Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (50 page)

Crain watched Sam worriedly for his reaction, but Sam just told Mr. Busker, the Jewish club owner, he would have to curtail the engagement because of the funeral on Thursday, but he would be back in time to honor his booking the following week in Jacksonville. The newspapers and ministers made the most of it. “The Grim Reaper has been shadowing [Sam],” the
Birmingham News
reported, and there were sermons once again on the subject of turning your back on God. But that was nothing more than ignorant superstition, Sam understood, tinged with not a little jealousy. At the funeral he was deluged with autograph requests, and he satisfied them all as best he could.

He stopped off in L.A. briefly on his way back to Florida and told Barbara about Dee Dee. She had never been able to figure out how he really felt about his ex-wife. She got the impression that Dee Dee had taken him for a lot of money, but he never talked much about his private affairs, and mostly she was just thinking about what this could mean for Linda and her. She thought that now that he really was a “free man,” he might at last want to be with her. But she was no more able to penetrate his reserve now than she had been at any other time since moving to California, and he rebuffed every attempt she made to bring up the subject. She was thoroughly disheartened. From what she could see, he didn’t want to be accountable to anyone.

H
E RETURNED TO THE APOLLO
on April 10, going through Atlanta on his way to New York in order to see the Soul Stirrers, who had just done a program there. He still felt a little uncomfortable around the fellows—not Crume or Johnnie Taylor so much as Paul Foster and J.J. Farley, the group’s manager ever since Crain had left, who still seemed to hold him personally accountable for the group’s visible decline in fortunes. He told Farley he had written some new spiritual numbers that he would like for the group to record, and Farley said he’d get in touch with Art Rupe and see what he had to say on the subject.

Then he was off to New York, where he was sharing the bill with the Clovers and “Glamorous Sallie Blair,” and he and Sallie worked up a cute little routine that “ran the audience wild,” as the
Amsterdam News
reported, “when he ‘taught’ curvaceous Sallie . . . how to Cha Cha.” Three-year-old Charla Mae Story, who went to the show with her aunt, was desperate to meet her idol, according to the newspaper, but backstage “little Charla had to wait her turn . . . because a few bigger girls had formed a long line seeking autographed pictures.”

Nineteen-year-old Lithofayne Pridgon, who had first met Sam with the Soul Stirrers three years earlier, didn’t have to wait in line. She was by now “a connoisseur of men” in her friend Etta James’ phrase, and she and her gang of “little freaky friends” did what they called their “sets” in various numbers and combinations with all the stars who came to town. “I was very well schooled by now. I was such a little tramp. I was all about having fun and partying and doing all kinds of silly stuff. I didn’t care anything about dating or a wonderful white picket fence or one-on-one ‘love’—I couldn’t handle that. I knew what I was doing, and I knew what to do, and I think one of the reasons Sam and I had a ball was because I wasn’t any threat. He knew he could call me any hour of the day or night, I just wanted to hang out. I had no intentions of going to heaven. If anything, I was going to help him go to hell.”

Jess joined Sam in New York and promptly found himself in the middle of an embarrassing business dispute with Apollo owner Frank Schiffman. William Morris had negotiated a deal that would have paid Sam $2,000 for the week plus 50 percent of the box-office gross over $19,000, but Sam turned it down. He didn’t trust the Schiffmans, he said, and held out for a $2,500 guarantee against $20,000, and then, when he got it, he wanted Jess to question the ticket count. Jess was astonished at the depth of Sam’s bitterness as Sam railed against the way that everyone was trying to take advantage of him, but he never said a word to the Schiffmans themselves, nor did Jess. That, he tried to explain to Sam, was just not the way you did business.

