In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (13 page)

Show-business deaths somehow seemed more devastating, imaginative minds convincing themselves that those deaths were premature, out of the ordinary. A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madam C. J. Walker, the Negro hair-care magnate, died in 1931. A’Lelia wasn’t an artist, but she played host to many Renaissance artists—Langston Hughes among them—at her Irvington-on-Hudson thirty-four-room family mansion. Hughes was among those who attended Walker’s funeral. He recalled:

Hubert Julian, one of the earliest Negro aviators—the “Black Eagle of Harlem”—flew over Walker’s funeral procession and dropped a wreath from his aircraft. (The Depression didn’t deter Julian: he flew off to Ethiopia and trained pilots in the army of Emperor Haile Selassie.)

But economic calamity was everywhere. The
New York World
newspaper folded in 1931.

W. E. B. Du Bois lost his home and fell into debt.

New York City began keeping a gruesome statistic: death by starvation. In 1931 it reported the number as forty-six.

In 1932 the Palace Theatre in New York—home to superlative vaudeville acts—closed. Flo Ziegfeld died that same year—penniless.

Jean Toomer, a celebrated writer, became unsure whether he wanted to be classified a Negro any longer. He was light enough to pass for white but had conveniently grabbed the Negro label in the heat of the Harlem Renaissance. Now he was jumpy about the skin-color issue and refused to be included in Negro anthology collections, fearing the inclusion would damage him. Publishers who had been excited about Negro authors during the Harlem Renaissance were now talking about the bottom line.

New York—like every other municipality—had to pay for its dreams. And the New Negro was, once again, suffering from old woes: unemployment, discrimination, hunger.

Many had no choice but to look elsewhere for work. “
The West Coast, not the East, now served as funnel and expressive outlet for the vast, inchoate, violent impulses of the hinterland,” a chronicler of the demise of 1920s New York has written.

There were theaters in the hinterland. And that is where Will Mastin was now holding forth. The economic malaise had forced him to let some members of his vaudeville troupe go. (Mastin had seen calamity before—he was backstage in a theater with Sophie Tucker during the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake.) Mastin’s troupe was moving like other vaudeville acts, from city to city, taking what bookings they could get. In Mastin they were lucky: he had innumerable contacts with Negro preachers, morticians, teachers, educators, newspaper owners, barkeeps. He knew how to drum up publicity. Will Mastin did not so much arrive into a town as he flowed into it. The child Sammy was still in tow, and Mastin’s showgirls took a fondness to him. “He was being tutored by one of the chorus girls,” remembers Cholly Atkins, a dancer who worked with the troupe in those days. “He was very fond of the young lady tutoring him.”

The girls pampered little Sammy backstage. They lay sweets in the palm of his hand. Mastin, a very private man, seemed to loosen a little himself around the child. From the wings, little Sammy began watching the shows, mugging and mimicking other performers. One afternoon—just another unbilled performance in Columbus, Ohio; Sammy himself would recall it as 1929—the little child ambled out onstage from the wings. For a moment, the boy seemed lost. But in the minutes that followed, he seemed to luxuriate in the light, to allow it to bathe him. The laughs, hoots, guffaws seemed to be the beginning of
some awful kind of mockery upon the child, but as he began dancing and primping, those in the wings realized it was not mockery at all but praise, and healthy laughter at the way the child had begun to kick up his heels.

Will Mastin got an idea: add the child to the ensemble! Mastin allowed the scene to repeat itself in city after city. As Mastin and so many others knew, it was hard times in America, and yet, there remained the magic of a kid onstage and Mastin knew it. And that is how little Sammy received his training—watching from the wings, following others around onstage, scampering and doing his own manic version of the Charleston, the cakewalk, and the fox-trot. A shtick was added: the show would begin, and soon Monty, a male dancer out of Detroit, would feign anger and walk offstage. A grumpy Mastin would plead with him not to abandon the act, but Monty vanished. Then Mastin, looking befuddled, would peer out into the audience. Sitting out there, he’d spot a man with a child in his lap, the child asleep. “He’d say, ‘Wake that boy up!’ ” remembers Cholly Atkins, the performer holding the child. “I’d be holding little Sammy and as soon as he said it, I’d turn little Sammy loose.” And with that, the child would bound up, screech past the customers, hop up onstage, and begin dancing beneath the lights. It would bring the house down. “He’d do a little paddle and roll,” Atkins remembered. “Then when he got through doing his dance, he took his bow and the music struck up and the three of them got together and did their exit.” And with each performance, the child would become more and more confident. He was so eager to take to the stage. Set loose in the world of make-believe, little Sammy seemed happier than ever.

