Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 34

  Jess had been getting Sam’s name in the papers on a regular basis for the last six months, mostly on the pretext of movie contracts and movie roles that no one had yet considered him for, but he had little doubt that they would. All kinds of new opportunities were opening up. You could read about them in the Negro press every week. It was impossible to miss the great strides that were being made in the entertainment world by Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and Nat “King” Cole. And while there were bound to be disappointments along the way, like the cancellation of Nat’s highly regarded network television show the previous December after its failure to attract a single national sponsor, the critical reception of Sidney’s bold new film, The Defiant Ones, seemed almost like the dawning of a new era of brotherhood and understanding. In every interview, Sam spoke of his acting ambitions, referring to the training he had received the previous summer, and he was confident that Jess, with all of his Hollywood connections and his longtime “in” with the William Morris Agency, which had been affiliated with Sammy Davis Jr. going back to the mid-forties, would help guide him to the achievement of his dream.

  So he could weather a little thing like a robbery. It only went to show that now at last he actually had something to lose.

  SONG STAR SAM COOKE TO MAKE TOUR OF DEEP SOUTH

  NEW YORK.—Sam Cooke, America’s newest and most widely acclaimed male vocalist, who catapulted [to] fame with his hit recording of “You Send Me,” is poised for another record-breaking tour of the South.

  The dynamic song star, who quit the famous Soul Stirrers gospel unit to climb to musical heights such as achieved by Roy Hamilton, Billy Eckstine, and Johnny Hartman . . . will return to many familiar scenes and thousands of admirers [who] have staunchly supported his appearances as a popular singer. . . .

  Cooke’s tour of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina is being arranged by B.B. Beamon, the Atlanta, Ga. promoter.

  — Atlanta Daily World, Wednesday, September 17, 1958

  THE CALIFORNIA TOUR with the Valiants turned out to be little more than a rehearsal for a considerably more ambitious undertaking: a kind of self-contained Sam Cooke Show, with Sam’s old champion, B.B. Beamon, sponsoring him. To the Valiants’ intense disappointment, neither they, nor any of the other Keen acts that had accompanied Sam on the West Coast tour, were included on this one. They had certainly expected to be, and they were even more miffed to discover that their place had been taken by the Pilgrim Travelers.

  “We were hurt,” said Rip Spencer. “We thought we had a good relationship with Sam and Bumps, and we thought for sure Sam was going to take us. The Travelers had no movements. They were good singers, but it was an old man’s sound. But Sam knew them longer than us, and I guess his friendship with them was more dedicated than [it] was to us. And after that we kind of lost contact.”

  Musical director Bob Tate’s opinion of the Travelers as a pop act wasn’t any higher. “They had never sung with a band before, and they had no arrangements. They would just get up there and sing, and we’d have to find what key they were in and write the music behind that. This one guy, George McCurn [“Oopie,” the bass singer], we’d play the introduction, and he’d back up to the bandstand, and I’d punch him in the back to let him know that it was time to sing.”

  They went out in two Cadillacs, a station wagon, and a truck for the equipment. They opened at the Magnolia in Atlanta after playing a warm-up date in Macon. Jackie Wilson was booked with them at the Magnolia for one night only, and, after having failed to show for B.B. Beamon’s birthday celebration in July, he promised his fans in the pages of the Daily World that this time, “barring an act of Divine providence,” he would be there. “It has never been my policy to not fulfill all engagements I’ve booked,” he told the paper but could well understand why the promoter was concerned about “the adverse publicity I’ve received, and I plan to give him and the public an explanation.”

  If he did, it didn’t impress Bob Tate—in fact, nothing about Jackie impressed Bob very much. Back at the hotel, Jackie asked if anyone had any reefer, and when some was produced, Jackie said that was fine, but he had to have his rolled for him. Bob said, “What do you mean, you have to have it rolled? We’re giving you a gift here, you roll it.” Then Jackie said, “You don’t realize who I am. I’m Jackie Wilson.” And Bob said, “Yeah? You don’t realize who I am. I’m Bob Tate.”

