Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (80 page)

Then one day he ran into a college classmate, Donnie Kirshner, on his way home from work, and Kirshner, who was just entering the publishing business himself, introduced him to two young rock ’n’ rollers from Texas, Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen, who shared a band, the Rhythm Orchids. Each had had an individual hit in 1957 that had started with the same small-label single and then been picked up (and reissued on separate records) by Morris Levy’s Roulette label. Knox’s “Party Doll,” the A-side of the original 45, had gone to number one pop, while Bowen’s “I’m Stickin’ With You” reached number fourteen, but both had come to believe they had not been dealt with fairly by their label. Allen Klein by this time had gotten married and set up his own accounting firm with a loan from his father-in-law, who, unlike his own father, seemed to have no trouble lavishing love on his only daughter or showing faith in her new husband (“I had nothing, it was like—he never expected to get it back, but my father-in-law was a saint of a man”). He offered to help out Knox and Bowen for no fee, simply in exchange for 25 percent of whatever money he was able to find, and he promptly set about auditing Roulette.

When he had completed his audit, he presented Levy with a bill, and Levy, whose reputation as a gangster seemed to intimidate everyone but his then-partners, Hugo and Luigi, and this upstart young accountant, acknowledged that he did indeed owe the money but he was not going to pay it, at least not all at once and not without lawsuits that could eat up every penny—and while they were at it, what was Klein going to do about it? Eventually they worked out an accommodation by which Levy agreed to pay $70 a week for a period of three or four years, and Allen Klein learned his first lesson in the business: you make the best deal you can.

From there, again through Kirshner, he met pop star Bobby Darin and audited Darin’s label, Atlantic, which led both to a financial windfall and, indirectly, to Darin’s leaving Atlantic for Capitol. It also led to a break with both Kirshner and Darin, as Klein, after getting Darin his publishing back, sought the job of administering it for a 10 percent fee and was turned down—but only after a serious disagreement with Kirshner over the way Kirshner, Darin’s new publishing partner, wanted to set up the foreign publishing, in a series of splits that Klein felt was inherently unfair to his client. It was, he said, a heartbreaking lesson in human frailty, and also in learning to deal with people not on the basis of how much you liked them but on your judgment of how you think they will act.

He became known in the business and went on to do audits for a number of other clients. Through Jocko he met Lloyd Price, for whom he audited ABC in the wake of number-one pop hits like “Stagger Lee” and “Personality,” but he had greater ambitions than to find other people’s money, something he was beginning to feel was almost too easy to do, and in 1961, through a series of coincidences as improbable as his entrance into the music business, he went into the business of making movies (“I just wanted to learn, and I saw an opportunity to get in”).

He took his first full-scale production,
Without Each Other,
to Cannes in the spring of 1962, after enlisting Oscar-winning composer Dimitri Tiomkin as musical director. He then screened the film at his own expense a day in advance of the festival opening and got a quote from a connection he had made at
Film Daily
about this “underdog” independent getting the honor of “opening” Cannes. Next he took out an ad in
Variety
expressing the “deep honor” he and his fellow producer, Peter Gayle, felt at being selected the “Best American Film at Cannes.” None of this, of course, was true, and none of it made the slightest difference in his finding a studio to distribute the film (“Ben Melniker at MGM said, ‘Listen, you’ve done a great job of promoting the film, but you got to have something to promote’”).

That was his third, and perhaps most important, lesson in business, and though he almost immediately began work with the same team (Gayle, writer/star Tony Anthony, and director Saul Swimmer) on another picture, it was never actually filmed, and he returned to the accounting business (which his two loyal associates had been carrying on in his absence) with no money, a vague sense of dissatisfaction, and a renewed determination to do something of significance. When Jocko came to him with the idea of leasing the State, a cavernous five-thousand-seat house in the Goldman movie chain that had fallen into disrepair, he seized on the idea with enthusiasm. It would be a better way to meet new clients than Jocko’s occasional shows at the Apollo, but more than that, it would satisfy the need he had to do something more.

