He carried much of the same act to the Apollo the following week (minus tap, top hat, and cane), as yet another reviewer from Variety attested. The show, which also featured tap dancer Bunny Briggs, “blue” comedian Redd Foxx, and r&b ingenue Barbara McNair, was “one of the brightest and best-paced reviews the Harlem vaudery has had in a long time,” while Sam, “a sort of hip and modern [very much middle-of-the-road singer] Billy Daniels, has a lot of relaxed charm and some swinging special full band arrangements behind his agile and pleasing vocals,” of which both “Ol’ Man River” and “Summertime” were “outstanding.” At the end of the set, taking his cue from relaxed television personality Perry Como and going to what one might think unnecessary extremes to distinguish himself from an extroverted showman like Jackie Wilson, Sam sang a medley of his hits while “draped casually over [a] stool.”
From there it was on to the Flame in Detroit, where, despite the absence of any written record, it can be assumed that Sam did much the same show to very much the same response.
Then he flew in to Chicago, on Friday, October 9, to get married.
BARBARA APPEARED COMPLETELY CALM when she met him at the airport on Friday. Which was understandable because, as so often in her highly charged moments with Sam, she was stoned. She and Linda had arrived the day before and were staying at a hotel on Fiftieth overlooking the lake. Sam expressed his usual surprise at how well she was able to maintain her cool. For all of his so-called sophistication, he didn’t have a clue. He was so damned naive about certain things, she thought—but that was his problem. It was her secret, and she was going to keep it. They got their license at the county courthouse, and then Sam had her drive him downtown so he could pick up some presents for her: a mink stole, some jewelry, a wristwatch. He told her to circle the block while he collected his purchases, but this was one time her cool betrayed her, and she had been driving around aimlessly for nearly half an hour when Sam finally spotted her and whistled her down. Where had she been? he demanded. But she answered—still calmly—that she had just been following his directions and driving around.
The wedding on Sunday was everything she could ever have imagined. They all gathered at her grandmother’s house on Ellis Park: her sisters and their husbands, her mother and stepfather, Crain, Sam’s friends Duck and Sonny Vincent, their photographer friend from the Defender, Cleo Lyles, and all of Sam’s family. Her grandmother’s living room was filled with gladioli, Linda was practically jumping out of her skin with excitement, and Barbara felt good about herself for once. She was wearing a simple, fitted beige dress with a scoop-neck lace top to set off her beautiful new diamond choker, and her hair was done up in a neat bob with bangs that framed a pretty, oval face which was, at least today, wreathed in smiles.
Sam’s father gravely presided, and Sonny and Duck both stood up for him while Barbara’s twin sister, Beverly, was her best girl. Sam had had her diamond band specially made by Jess Rand’s jeweler in New York, and there was a lot of kidding among the men about how Sam wasn’t going to be able to tell the twins apart. But Sam told L.C. later that if this marriage didn’t work out, he would never marry again, he would just get seven women, give them all Cadillacs, “and be with whoever I want to be with”—and L.C. wasn’t sure that he was joking.
That night, they went to see Al Hibbler at one of the clubs on Sixty-third, and Hibbler introduced them from the stage as man and wife. Al got Sam to come up and sing with him, and then he had Sam bring Barbara up. “Man, she’s pretty,” the blind singer said as he felt the contours of her face. “Man, she’s real cute.” The next day, they flew back to California so that Barbara could continue fixing up the airy two-bedroom duplex she had found for them at 2704 West Forty-third Place, a few blocks from Leimert Park, just down from Baldwin Hills. It was the beginning of their new life together.
