Papa

When James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, he left behind a fortune worth tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars. The problem is, he also left behind: Fourteen children (pending DNS tests); Sixteen grandchildren (and counting); Eight mothers of his children (that’s a low estimate); Several mistresses (the man was a rock star); Thirty lawyers; A former manager; An aging dancer; A longtime valet; And a sister who’s not really a sister but calls herself the Godsister of Soul anyway. All of whom want a piece of his legacy. And when the dust clears, there might be nothing left of the (supremely talented, extremely careless, and massively troubled) Godfather of Soul. Selections from GQ's April 2008 issue

By Sean Flynn

Photograph by Robert Knight; Courtesy of Retna

*****

On the current legal claims to the James Brown estate:

Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his “personal and household effects”—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. “I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,” he wrote in the will. “Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.”

Everything else he owned, including his sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for “financially needy” students who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown’s best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he’s still pulling eight figures annually.

In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.

Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving…precisely nothing.

For such a simple little will—all of five pages, and mostly boilerplate at that—there are a stupefying number of issues to resolve.

Mr. Brown’s ostensible widow and the mother of James Brown II wants at least a third and perhaps half of his riches—though, as a matter of law, she is almost certainly not his widow nor, as a matter of human physiology, the mother of his biological child. Five of the six children named in the will want the trust dissolved and the will invalidated, which would entitle them to equal shares of the entire estate; that puts them at odds with the sixth sibling, Terry, and his boys, Forlando and Romunzo, who want the will and educational trusts to stand. At least two other daughters whom Mr. Brown never acknowledged also want a share of the pot, as well as eighteen years of back child support. Four more potential children—Jane and John Does I, II, III, and IV in the court records—might have similar claims. The three men Mr. Brown named as trustees have resigned, though two of them, Albert H. “Buddy” Dallas and Alford Bradley, want to be reinstated, because they say a judge bullied them into quitting. That same judge, Doyet Early, wants to put the third former trustee, David Cannon, in jail for not repaying $373,000 in misappropriated funds. Cannon says he can’t afford it, which looks bad considering he spent almost $900,000 in cash to build a house in Honduras last year. State investigators are working a criminal case on Cannon, too. The two special administrators Judge Early appointed to replace those three men, meanwhile, are being sued in federal court by Forlando Brown, who argues that they were illegally put in charge and are improperly attempting to shift assets from the trust to the estate, from which their $300-an-hour fees could be paid. The administrators, Adele J. Pope and Robert Buchanan, have in turn sued Bradley, Cannon, Dallas, entertainment lawyer Joel Katz, his firm (Greenberg Traurig), and Enterprise Bank in state court, alleging a years-long conspiracy to swindle millions from Mr. Brown. All of those people have lawyers, and many of them have more than one. Tomi Rae Hynie, the widow who’s probably not technically a widow, has five. Her son has his representative, a guardian ad litem, and the guardian ad litem has his own lawyer. Pope and Buchanan have lawyers. Even the anonymous beneficiaries of the trust, all those needy and deserving would-be students, have a lawyer—the attorney general of South Carolina—and they used to have two until Judge Early tossed out the Georgia attorney general.

And those are the relatively dignified legal proceedings.

Outside the courtroom, the family has bickered over absolutely everything, including the disposition of Mr. Brown’s body, which for a time was kept in a gold-plated coffin inside a climate-controlled room in his house. When it was finally decided that the corpse would be put in a crypt in daughter Deanna’s yard in early March, daughter Yamma nearly missed the private ceremony because police in Atlanta had arrested her the night before for stabbing her husband in the arm with a butcher knife. Since then, Forlando Brown has accused those two aunts, Deanna and Yamma, of swiping mementos, checks, and tens of thousands in cash from his grandfather’s house, and in court he called their lawyer—who used to be his lawyer—a liar and a forger, or at least an accomplice to forgery. Yamma, Deanna, and half-brother Daryl accused the former trustees of hunting for “certain assets” when the trustees photographed the woods around Mr. Brown’s house, an obvious reference to cash Mr. Brown is believed to have buried in the yard. Tomi Rae Hynie, who prefers to be called Mrs. Brown, was locked out of the house, and she insists someone—the adult children or the former trustees, or a combination thereof—shredded more recent wills, which she believes left half of Mr. Brown’s assets to her and her son, and took all of her jewelry and most of Mr. Brown’s clothes. “They looted everything,” she says. “You’re dealing with nothing but liars and thieves and cheats who would throw a widow and a 6-year-old child out on the streets.” She also believes, along with several other people, that Mr. Brown was killed, though by whom and how neither she nor anyone else will say. “I can’t comment on that right now,” she says, “for the safety of myself and my son.” Even the lawyer who drew up the will and trust that are now being contested is a tawdry little sideshow: He’s in prison for the 2006 murder of a strip-club manager who’d bounced him for nakedly masturbating while waiting for a $300 lap dance.

