In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (48 page)

Alfred Hitchcock—the British filmmaker who had directed such recent films as
To Catch a Thief
,
The Trouble with Harry
,
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and
Rear Window
—usually got the actors he wanted for his movies. In 1957 he wanted Vera Miles, so memorable in John Ford’s 1956 Western
The Searchers
, for a crime thriller he was preparing. It was based on the French novel
d’Entre les morts
, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. But Miles was in the first months of pregnancy and declined the role. Hitchcock then turned to Novak. He had to enter negotiations with Cohn because he was making the movie for Paramount and not Columbia. Hitchcock had already decided on his male star. It would be Jimmy Stewart, who, in 1954, had turned in a shrewd performance—opposite Grace Kelly, another Hitchcock blonde—in
Rear Window
.

Hitchcock would ultimately change the title of his new movie to
Vertigo
. Not long after filming began, in San Francisco, Sammy arrived to watch the film’s daily rushes. He frequently used his movie contacts to visit film sets, spry as a kid around cranes, movie cameras, and lights. On the set, he’d silently glide around Novak, letting on to no one that she was his reason for being around, until he befriended Luddy Waters as his “beard.” (Sammy soon hired Waters’s husband, Jim, a lowly actor, to become an assistant on his staff.)

Steve Blauner, who had befriended Sammy during the
Mr. Wonderful
run, had now gone on to take an agent’s job with GAC (General Artists Corporation). Sammy excitedly told Blauner about his relationship with Novak. Blauner froze. “I grab him by the throat,” Blauner remembers. “I say, ‘You stupid son of a bitch! How long you think it’ll be a secret? They’ll kill you.’ ”

Blauner did not mean literally, but figuratively. They—the men in the shadows of the big studios, the men who had to keep the secrets inside the secrets of a Hollywood secret—would ruin little Sammy’s career. But Sammy heard none of it, none of the words raining from the mouth of big hard-edged Steve Blauner. He was in love. He had pulled Kim Novak down from the big screen and into his life. Blauner feared that news of Sammy and Novak could only lead to tragedy, certainly for Sammy, possibly for Novak.

Kim Novak liked what so many other women had liked in Sammy—the way
he rose in a nightclub, how his mind searched and searched, the genius gathered inside him. “I happened to be one of the females in the world,” says singer Keely Smith, “who thought Sammy Davis was one of the sexiest men alive. Sammy had an animalistic thing about him that was sexy. If you’re a woman in the audience and watched him, you’d think he was the sexiest man alive.” Kim Novak had been, for a spell, Sinatra’s girl, and yes, Sammy wanted what Sinatra had had—and why not? Sinatra had the best things in life. So Sammy did what came naturally to him—he gave her things, things to make her like him, or love him, or think of him. Kim Novak received what Peggy King and Eartha Kitt and Chita Rivera all had received—flowers, gifts, sparkling jewelry. His friends could tell how happy he seemed to be, both for the furtiveness of the relationship and for the fact it was Kim Novak. The lady in the parlor; the whore in the bedroom. “I remember being in his room,” Bonnie Rand says of Sammy. “He had just hung up with Kim. He was so happy.”

Sammy and Sinatra and singer Keely Smith were sitting around one evening. Just three singers, awash in the joy they were all having, talking about singing, songs, life. Sammy told Sinatra he’d have to leave early, couldn’t hang around. Sinatra couldn’t understand what might be more important than hanging around with him. So he wanted to know why Sammy had to leave, and those blue eyes pressed for an answer. It was Kim Novak; they had a date. A little smirk crawled across the Sinatra face. He told Sammy he could get Kim to break the date. Sammy thought Sinatra was kidding, but he wasn’t, the blue eyes steady and hard. Keely Smith sat listening, looking between both men. Sammy against Frank. She knew who would win. “I said, ‘Frank, don’t do that.’ He went into the room, called Kim [said he wanted to see her], and she broke the date with Sammy to go with Frank. It broke Sammy’s heart. And Frank never went to meet her.”

Sammy, by conveying to Sinatra that he could swim in the same romantic waters, had toyed with the famous Sinatra ego. He had sinned. And to sin against Frank Sinatra carried consequences.

