10

“They Say You Can’t Teach New Tricks to Old Dogs—So Get New Dogs!”

I’m nervous. Old Baby. I’m awfully nervous. I’ve never been a bridesmaid before,” trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie joked with reporters gathered at Chicago’s City Hall.¹ Vaughan had just returned from her tour of Europe, culminating in her appearances at the World’s Fair in Brussels, and now, on Thursday, September 4, 1958, she was getting married. Two days earlier, on Tuesday, she and Clyde B. Atkins became engaged. Wednesday the couple went to City Hall for a marriage license, but they needed blood tests first. Vaughan and Atkins then rushed to a lab, and as the happy couple waited for their test results, they celebrated through the night at a nearby South Side club. Thursday morning a tired yet excited Vaughan married Atkins. It was a simple ceremony. Judge Fred “Duke” Slater presided. Atkins’s half-brother Carl Irvin was best man, and, of course, Gillespie was maid of honor. Vaughan’s parents were not there, nor were Modina Davis, Johnnie Garry, or any other close friends. Art Talmadge, the Chicago-based vice president of Mercury Records, was the only guest. He presented Vaughan with a single orchid.

“After I got divorced from George, I never thought I would get married again,” Vaughan said as she fielded questions from reporters after the ceremony. “But here I am.”² When asked about her whirlwind romance and suggestions that the wedding might be impetuous, she explained that she first met Atkins a year earlier in Atlantic City and that they hung out whenever she played in Chicago. “He used to catch all my shows when I came to town, and we sort of eyed each other when I was singing,” she said. “I dug him and he dug me, so we just decided to jump the broom.”³ Then a white photographer asked Vaughan to gaze at Atkins, grin, and roll her eyes. This angered the usually polite Vaughan, and, her patience waning, she snapped: “I’m no comedian. You’d better get your picture.”⁴

An impromptu reception at the Archway Supper Club followed. According to the press, as news of Vaughan’s marriage spread, she fielded phone calls from friends and fellow musicians. “I just heard about it,” vocalist Dinah Washington reportedly said. “Congratulations . . . or should I say ‘condolences’?” Washington was on her fifth marriage.⁵ She and Vaughan used to commiserate about men, and vocalist Joe Williams remembered their joke: “They say you can’t teach new tricks to old dogs—so get new dogs!”⁶

“You’re going to love him,” Vaughan insisted when she phoned Modina Davis with the news. “Well, but who is he?” asked Davis.⁷ Vaughan’s pianist Ronnell Bright remembered Atkins from his childhood in Chicago. They lived blocks apart and attended the same elementary and high schools. But no one knew what Atkins did for a living. Atkins told the New York Amsterdam News that he worked for Down Beat, but he did not. The New York Times and Variety reported that Atkins owned a fleet of cabs in Chicago. Also unlikely. Other profiles emphasized his athletic prowess, writing that he ran track and played football in high school and later unsuccessfully tried out for the Chicago Cardinals football team. Elsewhere he was described as a sportsman, a hustler of sorts, and a well-known regular of Chicago’s nightclubs.⁸

Despite George Wein’s warnings, Vaughan soon installed Atkins as her new personal manager, even though he had no musical or industry experience. She leased him office space in the same midtown Manhattan building housing her ex-husband’s agency, and Treadwell was not happy. Some suspected jealousy, but it’s also likely Treadwell worried about his professional well-being. According to news reports, Vaughan, his biggest client, had a five-year management contract with him, and he did not want to release her. He called in his lawyers, claiming that Vaughan still owed him money for managing her. “He won’t get a cent,” said Vaughan, according to society columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.⁹ The estranged couple eventually came to an agreement, and in February 1959, during her honeymoon in Acapulco, she announced, “I’ve severed all management connections with my former husband, George Treadwell.”¹⁰

On July 26, 1959, as the couple approached their first wedding anniversary, “Broken-Hearted Melody” began to climb the Billboard charts. Even though Treadwell no longer managed Vaughan, he seized one last opportunity to take credit for his ex-wife’s success. He claimed that he sensed “Broken-Hearted Melody” would become a hit and persuaded executives to rush Vaughan into the studio, despite the fact that it had been recorded a year and a half earlier on January 7, 1958. Nonetheless, her popularity soared, and the stature of her gigs (and paychecks) took another leap. During Christmas, she returned to the Waldorf Astoria, this time playing their more prestigious Empire Room.¹¹ The next week, she appeared at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, followed in January and February by another tour of the United Kingdom, where “Broken-Hearted Melody” spent months on the charts. And she continued to appear on radio and television programs in England and the United States.

