577 - Little Richard en Lee Angel
Little Richard (Richard Penniman, 1932-2000), de zwarte vertolker van songs als ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’ en ‘Lucille’, was een bijzondere artiest, een bijzondere man – vanaf zijn prilste jaren. In een artikel over zijn jeugd bijvoorbeeld heb ik [hier HK] een en ander aangeduid.
Dat gold tevens voor zijn omgang met vrouwen. Een van die vrouwen was Audrey Sherbourne, die op 12 januari 1940 geboren werd in Savannah, Georgia, de Amerikaanse staat waar hij ook zelf vandaan kwam. Richard was afkomstig uit Macon, Georgia.
In zijn autobiografie vertelde Richard aan Charles White hoe hun eerste ontmoeting verliep. Die vond anno 1956 plaats in de woonplaats van Audrey, Savannah dus. De pas doorgebroken artiest zag haar vanuit zijn hotelkamer en was met name onder de indruk van haar figuur: “We were in Savannah, Georgia. I was sitting in the hotel room with some of the band looking out the window. I saw this beautiful young girl with this fantastic body, fifty-inch bust and eighteen-inch waist. She was with another girl walking toward the theater”.
Richard reageerde meteen. “I asked one of my band to go across the street and ask her to come over to the hotel. She told me she was about to graduate from high school”.
De artiest was 24, het meisje, nog minderjarig: 16 jaar.
Eerste ontmoeting, in 1956
Aan popjournalist Johnny Whiteside vertelde Audrey later dat ze helemaal niet hield van liedjes als ‘Tutti Frutti’. Bebop jazzartiesten Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) en Sonny Rollins (1930-2004) hoorden tot haar favoriete artiesten. “I hated Richard’s music”, liet ze vastleggen.
Haar vriendinnen waren wél enthousiast. “All the kids were excited about the big dance that night with Little Richard, but they said, ‘We knew you won’t be there’”.
Audrey had een andere reden om de straat op te gaan. “I was done with high school for the day and out doing an errand for my stepmom”.
Audrey was verbaasd over de belangstelling van de artiest. Misschien was ze wel op de hoogte van zijn seksuele voorkeur. Naar eigen zeggen zou ze op de uitnodiging gereageerd hebben met de woorden ‘Does he know I’m a girl?’
Toch was ze wel nieuwsgierig toen een van de begeleiders haar vroeg mee te komen. “Someone came up to me on the street and said, ‘Excuse me, Little Richard wants to meet you’. Curiosity kicked in, as usual, and I walked in that room”.
Liefde?
Het bleef niet bij die ene ontmoeting. Audrey zou het initiatief genomen hebben. Richard: “A few weeks later she turned up at a concert in Wilmington, Delaware”. Een afstand van bijna 1100 kilometer, en dat voor een meisje van ongeveer 16 jaar?
Richard: “She had decided to come with me. When we left for Washington, D.C., that night, she traveled with us in my car. We checked into the Hotel Dunbar, in Washington, and we shared a room”.
Het samen zijn pakte goed uit. “She was a wonderful lover. She changed her name to Lee Angel and worked as a nude model, a dancer, and a stripper”.
Over hun relatie verklapte Richard: “From the beginning she seemed to know exactly what I wanted in sex. She would do anything to excite me, including having sex with other guys while I watched”.
Richard definieerde hun relatie met de woorden “I loved Angel and Angel loved me, but in different ways. Marriage was a dream of hers, but I never wanted to marry her. I loved Angel because she was pretty and the fellers enjoyed having sex with her. She could draw a lot of handsome guys for me. She was like a magnet. She drew everything to me”.
Ter verduidelijking: “You ain’t never seen a woman made like Angel. That fifty-inch bust. Natural, too, never a fat woman. She looked like a white girl, but she’s black”.
Huwelijk?
Bij Little Richard zou dus geen sprake van een huwelijk zijn. Audrey dacht er anders over, zoals hij zelf aangaf. Ze hadden immers zo’n goede verstandhouding, vertelde ze aan Charles White. “We were so close that we could read each other’s mind. I would be in a room with him and I’d start cursing him out because I’d know what he was thinking. Everybody in the room used to wonder what was going on between us”.
Ze gaf nóg een voorbeeld: “If he was away on the road and I wanted to talk to him, I would really concentrate on him and he’d call me within a few minutes”.
Volgens Audrey was er begin 1957 bijna sprake van een huwelijk. “Richard and I became very close friends to the point where we almost got married”.
