Then, on May 2, backed into a corner by the white establishment, virtually abandoned by both the Kennedy administration and other civil rights organizations, and desperately in need of some sort of victory, King ignored the well-meant advice of family and friends, not to mention the entire Birmingham black establishment, and, along with SCLC lieutenant and local leader Fred Shuttlesworth, launched what amounted to a latter-day Children’s Crusade. On the first day by some accounts, 959 children were arrested out of six thousand marchers between the ages of six and sixteen. On the second day, the police dogs and fire hoses were set loose on the marchers, and the world saw images of children being bitten, of a little girl being rolled down the street by the pressure from the fire hoses, of children singing just the single word, “freedom,” to the tune of the old hymn “Amen” as they were brutalized by the civil authorities.
Within days, the Kennedy administration became involved; within a week, the city government had essentially capitulated to the movement’s four basic demands, establishing a ninety-day timetable for citywide public desegregation. The settlement was announced on May 10 amid euphoria in the black community (“Do not underestimate the power of this movement,” King declared to a packed congregation), only to have riots break out in the wake of the bombing of King’s brother’s Birmingham home and the Gaston Motel, where King and all the other Movement leaders had plotted their strategy over the last month. It was only when President Kennedy announced his unequivocal support for the settlement, and the federal government’s refusal to see it “sabotaged by a few extremists on either side,” that the precarious truce was saved. It was, as Martin Luther King remarked just before the bombings, “the nonviolent movement coming of age.” But it raised new questions, and new challenges, within the black community at large, and within the community of black entertainers as well.
Brook Benton, who, like Sam, wrote almost all his own hits, had only recently played Clemson College in South Carolina in support of its new policy of student desegregation. “Before it’s through,” he declared to a Chicago Defender reporter in the immediate aftermath of Birmingham, “no one’s going to be unaffected. I hate to say this, but I’m pretty sure that before it’s over there’s going to be bloodshed.
We’re waking up. We’re tired of being pushed around. What are we—dogs? The man tells you, “Here’s a uniform. Take 13 weeks of basic training . . . and go fight for your country.” So you fight, and you get out and you can’t even vote. . . .
I’m not a non-violent Negro. If a dog or an Alabama or Mississippi cop comes on me, I’m gonna have something to protect myself with. . . . If I’m going to go downtown to try to speak to the officials to explain the rights of my people, and they have dogs there—well, it’s hard to fight off a dog with bare hands. So I figure I’m probably gonna have to get me a gun, or a knife, or a few bombs. . . .
Somebody’s gonna slip up somewhere, and it won’t be Negroes. These Negroes in Alabama have right on their side. Nothing they’re doing is wrong; they’re simply marching in to demand what’s been due them for years. . . . They’re not citizens, no matter what it says in the book. They’re not free, they’re slaves—they’re in something even worse than slavery. . . . When a man knows he may die, you’d be surprised how many people he’s ready to carry out with him.
Sam might very well have expressed the same feelings—and the same emotional ambivalence. As he declared to another reporter not long afterward, “We’re in the middle of a social revolution, and some violence is a part of it. There was violence in the American Revolution and in the French Revolution.” But for the time being, all he could do was follow the news with avidity as they played Raleigh, Richmond, Augusta, Memphis, and Atlanta. He knew most of the players to one extent or another, he was acquainted with Martin and his father and brother, and, like everyone else, he had stayed at the Gaston Motel, probably in the very rooms that Martin had occupied, the Gaston’s only suite. In describing his feelings to one and all, he found himself caught between anger and a sense of proprietary responsibility, joking with Dionne Warwick and Johnny Thunder in some measure to ease the pain of humiliation but telling Bobby about the time when he was with the QCs in Memphis, no older than Bobby now, “and they come and slap me in the park, ’cause I was black and I wasn’t supposed to be there.” His father had taught him: when you’re in the right, don’t never back down. But when Bobby said, “Man, if all black people would just [get guns and] fight back,” he told Bobby, “We got to buy the guns from them.” Part of him felt like he and Alex had figured out a way of operating in the white man’s world, they were gaining respect in the manner that mattered most, as businessmen, climbing the success ladder in the one way that permitted them to escape both detection and self-analysis. “I don’t care what the fuck you doing,” he told Bobby, “you can be oversold to your commitment to what you believe. Bottom line, if that fucker ain’t making no money with you, you gone.” But then sometimes his heart took over, and his commitment to what he believed overwhelmed his long-range plan, just as it had in Memphis when he and Clyde had simply refused to go on, and as it did not infrequently on this tour when he read fresh accounts of racial injustice throughout the country or simply listened to local news reports on black radio stations as he traveled from town to town. He never doubted that with SAR Records he and Alex were making a difference, but whether it was enough of a difference he was not at all sure.
