Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (39 page)

I stared at the door as it closed and then swung open. Will came in, his eyes blazing. “What’d he say?”

“He said I should tell you he didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“He didn’t hurt my feelings. I just want what’s mine, and that’s all I ever asked a man to give me in my whole life.”

“I know that, Massey. He was dead wrong, and he knows it, too.”

“If he don’t want to live up to his end of the contract, then we don’t play. It’s that simple.”

“Come on, Massey. It’s not worth getting annoyed over. He had no right to do it, and it’s being changed.”

“You bet it’s being changed. The name of this act is The Will Mastin Trio and that’s the name it’ll always have. We come up from nothing with that name. It was a good name in show business long before he ever built this place. The damned fool.”

“Brother Mastin? You swearing in front of me?”

He’d been pacing the room letting off steam, convincing himself, but he stopped, embarrassed. “I guess that’s the first curse word I ever used around you, Sammy.”

He sat down, lost in thought, and I had the feeling he was terribly lonely for the old days. I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t let those bastards bother you, Massey.”

He looked straight at me for a moment and his smile gained confidence. He nodded and stood up. “I better get moving. We’ve got a show to do.”

Jack Eigen reached out to shake hands with me as I sat down in front of his microphone. “Sammy, welcome to Chicago and thanks for stopping by. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m speaking to the dynamic star of the great show here at the Chez Paree. Sammy, it’s a pleasure to meet you …”

I glanced across the room at my father. He winked and threw me a circled thumb and forefinger.

“… this young man just finished his first show of the engagement and literally turned the Chez upside down. It was pandemonium, they wouldn’t let him off the stage, they were jammed in like sardines but they kept calling him back …”

He was reporting it like Clem McCarthy doing a Kentucky Derby, screaming the winner past the finish line. I looked at my father
again. He made a motion of dealing cards, bridging the years, and I smiled back at him.

“… Sammy, how do you feel about what’s been happening to you lately?”

“Jack, I’d have to be out of my mind not to be thrilled and very grateful. And I’m particularly happy to be a guest on your show.”

“Thank you, Sammy, I’m certainly happy to have you.”

He thought it was just show biz Glad-to-be-here folks. “I really mean that, Jack. When I was a kid, there was a time when we’d pawned everything except our radio, and we held onto that just so we could listen to your show from the Copacabana. I’d sit in our apartment playing cards with my father, and we’d hear you talking to Jimmy Durante, Joe E. Lewis … well, maybe it’ll sound a little cornball, but I dreamed and prayed that someday I’d get a little closer to all that excitement.”

“And here you are not only closer to it but generating it. Sammy, it’s been a long road, hasn’t it? Would you say it might have happened faster for you if you weren’t a Negro?”

“Jack … I’m not that good a guesser. But I do know that when I was a kid and we had to scrounge for work, my uncle, Will Mastin, and my father and I used to go to the booking offices and we’d sit there alongside some awfully good white performers who were pretty hungry too. Some of us got lucky, and some didn’t.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, in case you tuned in late it’s my pleasure to sit opposite the most talked about, most talented, most versatile Negro performer …”

I was aware of the warmth of my arms and legs taking the crispness out of my suit and wrinkling it.

“Sammy, we’re all familiar with your great energy and your great talent. Let’s find out a little more about you. Is there anything missing, anything further you’d like? How about motion pictures?”

“Well, sure. I’d love to make one someday.”

“How is it you haven’t done a picture already? I mean now that it’s out in the open, do you feel that your color has prevented you from doing a movie?”

“Wait a minute, it’s not ‘out in the open’ because it’s never been a hidden subject. The way things have been going for us I haven’t had time to even think about it, but I can tell you that the opening we had earlier this evening was everything I ever dreamed about. We’ll be doing the second show soon and if the people are as fab—”

“But isn’t it true, Sammy, that when a young singer has a hit record and starts getting hot, he almost automatically gets pulled right out to Hollywood?”

“I don’t know, Jack. I really don’t. I doubt it.”

“You’ve had several big hits and you’re a great performer …”

I pressed my hands against the cloth on the table and glanced at my watch, hoping it was almost show time.

“Have you had any offers from Hollywood?”