The success of “Broken-Hearted Melody” begot other, albeit minor, hits. “Smooth Operator” spent nine weeks on the Billboard charts, peaking at No. 44 in December. “You’re My Baby” made a brief appearance in the top one hundred in February, followed a week later by “Eternally,” which rose to No. 41 during an eight-week run. “Our Waltz” lingered at the bottom of the charts in May, and “Serenata,” her first single for Roulette, spent eight weeks on the charts, peaking at No. 82. Ten months earlier, shortly after Vaughan married Atkins but before the release of “Broken-Hearted Melody,” Morris Levy, the owner of Birdland and the impresario behind the lucrative Birdland tours, wooed an unhappy Vaughan to Roulette. She had become restless at Mercury. Although she continued to record stunning jazz albums for the label, including Sarah Vaughan at Mr. Kelly’s, Sarah Vaughan After Hours at the London House, and No Count Sarah, the quality of the pop material offered her had declined. Levy promised Vaughan a bigger paycheck and more artistic freedom. On April 19, 1960, after her contract with Mercury expired, she recorded her first album for Roulette, Dreamy, a collection of wistful, romantic pop tunes backed by strings.

That May, she landed her first gig in Reno. In June, she performed at Madison Square Garden for a screaming crowd of fifteen thousand.¹² Weeks later, the feature length film Murder, Inc., premiered. Billed as “newcomer Sarah Vaughan,” she made a cameo appearance as a nightclub singer in the moody gangster flick showcasing future Columbo star Peter Falk. In July, she returned to Las Vegas for the first time since her last string of hits in 1955 for a lucrative six weeks at the Flamingo. Unlike her last appearance, she did not have to sneak out through the casino’s kitchen to a trailer between sets. She could now stay in the hotel. She played Las Vegas again in January. And, following a stint at the Cloisters in Los Angeles, she performed on the telecast of the Academy Awards on April 17, 1961.

As Vaughan’s career thrived, the newlyweds settled into what appeared to be a life of happy domesticity. In the fall of 1959, as the success of “Broken-Hearted Melody” resolved Vaughan’s troubled finances, refilling the bank accounts pillaged by Treadwell, she and Atkins purchased a home together in Englewood, New Jersey. It was a spacious 2,933-square-foot split-level ranch with a two-car garage, four bedrooms, white shutters framing the windows, and an impressive multipaned bay window looking out onto their expansive front lawn. In the back, they had a large, fenced-in yard with rosebushes and old-growth trees. Vaughan paid $50,000 for the home, built in 1950, and reportedly spent another $50,000 on renovations supervised by Atkins. They installed a $450 set of entrance chimes that played “How High the Moon.”¹³ “I used to eat for a year on the price of what it now costs to ring my silly old doorbell,” Vaughan joked in Time magazine.¹⁴

She was living the suburban dream. She had a beautiful home in an affluent neighborhood and entertained regularly. Society columns reported that she welcomed African dignitaries to her home and hired three taxicabs to ferry the Treniers, a popular R & B act, to Englewood so she could prepare them a home-cooked meal. Friends Dinah Washington, Gloria Lynne, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clyde Otis all lived within walking distance. Vaughan was just thirty minutes from her parents’ house in Newark and a short ride from Manhattan. During her Waldorf Astoria appearance in December, she commuted in a limousine furnished with a record player. When asked by columnist Leonard Lyons how long it took her to get home, Vaughan answered: “Not long. Just one Count Basie LP and two Miles Davis singles.”¹⁵

Yet, by many standards, this picture of a happy suburban life remained incomplete. Postwar America, with its renewed emphasis on domesticity, home, and hearth, expected a “home” to include a husband, a wife, and their children. Vaughan, now thirty-seven, still wanted children, and on June 14, 1961, she and Atkins adopted a baby girl. Vaughan, casually clad in a white dress, head scarf, and sunglasses, held the two-month-old close as they left the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society in Chicago. Atkins carried Vaughan’s handbag as he walked beside mother and child.¹⁶ During the ride home, Vaughan stared at her new baby in her arms, captivated, as Atkins timidly peered over her shoulder.¹⁷ They named their daughter Deborah Lois.

“This is what I have always wanted. I never had a child before because I was either too busy to take time to have one or because I wasn’t happy,” Vaughan explained in an Ebony profile by Allan Morrison published in September. “My life was being wasted,” she said of her marriage to Treadwell. “I knew it wasn’t going to last.” Atkins represented a second chance at happiness, an opportunity to fulfill not only her longstanding desire to be a mother but also society’s expectations that women be nurturers and caretakers. “This baby has brought a lot of happiness into our home,” Vaughan continued. “She has made a big difference already.”

The cover story featured formal portraits of the family, one with both parents gazing at the sleeping infant, who grasped Vaughan’s pinky finger as the new mother looked on with an easy, comfortable smile, as well as candid shots of Vaughan performing her new duties as a mother. She weighed Deborah as her husband and Inez Brown, their nanny, watched; sterilized bottles for formula; put the fussy baby down for her nap; and pushed a baby carriage as she and Atkins surveyed their property. Motherhood suited Vaughan and, according to Ebony, brought a serenity and security the famous singer had not experienced before, an unconditional love that until this point had eluded her. “I’ve had to get used to a lot of things since the baby arrived. That baby has changed my household,” said Vaughan. “But I love it.”

