That weekend Joe D’Imperio came down to see Sam at the Hurricane Room in Wildwood, New Jersey, a beach resort that had showcased Fats Domino, LaVern Baker, and Dinah Washington at different clubs the week before. Sam’s genial supper-club version of “Frankie and Johnny” had just entered the Top 20 pop charts, and D’Imperio was knocked out by the show. There was no trouble this time about getting backstage, and when D’Imperio asked Sam if Allen was really authorized to negotiate for him, Sam just flashed that brilliant smile that could disarm both knaves and kings and said, “He’s the guy I want.” Allen heard from D’Imperio at the beginning of the following week, and with that, the real negotiations finally began.
ALL SUMMER, preparations for the massive civil rights March on Washington had been under way. It represented the fruition of a dream first envisioned in 1941 by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a coming together of all the voices of peaceful protest against the forces of racial prejudice and economic oppression that had denied true emancipation to the Negro at that point for three quarters of a century. When the idea of a massive demonstration was first revived in the winter of 1962-1963, by Randolph and longtime peace activist Bayard Rustin, it was originally conceived as a “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” but with the entry of Martin Luther King and the rise in racial tension in Birmingham and throughout the South, the emphasis shifted to civil rights legislation, and for the first time, all six of the major civil rights leaders (Randolph, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, John Lewis of the upstart Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality’s James Farmer, and King) were united under a single national banner. There was a profusion of public events preceding the March, and, as usual, such stalwarts as Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, and Lena Horne had been in the forefront of fund-raising and publicity drives, but by the summer, Nat “King” Cole and Johnny Mathis, too, had pledged the proceeds of Hollywood and Chicago concerts to the Movement, and on August 5, Mathis, who had previously avoided any identification with the cause, participated in a Birmingham benefit for the March, stating, “These are not the days for anonymous and quiet approval. . . . The time has come to take a stand.” The benefit, which took place while Sam was playing the Regal, also included Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Nina Simone, the Shirelles, boxing champion Joe Louis, and author James Baldwin and was transferred at the last minute from Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium to the football stadium of all-black Miles College when civic authorities suddenly discovered that the auditorium urgently needed painting.
There was another benefit, at the Apollo on August 23, that raised $30,000 with a lineup that included Tony Bennett, comedian Red Buttons, actors Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and jazz headliners Thelonious Monk and Ahmad Jamal. That same weekend, Sam and Barbara threw a party for NARA, the organization of black radio announcers, which was holding its annual convention in Los Angeles. It was a catered affair, and “[Sam’s] Los Feliz area manse buzzed with a multitude of show folks and those in related businesses,” the Los Angeles Sentinel reported. “It was like old home week when guests began to loosen up and swing—from the gaily colored umbrella tables in the patio to the exquisitely furnished music room. J.W. Alexander flew in for the bash.” It was, said Carol Ann Crawford, the young woman Alex had been seeing for the last few months, a sophisticated, glittery affair. “I was terrified!” said Crawford, just twenty-one years old and a recent graduate of the Patricia Stevens modeling school in Hollywood after having been turned down by the segregated franchise in her home town of Houston. “I was just practicing being comfortable in a world I had never entered before.” But Sam and Barbara couldn’t have been nicer to her. “They thought I was this cute little girl that Alex should hold on to. And I looked at them as a couple. I didn’t see no evil. I didn’t know nothing. I was just looking at the picture.” There were colored lights, and there was barbecue, and Sam, as always, picked up his guitar at some point in the evening and started singing little story songs about different friends and party guests, just plucking the guitar and making up words as he went along.
The March took place four days later, on August 28. Close to half a million people converged on Washington and rallied at the Lincoln Memorial in what was widely referred to as the largest political demonstration to date in American history. The Brooklyn chapter of CORE walked 230 miles, and three teenage members of the Gadsden, Alabama, Student Movement walked and hitchhiked all the way. Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, and director Billy Wilder were all a prominent part of the Hollywood contingent, with SNCC’s Freedom Singers, Josh White, Odetta, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary (singing Dylan’s new civil rights song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” currently number two on the pop charts) providing entertainment in a free morning concert at the Washington Monument emceed by Sammy Davis Jr. Introduced at the rally itself later in the day by A. Philip Randolph, Mahalia Jackson was the last “entertainer” scheduled to perform before Martin Luther King’s climactic speech, and, at Dr. King’s request, she began with the old spiritual “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.”
