In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (12 page)

Jolson lived a good life, pampered on the road, theater owners catering to his every need. But mostly, the road of the vaudevillian—especially for the Negro—could be harsh. The Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association was established to aid the indigent, but the organization itself was often strapped
for funds. Many of those who suffered serious illnesses while on the road went without medical services and died. The deaths were quiet; the shows had to go on.

In 1918, Will Mastin was out on the road, doing what Sam Lucas had done before him—organizing shows, keeping vaudevillians working. Many vaudeville shows traveled with children, so-called pickaninny performers. The young Will Mastin, born in Alabama in 1878, had hitched himself to a pickaninny revue as a child. By his teenage years, Mastin seemed to vow—against odds not only daunting but seemingly impossible—that he was going to commit himself to a career in show business. The options were painfully limited: “coon” shows, “darkie” musicals, burlesque, tent shows, vaudeville. When times were especially fallow, he found work as a horse groomer.

The actors were most vulnerable in these shows, which could run one week, two weeks, or one day, depending on the vagaries of the public. Will Mastin aimed to hedge himself against the odds of being thrown out of work. So he hoarded his money and began putting together shows of his own, billing himself as both dancer and producer. Producers like Mastin relied on word of mouth and strategically placed advertisements. Pat Chappelle, based in Jacksonville and, like Mastin, another Negro producer, operated the Rabbit’s Foot Company vaudeville revue. One of his ads was typical of the times. “
State all that you can do in first letter and lowest salary,” the ad advised. “Ladies send photos. Can also place advance agents, lithographer, bill posters and first class baseball players.”

Vaudeville attracted a luminous array of performers. Will Rogers, the cowboy star, performed in vaudeville—at times behind the mask of blackface. He’d crack prairie jokes and twirl his rope. Harry Houdini became renowned as an escape artist. Handcuffed and padlocked in a box, dipped beneath water, time ticking, he’d work himself free and rise up at seemingly the last possible moment—beating back death. Onlookers would let out breathless gasps. Helen Keller, blind and deaf since early childhood, took to the vaudeville stage and gave readings in braille. The sight of her, waltzing across the stage in darkness, stilled audiences.

In 1915, Mastin had a vaudeville revue,
Over the Top
. In 1916 he had another show,
Mastin and Richards: Holiday in Dixie
. Roaming the country, coast to coast, he picked up all manner of entertainers. He was opportunistic and—for merely possessing the moxie to be a Negro producer—considered eccentric. One season saw Mastin with Bob Thurman among his assemblage. Thurman was said to be the fastest dancer in the country. Like the other dancers Mastin had with him, Thurman was known as a Texas Tommy dancer. The Texas Tommy was a swift dance, with feet crossing over, a blur of movement. Sometimes,
however, the dancers were mistaken for something else: “
 ‘Tommy’ meant prostitute,” Mastin once explained, “and when we presented the dance at a San Francisco theater—the place was jammed, lots of cops, too, expecting a riot—but nothing happened because there wasn’t anything bad about it, just a kind of acrobatics, with every step you could think of added to it.” Ida Forsyne, a onetime dancer for Mastin, remembers a peculiarly gifted contortionist and musician that Mastin had discovered and employed. A lit lamp was perched atop his head while he contorted. “
His name was George McClellan, and he did his contortion work while he was playing, too.”

And owing to Thomas “Daddy” Rice—a white actor who donned blackface—a potent character by the name of Jim Crow came upon the land. While in Louisville performing in 1830, Rice noticed a stable hand singing and shifting on his feet inside a livery stable. Rice could see the man was deformed, especially his left leg, and he walked with a painful limp. Rice heard the old Negro singing and caught a verse of the song: “…  wheel about, turn about, do jis’ so, an ’ebry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.” The moment fascinated Rice, and he stole the verse—and the image of the man—for his show. (“Crow” was likely the owner’s surname; “Jim” a common name given to slaves.) Rice acted the part of the shiftless coon, the illiterate stable hand. Jim Crow, in both image and myth, was born. Audiences loved it.

