In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (87 page)

Jerry Blavat, the Philadelphia radio personality who had known Sammy since 1956, and was right there when Sammy married Altovise, stopped by almost daily. During one visit Blavat was toting some holy water. “They sent it from Rome,” Blavat says. He asked Sammy’s nurse to apply the holy water to
Sammy’s neck. No one questioned the request. “They unwrapped his neck,” remembers Blavat. “And they applied the holy water.”

Sammy’s weight slipped to sixty pounds.

Mark, Jeff, and Tracey, his children, came. Tracey, who had her mother’s beauty, was working in television. She had gotten married; her husband was white. The boys were finding it hard to keep steady jobs, and May would sometimes go weeks without seeing or hearing from them.

One morning Sammy was stirring around in bed a lot. Shirley understood: he wanted to go outside. So she wheeled him out to the back patio. Side to side he turned his head, off into the distance, all around. They were the hills he had conquered.

To have seen him in his twenties, carving up a stage; and to have seen him in his thirties, holding up two aging hoofers; to have seen him hugging the bony chests of old vaudevillians and slipping them money; and to have seen him singing before the queen of England; to have seen him at his sister’s side, pleading with her to hold on as she grappled with her own demons about family pain; and to have seen him kiss his father on the lips and wonder to himself why he wasn’t a better parent himself; to have seen him shining his own shoes—he said it relieved stress; to have seen him get emotional over a newspaper story about a family in distress because of fire or flood and insist they be sent money, not tomorrow, but now, immediately, money from his account, and flowers as well; and to have seen him express his joy at America—her nightclubs, her military bases, which he relished visiting, her women, black and white, whom he loved loving; to have seen him go from black to white, and white, to black, to Sammy, was all amazing. And Shirley had seen it all.

“
I’m vaudeville,” Sammy had said to a Radio City Music Hall crowd in 1977, aligning himself with that pantheon of entertainers who now were mostly dust.

She wheeled him back inside.

He didn’t have his shoes on.

On May 16, 1990—it was 5:59 a.m., the sun up—the heart of Sammy Davis, Jr., stopped.

Throughout the day, the house filled with tears and sometimes shrieks. The child in blackface, the child inside the photo that hung in the foyer, had died. He was sixty-four years old.

Shirley and Murphy did not want the media—namely the tabloids—to get photographs of Sammy being taken from the house, as his body was so emaciated. Jerry Blavat had arrived at the house shortly after Sammy died. Noticing all the flowers in the home, Blavat came up with the idea to call the florist and have them send a truck, explaining that they wanted to cart some of the old
flowers away. The truck soon arrived. Inside the home, Sammy was gingerly placed in a small black bag, and the bag was zipped up. Then he was carried out and set in the flower truck. The driver was given strict instructions to take his body to the funeral home. And when the truck rode out through the gates, the media unaware, Sammy was making his last ride down the sloping road, swathed in flowers.

Family members approached the gates and announced the death—and revealed that Sammy was already gone from the home.

And by midmorning, Sammy’s mother, Elvera, was in the air, on her way.

The news immediately went out over the airwaves. Across the country and throughout Europe they began playing his songs on the radio—“Mr. Bojangles,” “Birth of the Blues,” “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” At dusk that evening, the lights along the Strip in Las Vegas were dimmed for a minute in his honor.

Peggy King, the singer with whom he had fallen in love during the 1950s—Catherine to his Heathcliff—was in Philadelphia giving a USO performance that night. “A friend of mine that I loved died today,” she told them about Sammy, “and I’d like to sing a song.” She sang “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and as she was singing it, bodies started to rise from seats. “Generals were standing up,” she remembers. “It was wild.”

The worldwide obituaries recapped his career, mostly drawing information from
Yes I Can
and magazine articles.

“
It was a generous God who gave him to us for all these years,” said Sinatra.

“
I’ll see him later,” promised Bill Cosby.

The evening before the funeral, on May 17, a private service was held at a small chapel in the Hollywood Hills. It was for family only. The casket was open; it would not be at the funeral. Sammy lay in a dark suit, red tie, red handkerchief. Altovise, his widow, and Murphy—who was family—and Shirley and his children got their last glimpse of him.

