In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (9 page)

A significant part of the Harlem scene was now a heady mingling of poets, dancers, writers. The unknown Arna Bontemps had a liberal arts degree from Pacific Union College in California. That got him a job in a Los Angeles post office. That is, until the grapevine touched him about Harlem. Bontemps quit the post office and came east. In time he would make his mark as a literary figure. Bontemps’s first glimpses of Harlem dazzled him. “
In some places the autumn of 1924 may have been an unremarkable season,” Bontemps would rhapsodize. “In Harlem, it was like a foretaste of paradise. A blue haze descended at night and with it strings of fairy lights on the broad avenues.”

It was in that blue haze of 1924 that Elvera Sanchez would get her first breaks in the world of show business. She joined the chorus at the famed Lafayette Theatre. Her sister, Julia, was already working the chorus-line circuit. They, like so many others, had their dreams, however brittle.

So now—unto themselves, without husbands or father—all three of the
Sanchez women found themselves earning a paycheck in the make-no-promises world of show business.

The Lafayette—with its admired Edwardian decor—was only five blocks from the Sanchez family apartment. It was widely known that the Lafayette played host to some remarkable talent. Ethel Waters had appeared on its stage, as had entertainers Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson, and Stepin’ Fetchit. Fetchit was a curious talent, epitomizing, with a fey smile and a roll of the eyes, the passed-along stereotype of the pickaninny. Fetchit entered vaudeville in 1914, performing in medicine shows. His real name was Lincoln Theodore Monroe Perry; the names of past presidents enraptured his mother. He took his stage name from a racehorse (“Step and Fetch It”), then wrapped the name around his act: “Step ’n’ Fetchit: Two Dancing Fools from Dixie.”

“We worked with a man named Addison Carey and Charlie Davis,” Sanchez would recall of her showbiz beginnings. “They had two choruses. One worked in New York, one went on the road.” Carey and Davis were known to slip downtown to Radio City Music Hall and watch the dancers on its stage closely, all the while taking mental notes, then hustle back to teach their Harlem dancers the steps they had seen on the Radio City stage. Carey and Davis worked their chorus girls hard, sending them hopping between various theaters. From the Lafayette they might hustle over to the Harlem Opera House, and from there to the Apollo. The two men had created a road show in a ten-block area. The work for the showgirls could be backbreaking. “
We would do a new show on a Monday and would do it Tuesday and Wednesday as well. We’d start rehearsing on Wednesday night and Thursday for the following week. But you had to remember what you were doing during the week,” Elvera would recall. There was nary a moment to grab anything to eat between shows.

The chorus girls—some of New York’s most beautiful young women—had to know a variety of dance steps, and Elvera did. But her specialty was the soft-shoe, a seductive glide across the dance floor in step with the other dancers. The girls in her chorus were doing eight shows a day, and yet, hardly anyone complained. The hours were long, but the work was thrilling. Thrilling to catch a glimpse of Ellington’s smile, to see some Negro musicians lined up—your mailing address in their pockets—ready to hit the road, their long coats as kind on their backs as capes. Thrilling to wade into show parties, to hear the illicit whispers, to taste the chilled champagne. But most exciting to simply be upon the stage as the velvet curtains parted and the music rose.

It was all so much better, Elvera thought, than schoolteachers and books. It seemed the very flip side of her Catholic girlhood, and she relished it, believing she was getting important life lessons here, in Harlem, on its stages: “Show business teaches you,” she said.

Many believed the Cotton Club—although its junglelike decor raised eyebrows—to be the swankiest club in Harlem. Negro boxer Jack Johnson had owned the nightclub when it was called Club Deluxe. Owney Madden, a gangster, was proprietor now. Elvera Sanchez would stand outside the club, and a tingle would come over her. She couldn’t get inside, at least not as a patron: the Cotton Club had a whites-only policy for customers. Negro singers, dancers, and musicians could appear on its stage, but they could not go through the club’s front door to see a show. Still, merely standing outside its doors mesmerized her.