“The button-down men in front and the old women in back came to their feet screaming and shouting,” wrote journalist Lerone Bennett of the reaction to Mahalia’s performance. “They had not known that this thing was in them, and that they wanted it touched. From different places, in different ways, with different dreams, they had come and now, hearing this sung, they were one.” With the crowd’s response ringing in her ears, Mahalia delivered perhaps her most enduring and uplifting “hit,” W.H. Brewster’s classic composition “How I Got Over,” and then Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German refugee, briefly took the stage before, at twenty minutes to four, A. Philip Randolph introduced Martin Luther King as “the moral leader of our nation.”
King spoke of freedom and justice. He delivered, as historian Taylor Branch wrote, “a formal speech, as demanded by the occasion and the nature of the audience,” not just the several hundred thousand who had brought all their hopes and dreams to Washington but a national television audience that could watch his speech “live” on any of the three major networks. They had come to the nation’s capital, they had come to this historic site, King declared, to collect on a promise, a promise made one hundred years earlier with the Emancipation Proclamation. They had also come “to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.” This was no time for empty rhetoric. This was no time for delay. Now was the time “to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”
It would be a terrible mistake, he said, for the country to ignore that imperative. There could at this point be no turning back, he insisted, enumerating the everyday brutalities and indiscriminate burdens of discrimination. “We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities . . . as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating ‘For Whites Only.’”
It was a moving speech, it was a speech that touched every base and raised the crowd to a height of emotion that “carried every ear and every heart,” wrote William Robert Miller, a pacifist colleague of Bayard Rustin, “along that rise of intensity and into the emotional heights as well.” But then as he got to the end of his allotted seven minutes and the conclusion of the prepared text, King seemed to be lifted up by the crowd, and, rather than stick to his prosaic written summation, he began to preach.
“Tell them about the dream, Martin,” Mahalia Jackson was heard to call out, recollecting the speech he had given at a massive civil rights rally organized by the Reverend C.L. Franklin in Detroit just two months earlier. “I have a dream,” he declared, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherho
od.” He had a dream, he said, that his children would come to see a world in which men and women were measured by their character, not their color. He went on to detail every aspect of his dream, morally, thematically, spiritually, geographically, with each segment ending “I have a dream today.” It was, wrote King biographer David Levering Lewis, “rhetoric almost without content, but this was, after all, a day of heroic fantasy. And so it continued with increasing effect [until] the antiphonal response of the multitude was almost deafening.”
If America was ever to fulfill its promise and become a truly great nation, King declared, quoting and echoing the song “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” then freedom must ring all across America, from every hill and valley, from every city and town, from every mountainside. When that day came, then all of God’s children, black and white, could come together “and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO CALCULATE the full effect that watching this on television, listening on the radio must have had on Sam. These were people that he knew. This was the world from which he came. Mahalia had called the Highway QCs “her boys” when Sam was just starting out, at the age of seventeen, and the Soul Stirrers had cut a new version of “Free At Last” for SAR no more than six months ago. He and Alex had been talking with student sit-in leaders in North Carolina on the spring tour. And when he first heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” on the new Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album J.W. had just given him, he was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that, he told Alex, he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself. It wasn’t the way Dylan sang, he told Bobby Womack. It was what he had to say. His daughter was always telling him he should be less worried about pleasing everyone else and more concerned with pleasing himself—and maybe she was right. But like any black entertainer with a substantial white constituency, he couldn’t help but worry about bringing his audience along.
It was a dilemma for them all. Julian Bond, the young SNCC Communications Director, was one of the few black activists who had made the connection between the music and the Movement explicit. “I, too, hear America singing,” Bond had written in the June 1960 edition of The Student Voice, the first issue of the SNCC newsletter.
But from where I stand
I can only hear Little Richard
And Fats Domino.
But sometimes,
I hear Ray Charles
Drowning in his own tears
or Bird
Relaxing at Camarillo
or Horace Silver doodling,
Then I don’t mind standing a little longer.
Roy Hamilton had attended the March on his own and was so inspired by it that he wrote to CORE national director James Farmer, “I still feel that there is something more that I can personally contribute. . . . Don’t hesitate to call on me.” But he didn’t hear back for almost five months, and then it was from an assistant community relations director, who suggested that he give her a ring so they could discuss just what he might have in mind. “We didn’t count,” was the matter-of-fact assessment of Lloyd Price, like Sam, an independent businessman and solid Movement supporter. “They wanted high-profile artists like Sammy, Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, artists [who appealed to whites and the black middle class] like Nat ‘King’ Cole—but what could have been more high-profile than rock ’n’ roll singers selling millions of records and playing interracial music, interracial dances?”
“I’m going to write something,” Sam told J.W. But he didn’t know what it was.
