All Daddy’s Girls, but How Many Are There?

“Ow!” said Melissa Ahuna, glowering at her sister, LeeAnn Hawkins. “She pulled my hair!”

Well, Ahuna sort of deserved it. She’d been muttering wisecracks as a friend of the family shared some memories at this event marking the first anniversary of the death of the clan’s patriarch.

“You two really act like sisters,” said one guest. Even if they’re adults, sisters are sisters.

“Yeah,” said Ahuna, 32. “And we only met today.”

That, in fact, was true for most of the five sisters on hand--and it’s not even the punch line to the story. The real kicker: Depending on whose count you buy, there are somewhere between 52 and 71 more siblings who didn’t even make it to the party.

This event on Monday at the House of Blues’ Foundation Room was the first attempt to gather together the several dozen children believed to have been fathered by R&B; legend Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who died Feb. 12 after suffering an aneurysm in Paris, where he had been living for some time. Inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland as a pioneer, he was best known for the song “I Put a Spell on You” and his outrageous stage show, which featured him entering in a coffin. On display this night, though, were the fruits of his offstage, um, talents. Forget the Human Genome Project. Here’s the Screamin’ Jaynome Project.

By most measures, this was a strange evening--sisters who a year ago didn’t even know the others existed meeting for the first time, hearing stories about their father from people who knew him much better than they did, such as Lance Freed, son of legendary deejay Alan Freed. It was Alan Freed who discovered Screamin’ Jay and first suggested the coffin shtick.

There was a song in tribute to their dad performed by Buddy Blue, a Southern California roots-rocker the sisters had never heard of. There was an invocation read off a Palm Pilot by the Rev. Leonard Jackson of Los Angeles’ First AME Church--”Rest on, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. You put a spell on us that death cannot take away!”

And then there was Irene Hawkins, 49, who brought a home-made, life-size puppet in the image of her father from her Cleveland home. With the puppet mouthing the vocals to a recording of Hawkins’ version of “You Made Me Love You,” she gyrated with it in a routine much bawdier than would generally be considered comfortable for a father-daughter dance.

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By Hawkins’ standards, though, it all seemed fitting. After all, this was a performer who wore a bone in his nose and carried a skull (named Henry) on a stick while Alice Cooper was still in grade school and long before Marilyn Manson was even born.

The “reunion” was put together by Maral Nigolian, a former investment banker who, using her USC film school background, started working on a documentary film about Hawkins four years ago. But attending the memorial service for the singer last year at Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery (eternal resting place of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and many other luminaries), Nigolian was saddened that not one of the children Hawkins had boasted of was on hand. Even if Hawkins, who had been married six times and was known to have had many extramarital relationships, was exaggerating when he boasted to Nigolian, first claiming 57 children and later 75, she had expected to see some of his offspring in attendance.

That launched her on a mission to track down as many of the progeny as possible. Putting the film and a planned companion book about Hawkins on hold, she set up a Web site, https://www.jayskids.com, and with a boost from some well-placed press she soon found herself overwhelmed with claimants. Some just wanted the truth known, some seemed to be looking either for some sense of identity, others angling for a claim on whatever estate the singer may have left (a matter currently in the hands of lawyers). And, as you can read in postings on the site, some were simply the kind of people who come out of the woodwork for something like this.

But legitimate heirs did come forth, including the five women who came to Los Angeles from as far away as upstate New York and Hawaii, with stories as wide-ranging as their homes.

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At 50, LeeAnn Hawkins is the oldest child of the clan, and she and her full sister Irene were the only ones present who, in their Cleveland childhood, ever had Screamin’ Jay as an at-home dad. (Their mother, Anna Mae Vernon Hawkins, was his first wife.) She recalled him going out for milk one day when she was 5 and never coming back. She admitted she’s having trouble going from being the No. 1 child to being one of 57 (or whatever).

Colette Howard said she was 10 when her mother sat her down to watch Screamin’ Jay on “The Merv Griffin Show” and said, “That’s your father.” After answering some questions, she forbade her from ever asking about him again. Now a safety inspector for the Occupational Safety & Health Administration in her native Cincinnati, she heard about his death only after one of her five children read about it in a newspaper and called her.

Ahuna, who readily admitted she’s not a fan of Screamin’ Jay’s music and always found his singing “bizarre,” said she had contact with him semi-regularly as she grew up. They last visited in 1993 while she was working as a dancer in Japan and Hawkins performed there.

Janice Paris, 45, a heavy machinery operator for a wholesale grocery company in New York, had seen her father “from time to time” growing up but had just reestablished a relationship with him a year before his death.

“I have a fax where he said he had 57 children,” she said, looking around the room. “I thought, ‘Yeah, right.’ I think the reason they haven’t found them all is because they don’t exist.”

As they chatted and exchanged their own stories and feelings, there was some clear tension, some push-and-pull and jockeying for status--not so much one-ups-sistership games, but f-e-e-l-i-n-g their way through what all this means. There was a lifetime of untapped sibling rivalry bubbling under the surface, but also a lifetime of sisterly love.

“It’s been an awesome year,” said Ahuna, dabbing a napkin at her constantly tearing eyes. “A lot of highs and lows. But look what Daddy did--he got all of us together.”