16

IN 1990, I GOT A CALL FROM CAROLCO PICTURES, another independent American production company. I had a lot of business with them. They were taking a new movie to Cannes that year, a sci-fi picture called Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and a pretty actress, Sharon Stone.

“We have a jet going. Would you like to come with us?”

“You bet.”

I took a limo to the airport. It was the first time I’d ever been driven onto the tarmac, right up to a private plane. When I boarded Schwarzenegger was already there, along with other celebrities I knew. The plane itself was not impressive. The cabin was small and narrow, with crappy seats three across that barely leaned back a couple of inches. It wasn’t nearly as nice as my rock-and-roll bus. I asked a stewardess if it was a nonstop flight.

“Oh no. We have to stop twice for fuel.”

Oh man. This was suddenly sounding like a long and uncomfortable trip. Then, about halfway down the aisle, I saw there were two cushioned benches, on one each side, dividing all those horrible, narrow seats. I decided one of them was for me. I spread blankets and sweaters and stretched out like I was asleep. Other people were boarding. I opened one eye and saw Michael Douglas. He looked around and got the same oh-shit look I must have had when I got on board. He took one of those awful seats up near the front.

I went up and greeted him. I asked him, “Mikey, do you have a manager?”

“No,” he said. “I just have an agent.”

I said, “Well, I’m going to show you right now what managers do. Grab your stuff and come with me.”

We walked back to the benches and I told him to stretch out on the one across from mine. He grinned. “Very nice managing, Shep.” We both slept the whole way over and arrived very well rested, while Arnold and the others twisted and turned all night.

I ended up hanging out a lot with Michael at the festival. One night Carolco threw a party for Total Recall at the Eden-Roc, one of the Hotel du Cap’s restaurants, and one of the most romantic places I’ve ever eaten. It’s in its own shimmering white building hanging out over the blue sea, with panoramic views of the Bay of Cannes. From the hotel you stroll down the grounds on a long cobblestone path that’s lined the entire way with fragrant rosemary bushes. It was the perfect setting for Carolco’s party, a formal affair for three hundred, everyone looking very elegant in their tuxes and gowns. The Gipsy Kings, whom I’d been managing for several years by then, provided the entertainment. I would have wanted to be there anyway, but that made it extra special.

I found myself sitting and schmoozing with Michael, his friend Roman Polanski, and Mick Jagger. Over to one side, in a swirl of flashbulbs and jostling, Arnold and Sharon swept into the room. She was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, and right up my alley, a trim, blonde shiksa. I elbowed Michael and whoever was on my other side, Roman or Mick, and said, “You guys are going to have to keep up the conversation without me. I’m leaving with her.”

They laughed at me. I myself didn’t know what had gotten into me. It was kind of a locker room brag, which was not my style. But I was having such a good time, probably a little high, sitting with the kings of the world, and I got cocky.

I spent the rest of the night failing to make good on my brag. Big shot as I was by then, I was still kind of shy around beautiful women, not a pushy guy, and she of course had a crowd milling around her the whole night. So I never saw my opening, and took a ton of shit from the other guys. “Still here, Shep? Didn’t work out?” Oh it was rough.

The next morning I went to have breakfast with Michael. He was staying next door to the hotel at Jean “Johnny” Pigozzi’s house. Now, to say “Johnny Pigozzi’s house” does not begin to capture what a phenomenal place it is. The Cap d’Antibes coastline below Cannes is just about the most exclusive and expensive real estate on the planet. It’s seven or eight huge estates with fairy-tale mansions on them, owned by families like the Heinekens and the Pigozzis, who founded the giant automobile company Simca. Johnny is a photographer, a philanthropist, an art collector, a playboy—a very interesting and fun guy. His estate is just down the coast from the hotel, and I think larger than the hotel, too. He always has celebrities staying there. This time it was Michael and Mick, who is good friends with Johnny. The estate is like a dream, with wide lawns leading to cliffs overlooking the sea. The house, the Villa Dorane, was built in the early 1950s; later Johnny had the great Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass give it a lot of playful Modern accents. Inside Johnny displays the largest private collection of African art in the world.

I met Michael down by the pool, which is near the ocean. Staff glided around, bringing us breakfast. Beautiful blue sky above, cicadas ringing in the trees around the pool, the ocean glittering out past them . . . Like a dream.

And then Sharon walked up. Michael introduced us.

“What a beautiful place,” Sharon said.

“Would you like me to show you around?” I replied.

Michael’s eyebrows shot up and he grinned at me, as though to say, Where do you get the balls? I didn’t know myself. I mean, I knew the estate about ten minutes longer than Sharon did. I just really, really wanted to be with her.

