Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (61 page)

Barbara joined the tour for a few days with Linda and the baby. It was all part of her plan to get next to Sam, and she brought plenty of weed for the musicians. The guys all loved it, especially June and Clif; they appreciated her presence, and even Crain started to see her as an asset. Little Willie John went around boasting to everyone that he had forced his tongue in her mouth when she went to give him a friendly kiss in greeting. “He would mess with people,” June observed. “I’ve seen big men cry, honest to god, rather than hit him, just say, ‘If I hit your little ass, I’ll—I’ll kill you.’” Marv Johnson and Willie got into a fight, and Willie said, “Come on outside, and I’ll kick your ass.” Marv was provoked enough to say, “All right, come on, you motherfucker,” but as he took off his coat, Willie pulled out a .38 and shot it in the air. Marv, said Billy Davis, almost died, “but Willie just fell out laughing. Marv was real dark, but he turned green. It was days before he got himself back together.”

Barbara didn’t have time for foolishness like that. She was determined to tighten up her game. Sam was crazy about the new baby, whom he called “Fats,” and, of course, he couldn’t get enough of “Lindalena.” Barbara was the one who still had to play it cool. But she miscalculated. Sam got pissed off at the way the guys all responded to her, even his brother Charles. It wasn’t the reefer, though Sam did not smoke reefer, he was square as a brick. But he was just plain outright jealous. Finally he told her he was sending her home. “I’m the leader of this here,” he said. “Damnit,
you
are not the leader.” She talked back to him for once. She didn’t get in his business, she said, but what was the matter with him that he needed to control everything so much, he got rid of everyone and everything he couldn’t control? And then give you the shirt off his back if you approached him all humble with your hat in your hand. It was like he was a whore for the spotlight, she said, and no one was ever going to satisfy his insatiable need for approval, not these chicks with their skirts up over their heads or her or nobody. That seemed to bring him up short, and he quietened down and said she was the only one who understood him, she was the one person who had known him from the start. But that didn’t change the fact that she had to go home. Crain even tried to intervene. “Aw, Sammy, Sammy, Barbie does everything, son,” he said. “You don’t have to go up and tell her, she just get the whole thing done.” “Yeah, my wife is kind of smart,” Sam conceded, “but she’s my wife, and I want you to butt out.” For a man that smart, Barbara thought, he was so damn stubborn it was a crying shame.

T
HE SHOW CAME
to the Rockland Palace at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Harlem on October 21, where a young French jazz critic, François Postif, described with wonder the scene that he happened upon. It was midnight when he arrived, and the 2,211-capacity arena was jammed with what Postif estimated had to be twice that number. Sam was onstage, “so popular that everyone is singing along with him. His latest hit, ‘Chain Gang,’ speaks of the sound that the workers on the chain gang make, and its rhythm is so hypnotic that everyone dances—I really wonder how, since everyone is so pressed in. But everyone dances.”

Sam stretched “Chain Gang” out, Postif wrote, for “a good quarter of an hour,” and then Hank Ballard and the Midnighters came on with a very different kind of act. They did an extended treatment of Hank’s original version of “The Twist,” and the crowd, Postif observed, seemed to go into a posthypnotic trance, with ecstasy replacing language or logic. The ecstasy took a different turn as the Midnighters started to disrobe, getting down to their underwear and miming sexual release in a manner that was assisted by a spray of milky water. At this point a number of black patrolmen arrived on the scene and put an end not only to the Midnighters’ self-display but to the Midnighters’ act.

“The crowd howls and yells,” Postif continued, “but right away Sam Cooke returns to get the audience back under control, and I must admit that it is the handiwork of a master.” Once Sam got the crowd primed, he made way for LaVern Baker, who left them limp with an intense and varied program, including a very bawdy “Jim Dandy,” during which LaVern danced with her own touring Jim Dandy, a small, “very well-dressed” man with a derby and cane, who comported himself with LaVern in a manner that incited a “savage delirium.” The show was still going on when M. Postif reluctantly made his departure at 2:00
A.M.
, to go see pianist Les McCann at Small’s Paradise. For him it was a moment never to be forgotten.

For the performers it was one more night on the chitlin circuit—and, in the case of Little Willie John, one that would end an hour later with a female fan emerging from the crowd to punch him savagely (“I never saw the woman before in my life,” said Willie. “She told me she was going to stick a knife in my back as soon as I left the Rockland”) and six policeman escorting him to his automobile.

