Kill 'Em and Leave (21 page)

“He says—and you know his thing was always his bad English. He was always saying ‘I and you.'
I and you—
whatever. He said, ‘I and you are a lot alike. We had a hard way growing up. I can see that about you. I recognized you because it wasn't but two real men in that room that day besides Mr. Friedman. It was
I and you
. The rest of them bums'—he liked to use that word,
bums,
he never cursed, it was rare for him to curse, but he'd say ‘bums'—he said, ‘The rest of them bums was nothing. You know what I'm gonna to do with you? I'm gonna hire you.'

“I said, ‘What?'

“ ‘I'm gonna hire you. I'm gonna hire you to be the manager. I'm taking you because you don't know nothing and you ain't got nothing. I can put my ideas in your head. I can teach you and send you out. You're an educated person and I can use you to represent me in places that I normally wouldn't be able to represent myself. You're gonna be my personal manager. I'm not hiring you to be the valet or porter or this or that. I'm hiring you to be the manager. I and you gonna be together till one of us dies.'

“ ‘Oh yeah?'

“ ‘Yeah. You gonna take the job or not?' ”

Bobbit, standing in Brown's living room, was taken aback. The great James Brown, the Godfather of Soul and Hardest Working Man in Show Business, was offering him a job.

But Bobbit hadn't asked for a job. He already had a job. A good, safe “city job,” one that most workers would die for. He had a lovely new wife, and a new child. To leave that safe job to work in show business? For the rest of his life?
Till one of us dies,
Brown had said. That was, he thought, pretty scary, no matter how you sliced it.

But Charles Bobbit had always had big dreams for himself. When he was a boy picking cotton in the fields of Franklin, North Carolina, till his hands bled, thinking of his mother, the one person who had truly loved him, now gone, and what his life would have been had she lived, he would look up at the planes that flew over the cotton fields and dream of flying. He dreamed of flying places far distant from the lard sandwiches and tobacco fields of Franklin County in the hot summers when he was sent down from Brooklyn to cure tobacco and pull cotton with the cousins who threw rocks at him, the relatives who talked right over his head about what to do with him, the same ones who'd talked over his head after his mother's funeral when he stood in their shack at age six, still dressed in his cousin's borrowed suit, fresh from his mother's burial. He heard them say to one another, “I don't want that snotty little nigger. You take him.” The wounds from that conversation would last the rest of his life. His mind would sometimes wander in the afternoons and he would dream of flying high over his relatives' heads, traveling across the world, vanishing into the future, until his painful past was just a dot, a small circle in his mind that would soon vanish. Charles Bobbit, a man who worked underground in the New York City subway system, had always dreamed of flying. And as he thought about Brown's offer, it occurred to him that if there was one thing that the Godfather of Soul did a hell of a lot of in those days, it was flying.

“I'm in, Mr. Brown.”

“Yeah.”

“I took the job,” Bobbit tells me, “thinking I could fly in planes and stay in nice hotels and quit when I was ready.”

Things did not happen the way he planned, of course. He did fly in planes. He flew around the world more times than he could count. He stayed in five-star hotels and ate food that his relatives never dreamed of. He met heads of state in Africa and Asia, he met the king of Morocco, and he even shook the hand of the infamous African psychotic dictator Idi Amin. He visited the White House four times, shaking the hands of four different American presidents. He flew more in one year than most people fly in a lifetime. He even took the controls of private planes as they flew over the Atlantic. But as for quitting the James Brown job, that would not happen. Because even after twenty years, when Bobbit quit the job, the job did not quit him. Nobody quits on James Brown. As it turned out, Charles Bobbit would be the last person on this earth to see James Brown alive. James Brown's prediction came true:
I and you gonna be together till one of us dies.