Timmie Rogers was another child performer who would grow up on the road and befriend little Sammy. Rogers traveled for a while in his youth with Ben Ross, a Jewish vaudevillian. With the lights down low onstage, Ross would approach the audience and tell them he wanted to introduce his son. When the lights would come up, they would be shining on little Timmie Rogers, a Negro. The audience would collapse in laughter. (Rogers was an impetuous sort. He once went up to a Negro who performed in blackface onstage and asked: “Would you still put blackface on if you were on the radio?” He got a strange stare but no answer.)

Rogers remembers the child Sammy as being obsessed with the stage. “He would learn things easily,” Rogers recalled. He would watch Sammy onstage and simply marvel. “He would break audiences up. He would kill them.” Rogers noticed that the child had questions for the other performers. He wanted to know how to do every dance. His whole body seemed to shake with questions, says Rogers: “How do you do this step? And how do you do this? He wanted to learn.”

“For a child,” dancer Billy Kelly says of Sammy, “he was a marvelous dancer.”

Sammy turned five, then six.

In Boston, during an appearance at the Symphony restaurant, the six-year-old found a friend in Russ Howard, who worked as an emcee at the Symphony and sometimes jumped onstage to join the Mastin revue. “
Sammy used to come home with me,” Howard would recall. “We used to see that he got good meals. He was only about six years old and a real trouper. Stopping off at a Cambridge restaurant where the politicians gathered in the evening, Sammy would go into his act for the boys. He collected a good handful of dollar bills and would delight in showing them to his dad the next day.” Howard sometimes sang a little duet—“Ain’t She Sweet”—alongside little Sammy and the chorus girls.

For a child who desperately wanted to learn, standing in the wings of a Negro theater in yet another city could be something akin to getting a Harvard degree. You were apt to see anyone while anchored in the wings: the Berry Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the wondrous Jeni LeGon (she was being likened to a young Florence Mills), the gifted Bunny Briggs. And you could watch Will Mastin and Sammy Davis, Sr., tall and powerfully built men with nimble legs who moved about suavely. “
I think the one thing that helped me more than anything else was just watching my father and [Will] perform while they played the vaudeville circuit,” Sammy Jr. would recall.

DeForest Covan, another dancer on the vaudeville circuit, was astonished by young Sammy’s precociousness. “He was like a sponge,” Covan says. “Anything he could see, he could do.”

Some nights, after shows, the child Sammy was too hyper to go to sleep. So his father and Mastin sat up with him and listened to radio shows—
Dragnet
was his favorite: cops and robbers, the apprehension of suspects, noirlike music humming from the radio and filling the motel rooms, the boardinghouses.

Mastin and Sam Sr. took little Sammy to meet dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson at the Hoofers Club in Harlem. Robinson had once been engaged in a barroom scuffle and Mastin came to his defense. (Robinson later began carrying a loaded pistol.) The brouhaha left Mastin with a scar on his cheek, which he carried for life, as he did the silver-tipped cane Robinson gave him as a gift.

Robinson—born a year after Mastin, in 1879—was revered by Harlemites. He got his start in a pickaninny chorus in 1892. He was an orphan, and the chorus became a kind of home. From 1902 to 1914 he toured the vaudeville circuit with George Cooper, playing the clown to Cooper’s straight man. Robinson was tall, kindly, generous, and not without an ego. As a dancer, he was willowy. In top hat and tails, he looked like something that had just glided through an open window on wings. Robinson appeared on Broadway in Lew Leslie’s
Blackbirds of 1928
, emerging as a legitimate tap-dancing sensation. Taking a child to meet Bill Robinson was like taking a Little Leaguer over to Yankee Stadium to meet the great Babe Ruth. “Bill knew Sammy was going to be a star,” recalls William Smith, a habitué of the Hoofers Club who sometimes served as Robinson’s driver and man Friday. “Sammy used to like to steal steps from Bill.” A pool hall was adjacent to the Hoofers Club. Whenever Robinson was sharing his dance steps, tutoring on the spot, the pool hustlers would drop their cue sticks. Everyone would become quiet. Smith and others would gather around and watch Robinson move. Robinson kept his hips stilled, as if they were in a cast; for him, it was all in the feet, which he moved furiously; the effect was astonishing. “Bill taught Sammy a lot of things,” adds Smith. “Sammy loved coming around Bill.”

