They Call Me Supermensch by Shep Gordon

Author:Shep Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

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WHEN CAROLYN HAD COME BACK FROM CANNES IN 1977, she’d told me about an incredible dinner party at “this great place in the mountains.” It was a Michelin three-star restaurant called Le Moulin de Mougins, up in the hills outside Cannes in a refurbished, sixteenth-century olive mill. “Shep,” she said, “you have to go to Cannes and the Moulin. Everyone goes there. It’s very cool.” She described the spectacular setting, the amazing nouvelle cuisine, and its owner, a famous French chef named Roger Vergé.

I had never heard of him, or his restaurant. Or nouvelle cuisine. Food didn’t matter to me much. I was a burger-and-fries, macaroni-and-cheese guy. But I was intrigued for some reason, so I filed it away in my head.

After that we made a couple more films with Hollywood studios. One of them was Roadie, a rock-oriented thing starring Meat Loaf, with small parts in it for some of my artists and friends, including Alice, Debbie Harry, Ray Benson, and Roy Orbison. We did that one for Warner Bros. Neither Carolyn nor I liked working with the studios, making movies by committee, dealing with the alpha dogs in Hollywood.

Then we made Return Engagement. It was a political documentary directed by Alan Rudolph, who loved eccentric characters. We created and filmed a national debate tour of two infamous guys from the sixties and seventies: Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy. Leary, for those of you too young to remember, was a former Harvard psychologist and hippie guru who became the leading spokesman for LSD and popularized the mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Liddy was his opposite number, a former FBI agent turned prosecutor who busted Leary for marijuana possession, then was arrested himself as Richard Nixon’s ringleader on the Watergate break-in. Leary had spent three and a half years in prison, Liddy four and a half. Now they went on this highly successful college speaking tour, two old warhorses arguing about whatever popped into their heads—revolution, evolution, national security, LSD, prison, religion, abortion. They traded radical theories and nutty humor and outrageous insults, and the college kids loved it. They were still as opposed as comic-book rivals, but they began to like each other a little.

We all flew over to Cannes together to have it in the festival in 1984. It was my first trip. I definitely wanted to experience the festival, but I also remembered what Carolyn had told me seven years earlier about that restaurant. I asked her to book us a dinner there, and we took Leary and Liddy along.

Moulin de Mougins was just a ten-minute drive out of Cannes, but it felt like a different world. During the festival, Cannes is one long crazy party scene, crowds circulating everywhere, tourists and locals and celebrities and paparazzi all swirling around. As we drove up the mountain out of town it got rural and dark, really quickly. No crowds, no lights, very serene. We turned at a big sign that said Moulin de Mougins, and

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