Kill 'Em and Leave (20 page)

Cannon's and Dallas's insistence that they never “unduly influenced” Brown was proven true. In February 2013, after seven years of hearings involving up to ninety lawyers, three sets of trustees, and several lawsuits that comprise more than four thousand pages, the South Carolina Supreme Court, in a moment of supreme decency and sane judgment, stepped in and put the case right back where it started—declaring that Brown was not “unduly influenced” by Cannon, Bradley, and Dallas when he set up his will and trust. But the court inexplicably stopped short of putting the three original trustees back in place. So the case has lumbered on, growing more heads, with the legal wrangling continuing.

Ten years after Brown's death, not a single child in Georgia or South Carolina has benefited, while the value of Brown's estate, which, according to Cannon, was easily $100 million or maybe $150 million at Brown's death, has plummeted to an unknown figure. According to Dallas and Cannon, Brown's estate is effectively ruined. It will never be worth its top value, because when an artist dies, there's a rush to buy his or her product. That rush is usually the peak of that artist's sales worth, and contributes to the overall value of the artist's estate.

Cannon, after paying lawyers $870,000 and counting, is ruined financially. His legal costs continue, as do the court efforts to seek more restitution. “The more they come after me, the more they can bill the estate,” he says. Instead of an easy retirement earned after more than four decades of work, he lives on thin ice, waiting for the next expensive legal attack and hoping to live long enough to care for his ailing wife, whose medication is prohibitively expensive. He says the case “destroyed my confidence in the judicial system in South Carolina. The good-old-boy system is alive and well here.”

Seven years after Brown's death, his body lies in a mausoleum in his daughter Deanna's front yard, which cost Brown's estate—paid through the state, which still controls his wealth—$100,000 to maintain in 2013. There are plans afoot by some of Brown's children to make Brown's Beech Island home into a museum like Elvis Presley's house in Memphis. Deanna started a James Brown School of Funk in Augusta, later called the James Brown Academy of Musik Pupils, complete with corporate donations—so the little children, presumably, can learn the Funk.

Not math. Not science. But the funk. Just what poor kids need.

So here Cannon sits, in the back room of his modest Barnwell home, on a hot August afternoon in 2012, doing exactly what James Brown's last words told him to do:
Go home, Mr. Cannon. Go home to your wife….He finishes his old-fashioned Scooter Pie and looks out at the freshly cut yard. He enjoys the grass, the birds, the hundred-year-old tree. He hands me another Scooter Pie. He takes another for himself, bites down on it.

“When I was in prison, they put me on a detail in the kitchen,” he tells me. “If you're good, they'd say, ‘You can take out the garbage.' Everybody wanted to take out the garbage, because you were outside then. You could see the sky. One day they asked me, ‘Mr. Cannon, you don't want to take the garbage out?'

“I said, ‘No, no. I don't want to go outside and see the sky until I'm free.' ”

Tears fill his eyes.

“So I never went out. I never took out the trash. That was the hardest part.”

He sits in silence for a moment, his blues eyes red now. He doesn't wipe away the tears, doesn't sob, doesn't dissolve into pitiful. He sits silently watching the yard. The birds. A soft, gentle wind brushes the tree branches nearby, pregnant with leaves.

“I'll tell you what. When I first got in, I was in an eight-by-ten cell with three other people. Lying on my bunk. Crying. My stomach hurt. Knowing I had six months ahead. I said, ‘Lord, I can't handle this. I can't do it. Lord, you got to take it.' And you know what? I woke up the next day and I had peace in my heart.”

He rocks slowly back and forth, nodding as he talks. “No matter what has happened to me, there isn't a day that I don't get out of bed and thank the good Lord for what he's done for me. I don't know anybody the Lord's been better to than David Cannon. I thank God, and I'm grateful.”

“For what?” I ask him.

“For every blessing I've ever had. For my wife. For my life. I've had too many blessings to count. God has been good to David Cannon.”

T
he old warrior sits in the parlor of his newfangled Atlanta-area home, peering out the window at his red Chevy Corvette, the one he got as a gift from the president of Gabon, the one that will be stolen in a few weeks from this very driveway. His wife would see the guy who stole the car too. How 'bout that? She would see him at a gas station just up the road, a young guy, black, standing over the red Corvette—gassing up
his
red Corvette. She'd walk over to confront him, but the thief would smell a rat, jump into the car, and speed off. The old warrior would be steamed about that. “You can't keep nothing,” he'd fume.

This is what happens when you live long enough. You see everything. You work your way up to the top of the music game after eating lard sandwiches in a shack in Franklin County, North Carolina, then watch the things you worked for vanish down the road, just like that car. He worked hard for that car. He spent decades taking care of James Brown, then left for twelve years to work in Africa, and that was no picnic. But Charles Bobbit, eighty-one, a sharecropper's son, a man who never saw his father and lost his mother at age six, didn't rise to this level and come to own this beautiful suburban house in Snellville, Georgia, being stupid. He didn't spend forty-one years as friend and personal manager to James Brown and another two years managing Michael Jackson being naïve. He worked in Africa because he liked it, but after twelve years, he came back to a music world that had changed. The old R&B had died. Disco was gone. Rap was the new world. Kids wore their pants around their behinds and their hats sideways. His friends had changed. Even the old man, the old boss, James Brown, had changed.

