Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  The Cook family and friends at the Civic Opera House, December 6, 1957. Left to right: Agnes, Mary, and David Cook (front), with Roosevelt (unknown last name) and Sam Milsap (in hat with dark band) behind; Leroy Hoskins (“Duck”) in dark hat, Rev. Cook, Willie Cook in white hat, Sam, L.C.’s girlfriend Barbara Clemons, Annie Mae, Charles, L.C., and Hattie Cook.

  Courtesy of ABKCO

  Before the interview’s Q and A format begins, several key points are established, including the fact that the “teenage idol” is not married (he had initiated divorce proceedings against Dolores on November 15) and that “unlike most of the Negro stars, all his managers [Bumps and Crain] have been and still are Negroes.”

  After a brief musical history, in which he describes street-corner singing as a teenager with Johnny Carter and James “Dimples” Cochran (now with the Flamingos and Spaniels respectively), his stint with the QCs, and his discovery by S.R. Crain of the Soul Stirrers, he credits his decision to change over into the pop field to “the man who was my personal manager at the time [who] encouraged me to sing ballads [an unnamed Bill Cook],” and to Bumps Blackwell, “my personal manager now [who] had confidence in me and bought the masters from Specialty and set up ‘Keen’ Records in Los Angeles to release my discs.”

  As to his family’s feelings about his music:

  My father, Reverend Charles Cooke [sic], agrees to my work. We have talked it over, and I enjoy my work, and besides I haven’t stopped singing religious songs. I sing them when I am on tour. I like them better than I do ballads. I have more feeling for them, and they have greater meaning for me, and greater satisfaction.

  Likes and dislikes?

  I like the Ivy League look in clothes. I am fashion conscious. . . . I’m impressed with New Yorkers. They seem so well polished, well versed and they keep you thinking. . . . I would like to know more about psychology.

  He returned to Los Angeles briefly, where Keen Records held a party at the Brown Derby in Hollywood to celebrate the official certification of the record as a million seller and the release of Sam’s first album. Sam proved himself “a prince of a guy,” the California Eagle reported. Everyone present was dressed to the nines: Bumps and his “gorgeous missus”; J.W. proudly avuncular in a sharp patterned suit; René with his wife, Sugar, who is beaming at Sam from underneath a stylish fur hat; a bespectacled Lil Cumber, her hair done up in marcelled waves and wearing a white fur wrap. And Sam himself is practically aglow, the sharpest one of all in his stylish pinstripe suit, wearing, the Eagle reported, “his sudden success in fine style [with] no padding, no put-on,” as he stands beneath portraits of other recording greats like Dean Martin and Nat “King” Cole, his close-cropped, almost “natural” haircut in sharp contrast to the gleaming, processed look that stares out from the album cover in his hand.

  He seems possessed of an almost serene self-confidence, as well he should be. He has just completed his first real tour as a star, he is on the cover of the current Cash Box magazine with Bumps and John Siamas, and he will be opening in three days at the Uptown in Philadelphia, from which he will go on to New York for an appearance on The Steve Allen Show at a fee of $2,500, his third Sunday-night network appearance in two months. The criticism of the press can scarcely touch him, the criticism of the church seems almost irrelevant when he has friends like Lil Cumber, a columnist now as well as a booking agent, who will defend him against the naysayers. “If church people feel that Sam deserted them,” Lil wrote in a widely quoted column, “they alone are to blame. If they would support their own, then the offers from the other side would not seem so appealing.” Sam’s “charm, modesty, and devoutness” were unexceptionable, she declared, citing her own background in the spiritual field, but “it is this writer’s belief that the final decision to change was due to the churchgoers’ themselves” and specifically their refusal to support gospel music financially.

  Sam opened in Philadelphia on Christmas Day with the Arnett Cobb Orchestra, comedian Redd Foxx, Atlantic Records artist Linda Hopkins, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s one-time singing partner Marie Knight. He gave an interview to the Philadelphia Tribune similar in scope and emphasis to the Amsterdam News feature, in which he went even further to credit Crain. Sam described the former Soul Stirrers manager, wrote Tribune reporter Malcolm Poindexter, as his “‘guiding force’ for the past seven years. Every bit of coaching, stage presence and style are credited to the manager of many talents.” Interestingly, Sam recalled that he was a “rather melancholy youngster before escaping the strict atmosphere of home and school,” but, the article concluded, “his frank personality and clean-cut physical makeup symbolize the ‘dream of tomorrow’s entertainer.’ . . . Carefree and unassuming, he has little hope of becoming wealthy and seeks only the security and comfort of the average man.”

