In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (30 page)

Fred Hull was a tall and gangly man. He had taken his medical degree in 1939 from the University of Southern California. The accomplishment made his father, a jeweler and a simple man, quite proud. In San Bernardino, Hull had acquired a reputation as a fine ear and eye surgeon. By the time Hull reached
Sammy at Community Hospital that Friday, the entertainer had been lying on a stretcher in a hallway, uncomplaining. Jeff Chandler wasn’t so tight-lipped about Sammy lying on that stretcher. Chandler had, in fact, frantically gone about calling other hospitals for a bed, but had had no luck. “I examined him, and I found that the left eye had been ruptured and that some of the contents of the globe of the eye had been lost,” Hull would recall decades later. “And in my judgment, the proper treatment was to remove the eye.” Hull wouldn’t even entertain leaving the dead eye in. To do so would risk “sympathetic ophthalmia”—a condition in which the damaged eye, over time, dilutes some of the power of the undamaged eye. “So the safest thing to do,” says Hull, “is remove the damaged eye if it is irrevocably blind.”

Having made his diagnosis, Hull went to tell his patient. Sammy listened with barely a movement. There was no howling, no expressions of verbal emotion, no self-pity. He took the news with amazing calmness; Hull was quite impressed. “He didn’t carry on or anything like that,” the doctor recalls. “I tried to explain in layman’s language what had happened and that he would never be able to see with that eye.” Sammy kept asking about his leg, pointing to it. There was a cut on his right leg, and pain. It wasn’t just a leg, but a dancer’s leg. His legs caused those nightclub-goers to rise and applaud him and take a sip of their drink and applaud him some more. Hull assured Sammy there would be no permanent damage to the leg.

Sam Sr. realized he would have to phone his mother, Rosa, Sammy’s grandmother, and the realization of it jangled his nerves.

There was no time to waste, and Hull decided on surgery that very night. Both Henderson, the nurse, and Hull could see how pained Mastin and Sam Sr. were when told of the news. “I just told them,” recalls Hull, “that he had a very major injury and his eyeball was destroyed and it had to be removed.”

Janet Leigh, rushing from Los Angeles, arrived that very day, before the surgery. Thin, pink, lovely, she had been starring in a string of MGM movies years before her marriage to Tony Curtis. The marriage to Curtis, in 1951, rocketed both into the consciousness of the fan-magazine crazies. Tony had introduced her to Sammy, and she had been immediately taken with his talents and showbiz eagerness. “It’s such a shock,” Leigh would recall of arriving at the hospital to see Sammy. “You’re not knowing what to expect.” She found him, told him it was she, blinked back her tears at his appearance. She sensed how calm he was, but thought it masked something else: “I think he was in shock. That’s almost too much to take.” She sat by his bedside for a while. Yes, she thought, sensing his sunny disposition, it must be shock. She later huddled, away from Sammy, with Jeff Chandler and Jess Rand. Everyone worried about Sammy’s future.

It was not a terribly old hospital—having been built in 1909—but it had
aged quickly. Repairs were clearly needed. There had been talk of building another one, but the talk always evaporated because of the lack of money.

Nurses arrived in Sammy’s room to prepare him for the operation. He was placed on a gurney, and hospital staff wheeled him outside, into the open air, because the surgery would be performed in another part of the hospital, accessible only by first going outdoors. As he was being wheeled, some staffers told him they knew family members who had seen his nightclub act; some told him they had only recently heard him singing on the radio. The adulation comforted him. Watching it all, Will and Sam Sr. kept shaking their heads. The whole scene—wheeling him about, nurses hovering, the coolish November air—looked rather ominous. Once he was inside the surgery room, the doors closed.

During the surgery, reporters found Will and Sam Sr. sitting out back of the hospital. The aging hoofers looked forlorn. The reporters wanted some reaction, something for the next day’s edition; they had deadlines to meet. But the two entertainers were too somber to be voluble. They talked about Sammy having been a performer since childhood, how much he liked performing—simple reflections. They rubbed their hands, looked into each other’s eyes, lowered their heads. They simply had little to offer. They rarely talked to the press anyway. Sammy had always done all the talking.

His surgical tools assembled, and with Sammy sedated, Hull went to work. “The eye was removed, and then we used what we call an implant to fill up the volume of the space in the orbit. You would do this to make better movement of the artificial eye,” he remembered. The delicate surgery required the smallest of tools, and took forty-five minutes. “The eye was removed. An implant was inserted, muscles closed over the implant, and the incision closed. He had cuts through the lid of the eye. There you have to do plastic surgery repair. I’m as proud of the lid repair as I am of removing the eye.”

All went well. In time, Sammy was wheeled back to his room, Will and Sam Sr. following every step of the way. It took thirty stitches to close the surgical incision.

