Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (99 page)

“I said, ‘Do me a favor. It’s very important. Do this for me.’” And with that, Allen flung open the door and revealed the Rolls-Royce that he had bought for Sam, with the big red bow that his wife, Betty, had tied around it.

Sam just stood there for a moment, stunned. He had been talking with Allen for months about getting exactly this model Rolls. He knew Allen didn’t give a fuck about cars—this was just for him. Allen handed him the keys, and someone snapped a picture, and the smile on Sam’s face was all the payoff that Allen needed for the $15,000 he had spent. Afterward, back in the dressing room, Sam took him into the bathroom and said, “You know, you’re better than Colonel Parker,” and when Allen looked dubious, Sam said, “No, I mean it. Because Elvis is white.” Allen didn’t say anything; he just gave Sam a hug. It was the kind of emotional moment that he rarely permitted himself, but when they emerged from the bathroom, it was time for Sam to go to work. Now he was really ready for the show.

Sammy Davis Jr.’s voice introduced Sam warmly on tape. “Good evening, everybody. My name is Sammy Davis. I’d like to say, tonight I’m taking the opportunity to introduce to you a cat who’s gonna set the town on its ear. He’s a good friend, swinging artist, and one of the nicest people I know. So all you first-nighters at the Copacabana, here is the swinging Mr. Sam Cooke.” Then René cued the band—the full sixteen-piece Copa Orchestra plus Sam’s expanded five-man rhythm section (Sam had hired New York percussionist Sticks Evans for the engagement)—and they were off and running on the agreed-upon set.

It was, as Sam had explained to Bobby, a distinctly white-folks version of his standard show. A ringadingding approach to “Bill Bailey” took the place of “Cupid”; a swinging “Frankie and Johnny” replaced “Chain Gang,” barely alluded to on opening night as part of the closing medley, then dropped altogether; instead of the anthemic “Having a Party,” Copa patrons got a cheerfully up-tempo version of the new single, “Tennessee Waltz”; and Sam’s hoarse, gospelized reinvention of “You Send Me” as preamble to “Bring It On Home to Me” gave way to a delicate linking of the song to “Try a Little Tenderness” and “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” complete with flute obbligato.

But there were similarities as well, as Clif’s rock-solid chording provided an underpinning for Bobby’s playful leads, the rhythm section, locked in by weeks of demanding rehearsals, found the same driving grooves that would have propelled the more familiar material, and Sam’s easy conversational delivery drew in the audience, drew in an entirely
different
audience, in much the same way that he had first wrecked house in all those makeshift storefront churches, with little more than his charm, his confidence, and his extraordinary storytelling ability to put him across.

It was, all in all, an unqualified triumph, even if the critics were not altogether unanimous in their praise. The
New York World-Telegram
opined that “Sam yells a lot but doesn’t sing much.”
Variety
maintained that “although he did well . . . he didn’t quite achieve his aim,” and the
New York Times
offered the additional caveat that while “[Mr. Cooke] has dignity, humility and feeling to go with a strong voice, the performance is not by a long shot all good.” At the same time, it was remarked that Sam moved “like a panther,” looked like “a young Belafonte,” and showed “worlds of poise and savvy” and “a zingy, swinging style.” But it was left to a female reporter for the Harlem-based
Amsterdam News
to capture the emotional impact for the woman at ringside.

“A dashing, handsome young man,” wrote Sara Slack, “sent the women in the audience C-R-A-Z-Y from the moment he opened his mouth until he stopped singing fifty minutes later.

Wearing black tapered pants set off with a black and white checked shortie Continental jacket, the [onetime] gospel singer sent women into lingering, swooning tizzies when he caressed the mike and began oozing “You Send Me.” Coaching the girls back to the present with “Tennessee Waltz,” suddenly off came his coat, off came his tie, and off went the ceiling when he began belting out “Twistin’ the Night Away.” . . . A singer of rare talent, Sam wound up by singing women back to dreamland with “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” Retiring to ear-splitting applause and shaking hands along his exit route, Sam Cooke left them begging, begging and begging for more.

It was, said J.W., who was working the light cues, “almost like a sex act. I said, ‘Lighten up, buddy. You got ’em.’” Or as fellow r&b singer Chuck Jackson, who had himself emerged from the gospel world, said of Sam’s invariable approach to performance: “He never did get so far into a song that he forgot where he was. He would feel the spirit as much as anybody else, but he was always in control, and women loved it. There was an earnest in Sam, they loved the coolness about him. It’s like women say, ‘Some men make love, but they’re just too fast,’ [but] what Sam did just went on and on, [he] could hold out till the end!”

