IN 1991, I GOT A PHONE CALL FROM FAT FRANKIE SCINLARO that Mia’s car had been hit by a bus as she was pulling into her own driveway. She had finally been doing well, and now she was dead.
It stopped me in my tracks. It seemed so wrong that someone so beautiful and sweet would have her life ended so early like that. I thought about not having gone to see her, and maybe for the first time in my life, I felt I had really fucked up, that I didn’t do the right thing. That life was getting too fast and I was losing sight of what was really important. That had been important, but I didn’t take the time then to stop my life and try to help her. It weighed very heavily on me; it wasn’t the way I liked to think about myself. It wasn’t who I thought I was.
I asked Frankie to go to the funeral with me. We drove up to the cemetery in a black limousine, which I shouldn’t have done. Worse, I was wearing my current “Hollywood Manager” outfit: silk suit, dark glasses, long ponytail. It only hit me how inappropriate I looked when I got there. Winona waved to me. We hadn’t seen each other in years. I knew she was living with her mom and grandmother and working in their basement hair salon. She was cradling a little baby girl.
“This is Keira,” she said.
“Who’s Keira?”
“Mia’s child.”
“You’re kidding me. Mia had a baby?”
“No,” she said. “She had four.” She pointed out the other three: Monique, nine; Chase, six; and three-year-old Amber holding her grandmother’s hand.
“Where’s the father?”
“We don’t know where they are.”
“Well, who’s going to take care of them?”
“We’ve given Keira to a foster home. I’m not sure what we’ll do about the others.”
I nodded and let that sink in. Afterward, while we were driving from the funeral home to Winona’s mother’s house, I smoked a joint and tried to think about all this. As gratifying as my career and my success were, I still felt there was something missing. I was surrounded by stars and celebrities, by rich and beautiful and powerful people, but at the end of the day I usually went home or to my hotel room alone. I had always loved kids. I had thought about having a family of my own, but had never met the right person to do that with, and frankly wasn’t sure that I was the right person for that, either. Maybe the universe was presenting an opportunity here.
I looked out at Newark as we drove to the family home. It looked poor, beat, and dangerous, like one big ghetto. When we arrived at the house, crack dealers were hanging around out front. I was actually scared to get out of the car. Nobody wanted to be in Newark. They were stuck there. By the time we reached the front door I was thinking, I can’t leave these kids here. They can’t grow up in this. I have to do something.
Without thinking about it any deeper than that, I took Winona aside and said, “Listen, I don’t know if I have emotional strength, but I have plenty of resources. I can support all of you. If you’re prepared to give up your life for the next eighteen years and raise all these kids, I’ll pay for everything you need. Just don’t count on me emotionally.”
That caught her off guard, to put it mildly. She said, “Well, let me talk to my mother about it.”
She did, and came back and said yes.
I said, “Can you get Keira back from the foster family?”
“I think so. They already pierced her ears and put in diamond studs. But I think they’ll give her back.”
“Okay. I’ll go find a house.”
That was all it took. We didn’t have endless discussions about the particulars of what I was proposing. I didn’t do a lot of soul-searching. I just did what I always do: I got to work making things happen. The next day, I got a real estate agent who found a house in rural Monroe, New York, maybe sixty miles north of Newark. Winona and I drove up a few days later. It was a beautiful Tudor house, with a big backyard rolling up into a mountain, and five nice bedrooms—one for Winona, one for grandmother Teri, three for the kids. A good school was practically next door.
I bought it and they all moved in. They lived there about a year. I was really busy then, working in L.A. and traveling back and forth from Maui. And I was a little scared, emotionally, to open up. I hadn’t really been emotionally engaged my whole life, since I was a kid hiding out in my bedroom. What kind of relationship were Winona and I supposed to have now? And what about the kids? I didn’t know anything about them. How would they feel about this awkward stranger hanging around? For the first year or so I kept my distance and just sent money.
Then I had a thought. Vergé ran the French Pavilion restaurant at Disney World in Florida, and I had never visited him there. I asked Winona if the kids would want to go to Disney World.
“Are you kidding? They’d love it. And I would love it!”
Flying to New York to pick them all up, I was nervous about meeting the kids for the first time and started thinking of a way to break the ice with them. I figured I’d do something radical and funny with my appearance. I landed, drove out to the house, and rang the doorbell. Winona opened the door, with all four kids standing there. Their eyes went wide and round as saucers as they gazed up at this big Jewish guy . . . in a Rasta wig. It worked. They started giggling and laughing.
“It’s Grandpa Shep!”
I liked the sound of that.
