In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (21 page)

The two of them—Sammy and Mickey—had much in common. Aside from being dimunitive—Mickey was shorter than Sammy by two inches—both
were feverish and desperate for success. They’d grown up in show-business families, and so their childhoods had been radically disrupted. The word “love” was as tricky to them as invisibility. Didn’t something have to first be visible to be invisible? “
I don’t know what psychologists would say about an infancy such as mine,” Mickey himself would say. “Bad for the child, perhaps. Too much attention. Too little stability. Nonetheless, I know this. I had a hell of a lot more fun than if I’d been the son of a psychologist.”

Back in New York, the Mastin trio got a gig at the Strand Theatre, opening for Billie Holiday. Sammy would dance hard, rush backstage to dry himself off, then rush back out into the wings to watch Holiday. Billie Holiday, born poor in Baltimore, was a heroin addict. She said she had been forced into prostitution at the age of eleven. Her childhood had clearly been full of torment. One of her most popular tunes—and perhaps her saddest—was “God Bless the Child.” Holiday often wore a gardenia in her hair while singing. Dan Morgenstern was a young Manhattan jazz buff—he’d go on to head the esteemed Rutgers Jazz Studies program—who remembered seeing the trio with Holiday. “They were a very tight act,” he says. “What I remember best were his imitations—of Crosby, Sinatra, Perry Como. The act had a real flair.”

The trio next played the Apollo in Harlem, on the same stage where Elvera had once danced. A young singer by the name of Keely Smith caught Sammy at the Apollo. She was walking down the hallway where the dressing rooms were “and heard these impersonations,” she recalls. Sammy was behind that door, practicing. She knocked on the door and went in. “And there was Sammy in a stocking cap and robe. He was so nice. He was quiet and shy.” Sammy charmed her. “He did his talking through his impersonations. I got the impression he was not too happy with things. But he never knocked his uncle, his father.”

Will Mastin gave Keely Smith a strange feeling. “He had an evil look about him. He just had a thing about him that you didn’t get close to him.”

But after seeing Sammy at both the Strand and the Apollo, Smith began to feel what others were feeling, that there was now “a buzz about Sammy.”

Amy Greene, a young, dazzling Cuban-born New Yorker—and the wife of renowned photographer Milton Greene—also remembers seeing Sammy at the Strand. “He was the opening act for Josephine Baker,” she says. “We had never seen a talent like Sammy. This little human being.”

Greene not only became a friend to Sammy, she became a kind of muse and teacher, introducing him around Manhattan, sharing with him her love and appreciation of fine things—china, table settings, art.

Arthur Silber sent his son, Arthur Jr., to travel with the trio. A sidekick for Sammy, Arthur Jr. was a big strapping young man. He grew up in Mississippi and felt at ease around Negro culture. “I grew up on soul food before I met Sammy,” he says. Once, he and Sammy were striding down 125th Street in
Harlem, Sammy always walking quicker than Silber. Sammy ducked into a diner, Silber right behind. “This white boy stole my wallet!” Sammy hollered out, just as Silber was squaring his shoulders. Silber froze. Heads swiveled. Silber thought he might be accosted. And then Sammy started cackling. “Just joking,” he told everyone.

Sammy very much liked the idea of having someone white with the trio on the road. It stayed some of the natural suspicion in the world of segregation—of three Negroes idling at the local hotel.

There were hundreds of dance acts for any big-band musician to take on the road in the 1940s. Lionel Hampton plucked the Mastin trio. Hampton—who in 1936 had joined the Benny Goodman quartet, in what was considered a wildly progressive move on Goodman’s part at the time—had great versatility. He played drums and piano, but his specialty was the vibraphone. By 1940 he had his own band, and, with the recording in 1942 of “Flying Home,” his first hit. Hampton also had a keen eye and ear for talent. He told Sammy that he and the trio had thirty minutes. A half hour to shake the world. That was usually the curse of any opening act—you went on, got all heated up, shook up the audience, and then it was time to scram. Time limit notwithstanding, it was a good moment for Sammy. Hampton knew it as well. “We were big time,” says Hampton of his band. “Sammy was in a good position.”

