In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (68 page)

Malcolm X, dead. Shot sixteen months after Evers while giving a talk in Harlem at the Audubon Ballroom. “When Malcolm died we had a benefit,” remembers Ossie Davis. “We asked Sammy to be on the benefit program. He flew in. He said all he could do was walk onstage and walk off. He stayed fifteen minutes.”

In the air, revolution.

Singer Curtis Mayfield released “People Get Ready” in 1965, a soul-stirring tune that took on the weight of a Negro anthem. “People get ready / there’s a train a-comin’.”

In 1965, Sammy released five albums—
When the Feeling Hits You! Sammy Davis Jr. Meets Sam Butera & the Witnesses; Sammy Davis • Count Basie (Our Shining Hour); If I Ruled the World; The Nat King Cole Songbook;
and
Sammy’s Back on Broadway
. Admirable albums, but not a political lyric to be heard.

Martin Luther King, Jr.—recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent protests, which ushered him into a far more messiahlike sphere—seemed to be everywhere; often Harry Belafonte was not far behind.

The events of the day seemed to be outrunning an ability to understand them. James Baldwin, his pen mightier by the day now, had written an essay back in 1963, “The Fire Next Time,” that had been widely praised. Something about that essay two years later, in 1965, seemed prescient.

Beauty?

For Sammy, the word represented such confusion.

Kim Novak was beautiful. May—and it was one of the reasons he had married her!—was beautiful. Ava Gardner was beautiful—dangerous, but beautiful. Even Sinatra was beautiful—the way he controlled his press agents, the way he sauntered, the way he sang, the way he ducked into his very own airplane, the cameras clicking, the plane enveloped in blue clouds. Frank, in fact, had a new wife, willowy, just nineteen years old, blond—and beautiful. Her name was Mia Farrow, and she was a budding television actress appearing on
Peyton Place
, an evening soap opera.

Frank was singing to the young.

White America, with its swinging and jangly and unpredictable power—Frank with a flower child!—was so beautiful.

“The first time I went up to the house he gave me a hug,” actor Peter Brown says of Sammy. “The only time I can remember being hugged by a guy was by a bullfighting friend—that’s the Latin way. Sammy felt a little hesitation from me. He took me by the shoulders, grabbed me and rubbed me cheek to cheek. And he said, ‘Now look [in the mirror]. See? It doesn’t come off.’ ”

“Black women,” says dancer Billie Allen, “would say of Sammy: ‘He reminds me of a trained mosquito—in a tux.’ ”

Whatever happened to be going on around him, Sammy could not help jumping when there was a phone call from Sinatra.

This time it was something out in St. Louis, a benefit for the Dismas House, a halfway house where ex-convicts lived. Sammy flew to Missouri. Dean Martin was coming. Joey was scheduled to host the event, but was felled by back problems, so Johnny Carson, the young, cool, and agile talk-show host, flew in to take his place. Anything for Frank. Even the June heat of a St. Louis summer.

“Joey slipped a disc backing out in Frank’s presence,” Carson quips in his opening remarks to the audience that had filled St. Louis’s Kiel Opera House. Guffaws all around. The late-night talk-show host already had honed a habit of wiping at his brow and under his nose with the forefinger of his right hand, giving him the countenance of a shy kid whose wit surprises even himself. Dean performs first, ambling out like a man strolling on a sunny beach. He is smoking a cigarette, he has a drink in his hand. Later, after several smooth and sunny songs, he tosses the cigarette onto the stage and puts both fingers in his ears as if it would explode. “Frank asked us to come,” Dean says, pausing. “Actually, he
told
us to come.” Ha ha ha. Dean sings some more, mangling songs with bawdy jokes, doing it all smoothly, and segueing into “Everybody Loves Somebody.”