We left Michael sitting there grinning and walked around the grounds. I pretended to know what I was talking about, and assumed that Sharon thought I was the owner. Later in our relationship I found out that she’d known I was bullshitting. One day she would say to me, “Are you just a schmuck, or do you really not remember that we met before that morning at Johnny Pigozzi’s?” The truth is I had forgotten—don’t ask me how—that I used to date her friend and L.A. roommate, the actress Angela Robinson, a very beautiful girl herself.

Sharon, gracious lady that she is, did not bust me that morning at Johnny’s. It was the start of our ballet. We spent the next week or ten days together. She came with me to Dallas, where Luther had a show, and from there to L.A.

We dated for the next few years. Sharon had a remarkable impact on my life, in many ways. She was funny, smart, beautiful—every box gets a check. For her, I think I was easy to be around. I don’t ask a lot of questions, and I’m not territorial in the least. She could relax around me. She was so smart and beautiful that a lot of men found her intimidating. By this point in my life I’d been around a lot of smart, beautiful women. I can’t say I had entirely gotten over my shyness around women. If she had not walked up to me and Michael that day, I would never have had the courage to call her. But that’s been true of all my relationships. I bumped into all of them. I’m very comfortable in the moment once it happens, but I’m not good at the pursuit beforehand.

One of the things I loved most about Sharon was that she was always searching for how to make sense of the planet. One day she asked me if I wanted to go hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak. Through my friend Marty and my time in Thailand I had learned a little about Buddhism. Now I did a bit of homework on the Dalai Lama, asking friends, doing some reading—this was in the days before Wikipedia. I learned that Tenzin Gyatso was four years old when he was recognized as the fourteenth incarnation of the Tibetan Dalai Lama. China took control of Tibet the year after he was officially installed. He fled Tibet in 1959 and had been living in exile ever since, traveling the world. He was the spiritual and political representative of the Tibetan people, spoke out for compassion and human rights, and supported the Tibet Fund, a New York–based nonprofit that primarily aids the tens of thousands of Tibetans in exile. China repressed the people of Tibet and refused all overtures for their autonomy, while harassing the Dalai Lama and pressuring other countries not to let him come speak. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

Sharon and I went to hear him speak at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a big gathering, but I was really interested in who was there: a lot of celebrities who didn’t seem to be there to be seen as celebrities, as I was used to. Still, I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, partly because of his strong accent, but also because of the content. My mind drifted and I was more interested in studying that crowd. Then we went backstage afterward, and when he walked into the room where we were I felt . . . different. I felt clean. It was overwhelming, this sense that just by being in his presence I was somehow cleansed. We joined the receiving line, and when I got to him he had this twinkle in his eye and giggled like a kid. He seemed so innocent. I am powerfully moved by innocence, maybe because in my work I have had to spend so much time dealing with the opposite of innocence. It’s why I love kids. It’s why I immediately fell in love with Maui. And now I was feeling it in him.

Still, it’s not like I became a Buddhist that day. It was more like going to a nice concert, then you move on with your life.

Sharon and I eventually went our separate ways, the way people do. We never had a bad word between us, no ugly scenes. We just went off on our different journeys. She’s still a good friend to me. She and her kids stay in my guest house sometimes. For years, I was always introduced as, “This is Shep. He used to date Sharon Stone.” It gave me this recurring nightmare. In the Jewish religion, when you’ve been buried one year they uncover your gravestone. It’s called an unveiling. In my nightmare, they unveiled my tombstone and it read:

SHEP GORDON

HE LIVED WITH HER

One day in Maui I walked into a Borders, got a cup of coffee, flipped through some books, and checked out their bulletin board to get a sense of what was going on in the community. There was a patchouli-scented flier tacked up there about a three-day retreat the Dalai Lama would be doing at Wood Valley, the Dharma Center on Hawaii’s Big Island.

It was 1994, and I had absorbed a lot of Vergé. I thought, I’ll feed the Dalai Lama. Then, as I always do, I started figuring out how to make that happen. From the Dharma Center in Maui I learned that if you wanted to do something for His Holiness it was called “an offering.” Sharon’s secretary gave me the contact info for Rinchen Dharlo, the Dalai Lama’s emissary in America. I called and said I wanted to make an offering of cooking for His Holiness, and Rinchen graciously accepted. Then, as I’d learned from Vergé, I started thinking about how to make this special for His Holiness. Somehow I got hold of his travel schedule and saw that it was a lot like a rock tour schedule. I thought it a pity that he was moving around so fast that he never got to really touch where he was. So if I was going to feed him, I would make it more than just a meal, and instead an experience created uniquely for him in that place and moment.

