In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (2 page)

Sammeeee! Sammeee!

What the hell. A novel. A book. One night, in another nightclub, another belligerent doorman looking him up and down like a new convict arriving at the state penitentiary, Sammy turned to Boyar and said: “If people could just know what it’s like!” He meant the indignity, how you could be made to feel low and hurt even if you had crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in your pocket. And suddenly, drawing in all of Sammy’s pent-up pain in that comment—it was as if Boyar’s mind had taken on a new engine—Burt Boyar realized that Sammy was talking not about the joy, but about the slights and the pain, the sometimes awfulness of a life lived high one moment, then dragged to the depths of despair the next by doormen who were making a tenth of your salary. Who knew, out there in the hinterland, that beyond the opening nights, the champagne, the Vegas lights, the beautiful small-waisted blondes, the raw sweet sexual escapades, that he, Sammy Davis, Jr., cried? That he hurt? Boyar wrote entertainment columns for a horse-racing paper, and now, as he listened to Sammy vent, imagining new layers for his unwritten novel, the writing juices in him began to gallop. Burt Boyar knew next to nothing about racism or the pain of the Negro. He never marched with any protesters, never arched his back over any social ills. Racism was something over there, something in the history books, in another city. Now Sammy was telling him that there was rot in Manhattan as well. Burt Boyar had an epiphany. If Sammy felt it—racism—Burt would have to start, if not feeling it, certainly trying to understand it. “He was very despondent. Racism was absolutely deflating, so totally unkind, unnecessary,” says Boyar.

Burt and Jane began to run alongside Sammy. They were at his New York apartment. They whizzed in and out of the nightclubs with him. Sammy was driving them—only they couldn’t easily see it; he was pushing and goading them, telling them they were authors, writers; he had met Hemingway, at Ciro’s, in Hollywood, and he frequently sprinkled his chats with journalists and writers with the story about the time he had met Papa. Sammy wanted a
book, needed a book, believed a book would get him into the living rooms of middle-class (read
white
) America. By 1960, Burt and Jane had spent two years with Sammy, a great amount of that time at night. They were writing with their eyes, just looking, taking everything in. “In the early days Sammy found attraction in us,” recalls Boyar. “We were the wholesome, well-dressed white couple. We moved very comfortably in the world he should have moved in. Although I’d think there were much more exciting people than us.”

At one point the Boyars moved to Hollywood and lived with Sammy for three months. They saw the rarefied world of the Negro in early 1960s Hollywood.

There was Sidney Poitier.

There was Harry Belafonte.

There was Dorothy Dandridge, who had lived across the street from Sammy before her death, on September 8, 1965, from an overdose of antidepressants.

And there was Sammy.

It was a world of oneness: One Negro on the movie lot. One Negro folksinger. One Negro sex kitten. One Negro star on Broadway.

Burt Boyar had been a child actor himself, beginning with radio. Stars hardly intimidated him, though they still sent warm shivers through him. He knew the trapdoors they had to avoid to stay on top. Boyar could see that Sammy had the jauntiness of a star before he really was one. The quality charmed Boyar. “We were in a cab once,” he says. “I take out a five-dollar bill, all I had. The bill was about $1.25. Sammy says, ‘Give him the five, baby, I’m a star.’ It was a lot of money to me.”

The Boyars traveled by train to meet with Sammy. They flew. They drove. They were sycophants; they were novelists. Sammy was their prey and their novel. It was a strange and tricky tightrope. Boyar knew there were trade-offs. “I did his pimping for him,” he says.

The white women would come to Boyar and slip a note to give to Sammy. And he would slip notes to the white women who caught Sammy’s eye. But that was just life, the whiff of celebrity and fame. Burt didn’t mind the pimping. The book idea drew them—Sammy, Burt, and Jane—so much closer. Their friendship deepened.