He remembers that day, when Brown called him up out of the blue. “Come work for me again,” he said.

Bobbit stalled. He'd been down that road. The yelling, the fights, the screaming, the horrible business of falling on his sword for Brown in 1976, when he took a hit for Brown by agreeing to testify that he paid a New York City DJ to promote Brown's records, while allowing Brown to testify that he had no knowledge of the payments and didn't condone them. Payoffs to DJs, though illegal, were widespread in the record business in those days. Brown gave him two grand. Two grand for taking the bullet for Brown.

“What do you want me to do?” Bobbit asked.

“I don't want to tell you what to do,” Brown said. “You tell me what to do.”

Bobbit could hardly believe his ears. For twenty years, Brown had given orders, and some were brutal. Now, after thirty-five years of giving advice, of knowing everything, Brown was asking for advice.

“I'll come for a little bit,” Bobbit said. He knew how clever Brown could be. It was probably a trick, he thought, to suck him in.

But it wasn't a trick. The old man was as good as his word. He wanted Bobbit's advice. Not on big things. Not money things—nobody told Mr. Brown what to do with his money. But other things, important things, like “I'm thinking 'bout squeezing an extra gig in Japan, what you think?” or “Can you go check on Leon?” referring to Leon Austin, Brown's childhood friend who was ailing, or “What should we do about the Rev?” because they both loved Rev. Sharpton. Brown followed Sharpton's doings like a cheesehead football fan in Wisconsin follows the Green Bay Packers. Every move, every blink, he wanted to know. Whenever the Rev was in the public eye raising civil rights hell, mostly in New York someplace, Brown would follow it on television or read the newspaper and give a running commentary to Bobbit. “Why'd he do that?” he'd say, or “Mr. Bobbit…Listen to this. Rev's got 'em on the ropes….Ha ha!”

Those were good times, the final years, watching the Rev, their prodigal son, birthed in their baptism of fire in a Brooklyn theater forty-five years ago. And talking over the old days too. The band. The women. Those were good times for him and Brown. Like when they got the news that the Rev was going to host
Saturday Night Live
. Brown was furious. “He's gonna make a joke of himself, Mr. Bobbit,” Brown muttered. “He's gonna look like a fool.” The two watched Sharpton host the show in a hotel room together, and when Sharpton broke into a James Brown send-up with the Saturday Night Live Band playing behind him, Brown hollered with laughter and shouted, “Call him, Mr. Bobbit! Get Rev on the line!” Bobbit got a nervous Sharpton on the line and said, “You turned him, Rev. He says you did all right.” Bobbit listened to Sharpton's palpable relief on the other end, knowing that the only opinion that ever mattered to Sharpton belonged to the old man who was suddenly fighting him for the phone, trying to grab it, to tell the Rev himself, “Rev! You got a B. I give you a B on it.”

But it wasn't really a B. James Brown gave no one an A but James Brown.

Even the Rev had changed with the times. The Rev had pushed off from the dock and was on his own, ferrying into the deep waters of the civil rights movement up north. Rev was a star now.

Brown's retinue was gone. He was vanishing into history as younger, slimmer black stars took center stage. Guys who had never done the chitlin circuit. Guys who wouldn't know the blues or jazz from a pair of pliers. Even as the younger stars praised Brown, they forgot him, one of the greatest American forces in modern musical history; they saw him as a guy in their rearview mirror, extolling his virtues and vanquishing him at once. History seemed to move so fast for Brown, and as it moved for Brown, so did it move for his shadow and ace man, Charles Bobbit. Brown, who was once lauded the world over, seemed to be growing smaller before Bobbit's eyes. It was horrible. There was no new music, only the old stuff, with new guys playing it at superspeed. In the old days, Brown would have slowed them down, demanded groove, and snap—“Get the band together, Mr. Bobbitt. We're going into the studio”—and Bobbit would pull Fred, Maceo, Pee Wee, Jimmy Nolen, and Clyde outta bed from some godforsaken hotel someplace and watch Brown work them until they busted loose with some bad shit that would knock out the competition. But Brown was old now, and tired.

His body was going. Bobbit could see that way back in 2000. The prostate cancer that Brown tried to hide, the swollen knees, the swollen feet. The inability to get out of bed easily. And the drugs that he did secretly, after never drinking more than an occasional beer, and rarely smoking so much as a cigarette in front of Bobbit in forty-one years. You watch the man you gave most of your life to, the guy who burned up the stage for nearly four decades, who epitomized black life for generations past and future, see him torch his own life at its end, alone, and you realize how rich you are. You realize that the one thing you are capable of, and that he was not, is what's destroying him: sharing your life, trusting somebody else. Brown knew it. He even admitted it. He confessed it to Bobbit at one point, said it outright. “Mr. Bobbit, you're the only one I let know me. You're the only man that knows I don't know how to love.”