Ze haalde een gebeurtenis aan. In februari 1957 verscheen zijn nieuwe single ‘Send Me Some Lovin’’. Audrey bevond zich in Tennessee. Ze vertelde: “Richard sent me to Tennessee to work with a piano player called Ray Charles. I was there about three weeks before Richard got there. He had planned to have his new record, ‘Send Me Some Lovin’’, released on that particular day all over the country”.
Die dag zou Richard zijn gehoor toegesproken hebben tijdens het optreden.
Audrey: “That night, at the show, Richard told me and about seven thousand other people that I was his fiancée and that we were getting married. That’s how I found out. He dedicated ‘Send Me Some Lovin’’ specially to me”.
Audrey en Richard stonden vaak samen op het toneel. Zij als danseres, als stripper. “I traveled with him when he was doing one-nighters. It was always fun. One time we were at the Civic Opera House, in Chicago. Richard introduced me to the audience. The place was packed with thousands of people. As we were leaving the auditorium his fans came up and ripped my dress off!”
Rock Wife
In 1986 publiceerde Victoria Balfour het boek Rock Wives. Daarin liet ze de vrouwen van beroemde popartiesten aan het woord, de partners van onder anderen Jerry Lee Lewis, Brian Wilson, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Donovan, Jimi Hendrix, Meat Loaf en Bob Dylan. In een van de hoofdstukken stond Audrey centraal. Victoria omschreef haar als ‘a voluptuous former stripper who performed in the fifties and sixties under the name Lee Angel’.
Over het mogelijke huwelijk werd afgedrukt: “She and Richard were so close that they were planning to marry. But she walked out on him – supposedly on the day they had set for the wedding”. Ondanks dat ‘incident’ waren ze altijd goed bevriend gebleven.
Audrey maakte duidelijk wat haar positie was. “They called me a groupie or some shit like that. That’s the pitch Richard’s been giving me. But, honey, I went around the world as a stripper. I’ve headlined in other countries and I have a pretty good following myself”.
Het boek van Victoria verscheen twee jaar na de autobiografie. Voor Audrey aanleiding om nog eens terug te kijken hoe het volgens haar allemaal gegaan was. Volgens de schrijfster genoot de vrouw van alle aandacht die haar ten deel gevallen was. Van strippen was intussen geen sprake meer. “There are no decent clubs for me to work in anymore. What they’re asking me to do onstage, I wouldn’t do in the privacy of my own bedroom”.
Haar leven had een andere wending genomen: “Life has been pretty quiet. She found work as a house renovator; most nights she plays pinochle with a next-door neighbor”.
Terugblik
Aan Victoria Balfour vertelde Audrey over haar muzikale achtergrond. Haar ouders waren betrokken bij het engageren van zwarte artiesten. Die konden vanwege hun huidskleur niet logeren in gewone hotels. “I grew up around show business. My parents used to be members of a society that used to bring all the black entertainers into Savannah. So I already knew people like Johnny Ace, Guitar Slim. My stepmom was the best cook in the country, and everybody liked to come to her house and eat when they were in town, so that’s how I grew up around these people”.
Audrey wist van horen zeggen een beetje wat zich afspeelde in de wereld van artiesten. “Naturally, I heard the rumors about Richard – that he was strange”.
Audrey kon zich in 1986 nog goed herinneren hoe het gegaan was in 1956. Ze wist zelfs nog hoe ze bij die eerste ontmoeting gekleed was. “ Dressed in pedal pushers and her father’s best white shirt, Angel was on her way to the soda parlor with a bunch of friends from school when Richard, who was in town for a concert, spied her from his hotel window”.
Audrey: “I remember one of my classmates ran over to me and said, ‘Hey! Little Richard wants to see you!’ My friends told me to go on up and meet him. And I went up to his hotel room and I walked in the door and I took one look at him and… Yuk! I don’t know what happened. I was plagued for the rest of my life. The moment I saw him, I heard the bells ring, I got dizzy. He was lying on the bed.
Richard hadn’t gotten into the makeup. He did dress a little wild and he always kept his hair pretty. I’ve always been the direct type. ‘You want to see me’, I said. ‘I’m a girl!’
He said he knew and he wanted to know if I was coming to his concert that night. I had no intentions of going to Little Richard’s concert that night. When I left home, that was the last thing on earth that I wanted to get close to”.
Lee Angel
Schoenen en een jurk
Als gevolg van die ontmoeting had Audrey haar plannen gewijzigd. “When I left him, I ran out of the place and I ran down to my dad’s garage and asked him for some money for new shoes and a dress”.
Haar vader begreep het eerst niet. “Daddy said, ‘What? What? What?’”
