Defying the Southern racial turmoil, instead of staying at the Negro hotel in Shreveport, the Royal, Sam booked his party into the Holiday Inn, only to find upon arrival that his rooms weren’t ready. Exhausted and not ready to put up a fight, Sam told off the clerk and left, and had just gotten to the Royal when five cop cars pulled up and arrested the entire party. The New York Times ran the news under the headline NEGRO BAND LEADER HELD IN SHREVEPORT, and went on to report that Cooke had been arrested for disturbing the peace after trying to register at a white motel. Press about the incident helped secure Sam’s reputation in the civil rights movement. Sam was reading books on African history and spending time with Black Muslim leader Malcolm X and one of his followers, Cassius Clay—soon to become Muhammad Ali. Angered by the discrimination in the music industry, Sam bankrolled a recording studio for emerging black talent, calling it “Soul Station #1,” and planned on opening several more around the country.
Bob Dylan’s gentle protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind” made Sam realize that he could share his activist views with his music, and despite its sorrowful tone, his self-proclaimed “civil rights” song, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” was his announcement heralding that change. At its heart, “Change” is a gospel song, a fervent message of hope—even though Sam admits it’s been “a long time coming” and he doesn’t know what’s “beyond the sky.” When the song had to be trimmed for a single release, Sam’s most poignant lyrics about going downtown and being told not “to hang around” were cut out. He had to live with it.
Sam sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” at his June 1964 show at the Copacabana nightclub, blending the coming changes easily into his breezy, sophisticated style. The show, an unqualified success, was recorded for RCA, and Sam Cooke at the Copa would remain on the charts for over a year. Sam had done it again—opened the doors for soul music to reach a higher-paying, mainstream (black and white) audience.
After a lot of touring early in the year, Sam spent most of the rest of 1964 in Los Angeles, working on “Shake,” the last of four singles for RCA that year, and preparing At the Copa for release. He screen-tested for Twentieth Century-Fox (for The Cincinnati Kid) and the talk was good. But by year’s end, his relationship with Barbara was severely strained, and he was having problems with his manager, Allen Klein. Sam told S. R. Crain that he had “found out something” and was planning on getting out of his contract with Klein. He had already made an appointment to meet with Steven Hill, who would later manage Marvin Gaye.
On December 10 Sam had dinner with friends at Martoni’s, a showbiz restaurant in Hollywood. He was seemingly in a good mood, talking about a blues album he wanted to start work on, when an acquaintance arrived with an attractive Eurasian girl. Sam excused himself and paid for the drinks, and his friends noticed that, as usual, he had a huge sum of money in his wallet (“several thousand dollars”). Sam didn’t return for his main course, and when the couple left Martoni’s, they saw him sitting in a booth, talking intimately with the Eurasian woman. Said the friend, “The picture in my mind at the moment was, “‘Oh, this is somebody he knows.’” Sam told another friend that he would meet him at PJ’s, a nightclub a few miles away, at one o’clock. He never got there. Instead, he took the Eurasian girl, Lisa Boyer, to the Hacienda Motel on Figueroa Street, paid the three-dollar charge, signed his own name to the register, and went into the motel room with Boyer.
Twenty minutes later he was slouched in the motel office’s doorway, bleeding profusely, wearing only an overcoat and one shoe. His brand-new red Ferrari was idling in the parking lot, but Sam Cooke was dead.
When the police arrived at 2:35 A.M., the motel’s manager, Bertha Franklin, told them that the half-naked man had banged on her door, shouting, “You got my girl in there!” She said he then broke the door down, grabbed her by the wrists, and they tumbled to the floor. “He fell on top of me,” she said, “ … biting, scratching, and everything … . I run and grabbed the gun off the TV, and I shot … at close range … three times.” Bertha Franklin said that Sam’s last words were, “Lady, you shot me!” Even after the bullet tore into Sam’s heart, she said he kept coming at her, “so I got this stick and hit him with that. In the head …”
Lisa Boyer had called the police at about the time Sam was shot. They found her in a phone booth a half a block away and took the twenty-two-year-old in for questioning. She said she had met Sam that evening at a dinner party and he had offered her a ride home but instead had kidnapped her and taken her to the Hacienda Motel. “He dragged me into that room … . He pulled my sweater off, and he ripped my dress off … . I knew that he was going to rape me.” When Sam went to the bathroom, Boyer said that she grabbed her clothes and ran out of the room, and that it was just an accident that Sam’s clothes had gotten entangled with hers. Later Sam’s family testified at the inquest that his wallet was missing, and it was never found.