In her dancing job, Elvera Sanchez made $18.50 a week. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep a chorus girl’s dreams alive. The girls walked the Harlem streets in twos and threes. They had a cachet there. They were ogled. And invited to nice restaurants. Sweet notes from suitors arrived in their mailboxes. You could have knocked Elvera Sanchez over with a silk scarf from one of Harlem’s fancy stores. “I remember I used to work the Apollo,” she recalled. “We’d leave, go to a bar. I’d walk from 125th and Eighth to 129th at night, by myself. Not scared one bit.”

She worked with the Duke Ellington band, and the Jimmie Lunceford band. Sometimes eight shows a day. “At the end of one show you’d be downstairs and you’d hear—fifteen minutes!—and you’d have to get ready for the next show.”

Not long into her life as a chorus girl, Elvera Sanchez met Will Mastin of Holiday in Dixie, a vaudeville troupe Mastin had organized. The Mastin revue consisted of singers, a comedian, chorus girls, and dancing boys. Mastin, a shrewd gatherer of eclectic talent who had been raised in and around minstrel shows himself, offered Elvera a tryout. She won a job in his revue.

Elvera’s mother, Luisa, had long been skeptical of young girls leaving home to travel the show-business circuit. She had been in the company of show folk long enough to know that there were men who led young women astray. There were men who whispered and made promises while twirling fedoras in their hands, and who stood at the bottom steps of a brownstone and promised the world. “
I don’t want you to go in show business because you are going to bring back a baby!” her mother had warned her from the earliest. “If I do, I’ll be married,” Elvera promised her.

Who could have told the young Elvera Sanchez that she would go from running errands up and down Broadway to rubbing shoulders one day with the likes of Duke Ellington and Jimmy Lunceford and dancing just inches from them on a stage? That she would hobnob with actors and actresses and hear their tales of a life in lights? Men paid to see her shimmy on the stages of Harlem. She wore silky and satiny garments that made her feel rich. She floated between theaters, hopping from chorus to chorus with drink in hand and her lips painted red. It was her job to dance her nights away, so she did. It was just the chorus, true enough, but she had dreams of becoming a singer
also. And who dared say she couldn’t be plucked from the stage and wind up another Sophie Tucker or Florence Mills or Ethel Waters? Why, Waters—“Sweet Mama Stringbean,” they called her—had once been a maid, scrubbing dishes and washing clothes before she became a vaudeville star.

Elvera Sanchez dreamed beyond Harlem. Preening herself in a mirror, she was as game as any chorus girl in allowing her imagination to gallop. So, as 1924 came to a close, Elvera Sanchez—a willowy and fearless dreamer—packed her bags and joined the assemblage of talent with Will Mastin and hit the road. She was nineteen years old.

They traveled throughout New York State, into Pennsylvania, along the eastern seaboard, wherever they could find work. Elvera wore a small close-fitting and elegant hat, and she carried a long wool coat for winter winds. She carried makeup kits, shoes, and as many clothes as she could bundle up. She had been in show business for all of one year, and here she was, out on the road, a trouper. “He played all the fine hotels,” she would remember of Mastin. “When I was with them, the dressing rooms were beautiful.” And the theaters were fine as well. “
Little kids would come out and look at the comedians with blackface on. The people were so nice.” Her heart was light and gay; she was happy.

In a way, all of the members of Mastin’s revue were fugitives from convention. They were a vaudeville troupe roaring through the 1920s. They could have been slaving away in cotton fields, or factories. The men could have been swaying on a Pullman train instead of a stage. They were grateful to be hitched to Mastin, and he kept them working.

They rehearsed on cold stages, giggled themselves warm. They tried new dance steps on one another, added skits to their shows. They ate in restaurants that catered to Negroes and wrapped delicacies in soft napkins to carry away with them. They idled at the homes of Negro strangers when invited and shared gossip, show-business news. They nursed one another through colds and fevers and back pains. They wrote letters home at night by lamplight and lamented that they could not provide a return address because they were on the move. They sent money home when they could, the better to assure family all was fine on the road of show business. They kept an ear out for places where recent lynchings had occurred—Mastin phoning ahead in whispered tones or sending telegrams—and avoided those towns. When troupe members weren’t performing, they read newspapers, ironed their stage outfits, strolled around the unfamiliar towns, window-shopped.

