In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (53 page)

Abe Lastfogel called Sammy’s office, and told Rand to reserve the Earl Carroll Room (private, but with a view of the stage) at the Moulin Rouge, where Sammy was performing. “I’m going to bring Goldwyn and his wife,” Lastfogel said. Goldwyn begged Lastfogel not to tell Sammy he was coming. But, of course, Sammy was prepared. “They come in,” Rand remembers.

Samuel Goldwyn had his Sportin’ Life.

Rand fired off news of the signing to the newspapers, the white as well as the black press. All done, of course, at Sammy’s energetic urging. But the Goldwyn people didn’t like it: “We do the publicity,” one of Goldwyn’s boys quickly told Rand.

Sammy, so happy, went out and bought Goldwyn a wristwatch to show his gratitude. The watch had gadgets on it. Jess Rand watched Sammy present it to the mogul. Goldwyn fingered it, peered at it, squinched his face. “It’s too complicated,” he said. He took the thing anyway.

The fittings for costumes began. Sammy was given a plaid suit, a derby, a cane—not much different from the clothing he wore in vaudeville. A controversy erupted during fittings, for someone had obviously ignored Pearl Bailey’s dictum: she looked around the costume room and began to scream. “
No one is going to wear a bandanna in any picture I’m in!” She didn’t get her way totally; a small number of bandannas were handed out.

On the first day of filming, Sammy gave everyone on the set gifts. Then he turned himself into Sportin’ Life—a drug pusher on Catfish Row who spreads his “happy dust” all around and insinuates himself into the life of Porgy and Bess.

On July 2, 1958, a fire broke out on the
Porgy and Bess
set. It was calculated that damages totaled between $2 million and $5 million. But Samuel Goldwyn was accustomed to having his way; the old mogul would not be deterred from making the movie. “So go replace it!” he snapped to his minions when told of the movie-set damages. And of course there were those who wondered—given the controversy surrounding the film—if Negro arsonists had engaged in an act of sabotage. If arson crossed his mind, Goldwyn kept such thoughts to himself, while conceding there would be a two-month delay in filming.

Before filming began again, there was another distraction: Goldwyn fired the director, Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian said Goldwyn had been too intrusive, and had made “
trespasses upon my private and professional life.” The mood was strange and bewildering. Goldwyn quickly hired another director, the estimable Otto Preminger. Leigh Whipper, a cast member—and president of the Negro Actors Guild of America—blasted Preminger’s hiring and abruptly quit the production. “
I believe that the proposed
Porgy and Bess
is
now in hands unsympathetic to my people,” Whipper said. “I have first-hand information concerning the new director which brands him, to me, as a man who has no respect for my people.” Sammy uttered little, save a statement, along with Pearl Bailey and Brock Peters, applauding Preminger.

Let other Negroes—Harry Belafonte, Whipper, members of the NAACP—complain and commiserate about a German director making a movie about Negroes written by a white Southerner in Negro dialect. Sammy was in heaven. Shameful material? Not to Sammy Davis, Jr. He was hungrier than all the heated protests of all the stereotypes of Hollywood cinema combined. “I went to visit Sammy,” Keely Smith recalls of a trek to the
Porgy and Bess
set. “Sammy was happy as a lark.”

It wasn’t always so for others in the cast. When Preminger screamed at Poitier one afternoon, Poitier calmly removed the knee pads he had to wear portraying the crippled Porgy and walked off the set. The mood was tense, the silence forboding. He agreed to return only after Preminger apologized.

Both Poitier and Diahann Carroll—young, very beautiful, and cast as Clara in the film—were married. But they fell in love on the set, and it would cause turmoil in both their marriages. Sammy added to the production’s overall turmoil.

“
I won’t be here on Monday,” he announced to Preminger at the end of one workday.

“Why not?” Preminger demanded.

“It’s Rosh Hashanah,” Sammy said. “It’s the Jewish New Year.”

Preminger didn’t care; he had a movie to shoot. “I’m Jewish too, Sammy, I’ll be here on Monday.”

“There’s a difference,” Sammy shot back. “You’re an old Jew. I’m a new Jew.”

The tough German director seemed taken aback, but he granted Sammy his wish.