IN THE MEANTIME, Allen Klein was doing his best to put Sam’s business affairs in order. With the accounting records that J.W. had supplied and Sam’s tax returns for the last couple of years, the problem became clear almost immediately: all of Sam’s money was going into SAR Records. His house might be worth $135,000, and he was owed a considerable amount of publishing money by Kags. “But,” Allen concluded, “he never took his songwriter’s royalties, and J.W. wasn’t getting any money, either. They were using the money to run the company.” For much the same reason, he had gone into debt with RCA, too, and Allen suspected the record company was using this as an unstated justification for holding back on its payment of mechanical royalties to Kags (mechanical royalties, as opposed to performance royalties, are paid not to the songwriter but to the song publisher for the right to manufacture records containing copyrighted material from that publisher’s catalogue; the publisher then splits the money with the writer). And while there could be no justification for cross-collaterization between Sam’s income as a recording artist and the money that was owed to a publishing company in which he happened to be a partner, it would not be the first time in Allen’s experience that a record company saw this as a way to quietly recoup its losses. It was hard to see where the rest of his income was going, but life on the road was much the same as any cash business, and Sam was clearly not averse to spending money. In the end, as far as Allen could tell, despite all of his record sales and all of his valuable copyrights, Sam’s entire net worth amounted to his house.
As soon as he had Sam’s signature on the May 1 letter of introduction, he entered into a dialogue with BMI, the performing rights organization that paid performance royalties directly to both songwriter and publisher. He met initially on May 8 with BMI president Bob Sour (who with Theodora Zavin had worked out Sam’s original songwriter arrangement with J.W. two years earlier), negotiating a deal over the next few days whereby Sam would get a $15,000 guarantee against his songwriting royalties for the present year, and an additional $14,000 in 1964, while Kags would receive an advance of $50,000 over the next two years, with various upgrades and bonuses attached.
As far as J.W. was concerned, that was more than enough to prove Allen’s value to them.
But there was still no word from RCA.
JACKIE WILSON WAS SHADOWING THEM up and down the road. He played Florida just behind them, headlined a Georgie Woods-produced benefit for the NAACP in Philadelphia, and hit number one with “Baby Workout” at the beginning of May. James Brown, whose touring schedule of 330 to 340 dates a year
never let up, was crisscrossing the East and Midwest with his own self-contained show, while Ray Charles, probably the most celebrated of all rhythm and blues performers and the one with by far the greatest crossover success, played Carnegie Hall before taking off for Europe on a monthlong tour. Henry Wynn even promoted a few competing dates with the Motown label’s Motortown Revue, starring Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, and Little Stevie Wonder, hopscotching much of the same territory as The Sam Cooke Show.
They ran into the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in North Carolina, and Sam asked if they needed anything, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a big roll of bills. “No, man, we okay,” said lead singer Clarence Fountain, who had been so entranced when Sam read westerns to them when he was still a Stirrer. Sam, Clif grumbled to L.C., would feed every gospel singer on the road if he had the chance. “Every time I look around,” Clif told L.C., “some gospel singer got their hand in Sam’s pocket, every one, I don’t care who it is, they all [get] some money from Sam.” Clif and June saw it as one more example of Sam’s trusting nature. Clarence Fountain took it another way. To Clarence, it went to show how Sam had succumbed to the sin of pride when he crossed over, how he had come to put his faith not in God but in the almighty dollar.