He had barely heard of Sam Cooke when Jocko first mentioned him, though, as a keen student of songs, he recognized the titles of Sam’s hits as soon as Jocko brought them up. Jocko was in complete charge of the booking (“He said, ‘Don’t worry, they all owe me favors, I’ll book the shows’”), and he installed a lineup composed mostly of acts from Florence Greenberg’s Scepter label (Chuck Jackson, the Shirelles, newcomer Dionne Warwick), along with the Crystals, a young singer from Florida named Johnny Thunder with a current Top 10 hit, and—in Sam Cooke—a headliner virtually guaranteed to draw. King Curtis, another sometime Scepter act (Jocko had had a long, and mutually profitable, relationship with Scepter), was providing the backup band, and the headliner was bringing along a young group of his own, the Valentinos, to round out the bill. Allen was well aware of the Scepter acts from his own association with the label (his accounting firm had done a considerable amount of work for Florence Greenberg over the years), but it scarcely mattered, he was prepared to place his full faith in Jocko, who had Lloyd Price lined up for the second week, the Four Seasons for the third, comedian “Moms” Mabley for Easter, and then an improbable (and highly unlikely) wish list of stars from Nat “King” Cole to Johnny Mathis and Ray Charles.

Klein
did
get involved in every other aspect of the business, though, from the water tower that had to be installed on the roof of the building to the new carpeting that was to be laid on the floor. A tireless worker, he showed up at the theater nearly every day and was in constant contact with his partner, and while his ferocious concentration did not fail to take in some of the potential pitfalls of the enterprise (even Jocko started referring to the building as “Big Mouth,” because, he said, it would swallow them all), just as with the movies, he was caught up as much in his vision of what it could be as in the way it actually was. But it was only with his first glimpse of Sam Cooke, at rehearsal the day before opening, that Allen Klein saw something that pointed toward a different kind of future.

He was sitting in the balcony with his four-year-old daughter, Robin, and his wife, Betty, just pregnant with their second child. “I had no idea who Sam Cooke was, I don’t ever remember seeing a picture. And I sat up there and heard him sing, and he was fucking magic.” Jocko introduced him to Sam afterward in their office, and Allen was as enthralled by the man as he had been by his music. “I was just smitten. He wasn’t distant. He didn’t say, ‘My man,’ the way Jocko did. There wasn’t really any time to sit down and talk, there were people constantly around, but he had a personality that was really captivating and he just charmed the hell out of me. He made you think you were the only person in the world. In one night.”

Opening night was a gala affair. “Politicians and Dogs Nearly Steal State Theatre Show,” announced the headline on the front page of the
Philadelphia Tribune.
The politicians, the newspaper explained, were unavoidable, and not necessarily a bad concomitant to any such significant public event, with the presidents of both the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) “us[ing] the opening as their opportunity to get in plugs for their organizations.” The police dogs, on the other hand, were “an unexpected added attraction” that brought to mind images of police brutality and aroused protests from the patrons and sarcasm from the stage. Sam in any case got a rave review from the
Tribune
critic, as he presented his recent hits in a format almost identical to the one he had employed at the Harlem Square, sang “Bring It On Home to Me” with a bluesy feeling and “a sense of phrasing and style that puts him miles ahead of the loud pack that comprises most rhythm and blues vocalists,” and concluded with a celebratory “Having a Party” that brought a boss-talking Jocko, all of the performers, and probably some of the politicians, too, out onstage to join in.

Some of the earlier acts didn’t fare as well. Dionne Warwick, nervous and in poor voice, was “unequal to the demands” of “Don’t Make Me Over,” her one hit single and, according to one audience member, was laughed at when she tried Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” Chuck Jackson, reported the skeptical
Tribune
critic, got more of a response from tossing his clothes into the crowd than for his music, and the Crystals were “disappointing [for] their hasty, almost sloppy treatment of their own specialties.” In fact, several of the young ladies whom Jocko invited onstage midway through the show to dance to King Curtis’ music “showed more poise and theatrical ingenuity [in their movement] than any of the paid performers.” The Valentinos, with no current hit on the charts, were not even mentioned in the write-up.

