In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (57 page)

May looked lovely. The expressions on Sammy’s face alternated: at times he looked startled, as if he had just fallen through the roof and landed on his feet in the middle of a gala wedding affair. At other times he looked as if he might cry—and then, strangely, he did. He was wearing a three-quarter-length tuxedo coat and his square, thickly rimmed glasses.

Outside, ten bodyguards stood watch. The death threats against Sammy had been coming more often leading up to the ceremony.

And there they were now, married, together, their love out in the open. In her high heels, she towered over him. In his giddiness, he warmed her soul.

They settled into Sammy’s home on Evanview Drive. May decided she wanted to learn about Judaism, so she went to Hebrew school. When they were
asked if Britt’s movie career would be hurt because of her marriage, studio producers were too polite to answer, but it spoke volumes when she began to receive fewer and fewer scripts. She didn’t seem to mind; she was happily married. She said she looked forward to raising children, to settling down.

But May Britt had married Sammy Davis, Jr. Settle down? He could hardly stop moving.

Sammy rarely slept.

Well, he did sleep, but hardly anyone saw him sleep. He imagined himself accomplishing as much in the night as during the day. He could sleep in cars, on airplanes, on trains. He slept for five minutes, three hours, any amount of time—and it was deep sleeping—then he’d rise and bolt like a man afire. Ideas would come to him—about entertainment ventures, movies, TV shows—and he’d leave a room, to think to himself, leaving other guests perplexed.

To Britt, his lifestyle was dizzying. He had never considered himself stationary. He had been moving since he was a child. May was surprised at his nonstop motion. He packed enough luggage to shame a dozen women. She was startled at the things he dragged with him. Just like that, they left Los Angeles in 1961—they’d keep their home—and moved into a New York City apartment.

In New York, fans trailed him on the street. He hated when they walked up to him on his bad side, where the world was invisible, and he’d yank his head suddenly when he heard a voice, felt a nudge at his elbow, saw May out of his good eye speaking to someone. Many times the autograph-seekers made him nervous. Janet Leigh visited the couple there. “I remember we were walking in the street to their place. We were talking about this movie idea—about a black man and a white woman—and Sammy said, ‘You have no idea how hard it is with me and May. You see this?’ He showed me the umbrella he was carrying. You could press it and the tip could become a knife. He said, ‘This is how hard it sometimes gets.’ ”

Sammy huffed on Mike Wallace’s
Nightbeat
radio show that his wife didn’t need American movies, that she was highly sought after in Europe. Sammy was wildly overestimating his wife’s overseas allure. During the course of their marriage, she’d never make another movie in Europe.

Sammy was constantly hunting properties. Producers and directors did not come to him nearly as often as he would have liked them to. So he looked for material on his own. He looked at mediocre movies late at night and imagined remakes, casting himself in leading roles and interesting character parts that he felt had originally been miscast. He talked, animatedly, with his friend Amy Greene about a remake of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, the classic 1935 film that starred Leslie Howard, leading a double life, and Merle Oberon.

Greeting wife May in 1965. His
Golden Boy
shenanigans had caused rumors of a separation. Sammy holds daughter Tracey. Pictured also are the couple’s two adopted sons, Mark and Jeff, and, in the center, the children’s nanny, Lessie Jackson. The adoptions seemed to bewilder Sammy. Fatherhood was the one role he would never master
.
(
PHOTO UPI
)

Sammy as the British Pimpernel! He talked and talked; his Hollywood friends listened and listened.

The theater frightened many Hollywood actors. The stage judged immediately,
and it could also judge cruelly. But Sammy was comfortable onstage, so he considered Broadway properties as well. In 1962—in a tale based on actual events—Sammy started dreaming of playing Glenn Griffin.

Griffin, along with another ex-convict, had broken into a suburban New York home and held a family hostage, terrorizing them. The context of family, sexual threat, murder, was, as drama, irresistible.
Life
magazine wrote evocatively of the real-life event. It wouldn’t be long before a playwright weighed in: Joseph Hayes’s drama was titled
The Desperate Hours
. It premiered on Broadway in 1955 and had a healthy, admirable run. Among its skillful cast were Karl Malden and, as the young hoodlum Griffin, Paul Newman. (It was also made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart, Martha Scott, and Fredric March and directed by William Wyler.)

In his revival of
The Desperate Hours
, Sammy—having used his name to mount the production—surrounded himself with unknowns. But he was savvy enough to recruit Lloyd Richards, the celebrated young Negro director, to direct. Three years earlier, in 1959, Richards had directed Sidney Poitier in Lorraine Hansberry’s electrifying drama
A Raisin in the Sun
on Broadway. That play had heralded, for the first time, white America into the living room, kitchen, and hearts and souls of a breathing, striving Negro family. On the eve of its March 11 opening, playwright Hansberry would write to her mother from a Connecticut hotel room: “
Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—people who are the very essence of human dignity.” (On opening night, Poitier pulled Hansberry up and onto the stage. The applause was deafening.) Hansberry—who favored Beat sneakers, who lived in Greenwich Village, who hailed from Chicago, and who, like Sammy, had married white—became the youngest woman, and first Negro, to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the year. It seemed, almost overnight, that American theater had suddenly crossed a threshold. Negroes had unleashed a kind of cultural juiciness into the American theater. There had not been as much talk about Negroes onstage, in fact, since Sammy’s wild and slapsticky romp in
Mr. Wonderful
.

“What I was intrigued by,” recalls Richards about Sammy’s mounting of the crime drama, “was Sammy’s desire to do a straight play. He wanted to establish himself as an actor and not just a pure personality. I knew this was not just a frivolous event on Sammy’s calendar. He had a purpose in doing it.”

