Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 27

  Henderson, not surprisingly, was sound asleep when Sam and Bumps arrived. “Somebody’s kicking on the front door, and I said to my wife, ‘Who in the world is that?’ So I put my bathrobe on, put my gun in my pocket, and went down and put the light on and saw two fellows out there, looked like very nice guys. I hollered through the door, said, ‘What do you want?’ Said, ‘Jocko?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Said, ‘My name is Sam Cooke, and this is Bumps Blackwell, my manager. And we have a record we think is going to be a big smash. And we just wanted to let you hear it. And pardon us for coming out here at four o’clock in the morning.’” What could he do? He listened to the record, pronounced it a smash, and promised to have Sam on his new TV show as soon as it went on the air.

  Sam and Bumps had already run into the Soul Stirrers back at the hotel. Crume had no idea that Sam was in town until after the Stirrers finished their program at the Met and found the lobby of the Carlisle across the street jammed. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘What the heck, what are all these people doing here?’ Then I heard Sam’s voice—you could always hear Sam, he talked so loud, you could hear him from practically a block away—he was right in the middle of the crowd. And he looked around and saw me, and he said, ‘Hey, Crume, remember what we used to talk about?’ And I knew exactly what he was saying. Then he said, ‘What room are you in?’ And I told him, ’cause I couldn’t even get near him, and he came to my room and said, ‘I told you, fucker. I told you. I got it, man. I got a hit. I’m on my way.’ Just like that.”

  He asked Crume where the Stirrers were playing next, and when Crume told him they were going to be in D.C. in a few days, he said that he and Bumps would be there. And they were. When he walked into the auditorium, the place went crazy. And when Crume got him up to do a number, he stopped the show. In Bumps’ words, “he emaciated the house.”

  In New York they were running like crazy—DJs, distributors, the Harlem social scene, and, for the first time, agents from national booking agencies who said they wanted to put Sam on the map. A little guy from William Morris had been chasing Bumps around for the last couple of weeks on the telephone, but Bumps kept putting him off, finally agreeing to a 6:30 P.M. appointment that he had no particular intention to keep.

  Larry Auerbach had been tipped to the record by Bernie Lowe, an old friend and owner of the Cameo label in Philadelphia. A twelve-year veteran of the business at twenty-seven, Auerbach had graduated from mail room clerk to teenage agent, then gotten drafted during the Korean War. When he returned, he was put in charge of the record division, a job no one much wanted at an agency that thrived on cabaret bookings and one for which Auerbach was singularly unsuited for the simple reason that, as he proclaimed to his superiors in his flat New Yorker’s bray, “I’m tone deaf. What do you want me to go in the record business for?”

  Nonetheless, he persevered, made some contacts, got Sammy Davis Jr. his deal with Decca, and had a hit with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Still, as he saw it, it was pretty much a dead-end street, unless he discovered some new, unaffiliated talent who could really get the agency to sit up and take notice. For all he knew, this kid Sam Cooke might be it.

  “I was sitting in my office with a guy named Paul Cantor, who worked for me: six-thirty, seven o’clock, seven-thirty, no Bumps. So I say, okay, I gotta find him, and I start on the natural haunts. So I call Al and Dick’s, say, ‘Who’s around?’ you know, to the bar, to whoever answered the phone, and they say, ‘Who you looking for?’ I don’t know. Finally, I say, ‘Goldie Goldmark,’ a guy who worked for Moe Gale, a publisher who was also an agent. Goldie was an active guy. So I say, ‘Goldie, do you know Bumps Blackwell?’ And he said, ‘Small world. I don’t know him, but he’s sitting in my boss’s office.’”

  Right away Auerbach knew he was in trouble. If Bumps was in Moe Gale’s office, that probably meant he was on the verge of signing an agency contract with Moe. “So I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to sit there all night. I want to get him out of there. So, Lord knows where I devised this scheme. I say to Paul Cantor, ‘Get me Moe Gale’s office on the phone.’ I get them on the phone, and now I do this terrible impersonation of Timmie Rodgers, the black comedian: ‘This is Timmie Rodgers. Is Bumps there?’ And sure enough, the girl puts Bumps on, and I say, ‘Get your black ass out of there. This is Larry Auerbach at William Morris, and if you’re interested, you better get over here now.’ And that’s how we met, and ultimately that’s how I signed him.”

