In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (38 page)

It was just a small thing, a small shift in loyalties. Cindy Bitterman and Peggy King and Tony Curtis all noticed it. Sammy stopped hanging out with Jeff Chandler. “He stopped seeing Jeff and started seeing Frank” even more, says Tony Curtis. “It was another crowd. Through Frank he saw another career. He didn’t see anything with Jeff. With Frank, he could see that Las Vegas was open to him.”

Sammy’s proclivities—the white women, the Judaism, the Sinatra worship—did not at all bother Will Mastin and Sam Sr. He was their baby; their boy; their life. Sammy’s years were their years. If Sammy was wrong—about life, people—then they were wrong. And they did not believe themselves wrong. In wide-brimmed felt hats, white suits, and low-heeled patent leather shoes, they’d stand with their Sammy against the world.

•     •     •

When in Manhattan—or anywhere else—and not appearing onstage, Sam Sr. spent his hours gambling, going to horse races. Since he found Rita, his womanizing days were over. He steered clear of Elvera. As for Will Mastin, whenever he had idle time, he vanished. In Manhattan, no one knew if he spent his free time lolling in Harlem dining spots, or looking up old cohorts from his vaudeville days. Invited to parties in the city, he wouldn’t show. He suffered nightmares and stomach cramps from the ulcers. The one constant thing in his life was the Will Mastin Trio.

Even if it had long been undeniable that Sammy was the whole show, Mastin, in a sweetly self-convincing and even humble way, began to tell others he cared little about Sammy’s fame. He would tell them that his own performance continued to be important—in the organizing, the bookings, the traveling, the dealing with the promoters. Mastin conceded that the white promoters had powers, far more than he’d ever have. But he had Sammy. Whoever got a peek at the contract would still see one indisputable fact: Will Mastin
owned
the Will Mastin Trio, and he had little Sammy Davis, Jr., under contract until 1965. Sammy felt that to question that contract, well, he might as well have been questioning the love of his very own father. And who dared do such a thing?

F
ew performers are without a competitive edge, and Sammy was no different. Although he was apt to heap slavish praise upon fellow entertainers, he also possessed an edgy, competitive streak. Not only did he want to be as good as Mel Torme and Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, and as funny as Eddie Cantor and Jerry Lewis—he wanted to be better. He had the nerve to stand before them—as a mimic—and bring them into himself, then spit them right back out into the rolling waves of laughter. Most mimics are swathed in the ethos of irony—even if they can’t quite put it into words. “Nobody wants to be a mimic,” says impersonator Will Jordan, who first met Sammy in 1952 in Pittsburgh. (Jordan was considered the craftiest of the Ed Sullivan impersonators.) “We want to be ourselves.” As himself, Sammy knew how good he could be, knew that it would take more than the loss of an eye to stymie his gifts. The entertainers he looked up to had one thing in common: they were white. They traveled in many of the same circles he did. He was charmed by the very air they breathed. Peggy King concluded that Sammy simply wanted to be someone else.

“Sammy,” says King, “wanted to be white—and pretty.”

Cindy Bitterman held a similar opinion. “I don’t think,” she says, “he thought of himself as a black person.”

There were, however, two Negroes in 1950s Hollywood whom Sammy deemed important enough for him to keep an eye on: Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. Both were more handsome than Sammy, which unnerved him. “Sammy caught me on the balcony with Sidney at a party, and he gave me this killer B-movie look he affected,” recalls King.

Poitier was born in 1924 in Miami and raised in the Bahamas, where his parents were tomato growers on Cat Island. He quit school by the age of thirteen and worked in a succession of dead-end jobs. He believed his future lay elsewhere—certainly not in picking tomatoes—and set his sights on New York City. When he arrived, he was nearly broke and forced to sleep on rooftops. He found himself caught in the Harlem race riots of 1943, dodging bullets and luckily escaping injury. After a stint in the army, he returned to Harlem and saw an ad for auditions at the American Negro Theatre. At his audition he was told his Caribbean accent was too thick. He rid himself of it by listening for endless hours to voices on American radio. Finally accepted by the Negro drama group, he rose in its ranks and made his Broadway debut in 1946 in an all-Negro production of
Lysistrata
. His Hollywood debut came in 1950 in
No Way Out
. His next film was
Cry the Beloved Country
, in which Poitier gave a strong and noticeable performance playing—opposite the estimable Canada Lee—a South African priest. There was a leonine grace in the Poitier walk, strongly accentuated by cool dark features. In 1955 he created a character both vulnerable and riveting in
The Blackboard Jungle
, an urban drama centered around a high school; Glenn Ford starred. Even in a film career that was still new, it was obvious by 1955 that Sidney Poitier would not be ignored.

Sammy in a 1955 recording session for Decca Records. The resulting album was titled
Sammy Davis Jr. Sings Just for Lovers.
His voice was large, but his phrasing, unlike Sinatra’s, was too often mechanical
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

Poitier and Belafonte—who was born in Harlem in 1927—met in New York City after the war. The two long-legged actors cut an elegant path in Manhattan.
Raised by a single parent, Belafonte had joined the navy at the age of seventeen—joining as much to see the world as to escape poverty. While enlisted, he became a voracious reader, plowing through the works of W. E. B. Du Bois. Upon release from the military, Belafonte—as Poitier had done—joined the American Negro Theatre. He possessed beautiful, almost Valentino-like looks, and a husky voice. The potent combination landed him a theatrical agent. His first lead role onstage was in Sean O’Casey’s
Juno and the Paycock
. In 1953 he appeared on Broadway in John Murray Anderson’s
Almanac
. The only Negro in the cast, Belafonte received stunning reviews—and a Tony Award for best supporting actor. That same year he made his motion-picture screen debut in
Bright Road
. The two—Poitier and Belafonte—became fast friends, and when in Manhattan they took to hanging around Greenwich Village beatnik joints. Women ogled them. Belafonte also started forging a reputation as a folk singer. In 1954, Belafonte was teamed with Dorothy Dandridge in
Carmen Jones
, the Otto Preminger–directed film version of Georges Bizet’s opera. The role established him—within the limited confines of Negro cinema—as a legitimate sex symbol. Bracketing each other, and within a few short years, Poitier and Belafonte had placed themselves at the front rank of what few starring roles were being offered to Negro males.

