Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (14 page)

I went back to Mrs. Cartwright’s and slammed her dirty, gouging door and swore to myself that someday it would be different. I tried reading but I couldn’t keep my mind on the book. I felt closed in so I went out for a walk but the sight of all the poorness drove me back to my room. I stared out the window at the glow of the lights from the Strip in the distance until it faded into the morning sun.

I should have been tired the next night but as eight o’clock drew near I was vibrating with energy and I couldn’t wait to get on the stage. I worked with the strength of ten men.

We did our shows and went out to get a cab to Mrs. Cartwright’s. I looked away from the lights of the casino but I couldn’t avoid hearing the sounds. Night after night I had to pass that door to get a cab. Once, between shows, I stood around the corner where nobody would see me, and waited for the door to open so I could catch the short bursts of gaiety that escaped as people went in and came out. I sat on the ground for an hour, listening and wondering what it must be like to be able to just walk in anywhere.

My father looked into my room, smiling. “Hey, Poppa, you wanta come out and wrap yourself around some of the best barbecue
you’ll ever taste? Then after lunch we could look in on the bar. It’s a real nice place. They got a Keeno game goin’ and we can double our money.” He was selling me, as he had been every day for a week.

“Thanks, Dad. You go ahead.”

“Hell, son, come on and get some laughs outa life.”

“I’m happy, Dad.”

“No you ain’t.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“The hell you is. You sit here all day listening to them records when already you sound more like them people than they do. Then you’re blowin’ the horn….”

“And I’m getting pretty good. Here, listen….”

“I know.” He tapped on the wall, causing a hollow knocking sound, and smiled. “This ain’t exactly made outa three-foot-thick cement.” He sat down on the bed. “Poppa, you do impressions, you dance, you play drums and trumpet, but you don’t know doodly squat about livin’. You’re not havin’ your fun.”

“I will, Dad. Bet your life on it. I will!”

He gave me a frustrated look. “Okay, son. I don’t know how t’help you. So just tell me….”

I watched him walking down the street toward the commercial section of Westside. There were a few decent places over there and under other conditions I could have enjoyed them, but the idea that I was being told, “That’s your side of town, stay there,” that those were the only places I was allowed in, made it impossible for me to go near them.

He looked back and saw me in the window and waved, offering me a chance to change my mind. I waved back and he turned and kept walking. I picked up the trumpet and started playing.

There was no bus or train out of Vegas until morning but I gladly paid fifty dollars to a musician for a lift into L.A. an hour after we closed. He dropped me a block from the Morris and I walked toward the hotel. Everywhere
I
looked were the dregs of Los Angeles, as if every pimp and dope peddler in town had suddenly moved onto Fifth Street. I reached the Morris but kept walking, faster, almost running. I saw an empty cab and ran into the street to flag him down.

When we’d gone a few blocks, I began to feel the pressure easing, and I didn’t have to hold my breath any more.

“Made up your mind yet, buddy?”

“Yes. The Sunset Colonial, please.” Lots of performers stayed there and I knew they’d take me. It was on Sunset Strip, in Hollywood, and it was more expensive but I knew that no matter what I had to do—or do without—I was never going back to Fifth Street.

I went over to the Frank Sinatra show and sent my name in. I was “the kid” to him and he let me watch rehearsals every week. I sat around the studio, absorbing everything that was happening, inhaling the atmosphere of the Big Time like it was clean, delicious, fresh air.

I figured if I spent my time at places where show people hung out, maybe I’d make a connection that could do us some good. There was a club called Billy Berg’s where I could get Cokes at the bar. Mel Tormé came in all the time. He had the Mel-Tones and he was dating Ava Gardner. I made it my business to meet him and we became friends. Frankie Laine sang there every Sunday night for twenty dollars at the jam sessions. We’d sit at the bar and he’d have a beer and say, “I’m just waiting for that break to come along.”

Through Jesse Price, a drummer, I made a connection at Capitol Records and got a contract for fifty dollars a side.

Will shrugged. “You sure didn’t get yourself much of a deal. The thing to have is a royalty, something that’d come to about a nickel apiece for every record they sell.”

“Massey, when I’m Bing Crosby I’ll ask for royalties. Right now what I want is this opening.”