Sam was an anomaly to Jess in so many ways he wondered sometimes if it was a deliberate strategy on Sam’s part to keep him guessing. One night they were standing in the wings, and the comedian Willie Lewis had the audience, and Sam, in stitches. Jess looked over at Sam, “and the tears are coming out of his eyes, and he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That’s the funniest thing I ever heard in my life. You tell him, don’t ever do that again.’” Another time, they were at the Palm Café, just down the street from the Apollo, “and the Palm gave Sam a champagne breakfast and advertised it, so for the price of a drink, you could come in and see Sam Cooke sitting at a table. And some guy comes over to the table and said, ‘Sam Cooke?’ and Sam looked at him and said, ‘Come on, man, you know I’m Sam Cooke.’ ‘No, no, if you’re Sam Cooke, get up and sing something.’ Well, Sam stood up, just smiling, and just as fast as that, he put his arm around the guy, threw him over a chair, and had him laying belly down looking at the floor. He said, ‘I’m going to break your fucking neck if you don’t get out of here when I let you up. Are you ready to go?’” Jess had seen this side of Sam once before, and it remained as frightening now as it was then—and just as inexplicable. But as quickly as it happened, it was over, and Sam was back to his cool, calm, collected self.

They were both staying at the Warwick on Fifty-fourth Street, which Jess had introduced Sam to on an earlier trip. Sam loved the Warwick, the kind of small, dignified business hotel where he took a half suite across from the elevator so a girl who valued her privacy could come and go as she pleased. But he kept a room at the Cecil, too, where Lithofayne and her “tenderoni” girlfriends could always be found, and one night he called Jess up in the middle of the night and told him that it was urgent that he come uptown right away. “I knocked on the door and said, ‘It’s me—Jess.’ And he said, ‘Hold on, J., come in.’ And, I’ll never forget, there was Sam laying in bed with five women, like, ‘Look at me-e-e.’ That’s what he got me up for in the middle of the night!”

Jess wondered sometimes who was fooling who, he felt like he was constantly being tested in a language he didn’t speak on a subject he didn’t know. He was aware that no matter what he did, he was unlikely to gain Sam’s 100 percent trust, that as close as he was personally to Sammy Davis Jr. or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sam for some unwarranted reason always treated him like a “civilian.” “If he said it to me once, he said it to me a thousand times—every time, I’d find out something, he’d say, ‘J., there’s a lot you don’t know about me, man.’” But somehow it was a mantra that was repeated so often, with such casual lack of discrimination, it was as if the repetition alone put Jess on the inside of Sam’s secretive world.

B
ARBARA HAD NO MORE
confidence in her reading of the man she had known and loved since childhood. At his invitation she joined Sam on the road when he was playing the Flame in Detroit at the end of May. She didn’t know what exactly he had in mind, but she was hoping it might have something to do with finally making things more “permanent” between them. He had started sleeping with her once in a while, she knew it didn’t mean anything, but she was thinking if she could just get him to try living with her—they didn’t have to get married or anything—then maybe she could prove how useful she could be in his life. But when she got there, his whole family was present, and his mother invited her to go to church with them on Sunday. Sam put his foot down about that, letting his mother know on no uncertain terms that Barbara was with him, she wasn’t there to go to church with his family—even though the truth was, they never even had sex while they were in Detroit, he was so busy running around with other women. She knew Sam’s reaction was just one more proof to Mrs. Cook of what a bad influence she was on her son, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

She just didn’t understand him. She didn’t understand what he wanted. She hinted that if they didn’t reach some kind of accommodation, she might have to fall back into her old way of life—she didn’t want to, but she had no other skills, no job, no education, not even a place of her own. And she had a child to support. Sam never even nibbled at the bait. She said, if he would only give her a chance—if she couldn’t make him happy, well, she would have to accept that. But he acted like she was someone who had just wandered into his life, it wasn’t that he had anything against her, it was as if there was no connection between them. She felt like she didn’t even know this man, it made her sick inside. But Sam sent her back to Los Angeles with no more than the promise that she could continue to live at St. Andrew’s until he got off the road, and then he would help her find an apartment of her own. That was all he could do.

S
AM WENT STRAIGHT
from the Flame to the start of a new eighteen-day tour. In what amounted to an outright admission of their own inability to supply Sam with enough club and theater dates to fill his schedule, William Morris sold him for $1,000 a night to Universal, the most successful of the r&b booking agencies. Universal, after putting Sam together with Jackie Wilson, their fastest-rising attraction and the opening act on the Biggest Show of Stars tour just one year earlier, sold the dates in turn to a brand-new national production company, Supersonic Attractions, the brainchild of Henry Wynn, the thirty-nine-year-old black Atlanta businessman who was moving in aggressively on B.B. Beamon’s territory.

