In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (56 page)

After Vegas, Sinatra, Sammy, and the crew arrived in Los Angeles by train. They arrived just in time for the Democratic National Convention.

Sammy’s support of politicians went back years, all the way to Adlai Stevenson, up to and including Governor Edmund Brown of California. But it was Kennedy’s expected Republican foe, Vice President Richard Nixon, who had first invited Sammy to the White House, in 1957, searing Sammy’s memory as he sat in Nixon’s highback chair. And how could he forget the moment with Nixon backstage at the Copa—with his father and Will and Jerry Lewis? But Kennedy was Lawford’s brother-in-law, and Lawford was in the pack, and Frank just had to whistle, and Dean and Sammy and the others were lining up to do what they could do for him. Sammy would hardly be alone at the convention as entertainer, as star. Janet Leigh was there; so were Gina Lollobrigida and Norman Mailer and Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, among so many others.

John Kennedy did not naturally appeal to American Negroes. His refusal to castigate Joe McCarthy hung in the air, as well as his cordial relations—many thought too cordial—with southern Democrats, who habitually blocked civil
rights legislation. Negroes were fond of Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington, two senators representing, respectively, Minnesota and Missouri; both men were considered progressive. Kennedy could not match their liberal credentials.

It was Sammy’s first convention. He was excited. For months, he had been playing go-between for Sinatra with Kennedy and the King camp, Frank threatening King about his lackluster support for Kennedy. (Deep in the darkness of that convention, the FBI and CIA were both wiretapping rooms: there were fears of the Kennedy and Sinatra connection, because of the Sinatra and Sam Giancana connection.) When Sammy took to the stage along with Sinatra and Peter to sing, the Mississippi delegation booed. They were booing Sammy’s skin color, his engagement to May Britt, just the fact he was before them; boos and boos. Sinatra rolled his eyes. They were bigots. In such a public arena, there was nothing they could do, except sing, and they continued singing the song they were singing when the booing began: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Senator Kennedy won the Democratic nomination on the first ballot.

The following winter months were not kind to Jack Kennedy when it came to Negroes. They remembered well his endorsement from James Patterson, the segregationist Alabama governor, and how warmly he had accepted it. There were also many old Negro southern ministers who still cozied warmly to Republican sentiments, owing to Lincoln’s legacy. Kennedy stood staring out at black ministers at one appearance, and many of them were wearing “Nixon Now” buttons. Nixon, in private, could be sincere, even charming (“
if Richard Nixon is not sincere,” Martin Luther King, Jr., would write to a confidant, “he is the most dangerous man in America”). Kennedy’s call to King in a Georgia jail, where he was being held, may have been coldly political, but it was also quite shrewd. Many Negroes believed it was a sign foretelling what kind of president he would be. Kennedy squeaked into the White House that November.

There still remained nothing more combustible, more dangerous, for an American Negro to do than to choose to marry a white woman. It was also illegal in many states below the Mason-Dixon line.

Two weeks after Kennedy’s election—Sinatra had asked Sammy to hold off until after November—Sammy took another bride, adding to his numbers of haters, both Negro and white. But Sammy could not help himself. He loved white women, loved the sight of one on his black silk sheets. His American dream.

She was born May Wilkens in Lidingo, Sweden—a sliver of a Stockholm suburb—in 1933. Her father was a postal employee, her mother a housewife. She grew tall, fancied a pageboy haircut, island-hopped, swam, sailed with
family. It was a rather typical middle-class European upbringing. Young May had catlike eyes and high cheekbones. Following finishing school, she worked in a photography studio in Stockholm. Surrounded by the beauty of Sweden, she wanted to become a photographer. Not long after the war, Carlo Ponti, an Italian filmmaker, began roving the European continent in search of young beauties. He’d breeze in and out of photography studios, studying the pictures of models, of beautiful women he felt could be in pictures. Once recruited, they were trained, instructed in how to become even more beautiful, sexier, and then they were put onscreen, where, suddenly, their beauty seemed as extravagant as it was precious. Some would fade away, not hungry and resilient enough for the tricky business of movies. Sofia Scicolone—dark hair, darker eyes, voluptuous figure—was one of those who did not fade. Ponti had discovered her in 1951 in a small Italian village and put her in the movies. Sofia Scicolone became Sophia Loren, who became an international star. She also became Mrs. Carlo Ponti.