Mastin quietly rebelled against doing “Jim Crow” shows, making attempts to do shows that had style and plots as opposed to mere stereotype. In doing so, he separated himself and his shows from the likes of Bert Williams, who had become a Negro sensation with his “coon” act.

Born in the Caribbean—1874 has been widely accepted as the year of his birth—Williams was raised in Riverside, California. He spent his high school years in San Francisco, where he began performing in saloons. Soon thereafter he joined a minstrel company, and in 1893 formed an act with George Walker. Among the duo’s early presentations was a performance called “The Two Real Coons.” Walker played it straight; Williams was in blackface. Williams became a sensation at doing the cakewalk dance. He made it so popular it became something of a national craze. Williams also possessed remarkable skills as a contortionist. He and Walker made it to Broadway in
Son of Ham
(1900), followed two years later by
In Dahomey
, which itself would be followed in 1906 by
Abyssinia
.

When Walker retired, Williams went on to become the first Negro to join the Ziegfeld Follies. He seemed imbued with a searing common sense: fearing reprisals from hooligans regarding any type of sexual innuendo, he did not want ever to be onstage with one of the white Ziegfeld girls, and Ziegfeld operatives thought it smart to comply with the request. Williams’s popularity soared so much that he became a draw on the private-party circuit. “
Is we all good niggers here?” he was known to ask cryptically as he launched into his
monologue. Williams had perfected the Negro stereotype, and he played the role—twisting it into a kind of pickaninny art—for keeps. “
I have no grievance whatsoever against the world or the people in it; I’m having a grand old time,” he once told a New York newspaper. “I am what I am, not because of what I am, but in spite of it.” The strangeness of the comment seemed to echo a bruising melancholy. Williams found it impossible—like most—to turn away from the light of his fame. He once sidled up to a bar in St. Louis and ordered a shot of gin. The bartender seemed taken aback, had no intentions of serving a Negro, and decided to have some on-the-spot fun with him. He said a glass of gin cost fifty bucks. “
Give me ten of them,” Williams said, and smoothly laid five hundred dollars on the bar.

Being the possessor of two souls—pickaninny and man—exacted a huge price; Williams became an alcoholic. In 1922, he died. “
Bert Williams was the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew,” W.C. Fields lamented. “I often wondered whether other people sensed what I did in him—that undercurrent of pathos.”

The blackface comedian Eddie Cantor—who had worked alongside Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies—perhaps caught that element of pathos in a comment he made about Williams that seems the oddest kind of compliment: “
He was the whitest black man I ever knew and one of the finest artists the musical stage has ever had.”

If Will Mastin was to keep a foothold in the world of show business, he would not be for hire—just some actor with a blackface kit under his arm—thrown out into the cold as a show closes. He realized he had peaked as a flash dancer. After all, he was forty-three years old at the time of Bert Williams’s death. Mastin knew his success would lie in organizing shows, producing them, gathering talent. Who knew where there might be another Texas Tommy dancer like Bob “Pet” Thurman waiting to be discovered? He would have to look right into the eyeteeth of Negro vaudeville and minstrelsy—which sprang from something so savage and dehumanizing—and imagine ways to dignify it. “Pathos” was not a word in Will Mastin’s vocabulary, but he would have to sail beneath it nevertheless.

Will Mastin liked a cane and top hat. He’d twirl both to keep his own shows together. If he could achieve a measure of independence, he figured he could keep the curtain from closing down on him. But even as he was imagining a route to his own independence, Mastin was being constantly challenged by the Theatre Owners and Booking Association, a phalanx of white theater owners who knew there was money, and plenty of it, to be made in Negro vaudeville.