While Ebony celebrated Vaughan’s newfound status as a mother, it also reminded readers of her professional accomplishments and Atkins’s role as her manager. Photos showed the couple at work in the midtown Manhattan penthouse offices of their company, Progressive Talent. In one, they relaxed on the suite’s balcony, gazing out at the Manhattan skyline. In another, Atkins took center stage as he led a staff meeting. He sat in his large leather desk chair, surrounded by his secretary, receptionist, and office manager. And Vaughan, the firm’s artistic director responsible for vetting talent, sat by his side. It was a portrait of an equal partnership and marriage, an ideal personal and professional collaboration, reminiscent of the press coverage of her marriage to George Treadwell a decade earlier. Vaughan wanted a partnership of equals, the perfect melding of her personal and professional lives. She wanted to be loved, cherished, and taken care of. But she also wanted to be in charge. “All a woman really wants is a roof over her head and a husband under her thumb,” said Vaughan in 1955.¹⁸ And these competing, seemingly contradictory needs would prove to be a difficult balancing act, especially in 1961.

But the enterprise must have been an enormous stress for Vaughan. She was Progressive Talent’s biggest, most lucrative client and was responsible for the livelihood of everyone in the room, not to mention her parents, daughter, daughter’s nanny, road manager, personal assistant, and the three musicians in her band. While Ebony proclaimed the management firm a success, citing its impressive offices and roster of clients, friends remember Vaughan going into the office to check up on Atkins to make sure that he was doing his job correctly. Yet she continued to fund his business ventures, with the hope that he too would thrive and succeed. In December 1959, she financed a trip to South America so that Atkins could negotiate a deal to become the sole United States representative booking tours for a Brazilian impresario. Atkins told the press that he had access to a $250,000 fund that would be used to guarantee artists’ salaries, but nothing ever came of the venture.¹⁹ In June 1960, she bankrolled Atkins as he dabbled in club management too, but the Roberts Show Lounge in Atkins’s hometown of Chicago failed within two months.²⁰ Industry insiders speculated that Atkins wanted to try his hand managing a club in Atlantic City next.²¹

In public, Vaughan praised Atkins’s skills as a manager, just as she had all of those years with Treadwell, and promoted his services. “Sarah always offered me her help and guidance,” vocalist Gloria Lynne wrote in her autobiography. “At one point in our friendship, I was in between personal managers and she recommended her husband, C. B. Atkins. I used him for a minute, but he just wasn’t any good at it.” Another piece of Vaughan’s advice, however, puzzled Lynne. “They used to say Sarah wasn’t human, because of her incredible voice. Well, I remember, Sarah told me one time: ‘Watch the humans.’ I didn’t catch her meaning. And this thing really tripped me up,” Lynne wrote. “I came home and told my mother, ‘Mom, Sarah Vaughan told me to watch the humans!’ ‘Oh, she’s just saying to look out for all those raggedy people,’ my mother said, ‘you know, nasty, lowdown people.’”²²

“C. B. was a gambler,” pianist Ronnell Bright said. “That was C. B.’s real calling.” In December 1959, while en route to Los Angeles, Bright remembered stopping in Las Vegas with the couple. Atkins won $40,000 shooting craps, but he soon lost his winnings and then some of Vaughan’s money.²³ As her personal manager, Atkins was responsible for collecting her earnings, and far too often, during engagements in Las Vegas, Reno, and Atlantic City, he simply gambled all of the money away. Thousands of dollars gone. Bassist Richard Davis, who worked with Vaughan for six years, between 1957 and 1963, agreed. “He was a gambler. You could have seen he was somebody you didn’t want to be around,” he said, adding, “He did not have a respect for the musicians who were behind her.”²⁴ Indeed, the week before adopting their daughter, Vaughan played Basin Street East in New York, and Atkins received a warning from Local 822 of the musician’s union following a dispute with her sidemen.²⁵

After adopting her daughter, Vaughan did not take maternity leave. Two weeks later, on July 2, 1961, she made her annual appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and on July 18, before continuing her usual summer schedule of festivals, country clubs, and benefit concerts, she returned to Roulette’s New York recording studios. Producer Teddy Reig told Vaughan that he wanted to present her in a new way. “On this next album I want you to sing naked,” said Reig, recounting the conversation for oral historian Edward Berger. “Are you losing your mind?” he remembered her replying. “I want you without all that jive noise,” he explained. Her previous sessions had been with Count Basie’s band and string orchestras, sometimes with a choir. “Just you and a simple background—whatever you feel comfortable with.” “How about guitar and bass?” she suggested. “Great. I want [bassist] George Duvivier,” he said. “That’s great,” she answered. “And I’d like [guitarist] Mundell Lowe.” “You got a deal.”²⁶

“We did it up at 106th Street in what I believe was an old movie theater,” Lowe said. “They invited about thirty people, and brought in some tables and checkered tablecloths, food and booze—it was like a nightclub. There was a little platform for Sarah, George, and me. We didn’t rehearse; all of the things you hear on that album are first takes. We’d talk about each tune for a minute or so and then just do it. We’d record for a while, then have a drink and do some more. We started at seven and by eleven we’d finished the whole album!”²⁷ It was one of Vaughan’s most intimate sessions, befitting the album’s title, After Hours. There was a seamless interplay, an easy give-and-take, between Vaughan and the duo backing her. And with this sparse accompaniment her voice was laid bare. She sang “My Favorite Things” as a gentle, caressing lullaby, “Sophisticated Lady” as a sensual cautionary tale, and “Easy to Love” as a hip, swinging invitation to romance. “I felt proud of that album,” Lowe said, and it is widely considered one of the finest albums recorded by Vaughan. “Teddy Reig told me later that it was the only album she ever made that made any money.”²⁸