For William Morris agent Jerry Brandt, who joined the tour from time to time for no other reason than his own fascination with Sam, the truth was somewhere in between. “He was charming. Totally [dis]arming. He would make you defenseless—[but] you could not charm him.
You could never get what you wanted from him. You know, it’s that elusive thing you fell in love with [but] could never touch. He’d let you see it, it’s there—but it’s not yours. Endearing and heartbreaking at the same time. He didn’t reveal anything to anybody.
He had the ability to call out your name in a roomful of fifty people and make you feel like you were the only one. It was amazing. He was a woman’s man, but he could totally capture men, sometimes in a sexual way—but the men didn’t know why. He could make the audience do anything he wanted, stand up, sit down, fall down, they would follow. He was a man about town, wherever that was. And if he was fixed on something to do, he was going to do it, no matter what you said. [Any problem with jealous husbands?] I didn’t see it. If there was, I should have been one of them.
The tour ended on June 2 in Kansas City. For the last few days, Sam left the women alone and sent Charles to get fresh oysters in Baltimore so Barbara wouldn’t know what he had been up to. “You got to have the oysters, Bob, to keep your pencil hard,” he told Bobby Womack. But not even Bobby was so credulous as to believe Sam could fool Barbara in that way.
Within ten days, Henry Wynn had yet another revue back out on the road. It was now The Jackie Wilson Show presenting Ben E. King, the Orlons, the Cookies, Ed Townsend-produced act Theola Kilgore, and, as a special favor to Sam, the Sims Twins, with the Upsetters Band once again backing all the performers and Gorgeous George featured as MC. The marquee might change, the headliner and supporting acts might vary from tour to tour, but within the world of Supersonic Attractions, the show always went on.
3 | VINCENT
HE WAS SCHEDULED TO BE AT HOME for almost the entire month of June. He and Linda played with the little racing-car track he had set up on the floor, laughing and betting quarters on the outcome of each race as Tracey and the baby looked on. He told them stories and drew pictures for them. Linda’s favorite place was the library, with books up to the ceiling, “all kinds of books, War and Peace and Hawaii and the beautiful leather-bound classics you find in real estate-home libraries. We had a full black history library before black history was even talked about or known, all the way back to Egyptian history, and we found the one and only black history [bookstore] in L.A., way out Exposition—we probably got every book in the world that [they] had, and my father used to read all that to us.”
Linda would talk to him about his music, too. At ten she knew just what she wanted to do when she grew up, whatever her father might think. It had nothing to do with being a “star”—“I didn’t look on [it] like that, I knew the depths of what he was trying to do, and I knew the purpose in it, and [I wanted] to carry it on. He said, ‘No, no, you not gonna —’ He wanted me to go to college and learn the wider aspects of life that he felt were maybe further progressed than the pitfalls that I [might] find in this business. And I respected that, [but] I didn’t deal with it.”
Whatever his ambitions for her, he valued her musical opinions. “My part was as the bounce-off person. He would test out the songs on me, make sure that the dance groove was right and that I thought the stories were good. He was always writing in his notebook, and he had a small reel-to-reel tape recorder, which he put a lot of stuff on. When I saw him onstage, it was more like something for outside people, but he could see I was really excited about seeing him work at home, that was a different and deeper emotional exchange. I guess he was in the time when he was trying to weigh: Should it be commercial? Should it have the hook that people will dig? Or should it be just what I feel? So a lot of times, he would be bouncing things like that off me. He would tell me, ‘Well, people need to come here,’ he wanted to reach everybody, but as a child, I just knew what I saw him love to do, and I always wanted him to feel free in expressing that, and that’s what we used to talk about all the time. He was always intent on growing to be able to reach people, and at the same time to say something that would be a mark in their life.”
