In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (4 page)

Straus went about the business of finding the right person to edit the book. The first editor he selected removed the first-person narrative structure. The Boyars were aghast and fired off an angry telegram to Straus. Straus sensed how flustered they were; he said he’d find another editor. The Boyars were far from mild-mannered when it came to their Sammy.

The book then went to Robin Pitchford. Upon the completion of her editing duties, Burt Boyar accused her of taking out “all of Sammy’s grammar.” With Sammy’s nightclub-speak gone, he sounded like “an English professor” to Boyar. Touchy and protective, the Boyars felt they had no choice but to demand the book be taken away from Pitchford as well—and so it was.

Straus began to raise an eyebrow at the Boyars’ peculiar demands, but then
figured he’d put the matter to rest by assigning Henry Robbins—his very well respected editor in chief—to edit the book.

Robbins was known around literary circles to have enormous insight. Reading the Davis-Boyar manuscript, Henry Robbins saw and smelled things he did not like. Changes would have to be made, and, as the editor, he’d make those changes. After all, he was dealing with two writers—three, counting Sammy—who had never written a book before. Surely they would appreciate his candor. Robbins did not like the story of Davis’s conversion to Judaism, which had been made not long after Sammy’s car accident. It sounded immature, Robbins told them; it lacked depth. In fact, the story of Davis’s conversion—the more Robbins thought about it—pained him. Boyar defended Sammy. “Here’s this Jewish editor, and he decides he knows what Sammy Davis is all about,” recalls Boyar.

There was something else about the manuscript that rubbed Robbins the wrong way. He felt Davis had been far too quiet in the book about civil rights. He wanted anger, heat on the page. He wanted to know where Sammy’s heart lay. “Henry said, ‘Sammy’s got to fight back sooner. Everybody’s going to think Sammy’s a coward. Sammy’s got to hit back sooner.’ ”

The Boyars sat and listened to Henry Robbins. And they didn’t like what they were hearing. It was their Sammy, and they felt Robbins simply did not know their Sammy. Never mind that they were unpublished, that this was their first book; they still could not abide by Robbins’s suggestions, his blunt orders. Robbins grew irritated. “If you don’t,” Robbins said to the Boyars about positioning Sammy as more of a rebel in the book, “people will see Sammy as a coward.” Burt Boyar felt Henry Robbins was talking about a Sammy Davis, Jr., that simply did not exist. “Don’t try to change the nature of this man,” Boyar finally told Robbins. “He is what he is.”

Robbins was not finished. He thought he might be able to get the Boyars to understand him if he got them in less formal surroundings, so he invited them to his apartment, where—through a meal and the flowing of wine—they took up their discussion anew. But Robbins could sense something: there was very little movement on the part of the Boyars. Finally, Burt Boyar had had enough. He did not want to discuss it further. He feigned near drunkenness and made his way to the door, Jane in lockstep with him.

Robbins simply “didn’t understand” Sammy, says Boyar. “He was not editing; he was trying to write. He was trying to write Sammy instead of edit him.”

Inside the publishing house, there was a sense that the Boyars were becoming oddly obstinate. “They were like two parakeets in a cage,” remembers Roger Straus.

Peggy Miller, assistant to Straus, sensed Robbins’s irritation. “He threw up his hands and said, ‘I can’t deal with these people,’ ” she says. Miller asserts that
the Boyars were well liked and quite charming, but they had a flaw that could stymie a publishing house: they were obsessive about every little change—commas, semicolons—that might be made to the manuscript. Why, they had been to the nightclubs! They had whirred along in the limo with Sammy through the streets of Manhattan!

Despite the problems, Roger Straus announced plans to publish the (still-untitled) book in 1964.

