In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (29 page)

July 1954: Sammy has run screaming and yelping after receiving a gift from his father and Will Mastin: the brand-new lime green Cadillac convertible that sits at curbside. He has never owned a car. Come evening, he will drive it up and down Sunset Boulevard, top down, eyes roving, the palm trees swaying. Within a few short months, on a desert-touched San Bernardino roadway, he will lie shell-shocked, the Cadillac mangled—and his left eyeball loosened from its socket
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

So, on November 19, Sammy and his valet, Charlie Head, climbed into his Cadillac convertible and pointed it in the direction of Los Angeles. It was in the wee hours of the morning. Sammy was tired and stretched out in the back, curling up on the leather seat, while Head took the wheel. The car was so huge, Sammy might as well have been at home on a sofa—only, of course, he didn’t have a home to call his own. The car’s interior design dazzled Sammy; he had slept in motel rooms not much bigger than his Cadillac. It wasn’t long before his eyes were closed. It was the old vaudevillian’s curse: you learned to sleep anywhere—in a car rolling around the mountains and away from Las Vegas, taking you to another itty-bitty dream coming true on the road to stardom. He had never sung a film score before, and he aimed to sing this one with everything he had—not that he knew any other way. Chandler and Tony Curtis would be depending on him.

The big new Cadillac was out there now, between the mountains, whirring by earth and beneath the rolling sky, almost floating in the sureness of its 230-horsepower engine. Not long into the drive Charlie Head pulled over. He was tired. Sammy sprang up and climbed into the front seat to drive the rest of the way. Charlie stretched out in the back.

Soon enough, Sammy could see the sun rising. He was in El Cajon Pass now, ninety minutes from Los Angeles, cruising on the outskirts of San Bernardino, a little farming community where miles of land swept off into the distance. There were mobile homes and motels in view. The car window was rolled down; the wind was soft. Early morning, and there were not many cars on the road. A car passed on his left. He thought nothing of it. Two women—as he would later remember—in dress hats, humming along just like him. What GM promised in its ads was so true: plenty of power, plenty of luxury. He rolled and rolled, Charlie asleep. Then Sammy noticed that the car that had passed him—with the two women inside—looked to be slowing in the distance. He was coming up on the car now. Then the driver of the car inched it
into the middle of the road. She was preparing to turn around. It was the damnedest thing, and so dangerous in the middle of a two-lane highway. He veered the Caddy into the left lane. Maybe he could pass her. No, he could not, for there were cars coming up ahead in the opposite direction. He quickly veered back to the right. And when he did, and before he could touch the brake, and before he could think another thought about singing a song for Tony Curtis’s movie, and before he could wish himself anyplace else but inches from another car in the middle of the road with Charlie in the back sleeping, and before his heart had a chance to rocket right through his chest, and before he could think about all the times his father and Jess Rand had expressed concern about his driving abilities, he crashed his prized Cadillac—boom—right into the stalled car. His head snapped forward. Charlie bounced like a toy. In that instant, there was the fury of sound: metal upon metal, and glass, and the godawful feeling that life might be over, and land looking like sand through an hourglass, and out-of-control voices—his and Charlie’s—and fear like a little child’s in a dark cave at night, and the slamming of limbs into metal and the cone in the middle of the steering wheel finding his face, and the blood spurting like something out of a Hollywood B movie. He felt pain everywhere—the leg, the shoulder, the face.

“
I had no control,” he would recall later. “I was just there, totally consumed by it, unable to believe I was really in an automobile crash.”

Everything was more vivid than normal reality. He was going to die. He was going to die on the road to stardom. He was already dead. A gifted but unlucky Negro. His road to Damascus. Maybe it was a dream. No, it was not. The day was real, and the wind was real, and the road was real, and Sammy Davis was real, and now he was stumbling from the car, blood streaming down his face, then turning in agony and reaching for Charlie in the back—and Charlie reaching his hand up to his own face and mouth and the teeth that had become pried from his gums.

It had all happened so quick; it was all so blindingly operatic.

Another driver slowed and hopped out and told the skinny little Negro that the two ladies up ahead were just fine—although one had a broken leg—and then Sammy and Charlie heard a siren and there were a couple of officers upon the scene.