Barbara continued to try to please him. At Sam’s urging she read James Baldwin, and she did her best to represent him in public in a way that would make him proud, but somehow it was never enough. She was a member of Gertrude Gipson’s gang of glamorous gals, the Regalettes (which also included Mrs. Ray Charles and Mrs. Earl Bostic), whose doings Gipson chronicled in her Sentinel column, and she attended social and charity functions both with and without her husband, but always, Gipson noted approvingly, under Sam’s watchful eye. One time, Gipson wrote, Barbara “had a custom outfit made [of] gold brocade trimmed with dark mink . . . it had cost a pretty penny [and] she was real excited waiting for Sam to approve. He came home from the engagement, took a look at the outfit and said, ‘I don’t like it, Barbie. It just isn’t you.’” And went out and bought her another.
She withdrew more and more into her own world. Her behavior became increasingly erratic, her distance as much a product of incalculable need as of any domestic disagreement that could be talked out. She watched Sam and Alex run up and down Hollywood and all over town—there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know her husband was a player—and she couldn’t understand how the man could go through life like that, keeping her and everyone else at a distance. Only Linda could get inside the barriers. She was strictly an outsider. So close but no closer: that was his rule. And it broke her heart.
Jess Rand had his own reasons to mistrust Sam. He had known since the previous fall that something was wrong, and he had more recently heard from his friend, Bob Yorke, at RCA that someone named Allen Klein was nosing around in Sam’s business. But every time he approached Sam about signing their management renewal contract, Sam just said “J., what do we need a piece of paper for?” and acted like everything would go on as before. Jess made some inquiries about Klein and decided the guy wasn’t much of a threat. Just another small-time grubber in the music business, not right for Sam, very likely no more than a passing fancy. Sam, Jess had finally come to believe, was never going to be happy with the way he was treated—by anyone. So if this guy found him some money, more power to him. And if Sam didn’t choose to say anything about it to Jess, just kept the money for himself, that was all right, too. It was all part and parcel of Sam’s furtive nature.
Luigi flew out for a singles session on June 15, the second Saturday that Sam was home. Once again Sam decided to do without the services of René Hall, working with Gerald Wilson, one of L.A.’s best-known, and most respected, big-band leaders and arrangers, who had played on the Billie Holiday tribu
te album for Keen. It was a curiously desultory session. The one original Sam brought in, “Cool Train,” was a conventional blues, similar in some respects to “Little Red Rooster” from the Night Beat album, but with a languid, Gershwin-like tonal arrangement that presented him as a kind of swinging blues sophisticate, a role for which he did not seem altogether suited. The only other number they attempted was a third pass at “My Grandfather’s Clock,” the children’s parlor song that Jess had originally induced him to record, and it came out no better than the first two times. Then he was off into the night with Alex—to check out Patience Valentine at the California Club, or Lowell Fulson at Gert Gipson’s Nite Life, maybe stop by Johnny Otis’ new Ben Hur club and catch Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s act or look in on the 5/4 to see if they might run across Oopie or Johnnie Morisette or Lou Rawls in the course of their pleasant peregrinations around town.
The following night, according to the Sentinel’s “Theatricals” column, Sam and Barbara, J.W. “Jack” Alexander, and Lil Cumber, who had been in charge of Specialty’s Herald Attractions while Sam was with the Stirrers and had long had an agency of her own, all met up at the official opening of the “posh, posh” Small’s Paradise West, where singer-organist Earl Grant was beginning a five-day engagement. Barbara was wearing a brand-new “high-fashion wig” and one of the two mink stoles Sam had just given her, and “their party rivaled that of PR woman Marilyn Green’s, who had a crush on vodka gimlets.” Sam cut his usual elegant figure, perhaps wearing the same pale blue suit and white silk shirt that r&b singer Etta James remembered him going clubbing in, giving you the feeling, as Etta wrote, that “he was very glad and blessed to be Sam Cooke.”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 63