  What Auerbach proposed to Bumps was something that, without his having any way of knowing it, was naturally designed to appeal to both manager and client.

  All that Larry Auerbach could offer were the club and cabaret bookings that were the focus of William Morris’ personal-appearance business. Auerbach didn’t know anything about the one-nighter circuit that most of the r&b acts were limited to and that agencies like Universal and Gale specialized in. So the tack he took with Bumps was that his client was too good for the one-nighters—with an across-the-board smash like “You Send Me,” the kind of song that could appeal to all ages, all races, he was sure William Morris could come up with a combination of club and television dates that would enable Sam to “make the conversion to the white clubs, and if he makes the conversion well enough, he won’t have to depend on hit records.”

  Never having set eyes on his prospective client, he was at this point talking through his hat, but once he actually met Sam and found him to be not only polite and intelligent but “very good-looking, with this angelic look to him,” Auerbach came to believe his own pitch, which was only reinforced when he was able to book him on The Ed Sullivan Show on very short notice, and Bumps signed what amounted to a letter of intent on the basis of this one-shot deal.

  That was the way it seemed to go everywhere they went, with a combination of charm, luck, and serendipity guiding their fate. In Atlanta they were able to set up a show in advance with B.B. Beamon, who booked Sam into the Magnolia Ballroom on October 10 for a quick $1,000. “Sam Cook, Formerly With Soul Stirrers,” announced the ad in the Atlanta Daily World on the day of the show beneath a smiling new publicity shot of Sam with a neatly coiffed pompadour. They couldn’t get ahead of the record, no matter how fast they drove. It was catching on in every city even before they arrived—it was like being in a time warp in which the experience in every city was exactly the same. But even as musical barriers continued to fall, it was equally impossible not to dwell on the aftermath of the ugly racial drama that had unfolded in Little Rock over the past few weeks, when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus blocked black students from registering at Central High School, and President Eisenhower reluctantly called out federal troops to uphold the law of the land. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” said Louis Armstrong, America’s unofficial “Ambassador of Goodwill” abroad, in a series of increasingly militant public pronouncements that were reported assiduously by the Negro press. The American Negro, said Armstrong, who had not infrequently been accused by more outspoken members of the community of being an Uncle Tom, was no longer going to be pushed around. “We don’t take that jive no more,” he said, “[and] I’ll tell the same thing to anyone I meet.” But, as Sam or any other attentive reader of the black press couldn’t fail to note, there were more and more calls for white boycotts of Louis’ concerts, and even his own longtime road manager suggested that he had spoken “in haste,” while a white NAACP lawyer declared that he had “stepped out of line.”

  By the time they got back to California toward the end of October, the record had sold over half a million copies, and the little record hops they had been doing with Art Laboe just a month before seemed like something left over from another life. Which was exactly how Laboe felt that he was himself treated when he approached Sam and Bumps about doing another KPOP show. He wasn’t really all that surprised about Bumps, who had acted like a big shot before he had anything to be a big shot about. But he was disappointed in Sam, who was, “I wouldn’t
say conceited, but very short, testy, you know. He was not as easy to get along with, would be the easiest way to put it. It seemed like he had a lot on his mind.”

