Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (48 page)

There appear in any case to have been few dissenters within his immediate circle. To J.W. no less than René, one of the things that gave Sam his distinctive voice was the “audacity” he possessed “to change a standard to his way of thinking. He liked to think of himself as the black counterpart to Irving Berlin or Cole Porter.” To John Siamas, still flush with Keen’s unexpected initial success and anxious to expand upon it, this was the kind of music that had gotten him into the record business in the first place, and Sam’s enthusiasm for it only further solidified his belief in Sam. Perhaps just as important, it proved once and for all that there was no more need for Bumps; the sessions had been supervised start to finish by Sam and René without any of Bumps’ boastful and tendentious claims. It was an expensive project but one John Siamas didn’t mind spending his money on. Because this was something he believed in, this was music that was really going to last.

Perhaps the lone voice of disagreement would have been Jess Rand. To his mind, Sam simply was not as much of a genius as Sam seemed to believe he was. Jess had
known
Irving Berlin (he had started out in the business at fifteen as a “counter boy” for Berlin’s publishing company), he was someone who genuinely appreciated a legitimate pop song and valued Clif White for his wide-ranging frame of musical reference. From his point of view, Sam did not know the songs well enough at this stage, nor did he treat them with sufficient respect. But Jess kept his mouth shut, doing his best to steer Sam toward a humbler, more high-class way of presenting himself while reserving the idea that he might get a chance to offer Sam more of an education along the way.

That opportunity arose much sooner than he expected. One day Roy Crain approached him on the steps of the Keen studio. To Jess, Crain was the single person around Sam other than Clif who was looking out for his employer’s interests. “Crain got me in a corner and said, ‘I just spoke to Sam. Let me tell you what our plans are. If you’d like to come along, it’s with [our] blessings.’ I said, ‘What about Bumps?’ He said, ‘Bumps is going to be taken care of.’ I said, ‘I don’t like stealing clients.’ He said, ‘This is not stealing a client. I trust you, and Sam trusts you. You won’t have to say anything to Bumps.’ About half an hour later, Sam came out and gave me a hug. That’s [how] we got together on a management deal.”

Jess Rand was confident that he could deliver just what Sam wanted. Sam, he knew, was desperate for legitimacy. He wanted acceptance by white audiences. He wanted an acting career. He wanted to play the same cabaret circuit that Sammy and Nat and Harry Belafonte were working, he thought he was that good, and, while Jess had his doubts, he was confident that with his connections, he could at least get Sam in to see the right people, something that neither Bumps nor Crain nor Alexander, who, Jess was certain, was scheming to manage Sam himself, could deliver.

That he had no formal background in management was irrelevant. He had practically grown up in the business; he had been Sammy Davis Jr.’s friend, confidant, and publicist for years; and he was in the midst of setting up a film production company with actor Jeff Chandler, another longtime client, who had convinced him to come out to California in the first place. A snappy dresser in an understated eastern kind of a way, Jess had already introduced Sam to some of the best Hollywood and New York shops—Zeigler and Zeigler at Sunset and Crescent for suits, George Unger in New York for jewelry, Sammy’s tailor, Cy Martin in New York, for custom-made tuxes—and Sam had soaked it all in, looking and dressing the part as if he were to the manor born. Jess had no doubt that Sam was an apt pupil; what he couldn’t get a handle on was the man underneath. If he gave Sam direct advice, Sam generally took it, but not without an argument. He had a habit of framing a question in such a way that you were never sure he didn’t already know the answer. And occasionally a kind of smoldering resentment would creep in, just below the surface, but then it was gone so quickly, smoothed over by that effortless charm, that you wondered what it was you had actually glimpsed.

“He was so involved with himself,” Jess theorized, “that he always felt like he had to cover his back. I don’t know what he got out of it, or if it was meant for you or for himself, but he would never concede a point.” Early on, he gave Jess the job of firing his longtime accountant. “He didn’t think the guy knew anything. I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ He said, ‘No, you’re my manager, that’s your job.’ Now this was an awful thing for me because I was good friends with the man, and I kept saying to myself, How do I approach this thing? until finally we’re just outside the guy’s door and Sam’s doing his biting-the-bottom-lip routine, and I realize I’ve just got to cut through the conversation and get right to the point. So I did, and the man says, ‘Well, don’t you want to hear my side?’ I said, ‘No, unfortunately, there are no sides here. Sam just wants out of this thing.’ And we get outside, and Sam throws his arms around me and says, ‘Man, you really handled that good.’” It was as if, Jess felt, he had finally passed an important test. Now if he could only get rid of J.W. Alexander as easily.

S
AM CELEBRATED HIS BIRTHDAY
with a party at the Nite Life on Thirty-eighth and Western, with
Los Angeles Sentinel
columnist (and Nite Life operator) Gertrude Gipson hosting an array of friends, guest artists, and the paying public. He kept his hand in, too, with an appearance on KGFJ radio personality Charles Trammel’s new show. But mostly he was just enjoying himself, kicking back. He was living now in a suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, where he had moved not long after getting home. It had become immediately obvious that Barbara wasn’t going to move out anytime soon, that she and Linda, for all her talk of finding another place, had nowhere else to go. It was equally obvious that Barbara had little interest in finding a place that did not include Sam. So they lived together for a while as a kind of family, with Sam and Linda occupying the twin beds and Barbara sleeping on the floor. No matter what Barbara had in mind, he was determined to keep a well-defined distance between them. So, even though he knew from all her hints and overt statements how much she felt she could do for him, and despite how badly he would have liked to give Linda a real home, he kept everything strictly on a superficial level, going out every night without telling her his plans, letting her deal with all the girls who called as if she were his private secretary, not even sleeping with her. And after a little while, without telling her where he was going, he moved into the Knickerbocker.

Lou Adler was not far behind. “It was one of those things where, you know, I was living the life with him, and it started out, ‘Meet me at the hotel, and we’ll go out.’ Then we’d go back to the hotel afterwards with some girls that we’d met during the night, and pretty soon [I’d start leaving] my clothes, and then I was staying there, I just sort of moved in. He could have pretty much any girl he wanted. And the ones that he didn’t have, I had. But we spent a lot of time alone, too, just sitting around, I never saw him really drinking, I never saw him smoke reefer—I did, but I never smoked around Sam. He was conscious of anything that was new to him—a film, a book, clothes—and he didn’t hesitate to ask, ‘Where’d you get that, where does that kind of thing come from?’ He was always opening his mind up to something new, he was always expanding. Wherever he was, he was always moving out to another place, and yet he always had that thing about how he was never going to leave his roots, he was always going to have some place to go home to.”

It was a very different view of Sam than Jess Rand’s, seemingly free of any tinge of personal or racial resentment. The Sam that Lou Adler knew was probably closer to the Sam that Alex or Crain or Lou Rawls knew, easygoing, relaxed, able to laugh at himself even at his most stubborn. One time at the Knickerbocker, there was a whole bunch of girls standing outside, and Sam, playing the big star, asked Lou for a pen to sign autographs with. When Lou said he didn’t have a pen, Sam went back to the gift shop and bought one himself. “So we go out, and we get to the top step, and the whole group comes running at him, and he looks over at me, and one of them says, ‘Can we have your autograph? Can we have your autograph, Mr. Mathis?’ He laughed as we were walking away. He said, ‘There’s a lesson in there somewhere.’”

And yet Lou was well aware there was an elusive quality to Sam, there was a side he didn’t want you or anyone else to see: if there were worries, he wasn’t going to show them; if there were conflicts, they weren’t going to come up. Even when he was uncool, Lou realized, he found a way to be cool. In all of the conversations that they had, Lou never heard him express his feelings about his family, and his feelings about religion were left unspoken. There was no question in that sense of who was directing the conversation, but at the same time there was equally little question that there was no one else even remotely like Sam. “I never met a man like him in my life,” Lou mused many years later in a statement he might have found difficult to express at the time but one no less reflective of his deepest feelings. “He was a shining light.”

