In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (63 page)

During the road turmoil, many of the Negroes in the cast quit: there were death threats; there was the death of Odets; there were worries about the leading lady. But if Sammy had quit, he would have thrown them all out of work. For staying, some of them thought him courageous. And some of them wanted to give themselves to him, wrap their long, long legs around his tiny waist. They wanted to comfort the tired but tireless star. It was infatuation. It was sex. It was love. It was a late-night rendezvous with Sammy in Detroit. It was fucking. “We were all living in a hotel. I’d see one of the showgirls coming out of Sammy’s room at three in the morning,” says Gibson.

Yes, it was his show, and Sammy would save the whole damn production, and he’d lick the sugar while doing it.

Dancer Sally Neal heard about the sex parties. She stayed away. “They were wild, bizarre, sick.”

The more the play righted itself, the wilder with joy Sammy became. He gave Arthur Penn a gold watch. And he gave William Gibson a gold watch. They had taken care of him. They had listened to him when he gave advice. He gave lovely pieces of jewelry to the female dancers in the chorus. Sammy was an old theater pro, and the old pros knew the value of generosity. He gave other cast members gifts: bits of jewelry he found lying around in his dressing room or at home.

From city to city, Sammy went on radio. He visited nightclubs that he only recently had performed in, publicizing his play. There he was, whistling through the theater, in argyle sweater, in square wire-rimmed glasses, in pointy-toed shoes, in sharkskin slacks. Then, onstage, bare-chested, jumping rope, sweating, a man in love, Odets’s fighter, singing and dancing, the whiff of
sex spewing from him, from those little hips, ugly offstage, but onstage, dancing, singing, he was beautiful—schooled by the great Sugar Ray Robinson himself. And the kids in the play began loving him, even the ones who had doubted him from what they had heard about his obsession with white—white people, white women, Sinatra. So he kept it all swirling. “Sammy was the magnetic center of this whole operation,” says Gibson.

Dancer Marguerite DeLain knew there was another reason for the constant curiosity about the play, even during tryouts. “This was 1964. Here was a white woman being kissed by a black man.”

After his daily performance, Sammy didn’t have the heart to clear out his dressing room, so the visitors would stay, until Murphy, his assistant, would have to beg them to leave, even as Sammy was bent and wrapped around them like a piece of licorice.

Hilly Elkins had fixed the cracks in his play, and made it look so good that to see it, one never would have thought it had ever been broken. Negroes on the march? Photos of deputies spraying tear gas and dogs yapping at the heels of Negroes in Alabama and Mississippi and Newark, New Jersey, on the front pages of the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
? The battle for civil rights? Well, Hilly had a little dramatic tonic: he’d march little Sammy right up onto a Broadway stage, a maroon boxing glove on one hand, a white woman on the other. And right there, out in the open, it would be boxer Joe Wellington’s civil right to parade his sexual appetite onto a white woman in front of everyone’s eyes.

Hilly still cursed the critics in his sleep, though. At some of the out-of-town theaters he had stood at curbside hurling insults at them! They wanted him dead before he reached Broadway, and he wouldn’t have it.

So, they both had been left for dead on the road. But they had fought back,
mano a mano
, with the public and the critics, Hilly and Sammy, against the world, spreading the gospel about their play. Two five-foot-six-inch men. They had the white girls and they had the Negro girls. They had sex and they had drama. They had the ghost of Clifford Odets. The entertainer and the producer. They were heading for Broadway, and they were armed like Napoleon’s army.

As usual, Murphy arrived in New York City ahead of Sammy. He set up a suite for Sammy at the Gorham Hotel.

In New York City, on the ground where they would live or die, cast and crew grew a little nervous. “The anxiety in New York before we opened was very high,” remembers Gibson.

The 1964–65 Broadway season was shaping up to be quite interesting. There
was the much-anticipated
Fiddler on the Roof
, which would open the week before
Golden Boy
. Also expected to make noise were two other musicals,
Half a Sixpence
and
Oh, What a Lovely War
.

Hilly had New York City plastered with
Golden Boy
posters. Huge pictures of Sammy rose like silky question marks above women dressed in sequins and falling at his knee. Negro women, white women. Sammy always the lone male in the blown-up photographs. He looked like a man being swallowed by sex.