The manuscript was passed from Henry Robbins to Sigrid Rock. Rock had been a writer at the
New Yorker
before turning to editing. “She was a tough-looking blonde,” Straus later remembered of Rock, whom the publishing house had not worked with that often. She began editing the book by making cuts, up to twenty-five pages by the time the Boyars had received her first version. The cuts astonished them, and they felt they were drastic. Actually, they were merely a few pages here and a few pages there, trimming the fat from a huge manuscript. But the Boyars had become too close to the material. Any cut seemed like an assault on their love for Sammy. The Boyars decided they would have to have a very serious discussion with Sigrid Rock. The discussion never took place. Rock, in the midst of editing the Sammy book, attempted suicide: she had been going through a painful romantic breakup. She survived the suicide attempt, but Farrar, Straus thought it best to take the book away from her. The Boyars hardly complained.

Straus was indeed charmed by the Boyars. They finished each other’s sentences; they often wore his-and-her matching outfits in the manner of young fraternal twins. They were doubly obsessive about their book. But, in time, enough seemed to be more than enough. “Because they were together all the time,” says Straus, “they always talked about the book, nitpicking.”

“Having put this manuscript together, it was holy writ” to the Boyars, says Peggy Miller. “They were a strange pair,” Roger Straus would have to admit, albeit with affection.

Every time the Boyars received the book back from an editor, they reread it. And after another reading, they realized they had more stuff to add! More words, more Sammy scenes, more Sammy! The manuscript ballooned from a thousand to twelve hundred pages. Finally, an exasperated Roger Straus told the Boyars that he’d edit it himself.

So the book had an editor. But the 1964 publishing season had already come and gone. Straus announced that the book would be published the following year.

With the head of the publishing house hovering with them, the Boyars finally relaxed, and they accepted Straus’s editing. All, at long last, went much
smoother in trimming a manuscript that at times reached nearly two feet high. Straus did not toy with the stylistic tone of the book. He made cuts, but they were not radical in any sense. “We went through about five editors and couldn’t work with any of them,” Boyar would recall years later, with not a trace of apology in his voice. He and Jane found Roger Straus much more to their liking: “We answered every question of Roger’s, and it went great.” Peggy Miller figured she knew why the Boyars were amenable to Straus: “He was the head of the company. They had no place else to go.”

The book was still in search of a title. Among those thought of and discarded were
Troubled Man, Excuse Me for Living
, and, in honor of Sammy’s favorite drink,
Bourbon and Coke
—the latter the silliest and offered by May Britt, Sammy’s gorgeous, Swedish-born wife.

One finds, however, in the
Golden Boy
script—the play Sammy was appearing in during the behind-the-scenes selling of his book—a genesis for the eventual title. In the script, Sammy, as Joe, asks the stage chorus a litany of questions.

Sammy liked that theme of fighting for his dreams to come true—in both the script and his own life. He had been told he couldn’t be a mimic, couldn’t mime white people, couldn’t hop from the stage into the band and play all those different instruments, couldn’t do Broadway. And he had been told that because of his height and his skin color, he couldn’t enjoy the full benefits of being an American entertainment star. He had been told he couldn’t be a Negro cowboy, couldn’t date white women, couldn’t date actress Kim Novak, couldn’t marry May Britt. He had been told he couldn’t spend money like Sinatra spent money.

“Yes, you can!”

For literary purposes, the title became
Yes I Can
. And it had muscle. It stood up. It had affirmation.

By the summer of 1965—Sammy was now in full flight as the star of
Golden Boy
—his book was listed as a fall arrival from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Among other titles on the distinguished publisher’s list were
The Old Glory
, by Robert Lowell,
The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1930–1963
, by Edmund Wilson,
To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings
, by T. S. Eliot,
The Myth and the Powerhouse
, by Philip Rahv, and
Aura
, by Carlos Fuentes. The unpublished Boyars were suddenly swimming in very deep and warm waters.

