Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (107 page)

Allen and Marty Machat met with the private investigator later in the day at the Beverly Hills Hotel, while Alex prepared to fly to Chicago for the funeral. The investigation was beginning to yield results, but Allen was more and more uncomfortable with the direction it was taking. The PI, Mr. Pelletreau, had already turned up information about Sam’s domestic situation that Allen wasn’t sure he wanted to know—there was something about a bartender with whom the subject’s wife had an ongoing relationship, and Pelletreau was convinced that the girl, Elisa Boyer, was a “professional roller” who operated with at least one known confederate and that, most likely, Sam had met her before. What wasn’t clear was how this particular scene had gone down—or, almost as important, how it was
supposed to
have gone down. For Allen, finicky about appearances even under the best of circumstances, there was little doubt that the situation was going to get messier, but equally little doubt that, for the time being at least, they had to go on.

Barbara, Ella, Crain, and Barbara’s two little girls all flew to Chicago with the body that night, with Allen, Alex, and Allen’s lawyer arriving the following day. The family, led by Reverend Cook, was at the airport to meet the plane, along with a limo and hearse from the A.R. Leak Colonial Chapel at 7838 Cottage Grove. Leak had gotten the business because his son was married to the gospel singer Mavis Staples, and through Mavis he was able to reach the family first.

The mourners were out in front of the funeral home well in advance of the three o’clock start of viewing hours on Thursday. It was a freezing-cold day, with temperatures hovering around zero and the wind howling down the desolate streets, but this did little to discourage an estimated six thousand fans from standing in line for much of the afternoon in hopes of gaining admittance to the viewing.

Inside the funeral home the Cook family was visibly distressed at the job the Los Angeles mortuary had done. Sam’s head was all bashed in, and it looked like all the bones in his hands, and maybe even his arm, were broken—he appeared neither peaceful nor at rest. They prevailed on the mortician to work on him some more, and then L.C. fixed his hair, and he was laid out, just as he had been in Los Angeles, in an elegant gray suit and tie, looking almost but not quite like the smooth, confident young man he had always been.

Chicago, December 17, 1964.

© Ernest Withers. Courtesy of Panopticon Gallery, Waltham, Mass.

Comedian Dick Gregory, singers Dee Clark and Major Lance, Motown stars Marv Johnson and Smokey Robinson, the Soul Stirrers, and the Upsetters were just some of the prominent figures scattered among the ordinary citizens who stood in line. Muhammad Ali, who had flown in specially for the ceremony, arrived at midafternoon with his omnipresent manager and personal adviser, Herbert Muhammad, and expressed the feelings of almost everyone in the crowd when he declared loudly and repeatedly that if Sam had been a white singer, “if he had been someone like Elvis Presley or one of the Beatles, the FBI would still be investigating and someone would be in jail.” Philadelphia DJ and civil rights activist Georgie Woods, who stood in the cold for hours, vowed that he and other DJs would hire private investigators to make sure that “certain facts about this case [that] are being withheld from the public . . . are brought to light.” As for the fans, they were there simply to be with Sam, and many were disappointed, the
Chicago Defender
reported, when they discovered that the coffin was covered with glass. “A blind woman who came to pay her respects and perhaps ‘touch’ her singing idol, was rammed against a door frame and had to be pulled over the entrance by funeral parlor employees. . . . The urgency of many to ‘get a last look at Sam’ resulted in near chaos with the young and old being crushed in the process. When the plate glass in a front door of Leak’s Chapel gave way under the pressure of the crowd,” the report went on, “Spencer Leak, a son of A.R. Leak Sr., shouted, ‘There are just too many of them!’” An eleven-year-old girl set up a wailing that could not be stilled, and when reporters pressed for her identity, her mother volunteered that this was Denise Cooke, Sam’s oldest daughter, and that she was Marine Somerville of Cleveland.

The funeral that evening was scheduled for eight o’clock, but a swelling number of mourners who had been unable to gain admission to the funeral home started lining up in front of the cavernous Tabernacle Baptist Church at Forty-first and Indiana by midafternoon. “It was the coldest night ever,” said Soul Stirrer Leroy Crume, as policemen in earmuffs tried to control the huge crowd with bullhorns and ropes. Barbara and her daughters had to be lifted over the crowd to get in, while Allen Klein stood outside for a few moments but then couldn’t bring himself to enter. L.C. was late, and when he told the police that he was Sam’s brother, he was turned away at first because Charles had just talked his way in with the same explanation. L.C. was prepared to fight any number of policemen and die in the attempt, but finally a lieutenant who knew him from the neighborhood said, “Naw, that’s L.C.,” and they let him through. Once the family was assembled inside, it took almost forty minutes for attendants to show them to their seats. Annie Mae Cook, looking pale, almost ghostly in her black hat and veil, with an unutterable expression of despair on her face, could barely stand, as her sons and daughters surrounded her and her husband stood unbendingly erect at her side. Close to two thousand people crowded inside the overflowing church, with at least twice as many standing outside in the frigid cold, as Professor Willie Webb played the processional, “Precious Lord,” over and over again and the congregation faced the giant mural dwarfing the pulpit and framed by vaulting arches on either side.

After greetings, brief Scripture readings, and prayer from various prominent ministers, including Reverend Clarence Cobbs of the twenty-thousand-member First Church of the Deliverance, the choir in alternating robes of black and white sang “Never Alone,” and “nurses” dressed in white fanned through the crowd to attend to the inevitable faintings and emotional disruptions that were bound to occur.

“The world is better because Sam Cooke lived. He inspired many youths of all races and creeds,” said Dr. Louis Rawls, no relation to the singer, who had just celebrated his twenty-third anniversary at Tabernacle Baptist and had lent his church to Reverend Clay Evans of Fellowship Baptist to accommodate the magnitude of the occasion. Like the other ministers, he had known Sam from childhood on, and, like the others, he alluded not just to the Highway QCs, listed in the program as honorary pallbearers, but to the family gospel group with which Sam had first begun, the Singing Children.