Wait, there’s more.

There are claims against the estate from creditors and would-be creditors. The funeral home wants $17,995 for the programs it produced for the services. One of Mr. Brown’s managers wants a $200,000 cut of royalties he was promised. Buddy Dallas would like $624,876 in fees he says he was shorted over seven years. The Pullman Group, to which Mr. Brown mortgaged his royalties in 1999, wants $31 million (the refinancing of that deal is the subject of yet another lawsuit). A doctor wants $8,500 to reimburse her for, among other things, all the times she packed Mr. Brown into a limo to rehab in Atlanta; she’d like an additional $14,000 for two African carvings he never returned to her, or failing that, the carvings. Roosevelt Johnson, too, would like to get paid. “We were always told by Mr. Brown we would be taken care of should anything happen to him,” he wrote in his claim. “We, meaning myself, and his group should have at least got two weeks severance pay. Myself for over 30 years of faithful service should get 2.5 million for a lifetime of service as he promised.”

Maybe Mr. Brown did make that promise. But he never put it in writing, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Somebody surely would’ve sued.

*****

On Brown’s sexual habits:

“You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they’d flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey’s to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?” Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)

So how many women? How high can you count? Mr. Brown always kept a few girlfriends on the side, some for decades, and he always found a woman or two in whatever city he happened to be playing. “There’d be times, literally, when one would be coming in the front door while another one was going out the back,” says Buddy Dallas.

Naturally, some of them got pregnant.

*****

Former lawyer Buddy Dallas on Brown’s financial struggles and eventual vasectomy:

Buddy Dallas met James Brown in 1984 at a political reception in Augusta, Georgia. It was a brief and unremarkable encounter—Dallas mostly remembers that his 2-year-old daughter liked the little man with the funny hair—but the next day, the phone rang in Dallas’s office. It was Mr. Brown.           

“Mr. Dallas,” he said, “I need you to represent me.”

“But Mr. Brown,” Dallas replied—it was somehow automatic that James Brown was Mr. Brown—“I don’t know anything about the entertainment business.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll teach you about the entertainment business. But I need you to represent me now.”

Mr. Brown’s immediate problems didn’t involve entertainment. Mainly, he was broke. He hadn’t broken the Billboard 100 in seven years, and he was playing shows for $7,500 that cost him $9,500 to produce. The IRS wanted $20 million in back taxes and penalties, the phone company had cut his line, and the founder of the Sacramento chapter of his fan club was after him for child support. “Mr. Dallas,” he said a week after they’d met, “I hate to ask you this, but I really, really need some money.”

So the first thing Dallas did as Mr. Brown’s lawyer was give him $12,000, two grand in cash, the rest in checks paid to his creditors. Less than a year later, Dallas put up his own Lincoln as collateral for another $18,000.

The second thing he did was straighten out the child-support mess in Sacramento. “Mr. Brown,” Dallas told him when the paperwork was settled, “you’re going to have to be more careful.”

“Well, Mr. Dallas,” he said, “we’re not going to have to worry about that no more.”

What he meant was there wouldn’t be any future paternity suits: Mr. Brown told at least six people he’d had a vasectomy earlier that year. But that was too little and much too late: One reason his estate is such a disaster is that he left so many heirs who could lay claim to his wealth.

His first wife, Velma, bore three sons in the 1950s, of whom two survive, and a backup singer had a fourth boy. Another singer gave birth to a daughter in 1965, and his second wife, Deidre, had two girls, one in 1968 and the other in 1972. The fan-club woman in Sacramento had her son in 1968.

That’s seven children from five women.

*****

Singer/songwriter Jacque Hollander on Brown’s sexually abusive behavior.

The idea of a trust—specifically, the I Feel Good Trust, which is what the fund meant to send poor kids to college is called—dates at least from 1988, when Mr. Brown performed a charity concert in Augusta to benefit a local children’s hospital. The woman who produced the show, a songwriter and singer named Jacque Hollander, made a video about one of the sick kids at the hospital, a little girl with cancer. Near the end of that tape, after Hollander had made a wrenching case for a worthy cause, she announced the creation of “the I Feel Good Children’s Trust Fund.” Hollander was not acting on a whim. “This was discussed with Mr. Brown and with Buddy Dallas,” she says now. “I mean, it was there.”

