Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (109 page)

T
HE INVESTIGATION
that had been instigated by Allen Klein and J.W. Alexander in the wake of Sam’s death was brought to an abrupt halt three days after Christmas. Even as the newspapers were trumpeting that “a crack organization of private investigators paid for by the slain singer’s relatives” was about to crack the case, Allen decided to shut it down, not because he was satisfied with the results but because he was convinced that it was not going to lead anywhere useful. The investigation to date, the Beverly Hills P.I., Mr. Pelletreau, reported, had “clearly shown that the victim Sam Cooke was lured to the place where he died by trick and device and though the homicide was justifiable, the alledged [sic] kidnapping was pure fiction”—as any observer with common sense or knowledge of the street would surely have concluded by now. The report further stated that “Elisa Boyer is well known among the cheap nightclub hangers on as being a professional roller. Her regular modus operendi [sic] [is] to lure the victim into a cheap hotel room and after they are both undressed to tell the victim that it is her custom not to undertake the evening’s entertainment until after her male partner has bathed. When he goes into the bathroom she then steals the clothes and takes off.” It named her pimp, a well-known local musician, and implicated him not in the killing but in the social mechanics of the introduction and in the business arrangements that ensured his participation in the profits. As for the murder itself:

Elisa made two miscalculations, one when she grabbed the clothing, she missed the victim’s coat, this made it possible for him to leave the room. And two, she miscalculated the effect of the liquor on the victim and the violent reaction that occurred when he discovered that she had taken him. There is little question in my mind that were we to continue the inquiry we could prove this investigation beyond a reasonable doubt. . . . I do not know what your final intentions are but I do know that if we do not tie up the facts in the very near future, we are going to throw away our investment. . . . I am holding the file open pending further instructions.

But Allen wasn’t worried about throwing away his investment. He was worried more about what the private investigator was uncovering, or might potentially uncover, about Sam and Barbara’s marriage. He didn’t know if Barbara was aware that Sam had spoken to Marty Machat about possibly instituting divorce proceedings, he didn’t really know (and he didn’t want to find out) where the business of the bartender would lead. And when he brought up the matter of the investigation to Barbara, she indicated not just her willingness but her eagerness to drop the whole thing. She said, “Allen, I have two kids. There are two questions I’d like to ask you. Can you get Sam out of the room with that woman? Can you bring him back? I just don’t want to put my children through this.” As Allen saw it, it was, in the end, her call.

However brave a front she might put on for the outside world, there was an increasing sense of panic on Barbara’s part. She didn’t trust Allen, she didn’t trust Alex, she didn’t even know where all the money was—and she was afraid to admit it. Every morning she awoke with nightmares. She was terrified about how she was going to manage. “I just don’t know, Bobby,” she told her twenty-year-old protector. “We ain’t gonna be able to stay here long.” He tried to tell her that Sam had always said that publishing was the backbone of his business, but she wouldn’t listen—it was like she wasn’t going to let Sam dictate to her from beyond the grave. “Well, this is mine,” she lashed out when Bobby offered her advice. “You can’t tell me what to do with it.” And she expressed her determination to sell it all as soon as she could.

She showed Bobby off all over town, heedlessly, it seemed, some would say shamelessly. She brought him into the office and told Alexander that Bobby was going to be occupying Sam’s office from now on. “She said to me, ‘I’m your partner now, and I ain’t gonna be like Sam.’ She said, ‘Sam trusted you, you did everything, [but] I’m going everywhere that you go and make your deals, and Bobby gonna take over Sam’s office.’ I told her,
‘I’m
gonna take over Sam’s office, and I’m gonna give Harold Battiste my office.’ That was when she went to [her lawyer] Hecht.” That was also, in effect, the end of their partnership, and J.W. began to quietly make plans to release all of his artists. As he saw it, he could still administer the publishing and back catalogue, and he could go into management for himself. And he planned to record a memorial album for Sam. He wrote a song called “Our Years Together,” which would eventually become the centerpiece of the album. “When the evening shadows fall,” he wrote:

That’s when I remember most of all . . .

Dreams of finding happiness

The times of our searching for success . . .

