In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (65 page)

One evening came another guest. An old man, and he seemed to glide along the walls. He was in from California, the sunshine. Sammy fussed over him, showed him around, showed him the big dressing rooms with all the congratulatory telegrams. Will Mastin had lived most of his life in theaters. Inside them, he felt kingly. Most of the cast members had never seen Mastin, only
read about him in Sammy’s cast-listing biography. They knew Will Mastin was where Sammy began. “He came down to the basement and said hi to everybody,” remembers dancer Lolly Fountain. “Very nice.”

Sammy liked Lolly’s mind, which he could bend, and Lola Falana’s bravery, which reminded him of his own.

Even in the midst of all the goings-on, Sammy remained worried about his personal safety. Hilly Elkins couldn’t keep all the news of the death threats from Sammy. Sammy conferred more and more with Joe Grant, his personal bodyguard. The marine veteran (Korean War) with the black belt in karate could be heard at times in the basement of the theater grunting—he was practicing his chops, he was breaking boards. When he mingled with the cast, he shared with them obscure volumes of books about Negro history. The combination of lethal skills and a probing intellect gave Grant a countenance that Sammy found intriguing. He’d often catch himself smiling at Grant’s presence: a bodyguard; someone who could hurt someone; a bone-crusher like Sinatra’s bone-crushers.

Lola Falana had told Sammy about her having left Philadelphia, no one believing in her except herself, how her friends and family warned her against it, told her she’d flop. “When I left home, I told Sammy, a lot of people were laughing at me. They said, ‘She’ll be back, she won’t amount to anything.’ Well, during
Golden Boy
, I told him I was going home to visit. He said, ‘Let me go back with you.’ He said, ‘I understand people saying you ain’t going to be nothing.’ ”

He called for the limousine. An easy ride, Manhattan to Philadelphia. The limo turned onto her street in the Germantown section of the city. Solid and sturdy homes. Her roots—something Sammy never had. Lola popped out, her family waiting on her, shrieking and giggling. Sammy was there standing, the oohs and aahs of neighbors’ voices rising upon spotting him. He loved it, how she was being recognized, how cars were slowing, all the waves. Of course the waves were mostly for him, but he threw them back at her, so generously, telling those gathered around how wonderfully she had been performing in
Golden Boy
—then, like a star, he invited many of those gathered to come see the show—as his and Lola’s personal guests! She was not just Lola anymore, but Lola of
Golden Boy
. Sammy signed some autographs, hugged her relatives as if he’d known them for years. Lola’s eyes became warm—as did her mother’s. “He came to Philadelphia,” recalls Falana, “to show them that a star of his magnitude respected me.”

Then Sammy and Lola climbed back into the limo and rode away—as in a fairy tale, only Sammy had really made it happen.

•     •     •

More and more Sammy started sleeping at his suite at the Gorham. And the girls came, and he bedded them. Lola Falana, who had turned into a New York Broadway sex symbol almost overnight, became a lover. She couldn’t help it. “As a rule, hanging around Sammy was fun,” Falana says. “You couldn’t be around Sammy and not learn. Sammy was a teacher. I learned what not to do, as well as what to do. He schooled me on the status of a star. Sammy was from the old school: ‘You don’t go out the door unless you look a certain way.’ ” She thought he was the bravest man she had ever met. She too grew wide-eyed the day Martin Luther King, Jr., came to see
Golden Boy
. She knew enough to know it wasn’t all about celebrity. “Martin knew the battle was color. He knew Sammy was in the throes of that because of the show. He saw Sammy as a brave warrior. They threatened to shoot Sammy down. While we were onstage, we would always be ready, listening for gunshots. Sammy had guts, that’s the basic word.”

Sammy’s energy fascinated Falana. His days blended into nights and
Golden Boy
, and after the curtains closed he couldn’t stop. He wanted to go some more. The world might, in the blink of an eye—as he well knew—vanish, and then what stage would he have to dance upon? “Sammy was very much alive with life,” Falana says. “He had that joie de vivre. He was curious about everything he didn’t know.” Sometimes he would mention books, the books he had read, then he’d sulk in the same breath about not having gone to school. “We—all those around him—would tell him that we’ve got, yes, school experience, teacher experience, class experience, but you’ve got life experience.”

Like all the women in Sammy’s life, Falana became acquainted with Sammy’s camera lens. “With Sammy,” she says, “I wasn’t allowed to show up someplace and look like I wasn’t ready for a photograph. Sammy thought if you were gonna climb a mountain, then every move should be a picture.” She could be standing someplace, and she’d see him, and he wouldn’t see her, and she would watch him move, quick jerky movements, looking around as if the heat of other human beings was more important to him than life itself, moving as if the world were getting away from him: where was everyone? And she’d find herself falling in love with him so deeply it stunned her. She’d wonder where he got his genius. “He wasn’t tall and thin and handsome and gorgeous. God chose this man with handicaps, with no education, no solid family encouragement. God chose all these handicaps and sent him out into the world to climb his mountain.” She wanted to laugh with him, hold him, love him. She wanted to wrap herself around him. The world was cold—so he let her.

They’d go shopping in Manhattan, leaving the limo behind, all walking, Sammy, dancer Lester Wilson, and Lola. Giggling as if they were floating. “So many people were following him,” Falana recalls. “He wanted some adventure.”

