Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (90 page)

Allen was, quite simply, overwhelmed. It was, for him, a truly “tender moment” and released a flood of emotion, the kind of feeling he had learned from early rejection to steel himself against. His inclination was to hang back, just to keep from getting hurt, but Sam had put his finger on Allen’s vulnerability, a need to be loved that he disguised from nearly everyone outside his immediate family. He agreed to represent Sam almost without thinking about it and, once again, without a piece of paper being signed—there was no “deal” involved, because, Allen made clear from the outset, he wasn’t going to take any part of the nearly half a million dollars in advance payments D’Imperio had in principle agreed to, nor was he going to get involved in Sam’s personal appearances. He was just going to take his five-year 10 percent administrative fee for the publishing, whatever he could make as the record manufacturer, and his ownership of the Tracey masters, which, while it would not pay off in full for thirty years, assigned to him the equivalent of something like 30 percent of the 6 percent royalty rate for at least the next five. A cynical observer might have suggested that in taking on additional managerial responsibilities he was only protecting his investment, but for Allen it was about something much more important: it was about trust.

“I got back the next morning and called the office. I told my secretary—her name was Nancy Mays, but I called her Nancy Nurse—‘Get all the bills on my desk. I’m going to pay off everything that I owe.’ So that’s what I did. Then I went home and went to sleep.”

It marked, as Allen would always acknowledge, his real beginnings in the business. Sam Cooke was not just a client; he represented Allen’s professional legitimacy and his musical “heritage.” And, as he would later reflect in a rare moment of introspection, “Sometimes I don’t know how I was able to get certain things done. I certainly am persistent. And I don’t give up. I try to have all of the facts, so that when I make a decision, it’s with the inclusion of everything that I know. And there is no short-term thing. I’m not going to make a deal that is based on just one day or one record. Can’t do it. It has to be based on belief. I mean, I hate the word, everybody uses it, but it’s a vision.”

S
AM AND J.W. WERE JUBILANT
. Allen had come through, just as he had said he would. Others, like Scepter Records head Florence Greenberg, former William Morris agent Paul Cantor, and Jerry Brandt, might warn them against Allen, but each of them had his own motivations, and Alex wasn’t worried. He and Sam were perfectly capable of looking out for themselves. They had outfoxed Art Rupe and the Siamases, they had outlasted Bob Yorke, J.W. had watched Bumps and Jess Rand hang themselves, and through it all, he and Sam had maintained a steady course. The deal they were making with Allen put real money in their pockets for the first time, and if it didn’t work out, it had a five-year expiration date. There was no question in either Sam’s or Alex’s mind that Allen could open doors for them. He had already proved it. He had told them the money was there, and then he went in and got it.

Twelve days later, the traveling show arrived in Shreveport at 7:30 in the morning after an all-night drive. Sam had called ahead to make reservations for Barbara and himself at the brand-new Holiday Inn North just outside of town, but when they pulled up in the Maserati, with Charles and Crain trailing in the packed Cadillac limo, the man at the desk glanced nervously at the group and said he was sorry, there were no vacancies. Charles protested vehemently, but it was Sam who refused to back down. He set his jaw in the way that Barbara knew always meant trouble, and, long after the clerk had simply gone silent, Sam kept yelling at him, asking, Did they think he was some kind of ignorant fool? He had just as much right to be there as any other damn body. He wanted to see the manager. He wasn’t going to leave until he got some kind of damn satisfaction. Barbara kept nudging him, trying to get him to calm down. They’ll kill you, she told him, when the desk clerk’s attention was distracted. “They ain’t gonna kill me,” he told her, “because I’m Sam Cooke.” Honey, she said, down here they’d just as soon lynch you as look at you, they don’t care who you are. Finally the others got him out the door, but he sat in the car fuming, staring at the desk clerk who just stared coldly back, and when he drove off, it was with the horn of the Maserati blaring and all four occupants of both cars calling out insults and imprecations.

