21

IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL MY RUNNING AROUND FOR THE CHEFS, I had the first big health scare of my life. I’d always been pretty casual about my health. I had lived the high life, done a lot of drugs, didn’t always eat right, and was a bit overweight. I didn’t have a doctor and never went for check-ups. Then again, I was going on fifty and had never had a major problem.

In the early 1990s the artist Peter Max, a really good friend of mine going back maybe a quarter of a century at that point, told me that he had just had this diagnostic procedure, a full-body scan. The machine was brand-new at the time. He encouraged me to do it. I said sure, then forgot about it.

A few years went by. Meanwhile the machines were popping up in hospitals everywhere. One day I was in Phoenix with nothing planned, and in my usual way I decided that what I’d do that day was go get scanned. The next day, on my way to play golf, I stopped in to get the results.

The doctor said, “You’re going into bypass surgery right now. It’s amazing you’re alive. You have ninety-nine percent blockage in the arteries going to your heart.”

I had been on my way to play golf. I felt fantastic. Now suddenly I was on death’s door? My reaction was nothing like I would have expected. For years, when trying to comfort someone who was confronting their own or a loved one’s mortality, I had a set speech I always said. It went something like this:

I happen to believe that the universe is not here by chance. I believe somebody created it—call him God, call him Allah, call him a mad scientist, anything you want. And there are only two things he guarantees to everyone in our species: you’re born, and you die. In between it’s completely random, and no two people are alike. You could be black, white, yellow. You could be tall, you could be short, you could be a guy, you could be a girl. Billions of us on the planet, and out of them all, you are absolutely unique.

Now, if there is a creator, why would he go to all that trouble to make each and every one of us unique, and to give us everything that happens to us between birth and death? Is he a scumbag? Or is it all a gift? Birth, death, and everything that happens to you in between? Accept it. Embrace the miracle.

I really believe that. But now I was the one who was dying, and my philosophy didn’t do me any good at all. I fell apart. I went into a complete, terrified panic. Holy fuck, I’m going to die. Some gift. I felt faint, I broke out in a sweat, I was angry, I was scared, I was filled with self-pity, everything.

The doctor wasn’t kidding around. He had me undressed and in a hospital gown in no time. In my panic I found the presence of mind to think, There must be someone else I can talk to before I let this guy cut me open.

I remembered a man I’d met on a plane. I had been in New York talking to American Express about getting involved with ACR. My flight to L.A. was on the runway when a flight attendant got on the speaker and asked if there was a doctor on board. The guy seated next to me got up and went forward. An ambulance rolled out to the runway and they took somebody off. While this was going on, I glanced at the book the man had been leafing through. It was called Week by Week to a Strong Heart.

When the man sat back down I asked him what had happened.

He said, “I think he had a little heart attack.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“Yeah, I’m a cardiologist in fact. I teach at Yale and have a private practice.”

It turned out he was Dr. Marvin Moser, the coauthor of Week by Week; he had been leafing through it to bone up for a TV interview.

I had one of my moments when things just clicked in my head. I told him who I was, that I represented all the great chefs in America, and wouldn’t it be great if he collaborated with them on a heart-healthy cookbook? He said he’d already written a dozen books on hypertension and didn’t think he had anything new to say on the subject, but I was on a roll. Wouldn’t it be good to clarify some of the myths and misconceptions about diet? Antioxidants, garlic, food additives, heart disease, cholesterol? But at the same time demonstrate how people could remain on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet and still enjoy recipes put together by America’s leading chefs?

He started to warm to the idea. I grabbed the phone in front of me—they still had phones on planes then, before the age of cell phones—and started calling some of my chefs. By the time we landed in L.A. I had gotten agreements from Larry Forgione, Alice Waters, and Jimmy Schmidt, and found us a publisher. Heart-Healthy Cooking for All Seasons came out in 1996.

So now, sitting there in my hospital gown facing death, I called Dr. Moser. They got him out of class to speak to me. I explained my situation.

He said, “Do you have any pain?”

“No.”

“Have you had any in the last few weeks?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said. “I want you to listen to me really carefully, Shep. You are not going to die in the next day or two. Do you understand me? You are not going to die. Calm down. You’re more likely to die from sheer nervousness. I can hear it in your voice. Now, you’re going to go to the doctor and tell him that you’re not having the surgery. You’re going to go get dressed, then book a flight to New York. You’re going to calmly fly to New York. I guarantee you’re not gonna die on the plane. And you’re going to go see my partner at his office in Connecticut.”

