Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 30

  It was a show almost altogether lacking in either distinction or distinctiveness. But that was because it never really became a Sam Cooke show. “It upset everybody,” said Clif. “It upset me. I had no feel and confidence in the material. I mean, the tunes were great, [but] he was still a gospel singer singing pop tunes.” What surprised Jess Rand, as it had surprised Larry Auerbach at the Elegante, was that he wasn’t more of a gospel singer. “What shocked me was that he had no showmanship, he didn’t know what to say. I was just the press agent, but I [tried] to tell him, ‘You’ve got to communicate more than just music.’” But when Sam tried to do just that, when early in the engagement he interjected even the mildest gospel exhortations, “Jules Podell told me to cut that stuff out or get out. So I cut it out.” Podell, a bull-necked authoritarian figure whose rumored Mafia connections were more than just rumors, left no doubt about his feelings on the subject of Clif, either. “You don’t need no guitar player on the floor with you,” Podell said, with little regard for Clif’s (or Sam’s) sensitivities. “Get that guy back up on the bandstand, where he’s supposed to be.”

  It was, without any question, a thoroughly humiliating experience. “He looked like a fish out of water,” said Lou Rawls, in New York on a promotion tour with the Pilgrim Travelers to plug their new gospel album on the Keen subsidiary label Andex. J.W. Alexander’s view was considerably less restrained. “Sam was on his own. There was no one who knew [what they were doing enough] to help him. He was just the little colored boy on Myron Cohen’s show.”

  Much of the Negro press was surprisingly open about its disappointment. “We were pulling for him all the way,” reported the Houston Informer. “We hated to see him not go over, for he’s a good kid, talented and shy and with ambition to get ahead without tricks and stepping on others. But . . . his performance at the Copa was lacking.” Some of his black critics even seem to have perceived him as getting a deserved comeuppance. Sam Cooke had “laid a golden egg,” crowed syndicated columnist A. S. “Doc” Young, whose mixed feelings were further evidenced by his follow-up declaration that “some smart-aleck Broadwayites had predicted that he would goof.” More predictable perhaps was Variety’s dismissal of the “handsome Negro lad with two hit records [who] may be a teenage idol but he doesn’t seem to be ready for the more savvy Copa clientele. . . . His stint,” sniffed the showbiz bible, “seemed slightly overlong and there was a feeling that he had overstayed his welcome.”

  It was a painful three weeks, but he stuck it out, with Crain consoling him that it wasn’t his fault, he was just playing to the wrong crowd, and Bumps doing his best to cheerlead him through the mistakes. He was able to distract himself with the attentions of Harlean Harris, “the pretty model with an amazing hair style,” according to a syndicated ANP dispatch, who had the prettiest thighs, Sam told his brother L.C. proudly, and then got Harlean to show them to L.C. Harlean’s attention began to wander, though, as Sam’s star temporarily dimmed, and he was brought face-to-face with the transitory nature of success.

  His anger boiled over only once, when a wiseass agent from William Morris came into his dressing room, looked him in the eye, and, as PR man Jess Rand looked on, said, “Boy, did you bomb tonight.” This was not, Rand hastened to make clear, either Larry Auerbach or Sam Bramson, the agent who had gotten Sam the Copa date, but it was a senior William Morris agent nonetheless. “Everybody in the room,” said Rand, “turned and went, ‘Holy shit!’ But Sam just looked at him and, I’ll never forget, he backed him towards the door and said, ‘Did you ever make a quarter of a million dollars singing?’ And the guy said, ‘No . . . ’ Sam said, ‘Well, I have. So until you do, keep your fucking mouth shut, and don’t tell me how to sing.’ And he pushed him out the door.”

  The trouble was, he told his brother Charles, who had driven Sam’s new Cadillac from Chicago for him to take out on the road, he had put his trust in the wrong people. “He told me he got the wrong advice from people who were supposed to be in the know,” Charles said, fully recognizing the ominous implications for those unnamed parties from whom his brother might have had reason to expect more.