At the studio, I listened to the band running through the music: thirty-two bars of clichés, with all the musical riffs lifted from other people’s hits. The conductor was swinging his baton with all the enthusiasm of a guy painting a house, and the band of staff musicians who ground out one session after another for no-names like me was playing like I was number 428. I knew I was lucky just to be getting the chance but I couldn’t help hearing the contrast between this and the fresh, vital sound of the Hit Parade band.

Mama’s kitchen was the warmest room because it had no windows, but even so, my father and I wore overcoats and had the oven
on low. The refrigerator, unplugged to save electricity, was open, scrubbed clean, and empty except for some ads my father had clipped from magazines: pictures of a roast beef, eggs, butter, sausage, and a bottle of milk.

It was 1946 and everybody else was rich and happy, tearing up their ration stamps and ordering their first new cars in five years. We, however, were bringing down the National Prosperity Average. We’d left L.A., plodding our way across the country, barely making expenses at the same old clubs, finally limping into New York and up to Harlem where Mama was still on relief. We were a great big help, starving on occasional one-nighters and listening to Jack Eigen telling us he was at the goddamned Copa.

Nathan Crawford’s factory had laid off a lot of men and forced him to take a cut to twenty-five dollars a week, but still he came stumbling into Mama’s place every Friday, doing his drunk act and giving her at least ten or fifteen dollars, never letting on how rough things were for him. We watched it week after week, unable to find sufficient words to say to this man who was actually keeping Mama alive.

My father was tapping
Variety
with the back of his hand. “Accordin’ to this, the Chicago clubs are usin’ acts by the hundreds. I heard the same thing from some of the boys. The sayin’ is ‘You can burp and get booked.’ ”

“It’s a long walk, Dad.” I was skimming through
Metronome
, hoping maybe Capitol had taken an ad.

I took
Variety
out of my father’s hands, stood up, and bowed.
“Metronome
has picked me, your son and heir, as The Most Outstanding New Personality of The Year.’ Plus, ‘The Way You Looked Tonight’ has been chosen Record of the Year.”

He read it and we screamed with laughter. He took an iron washer out of his pocket. It was the size of a quarter and we’d been using them to get cigarettes out of machines. He stood, ceremoniously. “Mr. Davis, I presents you with the first Iron Record ever given out in music. It’s a honor which means: you sings good even if you sells bad.”

I went downtown to
Metronome
to thank them, hoping they’d write more about me. I saw Barry Ulanov and George Simon, the editors, and sure enough they said they’d like to do a story on me, but they suggested I ask Billy Eckstine, who was playing the Paramount, to pose for a picture with me to give the story name value.
He was a friend of the family and it was embarrassing to ask this kind of a favor, but I called him.

He posed with me the next afternoon between shows and I started to leave. “Thanks a lot, B. I really appreciate it.”

“Thanks for what? C’mon up and sit with me awhile.” I followed him to the star dressing room, we had coffee and he asked how things were going for us.

There was no point in trying to kid him. He’d know we had to be in trouble or we wouldn’t be taking the one-nighters. “No good. We just can’t seem to get off the ground. I’m getting some good write-ups on the records but they’re not selling.”

“You meeting the rent?”

“We’re hungry, B.”

He shook his head compassionately. “It’s rough.”

I thought about asking him for a loan. Pride is great but Mama and my father were at home with an empty icebox and not twenty cents between them, and I knew it would be like twelve times Christmas if I came back with a few dollars for food. “B, if you could lend me five dollars, I’d sure appreciate it.”

He looked at his watch, a gold and diamond one that must have cost $500. “Come on downstairs and watch the show.”

I stood in the wings waiting for him to go on. I shouldn’t have asked him. Maybe he was broke, or maybe he just didn’t want to lend me any money. It seemed that it would be nothing to him but you never know about people when it comes to money. He’d been great about taking the picture but that hadn’t cost him anything. What the hell, why shouldn’t he have done it? Not that he needed it, but it couldn’t hurt him any to have his picture in
Metronome
again. He was onstage and I could see the spotlight bouncing off a diamond ring he was wearing. We could eat on that for a year … he’s got a helluva nerve keeping me on the string like this for a few lousy dollars, humiliating me, making me stand here like a moocher. It’s a lesson I won’t forget: keep your problems to yourself unless you know the guy you’re telling them to is going to help you. I started to walk out, to show him I didn’t need him. But I did need him.

