The Hippest Trip in America (23 page)

Chapter 20
The Hippest Trip in America

WHEN DON
Cornelius sold
Soul Train
in the spring of 2008, he was seventy-one years old. He was a rich man who'd just become a very rich man. What would he do with all this new leisure time? He talked to several writers (including myself) about helping him write an autobiography, but apparently it was never completed. There were conversations about a
Soul Train
movie, but that didn't get traction at any studio. He met with John Singleton and pitched a
Soul Train
–themed television show, using the
Soul Train
tapings as a setting for tales of Los Angeles during the seventies. It was a promising concept, but it, too, got lost in the Hollywood wilderness, a place where black-themed series in the twenty-first century were now as rare as they were pre–Diahann Carroll's
Julia
. In many ways the book Don never wrote was the VH1 documentary
The Hippest Trip in America
, which was the highest-rated entry in the network's Rock Doc series. In 2009, Cornelius was the first person interviewed by the episode's director, J. Kevin Swain. It was a three-hour interview, and while nothing was expressly off-limits, Don didn't want questions about his personal life, and, as we've seen, he didn't want to get into his long-ago issues with Dick Clark.

 

Don Cornelius, 1936–2012. Rest in peace.

 

 

The dynamic dances first showcased on
Soul Train
live on around the globe.

 

It was a very relaxed interview, largely because of Cornelius and Swain's relationship. Swain had worked in production on fifteen Soul Train Awards shows, from the late 1980s up to 2003; he had also been involved with two Soul Train Lady of Soul broadcasts and one comedy special that Cornelius produced for syndication. “We had a kind of father-and-son relationship,” Swain said. “I was always getting into trouble and being called into the office by Don, being sat down and told, ‘I'm gonna tell you what you did wrong this time.' ” For years Cornelius had always told Swain, “as long as you are on my set, I'm the boss,” but on the day of the shooting, he was on Swain's set, where Swain was the boss. “Don told me, ‘I guess you are the boss now,' and was very good about it.”

It was quite a challenge to squeeze all those years of television shows into sixty-four minutes. Chaka Khan got one line. Sly Stone got one line. Patti LaBelle, two lines. Two key friends of the show, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder, could never get scheduled during the six-month shoot and edit. The producers could never pin down Oprah Winfrey. Cornelius very much wanted Marvin Gaye represented in the documentary, because Don considered him one of his closest friends in the business. But according to Swain, Cornelius was “appreciative of [the final film]. Believe me, Don was not one to bite his tongue. If he didn't like it, we'd have known.”

Having known his subject as a boss for over a decade, it's interesting to hear Swain's take on Cornelius post–
Soul Train
. He said, “At the interview and whenever I saw him, he was upbeat and smiling. Looked like a burden had been lifted.” Along with Cornelius, Swain did a number of promotional events for the documentary, including a 2011 Don Cornelius weekend in Chicago where a Don Cornelius Boulevard was named. “Don just seemed to be having a good time and was very open whenever he spoke in public.”

“I'd see Don around Los Angeles in the years after the documentary. I'd see him at Neiman Marcus with his wife, shopping and eating. He'd drive around with a young wife and his yellow Rolls-Royce, and they looked like a very happy couple.”

The Hippest Trip in America
has been aired on VH1's Viacom sister stations, BET and Centric, as well as shown at festivals in Berlin, Barcelona, and two cities in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (though because of the many music-clearance issues with the show, it has yet to appear on DVD or Blu-ray). Despite those limitations, Swain is convinced “the doc cemented the legacy of the show. What a great, great show it was. Now you know what we really miss.”

Chapter 21
Last Days

IF YOU
Google images of Don Cornelius and Viktoria Chapman, you'll see a gallery of red-carpet photos of Don in well-tailored suits and designer glasses, his salt-and-pepper hair cut into a dignified curl (far different from his huge Afro days). Viktoria is a pale, statuesque Russian blonde in a tight-fitting dress with lots of visible cleavage. They were married in 2001 and make a handsome May-September, ebony-ivory couple. In Beverly Hills circles, couples made up of older rich men and younger beautiful women are as common as palm leaves falling onto convertible car hoods.