  They had to turn around again almost immediately anyway to fly back to New York for The Ed Sullivan Show. Two young white singers, Jimmie Rodgers and sixteen-year-old Paul Anka, both with recent number-one pop hits, were also featured on the program, along with all the acrobats, magicians, and comedians who made up Sullivan’s usual Sunday fare. Bumps and Larry Auerbach watched anxiously from the wings as the show ran longer and longer, and Sam, who was scheduled to go on last (“If Sullivan didn’t like an act,” according to Larry Auerbach, “he put you on last, and you had to be lucky to make the show”), tried hard not to show his nervousness. He was wearing a nicely fitting tailored suit with the top two buttons of the jacket buttoned, his hair was cut short and slicked back, a square-folded handkerchief nestled in his breast pocket—he looked, in other words, every inch the picture of the all-American boy that he wanted to project. Reverend C.L. Franklin’s daughter, Aretha, playing a gospel program in Atlanta with her father, watched in the lobby of B.B. Beamon’s Savoy Hotel. “We were all crowded around the small set behind the front desk. All of us except my sister Erma. When she finally came through the lobby door, I thought I would never stop laughing: she had on a prom gown! And [there] we were, all poised and waiting. And finally, when the big moment arrived, you know, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Cooke,’ and he came out, the lobby just erupted with cheers and screams and swoons and what have you—and then they cut him [off]! And we just had a fit. We all but turned the lobby and the hotel out.”

  What had happened was that after calling actor Rod Steiger out to plug his latest movie, Ed urged him to “listen to young Sam Cooke” as the orchestra struck up a mincing introduction to Sam’s song. But then Sam didn’t even have a chance to get through the first verse. With his arms held close to his body and gestures so practiced they seemed stiff from overthinking, he was in the middle of the second line (“I know you-oo-oo —”) when the CBS eye filled the screen. There’s no telling what the reaction was like in the theater, whether Sam and the orchestra finished the song for the live audience, but, once he realized what had taken place, Sam was utterly crestfallen. Nor did it help when Larry Auerbach reassured him that the William Morris Agency would never stand for this, that he would get Sam back on the show in no time—to Sam it was the end of the world. As it turned out, though, it might have been the best thing that could have happened. There was so much hue and cry from the public that Sam was rebooked almost immediately, and by the time they returned to New York four weeks later, Bumps said, “We had killed [all the] covers, we were way over a million, and there was a chance to build up and cash in on the snafu!”

  But for the time being, they were back on the Coast with little to do for the next three weeks other than give Sam the opportunity to bask for the first time in all his newfound glory. Except that now there was a new storm brewing.

  Art Rupe had grown tired of waiting for a response from Siamas—or maybe it had finally begun to register with him that the novice label owner might have other plans afoot. So, on October 21, he fired off letters to Higuera Music Publishing Co., Siamas’ umbrella corporation Rex, the Harry Fox Agency (which served—and continues to serve—as a one-stop licensor and collector of mechanical songwriters’ royalties for any number of publishing companies), and the Library of Congress, instructing the latter to institute a copyright search for “You Send Me” on a rush basis. He also wrote to Bumps, formally reminding him of his obligation, as per the terms of his June 14 release agreement with Specialty and the assignment to him of Sam Cook’s contract, to see to it that Sam “perform and record eight sides for our firm,” as required upon demand. “This is to give you notice that unless we have performance by Sam Cook within thirty days of this letter that the above-mentioned release agreement . . . is rescinded by us, and we will seek an accounting from you for all loss of profits and damages.”

  On October 24 the Library of Congress wrote back to him that “You Send Me,” with words and music by L.C. Cook, had been registered in the name of Higuera Music Publishing Co. on September 4, 1957.

  One week later he heard from John Gray, as attorney for Rex Productions, “to categorically deny [Venice’s] allegations of ownership. . . . We have no intention of honoring your bare-faced claim of ownership, which apparently is substantiated by nothing other than your signature.” He also heard from Gray, in three additional letters, as attorney for Sam Cook, as attorney for Robert A. Blackwell, and on behalf of Higuera. The letter on Sam’s behalf was addressed to Specialty Records and stated that “Mr. Cook rescinds the contract [requiring him to make any additional records for Specialty] on the ground that his consent to the signing thereof was obtained by fraud on behalf of the President of your company, Mr. Arthur N. Rupe, and also because of the duress, menace, and undue influence practiced upon him by Mr. Rupe.” So far as Specialty’s claim on Mr. Blackwell was concerned, Gray declared, “Nowhere in [his] release do I find anything which would support the contentions you set forth. . . . We see no obligation on the part of Mr. Blackwell to assist you in your negotiations with Mr. Cook.”

