In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (43 page)

Rehearsals went on, as did rewriting by the day. Every day, paper flying, from Dorothy Dicker to Styne, then to Sammy, then back to Weiss and the other writers, then back to Dicker, sending her back to the typewriter. The first half of the show would be about Charlie Welch/Davis, trying to rise out of meager nightclub surroundings. The second half of the play would be a rendition of the Will Mastin Trio Featuring Sammy Davis Jr. At that theatrical device, the writers grimaced. “It was presented to us,” Weiss says of the second half. “We didn’t like it. That was the climax of the second act. It was deemed necessary. Sammy wanted to do it.”

It did not take Sammy long to begin his gift-giving. He gave dancer Popwell—whose insights frightened Sammy—a piece of jewelry, a band to wrap around the wrist. Popwell turned the band over and noticed an inscription: “From Uncle Will to Sammy.” Sammy had tossed him a gift from Will that he no longer wanted. Big deal. Ha ha. Popwell, however, did not find it funny. “I went to give it back to Sammy. Sammy was always giving.”

It is not uncommon that many child actors come to possess a very sharp insight. They are able to look beyond the surface. In a way, they are forced to become little adults. Like Sammy, Albert Popwell had been a child actor on the New York stage. There were times when Popwell would look at Sammy—and then right into him, with a kind of laserlike intensity. “I remember saying to Sammy one day, ‘Why have you got your mother working in a bar?’ Sammy broke down and cried.”

The Great White Way had never seen anything like Sammy when he arrived in 1956 to star in
Mr. Wonderful.
He took command of the musical, ignoring the critics, and lasted a year. His father and Mastin (in fezzes behind Sammy) were befuddled by the taxing nature of a Broadway show. They were aging; their Sammy was soaring. All they could do—they were old pros—was hold on, and they did
.
 (
COURTESY SALLY NEAL
)

Weiss, the lyricist, was Jewish. Sammy homed in on him. The homing made Weiss nervous. He smelled fakery. “Apparently he took a liking to me,” Weiss says of Sammy.

The company headed to Philadelphia in February for their pre-Broadway tryout. Styne and Sammy settled in at the Bellevue-Stratford. Sammy was in a Brooks Brothers suit–wearing phase. Everywhere he went, he looked like an elfin Negro banker or funeral director; the thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses completed the touch.

Sammy seemed completely at ease onstage, but the Philadelphia run was rocky. One critic pronounced it “a dazzling showcase” for Sammy, but overall, the reviews were bad. The
Philadelphia Daily News
referred to the musical as “
a tedious two-hour build-up for a half-hour night club act.” The words had to sting the production. “True,” the
Daily News
added, “the floor show finale stars Sammy Davis Jr., one of the cafe circuit’s most gifted and popular young performers.” At play’s end Sammy does a Jolson imitation—as in his childhood, in blackface. He relished the Jolson interlude. The
Daily News
critic took notice, with a sideways compliment. “
Major innovation is the Al Jolson ‘tribute’ on the stage ramp, which is intended to be meaningful, but is merely another portrait in Sammy’s extensive gallery of impressions.”

“The book was trite, it was nothing,” says cast member Jack Carter of
Mr. Wonderful
.

There were missed cues, rocky arrangements, and cast members knew it. Jack Donohue might have been used to working with Shirley Temple; Sammy was another matter. Sammy was quick, he improvised, he whirred. With tensions rising, knives were drawn, culprits looked for, bodies to point fingers at. “Jule Styne didn’t want me,” says Carter. “He was a snob. Sammy fought for me.” It was to be expected that Olga James, making her Broadway debut, might be a little nervous. “I almost got fired on the road,” says James. “When you have problems on the road, one of the rules is, ‘Fire the ingenue.’ I gather Sammy and Jule Styne took up for me.”

Sammy remained cool. Damn the critics. He had other weapons: his nightclub
denizens. In Philadelphia there was the Latin Casino; across the river in New Jersey there was Bill Miller’s Riviera. He rushed from stage to nightclub, a one-man publicity machine. He lunged at radio microphones, imploring listeners everywhere to come see the play. He quickly took the company over; he let it ride on his shoulders, just as he had been doing for years with his father and Will Mastin.

Will Mastin wasn’t happy. In the script, there were lines that seemed to mock him. In one scene, the Jack Carter character has to say he has taught Welch (Sammy) all he knows in the world of show business. A meeting was called. Will Mastin voiced his feelings about that line, unable, as Dicker noted, to separate fact from fiction. “
I don’t want Carter saying that ‘I taught Sammy everything he knows,’ ” Mastin blurted. “How do you think my friends react to that line?” Styne would have laughed, aloud, but he peered into Mastin’s eyes and saw how serious the old man was, saw that Will Mastin was confusing show lines with reality, saw that Will Mastin truly seemed pained. And the vaudevillian was hardly finished. “And we want more to say in this show. We’re performers.” When he finished, he left the hotel suite along with Sam Sr. Everyone in the room stared at one another.

The Mastin threat, however, was not to be ignored. Will Mastin owned the Will Mastin Trio, and Sammy belonged to the Will Mastin Trio. “
Unless you listen to what he says, he’ll pull Sammy,” a William Morris agent who sat in on the meeting whispered to Styne. Sammy felt the hurt of the two old men, but he assured Styne that everything would be fine. “
Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll talk to them.”

Styne felt a need to keep Sammy out of the possible imbroglio, so he went to see Mastin himself. “
In the show,” Styne began explaining to the vaudevillian, “Sammy isn’t playing himself. He’s playing [Charlie] Welch. So you’ll have to tell your friends that we don’t have Sammy Davis, Jr., onstage. We have a character. You aren’t playing Will Mastin, are you?”

