In a suburban bank vault 30 miles northwest of Chicago sit boxes containing master recordings by James Brown. Stuffed into one safety deposit box is a carefully folded pillow case protected by a clear plastic bag.
“That’s his hair,” Jacque Hollander says with reverence.
Hollander, a 59-year-old songwriter with long, bleached-blond hair, was once a member of the Brown entourage. She was a close confidante of the singer and has variously been described as a producer, public-relations manager and perhaps one of his many lovers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, like many of his hangers-on, their relationship was tumultuous.
She is also — to the annoyance of family members and scholars of “The Godfather of Soul” — the keeper of a treasure trove of his memorabilia, including elaborate costumes, photographs and even unheard songs.
While Brown is celebrated this coming Friday with the Mick Jagger-produced biopic “Get On Up,” these items go unseen — fading in Chicago storage lockers, as Hollander, who lives in an RV and holds no steady job, dithers over what to do with it all.
“I was the keeper of his secrets,” Hollander says.
Hollander’s relationship with Brown, as she tells it, dates back to a chance meeting in the 1970s when she was a teenager in Georgia. At the time, Hollander claims, she was suffering from colon cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. As a distraction, her father would take her to the Atlanta airport to watch planes land.
“One day we were at the airport and this man started walking with all this entourage of people,” Hollander recalled. “He looked like a black Santa Claus.”
The man came over to talk to the bald teen. She told him she wanted to be a songwriter.
When they parted, Hollander says, he gave her a message scrawled on a piece of paper — “Bring me the song.” Hollander still has that scrap, signed “James Brown.”
Hollander recovered from her illness and, in 1980, married Dean Daughtry, a musician with the band Classics IV and with Atlanta Rhythm Section. The pair divorced in 1995.
She did go on to be a songwriter, claiming to have penned tunes for “well-known artists” in the early 1980s and a theme song for Gwinnett County, Georgia.
The “notoriety” from that song, Hollander says, led to her next gig — writing a song as a fund-raising project for the Atlanta Falcons football team. She envisioned the players belting out the song, but management wanted a headliner — Brown.
So Hollander reached out to Brown’s lawyer, who put her in touch with the entertainer. Brown had no idea who Hollander was, but still agreed to record the song — with the condition that they use his Living In America band.
Brown showed up hours late for the recording session and wanted to know who wrote the song, called “Atlanta Will Be Rockin’.”
“I indignantly came forward, angry at his lateness and audacity, and announced that I wrote the song,” Hollander claimed in court papers.
Brown smiled, she recalled.
Hollander then handed him the paper he had signed years earlier at the airport. She said he realized she was the same girl and began crying.
“You are the chosen child,” he told her.
Hollander claims she and Brown began a “partnership” to write songs together and to raise money for needy kids. She says she became part of the singer’s extended family and refers to him in court papers as a “father figure.”
Hollander said she and Brown formed the I Feel Good Trust, a charity for needy children, and that the singer’s lawyer, Albert “Buddy” Dallas, was a witness but never drafted paperwork outlining her role. Hollander has tried unsuccessfully to gain control of the trust since Brown died on Christmas Day 2006.
“Atlanta Will Be Rockin’ ” was not released until 1987 when she and Brown sang it at the Falcons’ first home game of the season. Fans at the game got copies of the single, a record that has now become something of a collector’s item. Hollander said she and Brown received a standing ovation for the performance.
“It was magic,” Hollander told writer Stanley Booth in his 1993 book “Rythm Oil.”
She told him something else: That same day, after the game and after the pair went to visit sick kids in an Atlanta hospital, they became lovers.
She described the alleged April 1, 1988, assault in court papers in one of the filings over the Brown estate, contending the singer took her to a secluded property in South Carolina and raped her at gunpoint.
She showed The Post a blood-stained denim skirt — studded with rhinestones — that she claims she was wearing that day. She stores it in her bank vault in a crumpled brown paper bag.
Hollander says she didn’t accuse Brown of rape at the time because he threatened to have her killed if she came forward. She filed a federal lawsuit in Illinois in 2005 contending that the emotional trauma from the attack led to a thyroid condition. Brown denied the rape allegations.
The suit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired, but Hollander eventually prevailed in having Illinois law changed to suspend the statute of limitations in certain rape cases.
At the time of the alleged attack, Brown was deep in a downward spiral. He was regularly getting high on cigarettes soaked in formaldehyde and laced with PCP, a concoction he called “gorilla.”
On April 3, 1988 — two days after the alleged rape of Hollander — Brown was arrested for beating his wife, Adrienne Rodriguez, attacking her mercilessly with a lead pipe and shooting at a car she was hiding in.
In September 1988, he led police on a two-state car chase during which he tried to run over two officers. Cops had to shoot out his tires to stop him. Brown was convicted of aggravated assault among other charges and received a six-year jail sentence.
Hollander maintains in court papers that she and Brown were estranged after he was released from prison in 1991. But, she claims, she continued to plan charitable work with Brown, with Dallas acting as the intermediary.
Dallas filed an affidavit saying he was present in 1987 when Brown publicly announced a partnership with Hollander to help “needy and underprivileged children” and that Hollander came up with the name the I Feel Good Trust. Dallas also noted that Hollander “became part of Mr. Brown’s inner circle and in all ways was Mr. Brown’s social conscience.”
The formal creation of the trust took until 2000.
Although Hollander sued Brown and they barely spoke after his release from jail, she still believed she would have a role in running his charitable trust after his death.
In 2005, in the middle of her lawsuit, Hollander says, Brown showed up unexpectedly at her house in Woodstock, Ill., and gave her boxes of his master recordings with hours of his hits and never-before-heard songs and other music.
She says he told her, cryptically, “Fight for the truth” — and claims he was referring to his legacy and continuing the work of the charitable trust.
“He knew and said, ‘When I die, this will be a mess.’ And it is, as he predicted,” Hollander said.
The value of the master recordings in Hollander’s possession is debatable and any sale would likely have to be cleared by the estate, which owns Brown’s copyright.
Alan Leeds, who was Brown’s tour director from 1969 to 1974, said Brown tended to be careless with unreleased songs and doesn’t doubt Hollander could have some.
Leeds says Hollander was associated with Brown during “a lot of craziness” in the singer’s life but that she seems to have inflated her importance to Brown.
The battle over Brown’s estate — estimated to be worth up to $100 million — began days after he died. While Brown’s will directed that most of his money should go to charity, fights erupted for the cash among his six children and a woman who said she was his wife.
A 2009 agreement put together by the South Carolina attorney general gave almost half of the money to the I Feel Good Trust and the rest to the family. But that was overturned last year and the court fight continues.
Hollander contends the trust has not helped any children since Brown’s death. Russell Bauknight, the South Carolina accountant who oversees the Brown estate, refused to comment on the trust.
Hollander vows to press on and regain what she says is her standing. Meanwhile, her boxes of memorabilia go untended and unseen.
“I am really pissed these people are pushing me and I’m not going away,” she said.