The amazing life & shocking death of SAM COOKE

NEARLY 60 YEARS AFTER THE ICONIC SINGER WAS SLAIN IN A SHOOTING, A NEW MOVIE EARNS OSCAR BUZZ AS IT EXAMINES HIS POWERFUL LEGACY

In the early hours of December 11, 1964, three shots rang out at the seedy Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles. When police arrived, they found a man lying dead in the manager’s office, clad only in a sport coat. It was Sam Cooke, the heavenly voiced soul pioneer and civil rights activist whose hits include ‘You Send Me’, ‘Another Saturday Night’ and ‘A Change is Gonna Come’.

A hotel manager claimed she’d shot him in self-defence after he attacked her. But nearly 60 years later, questions about Cooke’s mysterious death at 33 linger, while his classic songs are as alive as ever. The new film One Night in Miami, which stars Hamilton’s Leslie Odom Jnr as Cooke, chronicles the role he and his music played in the civil rights movement. “Playing Sam Cooke was some big shoes to fill,” says Odom, who’s earning buzz as an Oscar frontrunner. “It was a challenge and an honour.”

In the 1960s Cooke was a groundbreaking crossover star, bringing gospel grandeur to the pop charts. Born in Mississippi in 1931, he was raised in Chicago, where he sang at his minister father’s church. As a teen, he was recruited to join the Soul Stirrers, one of the country’s biggest gospel acts. But Cooke wanted to go solo, fusing gospel with pop and R’n’B. In 1957 he released ‘You Send Me’, a sublime love ballad that sold a million copies. An astonishing 28 Top 40 hits followed.

“Sam knew exactly what he wanted. He’d come in the studio, and he’d bring this incredible smile, like

sunshine walking into the room,” remembers his friend and long-time producer Al Schmitt, 90.

But Cooke’s popularity across racial lines often came at a cost. When he toured the South, restaurants wouldn’t serve him and few hotels would allow him to sleep there. In 1958 the Ku Klux Klan threatened Cooke’s life when he was booked to play alongside white performers on the The Dick Clark Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show. He performed anyway, his typically stubborn response to bigotry. He followed the civil rights movement closely and befriended figures like Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) and Malcolm X, a friendship that forms the plot of One Night in Miami (now on Amazon Prime – see sidebar). He began using his platform to push for equality. His 1960 hit ‘Chain Gang’ was a veiled critique of the oppressive prison system.

While Cooke was making huge strides musically, his personal life was marred by tragedy. His first wife, singer Dee Dee Mohawk, was killed in a car crash a year after their divorce in 1959. And in his final months Cooke was overwhelmed by grief after his son Vincent, whom he had with his second wife, Barbara, drowned in the family swimming pool at 18 months. “It destroyed his marriage,” Schmitt says.

“It broke Sam’s heart.”

Cooke took comfort in alcohol and women. On the last night of his life, he met Schmitt for dinner at Martoni’s restaurant in LA. Cocktails flowed, and Cooke wandered to the bar, where he reportedly waved around a wad of nearly $5000. Schmitt last saw him getting cosy with a woman he didn’t recognise. Her name was

Elisa Boyer. Cooke and Boyer left together, checking into the Hacienda Motel around 2.30am. What happened next remains shrouded in mystery. Boyer claimed that Cooke tore off her clothes. “I knew he was going to rape me,” she told the police. According to Boyer, Cooke disrobed and entered the bathroom, at which point she made a panicked exit, scooping up Cooke’s clothes along with her own. (Friends of Cooke’s insist Boyer was trying to rob the singer.) Cooke then confronted the motel manager, Bertha Franklin, whom he believed was shielding Boyer. Franklin claimed the encounter turned violent, with Cooke breaking down her door and throttling her. She grabbed her .22 and fired it through Cooke’s heart and lung.

Cooke’s death was ruled a justifiable homicide (see sidebar). His loss dealt a lasting blow to popular culture, but his last gift to the civil rights movement was a song released just weeks after his death: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’. Though he never lived to see the strides made for racial equality, the song became an anthem for Black Americans fighting injustice.

THE VELVET VOICE Cooke (far left, in 1964) “just opened his mouth and it came out,” says friend Al Schmitt. “His tone, his pitch was incredible.” Inset: Leslie Odom Jnr as Cooke in One Night in Miami.

TWO CHAMPS Cooke grew close with Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, who was going to record an album in 1963. “Sam was helping him with vocals,” says friend Schmitt. “They were hilarious together. I never stopped laughing.”

LOVE AND LOSS Cooke married Barbara Campbell in 1958. They had daughters Linda, 67, and Tracey (right), 61, and son Vincent, who drowned in the family pool at 18 months. Three months after Cooke’s death, Barbara married singer Bobby Womack.

HEIGHTS OF SUCCESS In 1964, five months before his death, Cooke paid for this Times Square billboard himself, advertising his twoweek run at New York’s Copacabana night club.