  After that, things went from bad to worse. As Tate recalled, Jackie failed to show for rehearsal, and when he did finally appear that night and his road manager produced his music just before he was due to go on, “We were like, ‘Well, so? What are we supposed to do with this?’” The result was a predictable shambles. “It was not kind of raggedy, but all the way ragged—I didn’t [even] bother to tune him up. He took his tie off, and nobody made any advance to get it. The women [just] weren’t reacting. And when he went offstage, he was scratching his head.”

  Sam’s show, on the other hand, was an unmitigated triumph, with women climbing over each other to get to him, and Sam’s driver, Eddie Cunningham, implacably kicking them off the stage as they grabbed at his watch, his rings, his tie. “But Sam,” Tate observed, “didn’t care. I mean, he wouldn’t wear anything cheap. Man, chicks would pull their drawers off and throw them on the stage.” It was the usual scene of pandemonium. Which only went to show, as Bob Tate pointed out, “Never mess with anybody that has to play your music.”

  They went on to Chattanooga, Augusta, Charleston, and Asheville, with the excitement growing nightly and Sam gaining confidence with each performance. Even the Travelers acquired more polish and assurance as they showed off their close harmonies and increasingly practiced precision steps. Every night, there was a point in the show that Bob Tate came to expect when “all of a sudden Sam would turn his head all the way back, and it was like something just straight out of his gospel, he’d just tear up the whole house. I mean, you didn’t know what he was doing, it was some kind of thing he did with his voice, it wasn’t a yell, [but] the women would go nuts. And you’d be playing your horn, and you couldn’t concentrate for listening to him.”

  To Lou Rawls, more familiar with the gospel experience, Sam was just doing what he had always done: opening himself up, revealing himself in a way that, for all of his polished craft, could never be calculated or planned. That was what set Sam apart, it was his mark: what made Sam Sam. That, of course, and the way he got to the women, seemingly without even trying. Sam could pick out whoever he wanted, and however many, and the rest would be fallout for everyone else. That was nothing new, either. It was the way it had been since they were kids. What was new, Lou observed, was the recklessness with which Sam now went about it.

  This was still the South, after all. In Little Rock they were told they would have to do separate performances for blacks and whites, and Sam refused. In the end the authorities agreed to run a rope down the middle rather than cancel the show. Sam’s stubbornness didn’t really surprise Lou, though with all the tension they had down there, he knew not everyone would have acted that way. Nor did it surprise him that as often as not, a goodly number of young ladies who just happened to be white showed the same kind of feelings for Sam as their darker sisters. The police even followed Sam into the restroom in Little Rock when some of those young ladies were particularly persistent. But Lou never expected Sam to openly reciprocate, as he did in Florida when he agreed to meet two ardent young white girls out in the woods. “I said, ‘Hey, man, don’t you know, they kill you for that down here.’ He said, ‘Oh, man, ain’t nothing gonna happen.’” He seemed to think he had it covered by driving out in the band truck, when everyone in town knew he drove a white Cadillac with gold trim. When they arrived at the agreed-upon assignation, he and Lou and the two girls kept hearing these strange noises coming out of the woods, and Lou nudged Sam repeatedly to express his strong reservations. But for all of his characteristically careful manner and cool-as-a-cucumber control, sometimes, Lou reali
zed, Sam just didn’t give a fuck. “Every now and then someone or something would come along and perk his interest, and he’d go for it, no fear.”

  Sam took a break from the tour after the Birmingham date to fly to New York on October 6 to do NBC’s Arthur Murray Party, his first national television exposure since the Dick Clark Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show in March. The Arthur Murray Party, which featured sumptuous displays of every kind of ballroom dancing and was hosted by the sixty-three-year-old Murray’s wife, Kathryn, served as an advertisement for its namesake’s national chain of dancing schools. This particular show featured a celebrity dance contest including Farley Granger, Shelley Winters, Fernando Lamas, Janice Rule, and, as it turned out, Dick Clark, who had grown up next door to the Murrays in Mount Vernon, New York.

