In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (24 page)

But now Rand had to get Sammy’s name in Winchell’s column. He pleaded with the acerbic columnist to come catch his client at Bill Miller’s Riviera nightclub across the river from Manhattan. Winchell hemmed and hawed, put him off. “Winchell didn’t like Sammy,” says Rand. “He said, ‘He’s always chasing white women.’ ” Rand told Winchell he didn’t know anything about the white women, he only knew that Sammy was one hell of an act. Winchell, beaten down, finally said he’d go. Then Rand got paranoid; he had to tell Winchell that it would be terrible for him if he mentioned only Sammy, that he must mention “The Will Mastin Trio Featuring Sammy Davis Jr.,” because if only Sammy were mentioned, Will Mastin might get upset. “I said to Walter, ‘Sammy’s 99 percent of the act, but it’s got to say, ‘The Will Mastin Trio Featuring
Sammy Davis Jr.’ ” Winchell thought Rand a little strange, but liked him nevertheless. “I said, ‘Walter, I’ll lose Sammy’s account if you don’t mention Will Mastin.’ ”

Winchell went—in coat, in hat, striking fear, the cigarette dangling, the smoke curling, the eyes darting—and watched, nonchalantly at first, then, as the show went on, with more focus. “I don’t know what he’s doing with those two older men,” Winchell said to Rand afterward, but the way he said it—with such awe for Sammy—Rand suddenly knew Winchell would put it in the paper, and he did. “I got him into Winchell that fast,” says Rand. “Sammy didn’t believe it.”

They hit the road.

Three Negroes and now Jess Rand. Jess was surprised by the act. It was the old—Mastin and Sam Sr.—and the new: Sammy. Rand found the clashing of styles almost comical. “Will never changed anything,” says Rand. “They were still doing the same thing from vaudeville.” Night after night Rand would spy Mastin “shooting the cuffs,” while still standing onstage. It was an old vaudeville habit. Mastin wanted the audience to think he was giving secret hand cues to Sammy.

Rand found the two aging vaudevillians strange but delightful. He’d sometimes return to the hotel lobby only to spot Mastin in a chair, holding his stomach—he had ulcers—rocking back and forth, mumbling: “Something bad is gonna happen. Something bad is gonna happen.” Sammy told Rand to ignore it.

They rolled on.

The four of them were in Boston, walking, checking out the city. Mastin had slept fitfully the night before. “Will passed out,” says Rand. It was the ulcer, spitting fire again. Passersby gathered. Mastin, on the ground and in agony, suddenly told Sammy and Rand to hurry and take off his money belt—he was afraid the crowd would jump the entire lot of them. He quickly recovered on his own. Will Mastin was frightened of hospitals and preferred home remedies and store-bought medications.

Rand came to respect Mastin’s reverence for show business. “He was always in the dressing room, polishing his cane.”

They’d have a day off, strolling in a town, and Sammy would duck inside a store. He’d roll his eyes over shirts, scarves, hats. “I’ll take two,” he would say—one for himself, one for his father. “His father had style like you wouldn’t believe,” Rand says.

Dusk would turn to evening, and they’d stroll, loose and limber, Sammy humming a tune, snapping his fingers. Sometimes strangers—two or three, staring hard—positioned themselves in front of the group as if ready to start a confrontation. Sam Sr. always stepped forward at such times; he was responsible
for his boy. “He’d say, ‘You better watch out. You never met this nigger on the street before,’ ” recalls Rand. “It was a whisper.” And it was enough to send the strangers on their way.

As press agent for Sammy and the trio, Rand always felt he was in the business of informing the public, of educating radio station deejays and magazine writers and newspaper writers, trying to get them to pay attention to this Negro act, to this kid with these two hoofers. “I’m a press agent in a country that doesn’t know there’s such a thing as a chitlin circuit.” Chitlin circuit: those small theaters in out-of-the-way towns that didn’t get much press, if any at all.

They got turned down for gigs, and it angered Rand. “I used to get sick [of the] people getting gigs we should have,” recalls Rand. “Sammy would say, ‘Baby, it ain’t right. The timing ain’t right.’ ”

Rand came to hate driving through the Midwest—Ohio, Illinois, Missouri. They got stopped a lot. “The police would frisk Sam Sr., and I’d lean against the car. We used to drive all through the night so we wouldn’t have to stop in certain places. One police officer said, ‘I don’t know what you’re driving this man around for.’ I said, ‘I work for him.’ One time we mentioned Sammy Davis, Jr., and the cop said, ‘How’s that little spook?’ ”

St. Louis became a frightful place for the trio. Once a cop demanded Sam Sr.’s wallet, and he gave it to him. The cop lifted fifty dollars, right before their eyes. “You can go on now,” he said, Rand watching, astonished. “Couple miles up, another cop did the same thing.”

Rand wasn’t accustomed to having to pick and choose places to eat. There were eateries along the roads that would not serve Negroes. “It was scary,” says Rand. “You’d have to go to the Greyhound bus stations to get some doughnuts and something to eat.” Some evenings they couldn’t find a place to lodge: “We slept in the car.” He and Sammy carried clothes in bags to wash. “We couldn’t even go to the Automat—a black and a white guy—without people looking at us.”

They stayed at places where you had to drop a quarter into a slot for the television to come on.

The two hoofers—Mastin and Sam Sr.—carried jewelry, just as the vaudevillians did before them. If their cash was stolen, they could pull their hidden jewelry out in the next town and pawn it. Good jewelry could be the ticket to keep rolling. Jewelry, then, was a kind of get-out-of-jail card—before you went to jail.

All that jewelry, for years and years, that had been gleaming in little Sammy’s eyes.

Will Mastin wore a diamond ring. Offstage or in the car, he took it off. Or sometimes just turned it facing in. Onstage he turned it back up—so it glittered, like the gold tooth he had. The jewelry was Mastin’s only indulgence.

Otherwise, he remained an ascetic. He hoarded his money. “Will used to take me in the bathroom,” says Rand. “He’d get you in the stall, take out a bag of money, say, ‘Thanks, you did a good job this week.’ ”

The sacrifices Mastin made for the trio touched Rand. Sometimes Mastin would skip a meal. Sometimes he’d just dine on Jell-O. “Will didn’t eat, Sammy did. Will didn’t get new shoes, Sammy did.”

The nightclubs: “Some of them were toilets,” remembers Rand. “We worked Harry Allman’s Town Casino in Buffalo. Get a lot of Canadians there. The place in Montreal we played was called the Black Magic Room. Then the Three Rivers Inn in Syracuse. While we were traveling we picked up little nightclubs in the New York area.”

Winter turned to spring, which turned to summer, which turned to autumn, which turned back to winter again. They stayed on the move, looking for fame.

Even as the nightclubs turned into big theaters, Sammy was hardly satisfied. “I’ve played every big theater in this country—but way down in the billing list,” he noted rather sadly toward the end of 1950. “
I’m not saying the Will Mastin Trio isn’t fast and furious, but I’m working towards that graduation day when the people will like me well enough for me to fly solo.”

He always talked about going solo out of earshot of his father and Will Mastin.

It was April 1939 when NBC heralded a milestone by becoming the first television network to broadcast on a regular basis. Initially, motion picture executives were not worried by the new medium. Movies were movies, bigger than life itself. But then the executives began to ponder the effects of television, because it was surely here to stay. However, with the onset of World War II, the production of televisions nearly came to a halt. After the war, however, TV—with new sets rolling off the assembly lines—became a cultural event. The 1948–49 season was a boon year for the medium. The first cable linkups between East and West Coasts took place. Some of the old vaudevillians were frightened of television, of all the wires, the machinery. But others, like Milton Berle and Arthur Godfrey, chewed on it with ravenous appetites.

On September 10, 1950, NBC premiered
The Colgate Comedy Hour
, a Sunday evening variety show done live that had been the brainchild of comic star Eddie Cantor. The show had a revolving door of hosts—Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, Fred Allen, the comedy duo Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Cantor himself. Before the show’s premiere, Cantor’s show-business career had been in decline. Born to Russian immigrants in New York City in 1892, Cantor was orphaned in early childhood. At fourteen he began working in vaudeville and burlesque houses. He found success with the Ziegfeld Follies, and on Broadway in 1926 in
Kid Boots
. Cantor often performed in blackface alongside the Negro performer Bert Williams. He had odd performing tics; he began rolling his eyes wildly—the whites flashing at the audience—and became known as “banjo eyes.” (Some Negro performers had been doing the strange minstrel eye rolling for years.) Cantor took his popularity to the big screen and in 1934 was the highest-paid movie actor in America, owing to the success of a string of movies he made for Sam Goldwyn, among them
Whoopee!
,
Roman Candles
, and
Kid Millions
. But after World War II his fortunes faded, as his act suddenly seemed outdated.

Vice President Richard Nixon visits the Will Mastin Trio backstage in 1954 at New York City’s Copacabana. Jerry Lewis is at far right. For Nixon and Sammy, it was the beginning of a beguiling friendship. Eighteen years later Sammy would campaign for Nixon’s reelection. The decision would become a potent political drama in its own right, anchored to the forces of race, American history, and Sammy’s naiveté
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

When Cantor would host
The Colgate Comedy Hour
, he was adamant about having exciting guests. “
My format for the show was purely variety,” he explained, “with a slight theme to take it out of the realm of vaudeville.” He was proud of himself for introducing various new acts to national television. On February 17, 1952, he introduced Sammy Davis, Jr. to the first national
audience that would see the tap-dancing sensation. Arthur Penn was working as the floor manager for the Cantor show. “Eddie Cantor came around and said, ‘Wait till you see this kid,’ ” recalls Penn. “He was always a great one for finding new talent,” says Penn of Cantor. “Of course he didn’t have a lot of talent himself.” Penn goes on: “[Cantor] knew he needed a lot of help. We had moved the show out of New York—to Los Angeles. Live show. No tape in those days. Went out live every Sunday—NBC.” Cantor, onstage in a silk bathrobe and a white towel around his neck—he had just exhausted himself in a skit—said to the national audience: “The other night I saw the Will Mastin Trio and one of the greatest hunks of talent I’ve ever seen in my life, Sammy Davis, Jr.” Mastin and Sam Sr. were in light-colored tuxedos, Sammy in a dark one. Sartorially, he stood out. Dancing—smooth, lovely, furious—they were wondrous. “It was an act,” says Penn, “where the two older men would bracket Sammy. Sammy would cut loose with great dancing, good singing, great imitations.” They all rolled offstage in perfect syncopation.

Barry Gray, a New York radio host whom everyone seemed to listen to, began talking Sammy up on his show, praising the Colgate appearance. “He was raving about the show, absolutely going out of his mind,” remembers Jess Rand.

The trio’s appearance was such a hit that Cantor asked them to come back several more times. Sometimes Cantor and Penn and other production staffers would just sit and watch Sammy off-camera. He’d be rehearsing. They’d just marvel. “At rehearsals he would do stuff that was not going to be on the show. At the rehearsal Cantor would say, ‘Do Jerry Lewis.’ Sammy would do this stuff, mostly for us.”

Penn thought Sammy one of the more kinetic figures he had ever seen. “[Sammy] enjoyed himself a lot, and he enjoyed this new medium. Television was a perfect home for him. Television was like a miracle.”

As for Mastin and Sam Sr., there was something a little mechanical about their television appearances. It was as if they were nervous about being watched by the camera’s eye, by all those millions of viewers.

After his multiple appearances on the Cantor show, Sammy adopted a strange and odd habit: he began rolling his eyes, furiously, wildly showing the whites of them while onstage dancing. Why, he was mimicking Eddie Cantor! Banjo-eyed Sammy! From Cantor, it looked like an imitation. On Sammy, it looked painful, the return of the Negro minstrel.

He wished to be the pure entertainer. To succeed in the world of black and white, he would have to put his mimicry to full use. He had started practicing an English accent. By jove, he sounded like a white minstrel performer—in blackface! Jerry Lewis advised him to drop the accent.

He didn’t hear Lewis.

He heard only the applause, the white hands clapping together in the audiences; the cackling noise from old wide-eyed Eddie Cantor in the rehearsal hall slapping his knee, and laughing, and laughing, and laughing. The hour-long format of the
Colgate
was actually a grind for Cantor. “It damn near killed me,” he admitted. But what else was he to do? What old vaudevillian wanted to wind up behind the door of a hotel room tapping his cane on the floor with sickening worry? Eddie Cantor got his aching body to the NBC set, and there he saw Sammy—rehearsing, mimicking, giving a show before the cameras were even turned on—and he howled. It kept his own blood warm. And Eddie Cantor gave Sammy the same pitched laughter he used to give Bert Williams, his dear and sadly dead friend whom Cantor thought “
the whitest black man I ever knew.”