  THERE WAS LITTLE TIME to dwell on it, anyway. Toward the end of his stay at the Copa he went into the studio to record the title track for the new Cary Grant-Sophia Loren movie, Houseboat, plus “Mary, Mary Lou,” the jaunty Bill Haley number he had adopted as his closer. Three days later, on March 22, he performed on Dick Clark’s brand-new Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show on the ABC network with Bill Haley as his co-star, and then the following Saturday, with the three-week Copa engagement at last over, he drove down to Washington, D.C., with Charles and his driver/valet Eddie Cunningham, to do The Jimmy Dean Show on CBS for $3,000.

  Charles didn’t think much of Eddie’s driving (“He do a hundred miles per hour going nowhere but to the airport”) or, for that matter, of Eddie himself, who never removed his sunglasses, even at night. Charles took over the driving chores (“I said, ‘Hey, the dude ain’t going to kill me out here’”), and he made sure that Sam let Eddie know in no uncertain terms who was in charge of the car when Charles was around. It was a beautiful car, a white convertible with gold trim and red upholstery, the kind of car Sam had always boasted to his Soul Stirrers pal, Leroy Crume, that he was going to have someday. In fact, he had shown up at Crume’s house in Chicago in December, “he drove up with the top down, and it was cold. And he said, ‘All right, fucker, come on down, let’s go for a ride.’ Really rubbing it in. And we rode all over town with the top down. He was the happiest guy in the world.”

  He showed his new car off to his brothers and sisters and Duck on that trip, and he ran into Barbara for the first time in a long time, too. He was standing outside the poolroom at Thirty-sixth and Cottage Grove that was operated by a guy named Diddy who had grown up with them all in the Lenox Building across the street. Diddy, like Charles, was involved in a number of dubious enterprises but on a much grander scale (“He wasn’t no bug or nothing,” said Charles), and Sam was just standing out there on the street talking to some of the fellows from the neighborhood, when Barbara suddenly came out the door. She was looking good, wearing her hair in a blond ponytail, and they started talking about one thing or another, he told her he was dividing his time between New York and California, acting the big shot, and then he asked her where she was living. So she told him she was living right here on the third floor, “and he said, ‘You’re living with Diddy that owns the pool room?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, where is my daughter?’ I said, ‘Oh, you mean you’re claiming your daughter [now]?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Barb, you know what I mean.’”

  They talked a little longer. She told him she had been living with Diddy for a while, he was crazy about her little girl, and, yeah, as he could see, she was getting by pretty good, she had the food concession at the poolroom so she had her own source of income, even though, in one respect, it was all Diddy’s. She asked him about his wife, and he told her what she already knew from Mildred Richard, that they were separated and she had moved back to Fresno. But, he said, he didn’t feel like he really wanted to divorce her, she was so low-spirited all the time. He asked if he could see Linda now, but she told him Linda was playing with her cousins over at Barbara’s aunt Geraldine’s. Maybe next time, he said, and Barbara gladly agreed.

  The next time she saw him, she had persuaded Diddy to move the three of them into a one-bedroom apartment on Sixty-third, with a partition for Linda. She wasn’t sure what exactly she wanted from Diddy, but she was consolidating her situation with him as best she could. She knew he wasn’t going to marry her, since he was already married. But he took good care of her, which was what she was looking for from a man, because she didn’t have the patience to learn a trade like her sister, Ella, who was a nurse, or her twin, Beverly, who worked as a bookkeeper. She liked to think of herself as a domestic, Diddy’s domestic—she took care of his house, and he in turn took care of her. He liked to show her off. They drove all over in his big black
Chrysler, and he bought her a beautiful mink coat. There was no question that Diddy was going places, there was always a ready supply of weed, and they made the scene with all the players—they were the talk of the town.

  It was ironic: she might never have seen Sam again if Diddy hadn’t liked to show her off so much. It was clear to her from their one brief meeting that Sam didn’t like the idea of Diddy and her one bit—more than that, she knew how it had to hurt Sam to see his daughter being brought up in that environment. And there was no question Diddy was certainly jealous of her having been with Sam. He was always talking about who the fuck did Sam think he was, coming back into the neighborhood and acting like a big shot, all the women after him just because he was a motherfucking star. But then the fool couldn’t resist putting her on display the next time they ran into Sam, boasting loudly that she was his woman now and Sam had better stay away. Which, of course, you didn’t say to Sam—ever. Sam just laughed the way he always did, never willing to reveal what he was really thinking. He said he knew it was Diddy’s shot now, he had had his chance, all innocence, giving off nothing but smooth talk and smiles. And Diddy believed him, the fool even asked Sam out for a drink, even though anyone could plainly see the man was still interested in her and, if the truth be told, she just might still have her eye on him. Diddy was blind to it, though, and Sam acted like they were all old friends, which in a way they were, and then she didn’t see Sam for a while. And when he came back to town at the beginning of May, he was headlining a national tour.