A year later, in an effort to re-create the magic of After Hours, Vaughan recorded its follow-up, Sarah + 2, this time with Barney Kessel on guitar and Joe Comfort on bass. And the next day, August 8, 1962, Vaughan returned to the same Los Angeles studio to record a second album, the polar opposite of Sarah + 2, a big band session with Benny Carter’s orchestra that became The Explosive Side of Sarah Vaughan. Producer Teddy Reig remembered the easygoing spontaneity of the music making that day. As the band rehearsed “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” Vaughan paced around the studio, trying to get a feel for the arrangement. When she heard the reed chorus Carter had written for the tune, she started to sing along. “Benny and I immediately looked at one another and decided right there to have her sing the lead part with the reeds,” said Reig.²⁹

There was, however, more drama on the sidelines. “Whenever Teddy did a session in California, he’d give me a call and I’d drop by,” publisher Mike Gould told Berger. “I was at the Sarah Vaughan date where Teddy backed her with only guitar and bass. It was one of those inspired concepts that worked perfectly. He used to have to deal with some pretty crazy situations. And he always kept his sense of humor. I was at another of Sarah’s dates where Teddy got involved in a scene with Sarah’s then husband, who was not a very nice man. A couple of guns suddenly materialized and Teddy screamed, ‘They’ve got guns and I haven’t even got a fingernail file!’”³⁰

It wasn’t the first indication that something might be amiss in Vaughan’s nearly four-year marriage. Despite outward appearances of domestic bliss, friends worried that Vaughan had married a controlling man with a volatile temper and that she herself might be in danger. Shortly after their wedding, as Atkins took control of Vaughan’s professional and private lives, he assumed the role of gatekeeper. “Within months, parasites, hangers-on, and even more legitimate acquaintances found that to get to the singer they had to get past Atkins first,” Barbara Gardner wrote in a Down Beat profile for the March 1961 edition, three months before the couple adopted their daughter.³¹ Vaughan became more and more isolated. She stopped calling her friends, and when she walked past their tables at clubs, she would say, “Call me,” but her friends could never get through. Vocalists Annie Ross and Carmen McRae both remembered dining with the couple, and Atkins would not allow other women in the group to accompany Vaughan to the restroom. “C. B. tried to tie her up so that nobody saw her but him,” said childhood friend Aretha Landrum.³²

In 1960, Atkins abruptly fired Vaughan’s road manager, Johnnie Garry and assistant Modina Davis. Garry remembered getting the call from Atkins while he spent his day off with Vaughan. “Sarah Vaughan was sitting in my kitchen eating, cuz we had been to the golf course, and she had asked my wife to fix her some black-eyed peas and stuff like that,” Garry explained in 2007. “So I said to Sarah, ‘Your husband just fired me.’ She said, ‘Well, I’ll talk to him.’ I said ‘No, don’t do that. As long as I’ve been with you and the things we’ve been through, if you had to talk to him about me, it ain’t gonna work.’”³³ Garry became the house manager for Birdland, and Vaughan hired a new road manager. She soon regretted losing Garry and asked him to return, but he refused. “I loved her, but I couldn’t go back steady because [it] never work[s],” said Garry. “Not when you go back to a job that you got fired from by someone that shouldn’t have fired you. It doesn’t work.”³⁴

Garry worked for Vaughan for a dozen years and Davis almost a decade, and both were friends, trusted confidants, advocates, and integral parts of Vaughan’s support network on the road. As she did with her musicians, Vaughan shared an intimacy and deep familiarity with both Davis and Garry, and now that was gone. As Vaughan’s circle of friends shrank, she withdrew into herself, becoming more sensitive and defensive, anxious and unsettled offstage. According to Gardner, Vaughan’s world centered on Atkins and his approval. “She is openly adoring of him, and obedient to the point of subservience. Often she sits quietly, watching him, hanging onto every word. If he asks her to do anything, she is off like a shot,” wrote Gardner. “She is almost childlike in her anxiety not to displease him. If in his absence she goes for a moment against his wishes, she is almost instantly contrite, hoping he will never find out what she has done.”

“I guess I’m too sensitive,” Vaughan acknowledged. “But I’m so afraid of being hurt. I’ve been hurt so much.” At first glance, Vaughan seemed to be discussing her first marriage to George Treadwell. The wounds from his emotional and fiscal betrayals remained raw. But they were also the words of a woman who did not want to get hurt again. It was a portrait of a woman walking on eggshells, doing everything in her power not to upset her violent husband. Gardner never labeled the dynamics between Vaughan and Atkins as domestic violence, but it was implied. She described a woman who was being abused financially, emotionally, and physically. “[Sarah] was scared to say something because this m.f. was going to knock her under the bed,” said friend McRae. “C. B. used to hit her. He thought that was the way women should be treated.”³⁵

Then Vaughan began missing work. The unusually resilient, healthy vocalist, who rarely called in sick, canceled a prestigious two-night engagement with Duke Ellington at Ravinia, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in August 1961, two months after adopting her daughter. Media reports cited a brief hospital stay, likely for a minor surgery.³⁶ In the fall of 1962, she canceled a tour of London, citing another hospital stay. Modina Davis, after Atkins fired her, remembered being called by a club manager when Vaughan failed to show up for her scheduled engagement. Davis believed that she missed the gig because she was too busy fighting with Atkins.

