In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (14 page)

Look for her in the whirlwind, too.

Broadway actress Laurette Taylor, Luisa Sanchez’s employer, had attended high school in Manhattan—though not for long. She was dismissed in her sophomore year. Her antics and hijinks bedeviled school administrators. Her father enrolled her in stenography classes. She loathed them. What she really wanted to do was act, to join vaudeville. A family friend told her and her mother about
auditions being held at a vaudeville theater on Fourteenth Street. Taylor, barely fifteen, went and auditioned. Not long into her audition she sang—while holding a bouquet of violets in her hand—a song titled “
You’re Just a Little Nigger but You’re Mine, All Mine.” She sang another song with a French accent. Before her final rendition, she vanished backstage. Her mother applied burnt cork to her face. When young Taylor reappeared, she was in blackface and wearing a gingham dress, all to play-act as a “mammy.” The vaudeville operatives didn’t hire young Taylor that day, but they could see her versatility, her overwhelming need to please.

In the years ahead of her, Laurette Taylor would conquer stage after stage. In doing so, she seemed to gather a peculiar insight into the consciousness of the performer, and why the craft of acting had such appeal. In 1914—her fame continuing to cast a rich glow—she discussed the intrigue of the child actor:

Imagine, then: a little child backstage, being dressed up, adults towering above him, voices alternately soft and hard. Women fawning over the child, patting the child on the head, asking the child, time and time again, to dance, to do a little soft-shoe number. Home from the road, sitting among family and friends, Sam Sr.—a drink or two inside of him—would want to brag, to show off his little Sammy. He’d ask the boy to dance. Other children were around; the child wished to play, not dance. “Dance for your grandmother! Dance for your grandmother!” Gloria Williams remembers Sam Sr. bellowing to little Sammy during one holiday visit, then reaching for his belt to give the threat of a spanking. So the child danced.

Imagine that child, while out on the road, staring out a car window, without a mommy in sight, with a mommy a thousand miles away, or maybe, for all he knows, in the next town over, doing her own thing, trailing along with a bevy of other chorus girls, everyone chasing a dream.

Imagine that child tired, rubbing sleep from eyes. Imagine that child happy, because who would not like to play and play and play? But also imagine that child unmoored from home, swallowed by magic and the all-time hustle known as show business.

Imagine a child who must now save two men and a vaudeville troupe from time, from vanishing, from disappearing like some two-bit road show—from dying. Imagine that child smothered in the kind of tricky love that has money attached to each performance, and each performance attached to an adult’s gratification or disappointment.

“One day when you’re in show business and are a child, something clicks and you realize what you do is important to a lot of adults around you,” says Bobby Short, a Davis acquaintance later in life who also performed in vaudeville as a child. “You are emboldened, and your childhood is over. It’s not a happy circumstance. If you don’t go on, you’re going to hurt a lot of people.”

Imagine the weariness. Short himself would remember it well in his own autobiography about vaudeville life as a child performer. “
Sometimes on a weekend night at a roadhouse on the outskirts of town, I’d go to sleep at the piano during a lull, my head on my arms. When the lights of approaching cars were seen around the bend, they’d wake me, and before the customers got to the door, I’d be sitting up and playing ‘Nobody’s Sweetheart Now,’ full tilt.”

Imagine a child who must engage in furtive activities, hiding from truant officers, scampering on his little legs when told to run, to dash, all to escape them. Little Sammy became adept at the quick reaction. “He was always ducking truant officers. They’d put him in the closet and tell him to keep quiet,” Timmie Rogers says of Will and Sam when the truant officers would come around. (The child did get schoolbooks from the Calvert School, an extension school in Baltimore that cost ninety bucks a year. They’d send the books and lessons wherever you were on the road. Extension courses were one thing. Another happened to be the cities where the truant officers warned Mastin and Sam Sr. about child labor laws.)

