Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (86 page)

Jess Rand could scarcely bear to watch Sam at the funeral, bending over the little white casket and straightening the boy’s bowtie, murmuring to his son the whole time. “I thought it was going to destroy him. I thought he [might] kill Barbara.” But when Jess tried to offer consolation and advice, suggesting that maybe Sam could cancel some of his upcoming engagements, take a little time off, Sam brushed him aside and said he needed to get back to work.

He was in the studio the following evening for the second night of a Mel Carter album session. Mel’s single, “When a Boy Falls in Love,” was just beginning to hit—and, perhaps not surprisingly, more on the pop charts than in the r&b field. Zelda had insisted all along that Mel was that rare kind of singer, like Mathis, who could cross categories—if they would only hire a white promotion man. At first Sam and Alex were reluctant, but after the disaster with Fred Smith, they were more willing to listen. They had given Fred $1,500 to take the record around the country, present it to the top disc jockey in ten key cities. Fred was emphatic that this was not enough money to convince even a single jock to play Mel’s record, and to prove his point, without informing anyone, he took the money to the track. This was a stratagem that, as an inveterate devotee of the horses, he had employed with some success on one or two previous occasions, but this time it failed him, and he lost half the money. He was almost too embarrassed to go back to the office to return the little that was left, and he announced then and there that he was quitting the business. That was when they finally hired Ernie Farrell, the independent promo man Zelda had been pushing for, who had worked for Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin for years.

With only two titles in the can, these new sessions were intended to provide material for an LP to cash in on the single’s success. J.W. had gotten five tracks the night before, and now, with Sam present, they once again buckled down to work. The songs that they had assembled were a lighthearted assortment of romantic ballads, lushly arranged, with pizzicato strings and an opportunity for Mel (who sounded a little like the way Roy Hamilton might have sounded if he were a high tenor with a falsetto that floated effortlessly above his fully rounded tones) to take off on one of his virtuoso vocal flights. Sam coached Mel on his words, but he was not as audibly present as usual. Alex remained at his elbow, just trying to keep Sam focused on the work.

Allen Klein arrived the next day with his four-year-old daughter, Robin, and insisted that they all go out to Disneyland. He never saw Barbara, but in his blunt way, he overcame Sam’s objections to the outing. “He didn’t want to go, but I told him, ‘You always had your mother and father, but I lost my mother when I was nine months old. You’ve got two other children. Those two girls need you even more now. You’re their only father, and you’ve got to take care of them.’”

At Disneyland Sam carried Tracey around on his shoulders, and the two men watched as Linda and Robin rode the bumper cars, and Allen took home movies. They didn’t talk much, Tracey was pulling at both their noses, and Sam did his best to smile. “I never saw him cry, but I know he didn’t want to live. He just didn’t understand it. I think he was starting to lose faith, not in God but in himself. He didn’t know where his son was going, he was doubting what happens after death. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to soothe someone’s soul or heart about having lost a kid. I just said, ‘You gotta live for your two other children.’”

Independence Day

S
AM AND BARBARA AVOIDED EACH OTHER
as much as possible in the one additional week that he stayed at home. Barbara felt as though all the love had gone out of her life. Sam was like a zombie, and she was, too. She had nightmares in which she saw her son at the bottom of the pool, and Sam was consumed with guilt and rage in a way she had never witnessed before. They lived their lives in silence, and every time he tried to talk to her, she started to cry and he would leave the house. It was just a mess.

An then, once again, he was gone. He played the Apollo with King Curtis, the Crystals, and SAR artist Patience Valentine, whose second single had just come out. Patience, a dancer and personality as much as a pure singer, studied every one of his shows, and Sam continued to give her encouragement and support, but she couldn’t help but notice how much he was drinking and the uncharacteristic bleakness of his moods when he did. Lithofayne Pridgon saw the change, too. “I don’t know, maybe I had just put him on a pedestal. I was just shocked to see a couple of people that had never been on his scene before. It was a quick thing—they were there, and they weren’t there. I didn’t think anything was necessarily wrong with it. I guess I just thought I knew him better than I did.”