Vaughan did her best to hold her marriage together, but her tenuous grasp on the little control that she had quickly slipped away, and the relationship spiraled out of control. Atkins repeatedly threatened to kill her. On October 18, 1962, she had her husband arrested, and what had been a private struggle soon became a very public scandal.³⁷

Earlier in the week, on Monday, October 15, as Vaughan performed in Larry Steele’s Smart Affairs revue at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, cast members saw Vaughan become upset and emotional. She had received a series of threatening letters and telephone calls, they believed, from her husband. Tuesday night, according to newspaper reports, Atkins confronted Vaughan in her dressing room. He berated her, and another violent argument broke out. Vaughan ran into the street to summon a police officer, who warned Atkins to leave the theater. He returned later that night and was ejected. Wednesday, with the urging of Lionel Beckles, a revue dancer, Vaughan filed a warrant for Atkins’s arrest, charging that he had threatened her life both in person and by phone.³⁸ On Thursday night, October 18, the couple argued again backstage. Officers arrived and arrested a surprised Atkins as Vaughan prepared to go onstage. Detectives talked to him for three hours; he denied making any threatening calls; and he was released. He spent the night at the Penn Sheraton Hotel in a room registered to his wife, but she never returned.³⁹

News of Atkins’s arrest spread quickly. Television and radio programs debated the upcoming hearing. Some speculated that Atkins had taken Vaughan’s daughter from her.⁴⁰ Others suspected petty jealousies. The gossip mill linked Vaughan with a revue dancer and Atkins with his client vocalist Gloria Lynne.⁴¹ By Friday afternoon, several hundred people gathered outside the courthouse, waiting for Vaughan to arrive. “As she stepped from an unmarked police car, dressed in black slacks, a cotton pull-over and a bulky knit sweater, the throng of fans let out a cheer,” the Philadelphia Tribune reported. Once inside the courtroom, an emotional, nearly despondent Vaughan fielded questions from reporters. An hour later, Atkins entered, and the couple immediately retreated into the chambers of Magistrate Earl Lane. “That’s husband and wife in there,” Lane told reporters gathered in the courtroom. “And I’ve given them five minutes to talk it over.”⁴²

The couple emerged thirty minutes later. When asked if she still wanted to testify against her husband, Vaughan, on the verge of tears, turned to the court bar and said in a hushed, barely audible voice: “I wish to withdraw the charges.” She bowed her head and averted her gaze, a grim frown on her face, as Lane lectured the couple and warned Atkins not to mistreat his wife. “You will be brought before me again,” said the magistrate, if he or the Philadelphia police learned of more threats. “You two are important people. You should not involve yourselves in such nonsense like this. Now kiss, make up and go home.”⁴³ For the benefit of the cameras, Atkins kissed his wary wife on the forehead. “Go out of that door and act intelligent,” Lane ordered, and Vaughan, still on the verge of tears, walked out of the courthouse, arm in arm with her husband.⁴⁴

Judge Lane’s inaction was regrettable and, from a twenty-first-century perspective, downright negligent. He ordered a downtrodden, abused woman, who feared for her safety and that of her child, to kiss and make up with her abuser. Instead of advocating for Vaughan, Lane deferred to the laws and social customs of the day, in this case, the institution of marriage, which dictated that a wife should be beholden to her husband, regardless of what happened behind closed doors. In the process, he reinforced the status quo and the sexism and gender inequality that it promoted. In the 1960s, domestic violence, though common, was still widely ignored. Society was in denial. There were no legal systems set up to protect the abused—usually women—or prosecute their abusers. Restraining orders didn’t exist until the late 1970s. And there were no support groups or safe houses to shelter abused women either. Domestic violence was considered a private matter, something that should be resolved behind closed doors, within the confines of the family. It was (and, for that matter, still is) a taboo subject, a secret, a source of shame and guilt. By coming forward, asking the police and courts for help, Vaughan unwittingly broke the code of silence. She aired not only her dirty laundry but that of society as a whole, and in the process she invited backlash and public ridicule, more shame and humiliation.