When you're a fixer, your job is to make things happen, and you have to be quick. In 1968, when Brown needed thirty kids for a three
A.M.
recording session to shout the background chorus of “Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud,” he sent Charles Bobbit to round them up from the black section of Watts. When Brown needed to fine a musician in his band for missing a hit onstage, or for scuffed shoes or an improperly tied bow tie, Bobbit collected the dough. Resolve a dispute with a promoter? Bobbit could do it. Slip a kid $500 for college? See Mr. Bobbit. Collect twenty-five or fifty grand in a cash advance for a gig—hundred-dollar bills only, please—in a stained brown-paper sandwich bag? See Mr. Bobbit. Slip a DJ a few dollars to play his records? That was Bobbit's job. In the sixties, when the James Brown Revue was a traveling show, with big acts like the gorgeous singer Yvonne Fair, the legendary comedian Pigmeat Markham, the Impressions, which included the great soul singer Curtis Mayfield, and Anna King, it was Bobbit's job to spread the catnip around. He did so with such cool that Nipsy Russell, a much-beloved black comedian who toured with the Revue, nicknamed him the Hundred-Dollar Man. The nickname stuck. Always loyal. Forever discreet. A man of a thousand faces. The Hundred-Dollar Man was a guy who could go 360 degrees: he could yak up a United States president or face down a mobster who threatened to release rats into the Apollo audience. A guy who could grab Brown's .38 caliber out of Brown's pocket when Brown flew off the handle—Brown carried it everywhere—and, if necessary, wade out into a crowd and calm the offending party himself, because he was a third-degree black belt and a former member of the Nation of Islam. There was no better soldier, no more discreet lieutenant. There was no better right-hand man than the Hundred-Dollar Man.

“I don't lie for anyone and I don't lie against anyone,” Bobbit says. “That's not my nature. I don't have to. I just tell the truth. Everything I have—a lot of it—is because of him.”

The Hundred-Dollar Man remembers the friend that was both a brother and tyrant, and the business that sucked their collective blood and gave them life at the same time.

“I don't normally give interviews,” he tells me. “The one or two times I did, I said the same thing basically because I don't talk against him. Whatever I accomplished has a lot to do with him. Many people claim they know him. Oh, I see the books and I hear the people say they know him. It's pure bullshit. Most of them don't know him because he did not let them know him. He didn't want them to know him. When he met you, he either liked you or he didn't. There wasn't no whole long thing about it.”

“Would you say you're that kind of person too?” I ask.

“Yes, because I learned a lot of that from him. I mean, hey, after all those years, I loved the man. We learned a lot from each other at the end of it all. I'd read him. I'd say, ‘Let me figure out which James Brown I am talking to today, because there was about three of him—to me. He even had two or three signatures. One for contracts. One for the fans. And one for whatever. He did not believe in letting people get to know him. This is what most people didn't understand.”

“Which were the three people?” I ask.

Bobbit talks in circles for a few minutes. It's a habit of an old survivor. Those old record-business guys are a different breed, they're not used to talking in straight lines. You talked too straight in that business, back in the old days, and you might find yourself lying facedown in back of a packinghouse someplace looking down on yourself from above. Finally he says, “He was a giving person. But he could go from a smile to a scream if things weren't just so. He was a complex individual. If you did something he didn't like, he would chew your ass out right then. Even if you were in front of the president. No matter who it was, he would come down on you. There was no such thing as ‘We'll talk later.' He made no distinction between his housekeeper or me, the manager. Or the band. The band would piss themselves when he walked into the room. With him, you listened. You didn't debate with him. You'd be wasting your time trying to convince him of something anyway. Everybody was in the same bag with him.”

“So who was the second person?” I ask.

He spins the web a bit more for a while, then says, “The other one was a businessperson. But he wasn't that great a businessperson. He admitted that. He said he was about sixty percent entertainer and forty percent business. And then the other one was he could be a demon when he wanted to be. Yeah, he could be mean and devious. He could go from a smile to a scream if things weren't just so.”

He is seated at the table now, fiddling with his hands a moment, thinking. “Very complicated. But he never forgot where he was from. He'd say, ‘Mr. Bobbit, don't forget where you're from.' Even when he met other entertainers on the road, he'd ask 'em, ‘When's the last time you been home?' ”

He shifts uncomfortably, opening and closing mental doors, running out of good stories to tell, maybe. Which doors to open? Which to keep shut? Talking to Bobbit is like interviewing a live dinosaur at a museum someplace and asking it what it ate last. It's not worried about last night's meal. It's the next meal that counts. He's part of a disappearing breed: America's soul-music wheelers and dealers. These guys—and most were guys, although Gladys Hampton, wife of Lionel Hampton, was as clever and shrewd a businesswoman as you could meet—know where every skeleton is buried. They know every secret. And they never tell. In many ways, Bobbit fits that mold to a T.