The sun was so bright on the day of his funeral that many wore sunglasses. Elvera sat in between May Britt and Altovise. Jess Rand, who had been out on the road with the Will Mastin Trio all those years ago, became agitated because he had to talk his way into the proceedings: Jess who? There were more than a few young teenagers milling around, tap shoes flung over their shoulders, who had come to pay respect to Sammy. An array of celebrities were in attendance. Milton Berle, Little Richard, Carroll O’Connor, Cicely Tyson; many more—Speaker Willie Brown of the California Assembly; Robert Wagner; Gregory Hines; Dick Gregory; of course Frank; of course Dean. Jerry Lewis didn’t go to funerals. They struck him as hypocritical—but there he sat. Jesse Jackson—who but Jesse—stood next to Rabbi Allen Freehling.

“
To love Sammy,” Jesse said, “is to love black and white.”

Lanes of two freeways were closed as the caravan of cars—more than three hundred—made its way out to Glendale.

He was laid to rest behind a gray stone wall, behind lock and key. His father lay next to him, Will Mastin three feet away.

Before his casket had been closed in that quiet Hollywood chapel the evening before his funeral, Murphy bent down and put something around Sammy’s wrist. It was the gold watch Sinatra had sent him after that final tour. Sammy had left instructions that he wanted to be buried wearing it. Of the many things Sammy Davis, Jr., believed in—art, jazz, old performers, cinema history, photography, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Romanticism, English royalty, the memories of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, the proper way to bow onstage, the voice of Mahalia Jackson—he also believed in the supernatural, in the afterlife. He took out subscriptions to periodicals that told of such things.

The watch that Murphy slipped onto Sammy’s wrist was glittering, and it was running. Maybe there were performances where he was going; maybe he’d need a good timepiece.

Mammy, don’t you know me? It’s your little baby!
AL JOLSON

S
ince he led a life without financial discipline, it is little wonder that there was such disarray following the death of Sammy Davis, Jr. Bills piled high; IRS debts went unpaid. There were overdue mortgage payments on the twenty-two-room home. Having no income of her own, Altovise, his widow, had no idea what to do. There were whispers of an auction of personal belongings. Of course, it would never come to that—only, of course, it did. The auction was conducted by Butterfield & Butterfield. Among the items were photographs, jewelry, a pair of tap shoes, the autograph book that Sammy—ever the fan—had inside his home. Long lines began forming outside the auction house that morning. Shirley Rhodes watched with fascination and without—she would have one believe—much sadness. “He would have loved it,” she says of Sammy. “It was crowded. He wanted fans to have his stuff. It was standing room only.”

Sammy’s pearl-handled six-shooters were not put on the auction block. He had bequeathed them to Burt Boyar. Those six-shooters, still holstered, lie inside a glass case in Boyar’s Los Angeles home.

Sammy’s tap shoes were auctioned by Butterfield & Butterfield and went for eleven grand.

Eventually, Altovise lost the home she and Sammy had lived in.

Two of Sammy’s children—Tracey and Mark—married young and suffered through divorces. Mark, strangely enough, went through three marriages before he reached thirty-five. There is no attempt here to make any connection to their father’s marital history; the heart tends to go its own way, as it should. But a trend is a trend, something a biographer must acknowledge. In 1996, Tracey Davis wrote a book,
Sammy Davis Jr.: My Father
. It is a book by a child of Hollywood about a father whose persona remained a mystery to her. Tracey Davis would recall just that one solo breakfast with her father: it was hardly
enough. Nor could the missed birthdays and graduation ceremonies be forgotten. “I know you love me Pop,” she says at one point in the book to Sammy. “But where were you?” It is full of pain—a little girl lost from her father, angry at her stepmother, suffering the trials of her own identity.

I had one interview, in 1999, with Altovise Davis in New York City. There had been various reports of her living in poverty. If so, I couldn’t tell. She looked rather elegant. She was, however, strangely guarded, and kept inquiring, in between my questions, if I were interested in helping her write a book about
her
life. I told her I was not; that I was otherwise engaged. Not long thereafter, I received a letter from Altovise in which she said if I wished any future interviews to take place, I would have to pay her. Thus we never spoke again.

