In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (39 page)

Styne worked tirelessly, never taking no for an answer regarding his projects and dreams. He was “impossible,” actually, as his widow describes him. “Very funny. Loved to be the center of attention.” Styne was the major force behind
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, which, in 1949, became a long-running Broadway musical and made a star of Carol Channing. Styne originally wanted Nanette Fabray to take the Channing role. “
Please, Nan,” he begged, scrunched-faced in her apartment lobby, “take it. It’s going to be a great show.” (Fabray didn’t believe him; Channing did, and she became a star. The show ran for 740 performances.)

Always hunting talent, Styne kept a close eye on nightclubs, on who might be rising on its stages. Sammy caught his attention, and Styne saw his act on both coasts. “He adored Sammy,” recalls Margaret Styne. “He was absolutely crazy about talented people.” Before Sammy’s car accident, Styne had approached Sammy on the West Coast—Sammy had been appearing at the Mocambo—and asked him about his interest in Broadway. Sammy listened; he was always easily flattered.

There had been Broadway impresarios and backers, like Styne, who had seen Sammy’s alternately rambunctious and riveting nightclub act. They were quick to wonder: Was he an actor? Did he have the discipline it took for the legitimate stage? They’d answer no, of course he did not—only to go on marveling at his skills. But the fact was that few shows on Broadway had featured a Negro male in the lead role and succeeded. Broadway was cold terrain for Negro writers and performers, and Sammy knew as much.

In 1925, Garland Anderson was the first Negro playwright to have a production—
Appearances
—mounted on Broadway. Ten years later came Langston Hughes’s
Mulatto
. There was a six-year gap between Hughes’s play and the next production,
Native Son
, by Richard Wright, which featured Canada Lee in a starring role and was directed by Orson Welles. It lasted only 114 performances.

In 1944 there was some bright light with the opening of
Anna Lucasta
. It was the acclaimed production of the Harlem-based American Negro Theatre wing. It did not have a recognizable star, but rather was an ensemble production—although the beautiful Hilda Simms and estimable Frederick O’Neal would receive wonderful notices.
Anna
would run 957 performances, the longest for a Negro production on Broadway. Oddly enough, few considered it a “Negro” play, inasmuch as it had been written with a Polish family in mind, and it reached Broadway without any of the depth or emotional weight of
Negro history in it. The fallout from
Anna
was bitter: the Harlem-based theatrical troupe lost out on most profits because of tangled contracts with Broadway and its own theater.

She wasn’t the lead, but Ethel Waters—Sammy’s costar in
Rufus Jones for President
—returned to Broadway in 1950 for the first time since
Cabin in the Sky
a decade earlier. “
Someday, somehow, I hope I can find a play in which I don’t have to sing all the time,” she said rather sadly during her
Cabin
run. “It’s a long time now that I’ve been singing, and I’m getting tired.” She got her chance in Carson McCullers’s
The Member of the Wedding
. Her nonsinging role: the family cook. Another six years passed before Louis Peterson’s
Take a Giant Step
opened on Broadway; it featured the Broadway debut of young Louis Gossett.

“
It was apparent that no one wanted to handle the ‘black’ theme,” a Styne biographer would write of Styne’s proposed show for Sammy. “One writer, shocking Jule, said he could easily come up with a story that involved a black man raping a white woman.”

But the eye accident had changed so much. With Sammy’s popularity soaring, Styne struck again, returning to Sammy with a Broadway proposition. He caught up with Sammy in Los Angeles. This time Sammy not only listened to Styne’s new intentions, he hurried them along himself, now dreaming of Broadway: “
The sooner the better,” he told Styne of a Broadway debut.

Jule Styne—the gambler—did not shrink from challenges.

He pondered show ideas, then hatched one quickly, firing off dictation into the ears of Dorothy Dicker, his secretary.

Styne’s planned production for Sammy was a musical. Something about a singer, in Miami Beach, who has a nightclub act and rises to fame. It would, in a way, be tailored to Sammy’s own nightclub act. Styne rushed around, looking for writers, lyricists, hustling in and out of the Brill Building on Broadway. He made phone calls, sent telegrams, held meetings with show financiers, among them Ruth Dubonnet. Dubonnet, of the wine Dubonnets, had long been charmed by Styne, whose productions, recalls John Barry Ryan III—about to become a Styne employee with his new musical—always “ran out of money.” It didn’t hurt that Dubonnet had a crush on Styne; she liked the Sammy pitch.