  It was Kathryn Murray, dressed in an elegant black-and-white ball gown, hands cupped together in front of her, lips pursed in a graciously restrained smile, who performed the introductions. “It’s Sam Cooke,” she announced. And then all of a sudden, there he is, dashing in from the wings, threading his way through a fairy-tale world of Junior Leaguers in their formal gowns, accompanied by their indolent-looking, tuxedo-clad mates. Sam is wearing his own elegantly fitted tux, along with a smile that conveys his sense of enthusiastic meritocracy, as if to say, ‘Yes, I, too, could belong, but I choose not to,’ and certainly the way that he delivers his number, “Mary, Mary Lou,” the one cut from his upcoming album that could serve as a “bop” stand-in, merely serves to reinforce the point. He is indisputably more relaxed than in any of his previous television appearances, snapping his fingers with practiced ease while surrounded by a vacant-looking cast of extras just itching for a chance to dance. Which they do as soon as he gets to the chorus, jitterbugging with elbows flying and petticoats swirling in a scene of awkward abandon so at odds with the playful assurance of the singer as to seem to have an almost satiric intent. If there is irony here, though, it is certainly not going to be pointed out by Sam, who, ever the gentleman, stands apart from the crowd and claps his hands in time, throwing in those impossibly graceful vocal interpolations as if merely to egg the kids on. It is a study in contrasts, as black and white as Kathryn Murray’s gown, but done with such charm, such natural grace as to never call attention to Sam’s indisputable distance from the scene. It is Sam as you imagine him to be, adaptive but not subdued, the kind of Sam that Lou Rawls had come to know, proclaiming his presence by his very act of self-effacement, brashly winsome or winsomely brash, for all the crispness of his enunciation, for all of his deliberate shrugs and gestures and the downy way in which he bites his lower lip, somehow uncompromisingly free.

  One can only imagine that he was much the same, only more so (no footage appears to have survived), when he appeared in front of a mixed crowd of six thousand local teenagers on Dick Clark’s Saturday-night show broadcast from Atlanta’s forty-fourth annual Southeastern Fair five nights later. There was a strong element of racial tension, not so much at the fairgrounds as in the Southern air. To Clark’s consternation certain threats had been received, but when he broached the subject to Sam prior to the show, his star had no hesitation about going on. “He said, ‘I’m gonna be out there for two and one-half or three minutes. You’re gonna be there for the [whole show].’ So we did it.” It was an everyday occurrence for Sam, but it was, as Clark came to see it “one of the few ballsy things I ever did.”

  BARBARA WAS BUSY while Sam was away. Things hadn’t worked out with her uncle—she had never gotten along with him all that well anyway—so she and Linda moved into Sam’s apartment, even though he had never really suggested that as a possibility. She rationalized that living there would enable her to redecorate better. It wasn’t that much of a job, with all the furniture supplied and screwed down to the floor, but she could brighten it up, put in some carpeting and new wallpaper, and she made friends with the building super and his wife, a nice colored couple who seemed to really care for Linda. She was able to familiarize herself with Sam’s life, too, with all the telephone calls from his girlfriends and from going through his mail. She hadn’t known about the other children—the one in Cleveland, the one in Philadelphia, it seemed like he might have gotten another girl pregnant in Oakland—and she filed away the knowledge with the idea that she would need to learn all she could about Sam if she was ever going to come up with a plan to bring the three of them together once and for all, like a real family.

  She started going to work with Bumps at Keen, leaving Linda with the building superintendent’s wife. That turned out to provide valuable information, too. It didn’t take her long to figure out that Bumps was more interested in his wife’s career than in Sam’s, and she soon concluded from watching the way he operated at Keen that he wasn’t much of a manager for either one. She didn’t say anything, though. She was going to save it, like all the other knowledge she had acquired, until it could do her some good. But she noted with more than a little bit of pride that when Sam’s new single came out, it would have her name on it.

  The new single, “Love You Most of All,” a cheerfully catchy up-tempo number, was something of a departure for Sam, without even a hint of the wistful undertone of most of his other compositions. What was most unusual about it, though, was that Barbara Campbell was listed as the songwriter. Which was understandable, given L.C.’s embroilment in the Specialty lawsuit. But it said a lot, Barbara had every reason to believe, about the degree to which Sam was willing to trust her with his business and his money. She was no more than a pass-through, she knew, but still, it made her feel like she was at least getting somewhere with him.