  THE SPRING EDITION of the Biggest Show of Stars for 1958 featured Sam Cooke as headliner, with teenage Canadian sensation Paul Anka, rhythm and blues veterans LaVern Baker and Clyde McPhatter, and clean-cut rock ’n’ rollers Frankie Avalon and the Everly Brothers as co-stars, plus the Silhouettes, the Monotones, the Royal Teens, George Hamilton IV, and, at the bottom of a sixteen-act bill, blues singer Jimmy Reed and explosive new solo act Jackie Wilson. Presented by Irvin Feld, the onetime Washington, D.C., druggist and record store and label owner who with his brother Izzy had been promoting gospel and r&b shows out of the District under the rubric of Super Enterprises or Super Attractions since the late forties, the Biggest Show of Stars went back as a fully integrated transcontinental rock ’n’ roll revue to the spring of 1956 and could trace its ancestry at least to The Giant Rhythm and Blues Show of 1952 for which Irvin Feld had handled regional promotion. Feld had had his eye on Sam ever since “You Send Me” first broke and had even announced an all-star gospel tour including Sam at Christmastime, then promoted the February tour with Ernie Freeman and signed Sam to the Biggest Show in its immediate aftermath. The Felds had had the rock ’n’ roll revue field largely to themselves for the first year or so, but more recently had picked up competition and run into serious racial situations in the South. “As though to highlight current segregation upheavals,” Billboard reported on October 21, 1957, with the Feld Fall Edition in the second week of an eighty-day tour, “the package will operate for five consecutive dates in Chattanooga, Columbus, Georgia, Birmingham, New Orleans and Memphis without [its white acts]. In the cities mentioned, Negro and white performers cannot appear on the same stage in the same show.”

  The problem had been solved after a fashion in the spring of 1958 by rerouting the tour, but success had bred imitation as Universal Attractions, the booking agency with the largest stable of black acts, mounted its own Rhythm and Blues Cavalcade of ’58, and Alan Freed, the biggest DJ in the country, with the ability to make or break stars nationally from his position at New York station WINS, put together a Big Beat package to go head-to-head with Feld’s tour. The result of this direct “competition between the Feld and Freed presentations for prime locations as well as attractions . . . [in a severe] economic slowdown” was predictable enough, as Billboard reported it. Talent costs were up (Super Attractions’ costs were likely to exceed $35,000 a week, Feld announced), and box-office grosses (which could go as high as $10,000 to $15,000 a night, and sometimes double that, if two shows were presented on the same day) were almost certain to be down. And with bland, Brilliantined rock ’n’ roll television personality Dick Clark (who was fast overtaking Freed in popularity and influence through his five-afternoons-a-week television dance party, American Bandstand) announcing his own tour for later in the year, the future of this brave new world of commercial integration seemed very much in doubt.

  The Biggest Show of Stars opened in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 5 (“for the first time in ‘package show’ history,” the city’s black weekly proudly announced, “a really big-time unit has elected Norfolk as its kick-off city”), after a couple of days of rehearsal in New York. The troupe was traveling on “buses, Cadillacs, planes, etc.,” according to the Norfolk Journal and Guide, which quoted a spokesman for the production company as saying, “If the show is a hit in Norfolk, it stands better-than-average chances of being a smasheroo elsewhere.”

  The news of Sam’s settlement with Connie Bolling, the source of the “fornication and bastardy” charge that had landed Sam briefly in jail in Philadelphia, was just being reported in black newspapers all around the country. It was the first time that his arrest the previous December had been publicly revealed or, in fact, that there had been any news of the lawsuit at all. The settlement was for “well over $5000,” the Philadelphia Tribune reported in a headline story on April 1. His lawyer would concede only that Sam had agreed to the payment to “avoid a long and expensive court battle which might damage his career,” but there was no question that the child was his—Sam had had Crain check it out, and at this point he just wanted to put the whole sorry mess behind him.