First I asked my friend Piero Resta, the painter and sculptor, to paint a series of plates with images that would reveal themselves to His Holiness as he ate his food, and might make him smile. Piero painted one plate with an image of the Potala Palace, where His Holiness was raised, another with an image of Buddha, and so on. I was friendly with several Hawaiian chefs by then, and they agreed to help out. I asked them to connect me with the people who grew the food we’d be serving, so that, when we served His Holiness eggs, he could look out the window and see the face of the farmer who’d raised the chickens. Every napkin was wrapped around 108 gardenia petals—108 is a special number in Buddhism—so that when he opened it the petals fell all over him. Cindy Dietrich, my go-to girl on culinary stuff, and her mom, Linda (who had been Miss Venice Beach), made white doves out of gardenias to hang everywhere. Every detail I could think up to make the meal unique.

Meanwhile, Rinchen and the Tibetans were being so gentle and undemanding that I couldn’t get them to tell me what His Holiness liked to eat. Other people told me he was a vegetarian, so that’s what I was planning. Maybe two days beforehand, I found out that he had stayed in L.A. at the home of Fred Segal, the clothier. I called Fred’s chef and he told me, “Oh no, he doesn’t like vegetables. He eats meat. He likes beef stew at five in the morning, spaghetti and meatballs.”

On my own, meanwhile, I had learned that all Tibetans grow up on yak butter. I have a friend, Ken Ballard, who has lived since the 1970s in Thailand and Bali and leads people on spiritual journeys throughout Asia. He sent me some yak butter. That jar sat in my kitchen smelling up the whole house for three weeks. It’s an extremely disgusting, rancid smell and gave me the dry heaves. It was like the house was filled up with thousands of dirty socks. I practiced making yak butter tea, a Tibetan staple.

Because Wood Valley is very remote, out in the middle of nothing on the Big Island, staying at a hotel in Hilo or Kona wouldn’t have worked. His Holiness gets up at five in the morning, which meant that we’d have to be up at three or three thirty to get his breakfast ready. So I found a house to rent not far away, pretty primitive but nice, and with five or six bedrooms.

Just before it started, Rinchen said to me, “There’s only one rule. You cannot have any expectations that you or anybody with you will meet or interface with His Holiness in any way. If you have that expectation, please don’t do this.”

Now the first morning arrives. I have one of my elaborate productions planned for His Holiness’s first breakfast. As usual, I’m being a neurotic producer, obsessing over every detail. I’m up at two thirty and start getting everyone else up. It’s pitch black out. We pile everything and everyone into our vehicles and start driving through the dark toward Wood Valley, when I look down and see I’m wearing no pants. I was obsessing so hard I’d forgotten to get dressed. I threw the car in reverse—and backed it right into the light pole outside the house, knocking it down. That killed all the lights in the house, and the electric-flush toilet. Not how I’d visualized the start of the day.

Finally we get to Wood Valley and set up two trays with His Holiness’s breakfast, with the gardenia petals in the napkin and the special plates and everything. Even the trays were special. I’d had a local artist make me them out of koa wood. Then Rinchen said to me, “Shep, would you bring His Holiness’s breakfast up to him?”

I was stunned. Cindy and I, wearing our kitchen whites, with white hospital masks covering our mouths, as chefs and food handlers do in many Asian cultures, carried the trays up. She stood outside his room while I took the first tray in, nervous as I’ve ever been. His Holiness was brushing his teeth in the mirror, with a big smile on his face. He called out, “Hello!”

“Your Holiness,” I muttered humbly, “I have your breakfast for you.”

“Oh good good good,” he said, brushing away. Then he paused and sniffed the air, looking at me in the mirror.

“Yak tea?”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

I was so proud. All that work, months of research and preparation, attention to every detail, culminating in this first moment.

And then he said, “Oh, that’s why I leave Tibet!”

He laughed his infectious, childlike laugh. I had to laugh, too. It was an excellent example of the way he can cut through all pretense, all preciousness, and reduce things to their simplest. I think he sensed how nervous I was and pulled me through it with that one line. That’s why he is who he is.

The whole rest of the weekend was magical. I have a photo of me bringing his food up the steps of the center that first day, and another of me after I served him the food, sitting on a couch with him. What a moment that was. He said, “Come, come. We take a picture.” And then, as we both smiled at the camera, he reached out his hand and took mine. I look at this picture and think, Oh my God, Little Shep from Oceanside sitting with the Dalai Lama—holding his hand. Can anything top that?