The police were waiting for them when they arrived at the Castle Hotel on Sprague Street, the colored guesthouse downtown where the rest of the group was staying. They were taken to the police station, where they were charged not with attempting to register at the Holiday Inn but with creating a public disturbance. They were held for several hours and finally let go, but not before the contents of Crain’s small suitcase had been carefully scrutinized and counted: it amounted to $9,989.72 in coins and wrinkled bills and represented, Crain told a skeptical police captain, “the receipts collected from recent performances.” The Maserati’s horn had stuck, Crain explained to even greater skepticism, because there was a short in the electrical system that caused it to go off whenever the automobile turned sharply to the left. Crain posted a cash bond of $102.50 apiece shortly before 1:30
P.M.
, and they returned to the Castle Hotel.

That night, a bomb threat was called in to the Municipal Auditorium, and the building had to be thoroughly searched before the show could go on. Tensions were rife all through the performance, and the police presence was very much in evidence. Early in the evening, Charles went out to a package store to pick up the liquor for the after-party. Still smarting from his treatment earlier in the day, he carelessly asked the white woman behind the counter, “Baby, how much is that V-O-five?”

“So this white man come up to me and say, ‘You call that woman “baby”?’ I say, ‘Man, get out of my face before I knock you down’—because I was mad already. When I went to walk out of the store, they called the police on me.” The police arrested him for DWI after finding an open cooler of champagne in the backseat of the car. When he told them he wanted to call his brother, “they put a gun to my head and told me, ‘You say another word, nigger, and I’ll blow your brains out.’” He wasn’t scared. Like Sam, “I just couldn’t stand for people to treat me any old way. You didn’t belittle me.” But when Sam found out about it, he just laughed. He might have been tempted, he told Barbara, to let his brother’s ass sit in jail for another few hours, but he wanted to get out of town as fast as he could.

They finished out the tour without incident, while newspapers across the country picked up the story. The
New York Times
ran an AP report the following day headlined “Negro Band Leader Held in Shreveport,” but the black weeklies told a tale of racial outrage, and over the succeeding weeks, months, and years, a kind of myth grew up around the incident in which nearly every major r&b singer imagined himself to have been with Sam and presented variations of the story that in their more extreme versions had Sam (and sometimes others) forced by the police to disrobe and sing their hits or, conversely, allowed the larger stakes of integration to be confronted, with Crain holding enough money in his briefcase “to buy the damn motel.” It was a measure of Sam Cooke’s standing not just in the world of rhythm and blues but in the black community at large, with the indignity that had been inflicted on him felt in a manner that reflected how much Sam was admired and loved. But for Sam it was one more reminder of just how fragile was the black man’s place in the white man’s world, just how tenuous were the bonds of status, safety, and human dignity in a fundamentally racist society.

H
E GOT THE FIRST $100,000
of his RCA advance on October 24, with a full-page ad for his new single and the Charles Brown- inspired
Night Beat
album running in
Cash Box
two days later. The deal had worked out almost exactly as Allen had said it would, only better. He was to receive a total of $450,000 over the next four years ($100,000 on or about October 15 for each of the next two years, additional payments of $75,000 on October 15, 1966, and October 15, 1967), amounting to substantial prepayment by the record company on a six-year, $75,000-a-year deal that, with the two-year option picked up, extended through August 31, 1969). The money was nonreturnable but applicable against future artist’s royalties, so that Sam would not see any further income from record sales until the advance-to-date earned out. The agreed-upon sum of publishing and artist’s royalties owed by RCA was $119,259.88 (subject to record returns), with Sam, Kags, and Malloy each signing off on that as the full amount of all past monies owed. All of the other provisions that Allen had outlined to Joe D’Imperio would remain in place, fleshed out by legal language supplied by Marty Machat. Future publishing royalties would be paid monthly along with full accounting to support payment, and the contract was backdated to September 1, as Allen had insisted all along that it must be. Most important, D’Imperio accepted the premise that Sam would have control not only of his sessions (with the sole provision that RCA could have “one or more persons present” for consultational purposes) but, with Tracey designated as the sole manufacturer and given approval of all elements of manufacture and fabrication, including art work and liner notes, in effect of his entire back catalogue as well.

At Allen’s suggestion, Sam put the $100,000 into General Motors 5 percent preferred stock issued in the form of bearer bonds, which Sam placed in a safe deposit box at the Wilshire-Robertson Bank of America, with the rest of his money deposited in a Tracey account at the same bank, to which he and Alex alone had signatory access. It was, just as Allen had said, a direct pass-through, with taxes to be paid only as Sam made use of the money.