But if Barbara was expecting things to change in any fundamental way, she was immediately disappointed. Sam was at home for less than a week, and he was running around town attending to all kinds of business even then. His protracted struggle with Keen was about to come to a head. On September 23 the lawyer Jess Rand had recommended, Sam Reisman, had demanded a full accounting from Keen, and, in the absence of any meaningful response, he was about to sue to have Sam’s contract voided. Sam and Alex had already attempted to confront the company about songwriting and publishing royalties on their own. They went into John Siamas’ office to ask for their money, and Siamas told them he couldn’t pay. J.W. understood the company’s dilemma—once it became known that Sam was refusing to record for the label and that there were legal issues involved, there was no way to keep the distributors from concluding that, without any more Sam Cooke hits coming from Keen, there was no real incentive to pay. Nevertheless, as Alex saw it, the situation was not altogether lost until John Siamas treated Sam with the kind of disrespect that Art might have shown when, instead of dealing with the situation directly, he tried to put it off on his lawyer. “Sam just said, ‘Come on, Alex, let’s go.’ He said [to John Siamas], ‘You got an unhappy boy on your hands.’”
Before leaving town, Sam had told Barbara that if she needed anything, she should just get in touch with his manager. He spoke excitedly about plans for their future together, but mostly, it seemed to Barbara, he was talking either about their daughter or about her improving herself by going to college—which she just could not see. And then he was gone, just like he always was, playing “Achievement Day” (another redneck word for “Nigger Day”) at the Dallas State Fair on Monday, October 19, the same date that his lawyer formally brought the lawsuit against Keen.
BILLBOARD GAVE THE SOUL STIRRERS’ new SAR release a four-star review (“Fervent . . . moving”), and to the astonishment of nearly everyone except Sam and Alex, Alan Freed even played “Stand By Me Father” in the last days before the gathering rock ’n’ roll payola scandals forced him off the New York airwaves once and for all. A Top 40 station in Pittsburgh picked up on it, too. “Everybody thought it was Sam singing,” said J.W. “Johnnie sounded so close, and we [did nothing to] discourage the rumor, ’cause it could only help.”
Meanwhile, Jess seemed to have finally gotten Sam’s movie career off the ground. Earlier in the year, he had obtained an interview for Sam at Paramount. He was counting on Sam’s charm to win over the studio executive, and, before going in, suggested to Sam that he might cite “repertory work” in Chicago if he was quizzed about prior experience. Things were going fine until the guy started asking Sam questions about some of the roles he had played, and Sam just kept getting in deeper and deeper until finally, Jess said, “the man just looked at Sam and said, ‘You’ve never acted a day in your life, have you?’ And Sam looked back at him and said, ‘I’m doing it right now.’ We walked out of that place screaming and laughing!”
This time, there was a more satisfying dénouement, as Jess got Sam a supporting role in a Sammy Davis Jr. half-hour drama, “The Patsy,” which was scheduled to be broadcast on CBS’ Sunday-night General Electric Theater, hosted by Ronald Reagan, the following February. Sammy, who had gotten his first dramatic role on the same series just the year before, vouched for Sam. It was a role that offered few lines but a good deal of on-screen exposure in an ensemble piece set in an army barracks that had previously been done with an all-white cast. Sam never hesitated, though the fee came to only $500 and he knew there would be plenty of hard work involved. In fact, he was so enthusiastic that he leapt at Jess’ suggestion that they drive to Las Vegas so he could rehearse with Sammy, who was headlining at the Copa Room at the Sands for most of November.
Sammy, it turned out, didn’t have the same enthusiasm for rehearsal, and Sam was forced to chase him around in almost humiliating fashion, carrying his script in an otherwise empty briefcase and grabbing whatever time he could. Finally, in desperation, he suggested a breakfast meeting, but Sammy just gave him that big grin and said, “I don’t get up for breakfast, baby.” He was also brought face-to-face with the harsh realities of
show-business segregation once again. On their first night in Vegas, he and Jess were relegated to the worst table in the house, and only grudgingly at that. Sam did his best to hide his disappointment, but Jess could see that for all of his sophistication and all of his extensive experience in the business, he was deeply hurt to discover that even at the pinnacle of show-business success, the only way you were going to be treated well was when you were the show. Sammy went to bat for him, and Jess practically made a scene, and after that, they always got a good table, no matter how the other patrons might stare. “But he knew,” said Jess, “if he wasn’t standing next to Sammy Davis Jr., he wouldn’t be standing there [at all].”