Though he doesn't sing or dance, he's named as a co-writer on several Brown songs, mostly minor hits. America's music-publishing catalogs are loaded with managerial types listed as co-writers—Duke Ellington's manager, Irving Mills, is listed as co-author on a number of Duke's most famous hits, and Mills, as far as I know, is famous as a manager—whereas the great gay composer Billy Strayhorn had a much larger hand in the creation of Duke's music. But the truth is, Duke could never have climbed the greasy pole of success without Mills, who was said to be among the first to integrate blacks and whites on the bandstand in New York going back to the 1920s. Talent is just dessert in the ear-candy business anyway. It's about who can stand the ride, the merry-go-round that forces you to toss off self-esteem, decency, and morality and pull out your gun on the competition—beat 'em down with the barrel instead of killing 'em outright, then pick them up afterward and say, “Get up, let's do it again.” A life of making ear candy can kill off every dream you ever had. The old record guys in Brown's life—Henry Stone in Miami, Ben Bart of Universal Music, Charles Bobbit—are old survivors in a game of musical chairs that often doesn't end well for everyone. It's a game of unwritten rules that they all understood and cared about: Fresh fruit. Old fruit. Bad fruit. Good fruit. Sell it if you can, because if you don't, the next guy will, and if the feds come knocking asking about payola to DJs, or if some lawyer with shiny shoes shows up asking for money, just remind that joker that he's probably got a can tied to his tail, too, that will rattle from here to the FCC or some Senate subcommittee hearing if he tries to make too much noise about you. Everybody in the record business has secrets, but the most obvious one is the hardest for musicians to accept: there's talent everywhere. I remember having lunch years ago with a legendary record executive in LA, bending his ear about a great unsigned singer I knew. The guy listened, nodded, yawned, reached for his triple-decker sandwich, and took a bite. “Great singers,” he said between chews, “are a dime a dozen.”

In that regard, Bobbit is a blend of General Patton and Gumby. You can bend him this way and that way, stretch him like a rubber band, put him in a headlock and give him a noogie, threaten him with jail even, but he will not talk in any direction he doesn't want to. He's a witness to more black history than most will ever see. He was a member of the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 at the old 116th and Lenox Headquarters in Harlem in 1953, when two promising young ministers, Malcolm X and Minister Louis Farrakhan—a respected musician himself—came on board. Malcolm X was the renegade who left the Nation and was murdered on February 21, 1965, in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom. Farrakhan—a calypso singer and also violinist—remained. Bobbit knew them both and never speaks of either. He was with James Brown back in the sixties, when everyone from the Black Panthers to the mobsters tried to push in on the James Brown Revue. No dice. Brown staved them off with payoffs, favors, concerts, and a willingness to fight back with a loyal crew, of which Bobbit was both lieutenant and soldier. Bobbit even took one in the face for Brown in a 1970s payola scheme involving Brown and Frankie Crocker, a legendary DJ out of WBLS in New York City. Bobbit admitted to having given Crocker $6,500 to play Brown's records. It cost Bobbit thousands in legal fees and two years' probation to get out of what was then a widespread practice in the record business.

I am curious about that one, and I ask Bobbit, “Did Mr. Brown help you after you took the hit for him?”

Bobbit smiles. The smile drips to the floor. “That's another story for another time,” he says. Another time, of course, will never come. Instead, he reels off the story of a fortune-teller who predicted his future, saying he would never go to jail after taking the hit for Brown during the trial. “Everything she said came true,” he says. “Thanks to God, Allah, Jehovah. Whatever you want to call it. I came out clean.”

Mention Bobbit's name to some of the old Brown band members, and the air in the room thickens. Their smiles move sideways, floating from left to right, aimless, like a drop of olive oil floating on a plate of water. They were friends. All part of the same troop. All shared the same hardship—“working for Mr. Brown”—all part of the plantation, so to speak. But Bobbit was both friend and hatchet man, jobs that in Brown's later years fell to Buddy Dallas and David Cannon. The legal case that nearly destroyed those two men also took a good swipe at the career of South Carolina attorney Adele Pope, an experienced and respected probate attorney and the only female lawyer of prominence in the case. But Bobbit, who was as close to James Brown as anyone in this world, walked away relatively unscathed. It was Brown's last gift to him. “Mr. Brown told me before he died, ‘I know you wonder, out of all the things we said to each other, why I didn't make you a trustee or something like that. I'm gonna tell you: I don't want you involved in that. When I die, it's going to be a big, big mess. If you were there, they're gonna put you in the middle of it and a lot of the blame is going to fall on you. It's going to take ten years or more before they straighten it out because they don't know how. And the reason they don't know how is they don't know Mr. Brown.' ”