Ponti waltzed into a Stockholm studio where young May Britt was working as a photo assistant. He was prowling through the daylight for his Yolanda, the lead character in a movie he was planning. Ponti wanted an unknown. Unknowns could be full of surprises; there was magic in the true discovery. Ponti saw magic in May Britt. Fourteen days after he laid eyes on her, May Britt found herself in Rome. She was all of sixteen years old. And she was going to be in the movies.

Her screen debut came in 1952 in
Yolanda, Daughter of the Black Pirate
. The ingenue took easily to Italian life. Over the next several years, she averaged two movies a year. Movie acting did not seem to intimidate her. Buddy Adler, the chief at Twentieth Century–Fox, spotted Britt in a small role in
War and Peace
. Director Jean Negulesco was on his way to Europe to make a movie, and Adler asked the director to stop off in Rome and screen-test the young Swede. The test went well. And there she was—in Hollywood. There were comparisons to Garbo. But where Garbo was distant and her beauty icy, Britt was approachable and warm, at least on the silver screen. She took an apartment in Beverly Hills. A clotheshorse, she shopped as if it were an avocation. Her lithe frame showed sweaters and slacks to a lovely effect. She was hardly naive: she told the studio, in one of those limp and self-serving biographical portraits, that she’d like to marry a doctor and have five or six kids.

She was a young actress, and she was sucking on dreams and ideas like candy.

Her first American movie, in 1958, was
The Hunters
. It starred Robert Mitchum. Critically, save for her beauty, she went unnoticed. Next she was cast in
The Young Lions
, the adaptation of Irwin Shaw’s flinty World War II novel. The movie starred Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift. Britt played a Brando love interest. She had more screen time, and there were teasing
hints of her seductive powers. But it was in a remake of
The Blue Angel
that Britt finally had her breakout role. (Hollywood widely thought the part would go to Marilyn Monroe.) She played Lola Lola, a sleep-around singer, and she played it to the hilt. (In 1930, the role had ignited German actress Marlene Dietrich’s career.) With
The Blue Angel
, moviegoers could truly see what separated Britt and Garbo: Britt appeared warmer; she did not appear as if she might slap you for saying hello.

In Hollywood, you always wanted what you didn’t yet have: scripts, movie roles, the lovely new female starlet in town.

May Britt might have dreamed of marrying a doctor, but she settled, at first, not on Sammy but on a socialite and would-be actor by the name of Eddie Gregson. Gregson, whose father ran an investment company, was also heir to millions. May Britt’s beauty carried currency, and she knew it: she married Gregson in Mexico on February 22, 1958—one month after she met him.

On August 17, 1959, Britt appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine: “May Britt: Star with a New Style.”
Life
was enamored of film beauties and would often feature them on its cover: Kim Novak, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren. The beauties were a good magnet to draw you to the serious fare: “Nixon Wows Warsaw,” said the cover that featured Britt. The
Life
article referred to Britt as “strange and lovely,” and went on to describe her life as a Hollywood ingenue and new bride: she plays tennis in the mornings in a see-through nightdress, she gulps coffee, she likes riding motorcycles, and she strolls with her husband on the Stanford University campus, where he is a student.

At first, her quick marriage to Gregson was good and it was true, but ultimately it was too good to be true. The couple split after nineteen months. Britt then fell in love with an Academy Award–winning cinematographer, Leon Shamroy. But he did not fall in love with Britt; he let her know he was married. Britt went looking for love again.

Sammy was always looking for love.

May Britt had no knowledge of American history, least of all its volatile racial history. She did not know of Frederick Douglass and Jack Johnson, who suffered for their marriages to white women. She did not know of the Scottsboro Boys. She did not know of all the states, in 1960, that had laws on the books banning interracial marriage. And she certainly did not know of two Negro youths, ten-year-old James Thompson and nine-year-old David Simpson, who had been sentenced to reform school in North Carolina in 1959—the very year of her engagement to Sammy—for kissing a white girl. She knew none of this. She confessed she had met no Negroes while growing up in Europe. In a way, the less she knew made her marriage to a Negro all the sweeter, absent—at least in the early going—the residue of racial paranoia that lay across the land.