Jess was busy on a number of other fronts as well. Through Larry Auerbach he had made contact with Hugo and Luigi, two colorful first cousins who operated as a production team and had been hired by RCA earlier in the year (at the unheard-of sum of a million dollars over five years) to rejuvenate the company’s pop music department. Despite contractual guarantees of independence, they had trouble at first with RCA’s traditionally stodgy attitudes, but just within the last couple of months, they had had their first big hit on the label with Della Reese’s “Don’t You Know,” which not only reached number one on the r&b charts but eventually went to number two pop. It exemplified, said Luigi, the kind of hybrid sound typical of the Hugo and Luigi approach, an operatic adaptation of a Puccini waltz set to an r&b sensibility.
Hugo and Luigi (their last names were Peretti and Creatore, but everyone knew them by the more familiar appellation, which served as their production handle) were unashamed hitmakers and practical jokers for whom Jess had less than total respect because of what he took to be their somewhat crass view of both their business and their craft. On the other hand, Sam hadn’t really left him with a lot of alternatives. It would have been his personal preference to go to Atlantic. The label had a sterling reputation in the business, it was set up to do the kind of music Sam was best at, and, after losing Clyde McPhatter to MGM earlier in the year and having recently become aware that they were about to lose Ray Charles, their biggest star, to ABC, Atlantic’s owners, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, made Jess aware that there was almost nothing they wouldn’t do to get his client. But Sam wasn’t interested. Sam had heard from Clyde McPhatter that he had been treated with racial condescension and disrespect at Atlantic, and no matter how much Jess argued the point and reminded Sam that this was the music business, after all (“I said, ‘Maybe they’ll steal, but you’ll sell more records with them than with anybody else”), and that Ahmet and Jerry were liberals in good standing, Sam clung to his own view of the matter and flatly ruled the label out.
Jess would have approached Capitol, too, except that Capitol already had Nat “King” Cole, they would not go above a 3 percent ceiling on royalties, and they were adamant that Sam would have to split his publishing, something Jess understood was completely out of the question. So he was left with RCA, which was offering a 5 percent artist’s royalty, the same as Presley got, and would leave Sam’s publishing alone. Plus, Hugo and Luigi had agreed to include Sam’s guitarist, Clif White, on all his sessions, a nonnegotiable item from Sam’s point of view. So Jess moved from discussions with Hugo and Luigi into more formal business negotiations with newly promoted RCA vice president Bob Yorke, a straight shooter he had known for some time and always liked, and even though he would have preferred to have had more options, he made his points and listened to what Yorke had to say, following the principle that had guided him ever since he had first entered show business at the age of fifteen: make deals, don’t blow them.
On November 9 Billboard ran an item disingenuously headlined “Hugo-Luigi Want Cooke” that reported on “the hottest rumor around the trade last week,” namely that “the hit-making a&r men at RCA . . . had made a fabulous offer to Sam Cooke to join the label after his Keen pact expires.” Even the size of the offer seemed designed to discourage literal interpretation, as a relatively modest proposal of $30,000 for a single year (with $20,000 of that against royalties), and another $30,000 (all against royalties) for a second-year option, was inflated to “a guarantee of $100,000, a rather sizable sum.”
With that, the fate of Keen Records as an ongoing label was to all intents and purposes sealed. Sam’s lawsuit up until this point had been proceeding in deliberate fashion, with motions and countermotions and moves for dismissal, but, as John Siamas now read the situation, with the RCA rumor out in the open, the distributors would simply stop paying, the money would dry up, and whatever chance there might have been for an amicable settlement, even a new start with Sam, was gone for good. The label had an album out on Sam called Hit Kit, a greatest-hits package that had been put together, as Cash Box presciently remarked, “for quick commercial consumption,” but even it stopped selling, and, while it would take another month before John Siamas threw in the towel, there was no question now, as John Siamas Jr. later observed, that his father simply “wanted to go back to the kind of thing that he had done professionally for twenty years [his aircraft parts business] and looked forward to doing again—and in an atmosphere that he, frankly, considered to be more ethical.” Siamas agreed to pay Sam a lump sum of $10,000 and transfer all song copyrights to him in exchange for Sam’s acknowledgment that this would stand in full payment of all artist royalties owed through June 30, 1959, as well as all songwriter’s royalties through the end of the year (in sum, close to $35,000). There were no bad feelings on either side, John Siamas Jr. felt certain. Keen, as his father saw it, simply “did not survive the record industry,” and while it continued as a catalogue label for the next couple of years (almost entirely Sam’s catalogue), John Siamas Sr. was not going to invest any more of his money in what he now saw as an essentially failed venture.
