19

TRAVELING WITH VERGÉ AS HIS GRASSHOPPER had opened my eyes to this world of the culinary arts and its artists. I saw that for world-class chefs cooking wasn’t labor, it was a labor of love. The more I observed how they worked, the more obvious it was to me that they had not monetized their value. They were mostly one-restaurant guys working six hours a night, and barely breaking even. No one opened a second restaurant. It wasn’t even a consideration. If they made guest appearances at other venues they still did it for free, thinking they had to do that because that’s why their restaurants were getting so hot.

In my parallel life, my artists were getting more famous and rich every day. I had Luther Vandross making a quarter of a million dollars a night. There wasn’t a chef in America making over $100,000 a year. One essential difference was that my entertainment clients all had additional revenue streams from selling replicas of themselves and their work—albums, posters, T-shirts. With rare exceptions, a chef made all his revenue from his one restaurant.

I didn’t see why selling an artist like Vergé should be different from selling an Alice. I pictured a world where chefs were celebrities, just like movie stars or rock stars. They would get paid fairly for their work. They would develop products and multiple streams of income. In a way, I thought, it should be even easier to mass-market food than music. There was a very big market for music, as we had shown with Alice and others. Still, not everybody loves music. But, as I said to a New York Times reporter once we had gotten the ball rolling, “Everybody eats. Not everyone listens to music, but they all consume food. Food is like software for the body. And these days, all software, like CDs, athletic equipment, and cosmetics, is celebrity-driven. Why not food?”

Nobody else, with the possible exception of Yanou Collart, was thinking about chefs this way. And even she doubted I could make chefs long-term celebrities like movie stars or rock stars. My peers in the entertainment industry thought I was nuts, too. I turned down representing Van Halen to manage Emeril Lagasse? Had Shep finally lost his mind? But now that I had the end of the road in my mind, I wasn’t going to let anyone else’s doubts stop me. I had always grown by setting myself new challenges. They thought I was crazy when I took on Anne Murray. They thought it was a stretch when I decided to work with Groucho and Raquel Welch. But stretching is how you grow. I knew I had to build the highway to get there, just like I had for Alice and my other artists. That’s always been my method. If you can see the goal, no matter how distant it might seem at the start, it makes it easier to start creating the path to it.

Not that getting there is easy. I had worked myself nearly to death getting Alice there, and getting chefs there wasn’t going to be any less demanding. But having the goal in sight makes each step on the path easier to figure out, and every bump and pothole in the road more manageable. Instead of being defeated by challenges, you think, Okay, how do we get around this so we can continue the journey? One day and one step at a time, but always knowing where you ultimately want to be.

I decided the first step was to raise public awareness—to give the public all the hints and all the pictures they needed to experience chefs as great artists and celebrities, just like other celebrities they knew. Everybody wants to be around a celebrity. From my experience early on with Alice and then with Anne Murray, I knew that one easy way to make somebody look like a celebrity is to get them seen with already established celebrities. Putting Alice next to Warhol, putting Anne next to Alice. Guilt by association. By this point I knew a galaxy of movie stars and music stars I could put my chefs next to. All I had to do was find the picture frame and put them all in it.

A good opportunity came along in January 1993, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held that year at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. L.A. was my turf, and rock and roll was my game, so I thought it shouldn’t be very hard to get one of my chefs hired to do the big ceremony dinner. I decided that Dean Fearing was the guy. Dean was a humble, funny, down-to-earth gentleman. And he was a huge music guy. When he wasn’t cooking he was playing his guitar. He loved the idea of cooking for everybody in the music business.

I made a reasonable deal. I simply asked what they could afford to pay him. They said $2,500, and that’s what we took. The key was that they were paying him. A first step.

Dean was ecstatic. But it wasn’t going to be easy. He’d be cooking for more than 1,400. And he’d have to work with the hotel’s kitchen staff. Kitchen crews always hate when a chef comes in from outside. The Century Plaza was a union hotel, and the union wasn’t happy about an outsider coming onto their turf for this big event. Normally the hotel’s banquet chef would cook for an event like this.

When we walked into the kitchen the day of the event, not a smiling face greeted us. The banquet chef took us into his office and started out with, “First of all, we should be doing this dinner. But you’re here, so I will give you a couple of people to help you. We’ve ordered all your food, but you’ll have to put it together.”

“A couple of people” turned out to be one guy—a dishwasher—to help Dean prep all those meals. Dean didn’t seem fazed. As a chef he’d seen this before. He got to work prepping. In the middle of prepping, he heard some familiar music and couldn’t resist wandering out to the ballroom. Cream and Bruce Springsteen’s band were doing their sound checks, and Dean got to be the only one in the hall listening. Later that afternoon I pulled him out of the kitchen again to meet Joe Perry, Eric Clapton, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt.