The Staple Singers sang the traditional “Old Rugged Cross,” and Mavis Staples started crying at the outset and cried all the way through. The Soul Stirrers sang Crume’s composition “His Precious Love,” one of Sam’s favorites, but only after Crume borrowed Pop Staples’ guitar because he had forgotten his own. The congregation for the most part behaved with tearful decorum, although fistfights broke out from time to time outside the church.

“We must strive in the midst of our grief to build a world where men will not need to perish with their mature songs still unsung,” preached Clay Evans, a young quartet singer himself when the QCs were starting out, whose small congregation Sam had joined while still with the Soul Stirrers almost ten years earlier. “We need not be afraid of anyone dying before his hour,” Evans comfortingly intoned. “Some men have lived long, yet they’ve lived a short life.” Sam, he implied, had packed a great deal into his few short years, into what must be considered a transitory experience at best, a “Great Park [in which] we are very much like children, privileged to spend a day.”

After the eulogy the family took one last look at the body and was escorted out, leaving the mourning to the public, who lined up once again for a final viewing of their own. Barbara went back to her hotel on the north side by herself—her mother took the girls, and she had no interest in being around anybody else, not the Cooks, not old friends looking to recall happier times, not even Crain and his wife, Maude, who had been looking out for her ever since her arrival in town. She knew what it was like after a funeral, people getting drunk and speaking sentimentally about the deceased—and then all of a sudden the dead person was forgotten. Just gone. She wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. She just felt so—alone. When she got back to her fancy hotel room, she took all the bedding off the bed and curled up in a corner on the floor and tried not to think of what was going to happen to her. She had a record company and a publishing company, and a partner and a business manager she didn’t trust. She had all these people who were looking to her to save them, and she couldn’t do a damn thing. Their leader was dead. And now she had to try to get some sleep before carrying the body back to Los Angeles in the morning.

T
HE FUNERAL DIRECTOR
at People’s told her he would do all he could to keep Sam’s color, but the body was getting darker by the day—it was lucky the funeral and final interment were going to take place on Saturday. Barbara’s old friend, the Reverend H.B. Charles, who by his own eagerness to take care of her and her baby when she first moved to Los Angeles had been unwittingly instrumental in finally getting Sam to marry her, had prevailed upon Barbara to allow him to perform the obsequies at his fashionable Mount Sinai Baptist Church. She wasn’t sure why she agreed to it, she told a friend, she knew he just wanted the publicity, but he begged and begged her, and he did have one of the biggest churches in town.

The funeral was scheduled to begin at 2
P.M.
, but just the crush of people outside would have delayed its start, and Barbara’s late arrival in the Rolls only extended the delay all the more. People began showing up at 9 a.m., and by noon, there were close to five thousand standing outside in the rain, as local residents flung open their windows and the sound of Sam Cooke’s music eerily echoed from turntables and radios throughout the neat, well-kept-up neighborhood. “Long lines of convertible Cadillacs, Rivieras, and Thunderbirds,” the
Afro-American
newspaper chain reported, “ladies in more mink and men in more silk than the Internal Revenue allows [arrived to give Sam] a regal send-off highlighted by brouhahas, rhubarbs, and enough wrinkled fenders to make any blues singer cry a new kind of blues.”

It was yet another celebration from which Sam alone had been strangely excluded. All his friends were there, everyone he had known from the start, Alex and Crain, Bumps, René and Sugar, Oopie, Lou Rawls, Lou Adler, Paul Foster from the Stirrers, Jesse Whitaker from the Pilgrim Travelers, Johnny Thunder, Jess Rand, Al Schmitt and his wife, Joan, nearly every one of Sam’s SAR artists, Ray Charles, and B.B. King. There were television crews invited by the Reverend Charles and loudspeakers set up to pipe the sound to the crowd outside. A lot of people were taken aback when the Womack brothers arrived, each dressed in an identical dark suit of Sam’s, but Barbara had given them the suits, she explained to Sugar Hall, because they had nothing else to wear. Barbara herself arrived in a diamond-mink coat, with Crain, the kids, a uniformed nurse, and a white man she identified as her new financial adviser. He was, in fact, a vice president at the Wilshire-Robertson Bank of America, and Barbara needed his help to gain access to the Tracey account, which would otherwise have been frozen with Sam’s death. A photographer who had been banned from the funeral home for snapping a picture of Sam in his casket was selling prints outside for twenty-five cents apiece.

Inside the church, after an organ prelude by Billy Preston, the Womack brothers, billed as “Sam Cooke’s Musicians [with] René Hall Conductor, Clif White, Dir.,” struggled tearfully to complete “Yield Not to Temptation,” their first SAR release. Then Lou Rawls, ordinarily the most controlled of performers, sang “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” with unrestrained emotion, barely able to contain his grief or mask the anger he felt at Elisa Boyer, the woman he blamed for Sam’s death. Zelda practically had to slug her way into the church in the middle of Lou’s performance. She couldn’t find a parking place, and when she arrived at the church door, she was met by some functionary who tried to block her entrance. She was not about to be denied, she told writer Daniel Wolff. “I had a fist,” she said, “and I just flung [it]. . . . I was screaming. I was kicking.” Nor did her efforts go unnoticed. “Every time things would get real solemn and quiet,” said René Hall, “she’d push back these guards and force the door open and they’d snatch her back.” It was, said René, a rare moment of comic relief, but when Johnnie Morisette started screaming, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Sam,” and then began to weep uncontrollably, it triggered an hysterical reaction all through the church.