That he had no formal background in management was irrelevant. He had practically grown up in the business; he had been Sammy Davis Jr.’s friend, confidant, and publicist for years; and he was in the midst of setting up a film production company with actor Jeff Chandler, another longtime client, who had convinced him to come out to California in the first place. A snappy dresser in an understated eastern kind of a way, Jess had already introduced Sam to some of the best Hollywood and New York shops—Zeigler and Zeigler at Sunset and Crescent for suits, George Unger in New York for jewelry, Sammy’s tailor, Cy Martin in New York, for custom-made tuxes—and Sam had soaked it all in, looking and dressing the part as if he were to the manor born. Jess had no doubt that Sam was an apt pupil; what he couldn’t get a handle on was the man underneath. If he gave Sam direct advice, Sam generally took it, but not without an argument. He had a habit of framing a question in such a way that you were never sure he didn’t already know the answer. And occasionally a kind of smoldering resentment would creep in, just below the surface, but then it was gone so quickly, smoothed over by that effortless charm, that you wondered what it was you had actually glimpsed.
“He was so involved with himself,” Jess theorized, “that he always felt like he had to cover his back. I don’t know what he got out of it, or if it was meant for you or for himself, but he would never concede a point.” Early on, he gave Jess the job of firing his longtime accountant. “He didn’t think the guy knew anything. I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ He said, ‘No, you’re my manager, that’s your job.’ Now this was an awful thing for me because I was good friends with the man, and I kept saying to myself, How do I approach this thing? until finally we’re just outside the guy’s door and Sam’s doing his biting-the-bottom-lip routine, and I realize I’ve just got to cut through the conversation and get right to the point. So I did, and the man says, ‘Well, don’t you want to hear my side?’ I said, ‘No, unfortunately, there are no sides here. Sam just wants out of this thing.’ And we get outside, and Sam throws his arms around me and says, ‘Man, you really handled that good.’” It was as if, Jess felt, he had finally passed an important test. Now if he could only get rid of J.W. Alexander as easily.
SAM CELEBRATED HIS BIRTHDAY with a party at the Nite Life on Thirty-eighth and Western, with Los Angeles Sentinel columnist (and Nite Life operator) Gertrude Gipson hosting an array of friends, guest artists, and the paying public. He kept his hand in, too, with an appearance on KGFJ radio personality Charles Trammel’s new show. But mostly he was just enjoying himself, kicking back. He was living now in a suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, where he had moved not long after getting home. It had become immediately obvious that Barbara wasn’t going to move out anytime soon, that she and Linda, for all her talk of finding another place, had nowhere else to go. It was equally obvious that Barbara had little interest in finding a place that did not include Sam. So they lived together for a while as a kind of family, with Sam and Linda occupying the twin beds and Barbara sleeping on the floor. No matter what Barbara had in mind, he was determined to keep a well-defined distance between them. So, even though he knew from all her hints and overt statements how much she felt she could do for him, and despite how badly he would have liked to give Linda a real home, he kept everything strictly on a superficial level, going out every night without telling her his plans, letting her deal with all the girls who called as if she were his private secretary, not even sleeping with her. And after a little while, without telling her where he was going, he moved into the Knickerbocker.
Lou Adler was not far behind. “It was one of those things where, you know, I was living the life with him, and it started out, ‘Meet me at the hotel, and we’ll go out.’ Then we’d go back to the hotel afterwards with some girls that we’d met during the night, and pretty soon [I’d start leaving] my clothes, and then I was staying there, I just sort of moved in. He could have pretty much any girl he wanted. And the ones that he didn’t have, I had. But we spent a lot of time alone, too, just sitting around, I never saw him really drinking, I never saw him smoke reefer—I did, but I never smoked around Sam. He was conscious of anything that was new to him—a film, a book, clothes—and he didn’t hesitate to ask, ‘Where’d you get that, where does that kind of thing come from?’ He was always opening his mind up to something new, he was always expanding. Wherever he was, he was always moving out to another place, and yet he always had that thing about how he was never going to leave his roots, he was always going to have some place to go home to.”