Sammy opened, dancing up a storm as Mastin and his father two-stepped in the background. Bouncing from one end of the stage to the next, in a furious and fevered show, he offered as much animation as he could because, as he knew, the clock was ticking—the vaudeville clock—which was but a harsh rising arm in the wings telling you your time was up. Then he was off, his fingers still snapping, his legs still loose. After he got offstage, he’d dry off and run back out to the wings to watch Hampton. Night after night. And every night, after the show, he’d browbeat Hampton to teach him to play the drums, the vibraphone. He wanted to know what Hampton knew. “I played a lot of drums,” says Hampton. “I taught him how to play drums. He was a fast learner. Whatever he attempted to do, he was good at.” The bus would be rolling, and still, Sammy would be bombarding Hampton with questions. Will and Sam Sr. would be sleeping, glancing at roadsides, dozing, Sammy’s voice still going in high gear full of questions—for Hampton or any other musician on the bus whose ear he could bend. He wanted to know everything about show business, about the big time. The land kept rolling. Hampton’s wife would find places on the road for the caravan to sleep. “We were all like a big family,” Hampton says. And yet, Hampton sensed a profound restlessness in young Sammy. “Sammy wanted to be a star, and that’s what he was working toward.” Will and Sam Sr. “were old show folks and welcomed the break they got,” Hampton says. “But Sammy was climbing all the time. All the time he was climbing.”

The more Hampton witnessed Sammy onstage, and the more his musicians began murmuring in his ear about the kid’s talents, the more a funny kind of feeling began to come over him. Sammy, to him, seemed a nest of other personalities. Hampton couldn’t imagine somebody being happy crawling in and out of their skin, somebody chasing vocal ghosts and shadows, because the further that person went into the mimicry, it seemed, the closer they stalked a kind of danger—laughing as Boris Karloff, as Cagney, as Bela Lugosi. “It was a great experience, and it was a great break for him,” Hampton says of the tour. “But I told him, ‘Don’t imitate nobody. Go be Sammy Davis. Develop yourself.’ ”

Go be Sammy Davis? What did that mean? He
was
being Sammy Davis. The audiences were laughing!

When they got back to Los Angeles, Steve Allen, a local disc jockey who worked for radio station KNX, a CBS affiliate, wanted Sammy on radio. Allen had seen the trio perform in Los Angeles. “Ordinarily,” Allen would remember, “one doesn’t invite a tap dancer to appear on radio, for obvious reasons, but I solved that problem by having Sammy dance on top of my grand piano—with the top down flat, naturally—while I played piano accompaniment for him to dance to.”

Allen was impressed with Sammy’s “acute, quick sense of humor” and with his stunning array of impressions—Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, Cary Grant. Sammy would sing songs in the voice of Lionel Barrymore, and Allen would crack up. As for Mastin and Sam Sr., they befuddled Allen. “By the time I saw them, they were middle-aged and pretty run-of-the-mill as hoofers. Actually, without little Sammy, I don’t think the other two would have had much luck in being employed.”

They were on the road, in Portland, Maine, when the telegram arrived:
OPEN CAPITOL THEATRE NEW YORK NEXT MONTH
,
FRANK SINATRA SHOW
.
THREE WEEKS
, $1250
PER
.
DETAILS FOLLOW
.
HARRY ROGERS
. It may as well have dropped from the sky. Sammy was going to appear on the same stage as Sinatra, his idol. He was beside himself, bouncing on his feet, giggly. Sam Sr. was happy because his boy was happy. “Frank Sinatra,” Mastin told the two, as if, somehow, he saw it coming all along and was hardly ready to do cartwheels, “always has a colored act on the bill with him.”

Frank Sinatra had a social conscience. It sprang from childhood, coming face to face, as an Italian, with words that cut. “
I’ll never forget,” Sinatra once said, “how it hurt when the kids called me a ‘dago’ when I was a boy. It’s a scar that lasted a long time and which I have never quite forgotten.” He spoke, now and then, in his early rise, to children about racial tolerance. He once was on a
high school stage in Gary, Indiana. A group of white kids had been rebelling against a school policy that allowed Negro students to play in the orchestra and swim—at an appointed time—in the school pool. There were some tough boys, sons of steelworkers, staring up at Sinatra, wondering just what he’d have to say. “
I can lick any son of a bitch in this joint,” he said to them, and he had them where he wanted them. They stared, and they listened. In 1945, Sinatra made a short film called
The House I Live In
, written by Albert Maltz. (The short was directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who had been one of the producers of
The Wizard of Oz
.) It was a touching and effective ten-minute documentary with Sinatra talking to a group of kids about racial acceptance. The film received a special Academy Award. So when Frank walked out onto the Capitol stage to introduce Sammy to the crowd, and tenderly threw his arm around him—the nigger and the dago, the house they sometimes both had to live in—there was something a little deeper than show business at play.