The body was taken to the County Medical Examiner’s, where an autopsy showed that Sam’s judgment might have been affected by the 0.14 level of alcohol in his blood. Then he was taken to the morgue and placed in crypt nineteen.
The late Sam Cooke, wearing only an overcoat and one shoe—the ignominious demise of a legend. (UPI/BETTMANN)
The coroner’s report showing Sam Cooke’s fatal gunshot wounds. (ADAM W. WOLF)
S. R. Crain was indignant. “That’s where you put people who ain’t got nowhere to go!” he fumed. “You wouldn’t put a man like Sam Cooke in the morgue!” But Barbara had been sedated after hearing the dreadful news and was in no shape to handle anything. Sam’s body hadn’t been claimed. She asked Crain to take care of it, and he called People’s Funeral Home in Los Angeles.
Sam Cooke had a double funeral. Thousands of stricken mourners viewed the body in L.A. before it was taken to Chicago so the Reverend Charley Cook and his wife, Annie May, could say goodbye to their son. So many people attended the ceremony that it took police forty minutes to escort the Cook family to their front-row pews. Many of Sam’s musical contemporaries turned up to show their respects. Cassius Clay was among the mourners and later voiced his feelings: “I don’t like the way he was shot. I don’t like the way it was investigated. If Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, or Ricky Nelson, the FBI would be investigating yet, and that woman [Mrs. Franklin] would have been sent to prison.” Sam’s body was flown back to Los Angeles for the final funeral rites. Outside the Mount Sinai Baptist Church, hawkers sold photographs of Sam in his coffin in Chicago, as throngs of weeping fans crowded into the service, where Lou Rawls and Ray Charles sang heavenly songs for their dear departed friend. As Ray Charles was led down the aisle, he stopped to place his hands on Sam’s casket, tears streaming down his face. Sam was buried at Forest Lawn under a small bronze plaque:
SAM COOKE
I LOVE YOU
1930–1964
UNTIL THE DAY BREAK
AND THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY
A lovely sentiment, but somehow somebody got the year of Sam’s birth (1935) wrong. A lot of things were wrong. People who had been to the funeral talked of seeing the young singer Bobby Womack wearing Sam’s clothes that day, and less than two months after the death of her husband, Barbara Cooke announced her engagement to the twenty-year-old SAR recording star.
One month after Sam’s death Lisa Boyer (a.k.a Crystal Chan Young, Jasmine Jay, and Elsie Nakama), who claimed Sam Cooke had kidnapped and tried to rape her, was charged with prostitution. In 1979 she was found guilty of shooting her boyfriend dead and went to prison. Nobody knows where Lisa/Crystal/Jasmine/Elsie is today. According to unconfirmed reports, the motel manager Bertha Franklin, who was awarded thirty thousand dollars from Sam’s estate for “battery,” died in Michigan a year and a half after shooting him through the heart.
Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) pays his last respects to his friend Sam Cooke. (UPI/BETTMANN)
After a brief inquest during which Sam was depicted as a drunken Negro in a rage, the coroner deemed that the shoot
ing of Sam Cooke was “justifiable homicide.” It didn’t seem to matter that the kidnapper/rapist had signed his own—very famous—name to the register. Or that his ID, credit cards, and money had never been found. And what happened to the ring he had been wearing? Why hadn’t anyone staying in the motel heard any gunshots? Nobody was buying the story. But very close confidants feel that Sam had been a victim of his own dangerous habits. Though some wondered why the successful, debonair singer was found in such a seedy neighborhood, pal Johnny Morisette said that he and Sam often frequented the Sands nightclub on Figueroa, also confirming that Sam had a penchant for hookers and knew the Hacienda Motel “very, very well.”
Some friends speculate that Lisa Boyer was a prostitute (Bertha Franklin testified that, upon his arrival at the motel, Sam’s tie was loose and his shirttails were hanging out of his pants). According to their version, when Sam went into the motel bathroom, Lisa may have stolen his clothes and made a run for it. When he realized what had happened, a bit drunk, his temper hot, Sam went straight to the motel office, broke down the door, and demanded to see the girl who had fled. Then the fifty-five-year-old manager grabbed her gun off the TV set and pulled the trigger three times. According to that version, Lisa Boyer probably invented the kidnap/rape story to avoid questions about what happened in the motel room, wantonly leaving Sam Cooke’s reputation supremely and forever tarnished.
