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.