Sam was no less disillusioned in many respects with the business. Out on tour once again, he had decided to do without the services of William Morris, who he was convinced were no better than Bumps, just better educated and better able to get away with it. What had they ever done for him, he railed to Jess and his brother Charles, except sit on their ass and collect his money, money that he earned by the sweat of his brow? He was still pissed off about the Jackie Wilson tour. It would never have come about—and he would never have had to suffer the kind of humiliation that he did—if they had supplied him with the proper kind of bookings. And he was pissed off at what he took to be their dismissive attitude toward his pay: they sold him like a slave to Universal, they sold him for a pittance—$1,000 a night—and then they didn’t even concern themselves with how much more Universal was actually getting for his services. They told him they had talked Universal into splitting the commission—fuck that. They were all just making money off his back.
So he told Charles and Crain to go out and look for dates on their own. “Me and Crain got in the car, and we just drove. Stopped in places that looked like they could use a show. Then we find out who the promoter was in that town or whoever owned the biggest club—Crain knew most of them anyway, he had worked with them before, and he knew who to trust. We’d approach them, say, ‘We got Sam Cooke, and we want to come to you with a show.’ All down in Florida and Alabama and North Carolina and South Carolina. We never had no problem, man. Sam was trying to prove a point.”
Sam put it out in Jet magazine that he would be touring with L.C. “to help promote [his] career,” and that, in partial payment of the debt he owed his brother for “You Send Me” and all the other hits L.C. had written for him, he had now written a tune for his brother, which L.C. was scheduled to record. “Sam do what he want to do,” observed L.C., “and they be glad to get them dates, ’cause they knew they was going to make some money. Sam was different from everybody [else]. He didn’t care who he cussed out. He said, ‘I ain’t got to wait on nobody.’”
All of his loyalty, as Charles and L.C. saw it, was to the tight circle of family and friends around him. As far as Jess Rand went, “I didn’t know too much about Jess Rand,” said Cha
rles. “Jess Rand wasn’t around us too much,” according to L.C. Crain was the only one functioning as any kind of manager. As much as Sam needed a manager. And Alex could call himself Sam’s partner all he wanted—he worked for Sam just like they did. Only they had known Sam longer. Sam didn’t trouble himself with such petty distinctions. He knew how everyone fit into his world—Bumps, the Soul Stirrers, the QCs, the Junior Destroyers, Duck, his brothers, even Rebert Harris, who was always going around boasting that he had taught Sam everything he knew. None of it affected Sam’s unwavering plan to move ahead with his life, to improve himself and his situation in every way that he could—but at the same time, it seemed like he felt responsible for them all somehow. Or maybe he saw them as responsible for him. It was as if he were determined to leave no part of himself behind—unlike Sammy Davis Jr., he would always mark a clear path to find his way home. And he was no less determined to make his marriage work. No matter how he had arrived at it, or how long it had taken him to get there, he felt as if his identity was as bound up now in the success of his little family as his father’s had been in his family of ten. He and Barbara had loved each other once—their little girl was the tangible expression of that love—and now, almost as if he could will it, they would love each other again.
The Soul Stirrers’ single continued to sell, and Sam gladly lent his name to a concert promotion in Atlanta on December 6 (“Star vocalist Sam Cooke” would serve as “honored guest, MC,” the Daily World announced, “pay[ing] special tribute to his old group”). When he joined them onstage, the crowd went wild, and it was just like the old days, only more so. With their prospects looking up, the fellows all welcomed his participation, even Paul and Farley, who had been resistant for so long, and he appeared on several more programs over the next week or two, careful not to steal too much of the glory but pleased nonetheless to be back on the gospel road.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 40