“Then she started saying, ‘René, when are y’all gonna be leaving? ’Cause I’m tired.’ Or something like that. So they was laughing and joking, like they knew what was happening, and I was really petrified. ’Cause I’m saying, This woman is hurt, and she’s coming on to me to get revenge or whatever, but I’m caught up in the shit. At the same time, to be honest with you, I was thinking of all the times I wanted a woman and could never get one on the road, and I got the real one now. ’Cause you could not get no heavier than this. Let me show her what I know.
“So she was telling me, like, ‘You afraid, you’re scared.’ I said, ‘I’m not scared. You know how I feel about Sam.’ So she said, ‘Well —’ And one thing led to another, and she said, ‘Give me a kiss. I mean, a real kiss.’ And she was more challenging. I didn’t like it, because she was more dominant than I ever could have been. I felt like a kid again. She tells me to go in the bedroom. I said, ‘No way. If I die, I want to die on the couch.’ She finally talked me into coming in there, and the only reason I went in was because she said, ‘I’m gonna cut out the light, and I hope you’ll be comfortable in here.’ But, you know, something weird happened, man. The next morning I woke up, and them front doors were wide open, big hardwood doors that were never open because [everybody] always went in the back—I thought he had came and opened the doors just to let me know he was there.
“I don’t remember if it was that day, but it wasn’t too long before she said, ‘Bobby, people are going to be talking about us. Why don’t you marry me?’”
PEOPLE WERE TALKING, and Bobby was causing trouble for at least a few of them in his efforts to take care of her. J.W. came by his place on Budlong before he had any idea that there was something going on between Bobby and Barbara. He told Bobby that the company still had money in the bank and that he wanted to invest it in Bobby and his brothers because, like Sam, he had faith in their talent and would do anything he could to keep them on the label. Instead of being flattered, Bobby went straight to Barbara, just as he had a week or two earlier about the new musical instruments Sam had bought for the band. After taking in the fact that Alexander was throwing money around that by all rights was at least half hers (and was attributable, she felt, almost entirely to Sam’s creative contributions), she asked Bobby why he was telling her this. “Sam would have wanted me to,” Bobby told her. “I just want to protect you from everybody, ’cause everybody is out to get you.” After that, he said, “she totally trusted me.”
Not surprisingly, Bobby’s protectiveness was not taken in quite the same spirit by anyone else. For J.W., there was first disappointment, then disgust. For Sam’s peers, who saw Bobby driving around in Sam’s car, dressed in Sam’s clothes and squiring Sam’s wife, it was almost like the punchline of a dirty joke. Even Bobby’s own brothers sought to distance themselves from him initially. “They said, ‘The disc jockeys ain’t gonna play our record ’cause you on it.’” The rumor was all over town that Bobby had been in bed with Sam’s old lady when Sam got killed. “I was accused of all kinds of shit, and I was totally innocent. Everybody said, ‘That little guy that he always would take [out with him], that he loved, has finally got his dream come true.’ But I can understand them taking the attitude that they did. I [should] have done it differently.”
The public outcry over Sam’s death, meanwhile, continued unabated. Talk of conspiracy abounded, with newspaper headlines suggesting cover-up and conspiracy, speculation reported as fact, and otherwise straightforward accounts heavily interlaced with irony and disbelief. “The story goes that Sam Cooke picked Miss Boyer up in a Sunset Strip bar. The story goes . . . ” was the way one ANP dispatch put it before acknowledging that “seldom in show business annals has there been so much unhypocritical postmortem expression of shock and regret.” But amidst all the hand-wringing, there were stirrings that indicated that even Sam’s adoring public might have to come to grips with an uncomfortable truth. The most commonly quoted reservation was one that first appeared in a syndicated series by A. S. “Doc” Young, “The Mysterious Death of Sam Cooke.” “Sam was a swinging guy,” an unidentified female friend of the family was quoted as saying, “but he couldn’t keep away from those $15 tramps.” Or as Bumps Blackwell put it more acerbically some years later, “I often said Sam would walk past a good girl to get to a whore.”