Wynn, a man with big dreams and little sense of his own limitations, had deliberately chosen the name to challenge Irvin Feld, the man behind the Biggest Show of Stars (all of whose ventures came under the heading of Super Attractions), and, with equally little sense of humility, was now taking it directly into Feld’s territory. Short, dark-skinned, and easygoing but with an unswerving dedication to the entrepreneurial spirit, Wynn had arrived in Atlanta in the late thirties from Albany, Georgia, where his father owned a filling station and convenience store that had helped provide him with a stake in his new life. In Atlanta he had built up an extensive network of businesses—various club and hotel ventures, a cab company, a chain of shoe-shine stands, a dry-cleaning establishment, a car wash, a liquor store, and Henry’s Grill and Lounge, next door to the Royal Peacock on “Sweet Auburn” Avenue, the city’s black Broadway. With this portfolio, and backed by the money of Charles Cato, Atlanta’s black numbers king, he had decided to challenge Beamon, the former Pullman car porter, who had held a virtual monopoly on Atlanta black music promotion for almost a decade, and with the same canny judgment that had served him in all of his other enterprises, he had formed an alliance with Universal to supply him with the talent.

Twenty-eight-year-old Dick Alen, the Universal booking agent who had set up the deal, drove down from New York for the first show, at Carr’s Beach in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 2. He was there to make sure that the tour got off on the right foot and to keep an eye on the ticket window with veteran tour manager Nat Margo, who would be the company’s eyes and ears on the road. Unfortunately, there was trouble right from the start.

“I had to leave my house at five
A.M.
so I could be there by nine, when people started coming in with their families—it was a beach with a band shell, and if you left before the show started, you’d get a refund. But we’re watching, making sure they sell a ticket to everybody and the money goes in the box, ’cause we’re on a percentage basis. I think there was equal billing, and we [may have] actually split the placards, but the fight was over who was going to close, Sam or Jackie, and I’m running back and forth, until finally Jackie agrees he’ll let Sam close but only on condition that he goes directly in front of Sam each night.”

Alen viewed it as an equitable solution, and one that shouldn’t necessarily work to the advantage of either singer. That wasn’t exactly how the other performers saw it, though. Hank Ballard, who had headlined Carr’s Beach over the weekend and was now going out on the undercard of the bill with his group, the Midnighters, had first made his mark with the “Annie” songs (starting with “Work With Me Annie” and including “Annie Had a Baby”) in 1954. These had had the singular distinction of being banned on both white radio and black radio, but Ballard had been a consistent hitmaker over the years, with three records currently on the r&b charts, including a gospel-inspired novelty number with a country lick called “The Twist.”

“They had a little war going. Sam was not going to bend. He wanted exclusive headlining or nothing,” Hank said with considerable disbelief at Sam’s hardheadedness, if not his pride. Sam insisted that it was all strictly contractual, said Billy Davis, the Midnighters’ new guitarist, a twenty-year-old so good-looking, according to Lithofayne Pridgon, that he was known among her and her girlfriends as “The Face.” “He said it wasn’t him, his management had it that he had to close the show. [At the time] I believed him, too, because who would want to come on behind Jackie Wilson if they didn’t have to? Shit, it was crazy.”

The result was exactly what Hank Ballard or Billy Davis or any of the other acts on the bill might have predicted. “It was so sad, so pitiful,” said Ballard, whose exuberant nature found little in life that was sad or pitiful. “Man, when Jackie left the stage, people just started walking out of the damn joint.” To both Hank and Billy it was as much a matter of idiom as of stage presence. Sam may have ruled the gospel world, but in r&b, said Billy, “nobody could follow Jackie at that time. And you could see that Sam didn’t really have the confidence [to]. I used to study his face: you could see the nervousness.”

And yet he clung tenaciously to his pride. “You know what Sam told me?” said Ballard. “He said, ‘Hank, when people leave here tonight, they will know that I was headlining.’ That’s what he told me. But, man, that’s embarrassing—I mean, who would want to go through all that embarrassment?”