So I flew there to see Marvin’s partner, who looked at me, looked at the results, gave me a stress test, and said, “Yes, it’s true you have very high cholesterol. There will come a time when you will probably have to do something about it, but you’re not at risk now. You should do no procedures whatsoever. I know one great cardiologist in Hawaii, Irwin Schatz. He’s retired from private practice and teaching at the University of Hawaii, but maybe he’ll see you.”

He hooked me up with Dr. Schatz. Every six months I would fly over to Honolulu and he would check me out. After six or seven years he said, “Now you’re at risk. Your blockage is getting serious.” We called up Dr. Moser, who arranged for me to fly to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where they put in three stents. Dr. Moser had made sure the top doctors there did the procedure, and it went beautifully. A couple of years later I went back to have two more put in.

After that I got lucky again and came under the care of Dr. Robert Huizenga, who blew the whistle on steroids in the NFL after being the team physician for the then–Los Angeles Raiders, and whose work on obesity led to the TV show The Biggest Loser. A couple of years ago he advised me to get a stent put in my carotid artery. There’s a small chance of stroke, like a 3 percent chance, if the carotid gets blocked. I said, “I have a fairly large estate. If I put you in my will, will you kill me if I have a stroke? Because I wouldn’t want to live after a stroke.”

I’ve seen what a stroke can do. Vergé had a stroke a few years ago. At first he was in a wheelchair—there it is again—but able to converse and feed himself. But his condition deteriorated gradually, until he couldn’t speak anymore, never left his room, and I don’t think he knew I was there when I visited. It was very sad to see him, and almost a relief when he passed away in June 2015. Wherever he went on to, it had to be a better place.

I’d rather they kill me.

Or at least I say that now.

In the early 2000s I woke up one morning in L.A. and decided it was time to retire. It wasn’t something I’d been thinking about or planning for at all. It was never a goal. Like so much else in my life, I just woke up and there it was. What am I doing today? I’m retiring.

I hear myself say “retire” now, which is interesting, because that word wasn’t actually in my brain at the time. I was still managing all these artists and chefs. I was still using drugs. I was not in a relationship. I was starting to feel the lack of a biological child in my life, as much as I love my kids. I had to do a couple of things for clients that day that I didn’t want to do. I had to say no to some people, and I never liked that part of my job. I realized that my income had hit a plateau, because I was never really good at running a business. I had twenty-five people in my office for whom I was making tons of money, while my income stayed exactly where it was.

What was it all for? What’s it all about, Alfie? I had no idea. I felt like I had spent my life living other people’s lives. I didn’t know if I had no personal life because I had been so very busy for so many years, or if keeping busy was just an excuse not to develop a personal life. Now I really wanted to figure that out, and the only way to do that was to get rid of any excuses. Given my health scares, who knew how much longer I had to find out?

I called Alice.

“Where are you?”

“In L.A.”

“You got anything going for lunch?”

“No.”

“Will you do me a favor? I’ve decided to call everybody this morning and resign. Will you come get me and take me to lunch so I can get really drunk when I’m done?”

I told Alice that I’d still manage him. That was a given.

I spent all morning calling other clients, explaining that it had nothing to do with them, only with me. I gave each of them the option of leaving the company or staying with the person in my office who was best able to continue handling them. I had no contracts with anyone that had to be broken, so that part was easy. I reached maybe half of them that morning. Almost all of them sounded happy for me.

Then I went back to Maui, ready to begin this “retirement” and figure out who I was. . . .

And discovered that I was the same person I’d always been. No big revelation, no Zen satori. I wasn’t happier than I’d been, but I wasn’t unhappy about it, either. You are who you are, I guess.

And anyway, people wouldn’t let me quit. When I decided I was sort of retiring, my friend Sammy Hagar decided I was not retiring. And Sammy can be very persistent. When I convinced him that I wasn’t managing artists anymore, he talked me into going to see Cabo Wabo Cantina, the restaurant in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, he opened in 1990. So I go, and in the restaurant there was a wooden barrel on the counter, which Sammy said held tequila that a local family had been making for him since 1996. I tasted it and it was fantastic, which gave me an idea.

“I really don’t want to do any more restaurants,” I said to him. “But if you want to have some fun, Jimmy Buffett has already laid out the highway for us. You know how he branded his Margaritaville tequila and distributes it all over the world? We could do that with Cabo Wabo tequila.”