Why did he have to ruin a beautiful evening, why cut it out from under me like this? “We’ve been booked solid in clubs, Jack, it would have been impossible to make a movie.”

The room was quieting down to listen more carefully, they were looking at me differently. I was colored again.

“But have you had any offers?”

I leaned against the back of the chair. “No, but that doesn’t prove anything because neither did anybody come up to me and say, ‘We aren’t calling you to make a picture because you’re colored.’ ” I lit another cigarette. The delicious taste was gone. He had asked me something but I’d missed it. I looked at him, knowing he’d repeat it.

“But they’re not calling you.”

“Jack, it can’t be a racial thing unless you can tell me that Sidney Poitier is trying to pass.” One of the ribs of the chair was sticking into my back, but I just didn’t feel like bothering to move away from it. Across the room my father was staring at the floor.

“Sammy, do you feel that despite the fact that you’re the most exciting Negro performer to come along since Bill Robinson …”

The last thread snapped. The beauty of the evening was long gone, but over and above that, words I’d heard and hated a thousand times, words I’d accepted without answering, words I’d forced to bounce off, stuck and stung me to response. “Why do you compare me to Bill Robinson?”

“Well, Sammy, I, uh, I don’t believe I understand your question.”

“Jack, I want to make it clear that you are not the first person to do it. I hear it all the time and I see it in the papers and in magazines, and obviously nobody means it as anything but a compliment and I’m enormously flattered by the comparison—but it’s a wrong one!” He was looking at me with curiosity. “I don’t kid myself that I could even begin to dance on the same stage as Bill Robinson. I haven’t a touch of his greatness. But aside from that: we are not the
same kind of performers. Sure, I dance, but my style is totally different from his, plus the fact that I also sing and tell jokes, do impressions, play the drums and the vibes, and act like a nut. Mr. Robinson didn’t do any of those things. So if you’re talking
performance
it would be much more logical to compare Fred Astaire to Bill Robinson, but I never heard
that
done.”

“Well, now that you mention it … well I just know that Robinson was the greatest Negro performer of his time and you’re the greatest Negro performer to come along …”

“Hold it, Jack. Maybe it’ll seem like I’m touchy, but I take exception to that too.”

“To what?”

“You called me a ‘Negro performer.’ I’m a Negro and I’m a performer, but I don’t think of myself as a ‘Negro performer’ any more than you think of yourself as a ‘white disc jockey.’

“Why do people want to label
me
when they don’t label other people? I never yet saw a newspaper refer to Milton Berle as ‘the greatest Jewish comedian.’ Sure, he’s Jewish and he’s a comedian but he doesn’t do Jewish comedy any more than I do Negro humor.

“Race shouldn’t come into it when people are speaking or writing about me professionally. Read the papers tomorrow and see if they don’t call me the most talented Negro performer in the business. Now I realize it may sound greedy of me to knock that kind of a review but frankly I’d be happier if they wrote, ‘Sammy Davis is an excellent performer’ or a ‘good performer’ or whatever they think of me. I’ll take less, if necessary, but without the label. When I walk onto a nightclub floor the newspaper guy is automatically comparing me to everyone else he’s seen headlining on that same floor. I’m competing against
all
performers, so if I get a rave I don’t want it to be qualified, like I’m good compared to only one small section of the business. I’ll take the knocks if I have to, but if it’s good then I want all that’s coming to me.

“When I played Florida about a year or so ago I was staying in the same hotel as Jackie Robinson, and he happened to see some of my reviews. They were raves but they all had the ‘Negro performer’ bit in them. He said, ‘I had it all my life. I was always the “Negro ballplayer.” Occasionally a hater would throw a black cat on the field and yell the names at me, but most of the time people bent over backwards the other way. If I missed a ball or struck out they didn’t boo me like they would a white guy. Then, all of a sudden one day it
changed. I don’t know how or why, but it did. I could argue with the umpire and shake my fist at him and the crowd started booing me, but I knew it wasn’t racial. The greatest day of my life was the day I was thrown out of a game. I went into the locker room and cried like a kid ‘cause I was finally just a plain “ballplayer” like any other guy.’