Four months earlier the Eisenhower administration had announced plans for a massive and badly needed interstate highway system. But it was just a plan. The country had too many small roads; the roads were not keeping pace with the numbers of cars and travelers.

Sammy’s Cadillac—dream car of the American Negro—sat there, a mangled mess on the side of the road.

Both Sammy and Charlie Head were rushed to County Hospital in San
Bernardino. It was the poor hospital, where any unknown Negroes might be taken. “The implication was that the police did not recognize Sammy Davis as a personality,” recalls Dr. Fred Hull, “so where else would they take a black guy but to County Hospital?” But once at the hospital, word seeped out. It was Sammy Davis, Jr., the nightclub entertainer. Still, there was a dilemma: there were no beds available at the hospital. So Davis lay on a gurney. A cursory examination showed a serious injury to his eye and also an injury to a leg. Community Hospital was the better hospital in town. A County Hospital doctor phoned Dr. Hull, the best-known eye and ear specialist in town, who was on call throughout the county. “I got a phone call from one of the doctors at County Hospital,” recalls Hull. “He said, ‘We have Sammy Davis here. He has a major injury. They don’t have a bed.’ I said, ‘Let’s get him in Community Hospital.’ ”

Virginia Henderson was the head duty nurse on call at Community Hospital when the call about Sammy came in. She listened, and she knew she had no beds, but she kept listening, and as she was listening, she couldn’t help recalling in her mind the talents of Sammy Davis, Jr. “I don’t know why, but I had kind of followed Sammy’s career,” she says. “He intrigued me. So when he came here, I wanted to see that he had the best care he could get.” Henderson’s sentimentality was one thing, reality another. She knew to have Sammy Davis at the hospital would be a publicity coup. So what if there were no beds available? She’d make some available, quick. “I got to moving beds around and got a couple patients discharged,” she would recall.

Word about Sammy’s accident spread quickly. A reporter from the
San Bernardino Sun
was hustling over to the hospital. The wire services were alerted. Jeff Chandler and Jess Rand were on the Universal lot, awaiting Sammy, when they heard. And just like that, Chandler was already in his car—Cadillac convertible—zooming from Los Angeles to San Bernardino, Jess Rand in the passenger seat. Chandler’s foot was heavy on the pedal. A policeman stopped him. Chandler, the easily recognizable movie star, explained the circumstances. The officer dashed back to his car, turned on his siren, and escorted them to the San Bernardino county line, where Chandler continued racing toward the hospital. He nearly galloped through the doors upon reaching them. He was wearing a pair of white duck pants. Tanned and silver-haired, Chandler looked like Hollywood. He and Rand raced to find their friend. “There was Sammy, a bandage around his whole head. He was moaning and groaning. Jeff and I were standing there, and didn’t know what the hell to do,” says Rand. Virginia Henderson, the admitting nurse, caught up with the pair. Chandler, upon seeing Sammy, suddenly looked hollow-eyed. “He took it very hard,” recalls Henderson.

Sammy was in total darkness with head wrappings. He only heard voices. He had never been hospitalized before.

Tony Curtis had a different feeling of why Chandler had rushed out to San Bernardino. No one knew anything about the town. It was just someplace you passed on the way to Las Vegas. It was farm country; they grew oranges. There were not many Negroes in or around San Bernardino. Chandler worried what kind of treatment Sammy would get. “Jeff went out and patrolled and made sure Sammy wasn’t going to lose another eye in the hospital because of [mis]treatment,” recalls Curtis.

After spending time with Sammy—everyone holding to an optimistic outlook, the fate of the damaged left eye not yet decided—Rand asked about Charlie Head, the valet. “I said, ‘Where’s Charlie Head?’ They said, ‘Who?’ ” Rand found Head in another room. He was lying on a cot. And he was gurgling. Rand stepped closer. Head pointed to his mouth. He tried talking, but only gurgled. His bridgework had come completely loose and was gagging him. Rand reached into his mouth and removed the broken teeth.