  The paper could not have been aware at the time of writing that Sam had practically been pulled offstage at the Uptown and arrested in the middle of his performance. Connie Bolling, whose son, Keith, was now nearly a year old, had been persuaded by her girlfriends that if she let this opportunity go, she would never see any money from the father of her child. He was rich now, he was successful, and, like all men, he wasn’t going to do anything for her unless he was forced into it. It was against her nature, but her baby didn’t have a father and his first birthday was coming up on January 6.

  The sheriff and his deputies showed up backstage but let Sam finish his act before arresting him and taking him to a cell down at the municipal courthouse. Crain followed close behind with a former state senator, whom he had engaged as Sam’s lawyer, and $500 to bail Sam out. A continuance was granted, Crain managed to keep the news from leaking out, and Sam completed his engagement without further incident.

  But something changed inside of him. He felt nothing but cold rage at this woman who had publicly embarrassed him. What she had done was a clear act of betrayal whatever her motivation, and he was determined to have nothing more to do with her or her son. But, more than that, he was determined not to let anything like this happen to him ever again.

  The Biggest Show of Stars for 1958

  LARRY AUERBACH, the William Morris agent, watched his new client perform for the patrons of Club Elegante, a Brooklyn supper club that didn’t entirely live up to its name. It was next door to a cemetery, and the William Morris reps always joked among themselves, “If you die there, you don’t have too far to go.” On the other hand, it represented a first step toward the kind of broad-based acceptance that Auerbach, Bumps, and Sam had mapped out as their long-term strategy. To Auerbach there was definitely something about the kid. He might be stiff and restrained in his stage movements, he seemed to think he had to play it that way, but “he had such excitement and rhythm,” even in a milieu with which he was almost entirely unfamiliar, he had such natural magnetism and charisma that Auerbach felt he couldn’t miss.

  It was a five-day booking, and Auerbach attended faithfully nearly every night and made suggestions. He felt like if he could just “loosen him up, [get him to] give some of his gospel training in his performance,” then Sam would really come across to a white audience that was looking for flash and excitement. But Sam had his own ideas, and in a way, the success that he had already enjoyed, the national exposure that he had gotten on The Ed Sullivan Show and, two weeks earlier, on January 5, with Sullivan’s Sunday rival, Steve Allen, only confirmed them.

  Sam with friends, probably 1958.

  Michael Ochs Archives.com

  Auerbach was as taken with the kid as anybody else. “I thought he was a sweet, innocent young guy, [not all] that outgoing but personable. He had the best look at that time of any black singer. Adorable. The women were going to love him, obviously.” So when Sam pushed him in that nice, unassuming way to go on to the next level, and Crain, the older man who rarely left Sam’s side and was generally so taciturn, strongly seconded Sam’s demands, against his own better judgment the William Morris agent gave in. He spoke to Sam Bramson, the old-time ag
ent in charge of William Morris’ “variety” department, who in turn persuaded Jules Podell, the autocratic manager of the Copacabana, the midtown Manhattan nitery, to come out to Brooklyn to catch the kid’s act. When Podell, a drinking buddy of Bramson’s who almost never left his 10 East Sixtieth Street post, indicated a willingness to book Sam at the beginning of March, Larry Auerbach couldn’t very well say no. He knew Sam wasn’t ready yet, but he figured there would be time to polish the act, and it was, after all, the number-one prestige booking in the country.