  THE TOUR STARTED UP AGAIN on October 13 at the Labor Union Hall in New Orleans, but before long, they had run out of solid dates, and Sam had Crain advance the show and start booking some dates on his own. He and J.W. had had dealings with just about every promoter out there, and, so long as B.B. Beamon could continue to supply them with their linchpin bookings, Sam was beginning to think they could stay out till Christmas.

  “Usually we knew the next place we were going to play,” said Bob Tate, who was accustomed to a more orderly way of doing things, “but [sometimes] we didn’t.” There was no advance advertising. “They just put the signs up, put the place, the name [of] the place, you don’t know whether this is a ballroom or what, just find out when you get there.” Sometimes they played cotton or tobacco warehouses, sometimes well-appointed clubs. A lot of the time, Bob Tate said, they would stay in different people’s homes, “me and the guitar player in one house, the saxophone and the trumpet player in another. ’Cause Sam knew all the gospel people, he knew all the women, and some girls went for drummers, some girls went for saxophone players, but you [knew] there was going to be a girl looking out for you.”

  It was almost as if they had fallen into a kind of no-man’s-land which Sam intended to navigate with little more than a crude compass and his own mother wit. He seemed stubbornly determined to prove that he was master of his own destiny in every respect, that he had no real need for Bumps or William Morris or Art Rupe or even B.B. Beamon if it came right down to it, and, as Bumps and René Hall frequently observed of his music, it seemed sometimes as if he was making it up as he went along.

  There is a curious document dating from this period, an amateurishly printed souvenir book that looks like the sort of program that could very well have been sold on this tour. And, indeed, that may be exactly what it is. It is called “Take a Look at the Sensational Sam Cooke,” with the first six hand-lettered words scrolled across the bars of two clefs attached to a flying disc, the S of “Sensational” a hand-drawn G-clef, and the o’s in “Look” transformed into half notes with simpering eyes. There are little drawings throughout the book that look like something Sam might have created for his daughter Linda, and the overall effect is that of a high school yearbook with a “Sam Cooke Story” as sweetly ingenuous (“Sam greatly admired the Soul Stirrers for their professional technique and poise”) and as hopeful about the future (“T
his is only the beginning of the ‘Sam Cooke Story.’ How far it will go and where it will end, WHO KNOWS?”) as any adolescent dream. Next to the biographical text is a drawing of a relaxed collegiate-looking singer, his foot up on a pair of joined eighth notes, and there are photographs and song lyrics scattered throughout. “You Send Me” is illustrated by a set of crudely drawn playing cards with three different-shaped hearts underneath, and “Lonely Island” is set off by a picture of a very small island with an undeniably lonely-looking palm tree occupying its center.

  They played a show in Memphis for Brother Theo Wade, the Spirit of Memphis Quartet manager and WDIA gospel jock who had helped bring the QCs to town nine years earlier. Sam was messed up at the beginning of the evening, according to Bob Tate, because he started playing for all these girls in his hotel room on an out-of-tune guitar. “I walked in, and there was Sam with five or six women in all states of undress, and he was entertaining them. I said to Sam, ‘Man, why don’t you tune that thing up?’” But he didn’t want to interrupt his show or give the girls reason to doubt him, and playing out of tune all afternoon affected his ear to the point that he had to cut the first set short before he could get the sound out of his head.

  He was on tour when he heard L.C.’s record, “Do You Remember?” on the radio for the first time, and he called him up right away to express his brotherly pride. “He said, ‘I just called to tell you something. I heard your song five times, and I only heard my song once!’ And then he hung up!” They ran across the Soul Stirrers in Miami and kept crossing paths with a Universal Attractions package starring Jackie Wilson and LaVern Baker that got consistently better billing. Little Willie John, an occasional co-headliner on that tour, was arrested in Atlanta at the beginning of November on charges of “cheating and swindling” local telephone companies with a phony credit card and was said to be suspected of “much more serious charges.”