He played various dates in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Carr’s Beach, Maryland. Then he was booked for the first time into the elegant Club Harlem in Atlantic City, where LaVern Baker’s ex-husband, comedian Slappy White, was the seasonlong MC, and Sammy Davis Jr. was scheduled for two weeks in August. The Club Harlem, which went back in its present Kentucky Avenue location to 1933 and had been called by Ed Sullivan “the best sepian night club show I’ve ever seen,” was renowned for “tall, cool, cigarette holder-carrying” Larry “Good Deal” Steele’s spectacular
Smart Affairs Revue,
deemed by one observer to be as important to Atlantic City as the Miss America pageant. It stood in sharp contrast to most of Sam’s usual bookings, with leggy, light-skinned chorus girls and a mixed audience dressed to the nines. “It was beautiful,” said June Gardner, who had been with Sam for almost three years now and could not recall a comparable gig. “Very, very warm feeling.” Less satisfying was a visit from an RCA executive seeking to dissuade Sam from the collision course with the company that his new representative, Allen Klein, seemed set on. The man said his piece, like he was talking to some
little boy,
as Sam’s brother Charles observed from the doorway. “Then Sam said, ‘Don’t send me no flunkies, I don’t even want to talk to you, man.’ He said, ‘Put him out of here, Charlie,’ and I [did]. He said, ‘If you want to talk to me, send the president [next time].’”

Sam, Oopie, René Hall, J.W., Lou Rawls.

Courtesy of the Estate of Clif White

Meanwhile, Allen Klein was still trying to make something happen, still working without a contract, perfectly aware that Sam could just walk off and make a deal for himself at any time. Everything in life was a gamble in his view. Whatever you did, you did, ultimately, on the basis of belief. “I don’t know how you get someone to agree to something [when] they just met you and they don’t know what you’re going to be able to do. Sam had no idea what he wanted, really, and
I
didn’t know what I was going to be able to do. So you have to take a chance. You have to deliver.”

J.W. watched with some bemusement as Allen “kept pushing himself to get in.” The guy was like a gale force, but something about him just tickled Alex, even though there was no question that Allen had no idea sometimes of the effect his single-mindedness had on others. Alex didn’t think he was trying to put anything over on Sam or him; his mind just focused on one thing at a time. But Alex believed to his core that the guy was really going to do something for them.

There was still nothing going on with RCA, so Allen approached Columbia—through Jerry Brandt. In order to draw RCA into negotiations, he needed someone else to show interest, so he had Jerry introduce him to Dave Kapralik, Columbia’s East Coast head of a&r, who had recently signed Jerry’s new client, Cassius Clay, to do a comedy album for the label, centered around his poetic fight predictions and boasts. Brandt had himself met Clay through Sam—he had been with Sam in Atlanta, and Sam was reading a story on the twenty-one-year-old boxing sensation in the
Police Gazette.
“I said, ‘Sam, this is a big guy,’ and he says, ‘You gotta get him,’ and tells his driver, ‘Take Jerry to the airport.’ So I get on a plane and go to Louisville, Kentucky. I don’t know where Clay lives, I just go to a cab driver and say, ‘Cassius Clay’s house.’ I knock on the door, and his brother, Rudy, answers, and I say, ‘Hi, I’m Jerry Brandt from William Morris.’ That means nothing. I said, ‘No, Sam Cooke sent me.’ And then Cassius Clay comes out. He says, ‘Where’s Sam? Is Sam out there? Sam Cooke, the greatest singer in the world. Come on. Sit down. What’s happening?’”