Well, almost there. Papers to establish the trust were never filed. Yet around the time the tape was made, she sat in an office with Dallas and listened as Mr. Brown outlined his plan for it. “I want everything to go into that trust,” he said. “My house, my royalties, everything.”

“Mr. Brown,” Dallas said. “You’ve got kids.…”

“Dammit, I ain’t giving them a stepping-stone to make history,” he snapped. “They all got education. I been supporting them. I ain’t givin’ them a dime.”

Dallas remembers that conversation almost verbatim, which is notable because Hollander didn’t speak to him for twenty years after it took place. And Hollander certainly has no motive to soften Mr. Brown’s image now. In fact, she says he raped her later that same year, drove her deep into earlier woods, high on PCP, and told her to take her clothes off. When she refused, he said, “I’m not going to ask you again. And if you don’t, I’m gonna.” Then he put a shotgun in her face. “He told me, ‘If you try to run away, I’ll kill you,’ ” she says. “He told me he owned me. He told me he was giving me a blessing.” (She never brought criminal charges, but she later passed two polygraphs, including one administered by a twenty-seven-year veteran of the FBI.)

Also, she’s glad he’s dead. “His death was the most unbelievable Christmas present God could have given me,” she says. “Is that a horrible thing to say?” Not really, considering. But she does like to believe that Mr. Brown called his fund the I Feel Good Trust because he remembered the first one, that he chose that name to cleanse his sins.

*****

On maintaining his mystique and creating his legacy:

The truth? No one knows the truth about James Brown, not the whole truth, because Mr. Brown never let anyone close enough to reveal the full measure of himself. He could make you believe you were close, make you believe that you, and only you, had been blessed with a glimpse of his soul. But that’s merely charisma. Or manipulation.

“People were his confidant in that area of his life where he was dealing with them,” Sharpton says. “All of us—all of us—were consequential to his self-image.”

And that’s from a man who was closer than most to Mr. Brown. He toured with him in the 1970s, lived with him for a while in the early 1980s, wrote the introduction to his autobiography. He’s called Mr. Brown his surrogate father, and Mr. Brown likened him to a son. Yet he has no illusions, either. He knows he was also a useful prop, a gifted black preacher Mr. Brown could mold and brand as a protégé, help smooth the friction with the civil rights establishment (Mr. Brown, after all, endorsed Richard Nixon). “He saw me as his answer to Dr. King,” Sharpton says, and then he drops into a pretty good impersonation: “I’m gonna make my own Dr. King.”

(Decades later, Mr. Brown still saw his reflection in Sharpton. “One of the proudest moments of my life,” he told the reverend in 2004, “was when you walked out at the Democratic National Convention with that James Brown hairdo and brought James Brown into mainstream national politics.”)

For all that, Sharpton doesn’t claim to have known the total man. “Only tell people what they need to know, Rev,” Mr. Brown told him long ago. “And anybody want to know anything outside their lane, don’t trust ’em.” Mr. Brown trusted Al Sharpton because he stayed in his lane.

Everyone saw in Mr. Brown only what he let them see. A mistress saw a frustrated old man trying to get hard while whacked out on PCP. His pastor in Augusta saw a spiritual man who quoted Scripture, especially Matthew: “Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Forlando Brown saw a grandfather who read through his college applications and checked his grades every semester. Buddy Dallas saw a captivating performer, an astute businessman, and more than that, a man who survived poverty and prison and drugs and the IRS. We rather die on our feet / Than keep living on our knees / Say it loud / I’m black and I’m proud. That’s what Buddy Dallas saw.

But none of them saw it all. Indeed, you can tell how close someone was to Mr. Brown by how readily they admit that fact.

“Mr. Brown was an exceptionally slick, conniving, brilliant man,” says Charles Bobbit, his friend for forty years and his manager from 1966 to 1977 and again from 2000 until Mr. Brown died. “And he made sure—made sure—he was misunderstood.”

Yet there was one matter on which he clearly wanted to be understood: his legacy.

Mr. Brown told people for twenty years how he wanted to be remembered. A few small details would change now and again, but his general wishes were consistent.