News of the surgery was now out over the radio airwaves. The next morning, hospital switchboard operators began fielding calls, and the calls kept increasing. Sinatra called. So did Dean Martin and Joey Bishop. Eddie Cantor called. “Someone called me,” remembers Eartha Kitt, who was in Chicago at the time, “and said, ‘Sammy’s in the hospital.’ They said he was saying, ‘Where’s Eartha? I got to talk to Eartha.’ I was doing an engagement. They explained to me the accident, and I screamed.”

Strangers began calling. Flowers arrived, and they kept arriving. Will and Sam Sr. brightened at all the goodwill, but they really wished they could turn back the clock, that Sammy would never have climbed into his new Caddy and driven it across the desert. “They were pretty pessimistic about the situation—but
Sammy wasn’t,” says Virginia Henderson. “Sammy knew he had one good eye.”

His friends back east were stunned when news reached them. “I was home,” remembers Judy Balaban. “I was very pregnant. I was watching TV. I didn’t know then he’d lost his eye. I remember my heart dropping. I remember getting on the phone. I remember having the name of the hospital and trying to call the hospital. I remember I had Sammy’s mother’s number and couldn’t find it. I didn’t know what to do.”

His sister, Ramona, called from New York City. “A friend of mine owned a pub. I went to the bar. They kept giving me change to call the hospital all night until he came out of surgery.”

In the hospital, Virginia Henderson was constantly trying to keep everyone calm. She could tell, however, that Jeff Chandler—back again the day after surgery—remained restless and agitated. “I invited him to lunch a couple of times,” she would remember. “He was so upset.”

The few Negroes who were employed at the hospital strained to get glimpses of the injured entertainer. They tiptoed by his room. And as they walked away, they shook their heads in agony and gossiped among themselves—as did others—that darker forces had been at work. That it wasn’t an accident at all, but the work of men—possibly Mafia hoods from Vegas—who loathed Negroes who dated white women. But such dark thoughts were in fact far too fanciful and merely reflected the temper of the times. Ruffians who wanted to injure Sammy Davis, Jr., would hardly have sent two elderly ladies—one seventy-two, the other sixty-nine—out into the morning hours to stage a car wreck.

As the hours and days began to pass, Will and Sam Sr. couldn’t help but think of the future. Onstage, minus Sammy, they were nothing. Before him, they were indeed something. But that was a long time ago, and a long time ago was gone.

“
I just got word that Timmy French give up the ghost,” Sam Sr.—apropos of nothing, save maybe the knowledge that the ghost, like time, was always on the move—had told Will Mastin one afternoon. “Let everybody go and he’s runnin’ a elevator at some hotel.”

The ghost was the business itself—the shoeshine box you kept and the rack of suits you owned and the names of theaters you had committed to memory and the money you had saved and the celebrity you had earned and the way your ear pressed against the velvety curtains backstage, where, if you were a Will Mastin, or a Sam Sr., you could nearly guess the number of folks in the seats on the other side of the curtains just by the timbre of the noise. The ghost lifted you from bed in the mornings. No member of the Will Mastin Trio knew the ghost as well as Mastin himself.

You could love and loathe the ghost. But you loathed it only when it wasn’t loving you properly. When all was going beautifully, when the square white boys in Spokane and Philadelphia and Syracuse were waiting in the wings and your name—Will Mastin of the Will Mastin Trio—was rolling off their tongues and echoing like meshed-together voices from a corner phonograph, when the name itself was up in lights, when you had crisp bills folded handsomely around the money clip and the ulcer wasn’t spitting fire, you were made aware of the gift-giving gentleness of the ghost. And as the years rolled along, you didn’t even have to move your body onstage much anymore because the kid, Sammy, the man-child, was moving around enough for a dozen men.

The ghost was the smooth road out of every town that had treated you right and with respect. The ghost was the Negro side of town, the folks who pointed to you as if you were some kind of hero, the ladies who had seen your face in some newspaper, or maybe even in one of those Negro periodicals like
Jet
or
Hue
that, more often than not, you could purchase only on the Negro side of town. The ghost was all the Negro ministers who had you into their homes—an afternoon supper of collard greens, yams, neckbones with gravy, a sip of liquor—and prayed over you when you hit the road again. Yes, the ghost was everything when everything was working right, the years—1950, 1951, 1952, 1953—rolling by, each better than the previous one.

The ghost was the soft bed in the good hotel. The ghost was all the edgy headlines of the day—Negroes on the march, Negroes jailed—which sailed right over you because you did not bleed from those wounds, you were moving across the land, you were on radio, on TV, Eddie Cantor himself sweeping you along down the hallways of the studio. You had a matinee in Pittsburgh, another gig in Vegas. The ghost had kept you away from your deep southern roots, where blood had roiled and men had been treated as less than men. To hell with Alabama: Mastins had died there flat broke and unmentioned in newspapers. Just died, gone, shoveled under.