Was the Arrest of Sarah Vaughan’s Husband Just a Publicity Stunt?” asked the Philadelphia Tribune in a poll of six female readers. Two believed it was, asserting that her ticket sales had been poor at the Uptown. Three believed it was not, insisting that, unlike Dinah Washington, Vaughan did not discuss her marriage in public, nor did she seek publicity. And one was on the fence.⁴⁵ In another column, an anonymous courtroom observer condemned the couple’s public reconciliation, adding, “I think she looked downright tacky. Whoever heard of anyone going to court wearing slacks? That husband of hers wasn’t any fashion plate either. He looked like he had just come out of the poolroom.”⁴⁶ In a letter to the editors of the Philadelphia Tribune, a concerned fan expressed his surprise and disappointment at learning of Vaughan’s troubled marriage. He believed that Vaughan and Atkins loved one another and hoped that this incident had all been a mistake.⁴⁷ A reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American described Vaughan as “pathetic,” while a headline in the Washington Post and Times-Herald, a white publication, proclaimed “Sarah Vaughan’s Sad Story Is Out.”⁴⁸

Having her private struggles put on display in the court of public opinion must have been mortifying for the shy, intensely private vocalist. The judge’s patronizing tone and the public’s victim blaming, all intensified by her status as a celebrity, must have compounded the pain and embarrassment that she felt. And as a race woman, a standard-bearer and role model in the black community, Vaughan was under pressure from many not to make black Americans look bad in front of white Americans. When Vaughan stood up to speak her truth, to protest the inequality and abuse she experienced, she found herself at the intersection of complex and competing forces. She regretted getting the police involved. According to the New York Amsterdam News, during the aftermath of the trial, Vaughan told her husband, “If I had any idea that this thing would blow up to this size, I wouldn’t have done it.”⁴⁹

She did, however, take action. After her public reconciliation in court, Vaughan, summoning emotional strength and courage, prepared to leave her husband. Unbeknownst to Atkins, she took her daughter and retreated to her parents’ home in Newark. She hoped to remove her personal belongings from her Englewood home on Thursday, October 25, but Atkins learned of her plans and stopped her. On November 2, she filed for divorce, citing mental and physical cruelty. The petition stated that Atkins had threatened her life multiple times during the previous two years, not only in Philadelphia but also Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and Canada. Through her lawyer, she also demanded a full financial accounting of her earnings during the four years Atkins managed her career. It seemed history was repeating itself.⁵⁰

“Sarah was not very sharp about money. She wanted someone else to always handle the money,” said bassist Herb Mickman, who worked with Vaughan between 1965 and 1968, during the aftermath of her second failed marriage. Yet who would have taught Vaughan how to be good with money? Her family was poor and likely lived paycheck to paycheck during her childhood. And as a professional woman, not to mention a black professional woman, she had few role models to emulate. “I think she had a bank account in both their names and [Atkins] went to the bank and cleaned her out when he left her,” Mickman continued. “And she didn’t even have enough money to pay all the plane fares to the jobs, so she had to borrow money, and she borrowed money from this guy Preacher Wells, who became her manager. I think he was her lover also; I think they were together.”⁵¹

Vaughan met John “Preacher” Wells in the fall of 1962, shortly after she left her husband and moved back home to Newark. She frequented a nightclub on Clinton Avenue where Wells worked behind the bar. She was vulnerable, in search of comfort and security after the physical and emotional trauma of her failed marriage, and Wells was available. He was three years her junior and a childhood acquaintance. He’d earned his nickname “Preacher” because as a child he shadowed his uncle, a prominent Newark reverend. The couple soon moved into an apartment in Weequahic Towers, near her parents, and, as was her habit, she installed Wells as her new manager, even though he too had no experience in management or the music industry.

Although Vaughan was moving on romantically and professionally, she and Atkins still had unfinished business, and even though Atkins told Jet magazine that he hoped he and Vaughan would reconcile, tensions between the estranged couple escalated.⁵² A gossip column reported that Atkins wanted the Englewood house, purchased and remodeled with Vaughan’s earnings, and an additional $25,000 in the divorce settlement.⁵³ Another gossip columnist suggested that Atkins wooed Vaughan with roses and a mink coat, hoping to reconcile.⁵⁴ In late December, not knowing the other would be there, both Vaughan and Atkins attended vocalist, friend, and neighbor Dinah Washington’s opening night at Birdland. At intermission, Atkins confronted Vaughan. They argued, and Washington stepped in and tried to calm the couple. The disagreement intensified, and Washington ferried Vaughan backstage to her dressing room. Police escorted Atkins from the premises.⁵⁵

Police intervened again on Friday, January 25, 1963, when Vaughan, accompanied by a patrolman and Preacher Wells, returned to her Englewood home, where Atkins still lived, to collect gowns she needed for her upcoming appearance at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. The officer kept watch outside until he heard gunshots from inside the home and broke down the door. He disarmed Atkins, who scuffled with Wells, then arrested both men.⁵⁶

Atkins told a very different version of that night’s events. He claimed that Vaughan hired ten “thugs,” led by Wells, to raid his midtown management offices in search of her contract, which guaranteed him exclusive management rights for the next four years. “Wells knew that before he could legally become her manager he would have to destroy that contract,” Atkins told the Chicago Defender. After trashing his office, the thugs proceeded to his home. Neighbors alerted Atkins that Vaughan was moving him out, and he returned home to find men removing furniture from his house. Wells and Atkins fought inside, and Atkins fired two shots at Wells, who fled to an upstairs bedroom as Atkins pursued him. Concerned neighbors called the police.⁵⁷

It was a classic he-said-she-said fueled by money and the powerful emotions of a dysfunctional, violent romance. A partnership with Vaughan bestowed social status, wealth, and power, and Atkins’s looming divorce forced him to relinquish all of this to another man. In the end, Atkins was charged with assault with a weapon. He was released on $10,000 bail, pending his February 8 trial. In return, he asked prosecutors to file assault charges against Wells, who was released on $200 bail.⁵⁸ And Vaughan returned to the safety of her parents’ home in Newark and prepared for a two-week return engagement at the Fontainebleau.