It was a very different view of Sam than Jess Rand’s, seemingly free of any tinge of personal or racial resentment. The Sam that Lou Adler knew was probably closer to the Sam that Alex or Crain or Lou Rawls knew, easygoing, relaxed, able to laugh at himself even at his most stubborn. One time at the Knickerbocker, there was a whole bunch of girls standing outside, and Sam, playing the big star, asked Lou for a pen to sign autographs with. When Lou said he didn’t have a pen, Sam went back to the gift shop and bought one himself. “So we go out, and we get to the top step, and the whole group comes running at him, and he looks over at me, and one of them says, ‘Can we have your autograph? Can we have your autograph, Mr. Mathis?’ He laughed as we were walking away. He said, ‘There’s a lesson in there somewhere.’”
And yet Lou was well aware there was an elusive quality to Sam, there was a side he didn’t want you or anyone else to see: if there were worries, he wasn’t going to show them; if there were conflicts, they weren’t going to come up. Even when he was uncool, Lou realized, he found a way to be cool. In all of the conversations that they had, Lou never heard him express his feelings about his family, and his feelings about religion were left unspoken. There was no question in that sense of who was directing the conversation, but at the same time there was equally little question that there was no one else even remotely like Sam. “I never met a man like him in my life,” Lou mused many years later in a statement he might have found difficult to express at the time but one no less reflective of his deepest feelings. “He was a shining light.”
Barbara was a whole other story. Lou got to know her in the two or three months he lived with Sam, and he liked her a lot, but “she was totally different. She never put on any airs, she was more street, whatever her lifestyle was, she hadn’t changed.” In certain respects Lou was more comfortable with that lifestyle than with Sam’s. With Sam, for example, he always felt he had to hide his marijuana smoking, but with Barbara he could just be himself, and the two of them could get high together. Maybe because Sam knew how comfortable Lou was with Barbara, he felt free to express his feelings about her without any element of disguise. He talked about how part of him just wanted to settle down with a wife and daughter of his own, but another, larger part of him told him to hold back. Lou started going out seriously with a girl at around this time, and Sam seemed to seize on that as a way of resolving his own conflict. He urged Lou to get married, as if maybe Lou could do it for him by proxy.
Lou met Sam’s brother L.C. for the first time during this period, when L.C. came out belatedly to collect his Christmas present. “I came out for my Cadillac. See, Sam asked me, ‘Man, what kind of car would you like?’ I said, ‘Sam, I ain’t got nothing, I’m walking. Anything, man.’ He said, ‘C., what kind of car you want?’ I said, ‘I’d like to have me a convertible Cadillac. I’d like to have me a Continental kit on it. As a matter of fact, Sam, I’d like for it to be so long that when I go to turn a corner I need a turntable to make the turn.’ He said, ‘You so crazy’—he called me a little crazy shit all the time. But I had no idea he was gonna buy me a Cadillac until my mother and father come over my girlfriend’s house and said, ‘Sam got you a Christmas present.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t he send it to me?’ I thought it was a little watch. And my father said, ‘Son, you got to go to Los Angeles to get it. He bought you a Cadillac.’”
He didn’t arrive until well over a month later, and when he did, he found that everyth
ing had been taken care of for him. Sam sent money for a plane ticket, but then Reverend Cook wanted to go out, too, and L.C. invited his running buddy, Herbert Henderson, along, so he cashed in the ticket and the three of them drove out. “We was over at one of my cousin’s house, and Bumps brought the car over, and, boy, when he turned the corner, man, I just said, ‘Lord have mercy.’ It was a 1954 canary yellow Cadillac, like brand-new, just twelve thousand miles on it, with a black nylon top, black upholstery, and a Continental kit. Bumps said, ‘Now, L.C., if you like the car, all you got to do is go over to Wilshire Cadillac and pick up the papers.’ Said, ‘Sam already paid for it, but he wouldn’t pick up the papers, he told the man it was on your approval.’ I said, ‘Man, you better get in right now and show me where to get those papers!’”