I watched him work. He was everything I was not: tall and good-looking and sure of himself, and he had every right to be. He was a giant in the business, as hot as the news yet to come, and they were packing the place to see him. Everything he wore was made to order
for him and it all had its own style. He reeked of success. And the way he handled himself. What a pro!

As he came off I said, “Great show, B. Thanks a lot for the picture. I’ve gotta cut and get uptown, now.”

“Here, wait a minute, you forgot this.”

I left, hating myself for misjudging him, disgusted with myself for being so nowhere that I had to bum a few dollars from a man I didn’t even know that well. When I was on the street I took it out of my pocket. It was a hundred-dollar bill. He’d known we were in trouble, but he had the sensitivity not to show it by offering me money. Instead he’d opened the subject so I could ask him if I chose to.

We hit Chicago laughing and scratching and ready to go. Will went out every day, from club to club, agent to agent, but we might as well have been out of town. People were standing in line for entertainment but after two months of stagnating at the old Ritz Hotel on Chicago’s South Side we still hadn’t been able to get on a stage.

Ossie Wilson, an old friend of my father’s, was keeping us off the streets, standing for the ten dollars a week rent on our rooms. He was running poker games and depending on whether he won or lost, we ate or starved. He hit a losing streak for eight days and the only thing Will, my dad, and I had to eat was a Mr. Goodbar apiece and a So-Grape. Occasionally his girl friend brought us the leftovers from their dinner, but after another week he was still on a losing streak and it reached the point where we were down to filling ourselves with water. The pain of hunger was almost matched by the excruciating frustration of idle hours, of knowing all the entertainment we had welled up inside us, while the radio taunted us with all the sounds of the life for which we were so starved. Night after night we listened to interview shows hysterical with the atmosphere of a nightclub boom, and we sat there endlessly wondering how it was possible we couldn’t get into it.

The Ritz was a real theatrical hotel and the three of us sat around the lobby every day with other performers like in a scene from a corny MGM musical. Will pointed to a newspaper ad. “I see where Dick and Gene Wesson opened downtown.” My father looked at it. “Damned fine billing, too.” A pleasant nostalgia crossed his face. “Remember back in the thirties when we were workin’ the ‘World’s Fair Vanities’ through Maine, Massachusetts, and Canada …”
Will’s face relaxed into the same happy memories. He folded the paper. “I’m happy to see the boys making it so big. They had plenty of hard times getting there.”

I looked around the lobby at groups of performers clustered together having the same kind of talks, convincing themselves that it could still happen to them too, like gamblers in a roulette game, hanging on, staying in, waiting for the wheel to spin again. I couldn’t stand the sight of all that failure lumped together. “I’m going upstairs.”

My father stood up, too, and spoke loudly, for effect. “Yeah, might as well go get washed up for dinner.”

I turned on the radio hoping, as usual, that I’d hear one of my records. I listened to Frankie Laine’s “That’s My Desire” for about the tenth time that day. The same man who used to sing at Billy Berg’s, the same talent, the same style, but from one month to the next he’d become a star, gone from $20 a Sunday to $5,000 a week. The disc jockey said, “That’s it, folks, the biggest selling piece of wax in America today. And here he is in person,
Frankie Laine
. Frankie, how does it feel to be sitting on top of the world?”

I snapped off the radio. “We’ve gotta get the hell out of this town. We can’t just sit around mildewing in the damned lobby. If we’ve got any sense at all we’ll go see the Wessons. My God, we’ve got roots with these people. Let’s ask ‘em outright if they’ll lend us enough to get us out of town.”

Will was shaking his head. “I don’t want to do that.”

“Massey, pride is fine and wonderful but it’s past the point of being ridiculous. It’s suicide not to try.”

Into the pocket they went and gave us a hundred dollars. And that wasn’t enough. The Wessons’ manager, Sam Stefel, also managed Mickey Rooney, who’d just come out of the army and was putting together a show to tour the RKO circuit. They called Stefel in Boston and got him to use us on the bill as the opening act.