Traveling Soul (38 page)

As soon as the album hit the streets, so did he. The band played the usual places, including a date at the Apollo in September. They also did something my father had never done before—perform with a live orchestra. At a show in Dallas, the seventy-piece Dallas Symphony backed him, providing what must have been a jaw-dropping performance.

He also toured Europe again with John's help. Throughout the trip he exchanged letters with my mother, and he found himself in the agonizing position of trying to save his relationship from across the sea. Though he'd gotten serious with his new girlfriend Toni, he still hadn't accepted losing Diane.

Preparing to come home, he composed one final letter to my mother. In it, he poured his passion into beautifully poetic passages; he made passive aggressive threats, then backed off with conciliatory words; he played the part of a spurned lover, though he never remained faithful; he slipped in guilt trips. Then, as if unsure that his message had gotten through, he added a passive aggressive ultimatum, signed with only his initials. In all, he sounded like a desperate man trying every tactic he can think of to keep his woman by his side—which he was. He wrote:

Dearest,

Tho I slept well last night all the way thru until about six my mind was once again fallen to the thought of yourself and I. I want so badly to call you but realizing it to be late you wouldn't understand … Not seeing you as I would like to, I am afraid that we are now entirely beyond each other. I have seen nothing more than friendly gestures of intention toward me as you would do any male friend … At this moment I am very tense partly from fear that your tender statements of love to me in the past week may truly be what you want, feeling that it is right. And yet you still seem resistant as in what you really want. You have said these things many times before. I have found you not to be sure really as to what you want where I may be concerned. As you have always said, actions speak louder than words …

I am very happy that you won't receive this letter until you have come back from your trip. Altho this is very intimate to me I am sure you will find reasons to share this letter with your companion. It is good to know that you have someone whom you enjoy spending your life and time with. I wish not to interfere, just unhappy that I don't play a part of such confidence and intimacy of you two. But maybe this is a blessing to both of us in disguise. In the letter prior to this one I tried not to be too mushy with words of love knowing that is really not your bag and not wanting to sound like I'm rapping.

I have been very sincere with my feelings for you and of you, and have often said times before that I want you and ours together.
That has not been the wish of both of us and decisions have been most permanent and clearly stated. Have you come to change your mind? How do you come to say your love when you often stated having no feelings at all as well as having clearly shown me that I am not needed? How do you look upon me? Diane, surely not as a companion, lover, buddy, nor really a friend. Then what am I needed for in your life? What is there you want that I may be able to give you other than financial support?

Without love there can be nothing else, although through loving you I have wanted to give of myself in every possible way but you have turned me out to deal with my needs and desires of love, only from the streets. I am sorry to say that Mrs. Diane Mayfield has truly become Miss Diane Mayfield as to your preference. But I have no love from the latter. It is not in me anymore to have to buy of love, companion[ship], and intimacy. The price is much too high. As always love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. It is not necessary for you to come to Atlanta as I do not wish to be part of your summer fun tour only to see it die come fall when the need of warmth shall truly prove upon us. Before there is anything more let us truly find the respect that has been lost. Only then can there be a true happiness …

Always,

Curtis

This is my final proposal of love and life with the two of us. As the years are rapidly moving I am eager to build all that has been torn down with or without—CM.

He'd have to go without. It stung, but like always, he had piles of work waiting for him when he got home in December. He planned on producing two new Curtom artists—Patty Miller and Ruby Jones—and he also had begun writing the next Impressions album.

Curtom also had its sights on the singer, playwright, musical writer, actor, and movement activist Oscar Brown Jr. Dad kicked around the
idea of writing a musical with him. It never happened—Dad was over-committed already, including an upcoming trip to Europe in January to appear at the MIDEM Festival in Cannes, France. “With me running cross country we figured we might be overloading,” he said.

Though the Brown deal fell through, Curtom had cobbled together Baby Huey's attempts at making an album, resulting in the posthumous
The Baby Huey Story
. Ruby Jones also put out her self-titled debut album, on which she covered my father's “Stone Junkie.” At the same time, several other Curtom releases were selling at a fast pace, including a single released in July of the previous year by Moses Dillard and the Tex-Town Display, featuring a young Peabo Bryson. That single, “I've Got to Find a Way (to Hide My Hurt),” sold a quarter million copies.

Everything was working. Curtom was flush with money.