I miss you more than words can explain

The joy I feel when others call your name

“Sam and I were just so fucking close,” he said. “Doing the album was the only thing that really helped me.”

J
UST TWO WEEKS
after denying that she was married to Bobby, on February 11 Barbara permitted
Sentinel
columnist Gertrude Gipson to reveal to the world the time and place of her upcoming wedding. In a story headlined “A Change Is Gonna Come For Barbara,” it was stated that “barring any rumored complications which we won’t even bother reporting,” Barbara and Bobby planned to marry at the Los Angeles county courthouse on February 25, “two days after the final disposition of Barbara’s late husband’s estate.” In an accompanying interview Bobby stated that Sam would have wanted him to do this and that the children were very fond of him and “think I look a lot like Sam.” He was planning on reorganizing his group and getting out on the road right away, he told Gipson. And he did not believe that any of the “recent stories or headlines linking him with Barbara Cooke [would] in any way harm his work, at least he is hoping not. Nor does he feel that this will take away any happiness.” Barbara’s mother, on the other hand, said only, “I don’t know anything about those people’s business. . . . I just don’t have anything at all to say.”

Sam’s new single, “Shake” (with the edited version of “A Change Is Gonna Come” on the B-side), was nearing the top of the charts when Barbara brought Bobby to RCA to meet with Sam’s producer, Al Schmitt. Schmitt knew Bobby from Sam’s sessions over the last year and a half, but he had never had much to do with him personally, and he was totally unprepared for the sight with which he was greeted. There the two of them were, dressed to the nines, Barbara as usual looking hard, remote, and glamorous, while Bobby was dressed head to foot in Sam’s clothing. “The sports jacket, the slacks—it was all Sam’s. I just went blank. I mean, I don’t remember a thing after that. I thought, ‘God almighty, it’s only been a [couple of] months!’”

L.C. had already approached RCA himself with the idea of being signed. With his younger brother, David, he had traveled to New York and lunched with two RCA executives, who told him they might be interested if he could get Allen Klein to endorse the deal. But L.C. didn’t know Allen Klein, and for all he knew, this was just a polite putdown on the record company’s part, so he and David turned around and drove back to Chicago, and he started his memorial tour in the middle of January.

Actually, it was two tours. The first was headlined by Jackie Wilson, with the Upsetters as the backing band and L.C., billed as “Sam’s good-looking singing brother,” giving away free eight-by-ten “Memorial Souvenir” pictures of Sam, whose photograph at the top of the poster was identified only as “That ‘Good Times’ Singing Guy.” The second tour, a mix of gospel and pop including Jerry Butler, the Impressions, Johnnie Taylor, the Soul Stirrers, and the present-day Highway QCs, served as a more explicit tribute to Sam, with Johnnie singing “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day,” the Upsetters’ “Johnny ‘Guitar’ Taylor” doing “Tennessee Waltz,” the Soul Stirrers featuring Sam’s best-known gospel hits, and L.C., of course, building his set around faithful but somehow over-the-top representations of such familiar numbers as “Wonderful World,” “Good Times,” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” There was something almost spooky about the tour, a Supersonic Attractions package with the headliner undeniably present but unaccountably absent and his brother, like Bobby out in L.A., summoning up memories that arrived, bidden or unbidden, with eerie familiarity. “L.C. scared me,” said Billy Davis, who had played with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters in the early days and now was back with Jackie, his boyhood friend. “He looked just like Sam. It was like seeing a ghost.”

B
ERTHA LEE FRANKLIN
, the woman who had shot Sam, made a claim against the estate for $200,000 on February 16. In the immediate aftermath of Sam’s death she had gotten so many threats that she had been forced to move from the motel and temporarily go into hiding. In her lawsuit she sought $100,000 in punitive damages and $100,000 for the injuries she had suffered “as a result of wilful misconduct, assault and battery, recklessness, carelessness and negligence of the decedent.”