Audrey, quasi onverschillig: “Oh, I’m going to see Little Richard tonight”. Waarop ze te horen kreeg: “You are going to see Little Richard? I thought you didn’t like Little Richard”.
Audrey kreeg haar zin: “She talked her dad into giving her the money for her first pair of high-heeled shoes and a dress. That night, after the concert, she stayed out with Richard until two o’clock in the morning – the latest she’d ever stayed out on a date. Apparently, they got along well that night. ‘It was flirt, pretty flirt, pretty’, she remembers”.
Wilmington, Delaware
De tweede ontmoeting vond volgens haar veel later plaats dan Richard aan Charles White verteld had. “Angel did not see Richard again until after she had graduated from high school and was living with an aunt in Philadelphia and working in little clubs as a dancer”.
Audrey: “I heard that Richard was going to be in Wilmington, Delaware. So I went to Wilmington. Richard was happy to see me, I was happy to see Richard, and that’s when my life changed.
The next thing I knew, I woke up in Washington, D.C. I got drunk for the first time in my life. Only I didn’t get drunk; Richard got me drunk. I always remember waking up the next morning and the first thing I realized that there was a man next to me.
And then I opened my eyes and I didn’t know where I was. And I want to turn over, but I don’t want to wake up this man over here. But I want to see who this man is. And it must have taken me three hours to inch my way over, to turn over and keep from waking up whoever was in bed with me until I find out who it was. And it was Richard! And that was the beginning of the relationship”.
Richard en Audrey trokken anderhalf jaar samen op, is in Rock Wives te lezen. “Sometimes Richard arranged it so she could work on the road, too”.
Audrey: “He had me put on a show with Ray Charles and Bob and Ray and Mickey and Sylvia – only the people he trusted. I’d be the opening or middle act”.
In die tijd woonde ze ook bij haar tante in Philadelphia. “Sometimes Richard would call there, and my aunt would say, ‘Well, she just went to the store to get a loaf of bread for me’. And he would go off. He’d get mad and angry and pissed. And I would come back, and my aunt would always scream the same thing: ‘Call that madman! Call that madman!’”
Samen op pad
Volgens Audrey zorgde zij ervoor dat Richard wat rust had in zijn chaotische bestaan. “If they went too long without seeing each other, she says, ‘Richard would start going crazy. Then the boys would start talking about me’. They knew that if he called up Angel and asked her to come visit for a while, ‘that would be the only time he acted human, and not only would he act human, he was tranquil for weeks after. When I’d go back home, they’d have a nice, calm Richard on their hands’”.
Balfour: “Life on the road with Little Richard was ‘wild’. They snatched sleep whenever and wherever they could: Angel remembers one time sleeping in a projection room in a theater, right under the speakers”.
In die tijd, aldus Audrey, rookte de artiest niet; hij dronk niet en gebruikte geen drugs.
Voedsel onderweg
Van dineren moest je je bij zwarte topartiesten niet te veel voorstellen. “As for dining conditions, they ate on what was known as the ‘chitlin’ circuit’ – that is, greasy spoons patronized by blacks only. ‘In those places, if you didn’t buy the roaches a steak, you didn’t eat in peace. And that was all that was open to blacks in those days – even for a star like Little Richard or Chuck Berry or Fats Domino’”.
Omdat Audrey een lichte huidskleur had stuurde Richard haar op pad om aan behoorlijk voedsel te komen. “At one point, she remembers, when everyone was sick and tired of eating in those places, Little Richard talked Angel, who is a very light-skinned black, into going into a White Castle and trying to pass herself off as white.
‘They parked around the corner, and I walked in. I’m nervous. It scared me. Here I’m a little girl, twelve o’clock at night and I just walked in with all these white people. I ordered twenty hamburgers and nobody paid any attention to me, but it took me a long time before I could relax with doing it’”.
Zo ging het wel vaker.
Lee Angel in 1962
Het huwelijk dat niet doorging
Audrey bracht het huwelijksaanzoek opnieuw ter sprake bij die gelegenheid. “Angel has many fond memories of the road, but, certainly the most memorable one has to be the time that Richard introduced Angel to his audience at a show in Chicago’s Old Civic Opera House. ‘Richard told the world that he was going to marry me. He introduced me to fifty thousand people in one night as his fiancée, and that night as we were leaving the auditorium the kids came up and ripped my dress off, and here I was standing in the middle of Chicago with nylon stockings, panties, and garter belt’”.
Het huwelijk zou plaatsvinden op 1 september 1957 wist ze nog. Volgens Audrey was zij degene die het niet door liet gaan – op de trouwdag zelf. “Instead of walking up the aisle on that day, Angel walked out on him”.