“Sammy would have schooling backstage,” entertainer Al Grey remembers. But playtime often would interrupt: “I used to play cops and robbers with him. I’d catch him off guard—‘Bang bang, I got you.’ ”

Will would notice which chorus girls were paying extra attention to the child. He’d slip them a couple extra bucks come payday.

Child performer Eileen Barton—who would cross paths with the Davises on the road—traveled in her mother and father’s act. The act was called Bennie and Elsie Barton and Company. “I was the ‘Company,’ ” Barton says. She was taking extension courses just like little Sammy. “My father wound up doing all my homework. I never looked at it.”

Sammy watched newsreels and movies—Mastin still called them “talkies”—in movie houses. It was in Chicago, in 1931, when he saw his first movie. The movie was
Dracula
, in which Bela Lugosi, who had played the role on Broadway in 1927, starred. Sammy had snuck away to the theater. It wasn’t difficult, inasmuch as it was attached to the vaudeville house where he and his father and Mastin were appearing. He sat in darkness, shaking, looking up at Dracula
slithering across the screen. “
My spine tingled, and the muscles in the back of my neck started making my head shake,” he would later remember. “My mouth opened even wider than my eyes, and my body shook uncontrollably.”

Sometimes he was accompanied to the movies by his father and Mastin, and he sat watching in the darkness of cinematic dreams as the two men dozed off into sleep, taking catnaps.

He did not participate in stickball, or softball, or the tossing of a football. He did not participate in sports of any kind—even as mere child’s play. There was the fear of injury. Children at play filled his little-boy eyes with curiosity. Walking by knots of schoolchildren, he would point and wonder where they were headed. Small heads like his, bopping along in the sunlight. Then they were gone, with their giggling, leaving him the only child in sight.

He read comic books—Batman and Superman were favorites—listened to jazz, saw the flickering bulbs of red-light districts in towns everywhere: Detroit, Chicago, Norfolk, Washington, D.C., St. Louis. “
We moved from New England into the Midwest, working steady, covering most of Michigan in theaters, burlesque houses, and carnivals, changing the size of the act to as many as forty people depending on what the bookers needed,” little Sammy would later remember.

He danced in front of hotels on street corners, the nickels and dimes handed over to Will Mastin, money to survive on. It was boom and bust, weeks of work, then weeks of idleness. “When Sammy was growing up they played club dates—Portland, Seattle, Vancouver,” recalls dancer Leroy Myers, who watched the act with awe. “Nice white clubs. You had to do a decent act to play them. If you were black, you had to be good to play them.”

Mastin dreamed up yet another idea. Little Sammy as Al Jolson! Anything to keep the act fresh. With a cigar provided by Mastin in his little mouth, little Sammy played the great Jolson. So he—a Negro child—played a white man in blackface who was portraying a black man. Alternating masks and faces. He got laughs just as Jolson got laughs. (Will Mastin would admonish Sammy not to touch his face with the blackface on; it smudged.)

What does a Negro child think of seeing someone in blackface? What mental anguish—if any—might come of that? Here is Florence Mills, giving an interview in London in 1926, describing a scene when she was a mere four-year-old about to go onstage:

Little Sammy himself was a mere four-year-old when he started donning blackface.

He slurped soda pop through straws. He ate Baby Ruth candy bars and wore a porkpie hat. In an automobile, he sat in the backseat like an urchin as the scenery—like frozen daguerreotypes come to life—passed in and out of his view.

Imagine staring fearlessly into the cameras, because he did that also. It was a little movie,
Rufus Jones for President
, shot in 1933 on a soundstage over in Brooklyn. Little Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers was first offered the part; he had other commitments. Will Mastin hustled the role up for little Sammy. (Will Mastin: now playing the role of Frank Capra.) The cast of
Rufus Jones
was eclectic. There was Ethel Waters, Hamtree Harrington, the Jubilee Singers, and the Will Vodery Girls. The movie is a dream in the mind of a little boy who wants to become president of the United States. His dream is realized in the movie; his mammy is vice president. Negroes in the White House—such a dream indeed for 1933. There is plenty of music, hijinks, and laughter. There are watermelon and pork chop jokes, the rolling of dice. A billboard in the movie says:

The movie revels in racial stereotypes. In one scene, supposedly in the Senate chambers, there is a sign outside the Senate door:
CHECK YOUR RAZORS
.