In March 1963 the Internal Revenue Service placed a lien on the couple’s Englewood home for nonpayment of back taxes.⁵⁹ Vaughan owed $19,150 in personal income taxes for 1960, the year after the successes of “Broken-Hearted Melody.”⁶⁰ As her personal manager, Atkins was responsible for her accounting and taxes. “Arrangements have been made to pay off the lien,” Atkins told Jet magazine. “The government has already received $4500 of it and will get the rest within two weeks.”⁶¹ It’s unlikely that Atkins made these final payments. When she learned of the seizure of her home, Vaughan told Jet magazine that she didn’t mind losing the house. “I always had to scuffle for bread,” she said. But she hated to lose the memories attached to the house.⁶² They represented Vaughan’s hopes and dreams of having it all: a rewarding career and a beautiful home, happy marriage, and thriving child. They also symbolized her efforts to realize the idealized version of her life portrayed in the press from the 1940s through the early 1960s, an ideal informed by what society expected of Vaughan and all women. It must have been painful for Vaughan to accept that she could not have this ideal. However, in the coming years, she would find happiness on her own terms, creating a life that better suited her reality as a successful career woman and artist.

Atkins filed for a legal separation on March 20, 1963. “I will surrender the [management] contract if Sarah does not want me to manage her,” he told Jet magazine. “We do not speak to each other anymore. I feel badly about the breakup of our marriage.”⁶³

Frustrated, financially and emotionally drained, Vaughan confided in Frank Sinatra. She worked the Riviera in Las Vegas in March, and Herb Mickman recalled, “Sarah told me that she met Frank and it was late at night and they took a walk around the hotel. It was, like, just taking a walk so nobody could see them, and she starts telling Frank, she says, ‘My second husband, he went to the bank, he cleaned me out.’ He did this, he did that, and Frank says, ‘Well, why don’t you give me his name, I’ll have a couple of guys break his legs.’ But she didn’t go for that. ‘No, I don’t think I want that,’ says Vaughan.”⁶⁴

As Vaughan dealt with the upheaval in her personal life and its inevitable toll, she went back to work. She returned to the daily grind of touring and life on the road, not simply because she had to support the people who depended on her but because emotionally she needed to. Singing had become her way of dealing with life’s challenges. Singing, being a musician, symbolized something very special for Vaughan. It represented autonomy, independence, and an opportunity for self-realization. It was the space where she was free to express herself, free to be herself, regardless of what society thought she should or could be. And she fought for this freedom and autonomy her entire life. Whatever might happen in her personal life, singing was her one constant. It was her salvation. And, not surprisingly, her life on the bandstand was also where she forged many of her most rewarding relationships.

As Vaughan went back to work that spring, she returned to Roulette’s recording studios. In February and March, she logged five sessions, producing two new albums: Star Eyes and Slightly Classical. Then Teddy Reig, Roulette’s A&R man, went on a Vaughan recording streak. In the span of a month, between May 29, 1963, and the end of June, she participated in eleven studio sessions, seven in Los Angeles and four in Chicago. She stayed in Chicago for another three weeks for a stint at the Edgewater Beach Hotel that began on July 2. This was bassist Charles “Buster” Williams’s first gig with the band. He was twenty-one years old and a native of Camden, New Jersey, but he had been working since he was seventeen, first with saxophonist Jimmy Heath, then Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Dakota Staton, and Betty Carter. Vaughan’s pianist, Kirk Stuart, heard him backing Betty Bebop at Birdland and introduced himself. “I’m the piano player with Sarah Vaughan,” said Stuart, who had been sent on a mission to find a replacement for Richard Davis. “She’s looking for a bassist, and she would love you! Would you be interested?” He was. Williams never had a formal audition for the trio, but he realized in hindsight that Vaughan had an uncanny ability to hear talent. “She could hear beyond what you were doing,” Williams explained. “She could hear your aptitude. She could hear your potential.”

“She made me feel comfortable with her from the beginning,” Williams remembered. “Now, the first night, the first set we played, it was really amazing. And when we finished the set, she took me up to her suite. And she sat me down and she was telling me how much she loved the way I played. And she was talking about Paul Chambers, who was my hero on bass, and she was talking about all these great bass players and how I was destined to be one of these great bass players. And while she’s talking, she rolled a joint. And I had never smoked reefer before. She rolled this joint and she lit up and she took a drive off it and then she passed it to me, and I panicked.” His father, however, had prepared him for this moment. Before Williams went on the road at seventeen, his father instilled many life lessons, including how to fake smoking marijuana. His father told him to squeeze the joint tight, put it to his mouth, and pretend to inhale. “When Sarah Vaughan passed me this joint, this is what I did,” Williams continued. “But now, she’s looking at me, and of course you know, when you’re smoking a cigarette or a joint and you suck it, you see the flame at the end gets more brighter. And I’m sucking and ain’t nothing getting bright. And she looked, and she said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And she took the joint and she told me, she said, ‘Now, this is how you hold it and you smoke this joint.’ And she made me smoke this joint.”⁶⁵