Everything about his visit to California was covered first-class, just like he would have expected it to be. Sam arranged for him to stay with Bumps and his wife, Marlene, on Normandie, and every Saturday Bumps gave him enough cash to get through the week, told him if he needed more, just ask for it, because it was Sam’s money and Sam said he wanted his brother to be treated royally. He had a charge account in Sam’s name at the filling station around the corner from Bumps’ house, and Bumps and Marlene really extended themselves for him, with no evidence of any ill feeling toward Sam on Bumps’ part. Which, as L.C. saw it, probably went back to the way Sam had always treated the people who mattered in his life. Bumps didn’t need to be told how hard it was to get through some of those doors out there, he had to know that a white manager would just make it that much easier. And if Sam told Bumps that he would come back and get Bumps once he had gotten through those doors himself—well, there was no reason for Bumps not to believe him. He probably would.
L.C. and Marlene would go out together at night and have a ball. “That girl was from New Orleans, we used to call her Little Mama, and she was as nice as she was pretty. You talking about a beautiful person.” He hung out with Clif, who told him that the way he was spending Sam’s money, his initials should stand for “Long Cash.” Sam got L.C. in with his L.A. crowd, too: Jesse Belvin; Eugene Church, whose hit “Pretty Girls Everywhere” was still on the charts; Bobby Day, who had toured with Sam off and on the previous fall behind his own hit “Rock-in’ Robin”; Johnny “Guitar” Watson; and Alex Hodge, who with his brother Gaynel had sung at one time or another with all of the others. He met Darlene Love, too, and proved that he could be as “mannerable” as his brother, picking her up at high school, bringing strawberry ice cream for her mama and cigars for her daddy. “You so full of shit, L.C.,” Darlene would say to him laughingly—and he didn’t put up much of an argument, but she was a very pretty girl.
All the while, Sam was trying to get L.C. to move out to California permanently. But he had his girl, Barbara Clemons, back in Chicago, and he had his own career to think about, and, besides, to L.C. Los Angeles wasn’t nothing but a country town. Things were going good for him and his manager, Montague; his first record on the Chess subsidiary label Checker was still getting airplay, and his second was scheduled to come out before long. He had played the Royal Peacock in Atlanta in January, where he was billed with Clyde McPhatter, in a “Big Battle of the Singers,” as “L.C. Cook (Sam Cook’s brother).”
“Sam said, ‘Look, C., I want you to stay out here with me.’ I said, ‘Sam, you know I don’t like L.A.’” Not that he wasn’t grateful, but he had his own life to lead. So he drove back after a month or so, not long after it was announced in February that he had won a BMI songwriting award for Sam’s hit from the previous summer, “Win Your Love For Me.” He was glad he had been able to help Sam out in his long legal dispute with Specialty. But he had done no more for his brother, certainly, than his brother had always done for him.
“WE’D BE SITTING AROUND TALKING,” said Lou Rawls, “and maybe something would happen or somebody would say something, and that would trigger an idea. He always wrote with other people in mind. He would say, ‘[So-and-so] would sound good doing this.’”
“Sometimes,” said J.W., laughing, “we’d be sitting on the floor partying with a bunch of girls, creating while we were partying.”
The Kags catalogue was growing almost daily, even if for the time being its financial prospectus was not. J.W. really believed in their new venture, and his enthusiasm and energy were practically irresistible. He formalized the partnership early in the new year, and, with a canniness that did nothing to belie his smooth charm, he included Crain in the partnership papers, which listed 1845 South St. Andrew’s Place #2, Sam’s apartment, as the business address. The two of them, Sam and Alex, were writing like crazy, both separately and together, taking the sensible view that good songs were an investment that never diminished, particularly if you wrote the kind of standard that continued to be sung long after the original hit version was forgotten. For all practical purposes the Travelers no longer existed as a working group (Jesse Whitaker was already contemplating a revamped quartet that would be called the New Pilgrim Travelers and devoted exclusively to gospel), but J.W. recorded a couple of Sam’s new songs, “I’ll Always Be in Love With You” and “I Gopher You,” under the group’s name. He had Lou Rawls, whom he was undertaking to guide toward a solo career, singing lead, and while he would not have turned down a hit, the primary intent was more to create a glorified demo at Rex Productions expense, a record he could take around to other artists with the idea of their cutting the song and reaching a wider audience than the Travelers at this point were ever going to have.