The young dancer Fayard Nicholas, rising as half of a popular duo with his brother, Harold, remembers young Sammy, his eyes so very wide. “When we would go onstage, he’d be standing in the wings, looking at us, jumping up and down,” says Nicholas.

To create the patina of family, little Sammy was told to refer to Will Mastin as his “uncle.” Sam Sr. hardly minded.

They entered him in children’s dance contests. He had his own suitcase, his own shoe bag. His own set of little drums. He had numerous outfits—a white suit jacket, a white hat, plaid slacks, and white buck shoes made up one dandy sartorial number. Another was a little-boy tuxedo, satin lapels and all. Onstage Will Mastin and Sam Sr.—in top hat and tails, each with a cane in hand—hovered over the child. Mastin grinned like a magician, as if the child at his knee had just sprung from inside the high hat atop his head.

“Will had all the contacts, knew all the people,” says Cholly Atkins, on the road with the trio in 1932. “You’d live in rooming houses. Up in New England you’d get to stay at some hotels. Whenever we played the South, it’d be rooming houses.”

They put white chalk around Sammy’s lips, enlarging them. In blackface, he resembled a miniature Al Jolson. They pointed pridefully at him when others came backstage to see him, and instructed him to start dancing, and he would—the Charleston, the turkey trot, whatever emerged from within. There would be oohs and aahs and giggles. Times were hard; laughter was a tonic. They gave the child bright lights and dressing rooms. They gave him show business. They gave him pennies from heaven.

“This little boy was more than a cute child actor,” says Evelyn Cunningham, a Harlemite who would go on to become a distinguished newspaperwoman and remembers the young Sammy. “That was clear. They were clearly very protective of him. You knew he was going to be somebody special.”

He turned seven, then eight.

Little Sammy Davis, Jr., was basking in the performer’s life. Eyeing train schedules like coloring books. Watching old vaudevillians slump into sleep on moving trains. Listening to the modulated tones of the Pullman porters, the names of cities spilling from their mouths like clipped music, their chained pocket watches glistening. Seeing snowflakes fall. Eyes widening at new automobiles gliding down the streets. Staring at leaves being windblown on autumn afternoons. Watching men slide nickels across countertops for the morning newspaper. Smiling at the pretty women who’d smile at him. Falling off to sleep as the covers were pulled up close to his shoulders in bed, all the while staring into the whites of the eyes of those who cared so much for him—his father, Will Mastin. The little boy was so free—and yet, so caged in the world of show business.

Will and Sam Sr. were as kind, as tender, and as attentive as they could be. In a way, they gave little Sammy everything. And with that, they bartered away his childhood.

They didn’t hear much from Elvera in those days. She was a mother, true enough, but she hardly seemed strong or wily enough—even if she wanted to—to get her child from two dream-hungry vaudeville dancers. Maybe it was anger, or a deep kind of aching, but often when asked if she had any children, Elvera would mention that she had only one child—a daughter. Maybe she only meant she had one child whose address she knew. “They took the boy away from her,” says Maurice Hines, a dancer who crossed paths with both Mastin and Sam Sr.

Elvera had continued to bounce around. She was in Philadelphia. She had joined another revue,
Hot Connors Chocolate
. But that revue disbanded. She joined another group; it was short-lived also. She wanted to sing. But she knew she had limitations, principally “I couldn’t carry a note.” It mattered little. She was going to launch a singing career. “She bought these long dresses,” remembers her niece, Gloria. “She was going to try out an act.” The act didn’t work out. Who knows why, except a lot of acts didn’t work out. She was in Boston. Someone said she was back in New York. No, she had left New York, was now in Montreal.