The house was full every night, because Allen and RCA made sure that it would be full, and they even guaranteed a good black representation by giving Crain a bloc of tickets to distribute to some of the social clubs uptown. Sam kept playing with the content and order of the show, but it remained a race-neutral mix of romance, sex, and—ironically—uplifting racial politics, in which, as
Variety
pointed out, “at no time does he make any political references but yet he scores his strongest impact with his long community-sing version of ‘If I Had a Hammer,’” the song with which night after night the audience declared its love for “my brother and my sister, all over this world.” Sometimes Bobby got so caught up in the show and how Sam worked the glamorous room, that he lost his place in the music. “He’d give me my cue, and everybody would be looking at me, and Sam would say, ‘Bobby, give me my motherfucking song.’ I said, ‘Oh, man, I forgot.’ ’Cause I’m watching him, I’m watching the people, you know. He’d say, ‘Bobby, you don’t drink, you don’t smoke. You ain’t got no excuse.’ But I was just that engrossed.”

Allen was no less engrossed. He was there every night, perched on the edge of the stage with a towel and a glass of water. René, for whom some years had passed since his last extended time on the road, was surprised at the number and diversity of Sam’s friends and associates. He knew Sam as an urbane man about town, but he was a little taken aback by all the people for whom Sam bought liquor and all the hustlers and lowlifes on the fringes of Sam’s world. Perhaps the most surprising visitor, though, was a young film executive in charge of 20th Century Fox’s East Coast production department who appeared out of the blue and started talking to Sam about a movie career.

Earl McGrath, a nightclub habitué and music fan who would go on to become a prominent record company executive, was sitting in the back of a taxi at 7:30 in the morning after a night on the town. “I was feeling really terrible, and I looked up, and there was that sign, ‘Sam’s the Biggest Cooke in Town.’ And I thought, God, that guy is so great-looking. And I just loved his work. So I went home and went to sleep, got to the office around noon, and called up Sam’s agent at GAC.”

He went to see Sam that night and was so impressed that he returned four or five times, with his wife, Camilla, and a group of people from the Fox office. “It was just a magical thing. Sam was wonderful and debonair and generous with the audience, and he made you feel like you were an intimate friend—I think everybody felt that, but he really worked [at] it, too, because he would call me up, and he got to understand what I thought was funny and so forth. He was a very, very sensitive person, one of the nicest people I ever met, and optimistic all the time, but he had a melancholic side that he would just sort of let roll over him. Something would go wrong, and there would be this little tiny pause where you could see him looking at it very carefully, and then, you know, just putting it aside—not out of his mind but just aside—because it was interrupting what he was doing.

“He was a natural, so I said, ‘Look, Sam, why don’t you do a screen test?’ And he was so friendly and so sweet. He said, ‘You really think I could do it?’ And I arranged to shoot him—I didn’t tell anybody, this was just to see how he photographed, and I would ask him a few questions, too—at the Fox studio, over on Ninth Avenue around Fifty-fourth, right after [he finished] his gig at the Copa.”

Sam took it all in stride. It was all part of the readjustment of goals, the refurbishing of image that went along with any kind of career change. He was aiming at a different kind of audience now, Sam told a
New York Times
reporter, who evidently assumed that Sam was speaking of a difference based primarily on age, not race, in this instance perhaps fundamentally the same thing. “You know, those old cats,” Sam said, falling right in, “they don’t go out much. A lot of them are lonely. They
need
records. They need them worse than anybody. I’m going to sell them.”

To Don Paulsen, a young freelance reporter and photographer, he mused more expansively on life, art, and the nature of success. His music, he said, consisted of a combination of elements, including blues, gospel, jazz numbers like “The Girl From Ipanema,” and country—“every singer draws inadvertently from everything he’s heard and liked.” Soul was “the capacity to project a feeling,” and rhythm and blues represented “the most fervent sound in pop music.” The Beatles had some of that fervor and, above all, real honesty of observation, but they would eventually discover that “once you get [people’s attention], you can speak softly.” For himself, he had learned that “there’s only so much to be gotten out of life. [With success] I have less free time, but it’s given me more sense of responsibility. I find I can’t do things without thinking about them; it has made me more of an adult [who] can appreciate the various shadings and tones of life.” As for future plans: “I want to go to Las Vegas. I’d like to do some movie roles. Someday I’d like to do a Broadway play.”

