In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (15 page)

Ramona found the promises her mother made about contacting the Gerry Society bewildering. She never saw her do it. “The history of us being separated is about our grandmother,” Ramona would say of her and Sammy. “My grandmother was a proper Hispanic—and a racist.”

Sammy sometimes donned a porkpie hat and practiced his dance steps outside “Colored Only” restrooms while waiting for Will and his father. He saw his dancing shadow bounce off walls, and he grew proud of himself.

He watched as women whispered in his handsome father’s ear, and as his father whispered back. His father was still married to his mother. He knew as much—the divorce wouldn’t come until years later—but life was moving on.

He learned how to fold clothes neatly as napkins. He learned how to pack quickly, learned to scan the hotel rooms cleanly when it was time to check out—fewer items got left behind.

He stayed up late, past his bedtime. When other children were reminded of bedtime, he was reminded that it was time to go to work.

He hated sleeping alone. He hated
being
alone.

Sometimes Mastin or Sam Sr. told nervous show promoters—some were jittery about allowing a small child to work, because of labor laws—that the kid wasn’t a kid at all, but a midget. Winks all around; chuckling in the air.

He saw his father drink, heard his father’s voice rise in volume when he became drunk. Will Mastin, by contrast, seemed ascetic. No drinking, no women—just a fierce determination to find the next stage. Mastin was also a stickler for rehearsing; a craft had to be learned.

Sammy was inventive, seemed borne by his own inner light and energies. “Will was always disciplining Sammy,” says onetime child performer Timmie Rogers.

In fits of little-boy angst, Sammy purchased comic books, dozens of them, as if storing up viewing material—always more pictures than words because he could not read—for the winter months.

He missed his grandmother.

Will Mastin, with the child in tow, couldn’t imagine any fear, or sleepless
nights, or pain, or motherless agony that a child might be having. That—or any kind of pathos—was far from his concern. He could only imagine what lay behind him: actors and vaudevillians thrown out of work overnight. That horrendous San Francisco earthquake; the terrifying Depression. Ida Forsyne, who had danced in one of Mastin’s choruses, was now “
coon shouting from twelve noon to twelve midnight” at Coney Island. And what of the great Sam Lucas—the first Negro Uncle Tom? Lucas was signed to play Uncle Tom in the first movie version of Stowe’s novel. In one scene Lucas was required to dive into a pond of very cold water. Off-camera, he grew ill from that icy dipping. On January 15, 1916, Sam Lucas died from the pneumonia he caught while making the movie. Will Mastin was a nervous and fitful sort. It did not take much for him to imagine unemployment—or worse. He saw all of it. Old vaudevillians out on the road with a broken ankle, strep throat, begging money to get back home. And the representative from the Colored Vaudeville Benevolent Association nowhere to be found.

“
The melancholy spirituals have been replaced by the equally melancholy, but less reverent, blues and the rhythm of the old plantation has vanished in the path of the weird and sensuous tempo of the jungle and the beat of the tom tom,” the
Baltimore Afro-American
reported in 1933—seemingly in an effort to warn of change all around.

The world, then, was moving on.

Some of the young child performers who saw Mastin onstage were amused by his old-time dance steps. “Will was more of a strutter,” recalls Timmie Rogers. “The strut thing was ancient. It was with Bert Williams’s era.”

If anything, Will Mastin was a survivor, and he believed he had found the new beat with someone who stood a mere four feet high.

Little Sammy was a queer little child, true enough, sitting and prancing around stage after stage, but he had genuine gifts, a currency. And he had Will Mastin. And he had a pair of toy six-shooters that he’d strap on backstage, and then he’d tug on anyone to play cowboys and Indians with him.

Draw!

Draw!

