In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (23 page)

Fred Astaire, so coolly elegant, hosted the Academy Awards. The two pictures that had garnered so much critical acclaim and publicity
—All About Eve
, and
Sunset Boulevard
—fared quite well at the ceremony.
Eve
won six awards, including best picture, director, and supporting actor;
Sunset
won three—best screenplay, best art direction, and best dramatic score. José Ferrer and Judy Holliday won best actor and actress statues. Afterward, there was a rush to the after-parties, the crowd beating its way over to Herman Hover’s Ciro’s. They’d be treated to Janis Paige, but first the Will Mastin Trio.

By the time Sammy slithered and skipped offstage, they were hollering for him. Mastin and Sam Sr. were already making their way to the dressing room, and Sammy had to stop and turn around and go back. The impersonations had floored them. Paige, in her dressing room, couldn’t imagine what all the commotion was about. Joe Stabile—his brother Dick ran the Ciro’s house band—was in the audience that night. “[Mastin and Sam Sr.] didn’t want Sammy doing anything but tap dancing. They ruled the roost. It was, ‘Hey kid, come on out!’ But at Ciro’s, Sammy started breaking out. The audience went crazy.” Every time the audience broke into wild applause, Sammy would do something different. He had only so much time onstage. He would give them his whole damn arsenal—all the things he had done in Maine and Ohio and Pennsylvania that no one ever saw. All those things he had done in front of the mirror. He had waited years—years!—to get to one of the premier nightclubs.

When she finally stepped out onstage, Paige seemed tentative, still hearing the murmurings at the tables of the act that had preceded her. Herman Hover scanned the audience. He realized something had taken place. Mastin and Sam Sr. sat in the dressing room, cooling down, nodding to each other, nodding to Sammy the way you reverently nod in the direction of a great athlete. The impersonations had been a smash, his dancing had been a sensation, his instrument-playing had been a surprise. Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler smothered him with adulation.

Next morning, the reviews were wonderful. “
Once in a long time an artist hits town and sends the place on its ear,” said the
Hollywood Reporter
. “Such a one is young Sammy Davis Jr. of the Will Mastin Trio at Ciro’s.” Word spread
quickly, from Kansas City to Chicago to New York. “We knew about it in New York the next morning,” Maurice Hines says. “The black guys in New York were jumping up and down. It was like Joe Louis had won the championship fight. Sammy had just opened another door for us. We all figured we got a shot, because the door’s opening now.”

Hover booked Sammy for eight successive weeks. The word of mouth was furious. One night a comic sat at a table, alternately waving wildly and staring intently. It was Jerry Lewis, himself a onetime child vaudevillian who had been, since the 1940s, appearing at nightclubs around the country alongside Dean Martin. “I was stunned at his whole body of work,” Lewis would come to recall of first eyeing Sammy at Ciro’s. “He did two hours of everything known to theatrical man. I’m thinking, ‘He’s a goddamn rocket.’ I had to go backstage for theatrical common courtesy.” There was something, once he reached backstage, that bothered Lewis. It was Sammy’s stage dress: “He was working in a plaid jacket. After the show I said, ‘Dump the jacket. You got too much talent.’ ”

Lewis became an instant fan. On another night during the Ciro’s engagement, he took Jack Benny to see Sammy. “Jack Benny and I sat together and were flabbergasted,” Lewis recalls. “I was there the night before, and Sammy did such a different show.” And Sammy—constantly prowling for a way up the entertainment ladder—was eager to befriend Lewis. Not just as fan, but as something deeper, like kin. And Lewis accepted. “I advised him on contracts, and I helped him with business affairs,” says Lewis. Lewis was relentless in taking on a role in Sammy’s life. “He would call me ‘the Preacher,’ because I was always on him.”