S
AM DID NOT RETURN HOME
for any extended length of time until just before Christmas. While he was still out on the road, a former gospel singer named Theola Kilgore, whom J.W. had discovered, recorded an “answer song” called “Chain Gang (The Sound of My Man),” with Kags getting the publishing on both sides of the record; Jess put out a press release announcing that Sam would soon be interviewed on network TV by hard-hitting newsman Mike Wallace; and John F. Kennedy was elected president. Kennedy’s election on November 1 had the support of Nat “King” Cole, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., and Mahalia Jackson, among others, and encouraged Barbara to cast her first vote, but Sam was in Canada, playing Chautiers, an elegant Quebec supper club. He was reading more and more, books on race, politics, and history, many of which had been borrowed from Jess’ library, all of which whetted his appetite for more. The reading only reinforced his indignation at the social injustice he saw all around him and the need to address it in the manner he had advocated in his Dorothy Kilgallen guest column. But as he went from the Crossing Inn in Trenton to Sciolla’s in Philadelphia, from the Evans Grille in Forestville, Maryland, to the Twin Coaches in Belle Vernon, Pennyslvania, he wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get his chance.

Clyde McPhatter evidently had no such misgivings. While playing the Royal Peacock, the crown jewel of Atlanta’s black nightlife, which Henry Wynn had taken over in October (Wynn conferred upon it what the
Atlanta Daily World
described as “eye-popping splendor,” with a decor “as captivating as a lover’s kiss”), Clyde had taken his place on a downtown picket line with Martin Luther King Jr.’s father and brother. The picket line was made up primarily of Atlanta college students, to whom McPhatter declared, “Until we attain freedom for everybody, [none of us can] be free to breathe the fresh air of liberty.” When he was unable to attend an NAACP fund-raising dinner in New York, he bought half a dozen $100 tickets to the event and urged everyone to follow his example by giving NAACP memberships instead of expensive gifts for Christmas.

Meanwhile
Jet
magazine reported that many big-name stars were bypassing the Deep South altogether due to the endemic prejudice of its racial practices, while lucrative rock ’n’ roll packages such as the Biggest Show of Stars were in danger of extinction because of the “prejudiced parents of white southern teenagers. . . . The territories of Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina, where mixed units of performers were [recently] accepted, are now shunned by booking agents lining up cities to display their supermarket-type revues, which feature 15 or more singers and quartets of both races.” With the latest edition of the Biggest Show of Stars (featuring such white performers as Fabian, Brenda Lee, and Duane Eddy), Chubby Checker had received a not-so-subtle lesson in prejudice when “after the show played in Houston and set out for towns in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, Checker and another sepia act on the bill, Jimmy Charles, were given a week’s ‘vacation’ and told to rejoin the revue when it got ‘up North’—which happened to be the ‘liberal’ . . . State of North Carolina.”

Sam had issues of his own with respect to both race and restraint of trade. He was furious once again with William Morris, this time, he told his brothers, because they had taken an idea he had brought them, a singalong television show, and given it to Mitch Miller. Larry Auerbach, in fact, was the agent for the show,
Sing Along With Mitch,
which had been introduced on
Ford Startime
the previous May and was scheduled to begin as a regular NBC series in January. Sam demanded a meeting with William Morris, and Jess dutifully set one up with Harry Kalcheim, head of the New York office. “You think I’m your little fair-haired nigger,” Sam railed at Kalcheim, in his brothers’ account. “You think I’m stupid. I come to you with an idea, and you told me it wouldn’t work. And then you take my fucking idea and give it to Mitch Miller. I made eighty fucking thousand dollars for y’all last year, but you won’t make it this year off Sam Cooke. I’m through.”

Jess’ recollection of the meeting did not include the singalong idea, which, as William Morris might have pointed out to Sam, had already reaped Mitch Miller enormous rewards in the recording field, with eight Top 10-selling
Sing Along With Mitch
albums since 1958 (and a total of 997 weeks on the charts). To Jess, the issue continued to be about the more down-to-earth matter of booking, but it was no less deeply felt. “Sam said, ‘What the fuck do you know about one-nighters? You have no black agents. You don’t know what it’s like on the road. And you get twice as much for your white artists as you do for me.’ When he was finished, Kalcheim said, ‘Mr. Cooke, are you asking for your release?’ Sam said yes. And Kalcheim said, very gentlemanly-like, ‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place. And by the way, the answer is no.’ Sam said, ‘You know, I think you mean that.’ And we walked out.”