Styne cared not a whit about having all the particulars sorted out: Sammy wasn’t signed, Will Mastin hadn’t been consulted. As well, the Mastin trio was a nightclub act, with nightclub commitments lined up. Styne bore ahead anyway. He had written lyrics for Sinatra. He had little doubt he was going to get what he wanted.

Word went forth that Jule Styne was hunting talent for a planned Broadway musical that would star Sammy Davis, Jr. Some of the company he pulled together quickly because they had worked with him before. George Gilbert, a
coproducer, had worked with Styne on
Hazel Flagg
and
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Lester Osterman, Jr., was brought aboard as another coproducer. Osterman, who had deep pockets, was a longtime Styne friend—and also a member of the New York Stock Exchange. Oliver Smith was being wooed to design the sets. Smith had done the set design for
Rock Hunter
. Smith’s talents were so sought after that he also had signed on to do the set design for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical that was in rehearsal—a little something called
My Fair Lady
.

Jack Donohue was hired to direct. Donohue, who had started out as a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies, was carving a career on both stage and screen. By 1956 he had directed dance routines in nearly two dozen Hollywood films and had worked with stars ranging from Shirley Temple (he directed the dance routines in five of her films) to Esther Williams.

Styne needed a lyricist for the show. He had a couple in mind. Jerry Bock and Larry Holofcener had met each other at the University of Wisconsin, where they began writing musicals together. In 1949 the duo arrived in New York City. They got jobs writing scores for a series of one-act musicals produced by Max Liebman. The Liebman work got them plenty of notice, and they were quickly labeled prodigies. They wrote for various TV shows
—The Mel Torme Show
,
The Kate Smith Hour
,
The Red Buttons Show
. The two also got writing jobs with Tommy Vallando’s music publishing company. Vallando, after a year, was beginning to lose faith in the duo; to him, they were little more than unproductive gadabouts; they seemed to produce first-rate work for everyone except him. Tommy Vallando wanted results—now. The past was the past. He began thinking of firing them. But then Bock and Holofcener heard through the theatrical grapevine about Styne’s planned musical. The two immediately went looking for Jule. Styne, meeting with them, was struck; he liked their energy and moxie. He hired them, convinced that “
they were going to be the next Adler & Ross”—the eclectic music-writing team that had been responsible for
Pajama Game
, a 1954 smash. Bock and Holofcener rushed into Vallando’s office and excitedly announced: “
We’re going to do a show, and we’re going to do it for Sammy Davis, Jr.!” Tommy Vallando would be a fool to fire them now.

For years Vallando had been trying to break into Broadway. And now two kids were telling him they were going to get him there. Other Broadway music publishers always seemed to outfox Tommy Vallando, to always trot out new talent. So he found himself listening to the kids, who were now about to be teamed with the gifted Jule Styne. Vallando’s future suddenly brimmed with possibility. “His chance had been thrust in his face,” recalls George Davis Weiss, another writer who worked in the Vallando publishing office. “Tommy says to them, ‘Get to work! Get to work! We can’t drop this ball.’ ”

Styne already had Dubonnet as a financial backer; now he went after others. One evening, Dubonnet held a little cocktail party to introduce Styne’s two young writers to potential investors. “Jule wanted them to play for the gathered people,” remembers Weiss. Dubonnet was adept at throwing such affairs, mingling the money people with the art crowd: among her guests—“a gang of big people,” recalls Weiss—were Ethel Merman, star of the smash 1946 musical
Annie Get Your Gun
, and Oliver Smith, the set designer. “At some point,” recalls Weiss, who was also invited to the Dubonnet affair, “Oliver Smith drew himself up, haughtylike, and walked away from the piano silently saying, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” Smith simply sniffed no magic in the compositions and was, in fact, aghast at what Styne’s writers had produced. “It was a big flop,” recalls Weiss. Styne, an emotional man, cringed. “The party was quickly over,” says Weiss. “He wanted everybody out. He went into a rage with the two kids. Jule had no feeling for kindness. He would break out in screams, shouts. They didn’t know what to do. They were stunned.”

Styne—who felt Bock and Holofcener were trying to write “
an opera”—phoned Vallando and told him to forget everything, crying that “the kids” had let him down. “
I’m going to call the coast and get myself a couple great writers,” he complained. “It serves me right to play with nobodies.”

Vallando pleaded with Styne. “
Give it a chance,” he begged.

“Give it a chance?” Styne answered. “I had all these people in to see this new team, and I get egg on my face!”

