In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (49 page)

Amy Greene felt the affair was Kim Novak’s way of rebelling against Harry Cohn, and that her fight with Cohn had placed Sammy in the middle. “It was just a blatant, sexual, fun relationship,” she says. “Her entire life was programmed by Harry Cohn. All of a sudden Sammy came into her life.” Greene worried that Cohn operatives might try to hurt Sammy simply “because he was banging Kim.” The relationship worried Tony Curtis as well. He felt Sammy was swimming in very troubled waters. “He didn’t know how to protect himself,” Curtis says. “You needed someone to help you organize that type of lifestyle: where to show up, what time. It had to be two or three people aiding you in that area.”

Sammy—the converted Jew—had no rabbi. At least not the kind called on in such situations.

“Harry Cohn wanted him dead,” believed Jack Carter, Sammy’s Broadway costar from
Mr. Wonderful
.

Sinatra would not help. Not regarding a former lover. Frank only sang for the lonely; he did not advise them.

“What he was cocking around with was the mob,” says Jerry Lewis of Sammy. “They had a lot of money in Columbia—namely Harry Cohn—and I knew it.”

Sammy sweated, had terrible dreams. Arthur Silber, Jr., was also quite nervous. “There were no random shootings in Las Vegas,” he would say. “They wouldn’t allow rampant gangs. People were just dead.” Will Mastin and Sam Sr. were beside themselves with worry. They were vaudevillians; they believed most anything could happen in life. Mastin’s mantra—something bad is gonna happen—rang in Sammy’s ears just as it rang in the ears of Jess Rand.

To be tucked away in hotel suites with white women was one thing. To have one of those affairs oozing out into public—when that white woman is attached to the economic dreams of others—was something else. The need for subterfuge was real; possible exposure served only to unleash notions of conspiracy, studio intimidation, racism, Chicago gangsters—the whole narrative
world that sometimes circled Negro and white America. Sammy was now caught in the boiling cauldron of it all.

America was splattered with examples of the repercussions of what could go wrong when minds raced back through the time zone of black and white sex. Negro boxing champion Jack Johnson went into the eyeteeth of it, and he paid a dear price. In 1911 he married the first of his three white wives, Etta Terry Duryea. A year after the marriage she committed suicide, the general feeling being that the pressure of being married to a Negro was too unbearable. In 1912, Johnson married Lucille Cameron. In 1913 he was convicted under the Mann Act for traveling across state lines for “immoral purposes”—the act of making love to his wife. Johnson did not wait around for his sentence and skipped to France. In France he boxed and wrestled. They were exhibitions, and he looked foolish. In 1915 he traveled to Cuba to defend his title against Jess Willard. He lost. He returned to America in 1920 and served a year in prison. The dethroned champion married Irene Pineau, the last of his three white wives, in 1924. On June 20, 1946, Johnson—now retired from boxing and dabbling in business affairs—died in a car crash in Raleigh, North Carolina. His life, to some, had seemed devoted to striking fear in the minds of whites from the boxing ring to the bedroom. There was yet another incident in the racial-sex narrative as potent as the Jack Johnson narrative, though this one touched more lives.

They referred to them as the Scottsboro Boys. On March 25, 1931, in Paint Rock, Alabama, nine Negro youths were pulled off a train and arrested. A group of whites had claimed that the boys had scuffled with them. There were two white women in the train compartment with the youths. Later, under pressure, the white women claimed the Negroes had raped them. Lynch mobs formed in Scottsboro. The case, written up in feverish newspaper accounts, unleashed raging fears across the South about Negroes and white women. Eight of the youths were sentenced to death. There were appeals. In 1934, Ruby Bates, one of the accusers who had gone on to recant her story, joined nearly three thousand marchers to the White House to make a plea for their release. The case gnawed on the conscience of civil rights officials for nearly a decade, becoming a cause célèbre. Charges were dropped against the youngest of the nine, but the others served a total of one hundred cumulative years before the final accused was freed in 1950.

Sammy’s predicament was dangerous—as quietly dangerous as the groaning echoes in movie theaters in 1957 when Harry Belafonte reached over to touch the arm of Joan Fontaine in
Island in the Sun
, the whiff of sexual foreplay whirring around both of them. In Atlanta alone, upward of five thousand—egged on by southern politicians—protested the movie’s showing.