Elisa Boyer had by now gotten two continuances of her trial on a prostitution charge stemming from a January 11 arrest at a Hollywood motel. After all the public debate about whether she was or was not a prostitute (“Although Miss Lisa Boyer has no police record,” J.W. had stated unequivocally to the
Sentinel
just days prior to her arrest, “we have absolute evidence in hand which indicates that she is definitely a hooker”), she had named a price of $40 over the telephone and was then picked up by an undercover agent posing as a client at the “swank” Hollywood motel that had served as their assignation. She, too, had been forced to leave her old address following Sam’s death, but the $300-a-month rent she was paying at her new apartment, with no evidence of gainful employment, was one of the elements that led to renewed questions about her means of support. The case was thrown out eventually by a municipal judge on the basis that the “telephone date” represented an infringement on protected constitutional rights (“What kind of a country would we have,” the judge asked, “if a man could get into your house . . . under deception?”) and constituted police entrapment. The arrest, however, bore out the point that J.W. and Allen Klein had been making all along: that Sam was the victim of a robbery, not the perpetrator of a crime, that he was killed, as Allen now publicly formulated the private investigator’s findings, “searching not for a girl but for his missing driver’s license and credit cards. . . . It just wasn’t Sam’s nature to chase women like that.”

Bobby and Barbara showed up at the Los Angeles county courthouse a day early, on Wednesday, February 24, with their blood tests and license application. Bobby was wearing Sam’s blue suit with black shoes and sunglasses; Barbara was dressed much as she had been at the inquest, in a lime green princess-style coat-and-dress ensemble, pearl necklace, and slouch hat. Linda and Tracey, René and Sugar Hall, and a tuxedoed Walter Hurst were all present as guests and witnesses. Television cameras were ready to record the event, but the application was “flatly refused,” Gertrude Gipson reported in the
Los Angeles Sentinel,
because Bobby, just eight days short of his twenty-first birthday, did not have his parents’ permission to marry. Barbara made light of the foul-up, but “according to reliable sources permission was denied by Womack’s mother who allegedly stated she ‘wanted no part of it.’” Bobby said, “Let’s go to Cleveland anyway,” and they took off with Barbara’s two girls on a kind of pre-wedding honeymoon, to meet Bobby’s and Barbara’s families in Cleveland and Chicago, before returning to Los Angeles to finally wed on March 5, the day after Bobby’s birthday. His brothers, evidently, were now reconciled to the marriage. Curtis Womack was quoted about the ceremony in the
Amsterdam News,
and the paper described the “big plans” Sam had had for the Valentinos and his intention “to invest a large sum of money into promotion for them. His widow, Barbara,” the
News
commented drily, “apparently intends to pick up where Sam left off.” Bobby followed up with an interview in which he declared that he and his brothers were currently negotiating with both RCA and Chess Records and would be recording in future as Bobby and the Valentinos, with Allen Klein serving as their manager.

T
HE COOK FAMILY’S ANGER
only continued to grow. To one degree or another they all held Barbara responsible for Sam’s death, and her marriage to Bobby was just the latest in a series of insults not only to Sam’s memory but to their status as a family. In the absence of a will, no one had been taken care of, and they could hardly expect anything from Barbara, given her long-standing feelings about them and theirs about her. Annie May was broken-hearted, and her health visibly deteriorated as she mourned the loss of her “sweet,” “thoughtful,” “wonderful” child whose greatest desire as a boy “was to grow up and take care of his parents when we got old.” Reverend Cook simply took his daughter-in-law’s remarriage as proof that she had never been worthy of his son in the first place. Charles, on the other hand, continued to harbor thoughts of revenge.

His opportunity came sooner than he expected. Sam’s niece Gwendolyn, Mary’s daughter, was getting married on June 27, and Linda and Tracey had been invited to take part in the ceremony. Barbara had no interest in going, but Bobby was determined not to be run off. “Charles called and threatened me. He said, ‘Hey, motherfucker, I know the real Bobby Womack.’ I say, ‘Hey, I’m packing my clothes.’ Barbara said, ‘You fucking crazy. You know how Charles is. Charles will kill you.’ I said, ‘It ain’t about Charles. I can turn and be in his position and understand how he feels if somebody marries his brother’s wife. He just gonna have to get it off his chest. But I’m going to be famous. I ain’t gonna be running. I’ll show them who the motherfucker is.’ But when I [did], them niggers tried to kill me.”