In 1920 a group of white theater owners made their way to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Their intention was to form an organization that would give them full
powers over the theatrical circuit, especially theaters that played host to Negro vaudeville. Each theater owner merely had to purchase $300 worth of stock to become a member. Individually, as owners, they were just names—Milton Starr, of the Bijou Theatre in Nashville; Charles F. Gordon, of the Star Theatre in Shreveport; K. W. Talbutt, of the New Royal Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina; E. S. Stone, of the Washington Theatre in Indianapolis—just men, showmen. But before they left Chattanooga, they were known as the Theatre Owners and Booking Association (TOBA). They decreed they would buy up Negro theaters where they could. They would stiffen performance contracts where they had to. And they would—by God—make more money for themselves.

News of their formation ricocheted through Negro circles. Some Negro businessmen who operated theaters wondered what the creation of such an organization might mean.
Billboard
magazine wasted little time in pondering the group’s beginnings and brazenly hired a Negro writer, J. A. Jackson, to cover the group. Some found it fit to ridicule Jackson’s beat as the “Jim Crow” beat. The
New York Amsterdam News
, in an unsigned column, came to Jackson’s rescue:

In the beginning there were reports of TOBA’s being good for Negro vaudeville, with promises made by the new owners of plans to beautify theaters. But it did not take long for complaints to begin. Owners were accused of hiring unscrupulous managers and of engaging in nepotism—and, worse, of buying up Negro theaters, cutting Negro independence short. But the owners were deaf to the complaints. From on high, word came down that the profits were not enough. Actor contracts were stiffened. There was grumbling, and charges of bad working conditions. Clarence Muse, a gifted vaudevillian, traveled widely on the TOBA circuit and would later write a book,
Way Down South
, about his experiences. That the book itself survives—for only one thousand copies were initially printed—seems a minor miracle. Here is Muse describing the green room of the Booker T. Washington Theatre, in St. Louis:

It is little wonder that in time Negro performers started referring to the Theatre Owners Booking Association as something else—Tough on Black Actors. (There was a cruder variation: Tough on Black Asses.) The bad publicity heaped on the theater owners kept building up. With it, many Negro managers—working for the theater owners—lost their jobs.

Will Mastin—caught between the disenchanted Negro performers and white theater owners—soon enough found himself in a game of life-and-death survival.

It pained Sammy Davis that his son was being raised without either parent around. So when he left Harlem in 1928 to rejoin Will Mastin, he had his little son, Sammy Jr., with him. It was an emotional separation between the little child and Rosa, his grandmother. Rosa wept. “It broke her heart,” says Virginia Capehart, Rosa’s friend. Sam Sr. did not know how he would raise the child, but there was more comfort in having Sammy close to him than fretting every night about him back in Harlem without his natural mother.

Mastin kept his troupe working. They continued to work hotels and resorts. They performed before the curtain rose on silent movies. But by 1928, there were ominous rumblings in the entertainment industry: the talkies were arriving (“Garbo Talks!”). Vaudeville troupes were getting fewer and fewer bookings. Thousands of theater musicians began to lose their jobs. Radio brought the vaudevillian right into the family home. In October 1929—the last Tuesday of that dark and crazy-quilted month—Wall Street crashed. The plunging of the stock market sent lives and careers into disarray.

New York had lived high during its Jazz Age; it fell hard during the beginning
of the Depression. And where New York fell, uptown Harlem fell harder. Luisa Sanchez was better off than most, but there was now “
five times as much unemployment in Harlem as in other parts of the city,” as the
New York Herald Tribune
reported.

Breadlines began forming in Harlem. Negroes were soon living in the streets. There were people selling pies from open windows for a nickel. “
By 1930,” went one book-length report, “Harlem contained some 200,000 people. Half of them depended upon unemployment relief.” Whites were hustling jobs they previously thought beneath them. Broadway theaters began closing. It seemed as if a deep bruising fist were flying across the land and knocking all in its path down. The perceptive writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that it was “
as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed” that the decade “leaped to a spectacular death in October 1929.”