Newspaper, TV, and radio reports relayed the cops’ version of the events: that Negro singer Sam Cooke, raging drunk and half naked, had kidnapped and tried to rape twenty-two-year-old Lisa Boyer and was killed in self-defense by the motel manager after he wrestled her to the floor.
Allen Klein told the Los Angeles Times that he never accepted Lisa Boyer’s story. “I was prepared to fight, and asked Barbara if she would like me to keep going on it,” he said. “She asked, ‘Will it bring him back? Will it get him out of the room with that woman?’ I told her no. She said, ‘I have two children, and I don’t want to put them through this.’ So the investigation was stopped.” Klein, who later, for a time, managed the Rolling Stones and the Beatles before falling out with both bands, said that he will produce a movie, revealing his theory of how Sam Cooke was killed.
Four months after Bobby Womack married Barbara Cooke, the couple went to Chicago for the wedding of Sam’s niece and were confronted by Sam’s very angry brother Charles. According to the newspapers, there was a heated argument about Sam’s belongings, and somehow Barbara’s gun was produced and Charles used it to pistol-whip the newlyweds. To this day Charles says he has no regrets about the incident. Less than six years later the Womacks divorced, and Barbara is now living very comfortably on Sam’s royalties.
Sam’s old gospel friends feel that Sam was punished for his sinful lifestyle. “When Sam was killed,” said Bobby Womack, “there were those who said, ‘He thought he got away but God waited on him.’ I said, ‘Man, God don’t do people like that—not this kind of God I know. They do it to themselves.’”
Sam Cooke, the soul-stirring preacher’s son, spent his time on earth touching hearts with his voice, creating music that was joyously color-blind. He was a student of black history, a civil rights activist who boldly faced oppression. It’s also said that he succumbed to late-night trysts and temptations, gave in to his “earthly desires,” and wound up paying for it with his life. But after he died, society’s dichotomy between spirituality and sexuality crucified Sam again. A double funeral for a double death.
Despite his tainted reputation, Sam Cooke’s music will live forever. I know in my heart that he has found his place “beyond the sky” and that his Lord has forgiven him, body and soul.
MARVIN GAVE
Sexual Healing
Tragically ahead of his time, and locked in a bitter, bloody battle between his shattered soul and his overpowering sexuality, Marvin Gaye spoke to Jesus Christ as if his Savior were hanging out in the studio while he blatantly sang sexual praises: “Let’s Get It On,” “You Sure Love to Ball,” and “Sanctified Pussy” (“Some girls suck/Some don’t dare/Some girls fuck/Some don’t care …”). It seems Madonna and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince have found a way to integrate sex and the soul, but Marvin was tortured and taunted the Lord with his endless wicked transgressions. Jesus said, “It is done unto you as you believe,” and Marvin Gaye believed he was a sinner like no other.
Brought up in a poor area of Washington, D.C., in a very strict, traditional church called the House of God, where his father was a minister, Marvin Pentz Gay, Jr., was singing to Jesus in his high, sweet falsetto at the age of three. Services were often held in the Gay home, where women weren’t allowed to show their arms or their hair, much less wear makeup, nylons, or nail polish. There was no television set, no movies, no dancing. From Friday night to Sunday morning, the four Gay children were cut off from the rest of the world, expected only to worship the Lord.
I met with Marvin’s younger brother, Frankie, also a beautiful singer—a sensitive, sweet, sad-faced replica of Marvin who has his own recollections. “We knew that being Seventh Day Adventists, we were going to church on the seventh day [Saturday], which to us was the right day, but you have to explain this over and over again to people in order to feel normal. People looked at us as being very abnormal. Marvin and I understood each other, where a lot of people didn’t. We were very close.” I ask Frankie if he sang in church with Marvin. “As children we all had to do something in church. It was one of my father’s rules. Me and Marvin found it better to sing because the rewards were greater. A lot of hugs and ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful!’ We were a dancing, shouting church. Our belief was ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ We used to go to church three or four times a week.” Frankie sighs. “I think too much church for any child will have an effect, and because Father was a minister, we were under ‘What you do reflects on me.’ That always stayed with us. We couldn’t do the things that other people do. What we did reflected on his teachings, his discipline. He was very effective in teaching us right from wrong.”