Before
Porgy and Bess
completed filming, Sammy had another engagement to fulfill. It may have taken him four years to deliver on his promise, but on November 15, Sammy climbed into a bus—he had commandeered three of them—with a bevy of handpicked stars to return to San Bernardino. Ever since his eye surgery there he had vowed to go back to raise money for its hospital. By the time he returned, in 1958, a new one had been built, but the proceeds from his concert would go toward buying needed medical equipment. “He said he would do it,” nurse Virginia Henderson recalls, “but when he left, we said, ‘He’ll forget.’ ”

On the buses were, among others, James Garner, a onetime traveling salesman who, a year earlier, had become a TV star playing a cardsharp in
Maverick
;
Zsa Zsa Gabor, a former Miss Hungary who had parlayed her smoldering looks—as opposed to acting talent, of which evidence was scant—to make herself a Hollywood celebrity; Lindsay Crosby (one of Bing’s sons); Buddy Bregman, the young musician (Sammy had brought Bregman along as music conductor, but he also wanted to secretly discuss with him—out of earshot of Sam Sr. and Will Mastin, who had stayed behind—musical possibilities for his solo career); Tony Curtis; Sidney Poitier (Porgy himself!); Diahann Carroll; Luddy Waters; Warren Cowan, the powerful Hollywood figure who handled Sinatra’s public relations; and Judy Garland. It was an eclectic mix, owing to Sammy’s reach across Hollywood.

Never mind the scorn heaped upon it while being made
, Porgy and Bess
showcased a cinematic Sammy of remarkable range. Some saw a mammy musical, but he saw gold, and he twirled and high-stepped onscreen in spats. It would be the high mark of his uneven movie career, even as his dream of an Oscar for playing Sportin’ Life went unrealized
.
(
AUTHOR
’
S COLLECTION
)

“Sammy was intrigued by celebrity,” says Cowan, the publicity agent. “And Sammy just didn’t know he was the biggest celebrity of them all.”

While rolling along, Sammy regaled his busload with stories of his auto accident, shrieking like a child who had escaped a terrible misfortune in some darkened cave. “I remember him stopping at a drugstore on the way,” recalls Luddy Waters, “and running in and coming out with all of these outrageous little gifts for us.”

The townsfolk of San Bernardino eagerly awaited Sammy’s appearance. A month earlier tickets for the benefit had gone on sale, and a frenzy had ensued. A ticket could be purchased at Krause Pharmacy, Wilson Mortgage Company, or the Arrowhead Springs Hotel—where a good many of those arriving on the buses would spend the night—and also Howe’s Shoes. In no time at all, the benefit sold out, to the tune of seventy-five hundred tickets. Posters were all around town:

San Bernardino’s finest came out to the Swing Auditorium on Mill Street on the evening of November 15, along with Sammy’s doctors and many of the nurses who had been there the day of the surgery. Virginia Henderson was in a lovely printed dress; Fred Hull, Sammy’s eye surgeon, put on a tux. They were all enormously excited knowing so many celebrities would be in their midst. No one could remember such a large number of people ever before fitting into the Swing. Many of the women were in fur, the men in long wool coats.

Sammy bounded onto the stage in a tuxedo and glasses following his introduction by Virginia Henderson. The city presented him with a scroll, of the
type the mayor gives to a lot of visiting dignitaries—only this one had a little feature: it highlighted Sammy’s musical career in words. Sammy eyeballed the thing as if it were the Magna Carta.

Then the show: he sang and danced. He introduced his friends—the other stars—his arms rising out to them with such reverence. A slight bow; a step back from them in his patent leather slip-ons. He reminded Henderson of a fast-moving master of ceremonies. He did a gun-drawing duel with “Maverick”—James Garner.

Draw!

Draw!

Draw!

Both were lightning fast. Oohs and aahs from the crowd. Sammy won.

He did some mimicry, some tap dancing, some singing: his anthemlike “Let Me Sing” reached a fevered crescendo, and thunderous applause followed. Henderson and Hull were amazed. All this just because in the wee hours of a quiet morning, on a desolate roadway, a rising-fast singer crashed his lime green Cadillac and lost his eye and lived to tell about it. His friends sat and watched him and loved it—their Sammy, so magnanimous, so giving. Then he turned the stage over to others.