There isn't much known about Chapman's background. She is a former Miss Ukraine who modeled in Russia and had a daughter, also named Viktoria, from a previous relationship. She apparently appeared in a couple of soft-core porn films before meeting Don. Even folks who knew Cornelius well apparently didn't get to know her well. “It was Hollywood,” said one old friend. “No one cares, really.”

That may be true in general, but certainly in the case of
Soul Train
's founder, there were many who questioned the marriage. But for several years the relationship seemed to be working, and the two were often seen at his longtime haunts, like the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had a charge card and a regular table.

Unfortunately, Don did not spend his retirement years in quiet contentment. Around 2004 Rosie Perez, by then an established actress, was dining at Spago in West Hollywood when he walked over. He was there with his wife, and he was very happy to see Rosie. They exchanged phone numbers, and she called him the next day. “We laughed about our run-ins and stuff that happened on the show,” Perez said. But her overriding memory of the conversation was “that he told me he felt very lonely.”

In 2007, Chapman filed for divorce and had two restraining orders placed against her husband. In 2008 he was arrested at his Mulholland Drive house after being pepper-sprayed by Chapman multiple times following a heated argument with his estranged wife. In court records, he's quoted saying, “Although she instigated the confrontation by shouting insults and profanities very close to my face, and even though the incident itself involved mutual acts of aggression against me, her injuries were very apparent. My injuries were to my eyes and face and not apparent because of the darkness of my skin.”

He was formally charged with spousal abuse and initially pleaded not guilty before changing his plea to no contest. Cornelius was placed on thirty-six-month probation, was ordered to take a fifty-two-week domestic battery course, do three hundred hours of community service, and stay one hundred yards away from the site of the incident. Their divorce became final in May 2009. “I am seventy-two years old,” he wrote in court papers, “I have significant health issues. I want to finalize this divorce before I die.” In the settlement, he was ordered to pay $10,000 a month in spousal support, buy his ex-wife a home not exceeding $1,095,000, and pay tuition fees for his adopted daughter.

In the wake of the divorce, Cornelius's health, physical and mental, was a focus of his friends. He was definitely suffering. He moved more slowly. Spoke more slowly. Couldn't drive anymore. Yet outwardly his spirit seemed strong. Businessman and longtime friend Danny Bakewell had lunch with him in December 2011 and recalled, “We were talking about family and friends. It wasn't about how terrible everything is. I didn't get the impression he had any major health problems or concerns.” Longtime supporter and soul legend Gladys Knight told CNN, “Last time I saw him, he was pretty sick. He had lost a lot of weight, but he still had that thing about him.” Clarence Avant, who dined with him the day before Don died, recalled Don being in the same good mood.

But Don, an icon of cool who'd learned long ago to mask his inner life when necessary, was clearly not at peace. Some speculate that the very messy divorce shattered his self-confidence and embarrassed him. Others suggest his failing health, including a cancer scare and lingering effects of his brain surgery, made him despondent. Or perhaps he was just uncomfortable with getting old.

Late on the night of February 1, 2012, Tony Cornelius received a phone call from his father. “It was a call of urgency,” he told CBS's Gayle King, “and I came to his home immediately.” When Tony arrived, he found his father lying lifeless on the floor. Police were called around 4:00
A.M.
and found Don with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His body was taken to Cedars-Sinai hospital where, at 5:00
A.M.
on February 2, he was pronounced dead. Don Cornelius was seventy-five.

Don's body was cremated on February 9 and the funeral service was held two days later inside the Forest Lawn Memorial Park's Hall of Liberty, where a three-hour service featured tributes from the celebrity world Don thrived in, including words by Smokey Robinson, Jody Watley, George Duke, Cedric the Entertainer, and Barry White's widow, Glodean. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, his old friend from Chicago, delivered an affectionate and lengthy eulogy, but he captured Don's importance quite succinctly with these two lines: “He's right up there with any civil rights leader. He gave people a chance to feel good about themselves.”