  Feld’s regular backup band, Paul Williams and his newly crowned Show of Stars Orchestra (Williams was the originator of the huge 1949 r&b hit “The Hucklebuck,” and a New York studio stalwart), provided solid instrumental backing, but Clif grumbled just as much about having to teach them Sam’s arrangements as he would have about working with any other group of musicians who did not play exclusively for his employer. “I carried a great big old suitcase full of arrangements, two of them, in fact. There was enough acts on the show to go for almost three hours, and when it was time for Sam to go on [at the end, after Clyde McPhatter and Paul Anka, the two acts that Irvin Feld personally managed], you’d just go out onstage, work your way through the amps, and plug in.” It was something of a comedown for someone who had performed with the Mills Brothers on stages around the world, but he believed in Sam, Sam treated him and everyone else around him with the utmost courtesy and financial consideration, and Sam was the star of the show.

  In Philadelphia they drew less than one thousand, with Philadelphia’s most popular black DJ, Georgie Woods, MCing the show. Without any question the economy was a factor, maybe the bad publicity about the paternity suit contributed, but clearly the single element that cut most directly into box-office receipts was the fact that the Alan Freed package—with Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Frankie Lymon, and Ed Townsend, among others—had played Philadelphia just eleven nights earlier, and Ray Charles was coming through with his own self-contained show in nearby Chester two days later.

  They did good business and bad business. In New Haven, Frankie Avalon was hailed by Billboard reporter June Bundy as the star of the show, and Feld’s directive to the performers to “play down suggestive gestures and material” amidst the “powder keg” atmosphere of the crowd was approvingly noted by Bundy. Sam, Clyde McPhatter, and LaVern Baker were hailed as the “most showmanly,” and indeed, in city after city the nonstop revue came to be seen as something of a personal contest between Clyde and Sam, two pure stand-up singers who captivated the house each night not with steps, acrobatics, or gyrations but strictly by the intricate arrangement of their art.

  Clyde certainly possessed the voice, the background, and to some extent even the temperament closest to Sam’s. Born in 1931 in Durham, North Carolina, to a minister father whose ten children all called him “Bishop” and a mother who
lived for her children, he had moved to New York with his family at an early age, forming a spiritual group with David and Wilbur Baldwin, whose brother Jimmy was a writer. It was while he was with this group, the Mt. Lebanon Singers, that he first came to the attention of Billy Ward, a musical martinet, who was in the process of putting together a new r&b group, the Dominoes, that would merge the styles of the Ink Spots, the Ravens, the Orioles, and the gospel quartets. Clyde first burst upon the national scene in 1951, in the same year and at the same age—twenty—as Sam, but with a succession of Top 10 r&b hits rather than spiritual numbers. His tremulous natural falsetto was able to tease a phrase in that familiar melismatic manner to the point that music historian Bill Millar would count out the number of notes to which he could draw out a single syllable (twenty-two) in an attempt to quantify McPhatter’s astonishing capacity to extend both meaning and emotional depth. Like Sam, he was quick to acknowledge his debt to Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, but, also like Sam, he brought something of his own, in his case an undisguised vulnerability, the kind of soulful excess that could transform “White Christmas” into a prayerful plea.

  He left the Dominoes in 1953 and quickly formed a new group, the Drifters, at the instigation of Ahmet Ertegun, for whose Atlantic label he would enjoy even greater success (and create even more widely known r&b standards) with such songs as “Money Honey,” “Such a Night,” and “Honey Love” while serving as the same kind of inspiration to the young white singer Elvis Presley that Bill Kenny had been to him. After a two-year stint in the army, he went out on his own, and in the past three years had enjoyed seven Top 10 r&b hits, all but one of which (a duet with Ruth Brown) charted pop. Every night he performed an array of these hits, including, typically, “Have Mercy Baby,” “Come What May,” and the soaring, gospel-based “Without Love,” which “left the audience,” as the Houston Informer reported, “gasping for more.”