  For Sam it was just further proof of the basic soundness of his plan. Clearly this was the time for the new Negro entertainer. While Sam was playing the Elegante, Harry Belafonte was appearing at Brooklyn’s genuinely elegant seventeen-hundred-seat Town and Country Club and carving out a leading-man movie career. Johnny Mathis, “the young man with the golden voice,” had two albums on the bestselling pop charts, had sung the title song for a major motion picture, Wild Is the Wind, and was headlining at the Crescendo in Hollywood. Even Johnny Nash, a clean-cut seventeen-year-old regular on Arthur Godfrey Time, was currently enjoying a Top 40 hit with a ballad sound very much in the vein of Sam and Mathis. It was a matter, Sam explained to L.C., of not appearing too threatening. That was why he had cut his hair. If you had all that slick stuff in your hair, he told his brother (who continued to cling to his upswept process), the white man was going to think you were slick, he wouldn’t trust you around his daughter. “But when they see me,” he said, “I’m the perfect American boy. That’s all they can say about me.” At a time when fellow performers were naming their process (there was the “Quo Vadis,” Dee Clark’s was called the “Sugar Ray,” and Lloyd Price nicknamed himself “Dark Clark” for the movie star Clark Gable), Sam was wearing his hair in a modified crewcut, close-cropped and “natural,” brushed up in front. And he was establishing a new life for himself, along with the new look.

  He had gotten a little one-bedroom apartment on St. Andrew’s Place off Washington near Normandie for when he was at home in L.A., but he was also enjoying a very active social schedule in New York. He was dating Sallie Blair, “the red-haired vampire,” whose torrid act took equal elements from Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, and Lena Horne; also, Zola Taylor of the Platters, eighteen-year-old Ebony cover model Harlean Harris, Lithofayne Pridgon, and any number of other dark- and somewhat lighter-skinned young ladies. “He was one of the coolest gentlemen I knew, very warm, loving, as smooth as his voice,” said interpretive dancer Lee Angel, who had left Savannah, Georgia, two years earlier, at the age of sixteen, had a brief but torrid relationship with Little Richard, and met Sam in Manhattan at just about this time. “He had his choice of any woman he wanted, he didn’t have to chase them,” she said. And while she herself never had a romantic relationship with him, she, Zola, and Sallie would frequently get together and discuss their boyfriends, who not infrequently turned out to be one and the same. “He’s cute as a button,” Sallie told a Time magazine reporter about one of her beaux, perhaps thinking of Sam. “He’s one of those people you want to walk up to and say—‘Okay?’”

  Sam was one of those people the world seemed prepared to say okay to. He had “a wardrobe full of Ivy League clothes,” Tan magazine reported, a somewhat fanciful income of $4,000 a week, and, getting a little ahead of himself, a new home in Los Angeles with its own swimming pool. And what was success like? Sam was asked by the Tan reporter at the end of January on the set of Patti Page’s CBS-network The Big Record, while pictures were being taken with Latin dance king Xavier Cugat, choreographer June Taylor, Broadway star Carol Haney, and r&b pioneer Louis Jordan. “It’s pretty much as I expected it to be,” he said. “It’s competitive, it’s exciting, it’s rewarding and I love it. But you’ve gotta produce. You can’t fool the public with slipshod performances, and you can’t hoodwink the people who buy and sell talent. . . . Actually, television has been more helpful to me than records. Bookers, promoters and agencies can see first-hand what my capabilities are on TV, then decide where and when they can use me.”

  He was, indeed, the all-American success, paying tribute once again to Bumps and in particular to Crain, “my old mentor, [who] helped on the arrangement [of ‘You Send Me’]. It was he who taught me to use my voice the way I do,” he declared, as Larry Auerbach hovered attentively in the background. Sepia already had a story in preparation, and Ebony was planning one of its own. Sam celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday on January 22, at Harlem’s famed Palm Café, and in the weeks following the celebration, a picture ran in Negro newspapers all across the country that showed party-giver Sylvia Robinson (of the hit duo Mickey and Sylvia) feeding him cake.

  HE FLEW HOME to cut a new single and do one last show for Art Laboe at the Orpheum Theater downtown. His co-headliner was Ernie Freeman, just coming off a number-one r&b instrumental hit with “Raunchy,” with whom he started out on February 17 on a whirlwind seventeen-day package tour put together by superpackager Irvin Feld in association with r&b booking agents Archer Associates. The show included Thurston Harris, the Drifters, the Dubs, and the Silhouettes, all but the Drifters essentially one-hit wonders, though in the case of Harris (“Little Bitty Pretty One”) and the Silhouettes (“Get a Job”), they were Top 10 pop hits. It was not the kind of booking that Larry Auerbach was looking for long term, but it provided two and a half weeks of solid work, and Auerbach was well aware that Sam “needed to support himself, and we weren’t prepared at William Morris [to book] the black one-nighters.”

