In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (61 page)

When
Golden Boy
opened on Broadway on October 20, 1964, Sammy was happily married to white actress May Britt. But within months, he was romantically linked to one of the black beauties in the play, Lola Falana (left), seated alongside fellow cast member Sally Neal. What must Sammy have been thinking as he snapped this photo? The cultural upheaval across the country changed him. His marriage began to collapse. Fade to black …
 (
COURTESY SALLY NEAL
)

Women were arriving through the stage door—leggy, beautiful—to audition for dancing roles. They’d quickly change into their leotards and take to the stage. Sometimes Sammy himself had summoned them. “Sammy would bring a lot of girls in who were pretty—but weren’t technically trained,” recalls Sally Neal, one of the dancers who was cast in
Golden Boy
and who had performed with Sammy in
Mr. Wonderful
.

Sammy, still the camera freak, aimed his lens everywhere, and at everyone, during rehearsals. It was as if he could stop the world for that nanosecond it took for the camera’s shutter to click; otherwise he might lose forever what his one good eye had just seen flash by—something beautiful, something soulful.
So he aimed his camera and stopped what he saw. The competition on Broadway for dancing roles was stiff, and doubly so for Negro dancers, who had so few opportunities. The chorus dancers were known as gypsies. In order to stand out as a gypsy, to catch the eye of director or star, you had to do something provocative. You had to shine every day, until you were no longer just shining, you were becoming indispensable. One of the new dancers—tall and aggressive—was shining every day. She caught Sammy’s eye. He believed he had spotted his ingenue—the role that he had first offered to Frances Davis. He raised the camera. Click, click.

Her name was Lola.

Lola Falana hailed from Philadelphia. As a schoolgirl she was quite determined about her future plans. “Even in high school I had said I wanted to be like Sammy Davis, Jr., when I grow up.” Shortly after high school, she had begun talking of going out on the road, of leaving home. It was just the kind of talk that frightened many parents. One night, the house quiet, she began to pack. Her mother stopped her on the steps, three o’clock in the morning, panting: she begged Lola not to go, told her how upset her father would be. “This is a done deal,” she told her mother. “I’m gone. The hour has come.”

She was headed to Atlantic City, where she joined a chorus revue put together by Larry Steele. She took a room in a boardinghouse. Lola Falana became known as a workhorse of a dancer. Her sexiness was potent. She heard about a Broadway-bound musical being cast starring Sammy Davis, Jr. She got herself into Manhattan. And during the
Golden Boy
auditions, she stood out.

“We put her in a pair of gold pants,” Hilly Elkins remembers. Her body—“a hell of a build,” says Elkins—froze the eyes of men. And the eye of Sammy.

O
ne of the rewards of returning to New York City for Sammy was the chance to renew old acquaintances. He hadn’t lived, really lived, in the city since
Mr. Wonderful
, and that had been nearly a decade before. He invited musicians, journalists, jewelry salesmen, and hangers-on to the
Golden Boy
rehearsals. They came, and he hugged them as if they had all been survivors of a sinking ocean liner. Magazine writers sent their requests to interview Sammy to Murphy, his assistant. Murphy was in no rush to reply.

While in New York City, Sammy—just as he had hoped—was going to make a movie. He rented an office, and Shirley Rhodes quickly turned it into a production office. Sammy had secured a movie deal with Embassy Pictures. He’d star in and produce
A Man Called Adam
, a tough-luck drama about a jazzman coping with the ups and downs of his life. If Sinatra could both star in and produce a movie, then so could Sammy. Shirley kept visitors without appointments away from the office, stopping them at the door, her face going cold in the presence of nonsense. Negroes were watched warily by whites. She knew it. Any missteps, and there was bad publicity, a rise in the number of Negroes doubting other Negroes. She would have none of it heaped on Sammy. So: a movie and a Broadway play! Sammy’s kind of pace; he’d film around the play.

Meanwhile, with Strouse, Coe, and Sammy working hard on
Golden Boy
, Odets fled back out to California, promising finished rewrites today, tomorrow, anyday. Hilly fumed. Then there was the matter of the production having to adjust to Sammy’s New York City schedule. “He was consistently late,” recalls Strouse. “He was the first person to use the expression to me ‘CPT’ [colored people’s time]. He was so complicated that when he was late, I felt guilty. I never felt totally at ease with him.” During rehearsals, Strouse realized Sammy was unable to read music. Sammy had developed an extraordinarily tuned ear. To compensate for the lack of reading, he’d pounce on whatever
didn’t sound right. The process unnerved Strouse. “I was doing a lot of bowing and scraping.”