As soon as Will Mastin and Sam Sr. got word, they raced to San Bernardino from Las Vegas, curving along desert roads fast as they could. When they reached the hospital, they made inquiries and were finally directed to Sammy. They walked along the hospital corridors—they were dressed casually but elegantly—with the smooth assurance of seasoned entertainers. Onlookers stared at them—two dandyish Negroes nearly glistening with worry. When they found him, he was on the gurney, heavily bandaged. They both grew sickened. They stood looking him up and down—his legs, arms, shoulders—worrying where injuries might be. They leaned over and whispered to him, trying to stay calm. They had had Sammy since childhood. They had protected him so, they had never seen him bloodied, in pain. This, now, was terrifying. This was Will’s worst nightmare. Sammy, out of his sight, driving the California roadways, and crashing. Just when Sammy had his biggest hit, “Hey There,” rising on the charts. Just when the act looked so unstoppable. Sam Sr. just stood, barely blinking. His Sammy, flat on his back. In bandages. The father did not want to break down before the son. He might instill more fear in Sammy than was necessary. So he was gentle, quiet, as reassuring as possible. Mastin was more expressive, seemed to be in more agony, showing a cross between commercial heartache—might this be the end of it all, the act?—and pain. “The doctor said it’s going to be all right,” Sam Sr. told Mastin in as sure a voice as possible. Rand and Chandler hovered near the two worried men. But Will Mastin seemed not to hear anything. Actually, he seemed to be going into shock. He stood looking at Sammy, at the star of his trio, at the only reason the trio still had currency coast to coast, and something seemed to spill right from him—life itself—like dark ink. For so long he had thought the world was trying to snatch Sammy. Showbiz agents whispering things to Sammy behind his back; Abe Lastfogel and his cheesy grinning; white women getting to Sammy, delivering notes from those very showbiz agents. Will Mastin believed wickedness
was afoot in the cold world of entertainment. He was nobody’s fool. Now this: calamity and disaster in the blink of an eye. The show must go on—only now the show would not go on. Sammy was the show, and the show was bandaged and bloodied. Mastin fell to the floor. Rand and Chandler and the nurses swiveled their necks and bent down to him, quickly reaching for him. “Will was on his hands and knees,” recalls Rand, “saying, ‘Jesus, just let him live.’ ”

The vaudevillian couldn’t take it. From the Barbary Coast of San Francisco to the gritty streets of New York, he had seen so much in the performing world. But few things were as debilitating to him as the sight of his Sammy hospitalized. He had never invested so much time and energy in an act as he had in the Will Mastin Trio, nor in a performer as he had in little Sammy. Sometimes people laughed at him. The bobby-soxers and the nightclub promoters even snickered. He was the old man in the corner, hovering like a shadow. But he had grown immune to all that. At least he wasn’t handing out tickets at some two-bit Negro theater. Nor was he on the unemployment line. Far from it: he was a Negro in a Cadillac with lovely dress suits and a trio to take care of. Will Mastin had nothing but the act. So in the hospital, he dropped to his knees and asked the Almighty to save Sammy. Jess Rand, whispering, asked a nurse for some sedatives to calm the seventy-five-year-old Mastin. “She gave me some Nembutal,” Rand remembers. It was an antianxiety drug. “I told Will it was a vitamin.”

There was a commotion back at the front door of the hospital. It was Jeff Chandler. He was verbally jousting with Jerry Lewis, who had just arrived and desperately wanted to see Sammy. Chandler—a very serious man, and one who did not take the young and often hysterically gyrating comic seriously—told Jerry that Sammy needed rest, that it might be wise to come back another time. Jerry’s body began moving about like something suddenly wound up. “I tangled with Chandler,” he would recall. “He stopped me at the door of the hospital. I said to him, ‘If you don’t have a white [doctor’s] coat on, don’t tell me what to do.’ ” Then Jerry Lewis raced down hallways until he reached Sammy’s room. “It was devastating,” he says of spotting the bandaged Sammy. Lewis pulled up a chair, and he sat down awhile, offering soothing words to Sammy. Of course, with the bandages, Sammy could not see him, only hear his voice. Quietly, very quietly, Jerry Lewis began to weep.