What I had feared would feel awkward and strange felt familiar and comfortable right away. Not that we were a conventional family in any way. I still spent most of my time in L.A. and Hawaii. But we carved out a lot of time together as a unit. Summers, vacations, holidays, weekends. My good friends in L.A. and Hawaii adopted the kids whenever they visited. Alice and Sheryl’s three kids loved playing with them. On Maui, Tom Arnold would come over to the house to play pool and other games. They took to calling Don Nelson—the former Boston Celtics star and coach—“Uncle Donny” because of how much time he spent with them at his house just down the beach. My celebrity friends who were constantly at my home spoiled them with attention. A few times the kids and Winona spent a whole summer with me. I took them to Disney World, to Europe, even on tour with some of my artists. They had their own bus, “The Kids’ Bus.” We had lots of fun and did a lot of bonding, even if it was unconventional and intermittent.
In Hawaiian culture there’s a concept called the hanai family. Everybody raises everybody’s children. It’s like one big kibbutz. It only recently occurred to me that what I did with Mia’s kids was kind of a hanai family. I never thought about “adopting” them in any formal, legal way. I just hanai’d them. They needed somebody, and there I was, and it just felt natural. I never questioned it.
One day when she was around twelve, Amber called. She was going to start eighth grade in a few weeks.
“Grandpa Shep, I decided it’s time for me to leave here.”
I said, “You’re not happy?”
She said, “No, I’m very happy. It’s just time for me to leave.”
“What does that mean, Amber?”
“I looked up a school in Hawaii where I could board and be near you. You don’t have to say yes. There’s a school in California. If you don’t want me to come there, I’ll go there.”
This from a seventh grader. I said, “Amber, I don’t think there’s any school here that has boarding.”
She said, “No, I looked it up. It’s on the Big Island, in Waimea. It’s called Hawaii Preparatory Academy.”
I googled it and said, “You’re right. Okay, I’ll call you back.”
I hesitated. I knew if she came she’d be my responsibility full-time. I still didn’t feel ready. But another part of me was really excited. I flew to the Big Island. Driving to the academy, which is roughly forty-five minutes from the airport, you go up the Waimea mountain canyon, into mist, and there are rainbows everywhere. Beyond gorgeous. The school is at the foot of the Kohala Mountains. I drove through white picket gates, Bonanza-style, then up a very long driveway through an amazing postcard campus of horses in rolling green pastures and kids running and playing. Idyllic.
When I met the admissions lady she instantly told me it was way too late to enroll Amber for the coming semester.
“Oh, that’s really too bad,” I said. “I’d love her to be here. She’s African-American, without parents . . .”
Her antennae shot up. “Could she be here in time?”
I didn’t know it then, but that decision was one of the greatest breaks in my life. Amber got to come stay with me every weekend. Suddenly I was going to PTA meetings and getting acquainted with her friends and their parents and her coaches and teachers. Amber was a wrestler, the first female wrestler at HPA. At first she wrestled guys—probably not my greatest parenting. I went to many of her matches. At the time, I became friendly with Kris Kristofferson. His son wrestled, so we started going to Kauai together to watch our kids’ matches. It gave me this great new rush of pride to watch Amber wrestle, feelings I had never experienced before. I felt like a real dad. For the first time, I got to really feel like a full-time participant, not an occasional visitor. I loved it and I loved her. I loved the problems, too, and the ordinary parent-daughter moments that would arise. Like when Amber wouldn’t let me come with her into the drugstore, because she was buying tampons for the first time. Those kinds of moments were so great, so intimate and sweet. And she was my buddy. I’d been living alone all this time. Now I had someone to go have dinner with, go see a movie with. Someone I loved.
After Amber went off to Arizona State University, Keira came to the academy and spent four years there and with me. Then she went to the University of Hawaii.
Having Winona visit in the summers was interesting, too. Sometimes it felt like we’d been married for thirty years. We always had a great time together. I had three bedrooms, so she stayed in a separate bedroom, and all four kids would stay in another bedroom, and I was in mine. When we traveled, we would take a room with an adjoining room for the kids. But we didn’t have a sexual relationship.
Being in a parenting role with Amber and Keira made me very happy. I loved putting them first, ahead of my own wants. It felt like the purest way to be of service to other human beings, that instinct I must have inherited from my father and honed in my relationships with Vergé and His Holiness. That they weren’t my own kids made it feel even more pure. At some point, I realized that parenting these kids was what I really enjoyed doing the most. And I had somebody to cook for, even if all they wanted was mac and cheese. It had real meaning, life-altering consequences. It wasn’t like what I did with the rest of my life. It was bigger.
Sometimes one of my friends would say, “You saved those kids’ lives.” I always answered, “No, they saved mine.”