The Columbia executive, Dave Kapralik, an effusive, diminutive man, was as taken with Sam as the Clay family had been. “It was a heart-to-heart connection. Sam would come into my office and kick his feet up on the coffee table, and we’d talk stories, as they say. He was warm, warm, warm, that’s the overriding description I would have of him—you wouldn’t want to fuck with him, but that was not the nature of our relationship.” J.W. was frequently with him—it was a “father-son relationship” from Kapralik’s point of view—and Jerry Brandt was always by his side, “brash, hyperactive, but I was hyperactive, too.” The one person who didn’t fit into the picture was Allen Klein, who possessed not a hint of Sam’s natural urbanity and “Cary Grant” charm and who, Kapralik suspected, was most likely using Columbia as a stalking horse. But he turned Allen over to Walter Dean, the head of Business Affairs, and sat in on some meetings where Allen pushed for such unrealistic goals as a 10 percent royalty (Dean explained they couldn’t even consider the figure, given that 5 percent was the label’s top rate, and they had favored-nations agreements with many of their top-selling artists) and something Allen vaguely described as “total control.”

Control was the key from Allen’s perspective. Sam wanted control of his records, and Allen wanted control of the business. But how exactly to get there he didn’t have a clue. “I really wanted to go with Columbia. They didn’t have the old baggage, and in my judgment Columbia Records was the best record company in the business at that time. They sold more albums than anyone else. And when I was negotiating with them, I remember saying we would take a five percent royalty on the albums but we didn’t need them [to sell] singles, so we wanted ten percent on singles. Dave Kapralik was a charming guy, and he really loved Sam Cooke’s music. But what RCA had that Columbia didn’t have was all of Sam Cooke’s old catalogue.” And without that back catalogue, Allen quickly came to realize, “we would [not] be able to control the manner in which his records [albums and packages, primarily] were put together and sold.”

At Dave Kapralik’s invitation, Sam met Dave and Cassius Clay in Las Vegas for the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston rematch on July 22. Floyd, who was both Sam’s and Kapralik’s favorite (the menacing Liston, an ex-con who was virtually nobody’s favorite, held that “a prizefight is like a cowboy movie . . . only in my cowboy movie the bad guy always wins”), had lost his heavyweight championship to Liston ten months earlier in just two minutes and six seconds of the first round and was destined to fare little better in this fight (he lasted four seconds longer). Within moments, Cassius was in the ring, shouting into the microphone, “The fight was a disgrace. Liston is a tramp, I’m the champ. I want that big ugly bear,” as Sam and the Columbia a&r man looked on with a combination of shock and amusement. Later in the evening, the three of them were standing at the back of the lounge, watching one of Dave’s acts, when Sonny Liston crossed the floor behind them. “All of a sudden,” Kapralik said, “we turn around and there’s no Cassius—but simultaneously we’re hearing this voice in the middle of the casino: ‘Let me at him, let me at him,’ you know, and he was making such a ruckus that all the tables and games stopped. The room is in chaos now, Cassius is banging at the doors to the ballroom where the victory party is being held, and Sam and I are standing there, half laughing, half stunned. Then the doors to the ballroom open, and out walks Joe Louis, who walks over and says something to Cassius that cooled him down very fast. But Sam and I were in convulsions.”

All in all they had a great three days in Vegas. “It wasn’t business, it wasn’t deep philosophy, it was just fun,” said Kapralik. “One night we went to see this girl singer I had just signed make her Las Vegas debut [as Liberace’s opening act] at the Riviera. That was Barbra Streisand, and I had a party with Sam and Cassius, and Reverend C.L. Franklin was in town with a couple of ladies, and they joined our party. Sam got a big kick out of it, and Cassius was deferential to him, you know, not obsequious [but] deferential, because Sam was a big star. They liked each other a lot.” And while Dave was aware of all the complications, and the warning signs that Allen’s byzantine business negotiations were raising, he firmly believed that in the end Sam would sign with him, if for no other reason than personal affinity. But then Allen learned that the man who had been his and Sam’s principal nemesis at RCA, a&r head Bob Yorke, had lost his position of independence at the company.