It was not lost on many entertainment watchers that Sammy—unlike Belafonte, unlike Poitier—lacked matinee-idol looks. And yet: “He was an absolute genius,” says actress Barbara Rush. Rush accompanied her husband, Warren Cowan, around the country in the 1950s, watching Frank and Sammy and Dean perform. “Women like to be around men who are fascinating. And Sammy was a fascinating man.”

There were times, even when he was not appearing in a film, when Sammy would make his way out to one of the Hollywood film studios to have lunch at the commissary. He was always hustling, always angling. It was at Fox studios one afternoon in 1959 that he first spied May Britt. She was there filming
The Blue Angel
. Sammy knew her face from her movies. But now, seeing her in the flesh, he became wildly smitten. He had to devise a way to meet the Swedish actress off the studio grounds.

Singer Dinah Washington was in Los Angeles, appearing at the Cloisters. Sammy decided to throw her a closing-night party. He invited Britt; the rising young actress, happy for party invitations, showed with a male acquaintance and her mother. In time, Britt caught on to Sammy’s interest and showed no hesitancy—even though she had never been involved in an interracial affair—in embracing the furtive manner in which they had to date. They went boating together out in Encinitas, plenty of Sammy’s friends along for obvious reasons. Britt resided in Malibu, where she rented a guest house. Sammy would come visit her under the cover of darkness, quiet as a spy. He started the jewelry-giving. And he began snapping pictures of her, and, once they were developed, admiring them in his home, his eye widening at her beauty. She asked no penetrating questions about race and America. Her naïveté gave her a blanket sense—false, as it happened—of security. Sammy was emboldened that his white male friends—Sinatra, Jim Waters, Buddy Bregman—were always available to “beard” for him. Britt began flying into Las Vegas—as a “guest” of Sinatra’s, the nosy reporters were told—and catching Sammy’s performances. In 1960, when May went to New York City to film the crime caper
Murder Inc.
, Sammy missed her terribly. His marriage proposal was blurted out over the phone; she accepted just as quickly; and there they were, Sammy and his golden blonde, sipping wine in her suite at the Sherry Netherland.

Britt had no idea she had become a capstone of Sammy’s long and enduring white-blonde dream. Unaware of his inner dramas, she believed the fast courtship was sweet, and simply their private business. She did not bother to concern herself with the omens laid out on the dust tracks of history when it came to black and white matrimony.

In Manhattan, news of their pending nuptials had leaked, and the scribes
were already hustling down Fifth Avenue to the hotel for peeks of the couple. Anytime they were surrounded by the press, an impromptu press conference seemed to form. Sammy would grin sheepishly, looking like the nerdy (those glasses!) and shy high school kid who, unbelievably, gets to take the most beautiful girl to the prom.

A week before Sammy’s wedding, a group of his friends—Dean, Frank, Peter Lawford, Milton Berle, Buddy Bregman among them—treated him to a stag party at the Villa Capri in Los Angeles. “We had the backroom,” recalls Bregman. “I was sitting in a booth with Sammy’s posse, and the biggest names in the business were there. Sammy Cahn threw the whole thing. Sammy [Cahn] wrote parodies for Dean and everybody else. The evening was so funny. It was so fitting.” Berle vanished during drinks, then reappeared dressed in drag—as May Britt. Sammy howled. When everybody caught their breath, Berle sang a song parody to the man of honor: “Have a lot of luck / Especially when you fuck / Hopefully he’s not a midget down there.” Sammy howled some more.

The wedding took place November 13, 1960, in Sammy’s Los Angeles home. Britt’s parents flew in from Sweden. Her mother, tall and shy, wore long white gloves. Sinatra was best man, Lawford one of the groomsmen. Luddy Waters, Sammy’s former assistant—who had also been Kim Novak’s former assistant—was the maid of honor, giving the proceeding a kind of unwhispered incestuousness. Shirley Rhodes was quite noticeable as the only Negro bridesmaid. Sam Sr., always natty, wore a tux; against his white shirt lay a white silk tie. (Will Mastin was a no-show.) There were white chrysanthemums, which the bride and groom strolled beneath. Rabbi William Kramer pointed out instructions. A gaggle of photographers had assembled. Looking around, seeing all the faces, Hugh Benson, a producer, realized something about the groom: “He wanted to be white. His close friends were white. Deep down in his heart, he wanted to be white.”