Jane and Burt Boyar were naive about the book-writing business. They didn’t have a literary agent, they’d just write the thing—“It didn’t occur to us to write an autobiography,” he says—and try to sell it. Luck sailed through the window one day when Scott Meredith, a literary agent, phoned Boyar out of the blue. Meredith wanted to know if Boyar—whose occasional writing for
TV Guide
Meredith knew about—wanted to write a book about TV censorship. Meredith had big-time clients, among them P. G. Wodehouse. “I was flattered,” Boyar recalls. He sat and pondered. He now suddenly had to imagine two book
possibilities: a novel about a Negro entertainer—though in reality what was it but a kind of exuberant pipe dream?—or a genuine offer, in which there would be money up front to write a book about TV censorship? Burt and Jane liked to live well. They were winsome, carefree, childless. In a way they seemed a couple frozen in time, that time being the 1940s, when couples dined out, listened to Tommy Dorsey music in elegant restaurants, dressed well. They were seldom seen without each other. They swiveled easily into pricey eateries and nightspots. Money did not grow, they certainly knew, on the edges of rose petals, and it cost money to live the way they did. The novel would have to wait. Sammy would understand. Anyway, just another idea out the window, just another scheme gone with the cigarette smoke.

To write a book about TV censorship, Boyar knew he’d have to fasten himself down. He’d have to sit in dusty libraries and pore over records. He did not look happily upon such demands. And it wasn’t long after Boyar signed a contract with Macmillan that he began feeling he had made the wrong choice. He realized he had no passion for such a book. It was dry, a colorless project, something, perhaps, for an academic. And he missed Sammy, the nights floating about Manhattan, mentally scratching up the novel. So he told himself he would not do it. Boyar confided to his agent his new feelings about no longer wanting to do a censorship book. He told Scott Meredith that what he really wanted to do was write a book about Sammy Davis, Jr. “If you can get that,” Meredith quickly responded, “it’d be great.”

Scott Meredith wasn’t talking about fiction, though. He was talking about a nonfiction book, real life. Real blood. No matter how pretty it was, or how experimental, fiction couldn’t hold a pearl-handled gun to reality. Ask Frank Sinatra, knocked loopy by critics and his love affairs, only to rise again, higher than ever; ask Jack Kennedy, murdered in the glow of his own promise; ask an old vaudevillian by the name of Will Mastin about real life—born before the automobile, before the plane, before the movie projector, now gliding along backstage at the Majestic Theatre, visiting with Sammy, to whom he had taught so much.

Suddenly, real life excited Boyar as well. He thought about a real book. He talked to Jane about it. The idea excited her too. To hell with the novel. “We only thought of it as a novel because we had to figure out a way to tell the story,” he remembers. If they were to write a biography, the Boyars wondered if there might be those who felt they were too close to Sammy to write the book objectively. They also had worries that if it was an autobiography, there would be those who would wonder if they had enough distance to bring critical insight to the task. “Then we thought, what the hell, we’d just write the book,” says Burt Boyar.

They told Sammy they now wanted to write it as autobiography. And there went Sammy: the eyes widening, the mouth forming into the circus smile, all
followed by the Sammy hug. “Great,” he said, “let’s do it.” They laughed long and hard. A trio again. Jane on one end, Burt on the other, Sammy in the middle. He viewed it as yet another performance. The Sammy Davis, Jr., Story. What did he know about book writing? He never went to school a day in his life.

Meredith got the trio a book contract with the publishing house of Bernard Geis Associates for $25,000. Sammy laughed some more: he was broke, he needed the money. They’d have to split it three ways, though. A third to Burt, a third to Jane, a third to Sammy. The same old curse delivered unto Sammy: two thirds of the dough gone before it came to rest in his pockets. Just like in the days when he danced with his father and Will Mastin.

Geis had no illusions about the type of books that intrigued him. In 1959 he published
Groucho & Me
by Groucho Marx. He was just now courting Lita Grey Chaplin, who was in the throes of writing a titillating tell-all about her marriage to and divorce from Charlie Chaplin. Never mind that the divorce had taken place more than two decades earlier. (
My Life with Chaplin: An Intimate Memoir
was published by Geis in 1966. That very year, old Charlie Chaplin himself was in England making
A Countess from Hong Kong
, billed as a romantic comedy. It was his last film. Despite an intriguing cast—Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Tippi Hedren—the movie was labeled a disaster.)

