Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (85 page)

J
ACKIE WILSON WAS SHADOWING THEM
up and down the road. He played Florida just behind them, headlined a Georgie Woods-produced benefit for the NAACP in Philadelphia, and hit number one with “Baby Workout” at the beginning of May. James Brown, whose touring schedule of 330 to 340 dates a year never let up, was crisscrossing the East and Midwest with his own self-contained show, while Ray Charles, probably the most celebrated of all rhythm and blues performers and the one with by far the greatest crossover success, played Carnegie Hall before taking off for Europe on a monthlong tour. Henry Wynn even promoted a few competing dates with the Motown label’s
Motortown Revue,
starring Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, and Little Stevie Wonder, hopscotching much of the same territory as
The Sam Cooke Show.

They ran into the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in North Carolina, and Sam asked if they needed anything, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a big roll of bills. “No, man, we okay,” said lead singer Clarence Fountain, who had been so entranced when Sam read westerns to them when he was still a Stirrer. Sam, Clif grumbled to L.C., would feed every gospel singer on the road if he had the chance. “Every time I look around,” Clif told L.C., “some gospel singer got their hand in Sam’s pocket, every one, I don’t care who it is, they all [get] some money from Sam.” Clif and June saw it as one more example of Sam’s trusting nature. Clarence Fountain took it another way. To Clarence, it went to show how Sam had succumbed to the sin of pride when he crossed over, how he had come to put his faith not in God but in the almighty dollar.

For William Morris agent Jerry Brandt, who joined the tour from time to time for no other reason than his own fascination with Sam, the truth was somewhere in between. “He was charming. Totally [dis]arming. He would make you defenseless—[but]
you could not charm him.

You could never get what you wanted from him. You know, it’s that elusive thing you fell in love with [but] could never touch. He’d let you see it, it’s there—but it’s not yours. Endearing and heartbreaking at the same time. He didn’t reveal anything to anybody.

He had the ability to call out your name in a roomful of fifty people and make you feel like you were the only one. It was amazing. He was a woman’s man, but he could totally capture men, sometimes in a sexual way—but the men didn’t know why. He could make the audience do anything he wanted, stand up, sit down, fall down, they would follow. He was a man about town, wherever that was. And if he was fixed on something to do, he was going to do it, no matter what you said. [Any problem with jealous husbands?] I didn’t see it. If there was, I should have been one of them.

The tour ended on June 2 in Kansas City. For the last few days, Sam left the women alone and sent Charles to get fresh oysters in Baltimore so Barbara wouldn’t know what he had been up to. “You got to have the oysters, Bob, to keep your pencil hard,” he told Bobby Womack. But not even Bobby was so credulous as to believe Sam could fool Barbara in that way.

Within ten days, Henry Wynn had yet another revue back out on the road. It was now
The Jackie Wilson Show
presenting Ben E. King, the Orlons, the Cookies, Ed Townsend-produced act Theola Kilgore, and, as a special favor to Sam, the Sims Twins, with the Upsetters Band once again backing all the performers and Gorgeous George featured as MC. The marquee might change, the headliner and supporting acts might vary from tour to tour, but within the world of Supersonic Attractions, the show always went on.

3 | VINCENT

H
E WAS SCHEDULED TO BE AT HOME
for almost the entire month of June. He and Linda played with the little racing-car track he had set up on the floor, laughing and betting quarters on the outcome of each race as Tracey and the baby looked on. He told them stories and drew pictures for them. Linda’s favorite place was the library, with books up to the ceiling, “all kinds of books,
War and Peace
and
Hawaii
and the beautiful leather-bound classics you find in real estate-home libraries. We had a full black history library before black history was even talked about or known, all the way back to Egyptian history, and we found the one and only black history [bookstore] in L.A., way out Exposition—we probably got every book in the world that [they] had, and my father used to read all that to us.”

Linda would talk to him about his music, too. At ten she knew just what she wanted to do when she grew up, whatever her father might think. It had nothing to do with being a “star”—“I didn’t look on [it] like that, I knew the depths of what he was trying to do, and I knew the purpose in it, and [I wanted] to carry it on. He said, ‘No, no, you not gonna —’ He wanted me to go to college and learn the wider aspects of life that he felt were maybe further progressed than the pitfalls that I [might] find in this business. And I respected that, [but] I didn’t deal with it.”

Whatever his ambitions for her, he valued her musical opinions. “My part was as the bounce-off person. He would test out the songs on me, make sure that the dance groove was right and that I thought the stories were good. He was always writing in his notebook, and he had a small reel-to-reel tape recorder, which he put a lot of stuff on. When I saw him onstage, it was more like something for outside people, but he could see I was really excited about seeing him work at home, that was a different and deeper emotional exchange. I guess he was in the time when he was trying to weigh: Should it be commercial? Should it have the hook that people will dig? Or should it be just what I feel? So a lot of times, he would be bouncing things like that off me. He would tell me, ‘Well, people need to come here,’ he wanted to reach
everybody,
but as a child, I just knew what I saw him love to do, and I always wanted him to feel free in expressing that, and that’s what we used to talk about all the time. He was always intent on growing to be able to reach people, and at the same time to say something that would be a mark in their life.”

Barbara continued to try to please him. At Sam’s urging she read James Baldwin, and she did her best to represent him in public in a way that would make him proud, but somehow it was never enough. She was a member of Gertrude Gipson’s gang of glamorous gals, the Regalettes (which also included Mrs. Ray Charles and Mrs. Earl Bostic), whose doings Gipson chronicled in her
Sentinel
column, and she attended social and charity functions both with and without her husband, but always, Gipson noted approvingly, under Sam’s watchful eye. One time, Gipson wrote, Barbara “had a custom outfit made [of] gold brocade trimmed with dark mink . . . it had cost a pretty penny [and] she was real excited waiting for Sam to approve. He came home from the engagement, took a look at the outfit and said, ‘I don’t like it, Barbie. It just isn’t you.’” And went out and bought her another.

She withdrew more and more into her own world. Her behavior became increasingly erratic, her distance as much a product of incalculable need as of any domestic disagreement that could be talked out. She watched Sam and Alex run up and down Hollywood and all over town—there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know her husband was a player—and she couldn’t understand how the man could go through life like that, keeping her and everyone else at a distance. Only Linda could get inside the barriers. She was strictly an outsider. So close but no closer: that was his rule. And it broke her heart.

Jess Rand had his own reasons to mistrust Sam. He had known since the previous fall that something was wrong, and he had more recently heard from his friend, Bob Yorke, at RCA that someone named Allen Klein was nosing around in Sam’s business. But every time he approached Sam about signing their management renewal contract, Sam just said “J., what do we need a piece of paper for?” and acted like everything would go on as before. Jess made some inquiries about Klein and decided the guy wasn’t much of a threat. Just another small-time
grubber
in the music business, not right for Sam, very likely no more than a passing fancy. Sam, Jess had finally come to believe, was never going to be happy with the way he was treated—by anyone. So if this guy found him some money, more power to him. And if Sam didn’t choose to say anything about it to Jess, just kept the money for himself, that was all right, too. It was all part and parcel of Sam’s furtive nature.

Luigi flew out for a singles session on June 15, the second Saturday that Sam was home. Once again Sam decided to do without the services of René Hall, working with Gerald Wilson, one of L.A.’s best-known, and most respected, big-band leaders and arrangers, who had played on the Billie Holiday tribute album for Keen. It was a curiously desultory session. The one original Sam brought in, “Cool Train,” was a conventional blues, similar in some respects to “Little Red Rooster” from the
Night Beat
album, but with a languid, Gershwin-like tonal arrangement that presented him as a kind of swinging blues sophisticate, a role for which he did not seem altogether suited. The only other number they attempted was a third pass at “My Grandfather’s Clock,” the children’s parlor song that Jess had originally induced him to record, and it came out no better than the first two times. Then he was off into the night with Alex—to check out Patience Valentine at the California Club, or Lowell Fulson at Gert Gipson’s Nite Life, maybe stop by Johnny Otis’ new Ben Hur club and catch Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s act or look in on the 5/4 to see if they might run across Oopie or Johnnie Morisette or Lou Rawls in the course of their pleasant peregrinations around town.

