In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (34 page)

So he practiced in secrecy, his image bouncing around, against mirrors, the two men—Will and Sam Sr.—watching him as if he might stumble or faint from exhaustion.

One morning Sammy climbed into his car—he was fearless when it came to driving again—and headed back out to San Bernardino to Dr. Hull’s office for a post-op visit. He had already been fitted with his glass eye. It was a good replica, but he was still uncomfortable when he took it out at night. He often wore the eye patch, but heading out to San Bernardino, he had discarded it.
When he wasn’t wearing the patch he wore thick eyeglasses, thick enough to conceal the false eye. When he reached the small town of Fontana, he started having engine problems. The car stopped. “I got a call from him,” recalls Hull. “I drove out and picked him up. Brought him up to the house.” Hull was
impressed that Sammy showed no signs of depression or broken confidence. In fact, inside Hull’s home—and after Hull had looked at the eye—Sammy regaled the family by entertaining. He did quick-draw tricks with a pair of six-shooters, wowing Hull’s teenage son. Amazingly, he seemed fast as ever. He banged on a pair of bongos. He seemed to want to prove to Hull that he could see just fine. His right eye—as Hull had told him it would—seemed to be compensating for the loss of the left.

Sammy invited Hull to his upcoming engagement at Ciro’s. Another driver came out from Los Angeles to fetch him, and Sammy bounced from the Hull home in a spate of energy.

At some social functions, friends of Sammy’s—Jeff Chandler, Tony Curtis—would show up wearing eye patches. It was their way of showing camaraderie. The patch got him publicity, and Sammy didn’t mind. Unlike Sinatra, he loved his name in the papers. “I read in the paper that we gave him a monocle,” says Cindy Bitterman. “It wasn’t true.”

By year’s end, there was something else profound in the life of Sammy Davis, Jr. It was religion. Sammy pronounced himself a Jew.

The announcement—the ricocheting word of mouth—startled his friends. He had never mentioned Judaism before. His own background had been one without religion. His mother was a lapsed Catholic, his father a lapsed Baptist. His adoption of Judaism could not really be called a conversion, because he had nothing to convert from. If pressed, he might well have answered “entertainment” as his religion. The decision had been made like many other decisions made in the life of Sammy—spur of the moment, a bout of light introspection, the mind working with a vaudevillian’s quickness and agility, no turning back from an arrived-at decision.

Sammy had always been a fervent searcher. And where his mind was not intellectual, his heart was always vulnerable. The conundrum left him forever open to new gadgets, new ideas, new kinds of love. And whatever winds blew those new ideas into the soft recesses of his heart proved, more often than not, to be strong enough to push the ideas even further into his mind, where they fastened, and where he mistakenly thought they had originated with the weight of intelligence. So he came to Judaism quickly and romantically—as if electrical currents were guiding him.

“I never could figure it out,” recalls Jess Rand. “It came out of left field.”

“He came to me,” recalls Jerry Lewis—born Jerry Levitch, and himself Jewish—“and said, ‘I’m going to turn Jewish.’ I said, ‘You don’t have enough problems already?’ ”

If we are to believe Sammy’s autobiography,
Yes I Can
, the act of conversion
had whipped itself around in his mind for all of two weeks. It involved the happenstance of coming across a book,
A History of the Jews
, and having a few conversations with rabbis. (During his hospital stay, Eddie Cantor had slipped him a Star of David, which he was now wearing around his neck.) There was no hunger, however, greater than Sammy’s hunger for fame, for Hollywood. He watched movies, trailed the famous, snapped their pictures, hugged them, and hugged them some more. Fame was meat. He was its tiger. If, as the film historian Neal Gabler has proclaimed, the Jews invented Hollywood, then, in 1954, Sammy proclaimed himself—with the acquisition of an almost overnight spirituality—an appendage to that invention. Once seized by a notion, he could be relentless.

He found Max Nussbaum, a rabbi in Los Angeles and a refugee from Europe. In Germany, Rabbi Nussbaum’s reputation kept growing. He had a gift. He was told he should be in that place known as Hollywood. His wife sensed his powers. “When he was young in Berlin, he was like a meteor coming on under Hitler,” Nussbaum’s wife would come to recall. “Everybody heard about Max Nussbaum in Berlin because he was such a novelty.” The Jews of Berlin came to revere Nussbaum. He told wonderful Hasidic tales, spinning them out. He was, according to his wife—and others—“beautiful”; his mind was energetic. “
When I met him,” his wife recalled, “I didn’t particularly like him, because he was much too glamorous for my taste. I made fun of him. I said, ‘You belong in Hollywood.’ That was 1937.”