  Finally, in his letter to Venice Music, he affirmed Higuera’s copyright ownership and further informed the company that “We have discussed this matter with Mr. Sam Cook, who has informed us that he did not write this composition and that it was written by his brother, L.C. Cook.” In addition, it had been stated (in Art’s letter of October 21 to Higuera) that there had been discussion with Mr. Robert A. Blackwell several weeks earlier and that Mr. Blackwell “left you with the impression that he would straighten out this misunderstanding. Mr. Blackwell informs us he at no time informed you that Sam Cook wrote the tune ‘You Send Me’ and that you, at all times, attempted to obtain the rights to this song through Mr. Blackwell’s intervention, by threatening to fail to pay him royalties which had accrued to him by Venice Music, Inc. . . . unless he saw that Venice got that song.” Any further attempts “to claim ownership in the composition,” Gray admonished Art impersonally, “can only be deemed wilful and malicious, and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law by my clients.”

  Art was beside himself. He knew that Sam had written the song, there was no question about it in his mind, and he couldn’t believe that Sam would lie not only to him but to his new company. But the more he learned of Sam, the more his view of his devious, deceitful, and totally unscrupulous behavior was borne out. Just days before, he had received a letter addressed to Sam care of the Specialty Recording Company and, after getting past the opening salutation (“Hi Sweet”), discovered that it was from some poor schoolgirl from New Orleans whom Sam had made pregnant. “Look Sweet,” she concluded, “whenever you get a chance write me back because I still love you very much.” But Sam “did not [even] come for this letter,” Rupe wrote disgustedly on the envelope, one more proof of the way in which he believed Sam “squandered his intelligence and made unwise moral choices.”

  On November 1 Art went into the studio with arranger René Hall and overdubbed the demo that Sam had cut on Bill Cook’s “I’ll Come Running Back to You” at the New Orleans session in December. He got the same mixed singing group that had backgrounded Sam on “You Send Me,” and René came as close as possible to replicating the hit record’s feel and sound not only on the Bill Cook number but, with new vocal overdubs by the same Lee Gotch Singers, on both “Lovable” and “Forever,” “Dale” Cook’s debut Specialty release. Art mastered the songs four days later, put “Forever” on the B-side, and had the new record out in two weeks. He took a hurriedly designed three-fifths-of-a-page ad in the November 25 issue of Billboard with a small circled head shot of Sam at the center and “New!” the only selling text. By the end of the month, Specialty Records’ “I’ll Come Running Back to You” was a hit.

  Sam didn’t really pay much attention to any of it—or at least tried not
to. Art wrote to him about his recording obligations care of Rex Productions on November 7. He was evidently hoping to appeal to Sam on a personal basis, but he could barely keep his rage in check. All this talk of fraud, duress, and menace was, as Sam knew, “a bald-faced lie. . . . When you signed the contract with me, it was done of your own free will; and in fact, you were more anxious to enter into this contract than we were. . . .

  “You have probably not told your attorney,” Art continued, “about the first artist contract which our firm still has with you under date of February 1, 1956.” If Sam proposed to throw aside the validity of his present artist contract, then Specialty would hold him to the earlier one, “and then you couldn’t record for anyone but us!

  “Before you get involved in a lot of unnecessary lawyer’s expense, I suggest that you contact me immediately so that we can set up a schedule for the performance of the eight sides which we have coming from you; and, stop this needless bickering.”

  It was Art, though, who couldn’t stop himself. He broached the matter sorrowfully to J.W., who by now was with the new label himself. “He said to me, ‘Alex, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I respect you enough not to ask you [about the authorship of “You Send Me”].’ So I never answered.” Somehow or other, Art seemed to feel that one of them would see the error of their ways. But if Sam had any second thoughts about it, he never gave any indication. As L.C. saw it, “He just wasn’t going to let Art Rupe get his songs.” Nor did it surprise L.C. that his brother should outwit the white man at his own game. “Sam was smart. He learned. He watched. He wouldn’t let nobody ever tell him nothing, but he’d ask questions. And he never would let you know that it was something that he really needed to know. He just said, ‘L.C., you wrote such and such a song.’ I said okay, and that was it.”