Little Rufus Jones (Sammy) walks up to the microphone when he is introduced as president. He’s got a pork chop in his hand. Even with all the racial baggage, watching the one-reeler decades after its release, one can see the clean and unmistakable talent of Sammy Davis, Jr., dancing and strutting, as jubilant around the camera as a child around a Christmas tree. In every scene he seems to be casting a kind of glow upon those around him. His signature song—“I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You”—is sung with gusto. The
Motion Picture Herald
, a Hollywood publication, calls little Sammy “
talented” in the role. He’s in the movies, just as little Shirley Temple is in the movies. Will
Mastin, however, is soon squinting his eyes. He is afraid. The studios might steal the child. That is what they do when they discover someone—steal them away, sign them to long-term contracts, own them. He can’t let it happen. He won’t let it happen. He needs little Sammy. Little Sammy will make one more movie as a child, something called
Season’s Greetings
, which will star Lita Grey Chaplin. Her divorce from the great comedian Charlie Chaplin had been worldwide news. By the early 1930s she had spent much of her money from the divorce settlement on a lavish lifestyle and was forced to go back to work, joining a vaudeville circuit, and making, on the side, one- and two-reeler movies, one of which starred little Sammy. The Chaplin connection forces sweat to form on the brow of Will Mastin. He has no idea what Lita might tell studio operatives about little Sammy’s gifts. Enough is enough: there will be no more movies, then; Will Mastin closes the curtain on little Sammy’s film career.

“
I never was a child,” Sammy’s
Rufus Jones
costar, Ethel Waters, would lament in the opening of her autobiography. “I never was cradled, or liked, or understood by my family.”

So it must have been for Sammy. Everyone he met he seemed to be waving good-bye to a few days later, at the end of the show’s run. Strangers onstage; strangers in memory. “
Only the details changed, like the face on the man sitting inside the stage door, or which floor our dressing room was on,” Sammy would remember. “But there was always an audience, other performers for me to watch, always the show talk, all as dependably present as the walls of a nursery.”

So his life consisted of ephemera—rumor, correspondence courses, stage lights, back rooms, medicinal concoctions, superstition, comic books, trains, radios, hellos, good-byes.

His sister, Ramona, would recall—and sweetly—the dolls he brought home to give to her when she was a little girl. Some of them were porcelain. He was almost shy in the giving—as if handing something to a near stranger. In fact, he barely knew her. The dolls meant so very much to her. She cradled them. She placed them prominently in her bedroom. She had no other siblings. When he went back out on the road, she thought of him. She also wondered why her father was leaving her behind. She never had any idea when she might see them again. “I would ask my mother about Sammy and she’d say, ‘I’m looking for him. I’ve called the Gerry Society.’ ”

The Gerry Society was established in 1874 in New York. Its agents’ mission was to uncover child abuse; neglected children were found and delivered to orphanages. Gerry agents—who were authorized to arrest parents if need be—often put the fear of God into families. Mastin and Sam Sr. knew enough
to fear the Gerry agents. In time they would avoid New York City as much as possible. They would have special codes to make contact with Ramona. “If the phone would ring twice, and stop, then I knew it was a clue. My brother was in town.”

The strange and furtive relationship with her brother would haunt Ramona forever. She would blame much of it on her grandmother Luisa Sanchez, who Ramona felt encouraged Elvera to pay little attention to the children, because of skin color. “She was so bigoted,” Ramona would say of her grandmother. “I couldn’t have dark boyfriends. You understand how deep this goes? Sammy thought Mother raised me. My mother didn’t raise me.”