Carson introduces Sammy, who zips onto the stage with snakelike energy. Sammy introduces the Count Basie Band, who are backing him. Then Sammy’s snapping his fingers, already off into song. After his first number, he confesses that it is “a tremendous thrill for me to represent the ethnic groups.” This is not uttered as a joke. Then he tells the audience it has been fourteen years since he was in St. Louis, performing with his dad and Will Mastin. He tells them that the theater where they had performed is now torn down; he sounds nostalgic. He plugs
Golden Boy
. He could easily have sung a song from it but doesn’t, instead choosing a song from another Broadway play,
The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd
. It’s the big-hearted entertainer in him, wanting to give credit elsewhere. To the audience, before every song, he says, “With your kind permission—” and then he launches into the song. He bows after a song, always beautifully. He does a scat number with Michael Silver, his drummer, Sammy’s voice tangoing with the beat of the drums. All for Sinatra. “Marvelous,” Sammy says to the audience about Frank, “how he can pick up the phone and say, ‘Be there.’ I immediately picked up the phone and called Martin Luther King, and he said it was okay.” Guffaws again. Well-to-do couples are seated in the audience, gentlemen in fine suits, their wives in evening dresses and white gloves stopping at the elbows. It is a lily-white audience. “Found myself marching with some cats with pillowcases on their heads one day,” Sammy goes on, unable to stop himself now, because he has already heard laughter and he wants to keep them laughing and appreciating him and loving him. “My conductor said, ‘Uh, Sammy, I believe you marching with the wrong group.’ ” This last part is delivered in a Pigmeat Markham antebellum voice. More guffaws.

“With your kind permission …”

He does a Fred Astaire impersonation, a Dean Martin impersonation, walking and singing in their voices, slurring a song just like Martin. He does Nat King Cole, then Billy Eckstine, then Tony Bennett, then Mel Torme, all dazzling bits of mimickry. He’s hardly finished. He does Louis Armstrong, bringing out a hanky and wiping his brow just like Armstrong. He does Jerry Lewis. Then he crawls back inside himself, back to Sammy. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for giving me the privilege to be in St. Louis for such a worthy cause.”

A gig for Frank, and he’s dazzling.

At the time, no one—save those in the audience and a select closed-circuit television audience—saw the show. Among Rat Pack chroniclers, it became a lost taping. But then, in 1997, it was rediscovered in the basement of the Dismas House. It enjoyed a ballyhooed run at the Beverly Hills Museum of Radio & Television.
Variety
reviewed it in 1998 and noted, of the three principals, Frank, Dean, and Sammy, that their “
humor is loaded with ethnic digs and
putdowns, but a shared love of talent and personality imbues each playful backstabbing moment.” It goes on: “Bottle humor gives way to Sammy Davis’s gratifying drum-and-vocal rendition of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and a hilarious version of ‘One for My Baby’ ” that features a good ten impressions. The dig at Dino, natch, is dead on.”

It is exactly the ethnic joking part of that performance, however, that makes so many Negroes around the country recoil in 1965 when they see various other examples of it floating from their television screens. But Sammy isn’t playing to them. He’s playing to the couples in the seats in the audience. He’s playing to the couples who have come all these years to see him at the Copacabana, at Bill Miller’s Riviera. He jauntily skips off the St. Louis stage, past the white audience, skipping like a man needing to suck up all the air around him just to stay alive.

Manhattan tossed plenty of bon mots in Sammy’s direction.
Cue
magazine—referring to him as a “Renaissance Man”—named Sammy “Entertainer of the Year.” (Barbra Streisand received the honor the year before.) “He switches from theatre to films to nightclubs to television to recordings with an engaging and seemingly effortless agility,” the magazine said in its citation. Sammy took his photography skills seriously. So did the Japan Trade Center on Fifth Avenue, which mounted an exhibition of his work. Not to be outdone, Willoughby-Peerless, another gallery, on West Thirty-second Street, also presented a Sammy exhibition.

On the eve of the first anniversary of
Golden Boy
, Hilly had plastered New York with billboards and juicy ads marking the occasion. So what that they lost out at the Tony Awards; the theater was still packed.