In the evening there were three children and a wife at home awaiting Sammy’s arrival. But his nights were long. He convinced himself May would understand why he couldn’t rush to their apartment after rehearsals—it was business, it was Broadway. Actually, it was all that and more. The young dancer Lola Falana happened to be drawing more and more of Sammy’s attention. May was becoming suspicious of Sammy’s carousing, but her quiet and reserved Swedish demeanor stopped her from questioning him.

Sammy understood, just as Hilly did, that the critics were sharpening their knives in anticipation of opening night. Everyone knew Sammy could dance, and everyone knew Sammy could sing. But could Sammy act? Could he become Joe Wellington? Could he exude the pain and suffering endured by one of Odets’s most memorable characters? In previous incarnations, Elia Kazan had played the boxer; John Garfield had played him. It was not a role to trifle with.

There were six days to opening. William Gibson felt his own reputation was on the line now. He had written right into the teeth of the play. “From the beginning, I was writing a feisty character for Sammy. Stokely Carmichael would have liked it. Martin Luther King, Jr., wouldn’t have liked it.” Gibson had not sought to turn the cheek on the issue of race in the play.

Then there were five days. Then four.

On the fourth day from opening—October 16—the stage manager reported that Sammy was late for the Saturday matinee. It was forty-five minutes until curtains, and the clock was ticking. Necks craned, hoping they’d see him whirring into view from the alleyway entrance of the Majestic Theatre. No Sammy. It was a long-running joke, but William Gibson gave Hilly one dollar every time Sammy was late for a curtain call. A lot of one-dollar bills went from Gibson’s palm into Hilly’s palm. But this was ridiculous, and no one was chuckling. There was worry that something might have happened to him. “We called May,” remembers Gibson. “She said she didn’t know where he was.” Hilly was running around, making calls. Lamont Washington, the understudy, was reciting his lines. “I got onstage,” recalls Elkins, “and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Sammy Davis won’t be performing today.’ ” He hardly finished before
he noticed bodies rising, muffled voices, the shaking of heads. They left even though the play had not yet officially opened. They had come to see Sammy. Without him, there was no reason to stay. Evening came, and everyone felt sure he would show, or at least they would hear something from him. A pre-opening crowd was still a crowd. But Sammy did not show, and there wasn’t a word. Dark thoughts began to swirl. After all, there had been death threats. Maybe the bigots had gotten to him. Maybe he had been kidnapped. Hilly started calling some of his Mafia contacts. He wanted to know if they knew anything, if they had heard anything. But nothing. The Shuberts themselves, owners of the Majestic—at 245 West Forty-fourth Street and their showcase theater—came down to lend emotional support. “We didn’t know if Sammy would return to the show,” recalls Gibson. They called May again and again. She had nothing new to tell them, save how her own worries were increasing. Margaret Gibson, the playwright’s wife, went on her own looking for Sammy. Margaret had grown up hanging around Negro musicians. She knew Negro culture. She had grown fond of Sammy. He liked to drink, so she scanned bars. “I felt so sorry for him,” she recalls.

One day turned to two. The police were alerted. Now it was the last day of rehearsals before the opening. William Gibson’s phone rang. It was Sammy; he said he was fine and would be returning for that evening’s performance. Gibson forgot his anger and anxiety; he was thrilled. He rushed to tell Elkins and Penn. “I went to meet him outside the stage door,” says Gibson. “He had given me and Arthur gold watches. Arthur said, ‘I feel like throwing that watch back in his face.’ ” Then there he was, the star, alighting from a taxi. He walked right into the theater without saying a word to Gibson or Penn.

Sammy later confided to Margaret Gibson why he had fled. “He told me he thought he was a terrible actor and could never go through with being in
Golden Boy
if it had any kind of a run,” she remembers. “He was terrified.” Margaret Gibson, the psychoanalyst, let Sammy cry on her shoulders. “He said to me, ‘Margaret, I love you.’ I said, ‘Come on, Sammy, showbiz people say that all the time.’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t mean it that way at all.’ And he began to weep. I apologized.”

October 20, 1964. Opening night.

