Don’t you believe it. White gurus up a storm in his publishing debut, kicking off each chapter with lengthy italicized sermons on romantic and domestic relations. Remember, life is a love song that comes all in the run of a day. Be free to let yourself be enraptured by its music, etc. White’s been a love god since he was 14. And that’s not the year he lost his virginity — that’s the year he started counseling neighborhood couples on their relationship problems. “By the end of that first year I was seeing twenty-two couples,” White recalls. “I’d give them simple, common-sense advice.” The disco beat came later.

Some questions you may want this book to answer:

Who is Barry White?

“What the world saw was one part of Barry White, the man who made music. I was, and still am, several Barry Whites …”

What is the approximate weight of Barry White?

(See above.)

Is Barry White a great guy and talented musician?

Absolutely. Everybody says so. “Uncle Barry,” say the three members of his singing group, Love Unlimited, “you’re the baddest!” “Barry White! I love you, man!” says Mike Tyson. “B.W., you got to produce my next album,” says Marvin Gaye.

What is Barry White’s personal philosophy?

“This is the philosophy I live by. I am, you are, and it is.”

How old is Barry White?

This press conference is over. The big guy stays coy about his age, but various chronological clues make it clear he was born in the mid-1940s and, from the sound of it, was lucky to have completed his stint as a juvenile delinquent in the era before every macho showdown eventually ended in gunplay. Even so, his brother Darryl ended up a casualty of the thug life. He was shot dead in a petty dispute over small change.

Despite the popular impression that White was born in a plush velvet dressing gown with a bubble bath already waiting, he came, in fact, from the gang-banging background
common to so many inner-city kids. You could hurt yourself whipsawing back and forth between White’s Hallmark love speeches and the details of his early life, which he spent scuffling and scrapping and landing in jail for petty crimes. For that matter, you might have a hard time trying to match his saccharine advice with details of his own love life. The big man with the satin voice that resonates in those lower regions is constantly referring to the great and powerful love he has for his Lady. Not something as mundane as an actual flesh-and-blood woman, mind you, but his one and only true love — Lady Music. I’ve learned to respect her beyond any woman. Everybody wants her, I know. But I love her in a special way. We’ve been fruitful and had lots of babies together … Love your special other the way I love my Lady Music, and you will find a level of happiness you never knew was possible. Especially if you’re not barricaded in the studio all night while, back home, the candles burn down and dinner coagulates. The Barry White credo: Do as I croon, not as I do.

White paints a benign self-portrait of a believer in peace, love and astrology. But like a romantic dinner disrupted by an unforeseen fart, some of White’s tales unexpectedly break the spell. They show a man whose fierce pride is occasionally backed by his street instincts. “Fed up and angry, I pulled my .357 Magnum out of the big leather coat I was wearing and without saying a word laid it in front of me on the table,” White says of one meeting with startled record company executives.

The negotiations concluded to Barry’s satisfaction. “I prefer to deal in truth, not deception,” he insists. “Trust, not trickery.” Thus spake Barry White: Speak truthfully, and carry a .357 Magnum.

As a black man coming of age in the ’60s, some of White’s best stories show a side of that decade white folks never knew. His first tour saw him playing drums for Jackie Lee, who was then riding an R&B hit called “The Duck.” It took him to the legendary Apollo Theatre in New York, where he met legends like Smokey Robinson backstage. After that auspicious beginning, the tour literally and figuratively went South. White and Jackie Lee were thrown in jail in Hattiesburg, Miss., for talking back to rednecks; woke up in a Louisiana motel to see the Klan packing up the caravan for a little trip; and faced down a group of white boys in a parking lot after a show (while headline act Slim Harpo hid his white girlfriend in the trunk of a car). The capper: White stopped at a pay phone in Mobile, Ala., to call his wife back in L.A. “Baby, get me area code 213,” he told the operator.

“Just a minute, sir, the lines are tied up,” she replied. Moments later the phone booth was surrounded by police cars. “You called our operator ‘baby,’” drawled one cop. “Where you from, boy?”

“California.”

“See, that there’s the reason you don’t know. Our niggers, they know how to talk on the phone. We get another call in this state that you called some operator ‘baby,’ you goin’ to jail. Hear that, boy?”