Barbara was a whole other story. Lou got to know her in the two or three months he lived with Sam, and he liked her a lot, but “she was totally different. She never put on any airs, she was more street, whatever her lifestyle was, she hadn’t changed.” In certain respects Lou was more comfortable with that lifestyle than with Sam’s. With Sam, for example, he always felt he had to hide his marijuana smoking, but with Barbara he could just be himself, and the two of them could get high together. Maybe because Sam knew how comfortable Lou was with Barbara, he felt free to express his feelings about her without any element of disguise. He talked about how part of him just wanted to settle down with a wife and daughter of his own, but another, larger part of him told him to hold back. Lou started going out seriously with a girl at around this time, and Sam seemed to seize on that as a way of resolving his own conflict. He urged Lou to get married, as if maybe Lou could do it for him by proxy.

Lou met Sam’s brother L.C. for the first time during this period, when L.C. came out belatedly to collect his Christmas present. “I came out for my Cadillac. See, Sam asked me, ‘Man, what kind of car would you like?’ I said, ‘Sam, I ain’t got nothing, I’m walking. Anything, man.’ He said, ‘C., what kind of car you want?’ I said, ‘I’d like to have me a convertible Cadillac. I’d like to have me a Continental kit on it. As a matter of fact, Sam, I’d like for it to be so long that when I go to turn a corner I need a turntable to make the turn.’ He said, ‘You so crazy’—he called me a little crazy shit all the time. But I had no idea he was gonna buy me a Cadillac until my mother and father come over my girlfriend’s house and said, ‘Sam got you a Christmas present.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t he send it to me?’ I thought it was a little watch. And my father said, ‘Son, you got to go to Los Angeles to get it. He bought you a Cadillac.’”

He didn’t arrive until well over a month later, and when he did, he found that everything had been taken care of for him. Sam sent money for a plane ticket, but then Reverend Cook wanted to go out, too, and L.C. invited his running buddy, Herbert Henderson, along, so he cashed in the ticket and the three of them drove out. “We was over at one of my cousin’s house, and Bumps brought the car over, and, boy, when he turned the corner, man, I just said, ‘Lord have mercy.’ It was a 1954 canary yellow Cadillac, like brand-new, just twelve thousand miles on it, with a black nylon top, black upholstery, and a Continental kit. Bumps said, ‘Now, L.C., if you like the car, all you got to do is go over to Wilshire Cadillac and pick up the papers.’ Said, ‘Sam already paid for it, but he wouldn’t pick up the papers, he told the man it was on your approval.’ I said, ‘Man, you better get in right now and show me where to get those papers!’”

Everything about his visit to California was covered first-class, just like he would have expected it to be. Sam arranged for him to stay with Bumps and his wife, Marlene, on Normandie, and every Saturday Bumps gave him enough cash to get through the week, told him if he needed more, just ask for it, because it was Sam’s money and Sam said he wanted his brother to be treated royally. He had a charge account in Sam’s name at the filling station around the corner from Bumps’ house, and Bumps and Marlene really extended themselves for him, with no evidence of any ill feeling toward Sam on Bumps’ part. Which, as L.C. saw it, probably went back to the way Sam had always treated the people who mattered in his life. Bumps didn’t need to be told how hard it was to get through some of those doors out there, he had to know that a white manager would just make it that much easier. And if Sam told Bumps that he would come back and get Bumps once he had gotten through those doors himself—well, there was no reason for Bumps not to believe him. He probably would.

L.C. and Marlene would go out together at night and have a ball. “That girl was from New Orleans, we used to call her Little Mama, and she was as nice as she was pretty. You talking about a beautiful person.” He hung out with Clif, who told him that the way he was spending Sam’s money, his initials should stand for “Long Cash.” Sam got L.C. in with his L.A. crowd, too: Jesse Belvin; Eugene Church, whose hit “Pretty Girls Everywhere” was still on the charts; Bobby Day, who had toured with Sam off and on the previous fall behind his own hit “Rock-in’ Robin”; Johnny “Guitar” Watson; and Alex Hodge, who with his brother Gaynel had sung at one time or another with all of the others. He met Darlene Love, too, and proved that he could be as “mannerable” as his brother, picking her up at high school, bringing strawberry ice cream for her mama and cigars for her daddy. “You so full of shit, L.C.,” Darlene would say to him laughingly—and he didn’t put up much of an argument, but she was a very pretty girl.