Traveling Soul (41 page)

In Craig's eyes, Johnny had a point. “Curtis couldn't write music down,” he says. “So, he wasn't going to orally translate those harmonies or those hits. You can listen to it and tell this is some big-band arranger putting this down. So, really, after all the things those two had done like brothers in the past, it shouldn't have been a problem. That was just a poor way of doing something, as far as I'm concerned.”

That was how my father had always done business, though, and that was how he'd keep doing it. Even near the end of his life, in an interview for the album's twenty-fifth anniversary, he framed the debate on his terms. “Most arrangers that I have used in the past will come in with their own contributions, but I was always careful to make changes and be assured that the music was still mine and there was no conflict
in the music that was arranged against the basic rhythm pattern in the song itself,” he said. “There's a Curtis Mayfield song that really has no singing or lyrics, which is called ‘Think' from the
Super Fly
album that I especially appreciate when I listen to it. My art and my creativities were totally something that was of my own heart and mind. I could never let anybody dictate to me what I should write and how I would write it.” Sharing writing credit would have meant sharing revenues, and Curtis had toiled his whole career to avoid that. As a result, he and Johnny would never work together again.

After Johnny left, Dad suffered another major split when Eddie sold his share of Curtom. Eddie had wanted out since Marv began angling for control in the late '60s. Now, the label Eddie worked so hard to help start was out of his hands for good. The record stickers still read Curtom, but for all intents and purposes, it had become CurtMarv. Marv lived on the North Side, and he'd already convinced my father to move the Curtom offices to a building at 5915 N. Lincoln Avenue—a more convenient location for him. Eddie planned to stay on the South Side. Thus, the split took on physical and emotional dimensions.

Eddie remembers those times with customary grace and good nature, saying, “I knew Curtis needed to stand on his own. I had to stand on my own too … You have to roll your sleeves up and say, ‘Hey, Eddie Thomas, let's get busy. Let's start doing things.' That's what I did. I said, let me get busy and do my thing. I can do something. I'm not just relying upon anybody else's talent. We all got something to offer. You don't hold grudges.”

The split took a toll on them both, though, and their relationship wouldn't mend for years. My mother is more candid about what went on behind the scenes. “I saw some changes when [Curtis] went from Eddie Thomas as the business partner to Marv Stuart,” she says.

They brought [Eddie's wife] Audrey and I in it. When Eddie and Curtis fell out, they didn't want us to speak. We had to sneak to
speak and make phone calls. “Oh, he's coming in! Hang up!” Like that. Everything was behind the scenes because they weren't friends anymore. They had severed their business ties. I was upset about that. I mean, this is your friend, how could you do that? And now you want me to ignore and not speak, because you and Eddie are not speaking anymore? I didn't like that.

There again emerged the cold side Tracy spoke of. It was a business decision, and Dad knew how to separate his heart from his business. Even though few understood why he trusted Marv, it felt like the right choice to him. My mother tried to explain his reasoning, saying, “Marv Hyman, that was a Jewish name, so of course he had more connections. I did say something to [Curtis] and he said, ‘Well Eddie can't, you know, he's black! He's still trying to get a little crack in the door, but Marv can open the door. And he can get better deals.'”

In my father's defense, like Priest and Freddie, he was forced into a rigged situation that left him few choices. Radio had opened up some since the Impressions' early days, and segregation was dead at least where the law was concerned, but America remained a racist, segregated country in almost every station of life. My father grew tired of beating his head against that wall. With the massive success of his first few Curtom projects, he had reason to believe he'd made the right decision.

The
Super Fly
soundtrack continued that massive success. It dropped a month before the movie and shot to the top of the R&B chart. It was an odd way to orchestrate a release, but a canny move in this case. Making a blaxploitation film came with tremendous obstacles, and the massive pre-publicity from the soundtrack helped overcome them. Fenty and Shore had that in mind when they handed my father the script in New York. They knew working with one of the hottest artists in the world would help them secure backing, and as Dad wrote and cut the soundtrack, Fenty got that backing. He went to Nate Adams, who owned an employment business in Harlem. Adams said, “I had a good picture
of what was happening on the streets, as well as what was happening in the business world.” He signed on.

Fenty also had producer Sig Shore on his side. He said, “Sig was ideal for this. He knew the market. He knew how to get things done. He knew how to hustle, how to put together an independent project with no money.” Shore received money from two black dentists that lived in his neighborhood. Gordon Parks Sr. also pitched in roughly $5,000. “It was really a struggle from the very beginning,” Shore said.

One struggle was overcome easily—casting the lead role. Fenty went to his friend Ron O'Neal, who was trained as a Shakespearean stage actor. It went without saying that
Super Fly
was not Shakespeare, but O'Neal felt a connection to Priest. He had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment on the West Side of New York and recognized himself in the script the same way my father did. “He really understood what that part was all about,” Shore said.