Allen Klein, for his part, had eyes for no one but Sam. As far as he was concerned, Sam could have been alone onstage with no supporting acts and no musicians to accompany him. He paid little attention to the audience. “I didn’t walk around and watch how they were reacting in the orchestra seats. I was just impressed with Sam, with his voice and personality. I was just listening for myself.”

Every night, he went to the show and sat in his balcony seat. He didn’t miss a single performance. He saw Sam backstage surrounded by well-wishers, mobbed by his female fans, and rarely ventured to say anything, deferring instead to Jocko, who was not shy about pitching him to Sam. “Jocko said, ‘I don’t normally recommend anyone, but I recommend Allen.’ Of course, I was his accountant.” He talked to Sam’s road manager, Crain, who complained about the way they were being treated by their record company and spoke of his associate Mr. Alexander’s difficulties in getting paid by RCA on their song publishing. But mostly Allen just bided his time. Generally considered to be the most aggressive kind of music industry hustler (he had, after all, acquired his biggest client to date, Bobby Darin, at a friend’s wedding), he held back now because he honestly “didn’t want to appear to be overbearing or pushy.” He wasn’t all that sure that Crain knew what he was talking about, but he continued to find Sam utterly beguiling with that incredible smile, great sense of humor, and a depth that he had not expected.

Then one night, as the run was coming to a close, Sam approached him directly, unleashing a controlled tirade of resentment about the manner of his mistreatment, both as an artist and as a man. Allen was well aware that, while it was far from unusual for artists to be unhappy, “he was
visibly
unhappy. And he asked my advice. I said, ‘Well, why don’t you call the people you’re dealing with at RCA, just tell them and see what they say?’” He said he had tried that and never got any response to his calls, but Allen simply said, “Try again.” There was no point in attempting to advance his own case too soon, because, he knew, “to talk to someone about what they might need and what you [can] do for them, you have to find out about them. And I didn’t know anything about him. I had to find out.”

When Sam left at the end of the week, he asked Allen to stay in touch. “I asked him where he was going, and he told me, and I said, okay, I’d give him a call.”

S
AM PLAYED THE GALAXY SUPPER CLUB
in St. Alban’s, New York, the following week, then the Royal and the Howard theaters in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. He took the Valentinos on the theater dates, and Bobby continued to play bass for him after the Valentinos finished their act. “I was always asking questions, and Clif would say, ‘Man, why don’t you shut the fuck up?’ All the rest of the guys would be laughing, and Sam would be cracking up”—but his brothers didn’t find it so amusing. They had all, except for Friendly Jr., moved out to California earlier in the year, staking their faith on the promises that Sam and J.W. had made and leaving their father’s censorious judgments behind. To some extent, that faith was in the process of being borne out, as this tour plainly showed. But Sam taking Bobby and putting him onstage with him like his own fucking son raised real questions of family loyalty. The way they all saw it, Bobby was out for himself, always had been, sneaking around and complaining to Sam that Curt had the lead vocal on the A-side of their last two singles, then acting like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

It had taken them long enough just to get to California in the first place. They had gotten money from Sam and Alex with specific instructions to buy a Chevy station wagon, then gone out and paid $600 for a motherfucking broke-down old Cadillac, because that was what all the pimps and gospel singers drove. They were on Route 66 for what seemed like weeks—first the wipers, then the headlights, then the tires went out, and in New Mexico they ended up in the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust. Upon finally reaching Los Angeles, they promptly ran out of gas and ended up pushing the car down Hollywood Boulevard.

Sam and Alex were out of town when they arrived, but Ed Townsend looked out for them, and soon they were installed in a basement room at the Dunbar Hotel on Central, where Johnnie Morisette lived, and where they were given three square meals a day on Sam’s account. Johnnie showed them the sights of Hollywood, driving them around in his red-and-gold Cadillac, with the windows rolled up as if he had air and talking away on a car phone that wasn’t even connected. He pointed out all the big stars copping blow and all the chicks running after them—the biggest stars in every field—it was an eye-opening experience.