On August 14, 1963, Clifford Odets died in California. He had been sickly off and on, bravely keeping it from Hilly. It was cancer. Hilly was sent reeling.

Odets, only fifty-seven, was saluted in the press, remembered for his early glories as a playwright by the likes of Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, two big guns of the American theater. But there were also the reminders of his shameful House Un-American Activities Committee testimony. In the end, as a playwright, Odets seemed a man frozen in that dangerous territory of being unable to transfer the words and ideas from his quick eyes and brain to the empty page. He had been told to write
Golden Boy
—once again—and lift it even higher this time. Always a man who came alive at night—he slept during the day—he had begun to find solace in darkness, far away from Hilly Elkins and his golden dream. What had sounded possible in Hilly’s mind proved stifling to Odets. He had taken on the assignment for the best of reasons—to support his children. Following his death, one of Odets’s former students, who had met him in the 1950s, referred to him as “
an archangel who had fallen.”

Hilly wouldn’t hear of retreat. He’d certainly miss Odets, but the world was going to keep spinning. He and the
Golden Boy
company would hash the play out, trying to imagine where Odets might have taken it. They’d rehearse longer. They’d take the notes and rewrites, skimpy as they were, that Odets had left behind. They would keep going. Sammy displayed not a bit of concern. For a child in vaudeville, potential disaster lay around every corner. This—the death of Odets—was life.

So they kept going. However, tension started to pervade the production. Hilly’s voice grew louder, edgier. The opening of
Golden Boy
would coincide with the opening of
Fiddler on the Roof
, another big musical, starring Zero Mostel. Hilly’s investors started to worry.

At times it appeared Sammy—seen jumping rope one moment in rehearsals, puffing on a cigarette the next—and Peter Coe were not on the same page. Everyone in the rehearsal could feel it. Everybody in the production seemed to be offering suggestions now. “One time,” recalls Strouse—still feverishly reworking musical numbers as well—“I went to Sammy’s dressing room with a notepad. Sammy said, ‘What’s that pad?’ I said, ‘I took a few notes.’ He said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ ”

Sam Sr. had come east to visit. He was worried, and it had nothing to do with the death of Clifford Odets. “The big deal was that the leading lady was white,” says dancer Lola Falana. Sam Sr. warned Sammy of possible backlash.

Hilly had lined up the cities and theaters for the out-of-town tryouts for
Golden Boy
. They’d begin in Philadelphia, go from there to Detroit, and then on to Boston. And from Boston, to Broadway. As he looked around at his cast
before they hit the road, a tinge of pride overcame Hilly. He had assembled a genuinely integrated company. “Because of the fact that, outside from the Negro Ensemble Company, there were so few opportunities on Broadway for blacks, I was able to put together the most extraordinary company.”

As the forty-one-member company set out, the belief in success, fueled by Hilly’s optimism, was rising. Odets was dead, but Sammy was very much alive.

Privately, there were cast members—particularly Negro—who still thought that long swatches of the play’s dialogue felt dated. But the road was for repairs and adjustments, and they knew every day would count.

In Philadelphia the reviews were tepid and troublesome. But the reviews were not the only problems. Outside the theater, there were hecklers, bigots shouting at the actors and actresses as they emerged, making references to the interracial romance onstage between Sammy and Paula Wayne. “For the first onstage kiss we had bodyguards,” says Elkins. It was something no one expected. Paula Wayne was rattled. Sammy ignored the protests, as if he had seen it all before—which he had—and as if life was just life, which it was. The fighter in Hilly wanted to tussle with the bigots. Instead, he settled for police protection. After Sammy received the first of several death threats, a bodyguard—in addition to Joe Grant, his personal bodyguard who always traveled with him—was positioned outside his stage door. It is a rather lovely phrase—“the Philadelphia Negro”—and it had been coined by W. E. B. Du Bois. Well, the Philadelphia Negro just now had no intentions of staging protests on Sammy’s behalf: he’d as soon cast his emotional glances in the direction of the Deep South, where church bombings and the murders of civil rights workers were going on.

