by Jake Brennan
“Hey Lou, what do you say we get out of here? I’ve got dinner with Al, and I’m gonna meet some radio folks at P.J.’s later.”
P.J.’s in West Hollywood was dark, intimate, and cozy. A place where dudes like Sam Cooke–—super-charismatic and famous pop singers—could hang unnoticed and largely be left alone. Al Schmitt was his trusted engineer, who had helmed such Sam Cooke hits as “Another Saturday Night,” “Cupid,” and the aforementioned “Bring It on Home to Me.” And Sam wanted to meet with the KAPP DJs at the local R&B station to ensure they were on board for his ambitious next release.
Sam’s current album for RCA, Ain’t That Good News, was ending its cycle, and he had plans for his greatest creative achievement yet: a blues album that perfectly melded his patented sophisticated soul with the down-home gut punch of blues artists he loved, like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It was unclear how Sam was going to pull this off but he was obsessed.
As he always did, he asked Lou what he thought. Lou knew that Sam didn’t really need his input, but he dug that his famous friend still solicited his advice. Sam, however, needed Lou more than the man knew. Finding the space to think and be creative was not easy for Sam. There was always something. The investment in himself? It was paying off but, man, it was stressful sometimes. He hoped Lou would come with him for a few drinks, but Lou was worried that Lou Jr. was sick, and leaving a sick six-month-old with the missus would not bode well in the long run.
Sam could understand Lou wanting to be cautious with his wife. Sam hadn’t been very cautious with his own. He’d married Barbara Campbell, the mother of one of his six children, thinking marriage would add a sense of order to his life, but all it did was add more chaos. The home, despite the wall-to-wall carpet, the brand-new hi-fi, and the pool out back, was a straight-up battlefield when Barbara was around. That woman was almost as restless as he was. The tension was thick and ever present.
And the goddamn phone? It never stopped ringing.
The Valentinos’ bus had broken down out on tour.
Little Billy Preston needed money for a new organ.
Johnnie Taylor was pissed off again about something or another.
And Martin was calling. He wanted to talk to Sam about performing at a benefit for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference early next year.
Sam would do anything for Martin Luther King Jr., but right now the civil rights movement would have to wait. Sam needed to blow off some steam and get his head right.
Lou could stay home with his sick baby. Sam needed some action.
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Sam Cooke’s Ferrari hit the valet at Martoni’s in Hollywood sometime on the evening of December 10, 1964. He’d meant to get dinner at P.J.’s with Al and his wife, but when he saw the babe at the Martoni’s bar, he got up, bailed on going to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Al, and casually approached the woman who had caught his eye. She was no astronaut’s wife, but she’d do.
At the bar, though, Sam was swarmed by friends and hangers-on. The drinks were flowing, and Sam was leading the bar in sing-along after sing-along until the woman he had his eye on started making eyes at him, demanding his attention. Sam was at her side in no time with a drink. She was just his type. And of course, he was hers. With Sam’s energy now focused on the task at hand, the vibe at the bar died down. A change of scenery was needed, so they decided to hit P.J.’s over on Santa Monica.
Now after midnight, Sam was at least four or five martinis deep. Little Miss Thing had a name: Elisa Boyer. As closing time approached, she was approaching something near stunning to Sam, and she was garnering attention from other men at P.J.’s besides himself. Mr. Wonderful grew angry. A fight nearly ensued.
Fuck the bars, he thought. Let’s get some privacy.
The two jumped in Sam’s Ferrari and were out on the 405 in no time.
He was driving fast. Heading out of town. Where were they going? Elisa was staying downtown. Don’t worry about none of that, Sam remarked.
Relax.
Enjoy the ride.
He turned on the radio, KAPP. Shit! Sam realized he had forgotten to meet up with those DJs earlier in the night. Frustrated, he twirled the dial from KAPP and landed on the sounds of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas.” He left it and let Elvis’s baritone ring out. He was too distracted by Elisa sitting to his right.
And Elisa was worried. She told Sam she wanted to get out of the car. He was clearly drunk. Driving like a lunatic. Pulling off a bottle of scotch. And apparently headed somewhere out by the airport. She had no idea where.