After Dad finished touring
Roots
, his feelings on the album changed, due in equal part to his mercurial nature and his insatiable need to create something new and better. “It's sort of funny,” he said, “but I guess as a writer I have to be a good critic as well and though I am pleased with it and people tell me they feel it's one of the better things I've done, I kinda feel I would like to try it one more time and come up with something fresher and stronger. But that's just the way I work, I have to keep on writing so by the time the album was out some of the stuff seemed stale to me.”

Roots
was old news. He'd thrown himself into rehearsing new songs for the Impressions. While at Fred's house one day, he gave an interviewer a taste of what to expect, saying, “We're working on several new things, new ideas and concepts for a fresh new album for the group. It will be a somewhat ‘down' album and the tunes will include timely things relating to what's happening around us as well as love tunes. There's another ‘Stop the War' song, which is nothing new and something everyone has already said, but I feel it's an important message; and there's a tune called ‘Potent Love' which I think might prove to be a single. It's a love song and a very tasteful track.”

With such constant writing, my father pulled off the staggering task of creating an entire record label's worth of music by himself. Perhaps he knew that no one could keep up such a workload forever, but for the time being, his songs gave him total control over the fate of his Curtom family, the same way they had given him control over his own fate and that of his actual family. After so many years of success, his decision to go solo had catapulted him to a level he'd never imagined.

As the label grew, so did Marv's influence. It remained a source of friction between Curtis and Eddie as they split further apart, their fifteen-year friendship and partnership fraying. “I told Curtis, ‘If we want Marv Stuart in our company, we could put him in here as an advisor, pay him what he earns, and leave it at that point so that we can watch everything that's going down,'” Eddie said. “But Marv had really done a job on Curtis—nothing I could say or do to change him.”

My father called a meeting with his two partners and said he wanted Marv to take over the day-to-day operations of the label and Eddie to handle promotions since that was his expertise. Dad would handle the creative side, as always. Eddie didn't like it one bit. He stared Marv dead in the eye and said, “I want you to buy me out of the company.”

It would take roughly a year before my father cut ties with Eddie, but everyone knew Marv had won the battle. Marv had an advantage over Eddie beyond his white skin—he knew girls who liked to party. “I heard they liked threesomes,” my mother says. “And you know, they were getting high. Marv along with Curtis. They both smoked pot and snorted cocaine. So, who knows what they did? I don't really; I was never there. [Curtis] was too trusting of people. If they said, ‘We got you covered,' come bring some girls in, they have a party, he forgot about the business.”

In such a way, my father went deeper into trusting the wrong people—accountants, employees, “friends.” He knew someone was doing something wrong when the IRS began hounding him again. This time, they wanted more than his Webcor tape recorder. He owned a building with Marv in Berwyn, Illinois, which he had to sell to pay off the government.

“He didn't want to listen to me about a lot of things,” my mother says. “I knew someone that was stealing from him, and I told him, and he said unless I told him who told me he was just going to let him steal. Someone would call me and say, ‘You need to tell Curtis to watch out for so-and-so because he knows how to steal the money from him,' and Curtis, you know, he could have a whole lot of money and leave it there, go leave the building, and he doesn't know, it might be $5,000 in there, and then when he came back, it might be $4,200. And I would tell him, but he didn't listen to me.” Again, for all his business acumen and obsession with owning himself, my father often acted directly against his own interests.

Even though they had separated, my parents stayed in each other's lives, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Once, when Dad went over to visit, a man called the house for my mother. Tracy answered the phone, but when Dad found out it was another man, he snatched the phone and hung up. Then, he stormed into the bathroom, where my mother had just finished bathing Sharon, and started screaming. He pulled my sister out of the tub, knocked my mother down between the wall and the toilet, and kicked her. “I had a huge bruise on my thigh,” my mother says.

It wasn't the only time he used physical violence. My mother recalls, “Another time when I wanted to do something, he wouldn't, and I think Kenny was there that time, and he punched me in my stomach. I started to call the police, you know, have him arrested, and Kenny asked me not to.”

It's hard to know what was going on in my father's mind during those times. He was not a violent man by nature, but he was under incredible pressure and experimenting with mood-altering drugs—a dangerous proposition for a man who could shift into a foul disposition at a moment's notice, even when sober. There was no excusing his actions, and he didn't try. It wasn't the last time he'd use violence to control a woman, either.

Within the previous two years, my father had entered uncharted territory in every aspect of his life. He moved far from his relationships
with Fred, Sam, Eddie, and my mother, and grew close to people who didn't have his best interests at heart. But at the same time, he had never been more successful. And he now lived and worked on his own terms. As the year ended, Eddie saw where things were headed. He made plans to sell his share of Curtom while Marv lured my father into moving the studio to the North Side of Chicago.