Cast members found themselves leaving the theater at night and glancing over their shoulders. “Being on the road with
Golden Boy
was one of the more painful experiences of my life,” says Strouse.

At the end of the Philadelphia run, they headed for Boston. Before arriving, Sammy waxed sentimental with the press about his memories of that city, where he had spent time with his father and Will Mastin. “
All of the old burlesque houses! They were schools for vaudeville performers. There’s no school like them for variety performance,” he cried. “There’s no way left for a boy to learn the business. There’s nowhere left for a boy to learn how to bow!”

Those cruel, unpredictable, poverty-stricken, dark, and sad days of vaudeville. Sammy sometimes missed them.

He talked to another group of reporters, and someone asked about the Rat Pack. Sammy did not want to dwell on that: “
a joke can only go so far, and it’s over now,” he said about the group and the movies and fun times they had. “Besides, most of us have too many commitments in the future to be able to get together again.”

They each—Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey—had had their own kind of
fame. And when they were together, that fame had taken on a kind of electricity of its own. But now they were just too famous to be famous together again. The Rat Pack. Done in by fame. It was the old Hollywood story.

Someone asked about Barry Goldwater, whose presidential campaign was scaring liberals and Negroes alike. “
I don’t have to think,” Sammy answered. “I’m a Democrat.”

Just after arriving in Boston, Sammy busied himself with his traditional duties. He shopped. He bought camera equipment, clothes, gifts for cast members and stagehands. The fans and autograph-seekers only caught glimpses of him, ducking in and out of the backseat of his silver-colored, convertible Rolls-Royce. “In Boston, a great many young fans once caught up to the Rolls,” remembers Strouse. “These kids started climbing all over the car. There were fifty kids on the windshield of the car. I was scared—I’m claustrophobic.”

The first preview audience in Boston streamed to the Shubert Theatre to see
Golden Boy
, right alongside Elliot Norton, the city’s esteemed drama critic. Norton, a Harvard graduate, wrote for the
Boston Herald American
. In his youth, Norton had seen Paul Robeson onstage playing Othello in a theater near Harvard Square. When the foot stomping began, Norton could see that Robeson was nervous, fearing trouble because of his white Desdemona. But it was just the Harvard kids’ way of showing their appreciation of the performance. Sammy wasn’t Othello, and Wayne wasn’t Desdemona. But Norton sensed a schizophrenic leakage in the play, as if they weren’t sure they truly wanted to tackle the racial angle. Norton also felt the play needed more action, and that Sammy’s character, Joe Wellington (“Wellington” had now replaced “Bonaparte” as the last name of Davis’s character, the former a Negro-sounding name, the latter Odets’s Italian name), wasn’t quite credible. The review virtually dismissed the production. Hilly was livid. He felt Norton was trying to sabotage his play. Hilly had to take action. He went on Jerry Williams’s Boston radio program publicizing the play; he did fifteen hours’ worth of radio in Boston, trumpeting it.

Hilly Elkins was wise enough to know he had work to do before
Golden Boy
reached New York. He phoned Paddy Chayefsky, the renowed playwright, who was a friend, and asked him to come take a look. Chayefsky came, sat, and watched. “At the end of the performance,” says Elkins, “Chayefsky said to me, ‘Hilly, I’m your friend. Close the fucking show. You ain’t got a show.’ ”

Hilly heard every word Chayefsky said, and he heard them loud and clear. And they angered him, but only a little. What they really did was propel Hilly Elkins forward. He had no intention of closing “the fucking show.”

Still, more and more, Hilly and Sammy realized their
Golden Boy
continued to have huge holes in it. Hilly stretched rehearsals, and he grew antsy. Godfrey Cambridge—whose wit could be biting, who was a raconteur, who was an edgy
and sarcastic presence in the company—began expressing doubts about the durability of the production. It did not go unnoticed that he was spending time on the telephone, talking to his agent, his voice quite audible, trying to line up another job. That was enough for Hilly, and he fired him.

Johnny Brown, the garrulous young actor who was Cambridge’s understudy, now had the proverbial break. Still, Cambridge’s firing only highlighted the tension coursing through the show. There began a creeping feeling of desperation. Sammy grabbed understudy Brown and took him under his wing. Suddenly, it was Sammy playing Will Mastin.