But Sam had an idea. The Hacienda Motel. It was perfect. Remote. Quiet. Cheap. And indiscriminate of color or marital status. No last-call lotharios to loosen the vibe while trying to get Little Miss Strange to help him blow off his steam.
But Elisa seriously wasn’t having it.
It didn’t matter. She’d come around. They always did. He was Sam Cooke. Mr. Fucking Wonderful.
The Ferrari sloppily roared into the Hacienda parking lot at 2:35 a.m. Sam hit the motel manager’s office looking like a damn fool. Wild-eyed. Anxious. Drunk. To the motel manager, he looked exactly like every other man who checked in at two in the morning. She gave him a room key and noticed the girl in the Ferrari with the Jacqueline Kennedy scarf and glasses. She made Sam sign in as part of a married couple. He couldn’t remember Elisa’s name, so he just wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Sam Cooke.”
In the motel room, things were not going as Sam planned. Elisa, despite her googly-eyed bullshit back at the bar, wasn’t picking up what Sam was putting down.
Sam had had enough. He was impatient. Horny. He grabbed her. Groping. Kissing.
All hands.
No heart.
Gone was the subtlety he was known for onstage and in records. It was replaced by a base, carnal desire that was obvious and boring. The same as all of the other ordinary men she’d known.
Elisa was disgusted. Wanted no part of it. What she wanted was for Sam to take her home. Now.
But Sam had never been denied before, and he couldn’t imagine a world where a woman wouldn’t want to be with him. What a nonwonderful world that would be. He was gonna have it his way or nothing at all.
She’d come around. They always did. He was the Sam Cooke. Executive Seducer. It was only a matter of time. Besides…he had to piss. He’d hit the bathroom to give Little Miss Strange a minute to collect herself.
Instead, she collected her clothes and got the fuck out of there. In a hurry.
She split. Ran out of the room half-naked, in just her bra and slip, and through the parking lot, past the motel manager’s office, and out onto the street. And just like that? Gone. In the wind.
Sam came out of the bathroom to an empty room. No strange. The door was open. Sam was naked. And his clothes were gone…And his wallet? What the fuck.
He grabbed all he could find: his blazer and one shoe. Scooped up his car keys, jumped in the Ferrari, and squealed over to the manager’s office where he imagined Elisa to be hiding out. Again, he parked like an asshole, jumped out of the car. Left the driver’s side door open and with one shoe on and with little Sam Cooke hanging out beneath his blazer, he began pounding on the door.
“Let me in! Where is she?
“Where are my clothes? She took my wallet!”
On the other side of the door was fifty-five-year-old Bertha Lee Franklin. She’d checked Sam in earlier and knew exactly how fucked-up the fool on the other side of the door was. She was nonplussed. And was on the phone with her boss at the moment as she always was at this time of night.
So she ignored Sam.
Sam grew more upset and started shouting again.
“She ain’t in here.”
“Yes she is! I know she is. Let me in!”
“Mister, there ain’t no one in here but me.”
That was when Sam started ramming the door with his shoulder. Three tries and he came pouring into the joint like a bag of banged-up bricks.
Bertha Lee was stunned. Still on the phone, she told this naked fool to get out. That the woman he was looking for wasn’t there. But Sam, cockblocked and blueballed, was not hearing it. He was leering over her shoulder into the apartment adjacent to the motel manager’s office—he knew she was in there, and he now thought that this woman was in on whatever scam was being run on him. After all, why the hell else wouldn’t that woman want to sleep with him?
“Where the fuck is she? And where are my clothes?”
“Mister, she ain’t here. You gotta go.”
Sam snapped. He grabbed Bertha Lee by the shoulders and started shaking her. The struggle intensified. The phone fell to the floor. Bertha Lee tried biting, scratching…Sam threw her to the ground and pounced…still naked and even more enraged but Bertha Lee was able to get out from under him and wobble to her feet.
She knew where the gun was. It was there for a reason. This reason. To fend off some wild-eyed, horny, drunk fool in the middle of the night. She grabbed the .22 resting on the television, and as Sam started to come at her again she aimed and pulled the trigger.
The first shot whistled over his head.
The second, past his shoulder.
And the third?