They overcame another struggle with help from an unexpected place. In need of a superfly hog—the sweet street-hustler car they felt a character like Priest would drive—Adams serendipitously ran into a real-life pimp with just such a ride. “I can remember sitting in the shoeshine parlor in the Theresa Towers, and a gentleman pulled up with this black Cadillac El Dorado with these big headlights,” Adams recalled. “This gentleman walked in, and he was slick as he wanted to be. A guy by the name of KC. He sat down next to me on the rack, I'm getting my shoes shined, you know, so I go, ‘Hey, man, that's a bad ride. We thinkin' about doing a movie, and I'd like to maybe let them look at your car to use in the movie.' So, he gave me his number. It took me three weeks to get in touch with him. Consequently, when we finally talked, he said, ‘Man, ain't no niggas makin' no movies. You jeffin' me?'”

After Adams convinced him, KC let them use his car, which features heavily in the film. Fenty decided he wanted more than just the car, though. “We said, ‘Let's put KC in the picture,' because KC was wonderful,” Fenty said. “When we ran out of money, KC would just,
[snaps fingers]
, ‘Buy 'em some food.' He would buy food, he had his own wardrobe, and he knew what to say.”

Even so, production difficulties haunted the actors and crew. “When you shoot a picture like this, you're very flexible,” Fenty said. “If you can't get in someplace, or if you get thrown off of a corner, you can't just fold it and wait for tomorrow. You got to find something else you can get.” Adams recalled, “We didn't have anything but raw bones and guts. We didn't have the luxury of saying, ‘We can shoot this scene over.'” They didn't have the luxury of a professional wardrobe, either, so most of what the actors wore onscreen came from their own closets, or from Adams's bevy of fly vines.

After Warner Brothers agreed to back the film, they held a sneak preview in Westwood, a predominately white California neighborhood. Reviews came back tepid at best, and Warner Brothers threatened to back out. They were, after all, taking a chance on backing such a movie. Shore wheedled, saying, “What the hell did you expect in that theatre? This is a white-bread town.” As he recalled, “The next picture they screened it with was with
Shaft
at the Fox Theatre in Philadelphia. Of everybody that came out, they were all raves.”

Spurred on by my father's music, the movie caused a fracas when it opened in New York in August 1972. “We decided we would go down and watch the lines for the movie,” Fenty recalled. “They ran out of tickets, and there was still a lot of line left. Somebody went around the side of the building, and they broke the door open. You saw this mass of people with police trying to stop them breaking into the theatre trying to see this movie. That was a very, very high moment for Gordon and myself. That was our little picture, and people were actually breaking into the movies to see it.”

Super Fly
briefly knocked off
The Godfather
as the highest-grossing movie in the country, and it was the third-highest grossing film of 1972. Dad took Tracy, Sharon, and me to the movie's premiere in Chicago. Even though I was only six years old, I still remember the excitement and electricity in the air. I had seen many of the scenes on video while he was in the process of making the soundtrack, but seeing it on the big screen with the score made it seem bigger than life. Obviously,
Super Fly
wasn't meant for a young audience, but I believe Dad was so proud of his accomplishment that he wanted to share it with us.

While the movie follows a pusher trying to escape street life, beneath the surface, it is about the same things my father had been singing about since “The Other Side of Town” and “Underground”: the dynamics of power—who has it, who needs it, who is denied it.

The movie has a strong moral center. At the end, Priest wins through intelligence and cunning, not violence—although he did give the cops a good beat down before driving off with his life, woman, and money intact. As my father noted, “In all the films at that time black people were portrayed as pimps and whores, who usually got ripped off at the end.
Superfly
had enough mind to get out of all that, and let the authorities know that he saw through their games.” In other words, unlike every other movie, this time the black man won.

Crowds loved it. Critics did not. They'd fallen hard for
Super Fly
the album, but a furor erupted over
Super Fly
the movie. The
Times
of London said, “You could find more black power in a coffee bean.” Vernon Jarrett, a black reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
, called it a “sickening and dangerous screen venture,” going on to say,

In real life, white biggie Warner Brothers and white producer Sig Shore and black writer Phillip Fenty and black director Gordon Parks, Jr. got themselves together and are selling to the black community a cinema brand of cocaine designed to appeal to the same people that are the targets of the hard-drug traffic. The truth is—ain't nobody stuck anything to the man.

Tony Brown, dean of Howard University's School of Communication, said in a
Newsweek
cover story, “The blaxploitation films are a phenomenon of self-hate. Look at the image of
Superfly
. Going to see yourself as a drug dealer when you're oppressed is sick. Not only are blacks identifying with him, they're paying for the identification. It's sort of like a Jew paying to get into Auschwitz.”