The Grammy Awards were to be held the next day in Los Angeles, and the show's producers were preparing a short tribute to Don Cornelius for the telecast. But the tragic death of Whitney Houston at the Beverly Hills Hotel the night of February 11 forced the producers to put together a hurried tribute to the multiplatinum pop superstar that preempted the memorial for Don. He was an innovator in the business, but Houston was a huge star who died a tabloid death. Given the difficult choice, the people behind the show went with the bigger name.

The next day, across the continent, outside in the dead of winter, a party was held at the base of a set of steps associated with a fictional fighter that proved a heartfelt memorial. In front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the bottom of “the Rocky steps,” over the course of four hours, a couple thousand people danced to the sounds of DJ Touch Tone in a
Guinness Book of World Records
record-setting
Soul Train
line. MFSB's
Soul Train
theme started things off, but jams like Chuck Brown's “Bustin' Loose,” the Jacksons' “Can You Feel It,” James Brown's “Funky Good Time,” and Maze featuring Frankie Beverly's “Before I Let Go” kept the party flowing.

The mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, a baldheaded, goateed, fifty-four-year-old black man who grew up with
Soul Train
, started the proceedings with a collective chant of “We love you Don Cornelius!” followed by his version of the show's trademark “We are on the
Soul Train
!” opening. The mayor didn't dance, but he did go down the makeshift dance floor—really just two strings of rope lined up half a block long—and glad-handed in prime campaign form.

The
Soul Train
line record of 211 had been held by students at a Berkeley, California, high school. That might not seem like a lot of people until you consider that the
Soul Train
lines on the show itself probably never had that many people lined up, and perhaps only a quarter of that number actually made it on air.

The dancing this time was not spectacular. There were no Tyrone the Bones or Don Campbells or Jody Watleys or Rosie Perezes in the bunch. Most were, to some degree, bundled up. But there were some bold folks who wore Afro wigs in place of wool caps and bits of glitter along with gloves. They were mostly black, but whites, Asians, and Latinos were among the folks who shook, shimmed, and slid down the line as they were phoned, videoed, and counted for the persnickety folks at the
Guinness Book of World Records,
who would officially certify 291 of the thousand or so who danced.

Not as well publicized but just as powerful was a tribute to Don organized by Marco De Santiago and held at a reopened Maverick's Flat, where several generations of
Soul Train
dancers shared stories and danced hard and long to classic tracks. Damita Jo Freeman, Tyrone Proctor, Thelma Davis, Don Campbell, and most of the dancers who made the show famous showed up at their old haunt. A highlight of the evening was Lakeside's Mark Wood performing “Fantastic Voyage” with his wife, Sharon Hall, and the other dancers joining him onstage as if the classic funk jam captured the spirit of the wonderful experience they'd all shared. The dancers vowed to meet annually at Maverick's Flat to celebrate Don,
Soul Train,
and their continuing sense of community. Many of these same dancers have been contacted by the Smithsonian Institution about contributing clothes and memorabilia to the new African American history wing to open in a few years, a prospect that fills them with pride.

All this activity, organized by fans and folks who lived
Soul Train
firsthand, reflect a warm looking back and a fun sense of nostalgia, but not a signal that the show's legacy will endure. Yet that would be a shortsighted view. Daft Punk, two visionary French electronic dance music producer-writers, released
Random Access Memories,
2013's hottest album, which was a rich blend of classic seventies and eighties grooves with twenty-first-century electronic flavor. The past and present mesh beautifully in Daft Punk's work. Inspired by the album, some clever video archivists reached back to
Soul Train
's rich catalog of movement and meticulously matched them to the rhythms of Daft Punk's “Get Lucky” and “Give Life Back to Music,” putting the genius of Damita Jo, Jeffrey Daniel, and the scores of unknown but equally funky
Soul Train
dancers at the service of cutting-edge music. Hundreds of thousands have watched these videos at this writing, the majority of them young people from around the globe. The dance, the clothes, and the spirit of
Soul Train
still captivate, and they will, through live events and clever online video use, live on whenever people feel the need to boogie.