Feeling desperate and sensing a prime opportunity slipping away, Vallando proposed adding another writer to the team, one of the seasoned writers on his staff—George David Weiss himself. When Styne finished fuming, the idea of adding Weiss seemed to calm him down. He had heard of Weiss. Weiss also wrote both words and music, Vallando told Styne—sure to be a valued contribution with the unproductive prodigies. Weiss—who would first have to meet Styne—secretly figured Styne was game for any new ideas from Vallando because he did not want to lose the opportunity to get Sammy Davis to Broadway. “He was an egomaniac,” Weiss says of Styne.

Weiss had studied at the Juilliard School of Music. He had also done arrangements for Stan Kenton’s big band and had a decade’s worth of hits behind him, among them “To Think You’ve Chosen Me,” “That Was My Heart You Heard,” “I Ran All the Way Home,” and “Let’s Make the Most of Tonight.”

Styne soon summoned Weiss—a rather formal man—to his apartment. “I went up to see him, scared to death,” remembers Weiss. “I realized I had a chance at a Broadway show.” After Styne got past complaining to Weiss that the writers on Vallando’s staff were trying “to ruin me,” he started, almost in the same breath, asking Weiss about ideas for the musical, about scenes, about what the beginning and middle and end would look like, all while simultaneously
offering his own ideas about what would make the show work. Then he told George David Weiss to go home and start writing. Styne had exhausted Weiss.

Working furiously over the weekend, songs coming into his head and floating out, only to float back in a better version, Weiss finally had something he was ready to show Styne the following week. This time Weiss would be going to the Styne apartment with musical numbers. “I crawled—I did not walk—to Jule’s apartment,” says Weiss. “I showed him my concepts, ideas. I sat at the piano and played him a couple of melodic things. He gets all excited—to my shock—and says, ‘Terrific! Terrific! Terrific!’ ” Jule was so excited, he began jumping around, playing the melodies over and over in his mind, allowing them to float in and out of his ears. He was smiling; he seemed happy. Maybe Weiss had the job. He looked into Jule’s eyes, waiting for an answer. But Styne bid him good-bye. There was no handshake on a deal, which worried Weiss. He feared Styne, and in that fear, he was unable to figure him out. Time passed—fitfully. It took a few days, and then news came that Weiss had one of the coveted music-writing jobs for the Broadway show.

So it was: George David Weiss, son of a milkman, was going to Broadway. And Sammy Davis, Jr., was waiting for him.

Weiss and the two kids—Bock and Holofcener—began working furiously, composing
Mr. Wonderful
. (The book for the show was by Joseph Stein and Will Glickman.) In a short time, however, the creative process grew tense. Bock would disagree with Weiss; Weiss would disagree with Holofcener. There were too many writers, too much stirring of the stew. The arguments didn’t seem to let up. Finally, the William Morris agent representing Bock and Holofcener asked everyone to come in for a meeting. “He said,” remembers Weiss, “ ‘I can’t take this bullshit. You guys have the biggest opportunity of your lives. This is Jule Styne—and it’s gonna star Sammy Davis, Jr., who’s going to be the biggest entertainer in the country.’ ” The agent went on to tell them that when there was an impasse, the writers should vote on it. Weiss told the agent it was nearly impossible to vote on such a creative venture. “He said, ‘I don’t care. Get the project written.’ ” The young writers huddled, and convinced themselves that egos must be put aside and the unnecessary arguments stopped.

The day soon came when Jule Styne told Weiss it was time to meet Sammy. Everyone would meet at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, where Sammy was performing. It was Skinny D’Amato’s club.

It was no secret that gangsters hung out at Skinny’s club, against a backdrop of swanky entertainment and fine bourbon. In the shadows of many high-profile nightclubs—sometimes not even in the shadows—sat mobsters. The mixture of nightclubs, entertainment, and the mob had long been a potent force in America.

America was born of revolution, of settlers and invaders, of slavery and immigrants, of action on the dusty plains. And of capitalism, which unleashed the shrewd work of financiers. The financiers had their games, and they played them for keeps. Liquidate, liquidate, urged financier Andrew Mellon. Mellon wished to protect the rich—those like him—and soak all others. Somehow, the common man pushed on. The country enjoyed its pastimes, its sporting events, its nightlife. Alcohol became a part of the enjoyment, a constant, like the sunrise. Early in the century, some began to shout pieties, believing moral decay was setting in. For years there were speeches, cavalcades led by fire-and-brimstone preachers, men and women screaming to the heavens and urging abstinence from alcohol. In 1919 they had their victory with the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed the sale of alcohol.