After the Boyars signed the contract in his office, Geis took them out that evening for a celebration. He squired them through the doors of the Waldorf Astoria, up to the Starlight Roof, everyone in a wonderful, lighthearted mood. There was an orchestra, music rising. Geis asked Jane—her black hair so long, so lovely—for a dance to celebrate it all. But Jane and Burt were Old World: they had long ago made a pact that they did not dance with anyone except each other. It was a kind of Elizabethan-era vow, and they very much realized it. Given the occasion, of course, one might have thought Jane would make an allowance. She would not. Geis looked befuddled. He was asking for a simple dance to celebrate something special. “Jane looked at me like, ‘What should I do?’ ” recalls Burt. “I said, ‘Mr. Geis, I hope this is not offensive, but Jane and I have a thing that we don’t dance with other people.’ It was very uncomfortable to tell your new publisher that. But that’s how we set it up, and that’s how we played it.”

The “Associates” in the Geis company were TV variety-show host Art Linkletter and the Goodson & Toddman Agency. The thinking behind Geis publishing was to promote the books Geis signed on the TV shows that Linkletter and Goodson & Toddman had a stake in. The publisher was in bed with the TV shows. It was far from highbrow; it was just this side of P. T. Barnum. Write a book, the Geis folks seemed to say to prospective authors, and we’ll hawk it on TV for you.

Sammy bought Boyar a fancy tape recorder and tossed it on a nightclub
table. The Boyars would ask their questions, and Sammy would just start talking into the tape recorder. Just words, and the words unveiled memories, which unveiled hurts. He riffed, like a jazzman, the words just flowing and flowing.

The tape-recording sessions were done all over, in moving automobiles, in dressing rooms, in nightclubs, in hotel rooms. They were in El Morocco one night, “21” the next, and the Copa another, Sammy bouncing around, Burt sticking the tape recorder down in front of him, the thing whirring and swallowing up the words. Sammy called Jane and Burt “scribes,” the old English word for newspapermen. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Boyar recalls. But they kept doing it. Other Negroes would come around, and Sammy would introduce the Boyars to them, telling them the Boyars were writing a book about his life. And there would come those looks from the just-arrived Negro guest: a white couple writing a book about white-obsessed Sammy. Ha ha ha. It made for jokes, kitchen-table ridicule. “They were fascinated with him,” remembers Evelyn Cunningham, a Negro writer for the
Pittsburgh Courier
who was based in New York City and met the Boyars. “They were not real hip—but they were hip enough.”

There was something else that Cunningham noticed about the Boyars when Negroes were around Sammy. The Boyars would retreat, either from the room or the conversation. “They were a white couple who knew how to stay in their place in a large black gathering.”

The Boyars, completely untested in the world of book writing, had no doubt about the kind of chance Sammy had given them. “When you think about it racially, Sammy gave us an opportunity,” says Burt Boyar. “Here was a black man giving whites an opportunity. Sammy always dealt with the best—the best trumpeter, the best light man. So, with us, he took a big chance.”

The more the Boyars heard of Sammy’s life, the more fascinated they became. Stories about the road, about nightclubs, about being broke, about climbing up on the marquee. Stories about women, about white women, the angst of love. At night, Jane, and sometimes Burt, transferred the words from the tape recorder to paper in a typewriter, the tapping of the keys echoing off the walls of their apartment. Then they’d pack and run to Las Vegas, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or wherever Sammy might be, for more tape-recording sessions. They enjoyed every second of it, reaching for new tapes as yet another tape ran out.

Sammy, into the tape recorder, recalled a show he gave while in the army:

Sammy recalled a musician who he felt didn’t appreciate a book about Jewish history: