In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (28 page)

There were problems from the beginning. “None of the actors liked the script,” remembers Jess Rand. It was also obvious, from the beginning of taping rehearsals, that Will Mastin was out of his element. The television wires and equipment seemed to bedevil him. He was a vaudevillian, and vaudeville had consisted of much improvisation. This was television, and marks—positions where actors had to be—had to be hit. Lines had to be memorized, one’s own lines as well as the lines of others. “Will couldn’t learn his lines,” says Rand. “And Sam Sr. didn’t care.” Rand says the two desperately wanted to get back out on the road, because, to them, “that’s where the money was.”

Sammy, sensing angst among cast members, approached the producers. “Would you mind if Jess did something with this?” he asked. The producers didn’t mind, and Rand was quite game. “I rented a typewriter at the Ritz and rewrote the dialogue,” Rand recalls.

The pilot was to be shot before a live audience. On the day of filming, Rand stood outside a New York City studio handing out tickets for passersby to come in and view the taping.

After the taping, Frances Taylor was convinced they all had done something special. It was not a show that put Negro stereotype on display. It featured Negro and white dancers. It gave her hope about the medium. But then, as time passed, no one heard when the show would be scheduled. The network approached Geritol to become one of the show’s sponsors, but they declined. Other potential sponsors did the same. And some sponsors seemed confused about how to sell the show—as comedy, or variety? Sammy was the star, and television had never had a Negro male star singing, dancing,
and
acting. “We were all excited it would happen,” Frances Taylor recalls. “Then came news it wouldn’t. We were so depressed. I remember the dance scenes, and I said, ‘How can they not want this?’ The fact it was a ‘first,’ I couldn’t accept. I was the first black ballerina to perform for the Paris Opera.” Photographs from the pilot got out to the press. But by the time they were printed in some Negro publications—with all the fanfare of the belief that a new kind of Negro show was about to be unveiled—news had come down that the show had been dropped. ABC had spent $20,000 to make the pilot. It was a show without a mammy figure, and it was a show with a theme—struggling musicians—as opposed to slapstick and stereotype. Will Mastin was not Andy, and Sam Sr. was not Amos. They were gentlemen in high hats who wore monogrammed shirts and patent leather shoes. Onstage, next to Sammy, they were like silent-screen stars—seen and not heard. They were as bewildered by television as television was by them. But there they were, figures on a show that had been cast adrift before it had a chance to land on the schedule.

There were those who whispered to Sammy that his father and Mastin had
stood in his way, that absent them the pilot might have stood a chance. The appeals to him to jettison the two grew even louder in the wake of the pilot’s failure. “Everybody was trying to convince Sammy to leave his father and Mastin,” says Rand.

Will Mastin and Sam Sr. and even Sammy shed no tears over the failed
Three for the Road
pilot. A naked stage with a microphone was all they had ever required to entertain.

Jess Rand came up with the idea to take out an ad in
Variety
showing a map of the United States. Superimposed over the map was a picture of the Will Mastin Trio. The message Rand sought to convey was that the trio traveled anywhere and everywhere. For quite a long time now, they had been three for the road.

Arthur Silber died on January 9, 1954, in Hollywood. He was seventy-five years old. The death freed the Morris agency from him—though not completely. Silber may have been a one-man operation, but he was not without a certain caginess. In the fine print of the contract he had signed with the Morris agency, it stipulated that, in the event of his death, the small percentage he had been getting from the Morris agency must continue to be paid—to his wife. So now, as long as Mastin owned a percentage of Sammy, Silber would continue to own a percentage of Mastin, who was under contract to the Morris agency, to whom he and Sammy both owed a percentage.

Sammy was now in debt not just to the living—but also to the dead.

J
ess Rand thought it was a prank. Someone was on the phone from the United States Treasury Department. He described himself as a secret service agent. Rand later remembered the agent’s request: “ ‘The vice president and his wife would like to come to the Copa to see the show with Sammy Davis, Jr., tomorrow night.’ I said, ‘Which show?’ He said, ‘Second show.’ Sure enough, the vice president of the United States walks in. Sammy introduces the vice president.” Nixon was dressed in a double-breasted suit, a printed tie. Nixon, raised poor in California amid movies and make-believe, always had an admiration for show business and actors. He chuckled throughout Sammy’s performance. Now and then he’d nod his head, as if to catch the beat. Pat Nixon, the vice president’s wife, beamed. Afterward, Nixon asked to be taken to the dressing room. Jules Podell, the club’s owner, and Jerry Lewis led the way. Jess Rand was busy hustling up a photographer. He wasn’t about to let such a moment pass. They all lined up: Sam Sr., Sammy, Nixon next to Sammy with his arm around Sammy’s shoulder, and Will Mastin and Lewis. A flash went off. Rand knew publicity, and this was hot publicity. He got hold of all the negatives. “I brought them down to every paper in New York—the
News
, the
Herald Tribune
, the
Times
. Not one paper printed the picture.” It is, in a way, a thrilling black-and-white photograph: Will Mastin, a onetime pickaninny child performer, at the shoulder of the vice president of the United States; Sammy, in his cummerbund and suspenders and pretty white shirt, with a chin-jutting smile and his hair as wavy—as “white”—as Nixon’s; Sam Sr., the very picture of insouciance; Nixon, far more relaxed and at ease than most photographs ever revealed him to be. Sammy swooned in the heat of such moments. Sinatra was big, but Nixon was bigger because he was the vice president. Sinatra might have traveled with men who carried guns, but so did Nixon: those secret service agents! It didn’t matter that the picture never made the newspapers. Nixon had come to see him. Sammy never forgot. Nor did Nixon.

Backstage at Bill Miller’s Riviera, 1953, with, as they were billed, the Riviera Beauties. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. avoided the Beauties—owing to their own nervousness about possible racial backlash. Not so their Sammy
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

•     •     •

Sometimes, onstage, Sammy would cup a cigarette in his palm, light it—just like Bogie in so many movies—drag on it for a few puffs, all the while tapping, the heels clicking very slowly on the darkened stage as he moved about inside the coned spotlight. Curls of smoke rose. But then he’d drop the lit cigarette to his feet, crush it out, and start tapping, the seductive taps turning to fiery control, then outright abandon. Inside twenty seconds, upward of three hundred lightning clicks of the taps. It sounded like thin noise from a bell tower gone amok, and, metallically, it all sounded beautiful. His father and Mastin, in the wings, their eyes wide, nodding almost imperceptibly, had seen it so many times, sometimes in the hotel room, sometimes in the hotel hallway, where
he’d practice, getting the guests, at first, riled, then, upon seeing him, curious and excited. Onstage now he seemed to be stamping out more than a cigarette. Sammy had reduced them, Mastin and his father—his teachers—to fans. And with each beautifully timed click of the heel, he seemed to be soaring away from them. But they were hardly frightened. In the haze of their own memories, and nostalgia, they convinced themselves they were looking at their former selves in him.

Imagine: a ship in a bottle; a dancer inside two aging men.

In the strata of upper-crust Negro society, one particular automobile took on a grand and psychic aura: the Cadillac. Moneyed Negroes—funeral directors, boxers, ministers, bootleggers, college presidents, Elks Lodge members—all cut supreme figures alighting from behind the wheel of a new Cadillac. The door would open, a leg would bend out, a shoe would touch ground, a body would rise up, and the heads of onlookers would swivel. Will Mastin of the Will Mastin Trio cut such a figure. He drove a Cadillac.

If well-heeled white America took the Cadillac for granted—just another comfortable car, from home to work and back home again—then Negro America took it for much more. It represented not only style, but one-upmanship. In a world where few luxuries fell from America’s tree into the Negro’s lap, the Cadillac was a purchase of quiet power, a victory in the commercial sweepstakes of the American dream. The 1954 ads in
Car and Driver
showed a family man and wife and their two children, all standing and smiling next to their Cadillac. The ads were handsome; the smiling and adorable members of the families always white. In 1954 America, a Negro driving a new Cadillac was a peculiar, even scintillating sight.

The ’54 Caddy was quite a stylish machine. It was “lower and longer in silhouette,” proclaimed the GM ad. Its features were seductive. “A great new 230-horsepower engine has added new power and explosiveness. A vastly improved Hydra-Matic Drive provides even greater smoothness and flexibility.” The power steering was now said to be more “advanced”; the car featured a “more massive grille” and a more “distinctive rear deck,” along with a “panoramic windshield.” In the middle of the steering wheel was a decorative cone. Nothing overwhelming; you might like to know that GM paid attention to its ornamentation. “
And what is even more remarkable, this great new Cadillac is as thrilling to drive as it is to see!” So it was actually more than a car; it was close to a dream. To the common man, it was automobile royalty. With those big whitewall tires, it seemed to be taking everything with it as it rolled by, hopes and whatever else was beating inside your very own chest.

Sammy never had a car of his own. But that year, that summer, Will and
Sam Sr. blessed him with his very own lime green convertible ’54 Caddy, fresh off the assembly line. He jumped high in the air—like the dancer he was—when he first spotted it, turning with beads of sweat forming on his forehead, his yelp-yelp of a laugh filling the air, touching Jess Rand, standing nearby. Will got a bear hug, Sam Sr. got a bear hug; Sammy would have hugged the world if he could have. Climbing in, starting it up, he cruised up and down Sunset Boulevard. He felt special as a king. The car took the corners and the summer breezes—top down—so sweetly. At night Sammy parked it on Sunset while he grabbed something to eat. He was showing it off. A lot of entertainers had nice cars. Their female admirers expected them to. Now Sammy had his very own. Still, Diahann Carroll, an aspiring actress new to Hollywood who sometimes took a room at the Sunset Colonial and had caught Sammy’s eye, wanted nothing romantically to do with him. Sammy frowned not at all; he was on to other conquests.

A new automobile might have sated the nervous energy of someone else, but not Sammy. Things—objects small and large—were toys, and toys only made him more eager, more hungry. Jess Rand worried that Sammy didn’t have a driver’s license. Rand went with Sammy, teaching him how to drive, mostly in the open lot behind a nearby Los Angeles warehouse. Sammy felt he knew how to drive well enough; he didn’t have time to bother with taking a driving test.

Frank Military, who managed stage acts on both coasts, had an act appearing at the Mocambo. “Sammy came one night,” he remembers. “I said to Sammy, ‘Gloria De Haven and myself are going up to Nick Sevano’s [a close Sinatra ally] house.’ Sammy said, ‘I’ll follow you up.’ Sammy was driving five feet behind me. I later said, ‘Sammy, why were you driving so close to me?’ He said, ‘This is my second day of learning to drive.’ ”

Sammy hated hearing Jess Rand complain about his driving. He thought Jess worried too much.

In September 1954 the trio was in the middle of a gig at the Last Frontier in Las Vegas. They took a pause because Sammy had another commitment, in Los Angeles. He’d be gone a couple days. Will and Sam Sr. could enjoy the desert air—could gamble, eat good food, unwind over on the Negro side of town; have the tuxes for the act cleaned; do what old vaudevillians do: rest their bones.

Sammy had to drive back to Los Angeles to do a motion-picture sound track recording for his friend Jeff Chandler. Chandler could get Sammy into all the right Hollywood parties and all the swank private hotel soirees. They had glided in together to so many places, big blond Chandler, his smile soft but his shoulders brusque, his walk hard as the Brooklyn he came from, daring anyone to stop him. And Sammy right beside him, limber as a jockey, his gaze darting about, taking the fill of rooms, of the blondes gathered about. Chandler could even pass along privileged knowledge about Hollywood casting—Sammy loved the gossip—but he couldn’t get Sammy any movie roles. Overall, roles for Negro males were practically nonexistent in Hollywood. (There was a conversation with a Universal executive about Sammy doing a Bill “Bojangles” Robinson biopic. The possibility held such fascination: Sammy, onscreen, portraying the legendary tap dancer who had taught him more than a few moves back in Harlem. But like so much in the entertainment business, it all went to dust.) The studios couldn’t see past color. Chandler knew it. There may have been color on the streets of Brooklyn, but not in Hollywood.
Still, Chandler knew how eager Sammy was to have anything to do with a movie, so he got him hired to sing the title song to
Six Bridges to Cross
, a finished film that starred Tony Curtis, who was steadily rising in Hollywood since his magnetic title-role performance in
Houdini
, released in 1953.
Six Bridges to Cross
was a re-creation of the celebrated Brinks robbery in Boston. (The studio prepared to call the film
Five Bridges to Cross
until someone realized, before its release, that there were actually six bridges going into Boston.) Chandler, along with Henry Mancini, wrote the
Six Bridges
title tune. Chandler himself recorded on the Decca label, which owned Universal, the studio that released many of Chandler’s movies. In Hollywood, Jeff Chandler had accumulated clout. If Chandler wanted Sammy, Universal—as long as it was an off-camera performance—was not going to go against his wishes.