During his weeks-long Ciro’s engagement, Sammy wowed the audiences. Hover gave the act a bump in salary to $750. The electricity surrounding the show brought William Morris’s Abe Lastfogel—and his wife, Frances—out to see it. It was widely known in Hollywood that if Frances Lastfogel took a shine to you, you were a lucky soul. She would force her Abe to make things happen for you. Frances, raised in Italian Harlem, had once been a vaudeville star herself, a singer who sang in a variety of dialects. Watching Sammy onstage, she instantly became smitten, poking her husband in the ribs, laughing at the act, her eyes widening at Sammy’s versatility. Abe went into action. He browbeat Silber to let the act go. Silber refused. He had a contract. And a contract was a contract. Lastfogel was hardly finished, and Silber knew he wasn’t, because men like Abe Lastfogel hated taking no for an answer. Sure enough, Lastfogel came up with another offer: he’d give a percentage of the Morris agenting fee to Silber, providing the Morris agency could be the primary agent. It meant Silber would still get a fee—for doing far less work. Lastfogel wanted to take Sammy into television, into bigger nightclubs. Arthur Silber knew he couldn’t
take Sammy into those arenas, and finally he agreed. Mastin, having worked with Silber in vaudeville in years gone by, trusted Silber far more than the slick-eyed Morris agents whom he knew nothing about and who were always watching Sammy inside the nightclubs.

So now, William Morris was into Arthur Silber, who was still into the Will Mastin Trio—which owned Sammy Davis, Jr., who was starting to explode.

There were a million reasons why they called it show business.

There was often a little clicking sound coming from behind the door of Will Mastin’s hotel room. Tap tap tap. Then long silences, only to start up again—tap tap tap. The old vaudevillian, all alone, would be tapping his cane on the floor of his room. He was a worrier. The German immigrant William Morris founded the agency that would bear his name in 1898. Will Mastin was twenty years old then, trying to bust his way beyond the pickaninny world of show business. And in 1932, when William Morris keeled over and died during a game of pinochle at the Friars Club in New York, Will Mastin was dragging a little seven-year-old kid around the country, trying to keep food in everyone’s mouths. Now, in 1951, there were television sets with voices inside them in hotel rooms. Now there was someone by the name of Abe Lastfogel huddling with his Sammy. Will Mastin used to be able to control Sammy, guiding him across the stage while practicing the dance routines, then buying him dollops of ice cream. Things were lovely then. But now his Sammy was speeding like one of those automobiles screeching around corners and killing unsuspecting pedestrians.

Mastin’s gnarly hand fit comfortably around the tip of his cane: tap tap tap. Sometimes Will Mastin, even with all that he had accumulated, not materially but spiritually—his pride and respect, his image, his little Sammy—worried that it would all get away. Sometimes, in fact, Will Mastin worried like a man on the verge of death.

His talent was the act. “Davis,” wrote
Variety
in an August 1, 1951, review of the trio at Bill Miller’s Riviera nightclub in New Jersey, “is a superlative hoofer, a suave gabber, a solid vocalist and a standout mimic—a natural. His only hazard is the possibility of burning himself out before his time in a long turn that requires him to go at a sprinter’s clip.” (The reviewer has no idea: Sammy rushed along as if the entire world of show business might be pulled out from under him, as vaudeville had been pulled out from under his father and Mastin, tossing them into penury.) The
Variety
reviewer had more to say: “That Davis has star potentialities is indubitable. The boy not only has a tour de force talent but a winning personality. That’s demonstrated in his intros to each bit and in tributes to [Mastin and Sam Sr.] for breaking him into the business, the chatter being delivered with both polish and charm.”

Backstage, 1954, following yet another performance. He is on the road all year long; the theaters and back stairwells are a comfort zone to him. Yet to come is the auto crash, and the bone-deep fears that will shake him up during a black and white love affair. He is but a twenty-nine-year-old song and dance man, wrapped in terry cloth and his own wide-eyed gallantry in the face of racial segregation
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

It was now time for Sammy to begin charting the act’s direction. His moves had to be subtle—on account of Will Mastin—yet forceful. He was determined to make decisions. Nathan Crawford and Big John Hopkins were both Will Mastin hires. They were nobody to Sammy, a valet and a driver, two Negroes that Mastin and Sam Sr. felt sentimental about. Sammy now needed
someone to promote the act, which meant promoting him. He needed someone willing to dream alongside him, who’d stay up past midnight imagining what new heights the act could be taken to. He wanted less sentiment and more shrewdness. He wanted someone out on the road with him who was white. He found his man in Jess Rand.