Charles Bobbit knew how to love. He loved his wife, Ruth. He loved his kids, and his grandkids. He loved his house. And he loved his red Corvette—which, he would confess later, when muttering about its theft, was just a car, after all.

Peering through the blinds of his house, he looks at the manicured lawn, the quiet suburban street, and mutters softly, “ ‘Stay ahead.' That's what Mr. Brown would tell me. He never stayed in one place a long time. He would go somewhere, to a meeting, or whatever. He'd be there for a little while and then go. He'd say, ‘Mr. Bobbit, don't ever stay nowhere for a long time. Don't make yourself unimportant. Come important and leave important.' ”

The horrible slew of lawsuits following Brown's death, the dozens of lawyers, most of whom never knew Brown, sucking Brown's estate dry, the squabbling children and widowed wife or ex-wife, depending on what you believe, each trying to pick one another's pocket while claiming to love the poor children for whom Brown's money was meant, gnaws at him. Brown predicted it would happen, Bobbit says. “He told me, ‘It's gonna be a mess when I die, Mr. Bobbit. A big mess. Stay out of it.' ”

So he has stayed out of it. Brown planned to give $200,000 to Bobbit. He signed a $40 million deal to sell his writer's share of his music in October 2006. But he died suddenly, three months later, in December 2006, before the sale was completed. And just like that car Bobbit's peering at in his driveway, that $200,000 is gone. And it likely ain't never coming back.

“Shame what goes on in this world,” he says.

Bobbit was the facilitator, the guy who made things happen. There were other facilitators in JB's life—Fred Davis, Judge Bradley, Buddy Dallas—but Bobbit cut turf on the gig during the early big years, 1965 to 1976, when Brown was on top of the world, making musical history, serving as a symbol of black American pride at a time when millions of young blacks were fighting to integrate, to go to decent schools and vote.

He was born dirt-poor in the 1932 depression that flattened rural Franklin County, North Carolina, twenty-eight miles north of Raleigh. His mother, a midwife, died when he was six. He was shuttled from one relative to the next, working the cotton fields and pulling tobacco, living without shoes, decent clothes, or a dad. None of his relatives down there, he says, wanted little Charles Bobbit. At ten, he was shipped to an aunt in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who agreed to take him in. He lived among Brooklyn's toughs as a careful, cautious kid. He was born with an athlete's natural build, but he refused to go out for sports teams in school because he worried he might get hurt, and if he got hurt, who would take care of Charles Bobbit? He was a country boy on his own in a world of Brooklyn hustlers and con artists who grinned and slapped you on the back with one hand while picking your pocket with the other. So much hustle. So little space to move around in that tight little world. He dreamed of getting out.

By 1965, at the age of thirty-three, he'd made his way up in the world. He had a good job laying subway track on the overnight shift for the New York City Transit Authority when he met a man who served as James Brown's driver. “Julius Friedman was his name,” Bobbit says, leaning back in his chair. “Imagine. A brother, with a name like that.” He chuckles. He's a heavyset man, with a hairpiece, youthful looking. He could easily pass for sixty-five. “He and I got to be friends. We started hanging out together. I'd go by his house. We'd go to a restaurant and have coffee and whatnot.”

Brown was living in St. Albans, Queens, at the time and had just bought a Rolls-Royce. One day, while working a show at the Apollo Theater, Brown telephoned Julius the driver and ordered him to go out to his Queens home and deliver his Rolls and an extra set of keys to him after his show at the Apollo. “Julius asked me to ride with him,” Bobbit says.

When they got to the Apollo Theater, “I was supposed to sit in the car while he went upstairs to give Mr. Brown the keys. Hell, I went on upstairs too. He went through the door of the dressing room and I was behind him. I was right on his butt, boy.”

They found Brown sitting in a chair before a mirror, combing his hair in a room crowded with men in $400 mohair suits and $200 alligator shoes. Bobbit stood behind them in his Sunday best, a fifty-dollar suit and an eight-dollar pair of Thom McAn shoes.

Brown spied Bobbit. He made no comment. He simply took his car keys from Julius, and then Julius and Bobbit left.

Two months later, Brown was returning from an overseas tour and found Julius—and Bobbit again—waiting at the arrivals gate. Just before he got into the car, Brown turned to Bobbit and said, “Come down to the house. I want to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

Bobbit reported to Brown's house in St. Albans. “When I got there, he said, ‘I know you wonder why I was looking at you so hard in the dressing room that day at the Apollo.'

“I lied and said, ‘Oh, no, no.'