The set is a stark boxing gym. A light shines on one fighter, jumping rope. With each jet-quick slapping of the rope on the ground, an orchestral sound echoes:
ssss, ssss, ssss
, a hissing of rope, over and over as the rope goes over the fighter’s head and slaps the gym floor. Then another light cranks on, highlighting another fighter, who is jumping rope in another spot, sweat glistening from his body like the body of the first fighter. Then another light, and another
fighter, jumping rope:
ssss, ssss, ssss
, like tree branches smacking the ground, over and over again, all three fighters now, three tight-bellied fighters. The music is almost fiery now, a rumble keeping up with the fighters and the ropes, which are turning fast now, in a rhythm. It is almost a dance. It all looks so balletic. A door suddenly swings open. And there he is. The star everyone has come to see. He lingers at the door. (Let the folks get their applause in. They have paid good money, and they have packed the Majestic because of him.) It is Sammy; in the program it says the figure at the door is Joe Wellington, a down-on-his-luck Negro boxer living in Harlem. He is in street clothes, a long coat. The look on his face is hard and serious; he is all business. Joe Wellington starts striding across the gym floor. He has to see his manager.

The action unfolds fast.

There’s a scene in the office of Tom, Joe’s manager. Joe feels Tom has been shortchanging him. Tom fast-talks Joe: he’s doing the best he can, he’ll get more money when the knockouts come. Joe has a winning record, but always on technical knockouts. Tom tells Joe maybe he’d get more money if he flat out knocked fighters out. Joe meets Lorna, Tom’s girlfriend. There are exchanges, the whiff, right away, of something forbidden, something Joe can’t have—a sensuous white woman—and never will have, because he’s a Negro.

Another scene, Joe singing to himself, to the world, of his frustrations, about being poor, a fighter, a Negro. He is moving across the stage with cat quickness; his voice is large and throaty:

The managers want to take Joe on the road. Joe is leery, always believing he’ll get gypped when it comes to money. Lorna is slightly flirtatious, chats with Joe. She is wondering why he fights, she is curious about his life. They’re in a park. Lorna tells Joe that traveling as a boxer will be wonderful.

“
Go on a tour, see the country—ever travel?” she asks.

“
Sure, thousands of miles,” Joe says. “All in Harlem.”

Joe confides to her that he is confused and sad about life. “
My poppa’s a junkman and thinks that’s fine, my brother works for CORE and gets his head kicked in—and my whole life seems like one long night I’ve been standing in alleys looking across the park at these buildings, the lights of this city, my God,
it’s like diamonds in the air, why can’t I pick some too?” This is not Clifford Odets’s writing; it is savvy William Gibson’s writing. (The giveaway is the reference to the civil right group, CORE—the Congress of Racial Equality.)

Some young punks—white—stroll into the park and spot Joe and Lorna.

“
Hands offa the lady, nigger,” one says to Joe.

He shies from a fight, he tries to shoo them away with words. There is Lorna to think of. But they want a fight. Three against one, and Joe battles them until they scatter. He is bruised but not down. In the melee, Lorna has tumbled to the ground. Now she sees a different America, it is Joe’s America, and it is full of daily insults and meanness and unpredictabilities. She has never been a witness to this particular America. She looks at him now not as just a boxer, or a meal ticket for her boyfriend. She now looks at him as one who has to fight for his dignity daily. He looks at her shyly. She asks him if girls frighten him.

“
White girls,” he answers. (Again, the pen of Gibson.)

Joe hits the road—Erie, St. Paul, Akron—and fights. He can’t get Lorna out of his mind. Before leaving, he told her he’d win on the road—for her.

Back from the road, there is a battle brewing between Tom and Eddie, a Negro promoter and Harlem numbers runner. Eddie has a shady past. Eddie wants Joe under his wing: he promises riches, women, fame. Tom laughs him off. Eddie glides through his scenes like ether: it is Billy Daniels, the nightclub singer, playing the hell out of a role that really isn’t much of a stretch for an old smoothie such as himself, but he still has to play it, he still has to get his cues, and he does.

There’s another dance number, Joe now torn between Harlem and the outside world, between Tom, the white man, and Eddie, the Negro, the soul brother. The leggy dancers—the sugar that Sammy, now hiding inside of Joe, had been licking at will on the road—are now swirling around him as he sings and belts another number. Then comes a dancer, dressed in gold. She manages to widen eyes in the audience a little more. She is sauntering one moment, leaping the next. They check their programs. Her character’s name is Lola, they see; and they also see her real name is Lola Falana. They have never heard of her, and already they are whispering about her.