For instance, he didn’t want his children getting his money. Why depends on who he was talking to and what his mood was at the time. Partly, he was a detached father. Blame the constant touring, blame the multiple divorces, blame whatever demons crawled around his head. “He was never much of a family man,” Bobbit says. “But I guess you got that.” Sometimes he’d say that being James Brown’s child was enough of an inheritance, that the name alone was worth more than anything he had growing up. He worked for his wealth, and they could, too. If he was in a foul mood, he’d be blunter: “They ain’t gettin’ rich off my back,” he told at least four people over the years. “They ain’t gettin’ a damned dime.”

*****

Gloria Daniel, Brown’s former mistress, on his paranoia and drug use:

To be fair, Mr. Brown did, on occasion, lapse into utter lunacy. He was terribly paranoid, convinced the government had bugged the armoire in the den, placed tiny cameras in the curtains, pointed satellites through his window, even wired up the yard. “See them trees,” he’d say when the wind blew and the branches swayed. “That’s them. They watching me.” And he would occasionally flat out lose his mind. “Motherfucker was crazy,” says Gloria Daniel, a girlfriend he kept on the side for forty years. “It was the drugs.”

Mr. Brown smoked his drugs—PCP, until that got hard to find, then cocaine—mixed with tobacco from his Kools. “You sitting there rolling tobacco out of a cigarette—that’s a woman’s job—and you sitting there naked so he can look at you ’cause he getting ready to fuck you,” she says. “Yeah, right.” She rolls her eyes. The drugs, to say nothing of the diabetes and the prostate cancer, made him impotent. “He tried like hell, though,” she says. “He’d wear you out. That man died trying to come.”

One night in the summer of 2001, after he’d slathered her in Vaseline (“He liked you all greased up,” she says. “Like a porkchop”) and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. “I’m an Indian tonight, baby,” he announced. “C’mon, let’s let ’em have it.” Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she’d been kidnapped.

Like she says, motherfucker was crazy on drugs.

*****

Charles Bobbit, friend and former manager, recounts Brown’s final moments:

The tour after Christmas was going to be the last one. Mr. Brown would play his final show in Anaheim, then pack it in after fifty-seven years. “When we finish this little thing, we going on a vacation,” he’d told Bobbit. He was going to take Tomi Rae and go to San Francisco, a few other towns, spend some money. “Then we going to Vegas, and I’m gonna marry her again. She’s my wife, I love her, and I ain’t gonna punish her no more.”

But first they had to do the shows, and for that Mr. Brown needed new teeth. Getting implants screwed into the jaw is a brutal procedure, and Mr. Brown didn’t think he could stand the pain. He wanted to be put under. But the man was sick. His knees were shot and his feet were swollen, his stomach hurt all the time, he was constipated and couldn’t pee too well, either. Now he had a bad cough, and he was losing weight.

Bobbit was waiting for him when Washington drove Mr. Brown to the dentist in Atlanta. Bobbit had a physician with him who gave Mr. Brown the once-over and then told him he might not ever wake up from anesthesia. He checked him into the hospital that Saturday, December 23. He rested all night and the next day, the doctors checking him, trying to clear out the pneumonia. Bobbit and Washington stayed with him. And then, late Sunday, just before midnight, Mr. Brown told Washington to leave the room.

“I’m gonna leave here tonight,” he said.

“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” Bobbit said, “that’s a trip I can’t make with you.” He was trying to lighten the mood, not ready for Mr. Brown to die, not believing he could die.

Mr. Brown stayed serious. “I want you to look out for my wife, if you can,” he said. “And I want you to look out for Little Man, if you can. And look out for Reverend Sharpton.”

He always called Tomi Rae’s son Little Man. He knew he wasn’t his son, but whenever someone told him to get a DNA test, he said no, not while he was alive. Because he loved Little Man, loved him as his own, almost as if he was finally going to be a proper father, make up for all those years and all those other children. Bobbit thought that’s why he called him Little Man. “It was his ego,” he says. “Like, ‘Look at him, look at that little man—he’s just like me.’ ”

Bobbit settled into a chair at the foot of the bed. Mr. Brown lay back and dozed. Then he bolted upright, grabbed at his chest. “I’m on fire, I’m on fire,” he said. “I’m burning up. Burning up.” He flopped across the bed, and his gown rose up, exposing him. Bobbit got a blanket to cover him up. He was leaning down, his face close to Mr. Brown, still holding the blanket. He heard Mr. Brown take three short, weak breaths, saw his eyes open wide for an instant, then close. “As God is my witness, I don’t know why,” he says, “but I looked at my watch and it was one twenty-four.”

The doctors worked on his body for another twenty-one minutes, but James Brown was already dead.

To read the full article, pick up the April 2008 issue of GQ.