That weekend was a huge amount of work. We had planned to feed about twenty people. It turned out that we were supposed to feed more like two hundred—everyone in his retinue, everyone who’d come to the Dharma Center to hear him, the cops on hand, everyone. That was fine with us, but we didn’t have enough dishwashers, kitchen help, people to clean up. Feeding two hundred people requires a whole different scale of organization than feeding twenty. We asked for volunteers from the stage after His Holiness spoke. One really small Hawaiian woman and her equally petite teenage daughter volunteered right away. The two of them washed dishes almost nonstop for three days. Joyously, never a word of complaint, washing dish after pot after plate.

At the end of the weekend, Rinchen said to me, “His Holiness was so happy with everything that he wants to thank all your staff personally. He wants to do that the last thing before he leaves. Can you line them up so you’ll be the last people he sees on his way to the car? That’s what he’d like.”

The little woman cried, “Oh, I can’t be here! I so wanted to meet him, but I have to go.” When I asked her why, she said, “Oh, there’s a firemen’s strike on Kauai.”

I said, “So?”

“I’m the mayor,” she said.

She was Maryanne Kusaka, who was in office in Kauai County from 1994 to 2002. That’s the sort of thing I love about Hawaii. Where else in the country would you see a mayor wash a dish, let alone three days’ worth of them, smiling and happy the whole time?

Maybe there’s something about His Holiness that inspires that sort of dedication to serve. But for myself, in all my dealings with him since that first weekend, I’ve never been able to tell if it emanates from him, or if it’s me, bringing my expectations to it. It’s not like we’ve had much personal interaction. We’ve actually spoken very little. I know that when I sit in an audience hearing him speak it’s beautiful what comes over the crowd. But it’s not the same as being in a small room with him. To me, that always feels like it did that very first time I met him backstage with Sharon—that feeling that I’ve been cleansed, like I just took a shower. It’s not as if he dispenses words of wisdom. It’s just being in his presence, looking at his face, looking at the way he looks at people. This is not something he’s ever said, but I believe that when he looks at anything or anyone, he sees a miracle first, then sees the person or object. And it’s impossible not to be compassionate toward everything and everyone if you see that miracle in them.

Maybe that’s just me projecting something onto him, but I know it works, and it works for millions of people. I think all of us, even the toughest, look for some light out there that answers some question we have. He seems to hold that light. He seems so happy, even with the unbelievable weight on his shoulders. Meeting Vergé, sensing the peace and satisfaction he derived from learning the path to a life that was so beautiful and fulfilling, the way he cut through life so elegantly, maybe prepared me for this somewhat. But with His Holiness there’s that other dimension, that feeling when I leave his presence like I’ve just stepped out from the most amazing waterfall. Perhaps it’s something like going to church and being forgiven your sins.

I continued to cook for him. After the Big Island I got to go to Trinidad with him. We flew on the same plane. I don’t think His Holiness quite knew who I was yet. I got up at one point and walked down the aisle past him, and he did give me a big hello. When I went by him again, I could tell that Rinchen had sort of told him who I was, because he said, “The flowers dropping out of the napkins! So beautiful!”

Our first stop after landing in Trinidad was a reception for him at a theater, attended by a small group of the top government and embassy people on the island. Backstage before he was to give them a speech he looked at me and said, “Oh, you cook for me on Big Island.”

“Yes, Your Holiness. Thank you. It was such an honor.”

“And now you cook for me in Trinidad?”

“Yes.”

“So,” he said, his eyes twinkling, “you only cook on islands?”

Another zinger.

He went out then to speak to the assembled. Interestingly, they were all dressed in the traditional garb of their homes, some in African robes, some in Native American clothes, and so on. I later learned that in Trinidad all the different ethnicities get along, but they have never blended. Now His Holiness looked around at all these different types of dress and said, “Oh, sorry. Must be wrong room. This is costume party?”

The assembled dignitaries looked kind of startled. Then His Holiness looked down at his own Tibetan robes and said, “Oh perfect. I’m good for costume party.”

Nobody outside that very small segment of Trinidadian society seemed to care that he was there. There was no Dharma Center, no Buddhist community on the island. His public speech was at a football stadium that was almost empty. The producer in me was upset, so after he went to sleep the first night I asked his people, “What are we doing here? There are no people, no donations. Why did His Holiness come?”

“Remember the lady you sat next to in the stadium?” they said to me. “She sat next to him at a wedding in India. She asked if he would visit her country and he said yes, so we’re here.”