Even as I was saying it a voice in my head was saying, Holy shit, now I’m going to have to work at this. And it was just me at this point. I didn’t have a staff anymore, didn’t have an office, nothing. But now I’m committed, so I need to figure out how to make this easy, fun, and, of course, win-win.

We spent the next six or eight months distilling the tequila, tasting it, refining it, designing the bottle and the label—a lot of steps. When we were ready I decided we should test-market it in Hawaii. I had one thousand cases shipped. By the time the tequila arrived, the Rolling Stones were coming to Hawaii to play a Pepsi convention on the big island. Ron Wood and I have been good friends for years and years, from back before he joined the Stones. He slept on my couch many a night. I piggybacked a couple of Rolling Stones concerts at Aloha Stadium onto the Pepsi convention. And I gave the band some Cabo Wabo Tequila, and they liked it. They were flying home in a private 747. I couldn’t resist asking Ronny if they’d agree to be photographed going up the stairs into the plane carrying bottles of Cabo Wabo. If the press asked, they were to say they really liked it, and it was only available in Hawaii, so they were taking some home with them. Ronny and the guys were very gracious and did it, and it made all the Hawaiian papers. We sold out one thousand cases in a heartbeat.

Now it just so happens a guy from Wilson Daniels, the high-quality wine and spirits distributor in Napa Valley, was in Hawaii. I knew him a little through the chefs, and took him out to dinner. We made a deal right there at dinner for the prestigious Wilson Daniels company to be our national distributor. And we set it up so that Sammy and I took no financial exposure on it at all. Wilson Daniels would order, say, five thousand cases from us, at say $40 a case. (I’m making these numbers up because I honestly don’t remember the actual figures. But these are close.) They would give us a promissory note for $200,000. We’d take that to the bank. Then we’d order the five thousand cases from our Mexican distiller, who charged us $20 a case. The bank paid the distiller the $100,000. When the five thousand cases arrived at Wilson Daniels’s warehouse, they had ten days to pay us the $200,000. We’d use half of that to repay the bank, plus a small handling fee they charged us, and pocket the rest.

It was beautiful. Sammy and I were making money hand over fist, and never laying out a dime of our own cash. We had no office, not one employee, no overhead. I did it all from home. I even designed the ads myself. By the time I sold out my interest to Sammy, we were billing $30 million a year.

A few years into my “retirement” I got a call from a friend who wanted me to think about managing this new young raw food chef, Renée Loux. I said my usual piece about how I was retired, wasn’t managing chefs anymore, and on top of that didn’t particularly like the raw food diet, which emphasizes a lot of fruit and uncooked or barely cooked vegetables. Then I agreed to meet her anyway.

When I answered the door a few days later this beautiful reddish-blond vision was standing there. For me it was love at first sight. I was still thinking about getting married again and having children. I was also still my usual fumbling self around a beautiful woman, but I invited her to stay in my guesthouse and she accepted. Despite roughly thirty years’ difference in our ages we found we had a lot in common—she was even from New York—and had a wonderful time the next five days, walking and talking on the beach in the days, cooking together at night. I learned to like raw food, which my friend Tom Arnold says is when he knew I was in love. The fifth night we moved the relationship to a more intimate place, and on the sixth day she moved in.

Two years later we got married on the lawn, the sun setting behind us, sixty-five friends there to cheer us on. I was three days shy of turning sixty, and she had just turned thirty. I had joked, “We only have a small window of opportunity here. Let’s get married when there’s only twenty-nine years between us.” For our honeymoon, Fiji Water offered an extremely exclusive resort on a tiny, remote island. Usually there’s only one couple staying there, but this time there was one other guest. One day Renée’s laptop stopped working. I called the desk to ask for help. A few minutes later the computer repairman was at our door. It was Apple founder Steve Jobs, who was the other guest on the island. He got Renée’s laptop working, and she made him dinner for the next few nights. It turned out he was already into raw food.

When we returned to Maui I got to work managing Renée’s career. I got her a book deal and a television show. Meanwhile, I still really wanted children. We worked at it, but it didn’t happen. I thought we should seek medical advice; she felt that pregnancy should occur naturally or not at all. That and other issues gradually pushed us apart. After four years we split up. Like so many of the other women I’ve been with, we couldn’t stay together, but we’ve stayed friends.