The following night, according to the
Sentinel
’s “Theatricals” column, Sam and Barbara, J.W. “Jack” Alexander, and Lil Cumber, who had been in charge of Specialty’s Herald Attractions while Sam was with the Stirrers and had long had an agency of her own, all met up at the official opening of the “posh, posh” Small’s Paradise West, where singer-organist Earl Grant was beginning a five-day engagement. Barbara was wearing a brand-new “high-fashion wig” and one of the two mink stoles Sam had just given her, and “their party rivaled that of PR woman Marilyn Green’s, who had a crush on vodka gimlets.” Sam cut his usual elegant figure, perhaps wearing the same pale blue suit and white silk shirt that r&b singer Etta James remembered him going clubbing in, giving you the feeling, as Etta wrote, that “he was very glad and blessed to be Sam Cooke.”

He went for a swim late the next morning, then rushed off to an appointment without thinking to put back the electric pool cover that he had recently had installed for the clover-shaped pool. Barbara went shopping not long afterward, and Blanche, the maid who had charge of the children, wouldn’t let them play outside because the cover was off the pool. When Barbara came home a little after four, the kids were going crazy, and she told Blanche it would be all right for them to go out now—Tracey, who was almost three, could watch the baby for a little while. She was hanging up the new clothes she had just bought when she became aware of an ominous silence, and then Tracey was in the bedroom, by herself, without Vincent, and Barbara stared at her as a growing sense of dread overcame her and Tracey said in her babyish way, “Mommy, Vincent’s in the pool.” She reacted without even thinking, rushed out of the house and dove in the water with all her clothes on, but it was too late. The little boy had blood, or some kind of pinkish mucus, coming out of his mouth, and even as she dried him off and tried to give him artificial respiration while Tracey explained that he had just been trying to get his rubber duck, she knew it was hopeless, and she picked him up and started walking around with him in her arms, her beautiful, plump, happy little boy. She was sitting on the ground just rocking him when the emergency rescue squad arrived.

Barbara’s twin, Beverly, called Sam at the office. She reached Zelda just as Sam and Alex were getting ready to go out. Sam got on the phone, said, “I’ll come on,” then told Alex, “Vincent just fell in the pool,” as he rushed out the door. By the time that Alex arrived at the house, Sam had shoved the rescue workers aside and was making one last hopeless attempt to revive his little boy, trying in vain to bring Vincent back. He accompanied the body to the morgue. Then he went to the bedroom to be alone.

T
HERE WAS NO TALK BETWEEN THEM
. There was no consolation to be had. Everyone could see how devastated both parents were, but there was no talk. Lou Rawls could sense Sam’s anger and despair, “but he never opened up.” As long as Lou had known him, Sam had always projected an unshakeable air of confidence that whatever problem might come up, he could find a solution. But now there was no solution. He never discussed it with Crain or J.W. Crain came out from Chicago as soon as he heard, and Sam asked him to stay at the house—but they didn’t talk about it. Alex saw his role as a friend not to intrude. If Sam wanted his help, he would say so; otherwise, you just offered whatever support you could.

The funeral was held three days later at Forest Lawn cemetery. Sam’s mother and father had flown out the day before, and Sam was surrounded by family and friends, but he sought—and found—no relief. Barbara hated Sam, and she hated herself. “You never cared about him, you never wanted him,” she berated her husband, even as she berated herself. One time,
one time,
she saw him cry—but the rest was all a blur. Bobby Womack’s most vivid memory of Vincent was of him dressed in a little white robe, picking up an ashtray full of ashes and mischievously blowing them all over his parents’ guests. “You see,” Sam had said, laughing, “I know that can’t be my son.” But he picked him up and hugged him anyway. Maybe, Bobby thought, it was simply a case of how, “when you play around a lot, you always have negative thoughts.” But now there was no way to let go of those thoughts, it was too late for Sam at this point, and “he just didn’t know how to say, ‘I wish I could have given him more love.’”