  The Ernie Freeman Orchestra accompanied all the acts, and Clif White grumbled about having to walk another bunch of new musicians through Sam’s arrangements, but the thirty-five-year-old Freeman, an industry veteran originally from Cleveland, had one of the top working bands in L.A., made up of guys who could actually read, and the tour provided Crain with welcome affirmation that Sam was bringing the gospel crowd along with him. “Sam took Sister Flute,” said Crain, using his term for the typical female gospel fan of a certain age, “and he carried her over—he made her shout—in the pop field. Sister Flute didn’t like it, but she came to his shows. And she say, ‘Mr. Crain, I ain’t got nothing, but I sure want to hear that boy.’ I got her a seat. I said, ‘Let her go on in and let her hear it.’ She come out and say, ‘Mr. Crain, I’m going to pay for that boy. I shouted for him in church, and I shouted for him tonight, and I’m going to pay.’ I said to myself, I said, ‘He got her. He got her.’”

  They were back in New York for The Steve Allen Show once again on March 2, with the Copa opening just four days away. Sam and Bumps and a white PR man named Jess Rand, with whom Sam had recently begun working, caught Tony Bennett’s closing night at the club, and Sam embarrassed both Jess and Bumps by announcing “That fucker never sang one song in tune” in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. Jess, a thirty-two-year-old Broadway habitué with thinning red hair who had moved out to the Coast six years earlier and whose principal clients were Sammy Davis Jr. and actor Jeff Chandler, thought that Sam was just scared, and from Jess’ point of view, he had every reason to be. “I didn’t think Sam belonged there [at that point]. I was horrified.” But if Sam was nervous, he didn’t reveal it, at least not in so many words, not even when rehearsals for the opening proved to be a disaster.

  It turned out that Bumps’ “song arrangements” for the show, essentially lead sheets for the kind of combo you might encounter on a one-night stand in Kansas City, were totally inadequate for the sixteen-piece Copa orchestra. “Bumps had written rhythm parts, not full orchestrations,” said Lou Adler, one of Keen’s three young a&r assistants, who had come east for the opening more out of his growing friendship with Sam than out of any professional obligation. “We were all on the floor copying out parts right up to the last minute, and you knew it still wasn’t right!”

  “Bumps didn’t know what he was doing,” observed arranger René Hall, who had helped out on the Coast as much as he could. René had had experience putting together legitimate shows, and
his arranging skills were far superior to Bumps’, but Bumps seemed to want to do it all by himself. “[He] was trying to create a show for a Broadway audience,” René said, “and he went in there doing the same type of thing you’d do at the Elks Club across the tracks, in the black part of town!”

  Nonetheless, Sam persevered, showing little of the sense of panic that he must surely have felt (“Bumps was a complete wreck,” said Adler, “but I never saw Sam in a frenzy”). He was opening for popular Jewish dialect comedian Myron Cohen, and, despite a few half-hearted attempts to attract the youth crowd (“Well, girls,” the Amsterdam News announced on March 8 to its sepia readers, “Sam has promised to sponsor a dinner-show date . . . with any girl between 15 and 19 and her chaperone who can write the best letter on ‘Why I’d Like to Date Sam Cooke’”), the Copa was definitely not going to draw an audience attuned to r&b or pop radio. That was all right with Sam. The program that he had put together with Bumps was an assortment of the kind of standards that he had featured on his first album. He opened with a Latin-flavored “Begin the Beguine,” went on to include “Canadian Sunset,” “Ol’ Man River” and his own hit version of Nat “King” Cole’s “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” and concluded with “Tammy,” the syrupy ballad that had been a number-one hit for film actress Debbie Reynolds the previous year. He generally encored with a gospel-inflected treatment of Gene Austin’s 1928 standard, “The Lonesome Road,” and a brand-new finger-snapping number by Bill Haley, “Mary, Mary Lou.”