Sammy moved out to Long Island for rehearsals. The play would open at the Mineola Playhouse, then go to the Westport Country Playhouse, and, if there was enough buzz trailing along the way, perhaps Broadway. Sammy sent
a car into New York City every day to pick up Richards. The young director thought that was classy.

Sammy already greased and straightened his hair—oh, to have hair like Tony Curtis! Now he dyed it red for the production. Richards was impressed with Sammy during the rehearsal period. “He was completely disciplined, which I assume came from his training in the business. You don’t get to be a singer, dancer, performer of that magnitude without a hell of a lot of work.”

Billie Allen, a New York dancer who had once spurned Sammy’s romantic overtures but became a friend instead, drove out to Long Island to see the play. “He had dyed his hair red, a red conk,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I think it makes me look younger.’ He wanted so much to be a straight actor, a serious actor.” Allen was mesmerized by the different incarnations of Sammy Davis, Jr. “He didn’t put himself in a category. That’s what I loved about him. You couldn’t box him in.”

If Richards began the production wondering which Sammy he’d be witnessing—celebrity entertainer or Vegas nightclub act—by play’s end, his opinion of the performer’s gifts had soared. There were also tinges of sentiment, for in getting to know Sammy, Richards would find himself admiring Sammy’s quest. “He was in no-man’s-land,” Richards says. “Nobody had encountered the things he had encountered. He was a big person, and he was in a big world—trying to find a way to live with dignity, and survive, and progress.”

The Desperate Hours
closed without Broadway’s interest. Davis shrugged his shoulders. His mind whirred like a child’s mind: there were a million ideas in front of him, and a million days left to do them. There would be no tears for things that failed to materialize. His shell was hard.

An invitation arrived for Sammy and May from the White House, and it made him brighten. He suddenly felt loved by the most powerful man in the world.

Once in office, President Kennedy had begun striking positive chords with American Negroes. Negroes were hired—in tiny numbers, to be sure, but they were hired—in high-placed government positions. For once, there were Negroes working for the president of the United States in positions other than valet, cook, butler, maid. Andrew Hatcher, a Negro, became a presidential deputy press secretary. But with the passage of time, those White House and federal jobs seemed rather insignificant compared to the plight of Negroes in many southern states who were still kept from voting by threat of intimidation or even murder. Waves of students across the South were continuing their sit-ins. Louis Martin, the shrewd black Chicago operative and a Kennedy advisor, sent a missive to the president on January 31. Its direct message implied that, as
far as Negroes were concerned, all was not well along the shores of Camelot. “
American Negroes through sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins, etc. will continue to create situations which involve the police powers of the local, state and Federal government,” Martin warned Kennedy.

Southern Democrats had been instrumental in Kennedy’s thin victory over Nixon. But the Dixiecrats, as they were known, were loath to support civil rights, and Kennedy stepped gingerly around the issue of Negroes and their battle for rights. However, Martin’s memo struck a nerve in the young president. Kennedy told Martin to plan a meeting with Negro leaders. It would take place on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. (There would, however, be no publicity, a highly unusual decision but one owing to Kennedy’s nervousness.)

Martin had contacts in every corner of the Negro world, from politics to sports to entertainment. He went about making his calls with enormous pride, knowing that such an event had never taken place at the White House before.

So on the Great Emancipator’s birthday, a stream of prominent Negroes were ushered through the southwest gate into the White House. The guest list was indeed eclectic: There was Langston Hughes—it was the great poet’s first visit inside the White House—and Dick Gregory, the comic, who had never imagined such an invite. There were NAACP officials and National Urban League officials. Louis Martin was beside himself. “
It looks like Uncle Tom’s cabin around here,” he quipped. Sammy and May walked hand in hand. Getting Sammy there was a coup for Martin: White House officials kept scratching Sammy’s name from the guest list, fearful of repercussions of having him and his white wife at the gathering. But every time they scratched it off, Martin wrote it back on. As Kennedy began his descent downstairs from the White House to join the reception, his scanning eyes stopped cold on Davis and Britt. “
What’s he doing here?” he heatedly asked an aide, an edge in his voice. “Get them out of there!” he ordered, and then he realized some form of tact would have to be adopted. Kennedy told aides to tell his wife to usher May Britt out of the room before the photographers arrived. Jacqueline Kennedy, however, became distraught at the idea and refused to tell them. She rushed upstairs, angry at the president. Others ushered the couple along before any photographer saw them. (That very day—just hours before the meeting with Negro leaders at the White House—the U.S. Civil Rights Commission delivered a report to Kennedy on the condition of the Negro in America. Among its findings was that freedom for the Negro was “
more fictional than real.”) Sammy Davis and May Britt left the White House that evening deeply aware of the awkward treatment they had received. The man who many believed the top entertainer in the world—Negro or white—would not forget what had happened.

On February 25, two weeks after the White House affair, union stalwart
A. Philip Randolph announced in New York plans for a march on Washington. The same Randolph had used the threat two decades earlier with the Roosevelt administration until they had capitulated to his demands for antidiscrimination legislation. The Kennedy White House paid little attention to the new threat.

By now Sammy had, along with Frank and Dean, shot a movie,
Sergeants 3
, and had it in the can. (It was, like
Ocean’s 11
, really Frank’s movie.) During the shooting Sammy had to fly back to Las Vegas for performances. He complained of the small plane, bitterly, until Howard Koch, the movie’s producer, hired a private plane. “We paid for him to fly in a big plane, six-hundred-seater—a black man sitting on the plane all by himself.”