White showed them. He’s spent most of the last 30 years cooing “Baby, baby, baby” to women all across that state and every other state besides. Along the way he’s learned not only of the awesome power of love, but also of the awesome power of “The Simpsons.” His appearance on the snake-whacking episode won him fans who weren’t even alive when he was rumbling his way through the boudoir stereo systems of the ’70s.

White’s devotees include Muhammad Ali and the Sultan of Brunei, who has arranged private Barry White concerts (Elton John concerts too, among others) for groups of about 20. And one day White came face to face with a man whose private yacht is stocked only with the music of Barry White. “Mr. White, I’m one of your biggest admirers,” the fan enthused. “I can’t tell you how much I love your music. I listen to it all the time!”

In what may be the least surprising revelation in the book, the yacht owner is identified as Sen. Ted Kennedy.

One State Department official described Kennedy as “pompous and a spoiled brat,” according to the memo. Kennedy was making a fact-finding trip to several Latin American countries. “Kennedy met with a number of individuals known to have communist sympathies,” the memo said.

Kennedy was a 29-year-old assistant district attorney in Boston at the time of the trip. He was elected to the Senate in 1962 and served more than four decades until his death in 2009.

Kennedy’s family members had no immediate reaction to the release of the memo.

The documents from Judicial Watch provide no indication of the source of the allegations or whether the FBI believed the allegations were true. Judicial Watch said it waged a “tough” fight with the Obama administration for access to the previously secret documents.

Last June the FBI released more than 2,300 pages of documents from Kennedy’s file, many of them containing information about various death threats against Kennedy and his family. Some of the material was redacted by the FBI.

Some of the threats prompted investigations, some resulted in warnings to Kennedy or local law enforcement authorities. There is no indication any attempts were carried out.

Kennedy family members were given a chance to review and to raise objections to the documents before they were released last June. The FBI has additional documents on threats to Kennedy, possibly thousands more pages, that it plans to make public once the agency finishes reviewing them.

The family has no legal power to keep information withheld, the FBI has said, but the bureau does consider privacy concerns on a case-by-case basis.

“Afterward,” Carter writes in his diary, “Kennedy drove over from his hotel, appeared on the platform along with a lot of other people, seemed to have had a few drinks, which I probably would have done myself. He was fairly cool and reserved, but the press made a big deal of it.”

They sure did — and for good reason. Kennedy’s challenge of Carter for the ’80 nod was unusually bitter and protracted. Even though Carter won twice as many delegates in the primary and caucus season, Kennedy fought all the way to the August convention, attempting to convince delegates to support a rule change that would have allowed them to vote their conscience on the first ballot — instead of being forced to cast a ballot for the candidate they’d been pledged to during the primary season. Only when this effort failed did Kennedy back down and end his campaign (with what was probably the best speech of his career). So it was only logical that the press would watch the body language closely when the two men came together onstage after Carter’s acceptance speech two nights later — and Kennedy’s discomfort was obvious. As the Washington Post reported it:

When Kennedy did arrive, wearing that familiar tight-lipped smile his traveling press corps has come to call “the smirk,” he strode into the crowd of Democratic officials already on the podium, gave Carter a perfunctory shake of the hand, and walked away to the side of the platform.

There followed a comical ballet in which Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (Mass.) all tried futilely to lead Kennedy back to center stage for an arms-up pose with the president.

When Kennedy went to the left side of the platform to raise a fist toward his Massachusetts delegation, Carter made a beeline to join him and struck the same pose. But Kennedy’s arm had come down a split-second before Carter’s shot up.

You can watch some of Kennedy’s snub of Carter in this video:

Carter has already rasied eyebrows while promoting his diaries. In a “60 Minutes” segment that aired over the weekend, he told Lesley Stahl that “we would have had comprehensive healthcare now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed” as president. “It was his fault,” Carter added. “Ted Kennedy killed the bill.”

The Associated Press and other media organizations requested the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Kennedy faced death threats when he ran for president in 1980 and before that in the years following the assassinations of his older brothers.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was slain in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968.

The deaths of his two older brothers cast a long shadow on Kennedy’s life, and prompted fears he too would be targeted by an assassin’s bullet.

After his brothers’ assassinations, Kennedy wrote in his memoir “True Compass” released last year, that he was easily startled at loud sounds, and would hit the deck whenever a car backfired.

Kennedy, who served in the Senate for nearly half a century, died in August 2009 after a yearlong struggle with brain cancer. He was 77 and the last surviving brother of the famed political family.

——

Online:

http://foia.fbi.gov/hottopics.htm