All his life, show producers had talked down to Will Mastin. And a lot of them were now gone, right down memory’s hill, where so many show-business acts tumbled—and Will Mastin was still around. He glanced coldly at Styne.

“I bet you think I’m dumb,” he finally said.

Sammy huddled with Mastin and his father, and he finally settled things. Then it was hugs all around; now as ever, the trio against the world.

In Philadelphia, Jack Carter began an affair with Chita Rivera. Sammy had had his eye on the lovely dancer. “Sammy went bananas,” says Carter.

The show opened on Broadway on March 22, 1956. The reviews were tepid. The show had shortcomings—the script, principally—and the critics knew it.

“The show was looked down upon like it was a piece of garbage,” admits Carter.

Try as he might, John McClain, theater critic for the
New York Journal-American
, couldn’t bring himself to give
Mr. Wonderful
much of a passing grade. “
The youthful Davis is by all odds one of the most versatile and stupendous singer-dancer-musician-impersonators on view anywhere in the world today,” McClain wrote, “but here he’s been asked to achieve the impossible.” McClain seemed to be rooting for Sammy’s talents, but not the show itself. “
Don’t get me wrong—it’s a monumental hunk of showmanship, but it doesn’t belong in a theatre.”

Sammy felt otherwise.

Styne had worried about both Mastin and Sam Sr. on opening night. He witnessed bizarre goings-on onstage: “
On exit the opening night, they’d said hello to the drummer. They didn’t understand a book show, I suddenly realized. To them, this was just a different approach to their nightclub act, where it was okay to greet the lead trumpet, have a dialogue with the audience.”

Jule Styne, sure enough, had landed in the world of vaudeville.

A week earlier another show had opened, and to wonderful reviews. It was based on Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion. My Fair Lady
starred Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison and was quickly on its way to becoming a raging smash. Alan Jay Lerner, who did the books and lyrics, would remark of the success of
My Fair Lady:
“
The time was ripe for something gay and theatrical, something that was not two lonely people finding each other in a dark alley.”

So it was Sammy against Rex Harrison.

Following the breezy first act of
Mr. Wonderful
—the eye-catching costumes looked like a cross between Indian sheikh and African royalty—it rocketed forth in its second act, with Sammy taking over and turning the production into the outlines of a one-man show. It was a thrilling spectacle. “Sammy,” recalls Olga James, “could generate more electricity and hold an audience in a way I had never seen before.”

Sammy constantly improvised, ad-libbed. He was giving his all, and all different versions of himself. “He was unbelievable,” says Dicker. “I went to the theater almost every night. He would do different things every night. It was an undisciplined type of play, but he was magnificent in it.”

Pat Marshall, the dancer, found Sammy’s newness to Broadway charming. “Sammy had never been in the theater before. We were standing in the wings—this is sweet—and Sammy was so excited. He said to me, ‘Look at them, it’s “RSO.” ‘ What he meant was ‘SRO’—Standing Room Only. He was cute.”

Word spread about
Mr. Wonderful
. Not about its being spectacular, or particularly riveting—word spread about Sammy. And the stars started to come.

“It was a very showbiz crowd,” says dancer Thompson. “And blacks came. We were the only black Broadway show at that time.
South Pacific
had had one or two blacks, but that had closed.
Bells Are Ringing
had closed. This show had 75 percent blacks.” (Actually, it was closer to 50 percent—but this was still revolutionary for Broadway.)

The crowds would line the hallway leading to his dressing room. “It was the first time I met Quincy Jones, Sidney Poitier,” remembers Olga James. “You’d come backstage and there was Kim Novak. She really was glorious-looking.”

Carl Green and Dean Green, young Negroes in Harlem—he would soon be playing basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters, she would become involved in Sammy’s fund-raising for charities—couldn’t help but notice the excitement Sammy was bringing to untraditional Broadway audiences. “It was great,” Dean says. “I wasn’t that sophisticated about theater then.” She spotted many other Negroes milling about in the theater lobby and got the impression they, like her, were newcomers: “The reason they were there was because of Sammy Davis.” She’d go backstage, and there stood Sammy, in a terry cloth robe, fans mobbing him, women slipping him notes, gifts. “He was so graceful, so wonderful.”

Jack Carter and Sammy formed a fascinating bond. For Sammy, Carter served as a means to an end. “Wherever he was appearing he would have parties,” Carter says of Sammy. “People would come to him. He wouldn’t go out. He was afraid of rejection. Like the Stork Club. I would ‘beard’ for him and get him in.” Sammy seemed to be clawing so ferociously that Carter began to form other opinions. He felt both an odd kind of pain and sensation percolating inside Sammy. “He always wanted to be white and Jewish. He was like a little Jewish kid. His speech, demeanor, everything was New York. He didn’t do ‘black’ comedy like Buck and Bubbles.”

Onstage, Carter and Sammy dueled, each measuring the laughter the other elicited from the audience. They competed, nightly. “We were strange fruit,” says Carter. “We were outlaws.” Carter, playing the Davis character’s manager, would show the kid steps, moves, how to perform. Sammy, as Charlie Welch, would watch, listen, then do a number that would absolutely bowl Carter over. Inside the play, the revelation was simple: the ghost was catching up to the Jack Carter character. At times Carter and Sammy would become Jack Benny and Rochester, Benny’s valet. The audience kept howling. The two would do Amos ’n’ Andy, adopting southern drawls. The audience would keep howling. It was all so theatrical, so spontaneous, so gay. Will and Sam Sr., in the background, were shooting the cuffs, dressed in their costumes that made them look like Arabian sheikhs slumming as butlers.