The ghost was the diamond ring on your pinkie. It was the way you tipped your hat to the lovely lady walking toward you with a compliment about that evening’s performance. The ghost was all of that, and more: Mastin with an “i,” not “e,” to the scribes; the Cadillac whirring up and over the mountains, up and right through the land of the free and the brave, right down Sunset Boulevard on a sunny afternoon. And so what if sometimes, when you ached, when you were tired, you couldn’t figure anymore if the ghost was chasing you or if you were chasing the ghost? Or, worse, if both of you were at a standstill, peering into the beyond of bad dreams and nightmares? That was just weariness, a drink could solve that—and antacid medicine could tame the bubbling ulcer.

Will Mastin knew the ghost. And sometimes the ghost frightened him.

“Something bad is gonna happen,” he’d say over and over to Jess Rand, even, bewilderingly, in the glow of a triumph for the trio, as if success itself held some underlying and dark forces.

Sometimes those traveling with him—Big John Hopkins, the equipment manager; little Sammy; Jess Rand; even Sam Sr., who had known him the longest—couldn’t quite figure what had been poured into Will Mastin’s eyes, into those vessels. They couldn’t quite see in there what was beautiful, and what was unfathomable. The Depression had nearly clawed him under, but he had fought back; he had endured.

During the traveling vaudeville season of 1930, Mastin gave five-year-old Sammy Jr. the ghost. You couldn’t always see the transferring of it. The same way you never saw how the ship got in the bottle. But it was there for the glazing glance: it was Mastin’s hand on the little kid’s shoulder while standing backstage and listening to the hum of audience members shuffling their way to their seats. It was the way he applied the child’s makeup. It was the slow and precious way he picked up the child’s strewn clothing. It was what Eileen Barton, child actress, saw when she looked at little Sammy, being tended to by Will Mastin, her eyes going over to Sam Sr., and Sam Sr. looking down at his boy, and Will Mastin looking over at Sam Sr., then the two hoofers looking at their Sammy. It was something deep and true unto itself. The child had been given the ghost, and it was inside him, and the years had gone on. They were men who drove Cadillacs and had money in their pockets. They were not men who wanted to give up the ghost. But here they were now, circling a hospital room with their Sammy half-blind and lucky to be alive. With their blood pressure rising. Never mind that the Negroes who worked in the kitchen would sneak glances at them as if they were the most important of Negro men, asking if they could get them anything—anything at all—to eat. They felt weakened. Watching as Sammy’s hand groped to touch things, to find things—water, a tray—and bending to help him. Sitting and watching as the evening November light faded inside the room as nurses appeared to check Sammy’s temperature, his vital signs. They grew tired; they felt more exhausted than they ever had on a stage. Their minds wondered dark thoughts. “They felt it was the end of his career,” Virginia Henderson says.

“They knew they’d never do anything on their own,” Jerry Lewis says. “What they had with Sammy was utopia.”

Timmy French—someplace out there pushing the buttons of a damn elevator. Which, in fact, is exactly what Sam Sr. did upon arriving in New York City all those years ago.

The owners of the Last Frontier in Las Vegas had to quickly find a replacement for the trio’s broken engagement. Tickets had been purchased; the people
wanted to see someone on the stage. Jeff Chandler and Billy Eckstine both offered to perform. No appearance, however, was as unexpected as that of film star Betty Hutton, who would appear alongside Eckstine. Hutton—known lasciviously as “the blond bombshell” despite her multiple talents—had announced her retirement from show business two weeks before Sammy’s accident. Betty Hutton was a feisty Hollywood figure. She was not at all shy about battling with studio heads when she felt she was either being mistreated or not taken seriously. She won wide kudos for her performance in
Annie Get Your Gun
, MGM’s lavish 1950 musical. (She took over the role for an ailing Judy Garland.) Two years later she won the coveted lead in Cecil B. DeMille’s
Greatest Show on Earth
. But thereafter she consistently argued with studio executives, walking out on a Paramount contract principally because the studio would not allow her husband, Charles O’Curran, to direct her films. Yet there she was—for one night only, it was to be understood—in Las Vegas, for Sammy. There were doubtless not many in the Last Frontier audience who knew about Betty Hutton’s upbringing back in Battle Creek, Michigan. Her father died when she was a child. Little Betty June Thornburg took to standing on street corners and singing. She was, in as dignified a way as possible, begging for money. The Thornburgs had to eat. By the age of thirteen—which would have been 1934, the depth of the Depression—she was constantly on the road, singing with bands.