In late 1998, I began a search to look up the obituaries of Sammy Davis, Sr., and Elvera Davis. The obits for Sam Sr. were easy enough to locate. But not so with Elvera. There was nothing. Then I realized that sometimes she used Elvera Sanchez, her maiden name. Still nothing. I called Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York, whom I had met while working on a previous book. I told him I was having trouble finding the obit of Elvera Davis, Sammy’s mother, and asked him if she perhaps had passed away unnoticed. “She’s not dead,” he said. “That’s the reason you can’t find her obit.”

She lived alone on the East Side of New York City in a town house. She was ninety-three years old. I was fortunate that the Sanchez women lived long lives. (Elvera’s mother, Luisa Sanchez—Sammy’s grandmother—had lived to be 112.) Upon seeing Elvera Davis for the first time, I couldn’t help but see where her son’s nose and angular features sprang from. There was certainly something of the Latina in Elvera, owing to her Cuban heritage. Her voice had a chill; she was wary of me. She wanted to know why I was interested in writing a book “about Sammy.” I imagined she would shoo me away any moment. But she did not, and she started to talk—about her days as a showgirl, about Harlem, about the smoky nights of vaudeville. As I would inch up on a question about her and Sammy—it was as if she could smell the question I most wanted to ask: Why the gulf between the two of them?—she’d stare hard and unblinkingly at me. The stare signaled her oncoming quiet. There was a cane propped between her legs, which she rubbed periodically. Then came a small opening as she began talking of bad blood between her and Sam Sr., of letters written to Sammy in her hand that were returned unopened. I asked her about the long gaps, the long months, when she heard nothing from her son, when he was out there on the road: Did that bother you? After all, he was your baby, your child. She snapped; the interview was over; I had overstayed my welcome. I rose to leave. But then a strange thing happened: Elvera Davis asked me when I would be returning to New York City. And there was something in the back of
her throat, something I sensed: it struck me that she might be a little lonely, that she hankered for company. I told her I’d return in a month, and wondered if we could perhaps have dinner. She said she would like to go out
—out
, as in to see some kind of entertainment. (Her grandnieces would later tell me that Elvera, in her ninety-third year, still went dancing.) I suggested something a little more sedate, perhaps a Broadway play; she mentioned
Ragtime
.

On my return, there she was, in the lobby of her apartment building. She was dressed in gold lamé and black, and wearing loopy earrings—they did not look cheap—several bracelets, rings on both sets of fingers, and a necklace around the throat. Truly bejeweled. Well, her Sammy loved jewelry, wore too much of it, in fact. Inside the lobby of the theater, she glittered in sparkles of light, idling and looking around with a showgirl’s curiosity. She leaned on me with one hand, on her stylish cane with the other.

We reached the elevator to go downstairs, where theatergoers could have a bite to eat, or a refreshment. The elevator was out of order. “You should have called ahead and found out about this,” she snapped to me, a sudden coldness in her voice building. I felt wobbly; I had angered the mother of Sammy Davis, Jr.!

I hustled through the crowd, wanting to find the stairs and the shortest possible route for me to walk her to them. I was breathing heavily, wondering if something might happen to her out of my sight. I got back to her, and there we were, finally, at the stairwell. “You really should have taken care of this! I don’t appreciate this at all.” Walking down the stairs, I held her for dear life. Those steps became my descent from Mt. Everest. I did not want Elvera Davis to slip, and fall, and break a bone. We were finally down, seated in a small room where refreshments were served. We each nibbled on fruit slices. I was practically shaking.

Halfway through the opening act of
Ragtime
, I looked over at Elvera. She was asleep. Perhaps the commotion around an inoperative elevator had exhausted her. But as she slept, I wondered anew why she remained out of Sammy’s sight; why she didn’t make even a feeble attempt to go rip him away from those two dream-hungry men. At first act’s end, the applause woke her. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Her voice was tiny as it fought against the rising applause. She had told me, during our first meeting, that she loathed the parents of famous entertainers who took advantage of their offspring.