Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (37 page)

“The Summit” at The Sands, Las Vegas

Sidney Poitier

Peewee and my dad

My wedding to Loray White, 1959. Donald O’Connor, Harry Belafonte (my best man), Joe E. Lewis, Loray, Jack Entratter

As Sportin’ Life in
Porgy and Bess

With Eartha Kitt in
Anna Lucasta

Sergeants Three

Ocean’s Eleven

There was finally a Negro cowboy, and for luck in playing it, John Wayne gave me the hat he’s worn in all his pictures. (In the playhouse at my home.)

Doing Chaplin on the Nat Cole Show, NBC-TV

Conversation stopped. Dave lit a cigarette, crossed one leg over the other and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “Connect me with the Lounge, please, darling…. Hello, I’d like to reserve a table for about twenty minutes from now for Sammy Davis, Jr. and a party of …” The burst of red across his cheeks was as though he’d been slapped. He lowered the phone back on the hook. “Sam … I did it again. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “Let’s not make a ninety-minute spectacular out of it.” I could feel everybody looking at me, embarrassed for me. There were murmurs of “Well if that’s how they are then who the hell needs ‘em …” “They’re a hundred years behind the times …”The party was lying on the floor dead.

I stood up. “Charley, get hot on the phone with room service and have them bring over twenty steak sandwiches, and tell them we’ll need a case of their best champagne, quick-style. Morty, do me a favor. Swing by the casino and find Sunny and the kids. Tell ‘em it’s a party. Invite everybody you see that we dig.” I turned on the hi-fi set, loud. Within ten minutes the crowd of kids pouring in was drowning it out, and the room came alive like somebody’d plugged us in.

Dave came over to where I was standing. “You okay?”

“Thanks, baby. I’m fine.”

I had the feeling of having waited all my life to own a raincoat and when finally I got one it wasn’t working, the water was coming through.

I had to get bigger, that’s all. I just had to get bigger.

Dave was having breakfast at a room-service table in the living room. I turned on the TV set and went around the room looking for an ash tray that had an inch of space left in it. I emptied one into a half-filled glass. “Damn, we’d better get us some buckets the way those people smoke.” I sat down and took the cardboard cap off a glass of orange juice.

Morty came stumbling in from his room. “It smells like a saloon in here.” He pushed open a couple of the windows.

“Hey, easy on that air, baby. That stuff’ll kill you.” He collapsed into a chair at the table and sat there, eyes closed, holding his head
up with the palm of his hand. His complexion was somewhere in the vicinity of moss green. “Morty, you look like the last eight bars of Tiger Rag.”

He raised his head just enough to find me. “It’s these parties. Every night—people. In my bathroom, in my closet … I haven’t slept since we got here. I can’t cat-nap like you do. I’ve got to get six hours. Or at least four. Look.” He held out his hand, trying to keep it steady.

Dave grinned. “That’s just a little case of the Vegas-Early-Mornings.”

“If my folks ever saw me like this they’d kill me.” He reached for his juice, spilling some into the cracked ice, took a slug and looked at me pleadingly. “I know I never had it so good. But it’s killing me.”

Dave buttered a roll and mopped up the egg yolk on his plate. “I feel great.” He finished off the rest of the roll with some strawberry jam and poured some more coffee. I put down my fork and watched his hand circling over a basket of coffee cakes until he’d chosen exactly the right one. He polished that off and reached for a jelly doughnut.

“Dave! Put that down!”

His hand stopped in mid-air. “What’s wrong?”

“Are we storing up food for the winter?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Okay, baby, but in case you’re still thinking about getting into pictures—they’re not searching the streets for Sidney Greenstreet types.”

He dropped the doughnut. “Hey, wait a minute! I’m not exactly Sophie Tucker. I’ve got a thirty-two-inch waist.”

“Mine’s twenty-eight but I’m not going for forty. Show me a man of thirty-five who’s got a pot, and I’ll show you a man who started that pot with bad eating habits when he was twenty-five.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Y’mean you diet?”

“No. But I don’t stuff myself like a nitwit, either. It’s my business to look good on a stage. When I take off my coat I can’t afford to have a goodyear hanging over my belt. I love desserts as much as the next guy, but did you ever see me eat one? And if I have potatoes one night I won’t have them again for two months. I eat until I’m not hungry any more and if there’s still food on my plate I leave it. And if I have ham and eggs and a roll I don’t follow it with coffee cake
and
a
jelly doughnut
!”

He was staring at me, dumbfounded. “What’d I do to get this lecture all of a sudden?”

“I was just trying to help, to be a friend.”

He nodded, gazing at the jelly doughnut as though he wanted to marry it.

As we approached the suite after the second show I could hear the hi-fi set and the people laughing from all the way down the hall. Morty groaned. “It sounds like half of Las Vegas is in there.”

Dave rubbed his hands together. “Don’t knock it. We’ve got the line from the Sahara tonight.” He opened the door and I watched him surveying the room, trying to decide which piece of candy looked best. Then he spotted her, hesitated, working on his opening line, touched me on the elbow, and grinned. “Excuse me, durling. My fudge is burning.”