There were times—although now they were becoming less and less frequent—that little Sammy would return to Harlem with his father and Mastin. It was where his grandmother Rosa awaited him. She would get out her best dishes, her fine linens, in anticipation of his arrival. Inside the apartment, the child would run from adult to adult, tiring himself out all over again, talking about sights from the road. He would show off the small amounts of money that Will or his father had allowed him to carry around in his pockets. Rosa would
delight in preparing a huge meal. The big woman would move about around the apartment as if light as feathers. Her little Sammy was back home, from places and towns they’d never heard of or seen. Then, as evening came on, she would have records spinning on the Victrola. “
Momma, squeeze me till I hurt,” the tired little child would finally say to his grandmother as he was being held close to her bosom. It was his way of asking her to rock him to sleep. And she would.

It was hardly the worst kind of life. There were cackling smiles from audiences, applause, hugs from strangers, a jawline smudged with lipstick from ladies. But it was a life without nursery rhymes. And it was a life without a mother in the kitchen baking pies. Sammy’s sister, Ramona, believes he was forever scarred by his exhausting childhood: “That being given away never goes away.”

Al Jolson, in his 1927 movie,
The Jazz Singer
—the first sound motion picture—cries out from behind the mask of blackface: “Mammy, don’t you know me? It’s your little baby!”

The focus of Will Mastin’s life was simply to survive. “Those who have confined their activities to what we might term the Negro theatre exclusively have either vanished completely from the arena or are existing in mediocrity,” the
Baltimore Afro-American
wrote in its January 1, 1933, edition. “The American black man honors only those whom the gods have chosen. The Negro theatre has not really progressed—it has merely been absorbed.”

Absorption and death. Uncle Tom was dead: not the spirit, but the body. Bert Williams and Sam Lucas and Florence Mills—dead. Mills was a mere thirty-two when she died; 150,000 crowded the streets of Harlem for her funeral. Andy Razaf, the soulful lyricist, wrote and dedicated a poem to Mills, part of which reads:

The great Charles Gilpin, gone. At one time Gilpin—who had once been a member of the Perkus and Davis Great Southern Minstrel Barn Storming
Aggregation—had been the brightest of lights on Broadway. In 1921 he starred in the title role of
Emperor Jones
, Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play. One afternoon—out of costume, of course—Gilpin went to the ticket window of the theater where he was performing to purchase a ticket for a front-row seat. He could not purchase a front-row seat, he was told; Negroes sat in the balcony. He protested, to no avail. Gilpin could not get in to see Gilpin. Five years later he quit performing. In 1929, Gilpin suffered a terrifying nervous breakdown. He died a year later in Eldridge Park, New Jersey.

Jim Crow, an old deformed Kentucky stable hand, his life memorialized day by day in coon shows, never aware of his strange fame, was also gone. And did he too not have a heart, a soul, certain dreams before the shovelfuls of dirt were swung over his coffin?

It was in the long and deep shadows of those who had come before him that Will Mastin was operating. Time was fate, and fate was mystery. So many were gone. But he was still in the game, strolling the lobbies of dusty Negro hotels with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s cane.

He had to create something new to keep going. And he did. When 1936 rolled around, Mastin had a whole new act: Will Mastin’s Gang.

The sound of it had a circuslike ring, which is exactly what Mastin wanted.

There would be no women. There was something tricky about Negro dancers and the mingling of sex onstage. The innuendo—the whiff of Negro sex—could be viewed as unsettling to white audiences. The tragic comedian Bert Williams knew it all too well. Matter of fact, the “gang” wouldn’t exactly be a gang at all—but less than half a dozen members.

Then Will Mastin thought of something else, his mind clicking hard now. The child had shown such astonishing fearlessness on the stage. The American public had a fascination with freaks onstage, with midgets, and, not the least, children. He decided to bump up a member of the act’s billing, and the act’s name was quickly altered:

Yes, that sounded so much better. More like vaudeville. Elvera would get reports from the road. Her son was doing what she was doing—working. “I liked Will,” she would say, “because he took care of Sammy.”