Audrey zou genoeg gehad hebben van hun seksuele relatie. “I’m the woman that Richard wanted to be. I am Little Richard’s alter ego. When he used to have his parties, when he became the girl, it was me. In his fantasies he became me”.
In plaats van met haar trouwde Richard op 11 juli 1959 met Ernestine Campbell. De popartiest was een religieus leven gaan leiden. Audrey: “I ran into him when he was preaching in Washington, D.C. I had to go to see him. I walked into the church and… Richard always knew when I walked into a place.
I watched the whole thing, and suddenly he motioned to one of the deacons and reached in his pocket and gave him something and whispered something. The next thing I knew the guy was standing next to me saying, ‘Reverend Penniman says please wait for him in the gold Cadillac outside’”.
Audrey accepteerde het nieuwe leven van Penniman. “I knew my presence around him was no good, because he was supposed to be a minister”.
Andere relaties
Audrey ging een leven zonder Richard leiden. “She was doing quite well in her career as a dancer and stripper and had even ventured into modeling. ‘I did an assignment for the Nudist Association of America and I had this blanket and they couldn’t get me out of this blanket. I am the big stripper, right? And they couldn’t get me out of this blanket!’”
Een van de artiesten met wie ze het aanlegde was Jackie Wilson, de zanger van liedjes, die vaak geschreven waren door Berry Gordy. “He was totally insane! Jackie had my door kicked in in Washington, D.C., at the hotel I was staying at, my being kidnapped out of the hotel room, thrown into Cadillacs, soaking wet hair, a very light pair of pajamas on and snow!”
Het ging er volgens haar niet fijnzinnig aan toe in de liefde. “Jackie was a cocksman. Jackie would go to bed with anything that was young enough or old enough. If you could pull down your panties and pull up your dress, you could be had by Jackie. And Jackie was the first one I met who had a true coke habit”.
Jackie Wilson
Opnieuw contact in 1970
Toch kwam ze in 1970 weer terug bij Richard. “I was in London and I was watching the Tom Jones Show. It was an episode that Richard was in. He was doing ‘A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh’, and I saw the loneliest man on earth. I didn’t see the makeup and I didn’t see the hair, but I did see a friend calling for help, and that’s when I came back to the States”.
Haar vrienden hadden haar gewaarschuwd. “All my friends told me the same thing, Brook Benton, Johnny Nash, Henry Nash, who was Richard’s manager, they all told me the same thing: ‘Don’t get in touch with Richard. He’s going to hurt you. You just don’t know Richard. Richard’s changed’”.
Dat bleek inderdaad het geval te zijn. Ze ontmoetten elkaar in de luchthaven van Los Angeles. “I’m at the airport, and this was during the tie-dye with the Indian beads and fringe. I had on a beautiful pirate-purple puff-sleeved see-through blouse. And this limousine pulls up, and seventeen people that I would not want to get caught in a dark alley with got out. Then Little Richard got out”.
Audrey schrok. “The makeup, the wig, this is twelve o’clock in the afternoon and he’s got on a red-and-gold batwing outfit. He got out of the car, and I right away shut up and I had to get in the limousine with him.
The people around him were treating me like a groupie. They would just not let Richard and me get close. Whenever I would get any touch of human being out of him, somebody would start something. And if I got close, they’d probably be out of the picture. And I’d say to Richard, ‘Why are you permitting these people to do this to me? Why aren’t you defending me?’”
Richard zat helemaal onder de drugs was haar conclusie. “She feels, Richard’s drastic personality change was a result of the number of drugs he was taking. The fact that he was doing drugs at all was a big shock to her”.
Daar was vroeger geen sprake van geweest.
Volgens Audrey bleef ze nog wel in contact met hem en zijn moeder in Riverside (Californië); maar zoals het vroeger was, zou het nooit meer zijn. “He went into the Twilight Zone and never returned”. Met de kerst in 1979 had ze nog een prachtige bijbel van hem cadeau gekregen – met daarin: To my wonderful lady and friend”.
In 1986 had ze afstand genomen. “I’m not going to waste my time. I have my own private life and I’m really happy with it”.
Achteraf was ze blij dat ze in 1957 niet met hem in het huwelijk getreden was, liet ze Victoria Balfour weten. “Though I often wonder what would have happened if Richard and I had gotten married. Would one of us be dead by now?”
Lee Angel in 1986
Interview met Johnny Whiteside
In 2018 liet Audrey (Lee Angel) zich interviewen door Jonny Whiteside, journalist bij Los Angeles Weekly. Hij introduceerde haar bij zijn lezers met de woorden: “Dancer Lee Angel was midcentury rock & roll’s premier muse, a backstage asset who exerted an irresistible force over Little Richard, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Jackie Wilson. She was both a burlesque legend and the ultimate rock & roll insider”.
