Free B007Q6XJAO EBOK by Betsy Prioleau Page A

and simultaneously, an “extraordinary, good person.”
    Rarely do you hear the terms rock star and virtue in the same breath. Unless, that is, you’re talking about Sam Cooke. The rhythm-and-blues sensation of the 1950s and 60s who popularized such classics as “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” Cooke doesn’t look exemplary at first glance. He did jail time—brief stints for distributing a dirty book in high school and for “fornication and bastardy” in his twenties. He was stubborn, quick-tempered, conceited, and all hell with women. A “woman’s man,” he indulged in countless affairs, fathered four known illegitimate children, and was once discovered in bed with five women.
    But the top note in his hybrid character was decency. Said friends, he conveyed “genuineness,” generosity, and “instinctive kindness in every fiber of his being.” Although a gospel singer in his early career and son of a Chicago Baptist preacher, he was not a by-the-Good-Book man; he lived by his own moral lights.
    Cooke seemed born for women. He had erotic crackle even as a teenager—energy, charm, vitality, and a way of talking to girls with “warmth, [and] kindness,” as though each were the only person on the planet. Forthright and honest, he refused to game them, and so enamored Barbara Campbell, a neighbor four years his junior, that she had his daughter out of wedlock at eighteen and waited in the wings for him for seven years.
    In the interim, Sam Cooke crossed over from gospel to mainstream rock and roll and became a celebrity with his sweet soaring voice. Women literally fainted when he sang, and stormed him backstage. He was “never crass, never vulgar” about it, but he capitalized on stardom: he fathered two more illegitimate children and married lounge singer Delores Mohawk. After that marriage ended, his high school sweetheart, Barbara Campbell, reappeared. They married and had two children, but he couldn’t stay on the porch. Women mobbed him, mesmerized by his charisma and naughty/nice mélange.
    Flawed, faithless, good-hearted, and an easy touch: he was each of these things—to his undoing. At thirty-five in December 1964, he hooked up with a party girl after a few too many martinis and took her to a cheap motel, where she changed her mind and bolted with his clothes and money. Enraged and dressed only in a jacket and shoes, he confronted the manager, Bertha Franklin, about the theft, and a scuffle ensued. In the process, Franklin pulled a gun on Cooke and killed him. As the bullet tore through him, he said with combined shock and disbelief, “Lady, you shot me.” He died as he lived, “a real gentleman,” who beneath the faults—anger, promiscuity, and more—was “a sweet, innocent young guy.”
    The ingénue of Primrose , an old musical, sings that her dream man “needn’t be such a saint.” Despite the imprecations of Platonists and love philosophers, women will never be persuaded to take perfect moral purity to their hearts. To be seductive, goodness needs sauce—joy, sweetness, and eloquence spiked with frailties. Better, though, to err on the side of the angels: kindness, Ovid reminded men, “will tame even the lions and tigers.”
    Courage

    All true desire is dangerous
    —R OBERT B LY , Iron John
    The story is as old as time. The princess lies comatose in a haunted palace under an evil spell. Men perish in the attempt to rescue her, until one day two princes come along with their younger brother “Simpleton.” At the palace they find a gray dwarf who tells them they must perform three impossible tasks to break the spell. As his two craven brothers fail and turn to stone, Simpleton boldly sets off into the forest. With the aid of the beasts he befriends, he collects a thousand pearls, dives to the bottom of the lake, finds the key to the princess’s bedroom, and picks the “right” princess out of a choice of three. Simpleton isn’t simple; he knows a cardinal ladykiller