Onstage that night the young Sammy did it all, dancing around his father and Mastin in perfect syncopation, beautiful little dance numbers, long slides, the comedy routine, the impressions, more tapping. Frank’s people shot cold looks from the wings; Sammy always ran long. But the audience was clapping wildly. It was on such nights that Will Mastin had touches of fear mingling with his joy. White power-brokers might see Sammy. They might steal him away. After the show, Sinatra had some advice for Sammy: “
You sound too much like me, but you should sing.” Sammy froze—not understanding the critical insight of the Sinatra comment—then a sheepish grin appeared on his face.

Frank didn’t understand the inside-out hunger of Sammy, the Negro mimic. Sammy had been standing in front of mirrors for hours—weeks!—trying to sing like Frank Sinatra.

You sound too much like me …

Frank had given Sammy the highest of compliments.

After the Sinatra shows, Mastin, taking his pats on the back—and how many were slapping him as a tribute to the young horse, to Sammy?—would vanish into a taxi. Sore feet, a cane, a hat, a proud hoofer. As for Sammy, being in Times Square, feeling the hum of the place in the middle of the night, seeing all the lights twinkling, the Cadillacs gleaming, the jewelry on wrists, the honking horns, he had simply been part of a Sinatra scene. It was all like a bolt from his vivid dreams.

Dancer Maurice Hines believes that audiences took to the trio because they were “a very classy act.” And, indeed, it had clearly separated itself from the so-called saloon acts. “They didn’t do anything derogatory,” Hines recalls. “No dirty jokes.” And after the Capitol Theatre appearance, Hines says, there was a secret feeling—something akin to a subtle but powerful ocean wave—that
Frank, Frank Sinatra himself, who had thrown his arm around little Sammy so lovingly on that stage, and did it again backstage all for the cameras, “was behind them.”

As he was swooping along in those early years, Sammy was recruiting his own showbizlike family—Amy Greene, for her lifestyle and sophisticated manner; now Sinatra, for his sheer power and clout. He began to send little thank-you notes to those he met, to those he felt, in whatever way, small or large, had helped him.

He plucked another recruit from the audience of the Strand Theatre in New York. Her name was Judy Balaban. Her father was the Balaban of the famous Katz and Balaban theaters, and on account of the family business, she was a frequent theatergoer, although she had never heard of the Will Mastin Trio. “They came onstage, and my socks fell off,” she remembers. “I could just not get over this kid who I thought was talented beyond description in some magical way.” After the show she got herself backstage. She had to meet Sammy. “It’s not a denigration of whoever else was onstage that day. I can’t remember who else was on the bill.” She goes on: “We made a fan visit to the Will Mastin dressing room. The dressing room wasn’t that impressive. I said to Sammy, ‘You’re the best thing to happen since Swiss cheese.’ I was awestruck at his talent and told him so. He was genuinely grateful for the appreciation. We laughed, did some shtick back and forth.” Something told her Sammy was just ravenous for success. “At that point in his career,” she says, “people were not falling down over him. We were kids—talking to another kid.” Will and Sam Sr. tensed at the gushing, which excluded them. She got the hint. “I remember consciously having to include them when I said, ‘You’re all so wonderful.’ ”

Hanging around Sammy, she got a bead on the trio. “From that moment on, I had a take on them: Sam Sr. was along for the ride, and Will was king shit. He was the power center, in his mind. Sam Sr. was an accessory. And Sammy was the goods. I remember that not from the act—but from the room. Will had a kind of grandiosity. It wasn’t that it was evident. He was too shrewd for that. It was an aura, and he wouldn’t have tried to show it.”

Sammy gave Balaban her first Ray Charles records. “He came over to my house and said, ‘You gotta hear this,’ ” she recalls. She fell in love with the trio, which meant Sammy. “If he was playing Camden, New Jersey, I’d drive to Camden to see him. Wherever he was playing, I’d go.”

Paramount studios produced a good many musical shorts, features that appeared before the main movie in theaters. In 1947 the studio made
Sweet and Low
, starring Richard Webb. It was over in a flash, ten minutes’ time. But right there, onscreen, was Sammy Davis, Jr., dancing and singing to “Boogie Woogie
Piggy” alongside his father and Will Mastin. It was their first national exposure to the moviegoing public, and Sammy danced—as he did in all of his stage performances—as if he would never get the chance to dance again. Like all shorts, against the backdrop of the main feature itself, it becomes blurry in the mind. Nevertheless, Sammy imagined it would make him famous. Maybe Sam Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer would call. Maybe there would be a return invite to the Hillcrest Country Club. He had squeezed everything he knew into his moment on celluloid. Hardly anyone, however, seemed to take notice.