“The joke was that Sammy didn’t start walking until he was two,” says his mother, Elvera, “and the first person he walked toward was a white woman.”

Judy Garland—although their relationship was merely platonic—seemed awed by Sammy. “He came into the Dunbar [a Los Angeles hotel] one night with Judy Garland,” says actress Maggie Hathaway. “They said, ‘Oh, no.’ My husband said to Sammy, ‘Come over to our house. We have a guest room.” Any white woman had to cross barriers to get to him—history, race, his looks. Garland sailed past his color, and he became, right before her eyes, just Sammy, his only history that counted not Negro but show-business history.

“The black girls wouldn’t pay him any mind,” says dancer Maurice Hines. “The white girls looked at the money—not color. The white girls were aggressive.” Being caressed by a white woman made him feel soft and loved. He could not help himself. White womanhood is what he wanted; it thrilled him so. But it rattled bones in the American psyche, and those bones made loud noises.

“Big publicity for Sammy,” says Jess Rand, “was if he was dating a black woman.”

Steve Blauner was worried enough to make a trip to the Columbia studios. He knew someone there, and that someone was Abe Schneider, one of the founders. “I said, ‘Abe, I know you don’t know what’s going on. Sammy Davis is having an affair with Kim Novak. If anything happens to Sammy, I’ll blow the whistle.’ ”

Sammy found it hard, as days passed, to shake the scene in that Chicago hotel room with the mysterious gentleman, the way the man had shown him his gun, the cold look he had in his eyes. There was something else he couldn’t shake: what Harry Cohn had also blurted out to Jess Rand. Cohn said that Sammy needed to marry a Negro woman. “You get him married!” Cohn had yelled. Rand put no significant meaning to the rant, until Sammy told him about a mysterious phone call. “I hear you like white women,” the unidentified caller said to him. “You should marry one. Her name is Loray White, and she works at a casino in Las Vegas.” Then the caller hung up.

Loray White? He knew her, only to have seen her, to have shared drinks with her—as there were so few Negro girls working in the Vegas clubs. She sang in the lounge at the Silver Slipper, down on the far end of the Las Vegas strip.

Sammy’s own vaudeville mind began to go into overdrive. He saw it all slipping away, his entire future—records, movie deals, the nightclubs. What would become of his father, of his grandmother Rosa? It was as if he himself were in a Hitchcock drama—the imagination knifed by whispers and bizarre phone calls, visits from strangers. And all because of the beautiful blonde curled up on his sofa: Kim Novak.

Besieged with worry, Sammy inexplicably told Jess Rand he was going to marry Loray White. Rand was stunned. But then everyone—Rand included—began thinking of their careers. Hollywood, in fact, was so small that you could
disappoint the wrong people and the place could suddenly become smaller than a dot. And that dot could engulf you. Rand went along with Sammy’s wishes.

Sammy went and met with White and pleaded with her to marry him. She was dumbfounded at first. When she saw how strangely earnest Sammy seemed to be, she became giddily flattered, a going-nowhere Negro singer in Las Vegas. Her first marriage—to a piano player who happened to be white—went badly right off and quickly ended. She had no inclination to toss away this fairy tale, so she agreed to marry Sammy. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. tried to talk Sammy out of it, but they could not; and because they could not, they began to feel he knew more than he was telling them. The two old men still believed that evil men onscreen were evil in real life. Nothing was more important than survival. And it was Sammy who had seen the gun in the hotel room, and Sammy who had heard the strange voice on the telephone.

Sammy well knew men were buried in the sands of Nevada. They were buried out there for crimes no one—save their perpetrators—knew about. In the shadows, and in the imagination—or maybe in both—there lurked dark figures: Harry Cohn, who knew George Wood, who knew the gangster Frank Costello, who knew other gangsters.

“The gossip,” remembers Annie Stevens, “was already backstage: Sammy has to get married—or he’ll be killed.”

Jerry Lewis believed Sammy had little maneuvering room regarding his plans: “He was told to do it.” Lewis felt the dark shadow of mobsters behind it: “You don’t say
no
to them! I grew up with these people. One thing you don’t do is ignore them.”