That year, 1936, dust storms were sweeping vast areas of the American West. So-called Okies were leaving the plains, bumping along in trucks. It was
impossible to predict when the Depression might end. (No one kept a running count of how many vaudeville troupes had gone under, but everyone imagined the numbers were brutal.) Week after week folks were pitching tents on the sides of roads, financially destitute and driven from their homes. There was pain and more pain. Companies—General Motors, many others—hired Pinkerton guards to thwart the attempts of would-be union organizers. Goons hired by management engaged in nasty confrontations with workers. Blood spilled. “This land is your land,” folksinger Woody Guthrie sang. It was hard to believe. Roosevelt—hearty, optimistic despite the Supreme Court’s challenge to much of his New Deal legislation—swept to thunderous reelection by defeating Alf Landon. Roosevelt lost only two states—Maine and Vermont. “
There is a mysterious cycle in human events,” he said that year. “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

Jesse Owens, a Negro track and field star attending Ohio State University, won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, had no intentions of shaking hands with Owens, and abruptly left the Berlin stadium before the medal ceremony. (Hitler had broken the Versailles Treaty months earlier when his army marched across the Rhineland into France—an ominous portent of war that went largely unnoticed by the American government.) Owens returned to America a hero, though he couldn’t find a job. He was soon seen at carnivals, out on the racetracks—being paid nominal fees to race by foot against horses. It was a shameful comedown from gold-medal celebrity. The track star seemed to take it in stride. “
I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” Owens would muse, “but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either.”

In Hollywood the Oscar nominations were announced. Frank Capra would win the Oscar for best director for
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
. Gary Cooper would win the best actor award for the same movie. The gifted brunette Luise Rainer would be awarded the best actress statuette for
The Great Ziegfeld
. Ziegfeld had been dead four years now; his bones were still worth picking over.

Will Mastin was no Flo Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld would send a hundred legs sashaying across a stage. Will Mastin was just a flash dancer with a silver-tipped cane and a suitcase full of clothes and medicine for his nervous stomach and phone numbers of motels that catered to Negroes.

But he had the heart of a Ziegfeld.

Sammy turned eleven that winter. It was the same age Asa Yoelson—who would become Al Jolson—was when he ran off to join a carnival known as Rich & Hoppe’s Big Company of Fun Makers.

T
hey played roadhouses and gin joints, theaters with creaking stages. It was difficult to keep a vaudeville troupe upright in the mid- and late 1930s, and Will Mastin knew it. The unknown was everywhere. There would be a solid week’s work, only to be followed by three idle weeks. The wicked economic times frightened theater owners; scheduled shows were sometimes capriciously canceled. Mastin felt he and his troupe were working twice as hard for laughs. The paychecks got smaller. Dancer Billy Kelly ran into the Mastin troupe in 1937 in Boston. “It was tough,” Kelly recalls. “They weren’t making much money. They borrowed from everybody. Naturally, they never paid back. The Depression was on.” Even so, Kelly would sit watching the troupe, and just marvel. “It was a great act,” he says. “A showstopper, with the boy,” he adds.

When he could, Will Mastin would get to a telephone, always eager to confirm upcoming engagements to save the group travel fare in case of a cancellation. When engagements fell apart, the debt of carrying the act only deepened. With tight purse strings, Mastin began to jettison dancers. But not Sam Sr. His job was quite secure: little Sammy was his father’s insurance policy. They were forced into subpar lodgings. At some of the motels, cold winds blew through cracked windows at night. Mastin and Sam Sr.—worrying more about the child than about themselves—were not above scrounging for fresh firewood.

In an environment where road acts were folding swiftly, Mastin must have pondered other alternatives to scuffling around the country. But what else could he do? An educated Negro might be able to get a job teaching in a Negro school. But Will Mastin had no education. And he was beyond the physical labor he performed in his youth working in and around horse stables.

So the vaudevillian held on.

Little Sammy—in the middle of it all—was such a natural. He had learned quickly. With bright and eager eyes, he seized stage directions and cues. He
acquired the gift of improvisation. On nights when Mastin and Sam Sr. were weary, Sammy provided the needed shot of adrenaline. On the nights he wore white buck shoes, he moved so fast it looked as if there were white birds scampering across the stage’s wooden floor.