Van artiest Dewey Terry had Whiteside gehoord: “He’d have little midget women running back and forth around this huge, giant man. All kinds of people. But Angel never took part in it, because Richard just wanted her to watch and he made sure that’s all she did”.
In het gesprek herhaalde Audrey niet alleen wat ze lang geleden al verteld had. Ze vertelde tevens hoe het verder gegaan was. Ze was haar eigen pad opgegaan. “Dizzy Gillespie was the one who really gave me the clue to start dancing. I was in Nashville and went to hear him play. ‘Night in Tunisia’ started the whole thing – I was dancing with someone and all of a sudden I was floating in air. Dizzy brought me up onstage, said, ‘You’re a dancer, now become a musician’ – he wanted me to be like a saxophone, another instrument in the band”.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Ook Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1929-2000), bekend van ‘I Put A Spell On You’, kwam ter sprake. “She fell in with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the horror-rock wildman with whom she also maintained a torrid lifelong alliance.
‘I miss Jay’, Angel says. ‘The insanity we had in our lives throughout the years was unbelievable. I left Savannah for Philadelphia and had just started dancing when I met him. We were staying in the same boarding house and he was giving me the ‘I was the only one for him’ line. Then he walked in with another ‘only one’ and I really gave it to him! And that went on throughout our entire relationship, back and forth’.
Volgens de journalist van L.A. Weekly zat Audrey in 2018 vol met dit soort verhalen. “Angel’s trove of high-flying, hard-living memories is as inexhaustible as it is flabbergasting, but even at the most intense moments, she maintains a coolly elegant, very Southern air of reserved genteel”.
Haar gezondheid was niet meer optimaal. “Following some recent health issues (heart surgery and a rehab stint), she bounced back in typically spectacular fashion, tossing her walker aside and hitting the dance floor at a 2017 fundraiser”.
Ook nam ze (opnieuw) afstand van rock & roll muziek. “I always liked the freedom of jazz when I was dancing. I picked all my own songs and I did it all over the world for 30 years”.
Op 3 april 2022 kwam er een eind aan haar aardse bestaan.
Vaarwel
Whiteside schreef een necrologie op zijn website. Daarin herhaalde hij veel wat er over haar al naar buiten gekomen was.
Hij voegde eraan toe: “Angel became a fabled muse and unsurpassed object of desire among show business’ top ranking habitués. Accordingly, she cultivated a hard-to-get Hellcat persona, and her encounters with high-profile suitors uniformly ended with her wardrobe in tatters, arriving back at her hotel the next morning, as she frequently recalled, clad in Sammy Davis Jr.’s pajamas or one of Frank Sinatra’s dress shirts. Her notoriety as supercharged inamorata led executives at Apple Records to fly her to London and offer a considerable sum if she would deign to break up John and Yoko; she declined”.
Ze werd volgens hem gevraagd om concerten van zwarte beroemdheden op te luisteren. “Between dance engagements, she toured with the roadshows of soul/R&B royalty (James Brown, LaVern Baker the Jackson 5, Etta James) and developed a sustained reputation as a sage insider capable of stewarding interventions for crack enslaved musicians, a sympathetic shoulder to cry on in any adverse circumstance”.
Een rustige oude dag was haar niet gegund. “Angel fell into poverty. Health failing, she and I discussed collaborating on her autobiography but the stars did not align. After undergoing heart surgery and a month-long rehab stint in 2017, Angel returned home, penniless, to find her utilities had been shut off. A hastily arranged fundraiser (featuring Richard’s original drummer Charles Connor among numerous other acts) provided some relief; Angel was in high spirits and when Connor took the riser, she cast off her walker and hit the dance floor, as graceful and beguiling as ever.
It was an electrifying moment but one that, considering her monumental life in entertainment, paled to insignificance. Farewell, Angel”.
Clips
* Little Richard, Long Tall Sally
* Little Richard, Send Me Some Lovin'
* Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put A Spell On You
* Etta James, Something's got a hold on me
Literatuur
Victoria Balfour, ‘Lee Angel’ in Rock Wives, Londen 1986
Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard. The authorised Biography, Londen 2003 (1984)
Jonny Whiteside, ‘Lee Angel: The Muse Who Had a Front-Row Seat to Rock History’, L.A. Weekly, 31 mei 2018
Jonny Whiteside, ‘Farewell to the Original Girl Can’t Help It’, 9 mei 1922
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