Gossip columnists—Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen—began sniffing around. Sammy and Kim Novak? It sounded preposterous—but also rich with scandalous possibility.

This was not like Sammy’s other affairs with white women, which were quiet, hushed dalliances. This was Kim Novak. She was the property of a major movie studio, Columbia, which had invested heavily in her. This was box office, part of a studio’s future. This was Harry Cohn. Movie studio operatives were savvy in the ways of handling scandal, but not Negro and white scandal that had the lightning bolt of sex attached. This was explosive and uncharted territory.

But Jerry Lewis saw the mutual affection. It struck him as something deeper than a fleeting affair. “There was no question that the two of them were insane
over one another,” Lewis says. He’d watch Novak’s eyes peering into Sammy. “She looked at him like she had just gotten the gold ring.”

At the time Sammy was secretly seeing Novak, Cindy Bitterman was working for Columbia Pictures in the publicity department. “They told me Kim Novak was coming to town,” she remembers. “I was to take care of her.” It was just a chaperone assignment, two young attractive Columbia employees out on the town. During the outing, Sammy’s name was never mentioned.

A short while later Bitterman was invited to dinner with a group of Columbia executives. Harry Cohn himself was at the table. The mogul showed off a bottle of pricey perfume he had purchased for one of Columbia’s starlets. The junior executives effusively complimented their boss about his taste in perfume. “At dinner,” recalls Bitterman, “the names of Kim and Sammy come up. Cohn has no idea of my relationship to Sammy. He asked somebody at the table, ‘What’s with this nigger?’ My stomach started cramping. ‘If he doesn’t straighten up,’ he starts saying about Sammy, ‘he’ll be minus another eye.’ I went to the bathroom and threw up. I threw up out of fear and greed and Hollywood moneymaking.”

Sammy and Kim Novak’s romance unfolded in 1957 against a brooding cinematic summer and autumn.

In April, Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck started talking up his new film,
Island in the Sun
, even though the movie would not open until July. Among the film’s stars were Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, and John Justin. The setting was the West Indies. The film marked the return of director Robert Rossen. Six years earlier Rossen had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to name names and was blacklisted. So he went back and named more than fifty colleagues who had been, according to his testimony, either sympathizers or members of the Communist Party. Friends were aghast. Rossen left Hollywood. Eventually, with the dimming of McCarthyism, he found work again, but it was abroad, in foreign locales. But Zanuck did not have to worry about Rossen’s past. The heated insinuation of black and white romance in his film was a far more potent flame, so much so that it all but vanquished Rossen as a concern. In South Carolina, two months before the movie’s opening, legislators debated levying fines against theaters that planned to show it. Politicians across the South threatened organized boycotts and picketing because of the film’s suggestion of sex across racial lines.

There was picketing in Arkansas that autumn, but of a different sort.

On the morning of September 4 in Little Rock, the Arkansas capital, nine Negro schoolchildren—they and their families had been winnowed from a larger list—were scheduled to integrate Central High School. It had been three
years since the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision outlawed school segregation. But Little Rock officials had yet to enforce the ruling, just as many others across the South had not. Rumors of possible violence against the children frightened their parents, and the planned integration was called off. Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine students, did not receive the message (her family had no phone), and she went to school. At the school she was taunted by a white mob. Epithets flew; cameras clicked all around her. “
Lynch her! Lynch her!” someone cried out. For all the world to see, she was just a young Negro student, clutching her school materials, trying to reach the classroom. She never made it inside, as she was forced to turn back. Governor Orval Faubus had decided none of the children would integrate the school and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block their planned entry. News of the event quickly reached the White House. Eisenhower officials made appeals to Faubus to remove his guardsmen. Eventually the governor was summoned to the president’s summer retreat in Newport, Rhode Island, where talks continued. Faubus, a shifty operator, finally did remove the troops but left no protection for the children against the massing mobs. On September 23 the nine Negro students had to be hurried out of the school for fear of violence. Members of the media kept arriving in Little Rock; two Negro reporters were beaten up by the mob. The White House felt tricked. A day after the children had been whisked from the school, an infuriated Eisenhower ordered the quick deployment of one thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to Central High to protect the children. Never before had television cameras swooped over and around such an event. A state was pitted against federal forces. The phrase “forced school integration” entered the nation’s vocabulary. One had to harken back to the dangerous days of Reconstruction after the Civil War for such an example of federal troops demanding order in the aftermath of racial strife. The Little Rock crisis ended without loss of life, though a military presence—federalized National Guard troops—would have to remain at the school for much of the year.