It had been nearly six years since the book idea had been born. The Boyars were so excited that they made a special trip to the Greenwich Village bindery where the books were being printed, and they saw the first copies rolling off the press. “We were there the night they put dust jackets on them,” Boyar recalls. They grabbed up as many books as they could carry and rushed for a taxi to get them uptown to the Majestic, where Sammy would be. Inside the theater, inside the dressing room, they gave copies of the book to Sammy, who shrieked with delight. May was also there. On the last page of the book, Sammy—or Jane, or Burt—writes, in a scene that allegedly took place beside May’s hospital bed after the birth of their daughter, Tracey: “I’m going to build something good and strong and wonderful for us, and I’ll never let you down. I promise.” (Tender words—only by the time May held the book in her hands, Sammy was already letting her down, by sleeping with a couple of long-legged beauties from the
Golden Boy
cast.)

The book, at 630 pages, is massive for the autobiography of a forty-year-old. The cover design is in bold yellow letters: YES I CAN. The publishers, on the flap jacket, describe the book as “a fullblooded, serious, intensely absorbing autobiography, written with the vitality, brilliance and aggressive greatness of Sammy Davis Jr.”

The opening pages of the book are designed as a Hollywood musical’s credits might appear onscreen at movie’s beginning.

There is an empty page:

Y    E    S

Another empty page:

I

Another empty page:

C    A    N

And then, on succeeding pages:
THE STORY OF SAMMY DAVIS
,
JR
.,
BY SAMMY DAVIS
,
JR
.
AND JANE & BURT BOYAR
.

On the back of the jacket is a moody photo of our memoirist, seated. He is holding a cane and has his chin rested on the hand that grips the cane. It is a side portrait (from the right side, showing off the good eye), taken by Philippe Halsman, a much-admired fashion photographer. Davis is wearing a pinstripe suit jacket and a white shirt with cuff links. He is holding a cigarette in his right hand. He looks to be as deep in thought as Aristotle.

His story, his life, in black and white. At the book’s beginning is an epigram:

The four lines sound like they might come from a Negro comic on a stage late at night—Dick Gregory or, say, Godfrey Cambridge, perhaps—over in Atlantic City. Or perhaps at the Apollo in Harlem. Note the bastardizing of the language, the verve—“We ain’t what we oughta be”—of street lingo. Actually, the author of those words is genuinely revered across America for his speeches, his verse. It is one of those rare instances when Martin Luther King, Jr.—in the book, his name is beneath the four lines—kneels down to embrace urban slang. The tone suits Sammy just fine.

Farrar, Straus announced it would publish
Yes I Can
on September 19. The galleys, copies of the book for reviewers, had already gone out. Roger Straus was enough of an industry insider that privileged information about his books came to him without much effort. “First of September, Roger Straus called us and said, ‘Kids, don’t get too excited, but I think you got the front section [the book review] of the
Herald Tribune
,’ ” says Boyar.

The kids couldn’t help but get excited. They were in their New York City apartment when Straus called, sitting on the floor. Just a mattress and a typewriter and a chair is all they had. They had ordered new furniture but ran out of money. They had never written a book, thus they had never felt the thrill—or the agony—of being reviewed. “[Straus] called me back,” Boyar says. “He said, ‘I got it in my hand.’ ” Straus proceeded to read them parts of the
Herald Tribune
review. It was written by the newspaper’s Eleanor Perry, and it was flat-out glowing. “He has written (or spoken on tape) a magnificent narrative. It is related with honesty, humanity, enormous intelligence, rage and humor,” Perry wrote. “For this reader it is the definitive documentary of The American Dream in America now.” Perry went on to praise Davis’s guts. “After he’s made it, after he has every glittering thing money can buy and an entourage of
devoted fans and a magnificent house in a white suburb, he attempts suicide.” The newspaper wasn’t on the street yet; it was, in fact, days away from publication; Straus was holding an advance copy. The Boyars were beside themselves. Giddily they asked about the
New York Times
. Could they dare think, dare imagine, they’d get the cover of the
Times
as well? In New York City, such a feat—the
Times
and
Herald Trib
on their respective covers on the same Sunday featuring the same book—was known to rival the almighty hat trick. And it was rare indeed to become the beneficiary of such an accomplishment. “Don’t be silly,” Straus told them. “Count your blessings.” The Boyars hugged and kissed.