“First time I ever heard of Sammy Davis,” Rand recalls, “I was doing publicity for Johnny Conrad and the Conrad dancers. Johnny Conrad said, ‘Did you ever see Sammy Davis, Jr.?’ I said, ‘No, who’s Sammy Davis, Jr.?’ He said, ‘There’s this kid who dances with his father and uncle.’ ” Jess Rand also liked going to benefits because they featured a wide array of musical acts. He heard about another benefit, this one to take place at Madison Square Garden. If you arrived at most of the benefits early, you’d often get to see smaller, largely unknown acts, which would be warming up the audience before the bigger names came on. Rand was barely in his seat when he heard the announcer’s voice introduce “The Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis Jr.” “I remember the opening number, ‘Put On Your Dancing Shoes.’ Then Sammy started doing impressions. I couldn’t believe it. It was a blast of energy like you never saw.”

Leaving the Garden, walking fast, hustling, Rand accidentally bumped someone. Words were exchanged, a punch thrown in Rand’s direction. A fight erupted, and Rand left with a bloody nose. He was walking slower now, wounded, in pain, and decided to go for a rest over at Child’s, an all-night eatery. Approaching the eatery he spotted someone. He was holding his bloodied nose, so his vision was blurred, but it looked like the kid he had seen onstage at Madison Square Garden. “As I was walking past, I see Sammy Davis, Jr., walking with a whole handful of magazines. He looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you get your nose fixed.’ That’s how I met Sammy Davis, Jr.” Rand couldn’t let Sammy get away, and soon they were engaged in conversation. They talked, about music, the benefit show Sammy had just been in, entertainers. Jess Rand was actually looking for a better job. He had publicity experience, and he had moxie. Sammy was looking for someone to go on the road with him, someone to help promote and market the act. Sammy as much talked it over with his father and Mastin—always careful to establish solid eye contact with Mastin when telling him something—as he told them it was going to happen. He was simply, as deftly as possible, beginning to exert a measure of power within the act. Mastin and Sam Sr. agreed with Sammy to hire Rand and promised him forty-five dollars a week, each member of the trio contributing fifteen dollars toward his weekly salary. (Sammy, growing in shrewdness, also hired a Negro press agent, Billy Rowe, who had worked for boxer Joe Louis, to keep his name bouncing in the Negro press.)

Jess Rand grew up in New York City, his mother a pianist. All around him was beautiful music. In his youth he had been quick on his feet, comfortable around artists. At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he worked on the student newspaper, the
Magpie
. One of his fellow writers on the paper was a shy, large-eyed student by the name of James Baldwin, who would be destined for literary fame. After high school, Rand found a job running sheet music back and forth to various offices in Manhattan. His employer was Irving Berlin. There were days when Rand would find himself over at the Waldorf, delivering music to another musician—Cole Porter.

After wartime service, Rand—dark-haired, skinny, jazzy—returned to New York and got himself a job doing publicity for various musicians. When he had a little extra money to throw around, he’d go catch the acts swinging through town. He was wild about Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. There was nothing better to him than hustling through Manhattan’s teeming streets on his way to another concert.

It took Jess Rand no time at all to feel the Sammy energy, the Sammy hunger. Sammy asked a million questions. He wanted to know how to get his name in the papers. He wanted to be on radio. He wanted publicity—now. “Sammy said to me, ‘My grandmother won’t believe I’m in show business until I have my name in [Walter] Winchell’s column and my picture in Lindy’s window.’ ”

Rand realized he was being tested.

He went and got a picture of Sammy, signed it himself (“To Leo Lindy, who feeds pastrami every night to the Broadway Army. Sincerely, Sammy Davis Jr.”), framed it, and made a beeline over to Lindy’s. He found Leo—whom he knew from hanging around Broadway—and he begged and cajoled him to put the thing in the window. Leo didn’t know Sammy from beans, but he knew Rand and liked him, his eagerness. “Couple nights later I said, ‘Sammy, you want to go to Lindy’s?’ ” Sammy shrieked when he saw the picture right there in the window.