In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (26 page)

Sometimes Sammy said he’d pay the movie star’s tab, only to slip out before the bill came. “Owners complained to me,” says Rand.

Sammy was cultivating contacts. He was flattering. He was determined not to be forgotten. Rand would sit back, in the nightclubs, and just marvel—the way Sammy held the stage, gliding between his father and Will Mastin, bantering with the audience; bowing once, then again; a lovely wave of the hand in the direction of Will Mastin, then a wave in the other direction, to his father; then bowing yet again, the three of them, in perfect unison.

Rand couldn’t figure where the low self-esteem offstage came from. “One time we were sitting around the swimming pool at Jeff Chandler’s house. Sammy said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone jumped into the pool and came out the same color?’ I said, ‘I think that would be bad.’ ”

A rare evening in 1947 when Sammy and his mother, Elvera—seated next to him—are out together. This is their first time together since his release from the army two years earlier. Elvera has been out of show business six years now, but still enjoys hobnobbing with showgirl acquaintances. The relationship with her son is ever strained. Her writing on lower right of photograph, “ME TO SAMMY,” is notable for the “XXXX” scrawl—and not the one word he hungered his entire life to hear from her: love
.
(
COURTESY LORELEI FIELDS
)

In every city, at every newsstand, Sammy reached for the showbiz magazines. Flat broke, he’d beg Rand to pay for them. “Sammy used to go to a magazine store at Fiftieth and Broadway,” recalls Rand, “and pick up all these fan magazines. Then he’d turn to me and say, ‘You got ten dollars?’ ” Sammy loved just standing there, flashing through them, almost furiously so. He had to know what Sinatra, Mel Torme, Tony Bennett, Harold and Fayard Nicholas (the Nicholas Brothers), and the Four Step Brothers were all doing. He could hardly sleep at night because thoughts of fame and celebrity—feelings that others were passing him by—filled him up so. There, in yet another magazine, was a picture of an entertainer. He’d never met her. She had an eager look in her eyes. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but she looked ripe for the taking. And there was something as well a little different that Sammy noticed—she was Negro.

•     •     •

It was in San Francisco that Sammy first met Eartha Kitt. She was a young dancer and chanteuse. She was worldly, insecure, sexually aggressive, and domineering. Her hit Broadway show—
New Faces of 1952
—had given Kitt a name, and she was now on the road with the play.

Eartha Mae Kitt was born in a place called North, South Carolina, in 1928. Her parents, William Kitt and Anna Mae, were desperate sharecroppers. They abandoned Eartha Mae and her sister, placing them with a foster family. An aunt, feeling sorrow, invited Kitt and her sister to come live with her in New York City. Young Kitt arrived in 1936. She was artistically minded and liked dancing, at which she showed precocious skill. She was invited to join Katherine Dunham’s admired dance troupe. Kitt traveled with the troupe around Europe and South America, where she began to make a name for herself. She branched off into nightclubs, her voice complemented with a husky sensuality. In Paris she attracted a following, including Orson Welles, the boyhood wonder of American cinema. In Paris, Welles cast Kitt in
Faust
, his much ballyhooed production. He and Kitt became an item—at least in the European gossip trades. In photos, she looked like a waif in Welles’s giant arms. “
We started in Frankfurt,” Kitt would remember. “We had to work under a tent covering what was at one time part of a theater. The stage creaked and our moods were constantly broken, but we lived through it. I never knew what mood Orson was in until the moment [to] kiss. If he was gentle, then I knew his day had gone well.”

Rita and Rosa Davis. Rita became Sam Sr.’s second wife. Sammy adored his stepmother’s panache and elegant manners. Rita was devoted to her husband and was quite happy to settle in California upon Sam Sr.’s retirement from show business. They liked tooling around Los Angeles in his convertible Jag
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

Sammy wooed Eartha Kitt in San Francisco in 1952. She was a rising chanteuse—feral-like, blunt, fashionably sophisticated (note the buttons down the side of her pants leg), and, ultimately, too mature for Sammy
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

By the time Kitt landed in San Francisco in 1953 with
New Faces
, she had played the Mocambo in Hollywood, the Village Vanguard in New York City, countless other nightclubs, and starred in Europe with Welles. She was sultry, had an arrogant manner, and a figure shaped like an hourglass. Sammy meant to charm the world traveler, and so he befriended Pat Warehauser, another member of Kitt’s San Francisco production. Warehauser stood there with Sammy, at Kitt’s dressing-room door. “I thought he was a gofer,” Kitt recalls, “because that’s where he was standing.” She asked him to go get her a cup of coffee. He did. When he returned, Pat Warehauser reminded Kitt again that it was Sammy Davis, Jr., that he wanted to meet her. “I said, ‘Who is Sammy Davis, Jr.?’ The name didn’t mean nothing to me. I thought he was just a boy from downstairs.”

She knew Sammy would ask for a date, and sooner rather than later, because show-business people were on the move, always. Moments vanished.

“A couple nights later Sammy asked me out,” she says. “Took me to a Chinese restaurant around the corner from the hotel. Everybody said, ‘Ms. Kitt, come this way … Ms. Kitt.’ He said to me, ‘I’ve been in this business since I was four. Everybody knows you, and no one recognizes me!’ ”

They went on walks around that lovely city by the bay. Sundays were perfect for strolling. Both had the day off and could relax. “We’d be walking along the street and he’d say, ‘You are such a big name. I’m gonna be bigger than you if it kills me!’ He would be screaming this out,” remembers Kitt.