“I guess what it comes down to, Jack, is that I want to be looked at by the world not as Negro, white, or polka dot, or put in a category with anybody. Good, bad, or indifferent, like me or hate me—but measure me by the sum total of what I am as an individual.”

My father was waiting as I stepped down from the platform. He put his arm around my shoulder and we walked back to the dressing room. “How
about
that, Poppa?” He smiled. “The Jack Eigen Show.” He was saying the words, but they didn’t have the ring of the kind of happiness he wanted to get out of them. He was shaking his head, reaching for the nostalgia we both wanted to feel. “You got it all now, just like you always wanted.” The last few words were hardly pronounced, as if in denial of their own statement.

I gripped his shoulder. “Not yet, Dad. I’ve got to get bigger. I’ve got to get so big, so powerful, so famous, that the day will come when they’ll look at me and see a man—and then somewhere along the way they’ll notice he’s a Negro.”

“Sammy, if you were white you’d have been in pictures a year ago.”

“Hold it, Lenny. That’s what I hear from the cats on the street. I don’t need it from my own agent. Now I’ve
got to have
the importance of motion pictures. I’ve got to expand. I’m not doing ‘the clown who wants to be a serious actor’ bit. I need this. I can’t be Charley Nightclubs all my life. I need extra dimension. I can’t stay in a box; I’ve got to break through the barrier of being a singer-dancer-comic, and you’ve got to help me.”

“Well, it’s not easy. Most pictures just don’t have parts for Negroes. And when they do, they couldn’t begin to meet your price.”

“What’s my price?”

“Well, I don’t know, after all, you’re a big star …”

I leaned across his desk. “My price to make a movie is fifty dollars! You hear what I’m saying?
Fifty dollars!
And I’ll take a cut if necessary.”

“It’s not that we aren’t trying for you …”

“You’re not trying hard enough. I’m not exactly a secret in the nightclub business and I’ve had a couple of hit records. Big ones. But I haven’t even been called to make an eight-by-ten glossy.”

His phone rang and he grabbed for it, holding one hand over the mouthpiece and extending the other to me. “Sammy, we’ll do the best we can. I’ll bring it up at the next meeting.”

I went down the hall to the television department and introduced myself to the guy who was supposed to be handling me.

“Sammy, the truth is we just haven’t been able to find a dramatic role for you. But you can have all the variety shows you want.”

“I’ve done all the variety shows.”

“Right. And they still want you back. At top money.”

“Fine. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do dramatic television, too. Out of all the thousands of shows being done every year how is it possible that you can’t come up with one little half-hour script for me?”

“Well, these programs have small budgets.”

“Baby, I just went through that in the picture department. All I know is everybody’s getting rich in movies and on television but as soon as my name is mentioned, suddenly everything’s got small budgets. Okay. I’ll work for box-tops!”

“Well, in addition to that we have the problem of finding a role you can play. For a star of your importance we have to find the right vehicle.”

“Don’t give me the vehicle jazz. I’m not asking for Rolls-Royce parts. Find me a little used Chevy. It doesn’t have to be a lead. It could be even one scene if it’s the right one. Let
me
be the one to say, ‘No, it’s too small.’ ”

“Sammy, what’re you knocking yourself out for? Why risk bombing in dramatic television? You’re a first-rate Sammy Davis, Jr.; why be a second-rate Sidney Poitier?” I held onto the arms of my chair, telling myself: don’t make an enemy, you need him, you need him. “You’re a great entertainer, but that doesn’t mean you’re an actor. Maybe if you took some dramatic lessons, like the Actors’ Studio, something that’d give us a little background to work with.”

I stood up and ground a cigarette into his ash tray. “You want some background? How’s twenty-four years in the business? How’s
eight hundred thousand dollars
a year, of which you guys get ten per cent? How’s the fact that I’m a star that you don’t have to lift a finger to get booked in clubs, all you have to do is answer phone calls. But I’m asking for your help on something important to me. Please, let’s stop kidding each other. The problem is racial!”

“Well, it
is
awfully touchy. Do I have to tell you that on certain networks Negroes are banned except if they appear as servants?”

“Look, we both know they aren’t running around town hoping to find colored actors. But I’m a name. Maybe I can draw a rating, right? The door isn’t locked. It’s just closed and there must be a way to get it opened.”