“So [the] first time I smoked reefer was with Sarah Vaughan. And I was scared to death not to do it,” said Williams. But this moment was about more than Vaughan asserting her presence or teaching him how to smoke a joint. Vaughan was sending Williams a message. “She made me feel like it was okay, I mean, ‘I’m going to protect you, don’t worry. So you can fly, I’m just right here.’”⁶⁶ She was telling him that it was safe for him to explore and grow as a musician, to take risks and try new things. It was a pivotal moment in their professional and personal relationship. It was a moment of bonding and trust building. “She never restricted me. She didn’t want to hear you playing in a restricted manner. She wanted to hear you growing, exploring. She wanted to hear you being daring,” Williams explained. “She wanted you to be free.”⁶⁷ She encouraged Williams to be open to all of the possibilities before him, to continue learning and moving ahead. “Every time you pick up your instrument, then it has to be an adventure. That’s the way I was taught. And that was what Sarah Vaughan initiated, or that was the kind of attitude that she generated. That was the perception that she had, and that’s the perception that she wanted those around her to have,” he continued. “In other words, what can you do better than you done before? And what can you find that you didn’t find before? Not haphazardly or helter-skelter. But based on a confidence and a willingness to take a journey, to explore.”⁶⁸

“I was the new guy on the block, and I’m learning the music and I make my mistakes, and she just gives me a big smile,” said Williams. “I loved it. I mean she acknowledged everything that you did. If she didn’t like it, you knew that. And when she liked it, you knew that too.” Pianist Stuart was the musical director, responsible for rehearsing the trio and making sure they were tight. And Chicago native George Hughes was on drums. “But she was always [there], her input was always there because she always made suggestions.” Sometimes it was an explicit instruction, but more often than not Vaughan led by example, using musical cues and body language to show her trio what she wanted. “She was always supportive and appreciative of your contribution. And she was so spontaneous that she initiated spontaneity from her musicians,” said Williams. She accomplished this by simply being herself. “By being who she was. In other words, she wasn’t in a box, so you better not be in a box,” Williams explained. “It’s not something that you have to say to someone. It’s the way you do things. So she was didactic in her excellence.”

Vaughan excelled at creating these havens for her and her musicians, spaces where they could be vulnerable, stretch out, and innovate. She fostered a camaraderie and musical intimacy. In many respects, for Williams at least, she often assumed a maternal role, protecting and taking care of her musicians, all while making sure they had what they needed to thrive. After the gigs in Chicago, the trio embarked on a three-month tour of Europe. They spent a week in France and a month at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, where she and Quincy Jones produced Sassy Swings the Tivoli, her first new album for Mercury since leaving Roulette in 1963. Three weeks of one-nighters in England with the Count Basie band followed. While in London, Williams visited the famous Boosey & Hawkes instrument store and fell in love with a bass that he couldn’t afford. He returned to the hotel and told Vaughan about the instrument. “Without hesitating, she said, ‘Come to the room,’ and she gave me the money,” Williams recalled. “Our understanding was that I would repay her in installments deducted from my salary, but I don’t remember ever seeing any deductions.”⁶⁹

Now, more than fifty years later, Williams still plays that bass. “Your relationship with her was not just ‘Tonight I’m on a bandstand,’” Williams said. “She was my employer, and at the same time she was a mentor. . . . I don’t know about anyone else’s relationship with her, but it was very special to me.” Most of the musicians who worked with Vaughan expressed similar sentiments. They felt a kinship with her, both musical and personal. They loved and respected her. She played a key, often transformational role in their professional lives. And she helped them in their personal lives. Fostering these relationships with her musicians came easily for her; it was intuitive and second nature, but she still struggled to find a similar kind of love, acceptance, respect, and generosity from the men in her personal life. She knew how to function as a musician, but she didn’t know how to function in the role of wife, especially as defined in the 1950s and 1960s. The flashy, often macho men she chose as romantic partners struggled to find their place in her life too. Society dictated that they should be the “man of the house,” but this was at odds with Vaughan’s powerful personality, stubborn streak, and status as primary breadwinner, internationally famous artist, and genius.

More than two years after she separated from her second husband, C. B. Atkins, her divorce was still not finalized, and tensions between the estranged couple were escalating once again. Vaughan learned that the IRS would seize their Englewood home on January 20, 1965, and then place it up for auction. In mid-December, before the IRS intervened, she returned to the home to collect her belongings. Atkins was at home, and another ugly confrontation ensued. This time, instead of resorting to violence, Atkins called the police. He insisted that Vaughan broke into his home, even though both her and his name appeared on the title, and took $5,600 in cash, clothing, and furniture. Atkins charged Vaughan with larceny. On December 18, she appeared before an Englewood magistrate, and he issued a summons requiring Vaughan to return to court on January 15 for a preliminary hearing. Just as their failed marriage was about to take another ugly turn, the couple called a truce. Atkins dropped the larceny charges, and they worked toward a divorce settlement.⁷⁰ Vaughan was finally free.