It was inevitable that members would get to know each other, that friendships would deepen. And, of course, the possibility of romance was real. Just months into her show-business journey, Elvera Sanchez began an affair with
Sammy Davis, one of Mastin’s lead dancers. “
Sharp as he wanted to be,” she would say of dancer Davis.

Sammy Davis arrived in New York in 1921 from Wilmington, North Carolina, with an eye on show business. His exit from Wilmington had not been smooth. He was fond of hats, particularly fedoras. In Wilmington, in a men’s clothing shop, he tried on a dress hat. A more obedient Negro male might not have done such a thing in a white-owned store in the South. Davis was immediately scolded and ordered to take the hat off. “The hell with your hat,” he said to the owner, tossing the hat to the floor, striding out the door. “The man wanted to have him arrested,” recalls Charles Fisher, Davis’s cousin and a resident of Wilmington. Davis went home and told Rosa, his mother, that the police might come looking for him. His mother told him he had no choice but to leave town. There was urgency in her voice. Like many other Negroes in Wilmington, Rosa Davis knew well the events of 1898.

The town was an oddity of southern towns, inasmuch as many Negroes—their power strengthened by voting Republican and bonding with the Populist bloc—held important elective positions. Of the ten aldermen in 1897, five were Negro. White Democrats intended to oust Negroes at the polls in the 1898 election, voicing concerns that so many Negroes in city government “
emboldens bad Negroes to display their evil, impudent, and mean natures.” Alex Manly was editor of the
Wilmington Record
, which catered to the city’s Negroes. He was not a shy man. “
Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men, than are the white men with the colored women.” The column elicited visceral anger on the part of whites. Just before election day, it was reprinted and distributed all over the town. It had impact: Negroes were voted out of office. Tensions began to rise; such was the brewing fear of more backlash that Manly fled town. This was wise; a mob torched his office. Negroes armed themselves and, in the Brooklyn section of the city—where Rosa Davis resided with her family—came face to face with armed whites days after the election. The first to be injured was a white man, William Mayo. A volley of shots was then unleashed, from both sides. More whites joined, and Negroes found themselves quickly outnumbered. A state militia was summoned. Negroes who could get away fled into cemeteries, the woods, anywhere for cover. It was estimated that two dozen Negroes were killed. In the aftermath, scores of Negroes left town on trains. By 1900, all the elected officials in Wilmington were white.

Rosa Davis wasted no time in pressing money to her son’s palm following the hat incident and putting him on an Atlantic Coastline train to New York.

In New York City, Sammy Davis found odd jobs—among them elevator operator—before entering and winning several dance contests. His reputation led him to Will Mastin. Onstage Mastin and Davis quickly recognized each other’s talents. They were elegant dancers, doing quick steps, followed by a slowing-down process of feet movement, only to speed up once again. Onstage, Davis specialized in the Charleston, which had swept the country in the early 1920s. It had become so popular that Charleston contests were held in many cities, spindly legged men and women working themselves into a feverish sweat. (George Raft, a young Broadway dancer, was reputed to be the fastest Charleston dancer in the country in the early 1920s. Raft would go on to make a name for himself playing murderously suave gangsters in film.)

As heralded by Mastin as Davis may have been out there on the road, Elvera was not at all shy about introducing him to other dance steps. Davis was six foot three, with perfect teeth—the smile warm but show-business slick—and had a deep baritone of a voice. His skin was dark and smooth. He had a proud posture, but also relaxed—like a military man gliding loosely and knowingly around a speakeasy. He carried a lovely gray fedora. There was something of the cad about Sammy Davis, and he seemed to know it. Women came after him, and he welcomed the attention.

Elvera Sanchez and Sammy Davis talked and talked as they traveled down country roads, earth rolling beneath them and the countryside passing by, on the way to another town and theater. His smile fell across her like autumn light. Meals and laughter were both shared, as were tales of Harlem and its still-running popular stage shows. They thumbed through newspapers together. Elvera found herself watching him from the wings of yet another stage in yet another town. He’d sidle up close to her as they exited yet another theater. He’d bundle her up on chilly mornings, fetch food for her. They posed side by side as pictures were snapped. He looked handsome; she looked as carefree as a flapper girl.