The precise scenario of his death remained a matter of debate among Sam’s friends and associates, but almost all could imagine how it might have happened, given Sam’s temper and the sense of unbridled rage that could manifest itself when he felt that he had been wronged. “He’d come out charging,” said one old friend. “He would not back down,” said another. There was dark talk of the Mafia; René Hall developed an elaborate theory of a drug deal involving someone closely connected to Sam in which Sam tried to intervene. Those who were less close to him interpreted the death as everything from simple betrayal to outright murder, whether by those within his domestic circle or powerful forces outside his control (“He was just getting too big for his britches for a sun-tanned man,” said one woman friend). Sam’s sisters saw it not only as altogether implausible, totally uncharacteristic of Sam’s way of life, but as irrefutable evidence of the same kind of spitefulness, envy, and racism that permeated society. Even Elvis Presley subscribed to a variant of this point of view. “You can only go so far,” he told his spiritual advisor and hairdresser, Larry Geller. “Sam got out of line, and he was taken care of.” But J.W. Alexander, Sam’s partner and friend, came to see it as little more than a tragic accident, a senseless waste of a life, while Sam’s brother L.C. announced that he was “preparing to step into the giant-sized entertainment shoes of his slain brother” just one week after the funeral, when he went into rehearsals for a memorial album and what would turn out to be a month-long memorial tour.
THE INVESTIGATION that had been instigated by Allen Klein and J.W. Alexander in the wake of Sam’s death was brought to an abrupt halt three days after Christmas. Even as the newspapers were trumpeting that “a crack organization of private investigators paid for by the slain singer’s relatives” was about to crack the case, Allen decided to shut it down, not because he was satisfied with the results but because he was convinced that it was not going to lead anywhere useful. The investigation to date, the Beverly Hills P.I., Mr. Pelletreau, reported, had “clearly shown that the victim Sam Cooke was lured to the place where he died by trick and device and though the homicide was justifiable, the alledged [sic] kidnapping was pure fiction”—as any observer with common sense or knowledge of the street would surely have concluded by now. The report further stated that “Elisa Boyer is well known among the cheap nightclub hangers on as being a professional roller. Her regular modus operendi [sic] [is] to lure the victim into a cheap hotel room and after they are both undressed to tell the victim that it is her custom not to undertake the evening’s entertainment until after her male partner has bathed. When he goes into the bathroom she then steals the clothes and takes off.” It named her pimp, a well-known local musician, and implicated him not in the killing but in the social mechanics of the introduction and in the business arrangements that ensured his participation in the profits. As for the murder itself:
Elisa made two miscalculations, one when she grabbed the clothing, she missed the victim’s coat, this made it possible for him to leave the room. And two, she miscalculated the effect of the liquor on the victim and the violent reaction that occurred when he discovered that she had taken him. There is little question in my mind that were we to continue the inquiry we could prove this investigation beyond a reasonable doubt. . . . I do not know what your final intentions are but I do know that if we do not tie up the facts in the very near future, we are going to throw away our investment. . . . I am holding the file open pending further instructions.
But Allen wasn’t worried about throwing away his investment. He was worried more about what the private investigator was uncovering, or might potentially uncover, about Sam and Bar
bara’s marriage. He didn’t know if Barbara was aware that Sam had spoken to Marty Machat about possibly instituting divorce proceedings, he didn’t really know (and he didn’t want to find out) where the business of the bartender would lead. And when he brought up the matter of the investigation to Barbara, she indicated not just her willingness but her eagerness to drop the whole thing. She said, “Allen, I have two kids. There are two questions I’d like to ask you. Can you get Sam out of the room with that woman? Can you bring him back? I just don’t want to put my children through this.” As Allen saw it, it was, in the end, her call.
However brave a front she might put on for the outside world, there was an increasing sense of panic on Barbara’s part. She didn’t trust Allen, she didn’t trust Alex, she didn’t even know where all the money was—and she was afraid to admit it. Every morning she awoke with nightmares. She was terrified about how she was going to manage. “I just don’t know, Bobby,” she told her twenty-year-old protector. “We ain’t gonna be able to stay here long.” He tried to tell her that Sam had always said that publishing was the backbone of his business, but she wouldn’t listen—it was like she wasn’t going to let Sam dictate to her from beyond the grave. “Well, this is mine,” she lashed out when Bobby offered her advice. “You can’t tell me what to do with it.” And she expressed her determination to sell it all as soon as she could.