With such a long run,
Golden Boy
cast members began leaving and new ones arrived. Robert Guillaume, a veteran of Cleveland’s fabled Karamu House theatrical troupe, arrived to take the place of Johnny Brown. “There was an aura in the company, people wanting to be close to Sammy,” Guillaume recalls. “He encouraged that closeness. While at the same time he was wary of who was going to be part of his coterie. If he figured you weren’t going to be part of that coterie, you got short shrift. He was extremely theatrical.” Guillaume couldn’t penetrate Sammy’s camp: “I was never able to be part of his inner circle. You had to have a fawning personality, and you had to self-efface.”

Guillaume was astonished at Sammy’s proclivity for bounding back out onstage to perform after the evening’s performance. “I always had the feeling that he hated to go to bed. He hated to bring down the curtain on the night.”

It took Guillaume—formally trained and proud of it—little time to realize Sammy’s competitive streak. It did not frighten him. “I remember one time I
went on as Eddie Satin. It was a flamboyant role. I got to lord over [Sammy] as the character, and one time we were singing ‘This Is the Life.’ We both have on body mikes. His goes out. I continue to sing lustily, putting him at a disadvantage. I never heard the end of it. He said, ‘Goddammit, there’s no agent out there. You’re not going to be discovered!’ Very petulantly. I was unknown, but I was not untalented.” The beautiful women in the cast caught Guillaume’s eye, particularly Lola Falana: “She was a full woman, the first glamour girl I remember. If you weren’t somebody, you knew not to mess with Lola. You couldn’t afford the tab.”

Guillaume would sit and wonder how Sammy did what he did with just one eye. He’d ponder how that might have wounded anyone’s psyche—his own included. “That to me was where his
cojones
were. Sammy was a bad motherfucker. The missing eye was formidable.”

While it was true that many of the Negro dancers were awed by Sammy’s Rat Pack reputation, Guillaume saw it through another lens. “Sammy was competitive. He welcomed competition. What must that have cost him when he had to submerge some of that working with Sinatra? You say, ‘How the hell do you do this—merge your personality with his?’ While Frank did not have the incandescent flair Sammy had, Frank was supremely in charge, and he was allowed to play that position.”

When an actor or dancer left the production, Sammy’s mood would swing. “When I left the show—when anyone left—Sammy considered it some kind of betrayal, a breach, disloyal,” says Guillaume.

Now and then Sammy would get a call from Club Harlem, over in Atlantic City. The owners would want to know if he could maybe pay a visit, a quick stage performance. It would do wonders for business. Sammy would get over to Atlantic City whenever he could. Shirley Rhodes would sometimes accompany him. And sometimes, of course, they’d pay a visit to the Little Belmont nightclub. “His mother would be working behind the bar,” she says. And he’d sing—as close to living with his mother as he’d ever be—right there in the edgy bar, in Atlantic City.

“I’ve gotta be me …”

If there was one unmistakable thing about Elvera Davis, it was her work ethic, which was powerful. And what son wouldn’t do a little something for his mother standing on her feet all those hours like that?

Golden Boy
closed in the spring of 1966. It had had a phenomenal run. During one week alone, the play had taken in a whopping $94,000. Hilly hated to close.

Actually, Hilly Elkins merely retreated, telling himself that
Golden Boy
was not yet dead. America was a big country—and Sammy was hot.

Sammy’s disposition—in both childhood and adult life—was the road. So he welcomed the end of the
Golden Boy
run. Back to the road. “He loved hotels,” says Shirley Rhodes. “He loved being away. He liked room service. Far as he was concerned, it never cost anything.”

He carried things on the road:

There were a scant number of feature writers who happened to be Negro on mainstream American magazines in the mid-1960s. They were so few in number that Sammy was rarely—save with the Negro press—interviewed by a black writer. Most of the known black writers—James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright—concentrated on fiction, even if, now and then, they took breaks for the occasional essay. One Negro writer who had broken through to mainstream nonfiction magazine work was Alex Haley.