Nussbaum reached Hollywood in 1942, an escapee from the waves of persecution sweeping the continent. He headed Temple Israel. Five of the seven founders of the Hollywood-based temple were power brokers in the movie business. Nussbaum corralled actors and actresses for fund-raising benefits. Following one—where Bill “Bojangles” Robinson had been the featured guest—he squired everyone to the famous Brown Derby restaurant. The group was told that Robinson, a Negro, would not be served. Nussbaum and company turned and left.

When Sammy found Nussbaum, he was full of childlike questions. He grilled the rabbi as if he were a director moving huge camera equipment across impossible terrain and he needed Nussbaum to help him navigate it all—this very minute. The rabbi was suspicious and saw fit to warn Sammy: “
Let me caution you not to expect to find Judaism in books.”

Sammy opened his one eye wider. The comment perplexed him. He would find Judaism, then, in the clutter of his emotional heart.

There were, however, depths and undertows and crosscurrents that Sammy could not imagine that would intercut with his decision to convert.

The Jew and the Negro had a sometimes complex and always emotional history in America. Both groups, indeed, stood upon common ground: that of
an oppressed minority. Bondage and suffering had shoved them together. Pain was understood by both. Several years before Sammy’s conversion, a young writer and essayist by the name of James Baldwin, writing in
Commentary
magazine, said, “
Though the notion of the suffering is based on the image of the wandering, exiled Jew, the context changes imperceptibly, to become a fairly obvious reminder of the trials of the Negro, while the sins recounted are the sins of the American republic. At this point, the Negro indentifies himself almost wholly with the Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of Egypt.” Baldwin goes on: “
It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting.”

Judaism was cultural, a long thread in a family dynamic. Many who underwent conversions did it for reasons of marriage. But not Sammy. Sammy the actor—the impersonator!—would take the lore of Jewishness because he was Sammy. It was like a wonderful role—he needed the approval of no casting director. He could just do it—open his heart a little, read, entertain other Jews, sit at Rabbi Nussbaum’s knee. Sammy, in the presence of intellectual vigor, sometimes simply wilted. Nussbaum, in the presence of Hollywood, sometimes became vulnerable. (The walls of Nussbaum’s office were lined with photographs of Hollywood stars.) Nussbaum’s warnings to Sammy aside, it was not his mission to try to dissuade him. They were two entertainers, and they were both in the business of pleasing, of soothing when necessary. Their eyes could easily tolerate the klieg lights.

Sammy did not care how Negroes would react to his conversion. He tried his best to operate above the emotional guitar strings of the Negro. Negroes were finicky—just like the Negro press. And Negroes were hardest on Negroes. He would merely endure their bemusement. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. uttered nothing about Sammy’s conversion. It was beyond them, although Sam Sr.—as if to bond with his son—draped a Star of David around his own neck. He wore it like a trinket.

Jess Rand and Jerry Lewis were hardly the only Sammy acquaintances to cast a suspect eye upon the conversion. “That was a ploy,” believed Amy Greene. “It was nonsense.” She figured she knew why Sammy had gone searching for religion: “Boredom. That’s how come he needed Judaism.”

He became a Jew. He was a Jew. A Negro in Jew’s clothing. It was tender, and it was strange. To Tony Curtis the conversion was also “a bit gratuitous.”

Actually, it was just Sammy being Sammy—shrewd, opportunistic, heart-touched, and childlike. There had been no religion in his life, there had been no foundation, and so there was plenty of room for invention. And where there was the possibility of invention, surprise could occur. Maybe something decipherable only by a psychiatrist—or a mimic. Or just a desperately searching
hoofer who had been spared death on a California roadway. Now the Negro in him was a Jew, and the just-created Jew in him was a Negro. Two Sammys, searching for truth and light. And love—and women, and sex, and money, and jewelry, and new clothes. The moguls had invented the town. And if Louis B. Mayer knew Sammy was a Jew, like Mayer himself, then great. And if Samuel Goldwyn knew Sammy was a Jew, like Goldwyn himself, then great. Hollywood was clannish. The gossip fell like rain. Sammy was now a Jew.