She showed Bobby off all over town, heedlessly, it seemed, some would say shamelessly. She brought him into the office and told Alexander that Bobby was going to be occupying Sam’s office from now on. “She said to me, ‘I’m your partner now, and I ain’t gonna be like Sam.’ She said, ‘Sam trusted you, you did everything, [but] I’m going everywhere that you go and make your deals, and Bobby gonna take over Sam’s office.’ I told her, ‘I’m gonna take over Sam’s office, and I’m gonna give Harold Battiste my office.’ That was when she went to [her lawyer] Hecht.” That was also, in effect, the end of their partnership, and J.W. began to quietly make plans to release all of his artists. As he saw it, he could still administer the publishing and back catalogue, and he could go into management for himself. And he planned to record a memorial album for Sam. He wrote a song called “Our Years Together,” which would eventually become the centerpiece of the album. “When the evening shadows fall,” he wrote:
That’s when I remember most of all . . .
Dreams of finding happiness
The times of our searching for success . . .
I miss you more than words can explain
The joy I feel when others call your name
“Sam and I were just so fucking close,” he said. “Doing the album was the only thing that really helped me.”
JUST TWO WEEKS after denying that she was married to Bobby, on February 11 Barbara permitted Sentinel columnist Gertrude Gipson to reveal to the world the time and place of her upcoming wedding. In a story headlined “A Change Is Gonna Come For Barbara,” it was stated that “barring any rumored complications which we won’t even bother reporting,” Barbara and Bobby planned to marry at the Los Angeles county courthouse on February 25, “two days after the final disposition of Barbara’s late husband’s estate.” In an accompanying interview Bobby stated that Sam would have wanted him to do this and that the children were very fond of him and “think I look a lot like Sam.” He was planning on reorganizing his group and getting out on the road right away, he told Gipson. And he did not believe that any of the “recent stories or headlines linking him with Barbara Cooke [would] in any way harm his work, at least he is hoping not. Nor does he feel that this will take away any happiness.” Barbara’s mother, on the other hand, said only, “I don’t know anything about those people’s business. . . . I just don’t have anything at all to say.”
Sam’s new single, “Shake” (with the edited version of “A Change Is Gonna Come” on the B-side), was nearing the top of the charts when Barbara brought Bobby to RCA to meet with Sam’s producer, Al Schmitt. Schmitt knew Bobby from Sam’s sessions over the last year and a half, but he had never had much to do with him personally, and he was totally unprepared for the sight with which he was greeted. There the two of them were, dressed to the nines, Barbara as usual looking hard, remote, and glamorous, while Bobby was dressed head to foot in Sam’s clothing. “The sports jacket, the slacks—it was all Sam’s. I just went blank. I mean, I don’t remember a thing after that. I thought, ‘God almighty, it’s only been a [couple of] months!’”
L.C. had already approached RCA himself with the idea of being signed. With his younger brother, David, he had traveled to New York and lunched with two RCA executives, who told him they might be interested if he could get Allen Klein to endorse the deal. But L.C. didn’t know Allen Klein, and for all he knew, this was just a polite putdown on the record company’s part, so he and David turned around and drove back to Chicago, and he started his memorial tour in the middle of January.