“Judy Garland was here,” says Henderson. “Poor ole Judy. She wouldn’t go onstage until I got her a bottle of vodka. I had to get one of the security officers to go down to the liquor store. She sat on a stool, dressed in a woman’s tuxedo. She gave a performance like you wouldn’t believe. She sang one song after the other. But she was higher than a tick.” Garland—her booze in a nearby flask—couldn’t stop singing: “Day In and Day Out,” “The Bells Are Ringing,” “Clang Clang Clang Went the Trolley.” Young Buddy Bregman watched wide-eyed. He remembers the auditorium being so crowded he “couldn’t see the end of the audience.” Garland seemed ready to quit, but Sammy egged her on to do more, and she did: “Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “Swanee,” and, of course, “Over the Rainbow.” “She punched me in the ribs with her elbow,” remembers Bregman, who was conducting the orchestra, “and kept saying, ‘Cut to “Rainbow.” ‘ “After she finished the tender and haunting ballad, the song’s lyrics seemed to hang in the air. Many had been near tears, as if they were sensing a kind of personal coda for Garland’s own torment.

Danny Thomas—star of TV’s
Make Room for Daddy
—was there, but he didn’t arrive with the others on the buses. “Danny Thomas gave a terrific performance,” remembers Henderson. “He drove up with his chauffeur, performed, got in his car, and took off.”

Sammy had more to offer. He brought out Nita and Pepe, an acrobatic dance act—ever the touch of vaudeville—that had been opening for the Mastin trio. Sidney Poitier introduced John Carroll, a baritone singer who gave a rendition of “O Sole Mio,” and followed that with “The Lord’s Prayer.”

Afterward, there were hugs all around, and much kissing. The reception was right next door. Some local college kids, attending San Bernardino Valley College, had served as ushers for the event. Sammy told them to come to the VIP reception. They backed off—they had no money. So he insisted they come as his personal guests.

The event raised more than $20,000.

Next morning, Sammy was gone, back to Hollywood.

Those reading that morning’s
San Bernardino Sun
saw that the reviewer had referred to Sammy’s benefit gala as “
undoubtedly the greatest vaudeville show ever to be presented in San Bernardino.”

Porgy and Bess
premiered on June 24, 1959, in New York City. Amid flashbulbs, Sammy showed up with an entourage, and Elvera, his mother, was also there. For weeks there had been buzz about Sammy’s performance. The reviews confirmed them. “
In previous stage productions of this folk opera,” Bosley Crowther wrote in the
New York Times
, “Sportin’ Life has come through as a sort of droll and impious rascal with the bright, lively quality of a minstrel man.… But there’s nothing charming or sympathetic about the fellow Mr. Davis plays. He’s a comprehension of evil on an almost repulsive scale.” Justin Gilbert of the
New York Mirror
would write: “
The most articulately fascinating figure is Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life. Let us say that with his tight little derby, high buttoned shoes and twitching cane he exhales sulphur and brimstone as the devilish dope peddler. In two words HE’S GREAT.” And the
Saturday Review of Literature
: “Sammy Davis Jr. is a source of constant fascination as he twirls and springs and minces through the role of Sportin’ Life, lively as a rubber ball, evil as the ‘happy dust’ he leaves in his wake.” In white gloves, spats, and a checked suit, Sammy is riveting. Onscreen he appears to be unleashing—pirouetting, strutting, singing—all of the inventiveness he has learned from a life on the road. (Only Sammy and Pearl Bailey did their own singing in the film; other voices were dubbed.) Goldwyn may not have wanted a vaudevillian, but he got one, rolled into a mimic, rolled into an actor. Sammy had felt hemmed in on the
Anna
set; but on
Porgy
, with its Gershwin music, he let loose. Now, at last, he was as tall as Sidney Poitier—maybe taller, even. Never mind that Negroes had complained bitterly of the stereotype in Heyward’s novel. In playing the role colorless, but colorful, Sammy soared. In a way,
Porgy and Bess
was the last of the old mammy musicals produced by the Hollywood studios. And it was also the last movie made by Samuel Goldwyn. Sammy blazed through a movie the critics saw rather indifferently. He was a kid come to life, giving a brilliant performance that mattered to no one save himself and his own blinding and impossible-to-fill hunger. He told Jess to start thinking up an Oscar campaign. Jess took out a full-page ad in
Variety
showing Sammy frozen in pose—his white-gloved hands outstretched, the derby shielding his eyes. He resembled an elegant snake outfitted in dashing threads.