project.

Understanding that, I said to Bob, “Let me just buy Teddy’s record back from you.”

“I can’t do that to Bruce,” Bob said.

What could I do? It was one of the toughest bridges I ever had to cross, and I didn’t feel like I managed to create the right history this time. “Hold Me” went out as Teddy’s first post-accident single, and flopped. It was the lowest moment in my managing career. All that work, from both me and Teddy—all that careful planning to get to that moment—scuttled by someone else’s decision.

Then, as these things happen, another chance came for Teddy to make his triumphant return to the stage. Bob Geldof, Midge Ure, Dick Clark, and Bill Graham announced that they were staging the Live Aid concerts, to raise funds for famine relief, in two simultaneous locations, Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, on July 13, 1985. They would be the largest outdoor concerts ever, with the largest television audience in history. I called Teddy’s friends Ashford & Simpson and asked if they’d sing one song with him. They agreed.

Teddy was very scared to get out onstage in front of so many people and sing live for the first time since the accident. We got to the stadium and wheeled him to the ramp up to the stage, and he said, “I can’t do it, Shep. I’m just too scared.”

“Listen, man,” I said, “I love you, but I’m wheeling you up there. There’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t have to sing, but you’re going up there.”

I pushed him up to the edge of the stage. When Ashford announced Teddy’s name, the one hundred thousand people in the stadium roared. Teddy wheeled out there with a big, relieved smile on his lips, and tears in his eyes. He sang “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand”—admittedly, a song I might not have chosen, with those lyrics—and nailed it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the stadium by the end of it.

Teddy continued to record and perform. I stayed very close with him for maybe five or six years, then Danny Markus and Allen Strahl took over as his managers and remained so right until the end. Teddy’s strength and dedication were awe-inspiring. He struggled with his health for the next twenty years. He had cancer a few times. He had bedsores every day. Yet he never complained. He carried on with such elegance and dignity. Ida, who is a deep, deep churchgoer, was a pillar of strength for him. He continued to perform almost right up until he died, in 2010.