Against this backdrop of paranoia and violence, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the challenging and potentially dangerous odds of tackling an interracial love affair on a movie screen.

Evangelist Billy Graham staged a two-month-long crusade in New York City that year. One of his fellow ministers issued a paper—“No Color Line in Heaven.”

Hollywood—where Sammy Davis and Kim Novak resided—was quite a long way from heaven.

In Chicago in 1957, visiting her hometown, Novak took her family to see Sammy’s nightclub act at the Chez Paree. As expected, he got them one of the
best tables in the house. Novak herself seemed oblivious to the possibility of gossip. But already Harry Cohn had studio flatfoots trailing her, snooping.

Sammy’s dancer friend Prince Spencer—who had had such an influence upon Sammy—was in Chicago at the time. “We were walking down the street with him,” Spencer says. “He was talking; he was in love. He went to a public telephone, called her, and let my wife and me talk to Kim Novak.” The phone conversation made his wife, Jerri, nervous. “[Sammy] wanted our approval,” she says, “and we said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ ”

After Chicago, Novak returned to the West Coast to continue film work. Jess Rand was summoned by Harry Cohn to come and see him on the Columbia studio lot. Rand was under no illusion of what the studio boss wished to talk about. Led into Cohn’s office, Rand walked up to the chair in front of his desk and prepared to take a seat. “Sit over there on the couch!” Cohn yelled. Rand, startled, backed toward the couch, wondering if Cohn was joking. He was not. The aging mogul—so paranoid he often recorded the conversations of visitors to his office with a hidden microphone—began to rant about Sammy and Kim Novak. He threw the remnants of a smoked cigar at Rand, who ducked. “I was scared to death,” Rand would remember of the blistering verbal assault against Sammy. “I know the right people,” the mogul threatened, glaring. “I’ll see he never works in a nightclub again.”

When Rand left the Columbia lot, his heart was beating furiously. He feared Cohn’s reach. “Hollywood was a small town.” Indeed it was: Sammy’s friend Jeff Chandler had filmed
Jeanne Eagels
alongside Novak. Rand talked to Chandler about the affair. “Jeff told Sammy he was crazy” to continue seeing Novak, says Rand.

Rand boarded a plane and flew to Chicago to see Sammy, to tell him about the meeting with Cohn. Rand found Sammy in his hotel room, talking with a man he had never seen before. Sammy looked agitated; the man sitting on the edge of the bed facing him appeared quite calm. The discussion going on was about Sammy and Novak; the eye being talked about was Sammy’s. Rand quickly—and rightfully—figured the man came from the underworld. “If you fuck with my right eye,” Sammy told the man, “I’ll kill you.” Sammy’s threat astonished Rand. He was surprised to hear Sammy talk with such uncharacteristic bravado; it sounded as if he were onstage, mimicking Bogart. After the threat, the room got quiet; you could have heard feathers floating. The man slowly rose from the bed. He pulled back his jacket and showed Sammy a flash of the gun he was carrying. “Don’t ever say that, kid,” he began, leaning over Sammy, the words coming slowly, “unless you mean it.” Sammy was stilled, as was Jess. The man left; they had no idea who sent him.

Was it a death threat? Was the man just fooling? Sammy and Rand had no idea. Word began to filter among Sammy’s friends, and they themselves began
to worry and play host to dark thoughts. (For years to come these mob-linked imaginings will play around in Sammy’s mind-set, as well as the public’s. In a succeeding decade Sammy will revel in the Chicago company of Sam Giancana, a known mobster. But Sammy’s connection to the mob underground was all surface: the loaning of money, the
heh-heh-heh
of his friendship with Sinatra, his own wobbly sense of self, which took him through various doors in life. Sinatra and Dean Martin both had financial stakes in Las Vegas properties, and those arrangements often had mob fingerprints upon them. Sammy’s skin color prevented him from being involved in such deals. As his financial fortunes improved, he had no need for his mob connections, and so they faded.)