ALLEN AND J.W. HAD A LUNCH MEETING with Joe D’Imperio and RCA’s hulking Division Vice President and Operations Manager Norm Racusin at D’Imperio’s invitation. It started off with an exchange of pleasantries, as D’Imperio reiterated how impressed he was with Sam and what great potential he had with the label. Allen readily agreed but then returned to the subject that had preoccupied him from the start: money. After carefully scrutinizing Sam’s financial records, he had come to the conclusion that if RCA owed Sam any artist’s royalties, they were negligible and offset in any case by the fact that Sam was in essence overdrawn on his account. But at the same time, it had not escaped his attention that, as both author and publisher of his own songs, Sam (and Kags Music) had supplied the lion’s share of Sam’s hits. A conservative estimate put that share at eight million sales of individual titles (whether as a single side of a 45 or a double-sided hit), not to mention album sales, including the previous year’s Best of Sam Cooke (with ten original titles), which, after nine months, had only recently gone off the charts. This should have generated at least $200,000 for Kags in mechanical royalties. But, so far as Allen could tell, Sam’s song publishing firm had received very little in the way of compensation. If RCA was somehow thinking that this was an acceptable way to balance their accounts, Allen was sure that they must be aware that they were supported by neither contractual nor statutory law. So unless they were willing to open up their books and pay Sam every penny he was owed, maybe they should all just pack up and go home.
But Sam’s record sales were disappointing, the RCA executives suggested conciliatorily. None of his singles had sold a million copies, his last few singles had not even hit the half-million mark. What they were talking about was potential. “They said to me, ‘Let’s make a new deal.’ I said, ‘Listen, you don’t want him, because he didn’t sell a million? [We’ll just] leave.’” D’Imperio tried to smooth things over but remained resistant to the idea of an audit—it simply wasn’t necessary, he said. Surely they could come to some kind of agreement without it. Allen didn’t back off one bit in his demands, brought up again the necessity for a self-contained artist like Sam to be able to “control” his catalogue, and the meeting ended on an inconclusive note. But Allen could tell, they were nervous.
Allen and Alex were in the lobby afterward having their shoes shined, when the federal marshal served the papers in the RCA offices upstairs. The first that they became aware of it, Norm Racusin, a former football player, came storming out of the elevator, waving the court order at them as if, J.W. thought, he was going to take their heads off. “How could you do this?” he was shouting. What kind of bullshit was it to come in for a so-called legitimate meeting and then follow it up with this kind of grandstanding crap? They could stuff their audit up their ass if this was the way they were going to conduct business. As far as Racusin was concerned, discussions were at an end.
J.W. chuckled to himself as Allen professed total surprise. There must be some kind of mistake, he said, let him just call his lawyer, and then, with Racusin looking on, he coolly upbraided Marty Machat on the phone. “I said, ‘Marty, how could you do this?’ He said, ‘What are you talking about? You told me to do it.’ I said, ‘It’s so embarrassing. I [come] here to have lunch, and you serve RCA with a federal marshal.’ I said, ‘Call it off.’ He said, ‘Well, I can’t.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ And we went on [from there].”
It was all part of his strategy of bringing people down to size. Hardly the most socially confident man himself, Klein was determined to eliminate class, convention, or social status as any advantage in negotiations. He might not be able to compete in the corporate boardroom or the country club, but if these people wanted to deal with him they were going to have to learn to operate on a level playing field. J.W. couldn’t get over Allen’s nerve; he laughed out loud later in recounting the scene to Sam. But there was no question in Allen’s mind that he had gotten the record company’s attention. D’Imperio, a down-to-earth man himself, informed Allen in no uncertain terms that he would brook no further stunts like this one, that if they were going to do business, they would have to learn to work together. But as Allen saw it, “When they got served, they saw I wasn’t fooling around. I hit them and woke them up. And they turned over and gave us the information.”
SAM ENJOYED HIS BRIEF RESPITE at home. He recorded an L&M cigarette
commercial (and shot an accompanying photo spread with the band) that he got through the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. “When a cigarette means a lot,” he crooned to a fully orchestrated background that could have been used on one of his own hits, “More body in the blend / More flavor in the smoke / Get lots more from L&M.” He drove around town in the Maserati he had just purchased from Eddie Fisher for $14,000. And he invited Jess Rand to lunch at the Brown Derby for a very belated reckoning. “Sam said, ‘You did a lot for me. But maybe you took me as far as [you thought] I could go.’ I said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ I could see he was very uncomfortable. He was tap-dancing all over the place. He said, ‘I want to give you something. We’ll straighten it out.’ I was terribly hurt. I kept looking at the picture of him on the wall of the Brown Derby with the gold record for ‘You Send Me,’ saying, My God, what am I listening to here?” But Sam kept after him, almost desperately exerting all of his charm, because, said Jess, “he still wanted me as a friend. And, you know, it was very strange: we stayed friends.”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 65