It did not come without a price. For Allen, there was the loss of his longtime Scepter account when Florence Greenberg, who had courted Sam for nearly a year and was furious that Allen, who was, after all, merely an accountant, had not delivered Sam to her, accused him of double-dealing.

Closer to home, in a development that would have been unthinkable to anyone in the SAR family until it happened, Zelda Sands left the company and took Mel Carter, the label’s most successful artist, with her. It was not entirely a business dispute, though Zelda had taken violent exception to Allen from the moment she first laid eyes on him. An old friend of Florence’s, she told Sam from the start that she didn’t trust the man. “It was the only argument I ever had with Sam. I just knew [Klein] was a con. The first thing he did was he ordered me to send the copyrights to New York, and I said to J.W., ‘Is this our office or what?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, this is where the copyrights are staying. You don’t even know the man.’” It was, of course, a losing argument, since that was Allen’s deal with Sam and Alex. And it only escalated when Allen questioned whether Zelda could serve as both an employee of SAR and de facto manager of one of its principal artists. Zelda thought she had worked that out with Sam and that they would form a management company together. But then something happened that threw all of the other issues into pale relief.

Outside observers, and just about everyone within Sam’s immediate circle, had long assumed that Zelda and Sam were having an affair, though Zelda insisted that the entire reason she could be direct with Sam on a business basis was that she was one female who had never gotten sexually involved with him. Then one day, while Sam was still out on tour, she got a call from Sam and Barbara together, they must have been having “one of those heartfelt things that they seldom had,” she said, “where they talked things out, I suppose.” They told her they wanted her to meet them on the road, just lock up the office and come to Chicago for a couple of days. She protested that she couldn’t just shut down the business, but they were both so insistent that she couldn’t say no—it sounded almost like they had some special cause for celebration that they wanted to share with her. When she got to their hotel room, though, she was met not with celebration but with angry confrontation. Her husband, Barbara said, had always found Zelda “tantalizing,” and she knew that something was going on. So, she suggested, as Sam sat there stonily, maybe there was a way all three of them could do something about it together.

Zelda caught the first plane back to L.A., but that wasn’t the end of it. A few days later, while Sam was still out of town, Barbara showed up at work with a gun and marched her out to her car in the Warner Building parking lot. She never went back, except to collect her things, and then she ran into Sam on the corner of Wilcox and Hollywood. It was obvious he felt bad about the way things had gone down, even if he didn’t want to acknowledge what Barbara had done or, for that matter, what had taken place in Chicago. But, Zelda said, he was the same old Sam, “he always smiled when he talked to me, Sam and I were dear to one another. I said to him, ‘Listen, I want to take Mel with me. I’ve had offers, you know, from other labels.’ And he said, ‘Okay, you can have him, I’ll let you have him, ZZ.’ Smiling the whole time. He was just as sweet as he could be. There was nothing in writing to let [Mel] out or anything. He just let us go free.” Three weeks later,
Cash Box
ran an item that announced: “‘Zelda’—Sam Cooke’s gal Friday for the past three years and his right arm in the Sar and Derby diskery and Kags pubbery has recently signed Mel Carter to a personal management pact.” It followed with a detailed biography and pointed out that “this busy gal . . . can even be seen on a few album covers.”

Crain, too, found himself unexpectedly on the outside. He seemed to keep waiting for an invitation from Sam and Alex to join in the business deliberations, but by the time the deal was done, it was clear he had no place in it. His two erstwhile partners, evidently feeling guilty, renewed talk of setting him up with an agency, but he was no more interested now than he had been before, so they put him on the Kags payroll as of December 4 at $200 a week. Sam approached Allen about Crain working for Tracey, he said Crain wanted to be involved, and Allen went so far as to set up a meeting with Crain at his office. “I said, ‘Well, what can you do, Roy? Just tell me.’ He said, ‘I can give advice.’ And he said it genuinely. I told Sam, ‘If you want to give him money, give him money.’ I could see him being pissed off about Kags. He didn’t want to be out on the road anymore.”