But he hardly escaped the guffaws. “When Sammy embraced Judaism I was doing the Milton Berle show,” says Peggy King, a singer who would have an important relationship with Sammy. “Milton said, ‘What are we going to do—Sammy became a Jew?’ ” King and others who were gathered around wondered what Berle expected them to say. The comic, recalls King, answered his own question. “Then he said, ‘I know, we’ll give them [the Negroes] George Jessel.’ You never heard such waves of laughter. We were rolling on the floor.”

Sammy—during a conversation with King—could see that she had concerns about his conversion. “He asked me what it means to be Jewish,” she would remember. “I said, ‘It means never doing anything to someone you wouldn’t want done to you.’ ” He looked at her quizzically. When he did, she made her own conclusion: “Sammy wasn’t Jewish.”

He bragged about his newfound reading habits. He walked around proudly carrying a book—
Everyman’s Talmud
—under the crook of his arm.

Before his accident, Sammy had promised to perform at a benefit in New York City for the Actors Studio. “He had been so thrilled he had been asked,” remembers Judy Balaban, who would be attending the event. “He was jazzed out of his brain.” But now, recuperating from his eye accident, Sammy decided he wouldn’t go. He wanted out of the commitment. “He called me and said, ‘I’m going to tell them I can’t do the show,’ ” remembers Balaban. “I said, ‘Why can’t you do the show?’ He said, ‘Because of the accident.’ I said, ‘I hear you’re out and okay. So why aren’t you going to do the benefit?’ He said, ‘Because I don’t know if I’m good.’ I said, ‘Do you think you’re going to bomb?’ He said, ‘Judy, if I do it and I’m a hit, I won’t know if they are applauding me because I was good or because I lost an eye.’ ”

Sammy instructed Balaban to pass along word that he would have to cancel. Balaban slept on it. The more she thought about the conversation, the more upset she felt herself becoming. She thought Sammy was being a coward. She phoned him back. The words were heated. “I said, ‘Sammy, why can’t you do this? You either have a career with one eye—or you don’t. In my opinion, if you don’t do this, you’re not going to work again. And I’m not giving anyone any messages.’ ” The challenge stunned him.

Whether or not Judy Balaban thought she was using something akin to reverse psychology on Sammy, it worked. He came east; Balaban was so happy, she threw another birthday party for him in her apartment at the Hampshire House. “Larry Gelbart and Jay [Cantor] and I spent two weeks before the party writing parodies and songs for Sammy. They were all satirical things about Sammy’s career. It was great. We invited all kinds of people. We had skits and parodies, Sammy was knocked out. His peers were there, up-and-comers. A lot of people to validate Sammy’s sense of self. We made a Sammy tribute out of it. He loved it. He loved the evening.”

The Actors Studio benefit took place on the roof of the Astor Hotel. Sammy sang, danced, and whirled in his first public performance since the accident. “He was brilliant,” remembers Balaban. “Beyond brilliant. People were standing, shrieking, screaming. Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein—everybody from New York was there.” Anthony Franciosa, a young New York actor and a member of the studio, remembers Sammy’s visit. “He had a patch over his eye. He had that room rocking. He was so good. It meant a great deal to him. I remember how solicitious he was to the audience.”

Before he left New York City, Sammy visited Balaban at her apartment. She always had enjoyed sitting and talking with him, about life, movies, show business. Because of the accident, Balaban suddenly wanted to talk about Sammy’s family. Before, it had just never seemed appropriate. “I said, ‘Sammy, tell me about your mother.’ He said, ‘No, tell me about
yours.’
I told him about my mother, who had given me this incredible gift of unconditional love. I remember tears coming down his face. At first I couldn’t figure out if he was crying because of the story or what. I said I had this mother who would watch me make mistakes but still loved me.” Balaban felt she had touched a nerve. Others might have backed away; she bore on; it was her nature. She really wanted to know about Sammy’s mother, so she asked again.

“She’s not like your mother,” Sammy finally told her.

“And I’ll never forget the way he sounded when he said it,” she remembers. “I had said, ‘Tell me about it.’ He said, ‘No!’ ”

Sammy made an emotional visit to Harlem to see his grandmother Rosa. She hugged him fiercely, examining his face, looking him up and down, fussing and fretting over him and insisting he sit and eat.