As Dean labored away all afternoon, the hotel staff softened and came to his aid. The banquet was a triumph. It was not only Dean’s first paid gig, but he got to cook for all his music heroes. When he got his check, he went back home and immediately bought two new guitars. ACR and the hotel came out winners, too. And it was a groundbreaking moment for chefs everywhere.

We kept on booking big-exposure events. I booked Wolfgang as executive chef for the Grammy Awards dinner at the Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles. It was part of the contract that he got an on-camera appearance. More guilt by association; put Wolf next to Sammy Hagar and it elevates Wolf in the public eye. I booked Dean again, to cook for the Independent Spirit Awards in a hotel in Santa Monica. The money kept getting better, and the excellent exposure transformed their careers.

Also in 1993 I arranged a unique deal to team ACR, Time-Life, and Elektra Entertainment for a video series called Cooking Is Easy. We produced a three-videocassette boxed set, the first cooking series of its kind to feature a group of master chefs: Daniel Boulud, Dean Fearing, Emeril Lagasse, Pino Luongo, Michel Richard, and of course Roger Vergé. It was Emeril’s first time on camera; he was thirty-four and looked twenty. Cookbooks came with the videos. It all suggested that there was more to food than just eating—that it was bigger than just what was on your plate, it was about lifestyle, too. The spotlight was on our chefs. They were featured, not the food. Later I got Sony Records to produce a series of CDs called Musical Meals. They combine music and food, matching recipes by chefs with music to eat them by. Like linking Paul Prudhomme with music by Aaron Neville for a Sunday picnic of Cajun food. A CD that came with a recipe book by Emeril featured twelve songs by Buckwheat Zydeco. We sold CDs at all the chefs’ live appearances.

Another huge breakthrough came in 1993 when Reese Schonfeld, one of the founders of CNN, launched the Food Network. Oddly, he was very vocal about the fact that he did not like chefs and did not like the culinary arts. His wife, who was the head of production, wasn’t too crazy about chefs, either. Now, I had been friendly with Reese before this, and I knew the Food Network was the answer for turning my chefs into celebrities. When I read that Reese was struggling to get it off the ground, I saw my opening. I knew paying the on-air talent was a big expense. If we offered them talent for free, they would not be able to resist. I met with Reese and made him the offer. All I asked in return was one free commercial per program for my clients’ products. He jumped at it.

The results were Emeril Live! and Too Hot Tamales, featuring the Border Grill’s Mary Sue Milliken and Sue Feniger. With Mary Sue and Sue, the free commercial was for their dried chili peppers. With Emeril, his now-famous “Emeril’s Essence” spices.

Both shows were very successful. The Food Network was on cable and the audiences were small. Still, it helped get across the idea of chefs as celebrities.

I saw supermarkets as another untapped income stream for chefs. If you walked into any shopping mall, almost every store was a chain outlet run by national buyers who shipped product to their locations. Foot Locker, Radio Shack, JCPenney—in every one, celebrities were driving the products. Cheryl Ladd’s line of clothes in JCPenney, Michael Jordan’s Nikes in Foot Locker, and so on. In the music store there were big posters and cutout figures of the bands to help move their records. In the bookstore, authors made live appearances to sell and sign their books.

In supermarkets, the only celebrities with products to promote were Chef Boyardee, Mrs. Butterworth, and Aunt Jemima. I met with some supermarket people and asked where their biggest profit margin was. They told me it was in prepared foods. “We can sell an uncooked chicken for three dollars a pound,” one guy told me, “but if we cook it, we can sell it for seven dollars a pound.”

I said, “Would there be any interest in selling Emeril’s barbecue chickens, using his spices? But I’ll only do it if you display his spices next to the chickens.” A supermarket chain called Frye’s in Phoenix took me up on it, and it worked like a charm. They sold their Emeril’s barbecued chickens by the truckload, and moved a lot of Emeril’s Essence as well. Bam!

With the exception of Vergé and to an increasing extent Emeril, the chefs on my Alive Culinary Resources list were business relationships. We liked each other, but we weren’t neighbors, I hadn’t gone to college with them; they were clients. In Hawaii, meanwhile, my group of friends included a lot of chefs. We cooked together a lot, I ate at their restaurants, they came to my house. Although they never sat me down and said it, I knew that a lot of them were a little hurt that I wasn’t representing them, too.

Like everything else in my life, a confluence of things made that happen. One was that Joe Gannon, my closest friend by that point, whom I’d worked with for years, was living in my house with his wife, Beverly. Joe was a bit at loose ends. Moving to Hawaii had taken him too far away from his Broadway and touring shows business. Beverly was a caterer; they had met on a Liza Minnelli tour. She was a wonderful cook and made some fabulous meals at my house. After maybe six months in my house we were having dinner one night with a few friends and neighbors and got to talking about how Joe and Bev could make a living in Hawaii (and move to a place of their own). She was such a good cook that three of us agreed right there at the dinner table to put up the money for her and Joe to start a restaurant. Dick Donner, a great movie director—the first Superman, all four Lethal Weapon films—who lived near me on Maui, and a friend from Las Vegas named Jennifer Josephs, and I put up something like fifty thousand dollars each. We would take no piece of the profits, just asked them to try and pay us back when they could.