Mostly, though, his problems were the problems related to his profession and craft. It was the music, as June Gardner, the new drummer, soon realized, that was his principal concern. Unlike June’s other experiences, with Roy Brown and His Mighty Men or the Lionel Hampton band, with Sam it could be a different backup band every night if they were playing a schedule of one-nighters. “Sometimes the bands could be so bad. Big bands, small bands. Sometimes Sam would say, ‘Let the fuckers stay out,’ and it would just be the three of us. ’Cause Clif could fill in so many things on the guitar, and the song would [still] go over. Clif was the glue that held it together—musically, and saying what was on his mind. He’d [always] get the band’s attention. His opening statement was, ‘If you don’t play my music, I’m going to snatch your arm off and beat you with the bloody end.’ He was a big guy, you know, big actor, had a great sense of humor. I learned a lot from him.”

Loyalty meant everything to Sam. But he still wasn’t where he wanted to be. To get there, to present his music properly, he knew he needed a band of his own. And to make good records, he knew he had to persuade Hugo and Luigi to record him in California, where he would once again be working with René and musicians who understood his music. Sam sometimes wondered if for Jess playing the Copa, a table at Ciro’s, headlining in Vegas like Sammy were not the sum total of show-business success. That was not the limit of his own ambition. One of the faceless RCA vice presidents tried to compliment him by declaring that Sam Cooke didn’t belong at the Apollo, Sam Cooke should be playing the Waldorf-Astoria. Sam just stared him down, refusing even to address him in the “proper” English he had spent so much time acquiring. “I ain’t never gonna sing at the Waldorf,” he declared angrily. “They’re not my people.” The truth was, he wanted to sing for everyone. But to do so, he had first to be true to himself.

Another Country

You know how it feels—you understand

What it is to be a stranger

In this unfriendly land

— Bobby “Blue” Bland, “Lead Me On,” 1960

N
OBODY WAS SURPRISED
when Jackie Wilson got shot. He had a reputation for smacking women around, and everyone knew he maintained two households—one in Detroit, one in New York. The shooting took place at his $500-a-month luxury apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street in the early morning hours of February 15, 1961. The way the papers reported it, a “love-crazed fan” showed up at his door, threatening to kill herself if he rejected her. “When the handsome singer tried to disarm her,” according to the
Philadelphia Tribune,
“she shot him twice, once in the [upper] thigh and once in his lower abdomen.”

What the papers failed to report was that, far from being a “love-crazed fan,” the shooter had been involved in an off-and-on affair with Jackie for years, and rather than herself, it was the girl entering the apartment with him, Harlean Harris, whom she was trying to kill. Harris was the teenage model “with the amazing hair style” who had dated Sam when he first came to New York in 1958 and then taken up with Jackie. Now twenty-one, she had been living with Jackie for the past year or so, but she disappeared from the picture altogether when Wilson’s wife, Freda, the mother of his four children, left their home in Highland Park, Michigan, to be at his side as he lay in the hospital clinging to life.

Sam had seen him just three weeks earlier at the BMI awards dinner in New York. Sam had gotten a pop songwriting award for “Chain Gang”; Jackie had received one, too, for “You Were Made For All My Love”; and, ironically, Barbara had been recognized as well—For her writer’s credit on “Wonderful World.” Jackie brought Harlean to the dinner, and everyone was having a good time until Jackie started mouthing off at Sam’s manager, Jess Rand. He had been drinking and was obviously feeling no pain, and Sam let it go at first, but after giving Jackie’s manager, a slick young mobbed-up white guy named Nat Tarnopol, a chance to settle his client down, he stepped in and defused the crisis. Afterward, Jackie asked Sam out for a drink with Harlean and him, but Sam went back to the Warwick instead. He had nothing against Jackie, they had long since patched up their differences over the 1959 Supersonic tour, and he always got a kick out of Jackie’s street swagger, but sometimes hanging out with Jackie just wasn’t that cool.