She took Sammy to the apartment of a Mr. Maxwell, an art connoisseur she had befriended in the city. “He invited us over for breakfast,” recalls Kitt. Afterward, Kitt and Sammy walked around the apartment, admiring the artwork. Maxwell mused as to how it might be interesting to do a bust of Sammy. Kitt immediately sensed Sammy was nervous because of his lack of art education. “All Sammy did was listen.” What Sammy really wanted to do was scram, to take Kitt to his hotel room and show her where he lived, so he did.

His boisterousness charmed her, amused her. His hotel room made her chuckle to herself. “All he had were cameras, comic books on both sides of the bed, from floor to top of the bed mattress. I said, ‘Sammy, you’re really into comics.’ He said, ‘I’m into Superman.’ ” Eartha Kitt was into Proust, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Faust. She had seen the ruins of Italy with her own eyes. Now she was with someone she had never heard of who was wild about Superman. She managed condescending smiles, which Sammy could not quite interpret. “We got into a conversation about art. He said, ‘I want to know what you know.’ I said, ‘Well, you can’t read comic books.’ He wanted me to take him to the museums.”

Kitt’s intellectual fervor hardly slowed Sammy’s romantic pursuit. Actually, it had the opposite effect—he was inspired. He showed up at the Huntington Theatre one afternoon, where Kitt was performing, with a load of books under his arms. They were picture books—of Monet, Picasso, Renoir. Sammy was giddy, twisty on his heels. “He opens up the books. ‘This is Degas! This is Renoir.’ ” Kitt stopped him: “I know the paintings,” she offered. Then Kitt told him it was not good enough to get reproductions in picture books, she wanted him to read books, biographies of the painters. Sammy slumped. He did not know how to truly read. “Do I have to read about them?” he finally asked in exasperation.

She took him to museums, explaining sculptures and paintings, lecturing about what she had seen, by way of art, in Paris, in Rome. She drove him around the hills of San Francisco in her big yellow Cadillac; Sammy ogled the car. Finally he coaxed her to come to the roof of the Fairmont. He posed her
and began snapping picture after picture. They kissed and groped; he took some more pictures. He screamed out that she had a beautiful body: so true. “We would go up on the roof of the Fairmont and he would photograph what he thought was the most beautiful body in the world,” says Kitt. “When he looked at me, it was as if he were breathing me in.”

Sammy invited her to come and see the trio perform. “He had not quite taken over the show yet,” she recalls. “But I could see where it was going. He was dynamic. His father and [Mastin] trained him beautifully. They let him do what he could. It was as if they let him exercise his ability. I loved them as a trio. It was a little family thing, working beautifully.” She felt warm in the company of Mastin and Sam Sr. “They were very gentlemanly. None of what Hollywood interpreted black entertainers to be and act like. They were very classy.”

Kitt liked Sammy, but also had a feeling he suffered from low self-esteem. “Nobody made him feel important as a person,” she felt, “not the community, or his family.” Finally she convinced herself that Sammy’s vaudeville years had left him badly scarred. “Before you realize you’re a man, woman, or child, you’re a
thing
,” she says of the child performer.

Kitt was rootless, as so many performers are rootless, but she felt Sammy’s rootlessness came with a price. “I’m an orphan, but I always felt I had a stabilized mind. I recognized my responsibilities.”

The more Kitt probed—believing Sammy childish and immature—the more Sammy fled her conclusions. He wanted to show her his impersonations; he wanted her to listen to his jazz albums; he wanted to impersonate her voice, her sultry walk—he was a mimic! Will Mastin told her she’d make a good wife for Sammy, that she could discipline him. The comment made Kitt feel strange. “It’s an embarrassment to think you can discipline someone, especially a man.”

But Sammy had the curse of the romantic, seeing only what he wanted to see. He sent Kitt flowers, and more flowers. “Sammy was buying relationships,” she says, “by sending too many flowers. When all I wanted was one petal. Eartha Kitt can’t be bought. She
can
be earned.”

Kitt was sure she and Sammy were simply not meant to be together. “The gods cannot be rushed. Timing is of the essence.”

Kitt was more realist than romantic, but still found it difficult to cast Sammy away. And yet, even as Sammy’s kinetic energy mesmerized her, one of the things that worried her was that he had never talked about his mother, his past, his childhood, special places. She felt sorrow for him. “Sammy never said, ‘
Je suis jesuis:
I am born as I am. There is nothing for me to explain.’ ”

Kitt left a heartbroken Sammy in San Francisco. She left to take an engagement at La Vien En Rose in New York City.

Sammy Sr. and Will had talked Sammy into pursuing Kitt. It wasn’t a pursuit
of the heart on Sammy’s part when she left San Francisco; it became a matter of pride. His father and Will didn’t think he could corral her. They had manly laughs about it. So Sammy chased her back across the country, all the way to New York City and her dressing room at La Vien En Rose. “It was opening night,” Kitt says. “My dressing room was filled with people: Doris Duke, Gloria Vanderbilt. When I came offstage Sammy Davis came in with a little box in hand. He said, ‘Come into the bathroom. I want to talk to you.’ He gives me this ring. I said, ‘Sammy, I can’t take this.’ It was gorgeous white and yellow—huge—a gold diamond. He said, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘I can’t put it on.’ If I did, and walked out there, all the people would see it and would think we were going to be married. He said, ‘Oh, please, please.’ When I went outside, I had this ring on my finger. Gloria Vanderbilt looked at my hand. She realized Sammy Davis had asked me the question.”