We found a location way, way upcountry, on a pineapple plantation called Hali’imaile. An old general store for the workers was empty. We rented it for maybe two hundred dollars a month, got a set designer to make it look good for cheap, and called it Hali’imaile General Store. Beverly was a complete unknown as a chef, and Hali’imaile was way out in the country, a forty-five-minute drive from the nearest hotel. We had to make it a destination. I started driving my celebrity friends up there to eat—Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willie Nelson, Alice—more guilt by association.

Meanwhile, whenever I was around my Hawaiian chef pals we kept dancing around the subject of ACR. They didn’t want to ask me how the agency was doing because they didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t want to tell them because I didn’t want to make them jealous. Finally it occurred to me that this was an opportunity for another win-win. I proposed that we start a Hawaiian regional cuisine movement. A few of them were agitated that it would include Beverly, a newcomer in every way, but I said she was part of the deal, or no deal. My idea was that if we could make this movement work we’d make Beverly and Hali’imaile famous and successful quick, and get us all our money back.

We began meeting at my house: Roger Dikon, Sam Choy, Mark Ellman, Peter Merriman, Roy Yamaguchi, Jean-Marie Josselin, Alan Wong, Philippe Padovani, Gary Strehl, George Mavro, Amy Ferguson, and Bev. I had chef jackets made up for all of them, with HALI’IMAILE GENERAL STORE on them, because that was what I wanted to promote. I got Dean Fearing, as a founder of southwestern cuisine, and Roger Vergé, as a founder of nouvelle cuisine, to come talk to us about how to make a regional movement work. They both told us the same thing: Regional cuisine is dependent on local farmers. But if you go to your local farmer and say, “I want you to grow arugula for my restaurant,” he will take out his shotgun and chase you off his property. Why? Because ten years ago some hotel chef came to him and asked him the same thing. The farmer grew a bunch of arugula, and nine months later brought his boxes of arugula to the chef. And the chef said, “Oh, thanks, but we’ve moved on and arugula isn’t on the menu anymore.” So you have to find a way to guarantee the farmers that they will be paid for what they grow for you. Then you can have your regional cuisine.

We had another meeting on the Big Island, at the hotel where Peter Merriman cooked. Peter brought local farmers and a representative from the state’s department of agriculture, and we talked it out. Within a few months the department of agriculture agreed that if we couldn’t pay the farmers for what they grew for us, the state would. They saw that promoting a new Hawaiian cuisine movement could be great for the state’s tourism industry.

So the Hawaiian regional cuisine movement (HRC) was born. Now I had to go to work and make people understand why it was important. The way to do that was to get all the Hawaiian papers writing front-page stories about it, then all the papers in the world. As I was thinking about all this, sitting in my Jacuzzi smoking a joint one day, I got an invitation from Arnold Schwarzenegger to come to his new restaurant in Santa Monica, Schatzi on Main. I thought, Hmm, maybe there’s a play here.

And I did what I do. I got the Hawaiian tourism department to pay for my chefs to fly to the mainland. I got Arnold to agree to introduce Hawaiian regional cuisine at Schatzi. I got Vergé to come and cook with them, to get HRC some international attention. And I got as many celebrities as I could possibly get to come to the event.

It was the hottest ticket in L.A. The crème of Hollywood was there—Michael and Alice and Stallone, James Cameron and Linda Hamilton, I think Luther came, even Sam Shepard, who never went to anything. I put them all in leis and chef’s jackets that said MAUI VISITORS BUREAU, because they paid for them. Hawaiian tourism sent Miss Hawaii to do the hula. It was a great night, and win-win in all directions: for Arnold, for HRC, for Hawaii and Maui, for Vergé, for all of us.

Over a few years, just as nouvelle cuisine and southwestern cuisine spread around the world, so did Hawaiian regional cuisine. In restaurants everywhere now you see seared ahi tuna or mahimahi in Thai sauce on the menu. Both started out as signature HRC dishes.

I was still thinking of ways to create new income streams for chefs. No matter how great a meal they cooked, the bill was always going to be eighty, a hundred dollars. How could we increase the perceived value of what they did? I was managing performers who made a quarter of a million dollars in one night. Maybe we could make what chefs did more of a performance. But there was a hitch. When Alice went to a city to perform, there was a stadium or arena there ready for him. When chefs went on tour, there was no such facility. If Wolfgang wanted to come to Maui, he couldn’t just take over somebody else’s restaurant.