He was, in fact, buttonholing every potential customer he could at any and every available opportunity. He approached Fats Domino, still at the height of his popular success, while he was getting his hair styled in the barbershop of the Hotel Watkins. But when he tried to tell Fats about publishing, “he looked at me like I had a tail, like, ‘Who is this stupid nigger?’ I felt embarrassed and cut down. But Sam had faith in me.” He went up to Jackie Wilson in the lobby of the same hotel. “I told him, ‘Man, I got a song for you [“I’ll Always Be in Love With You”].’ He said, ‘Sing it to me.’ So, fuck, I went on in the toilet and sung it to him. And he cut it! Then the Flamingos were in town, and I told one of them, I said, ‘Man, Sam wrote a song [“Nobody Loves Me Like You”], I think it would be perfect for you guys.’ So I sung it to them. [Some of the] musicians asked Sam, ‘What’s Alex doing? He’s got a hole-in-the-wall type of thing, you know.’ But I had confidence. I was operating out of my apartment, and it wasn’t even my apartment!”
Alex’s confidence seemed to be catching. Without any of the constant touring or major television exposure of the previous year, “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” was proving to be Sam’s biggest hit since “You Send Me.” He had his last session for the Billie Holiday project on February 25, then returned to the studio five days later for an impromptu session designed primarily to lay down three more songs he had recently written. This time, there is no arranger, there is no orchestra, there is only Clif’s acoustic guitar, Adolphus Alsbrook on bass, a teenage drummer named Ronnie Selico, and a quartet that sounds suspiciously like the latest trio of Travelers (J.W., Lou, Oopie) for vocal support. The first number was a song Lou Adler and Herb Alpert had been working on that had caught Sam’s fancy. The thrust of it was that you didn’t need to possess any great degree of knowledge or education to know what your feelings were, and it circled around the idea that love—and love alone—could make the world a wonderful place.
Not even Lou Adler thought it was much of a song, “but Sam kept coming back to it. He’d say, ‘What about that song, you know?’ And then he’d start on it again. His idea—since it was all about reading and books and what you didn’t have to do in order to [find love]—was to take it more towards school, and that’s how it evolved. And then when he pretty much finished what he wanted from the song, we were over at the Keen studio one day, and Sam said, ‘Let’s try “Wonderful World.”’ I don’t know what it would have been if he didn’t get inv
olved, but what it became was because of him.”
What it became was a perfect pop confection in which, as Sam might have defined it, the simplest elements were allowed to coalesce in such a way as to form a whole much greater (and more memorable) than the sum of its somewhat flimsy parts. “Don’t know much about history,” Sam declared over a light Latin beat while completing the educational transformation of the song. “Don’t know much biology / Don’t know much about a science book / Don’t know much about the French I took:
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me, too
What a wonderful world this would be.
It had become, as Lou said, a kind of conversation with the listener, “it was light, it wasn’t, ‘Listen to this song.’ Sam always told me, ‘You got to be talking to somebody.’ Even if the lyric was heavy, his approach to it wasn’t that intense.” The third song he did that day, “No One Can Take Your Place,” once again with Clif’s jangly acoustic lead, bore out this dictum even more strongly, as Sam translated an unadulterated gospel feel into a swinging celebration of life, love, and freedom, propelled by interjections and hand claps from the gospel chorus.
Ironically, the formal gospel session that he had the next day achieved little of that feeling. Bumps had long contended that gospel possessed the greatest unrealized sales potential of any music in the world; in fact, ever since first hearing Sam at the Shrine, he had come to believe in the visceral power of the music and its inherent appeal to a mass audience, to any audience, if that audience could only be exposed to it. His intention, from the time that he and Sam had come over from Specialty together, was to cut Sam singing gospel, only classier, with strings and a big chorus, hell, they might even use the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. His recordings with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Gospel Harmonettes for Keen’s Andex subsidiary the previous year were only a barebones rehearsal for that session. But Keen’s gospel series, as true as it was to the classic quartet sound, had failed to sell, the Blind Boys and the Harmonettes were on the verge of leaving the label, and Bumps himself was to all intents and purposes out of the picture. Nonetheless, Sam’s eight-hour session, arranged by René with strings, harp, kettledrum, and a near-operatic “jubilee” chorus, could not have better captured the spirit of Bumps and Sam’s plans.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 36