Straight into the heart of Cupid.
Stunned, Sam Cooke looked up at Bertha Lee Franklin and said, “Lady, you shot me?”
Sam fell to his knees and for a moment seemed subdued but then, in a last burst of adrenaline, attacked Bertha Lee again. This time would be his last. She could sense that life was a fleeting proposition for this naked fool and showed mercy. She dropped the gun. Grabbed a broom and gave Sam a simple oops upside the head to keep him at bay. It was all that was needed. He fell over and died.
Bertha Lee Franklin shot and killed Sam Cooke. The court cleared her of any charges. The homicide was ruled justifiable. But the court of public opinion thought otherwise. She received numerous death threats, was forced to quit her job and go into hiding. She was sued by Sam Cooke’s widow for her husband’s funeral expenses. A husband who was one of the most successful pop stars in the world. A husband she grieved over for exactly three months before marrying his good friend, Bobby Womack.
Still, to this day, the world does not want to accept that Bertha Lee Franklin shot and killed Sam Cooke. Though the circumstances of his death are not shrouded in mystery.
There is no shortage of rock ’n’ roll conspiracy theories. They exist in part because fans don’t want to let go. There are legions who believe Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper never crashed and burned in an Iowa cornfield back on February 3, 1959, the supposed “day the music died,” and are somehow still alive, making music and living happily ever after. Some even believe that the crash was caused by something nefarious like Buddy Holly firing a pistol inside the plane at the pilot as a means to affect his own suicide. This is a real theory. And people believe it. Just like the people who choose to believe that Rolling Stones guitar player Brian Jones was murdered by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as a way to get the increasingly strung-out and useless band member out of their lives forever. Which is almost as ridiculous as those who believe that Courtney Love murdered Kurt Cobain because they didn’t have a prenup. A small cottage industry has built up around Elvis Presley conspiracy theories. Most fascinating is the theory that Elvis’s twin brother, Jesse, did not die at birth; that he lived on and still lives to this day, and that’s the reason why there have been so many Elvis sightings since the King’s reported death back in 1977. And of course, the granddaddy music conspiracy theory of all time is that Elvis faked his own death and does indeed still live on. Why else would he have misspelled his own name on his headstone? This is true. Look it up.
But regardless, Elvis is not alive. Neither is his brother. And Kurt wasn’t murdered and the Stones aren’t assassins. Buddy didn’t pop one off in the back of the pilot’s head to crash his plane and Sam Cooke wasn’t killed by anyone other than Bertha Lee Franklin.
It wasn’t a jilted lover.
It wasn’t a jealous husband.
It wasn’t a robbery gone wrong.
And it wasn’t the mafia.
It was a justifiable homicide. So said the jury.
Sam Cooke, despite the conspiracy theories that sprung up immediately, was not the victim. Bertha Lee Franklin was.
The jury knew this because Bertha Lee voluntarily took and passed a lie detector test. As did her boss, the owner of the hotel, Evelyn Carr, who was on the phone with her at the time the incident went down.
The jury also knew from phone records stating that at 3:15 a.m., as soon as the phone line disconnected and while Sam was attacking Bertha Lee, Evelyn Carr called the police to report what she’d heard on the other end of the motel phone. Of course, the police had a record of that call.
And the call came minutes after Elisa Boyer had called the police herself—from a pay phone out on the street from the hotel—to report that she had been kidnapped.
Furthermore, as soon as the police arrived on the scene, Elisa emerged from the shadows to voluntarily speak to them about everything that just happened.
There is no mystery surrounding Sam Cooke’s death. There is no conspiracy. Mr. Wonderful was denied that night in the Hacienda Hotel, and there was nothing Cupid could do about it.
Sam Cooke, shot dead by the female hotel manager he attacked, half-naked.
Chapter 9
Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes
The Suit from the record label was telling Lisa the new single wasn’t strong enough, but the playback was telling her something else. They’d have to test the single out in the overseas market. What the hell was that all about? Test the single out? Despite what the Suit said, Lisa liked what she heard. The chord progression reminded her of “Bonita Applebum” by A Tribe Called Quest. This shit was dope. Definitely strong enough to be the first single. At the very least, it could be the leadoff track on her solo debut. She smiled, thinking about how it would throw TLC fans for a loop if the first thing they heard from one-third of the best-selling American female group of all time was the voice of a man—and not just the voice of any man; it was the sweet croon of Carl Thomas, whose “woah oh ohhhh” was channeling the same swoops of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” a song her dad played for her as a kid.