Actually, it was two tours. The first was headlined by Jackie Wilson, with the Upsetters as the backing band and L.C., billed as “Sam’s good-looking singing brother,” giving away free eight-by-ten “Memorial Souvenir” pictures of Sam, whose photograph at the top of the poster was identified only as “That ‘Good Times’ Singing Guy.” The second tour, a mix of gospel and pop including Jerry Butler, the Impressions, Johnnie Taylor, the Soul Stirrers, and the present-day Highway QCs, served as a more explicit tribute to Sam, with Johnnie singing “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day,” the Upsetters’ “Johnny ‘Guitar’ Taylor” doing “Tennessee Waltz,” the Soul Stirrers featuring Sam’s best-known gospel hits, and L.C., of course, building his set around faithful but somehow over-the-top representations of such familiar numbers as “Wonderful World,” “Good Times,” and “Twistin’ the Night Away.” There was something almost spooky about the tour, a Supersonic Attractions package with the headliner undeniably present but unaccountably absent and his brother, like Bobby out in L.A., summoning up memories that arrived, bidden or unbidden, with eerie familiarity. “L.C. scared me,” said Billy Davis, who had played with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters in the early days and now was back with Jackie, his boyhood friend. “He looked just like Sam. It was like seeing a ghost.”
BERTHA LEE FRANKLIN, the woman who had shot Sam, made a claim against the estate for $200,000 on February 16. In the immediate aftermath of Sam’s death she had gotten so many threats that she had been forced to move from the motel and temporarily go into hiding. In her lawsuit she sought $100,000 in punitive damages and $100,000 for the injuries she had suffered “as a result of wilful misconduct, assault and battery, recklessness, carelessness and negligence of the decedent.”
Elisa Boyer had by now gotten two continuances of her trial on a prostitution charge stemming from a January 11 arrest at a Hollywood motel. After all the public debate about whether she was or was not a prostitute (“Although Miss Lisa Boyer has no police record,” J.W. had stated unequivocally to the Sentinel just days prior to her arrest, “we have absolute evidence in hand which indicates that she is definitely a hooker”), she had named a price of $40 over the telephone and was then picked up by an undercover agent posing as a client at the “swank” Hollywood motel that had served as their assignation. She, too, had been forced to leave her old address following Sam’s death, but the $300-a-month rent she was paying at her new apartment, with no evidence of gainful employment, was one of the elements that led to renewed questions about her means of support. The case was thrown out eventually by a municipal judge on the basis that the “telephone date” represented an infringement on protected constitutional rights (“What kind of a country would we have,” the judge asked, “if a man could get into your house . . . under deception?”) and constituted police entrapment. The arrest, however, bore out the point that J.W. and Allen Klein had been making all along: that Sam was the victim of a robbery, not the perpetrator of a crime, that he was killed, as Allen now publicly formulated the private investigator’s findings, “searching not for a girl but for h
is missing driver’s license and credit cards. . . . It just wasn’t Sam’s nature to chase women like that.”
Bobby and Barbara showed up at the Los Angeles county courthouse a day early, on Wednesday, February 24, with their blood tests and license application. Bobby was wearing Sam’s blue suit with black shoes and sunglasses; Barbara was dressed much as she had been at the inquest, in a lime green princess-style coat-and-dress ensemble, pearl necklace, and slouch hat. Linda and Tracey, René and Sugar Hall, and a tuxedoed Walter Hurst were all present as guests and witnesses. Television cameras were ready to record the event, but the application was “flatly refused,” Gertrude Gipson reported in the Los Angeles Sentinel, because Bobby, just eight days short of his twenty-first birthday, did not have his parents’ permission to marry. Barbara made light of the foul-up, but “according to reliable sources permission was denied by Womack’s mother who allegedly stated she ‘wanted no part of it.’” Bobby said, “Let’s go to Cleveland anyway,” and they took off with Barbara’s two girls on a kind of pre-wedding honeymoon, to meet Bobby’s and Barbara’s families in Cleveland and Chicago, before returning to Los Angeles to finally wed on March 5, the day after Bobby’s birthday. His brothers, evidently, were now reconciled to the marriage. Curtis Womack was quoted about the ceremony in the Amsterdam News, and the paper described the “big plans” Sam had had for the Valentinos and his intention “to invest a large sum of money into promotion for them. His widow, Barbara,” the News commented drily, “apparently intends to pick up where Sam left off.” Bobby followed up with an interview in which he declared that he and his brothers were currently negotiating with both RCA and Chess Records and would be recording in future as Bobby and the Valentinos, with Allen Klein serving as their manager.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 81