But there were hotels. Hotels often had chefs come and cook for special events. They did it for free, which I thought was nuts. When Vergé did his Master Wine Class, for example, people paid $2,500 to attend, and the hotel paid him nothing. It seemed to me there must be a way to take that to another level and make it a win for everybody—the customers, the hotel, and the chef.

All my chefs had large local followings in their own cities. These were people who liked and could afford to travel. What if we targeted a chef’s hometown fans and offered them an opportunity to come to Maui with him? We could package their rooms, meals, cooking classes, entertainment, beach time. All I had to prove was that a celebrity chef could draw the people. If the hotel booked the event during one of their normally slow periods, they’d fill rooms that were usually empty and maximize their annual profits.

I knew Chuck Sweeney, owner of a beautiful hotel in Maui called the Kea Lani, right on the beach. But next door were a Four Seasons and a Grand Hyatt, brands known internationally, with huge ad budgets. He had asked me, “Can you think of anything I can do to differentiate us from these guys and compete with them?” There were probably a lot of hotels in that position. If I could prove it worked for Chuck, I’d have a model program I could use to build a circuit. I could have these guys traveling around the world. If we could fill fifty hotel rooms for four nights, that’d be $100,000 the hotel made. The chef could take a percentage and be making real money instead of being treated like an indentured servant.

Chuck liked it. I went to American Express and Hawaiian Airlines and they liked it. So we became what we call in Hawaii a hui, a group or association. Chuck and I had a beautiful outdoor kitchen built, so you could sit outside, leave your table, and come watch while the chefs were cooking. We brought in all the great chefs—Vergé one time, Charlie Trotter another, Nobu, Emeril, Alice Waters, etc.—and paired each with an HRC chef and music. Willie Nelson and Leon Russell were our first guest artists. We had 150 people at a time, and they loved it, and it was a wildly successful kickoff. Again, a win for everybody. Over the next three or four years, we did it in Hawaii, in California, and even in India (I’ll come back to that), and it worked beautifully every time. We got the chefs two first-class airline tickets, a luxury car, the best rooms in the hotel, and maybe $2,500 for the weekend. All the perks and benefits they had never gotten before.

I also got involved in some restaurant chains in Hawaii. After the success of Carlos’n Charlie’s in L.A., I invested in a couple more in the San Francisco area, so I had some experience in franchising. When I moved to Maui there were one or two Maui Tacos locations, owned by chef Mark Ellman. We built that into a national chain of something like thirty-two locations, including a great one in Newark International Airport, then sold it to Blimpie.

I’m particularly proud of another one of those projects. One day Chuck Sweeney told me he’d just bought a shopping center in Honolulu, the Aloha Tower Marketplace, in a beautiful location right on the water. He thought it would be a great location for me to do a restaurant. At first I thought about putting a Trader Vic’s there. Then I had a better idea.

Outside of Hawaii, I guess Don Ho is remembered only as the guy who did “Tiny Bubbles,” which was a pretty inescapable hit record in the mid-1960s. But in Hawaii, Don Ho was the Man. I mean the Man. I had only met him peripherally, but I thought what could be better in Honolulu than a Don Ho version of Arnold’s Schatzi? It was a no-brainer. I went and met with him, and we got along really well. He was one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met in my life. Funny, loyal, solid. I can’t say enough good things about him.

The result was Don Ho’s Island Grill. I felt we needed to start it with a really nice statement to the local community, so on opening day we fed the homeless, with celebrity waiters: Alice Cooper and Albert Finney, who were staying at my house, and my Maui neighbors Willie Nelson and Magic Johnson. As we were flying over, we all started telling our favorite Don Ho stories. In Hawaii, everybody has a Don Ho story. Everybody. Either they first made love to Don Ho’s music, or they were conceived to it, or he proposed to her at a Don Ho concert, something. So we all told our Don Ho stories—except Albert.

When we arrived at the Grill, Don ran over and gave Albert a huge hug. I didn’t even know they knew each other.

Don said, “Albert, you never told them the story?”

Albert looked sheepish, so Don told it for him. When Tom Jones came out in 1963, it was Albert’s first starring role, and it made him a matinee idol around the world. The fame started to get to him, so he went to Honolulu to get away from it for a while, and got friendly with Don. Don put him up at his home and set him up with a woman he knew. One night Albert went to the woman’s home with her, and they were in bed when her husband came home. Albert jumped out the bedroom window, naked. The only other person he knew in Honolulu was Don, and Don was giving a show that night. So Albert Finney walked naked into Don Ho’s show. That was his Don Ho story.

I loved Don. As I write this it’s been eight years since he died, and I miss him a lot. He was as solid a partner as I’ve ever had in my life. Never said no, always with a smile. Loved food, loved life. Just a great, great guy. I don’t think I ever saw him in a pair of long pants. Only shorts.