In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (18 page)

Sammy couldn’t get—except in his mind—close to Sinatra. But Prince Spencer was another matter. Spencer wore nice clothes, and nice jewelry. He let Sammy wear some of his fine clothes. Sammy loved it, trying on shirts, vests, pants, then preening in a mirror. Spencer learned soon enough that Sammy operated on seesawing emotions of competitive spirit and praise: he’d praise Spencer, then behind closed doors he’d swear he’d become a better dancer and performer. Spencer was insightful enough to recognize something about young Sammy: “He was very ambitious.”

At first Spencer thought little of Sammy’s peculiar need—or maybe it was a hunger—but in time what began to wear on him was Sammy’s constant attempts to meet movie stars and singers. Sometimes, for hours on end, he’d want to hang around theaters, or loll outside movie studios blowing cigarette smoke and angling his neck for whoever might be approaching. Or—growing bored and unsuccessful in stargazing—he’d want to rush off to a nightclub or a movie premiere to see whom he might be able to pigeonhole there—maybe an autograph, a handshake, a contact for Mastin and his father. “He wanted to be invited where the top entertainers were,” recalls Spencer. “But at fourteen, fifteen, no one knew him or went out of their way to be in the company of the Will Mastin Trio.” But Sammy insisted, and he’d get to staring so forlornly at Spencer’s jewelry that Spencer would feel sorry for him. “A lot of times when Sammy wanted to go someplace, I’d let him wear my watch and rings.” Sammy would position himself to meet the stars—Danny Thomas, Humphrey Bogart, Milton Berle—and he would bow before them with graciousness and solicitousness. But it was off-putting to Spencer. He’d sit back and nearly recoil. “I saw Sammy ‘Uncle Tomming’ with white people, and I resented it. The Step Brothers, well, we knew our place was not to be in white people’s company. He wanted to be in their company. I’d see it, and I’d try to block it out of my mind.” While Will Mastin and Sam Sr. were sleeping, or playing pinochle, or soaking their feet in Epsom salts, their Sammy was pounding the pavement. “When Sammy was by himself,” says Spencer, “he got mistreated, called ‘nigger’ and ‘coolio.’ ” But Sammy could take the insults. They were nothing, just edgy and whispery words floating in and out of his ears. He wanted to make contacts, to elevate the trio. In self-promotion, he knew no shame. “They didn’t infringe on entertainers the way Sammy did,” Spencer says of Mastin and Sam Sr. “Sammy would make it his business to find out where the stars were and get their autographs.”

He has just performed at Bill Miller’s tony Riviera nightclub in Palisades, New Jersey. It is 1953 now. The kid in the middle is all grown up. Sammmeeeee! they are beginning to scream. He will plead with the photographer, however, to never let this photo get in the hands of the tabloids—and it doesn’t. Deep in the smiling, there is the whiff of sexual innuendo, of scandal—of black and white
. (
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

It was becoming routine for the young Sammy: once a door was opened, he smiled his way through and then unleashed his talent on whoever would give him a moment. He’d corner nightclub owners and promoters and tell them he was a dancer with the Will Mastin Trio, a dance act, new to town. Mastin and his father didn’t have the young legs anymore, and Sammy knew it, so he’d run for them, he’d be their legs, he’d pounce like a lion. He was their legs onstage, and he’d be their legs in the streets. He did not notice the shame in Prince Spencer’s eyes. It was so very dim compared to the light of possibility.

But the Four Step Brothers were moving, far quicker than the Mastin trio, and Sammy worried about keeping up. He had no choice but to watch as the careers of the Step Brothers took off. In 1943 the quartet appeared in
It Ain’t Hay
, an Abbott and Costello film. A year later they were featured in
Greenwich Village
, a Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche vehicle. No one was tossing any movie scripts in the direction of the Will Mastin Trio.

Given Sammy’s competitive spirit, their ascendancy must have caused some kind of wound on his psyche. The laying down of a kind of ethos perhaps—to succeed, to run, to push, to climb and climb.