This was so different from anything on the TLC tip. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, the spitfire singer for one of the hottest R&B groups of the ’90s, loved messing with people’s expectations, and now she wanted to show the world how creative she really was. Two years before she had challenged her bandmates to make solo albums, just like she was. Her vision was to release them all as a three-CD set on one day. She encouraged LaFace, the group’s label, to choose whose album was best and award the “winner” $1.5 million. To seal the deal, she challenged her bandmates and label by writing an open letter to all parties concerned in Entertainment Weekly. It was true to form. Most everything Lisa did was over-the-top.
Her bandmates, T-Boz and Chilli, responded publicly by saying that “Left Eye is only concerned with Left Eye,” and “she doesn’t respect the whole group.” So, no solo albums from the TLC members to compete with. Lisa didn’t care. She knew she was going to make a great solo record no matter what. But she didn’t.
The album was a bust. It was released overseas at first, and sales were so underwhelming that the label never released it in the United States. That’s how poorly the record performed.
Lisa wasn’t used to anyone telling her she was performing poorly. Behaving poorly? Now that was something she was more accustomed to. But every time she went onstage, she brought it. What was “poorly,” anyway? It was all relative. TLC had sold 65 million albums worldwide, so even sales in the single-digit millions would have been deemed a “poorly” selling record by her label.
This business was killing her. People talking shit about her, saying she was crazy, selfish, messed up in the head, etc. They said all that even before she burned down Andre’s house.
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br /> After the fire was the first time she went to Honduras. A spiritual journey. And now, with her solo album a bust, she needed to get away again, back to her roots, and anchor herself to the rhythm beating inside of her, back to why she did this in the first place: the music.
Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes came from a long line of artists and musicians. From a young age, her natural talent was evident—she sang, wrote, drew, danced. Her dad played piano, clarinet, the harmonica—basically, he could play anything he got his hands on. But, just like with her boyfriend, Andre, her dad’s hands were also part of the problem.
Lisa loved her dad, but domestic abuse was always up in the mix. Maybe it had something to do with his fiery creative nature, maybe it was due to his stint in the military—maybe. Most likely it was his drinking.
Lisa’s dad was super strict about everything except drinking. In fact, from the time Lisa was a preteen, they bonded over booze. Daddy-daughter days would just as well be a trip to the movies as they would be a drinking competition in the backyard. “Look at Little Lisa get after that beer.”
For some musicians, drinking and creativity go hand in hand—often, the one begets the other. For Lisa, her creativity and her drinking were at odds from the jump.
Lisa would joke that when she got too drunk, all of her behavior could be blamed on her alter ego, Nikki.
But despite Nikki’s presence causing plenty of trouble during her school days, Lisa’s creativity usually won the day.
She acted in school productions, sometimes as the star, sometimes as a backup dancer. She modeled and used her gifts as an illustrator to design her own outfits. Her brain was filled with a million different creative endeavors, each as compelling to her as the next. She wrote poetry and of course rhymes. And rhymes were the ticket to the future.
It was 1990 and hip-hop was exploding, and for a young Lisa Lopes, potentially transformative.
Just up the road in Atlanta, the South’s burgeoning hip-hop scene was making waves. Taking its cues from the big bass sounds of Miami “Booty Music” down the road a piece, Atlanta hip-hop was growing into something wholly unique; sweetened melodies contrasted with drawled-out rhymes over big, electro-funk beats. The music lacked the abrasiveness of East Coast rap and eschewed the hardcore reality of gangsta rap out west for something different; a laid-back Southern sophistication that knew instinctively when to deploy maximum R&B to keep the party bumping. Two ambitious local movers and shakers, Antonio “LA” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, were busy promoting and producing a wellspring of homegrown talent. Artists like Outkast, Toni Braxton, and Usher were about to bring what would come to be known as the “Dirty South” to middle America.