Sammy, a keen reader of the Hollywood trade papers
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
—as well as the Negro press—could hardly ignore the two performers. Reading about them, noticing the attention they were getting, only unleashed his competitive juices. “Sammy used to say if he was as tall as Harry Belafonte, he’d run him out of the business,” says Shirley Rhodes, who went to work for Sammy in 1956 as an assistant.

There was something else, aside from cinematic good looks and stage training, that both Poitier and Belafonte had in common that Sammy did not: they had been witness to a society—the Caribbean (Belafonte spent part of his youth in Jamaica)—where blacks had cultural ownership from within, where a spirit of fighting against colonialism existed that gave them both a political identity and a center. In 1950, when the British government of Nassau would not release Poitier’s film
No Way Out
, there were widespread demonstrations by blacks in the Bahamas; Poitier had rushed home to join them. Belafonte himself had long been influenced by the social activism of Paul Robeson, whom he considered his hero, and was quick to join progressive causes. Granting them their feisty streak, friends of the duo sometimes referred to Poitier and Belafonte as “
those two West Indians.” Both Poitier and Belafonte meant to serve notice to Hollywood that they would not endure shuffling, stereotypical roles. They aimed to play fully drawn characters. Sammy came from the dusty aura of vaudeville. He took what was given to him; the play was not the thing—the thing was the opportunity to perform. His struggle lay in getting
his name in lights. To that end, his nerves and pride pinched hard against each other only in the name of entertainment opportunities. Social activism did not—at least yet—move him. Sammy had not been running around Hollywood, cavorting with actors and producers, sidling up to them, schmoozing with them, so that, at the last minute, upstarts Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte could be seen striding through the doors of Hollywood—right by him. He would concede them their handsomeness—but little else. He had been in the business long before they even started scuffling up acting jobs in New York City. The American Negro Theatre wing in New York City did not teach him a thing: he learned on the road; he learned from the shrewdness and grace of Will Mastin; he learned from the giants of vaudeville. He learned from Eddie Cantor, who had come to visit him in his San Bernardino hospital bed—when Poitier and Belafonte had not.

Sammy prided himself on versatility. Poitier and Belafonte had Broadway roles to their credit—and he did not.

The gap would not last much longer.

Jule Styne was a Broadway impresario and bon vivant. He wore French cuffs with his monogrammed shirts, fine tailor-made suits. Jule played the horses—and he was addicted to gambling. One of his dreams was to get Sammy Davis, Jr., to Broadway.

Born in London, as Julius Stein, he came of age in Chicago. As an eight-year-old, he began taking piano lessons at the Chicago College of Music. At recitals, he wore Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits. His parents were amazed at his composure at the piano. He played Rachmaninoff and Mozart and Haydn. The dream of becoming a classical pianist, however, began to fall away when an instructor bluntly told him he would never become a great classical pianist because his hands lacked strength. Styne sulked, though not long. He bought sheet music on Chicago’s famed Division Street and began playing ragtime at his high school. He got jobs in burlesque houses, playing “Mama’s Blues” and “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.” In the burlesque houses he was teased by strippers and befriended by Negro musicians. He sat starry-eyed listening to the likes of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.

Enraptured by jazz, Styne graduated to mob-backed nightclubs. “
More or less, musicians fed off the mob,” he would recall. “They still do, to a certain extent, and before I got out of Chicago, I must have worked a couple dozen mob joints. But those people always seemed to like musicians, and I did my job and kept my mouth shut.” When Gene Tunney fought Jack Dempsey in Chicago, Al Capone rented out the Metropole Ballroom for an after-fight party; he hired Styne to tend to the music. Capone tipped young Styne $2,500. Chicago was wicked, and Styne knew it: he was in the city when the St. Valentine’s Day massacre happened. When other musicians began taking off for New York City, Styne felt the wave eastward. “
The big-band day had definitely started, and it looked as if New York, not Chicago, was the place to be.”

Sammy, springtime 1956, in Manhattan. He is on Broadway, in
Mr. Wonderful,
and ensconced in a suite at the Gorham Hotel. He sits on the rooftop of the Gorham, the city spread out below
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

He fell in love with Manhattan, writing music, gigging in bands. Quick and voluble, he worked tirelessly. In 1942, Styne met songwriter Sammy Cahn—genius seems to find genius—and the two began a long and fruitful collaboration. Their first hit was “I’ve Heard That Song Before.” A very skinny Frank Sinatra sang it in
Youth Parade
, a 1942 film. A string of Cahn-Styne hits followed,
many of them World War II hits, speaking romantic love and gallantry. Styne soon formed an important friendship with Sinatra. They roomed at the Warwick Hotel together for a while, with plenty of hijinks—“sharing a bathtub together, that sort of thing,” recalls Styne’s widow, Margaret.