As much as he lamented that the trio’s career was not moving faster, Sammy never stopped practicing. He practiced the speech patterns of movie stars, their mannerisms. He wondered how—and when—he and his father and Mastin would make it into the movies. Sometimes he became melancholy. He sulked in his small hotel rooms. He bought albums—Jimmy Lunceford, Ellington, Sinatra—and listened to them until he fell asleep. He read his comic books, fussed over his electrical gadgets. He fell behind in his correspondence courses and cried not one bit about it.

On account of the double-breasted suits he favored, young Negro boys looked at Sammy as if he were a minister’s son. They smiled strangely at him, more out of mockery than admiration. He gave the same smile right back. Their games of throw and catch meant nothing to him. He was after the attention of their parents, who might pay a silver dollar to see him dance onstage. So he lived in his own world, between childhood and adulthood with no in-between.

He never seemed to get enough calcium. His teeth needed attention, cavities on both sides of his mouth. But there was no money to see a dentist, so he sometimes ate his meals in pain. He dreamed of Montreal. And dreamed of white girls. He had no interest in black heroes like boxer Joe Louis; he wanted to meet Sinatra. He listened to the singers on
Your Hit Parade
and lip-synched along. He dreamed himself to sleep, and dreamed himself awake.

Sometimes, in yet another city, he’d be dispatched to the store to get medicine for the small ailments that bedeviled his father and Mastin—rubbing cream and soaking salts to soothe the leg muscles. He’d sneak a cigarette, hand in pocket, the smoke curling above him while he took the pavement on his light feet.

Then it came, as it had come for so many thousands and thousands of others, and it stopped him, it quieted his tap shoes. It was his wartime draft notice. Psychologically, he was unprepared for it. Guns and blood and dying seemed but mere fantasy to him. Being a connoisseur of comic books, he believed in Superman. Now war and danger were as close as the blaring headlines. Abe Ford, the Boston booking agent, remembers talking with Sammy—they were
zooming through Boston for an engagement—just before he went off to the army. Sammy seemed petrified. “I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘I’m scared stiff.’ I said, ‘Sammy, not only will you never fire a gun, you’ll never see one, because of the talent you have.’ ”

Still, fear of the unknown gripped Sammy—just as it did his father and Mastin. The two hoofers knew men had gone off to war and not returned. Anything could happen. Will Mastin was old enough to remember that, in the aftermath of World War I, plenty of acts had simply fallen apart. And plenty of men had come home minus a limb—a foot, a leg.

Sammy found himself in San Francisco on the eve of induction. He was spending his last hours carousing with dancer Paul Winik and some friends in a hotel room—food, drink, memories, dance steps. Then the phone rang. Winik reached for it. It was the front desk calling. “We hear you got black people up in your room,” someone from the front desk complained. They took their carousing elsewhere.

Next morning—August 19, 1944—Sammy Davis, Jr., entered the U.S. Army in San Francisco. Always ashamed of his lack of formal education, he put “high school graduate” for level of education on his induction form, which was quite far from the actual truth; he had no formal education at all.

It would be his first time away from the “home”—the hotels and motels, the trains and buses, the boardinghouses, the small towns and big cities—that had been provided by his father and Mastin. His father told him not to worry about his records and record player, his comic books, his nice clothes; he promised to take care of everything.

In a few months, Sammy would be nineteen years old. An interesting age, where there is still belief in possibility and even magic. His mother, Elvera, was nineteen when she first ventured out into the wide world to see what destiny awaited her.

After seeing Sammy off, Will Mastin and Sam Sr. made their way south from San Francisco by road and unpacked their bags at the old Morris Hotel in Los Angeles. Without their Sammy, they now had to imagine a different kind of act. Mastin hustled up a couple of jobs in burlesque houses, but the work quickly faded. Youth was not on their side, as it was for the Nicholas Brothers and the Four Step Brothers. Hardly anyone believed two male tap dancers—who were getting on in years—could keep customers in their seats. Bookings began to evaporate. Mastin brooded more than ever. The stack of bills that he kept inside the money belt he wore around his waist got smaller and smaller. “Will would come by every Friday, and I’d slip him a little something,” remembers Paul Winik. “I was working and they weren’t. When Sammy left they had
nothing. I don’t know how they survived. I gave them a few bucks, but what was that?”