That filled me with such admiration. He did what he said he was going to do because he said he was going to do it. After my years dealing with Hollywood, where basically nobody’s word is as good as his bond and everyone will say or do anything out of self-interest, this had a powerful impact on me. Maybe it reminded me of my father, an honorable man who kept his word. It’s how I’ve always tried to live and conduct business, and why I never wanted written contracts. Once an artist and I gave each other our word, I felt that was all I needed.

At the same time, I never allowed my artists to provide any services for anyone else without contracts. It was my fiduciary responsibility to them. So if any of my artists chose to screw me, that was my problem, and if anyone else chose to screw my artists, that was also my problem!

In retrospect, I probably should have signed contracts with my artists. I was always looking ahead to their future, but never to my own. Because I made sure that my artists had strong contracts with their record companies, they’ve received royalties through their lifetimes. But when my handshake relationships with my artists ended, so did my income, whereas most managers continue to earn a percentage of their artists’ royalties in perpetuity. It was in a way very naïve of me to arrange things that way, even though it gave me a sense of inner strength. There’s integrity, and then there’s stupidity.

After Trinidad I followed His Holiness to New York City. I had a very good friend, Raymond Bickson, who was the general manager of the Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side. He graciously allowed His Holiness to stay there without charge. In New York the Secret Service detachment assigned to guard His Holiness came more to the forefront of the retinue than they had been before. They were not happy with his going to private homes or eating from private kitchens. They wanted tighter control of his every move. So I was phased out as someone who cooked for him. But I transitioned to sitting on the board of the Tibet Fund.

I also got the bed the Dalai Lama slept on at the Mark and shipped it to Maui. I still sleep in that bed every night I’m home. Thank you, thank you.

One of the amazing things about His Holiness is that somehow he’s always aware of everything going on around him—everything. He just comprehends it all. It can make things unpredictable for his Secret Service team.

One day, when His Holiness was going to appear at a benefit in Century City in L.A., George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic called me and asked if I could get him in.

“Sure, George, but you’re in Detroit.”

“I’ll get there, if you can get me a seat.”

At the event, His Holiness sat on a high dais receiving one California dignitary at a time—the mayor, the governor. The Secret Service stood all around. An hour into it, a door in the back flew open and George swept in in full P-Funk regalia, including rainbow dreadlocks down to his ankles. He looked as bizarre as it’s possible for a human being to look.

“Can I meet His Holiness?”

“We’ll try, George.”

As I led George toward the dais, the Secret Service men went into war mode. They grabbed us both roughly. There was no way they were going to let this crazy-looking man near the Dalai Lama.

But then His Holiness stood. He walked over to us, smiling, and gave George a big hug. Then he took him by the hand and had him sit next to him for a while on the dais. He had instantly comprehended everything, and knew that George was no threat.

Another time, I arranged to bring His Holiness to Maui. I was very excited. This time it was all on me. We didn’t have the infrastructure, so I had to invent everything, down to the backstage passes. Two weeks before the event, I brought in ten of my best people from the mainland. We got maybe two or three hours of sleep a night, on my office floor.

In the midst of this I got a letter from a man in Honolulu whose nine-year-old granddaughter was dying. They’d been to every doctor and there was no hope for a cure; they didn’t have the resources anyway. He believed that if His Holiness would just touch his granddaughter, she would be saved. I got so excited. Now I know why I’m doing this. Thank you.

I shared the letter with everybody and we all cried. I called Rinchen in New York and told him the story. Rinchen was no longer His Holiness’s emissary; he passed my request to the man who had replaced him, and he said no, His Holiness could not meet her. He was too busy, he already had a lot of audiences, etc.

I knew they had to be very, very cautious about personal requests like this. What if it was a scam? But I believed in the grandfather’s letter. It was so compelling and so heartwarming and pure. And I knew he was a man of very few resources, a local farmer desperate for a miracle. So once again, I didn’t get mad, I accomplished my goal. I had the man and his granddaughter flown in, gave them backstage passes, and got them to the stage steps.

The event worked out beautifully, the largest gathering in the history of Maui, twelve thousand people. As we were escorting His Holiness up to the stage, without anyone saying a word to him about the girl, he went right to her, out of thirty people waiting at the foot of the steps, and lifted her up in his arms. He kissed and hugged her, then gently placed her in her grandfather’s arms. It gave me goose bumps. I was convinced he’d known—he’d seen it or felt it in her. That’s what he does.

Four years later I got a letter from the grandfather that a miracle had happened and his granddaughter lived. Now, it could have been that she wasn’t that sick in the first place. But I choose to believe it was a miracle, and the fact that the little girl lived was all part of His Holiness’s true karma on earth.