Sammy and Loray went, accompanied by Rand and Arthur Silber, Jr.—Rand having tipped off the Las Vegas press—over to the district court county clerk’s office to apply for the marriage license. Bureau clerk Helen Bunting accepted the application; Sammy raised his right hand to swear that all the information he had given was true. He was dressed in a plain cardigan sweater, a dark shirt underneath, simple slacks. He looked distracted. His fiancée wore a long dress, pearls, high heels. She looked to be swooning. Outside the courthouse they posed on the steps. Flashbulbs went off. He had bent a leg on the step just above the flat surface of the ground. He had tried to raise himself up as the flashes went off. Loray was taller than he was; her high heels only further reduced him in height. At times she bent down to his ear to talk.

Sammy hustled to introduce Loray White to his friends. “Sammy took us over to the Silver Slipper to see her sing,” remembers Annie Stevens. “She was an okay singer—but very, very beautiful. That night he got up onstage and introduced her as his fiancée.”

Once the wedding date was announced—January 10—it seemed impossible to pull it back in.

“Sammy didn’t even like her,” admits dancer Prince Spencer. It seemed to matter little. The invitations were liberally sprinkled about: every stage act along the strip was invited. Jack Entratter, president of the Sands, put his publicity staff to work. Sammy assured Entratter he would stick to his appearance schedule at the Sands, even on his wedding night.

One afternoon Sammy turned to a gathering of friends—Annie Stevens among them—and made an announcement.

“Annie is going to be the matron of honor,” he said.

“How can you do that,” Stevens shot back. “I don’t even know Loray.”

Kim Novak had appeared on the cover of
Look
magazine in its November 12, 1957, issue, eight weeks before Sammy’s scheduled wedding. She looked golden, and lovely, wearing a straw hat with a lavender ribbon wrapped around it. Her face—one eye in shadow from the brim of the hat—dominates the photo. In the accompanying article, there are references to her past, mentions of her love life. For months, her secret affair with Sammy had been humming along inside the edges of Hollywood. And yet, in the article, there is not a single mention of Sammy, of the Negro entertainer. He’d been sufficiently erased.

Loray White went shopping the day before her wedding. Bonnie Rand thought it an odd diversion. She jauntily breezed in and out of the Las Vegas stores. “She bought about fifty pairs of shoes” at I. Magnin, remembers Rand.

On January 10, their wedding day—it all took place at the Sands with Jack Entratter hosting, which meant that Entratter footed the bill and thus would own a little more of Sammy’s ass—all the stars of Las Vegas showed. There was Joe E. Lewis, the old Borscht Belt comedian; Donald O’Connor, the dancer; actor Gordon McRae; Eydie Gormé; a bevy of tall and exquisite chorus girls. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. looked elegant, as always. They brought along Rosa, Sammy’s grandmother, and members of Sam Sr.’s new family, Rita and the adopted children. Best man Harry Belafonte—a feline presence with his butterscotch complexion—was coolly attired in a black suit.

Amid the subterfuge of Sammy’s wedding day, Belafonte arrived as a Byronic presence: he was a dash of Negro Hollywood—but he also staved off what he perceived as Sammy’s deep pain. Belafonte was more knowledgeable than most about what had occurred behind the scenes. “I knew he was having a romantic interlude,” he says of Sammy and Novak. As small as Hollywood was, it was considerably smaller for the Negroes working in its employ. Belafonte was too conscientious to abandon Sammy in his time of need. “Sammy was in an excruciating place in his life,” Belafonte would remember.

Sammy’s mother, Elvera, was not in attendance, unable to take the quickly arranged marriage seriously. She stood behind the bar where she worked in Atlantic City and let an assortment of scenarios flow in and out of her mind about why her son was about to get married. “He married her because if he had not, they would have broken his legs,” she would say years later.

The drama reached Madelyn Rhue, an insightful actress who, in the past, had peered deep inside Sammy. (Rhue, who was white, had briefly dated Sammy. Her mother was aghast, and it all ended.) Now Rhue felt for Sammy. “He was left out there on the hook, and no one came to help him.”