Mastin was hardly going to take Sammy’s absence without action. He would have to improvise. All his life he had been improvising. He needed to find another dancer, and he sent word around. Pudgy Barksdale asked for an audition. She hailed from St. Louis. She had originally come out to Los Angeles to dance in
Born Happy
, a show that starred Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. When she heard news that Will Mastin was looking for a dancer, she was eager for a tryout. “They weren’t famous yet,” Barksdale said. Mastin liked what he saw in Barksdale. She was small, five foot two—small like Sammy. Mastin and Sam Sr. welcomed her into the act.

Pudgy was amused by the two men, whom she thought of as from another era. “I thought of [Mastin] as old-time show business,” she says. “I thought the routine he did was hokey. But Sammy’s daddy was a good tap dancer.”

Will Mastin had been living on “hokey” for a very long time now. “Hokey” had kept him in nice suits, nice shoes, felt hats, long overcoats come winter, linen come summer, silk at his pleasure.

Mastin concentrated on getting bookings in Los Angeles, mostly—he and Sam Sr. wanted Sammy to be able to find them if need be. He grinned tightly in the company of show promoters as he introduced his new dancer. “I was cute and little,” Barksdale says, aware of how Mastin promoted her. “I had a costume.” Her costume was “a little female tuxedo.” She wore black shoes and stockings. “I was treated like a minor, really, even though I was in my twenties.” Barksdale had played better venues than what Mastin offered. “They were working at nightclubs around Los Angeles,” she recalls. “The clubs were so small that [some of the] seats would be at the bar.” She’d watch Mastin and Sam Sr. onstage and, sometimes—surprising even herself—the hokiness got the better of her. “They looked good,” she admits. Barksdale remembers one engagement where female strippers appeared onstage doing fan dances. Will Mastin was a dignified man, but the war was on, and money was tight, so he was not above playing burlesque houses and two-bit bars up and down Central Avenue. The old vaudevillian aimed to survive.

In time, there were fissures in the new arrangement. Pudgy Barksdale was young. She wanted to have a good time. She drank a little. Mastin was a disciplinarian. He did not brook tardiness. Sometimes there were cold stares, which made Barksdale chuckle. She kept her ears open for other dancing opportunities.

Barksdale got a job offer to join a chorus that impresario Leonard Reed was putting together. Reed was half Negro and half Cherokee Indian. Early in his career he had brazenly and successfully passed himself off as a white dancer. He was now preparing to take some dancers into Nevada and other western
states on a tour. Knowing Mastin and Sam Sr. had an uncertain future with Sammy away, Barksdale asked Reed if the two hoofers could join up, and he told her they could. Will Mastin in a Leonard Reed show? Mastin didn’t think so. He refused the offer, allowing that he did not fly—which he didn’t—but the real reason was simple pride. So she left them. It was no leather off Will Mastin’s money belt. He had seen dancers come and go for years.

Years before, Mastin had had cyclists and contortionists in his employ; he couldn’t find either now, so he hired a roller skater instead. So there they were, Mastin and Sam Sr., two dancers in tuxedos twirling canes with a young roller skater zooming around and between them onstage. It felt and looked desperate, and they both knew it. Mastin let the roller skater go.

The Will Mastin Trio was down to two again.

Mastin was back to rubbing the money belt, jangling the coins in his pocket. He had to keep the tuxes cleaned; he and Sam Sr. had to eat.

As days rolled over onto weeks, the two men whiled away their time in and around the environs of Los Angeles, reading the theatrical trade publications, checking the desk in the lobby of the Morris Hotel for messages, eating greasy food, hoping for war’s end. They were indeed resilient men, dancers who had traversed the country many times over: through the snows of Maine and the rains of Seattle; through the heat of Texas and the great mountains that humped in the middle of the country; along the Mississippi River and into dilapidated theaters; and into other evenings through doors of theaters constructed in the last century. And onward—often catching their breath in the falling-apart Negro part of town—playing the double and triple bills, sleeping with noise in the hallways; then, at sunrise, on a train’s platform in coats and fedoras with the train whistle slicing the air, then gone, on the by and by: Harlem, the Catskills, the province of Quebec—they had seen it all. They had moved about the whole of North America like a tiny regiment. Three Negro dancers—six legs—counting on a juiced-up Sammy to dazzle.