The fear of God was instilled early, but young Marvin feared his earthly father far more than he feared the one safely tucked away in heaven. Marvin Sr.—“Father”—beat his sons unmercifully for the slightest bit of imagined defiance, while his long-suffering wife, Alberta, spent a lot of time down on her knees, begging God to stop the continuous torment. All the children had bed-wetting problems, and a damp mattress inflamed Father to madness. After insisting that they disrobe, he would whip his naked kids until he could see the welts rise.
Because he was unable to please him, the only attention Marvin could get from his stern, moody Father was negative, so he started to provoke the violence, challenging the older Gay at every turn. But Frankie doesn’t feel Marvin was overly defiant. “I don’t think he rebelled consciously. He was more of a dreamer. It was an unconscious rebellion.” Years later Marvin would insist that Father enjoyed the beatings he doled out and relished the fear he created within his children, saying it was like “living with a very peculiar, changeable, cruel, and all-powerful king.” The Jesus that Father believed in demanded sacrifice that he wasn’t able to give. Marvin Sr. loathed his own weakness and took it out on his family.
Father’s “peculiarity” was that, in private, he enjoyed wearing women’s clothing, often stepping into Alberta’s panties, shoes, gowns, and nylon hose. Sometimes he wore his hair long and wavy, sometimes he wore wigs. He rarely worked, spending most of his time at home while his wife left at five every morning for her job as a domestic. “Among the many sins I got from Father,” said Marvin, “is a love of loafing.” The neighborhood kids, sensing something strange about the effeminate Gay Sr., called him a sissy, the ultimate insult. But instead of challenging the attackers, young Marvin ran for his life, mortally ashamed. He would later attach an “e” to Gay, but it wouldn’t stop people from adding an “is” in front of his name—“Is Marvin Gaye?” “Man, I can’t tell you,” said Marvin, “how many guys have asked me that.
”
In his biography Divided Soul by David Ritz, Marvin told the author that his fascination with women’s clothing had been handed down to him. “Sexually, men don’t interest me. But seeing myself as a woman is something that intrigues me. It’s also something I fear. I indulge myself only at the most discreet and intimate moments. Afterward I must bear the guilt and shame for weeks. After all, indulgence of the flesh is wicked, no matter what your kick. The hot stuff is lethal. I’ve never been able to stay away from the hot stuff.”
Motown’s golden boy. An early shot of Marvin Gaye. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/VENICE, CALIF.)
For someone who would become such a drooled-over object of desire, Marvin Gaye was an extremely shy teenager who felt devastating guilt about his constant masturbation, likening orgasm to “pleasures of the devil.” When Marvin entered Cardozo High School in 1953, Father was still giving him whippings, throwing him out of the house, threatening to disown him, calling him a “bum.” “I wanted to strike back,” said Marvin, “but where I come from, even to raise your hand to your father is an invitation for him to kill you.” Instead, Marvin’s “unconscious” rebellion increased: He started smoking Viceroy cigarettes and turned to doo-wop music as his deliverance, forming his first group, the D.C. Tones.
Believing school was a waste of time and afraid he would incur the wrath of Father if he failed, Marvin quit after the eleventh grade and joined the Air Force. But he soon found that seeking refuge in the service was a big mistake. Marvin had wanted to learn to fly but instead was stuck peeling potatoes in Kansas. He felt betrayed by his country and thought his superiors were “pompous assholes.” Coupled with an almost lethal lack of self-confidence was Marvin’s massive ego. He had huge dreams of stardom—of becoming the black Sinatra—and just wasn’t capable of taking orders. He faked crazy for a few months and finally got an honorable discharge (“Marvin Gay cannot adjust to regimentation and authority”). When I ask Frankie if Marvin’s troubles in the service led to his hatred of Uncle Sam, he balks. “I think ‘hate’ is very strong. My father taught us not to use that word. You can disagree with the government in certain areas, but I don’t think Marvin felt that this wasn’t the greatest country in the world, as far as opportunity.” Then Frankie admits, “Marvin did say, ‘It makes you want to holler, throw up both your hands.’”
Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon Page 16