Most of all, he said with the utmost conviction, “I have an intense desire to make all of my audiences happy.”

A
LLEN HAD ARRANGED
for RCA to record the last two nights of the show, something that Joe D’Imperio supported over the strong opposition of his staff. The prevailing opinion in the a&r department was that a live Copa album would never be a good seller for this kind of artist. D’Imperio, however, insisted that what had led him to sign Sam in the first place was his belief that they had in Sam Cooke a pop artist of unlimited crossover potential. It was their own fault, D’Imperio said, if in the past they had ignored that potential because of his color. Now was the time to turn Sam Cooke into the next Belafonte, the next Nat “King” Cole—and selling albums was the place to start.

Al Schmitt, the longtime engineer on Sam’s West Coast sessions and now, with the departure of Hugo and Luigi, his official “producer” at RCA, got a much better sound out of the room than Bob Simpson and Tony Salvatore had been able to achieve at the Harlem Square Club a year and a half earlier. That album had yet to come out and didn’t appear likely to surface anytime soon, mainly because it had no place in the new scheme of things. It was, to Allen’s way of thinking most of all, too much of the image they wanted to get away from, too much of a way of life that Sam wanted to leave behind. Sam in any case was, for the time being, thinking only of the present, and after a decent second show on Tuesday night (from which Al Schmitt planned to use at least the “You Send Me” medley), he put everything he had into the early show on Wednesday, July 8, the final night. What you hear is a summation of one side of the vision that had defined “Sam Cooke” ever since he first switched over to pop. It had been Bumps’ prescription for success from the start (“a modern Morton Downey”), in different ways it had been René’s and Alex’s, and it had been Hugo and Luigi’s, in full collusion with his own. The show ended with a medley of “Amen” (recently featured in the Sidney Poitier vehicle
Lilies of the Field
) and “This Little Light of Mine,” his father’s favorite song, followed by a full-throated big-finish version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And when he encored with Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz,” he completed the process, putting the crowd away with songs with which he was able to identify but, more important, which they could also claim as their own. It was not intended as a performance for the ages; as the
New York Times
critic wrote about another number in his Copa repertoire, “The way Mr. Cooke sings [it], a person who does not understand English would assume that it was a song about a little girl hippity-hopping down to the candy store to buy herself a lollipop.” But the effect was exactly what he intended, Bobby and Clif and June were playing their asses off, and clearly no one in the audience that night could fail to be entranced by the sound of Sam’s voice and the pure pleasure he found in the very act of communication. Patti Page wouldn’t recognize her own song, Sam declared with a chuckle over the introductory vamp. And he was right.

Immediately after the last show, Jules Podell, the gruff Copa manager, presented Sam with the prized Copa cuff links and bonnet. The following day he sent a letter to Sam care of Allen Klein Associates, letting the performer know that he had just completed a deal with GAC to bring him back to the Copa for the next two years, and Allen took out a full-page ad in
Variety
two weeks later, highlighting a performance shot of Sam, Podell’s letter, and a “Thank You, Mr. Podell” above the legend, “Direction: Tracey, Ltd.”

Sam stayed in New York for a few more days, did his preliminary screen test for Earl McGrath, and purely by accident ran into Jess Rand, whose group, the Lettermen, was about to open at the Latin Quarter the following week. Jess was checking into the Warwick, to which he had introduced Sam six years earlier, and the desk clerk told him his client, Mr. Cooke, was in the bar. “Sam was drinking Manhattans, and I was drinking Scotch on the rocks. He said, ‘Come on upstairs.’ So I went to his room, and he started telling me about the Rolls-Royce. At that time, there was no building across the street, there was this half-empty lot, and the hotel used to park cars there, and he pointed out the Rolls to me. I said, ‘Why would anyone, especially a bookkeeper, just give you a car [like that]?’ He said, ‘No, he gave me that as a present.’ I said, ‘You own the car? You got the pink slip? It just doesn’t make sense.’ He gave me a look, like, ‘Well, you’re just mad,’ and he smiled at me. You know, it’s funny, he walked out on the Soul Stirrers, he walked out on William Morris, he walked out on me. And yet he just wanted everyone to like him.”