Shrewd in the ways of keeping a theatrical company happy, Sammy sent members of the company on quick out-of-town trips. He had Murphy deliver gifts to dressing rooms, accompanied by a little Sammy note. Murphy wrote the note, owing to Sammy’s self-consciousness about spelling. “Sammy gave people trips to Bermuda,” Charles Strouse would recall. “He wouldn’t give me anything. I felt left out.”

William Gibson was amazed at how Sammy’s world kept turning, one day more fascinating than the next. There Sammy stood, teaching members of the company how to fence—touché! There he sat, teaching them foreign accents. “Around the play, there was all this glamour,” he remembers. “Joe Louis would be in the lobby, saying hello to Sammy.”

Margaret Gibson—William Gibson’s psychoanalyst wife—seemed unable to stop herself from quizzing Sammy about Negro life, Negro culture. She was curious about why he adored Sinatra so much, why he seemed to be running from his own culture. She wondered about his hair, why he had it greased to look like a white man’s hairdo. “I used to plead with Sammy: ‘Please don’t slick down your hair. Leave it natural. It looks better that way.’ ” He listened and didn’t hear her. His hair was fine; the seats at the Majestic were filled to capacity. Lolly, the dancer, loved his hair, Lola loved his hair, May loved his hair. All the women handing those seductive notes to Murphy to pass along to Sammy thought his hair was just fine. There was white culture and there was Negro culture. There was also the culture of success. That was the best culture of all to Sammy. He and Hilly fighting each other over restaurant bills, the limo waiting at curbside, the long legs of Lola folding herself into the limo, she and Sammy off into the night.

The young Hollywood television director Richard Donner, a Brooklyn native, was visiting New York City at the time. He bumped into a friend who told him he just had to see Sammy in
Golden Boy
. “He was gorgeous,” remembers Donner. “It was brilliant acting.” The crosscurrent of racial imagery in the play deeply moved Donner: “[Sammy] was really playing reality.” Donner rushed backstage after the performance. “I see Sammy. I had tears in my eyes.”

It was a dizzying and powerhouse performance, emotional and kinetic. Broadway had been struck by lightning. It was a play about race and love, and boxing. Joe Louis was in the lobby, but the dead Jack Johnson—undone by his love of white women—was, if you looked deep enough, in the shadows. It was all about victory and defeat of the soul, about chicanery. It was, as well, all about what was left unsaid across the boundaries of black and white America. Sammy and the Golden Boy seemed—like King and Montgomery—the perfect constellation of performer and message. There seemed no one else in the country who could have performed the role like Sammy, with his very own demons and insecurities and obsessions; his mother’s hurtful love, his rambling vaudevillian’s life, his white wife, his wondrous gifts. In the ring, his boxer moved like a feral, lethal tap dancer. And, on a deeper level, he did not have to imagine blackface—hiding behind one face to offer another—because he had worn the burnt cork! He had shaken something loose on Broadway, and what he had shaken fell upon those who saw his performance like the bruised leaves of history. It mattered little that he did not totally realize what
he was doing. Nor did Will Mastin when he plucked a little child from his father’s arms and sent him out onstage to stomp at ghosts.

Black begets white begets golden
.
 (
COURTESY SALLY NEAL
)

What now ailed the country—fear, pain, paranoia, the madness of sex—all seemed to be inside Sammy. He was dispensing it like some great pharmacist of feeling—all our racial paranoias. Pull back the curtain and, for the simple price of a Broadway ticket, there it was, all on display. What had killed Bert Williams and haunted Jack Johnson only enlivened Sammy. Race and sex were the American sword. He knew it—he was smarter than he let on—and he could not stop himself from dancing, tap-dancing, across that sword, laughing, and bleeding, and crying, and laughing.

T
he role of Joe Wellington was punishing. It was soon taking its toll on the 120-pound Sammy. During the first week of July 1965, Jamie Rogers, who played the Puerto Rican prizefighter in the play, accidentally kicked Sammy in the chest during a scene. Sammy crumpled to the floor. When he stayed there, audience members sensed something amiss. They began bringing their hands to their mouths, as if gasping for air. Sammy was finally lifted up and taken offstage. Hilly told the
New York Times
that Sammy had suffered “
bone bruises in the ribs on the left side, as well as muscle and ligament damage.” The star missed several performances before returning; when he did return, the theater seats filled up again.

Sammy’s dressing room was just above the dressing room of the gypsies. Sometimes dancers wanted to get to him—to talk about their futures, life, him—and it wasn’t always easy to reach him. So he’d hop downstairs via the stairway to chat with them, taking in their rooms, the heat and juice of so many female bodies, the one eye darting around, then he’d dash away. “He typified what the word ‘star’ means,” says Lolly Fountain. “Like this luminous energy.”

When Sammy became interested in a dancer, he let them know very clearly. “He would meet you on the backstairs case. He’d give you a kiss, a flower. Sammy made it very apparent he was interested,” recalls Fountain. He made it very clear to Fountain he was interested. She couldn’t resist. “Sammy was warm, attentive, romantic. He would sing to you in bed sometimes. He had a song from
Dr. Dolittle
—‘Look at That Face.’ He would sing something that had meaning for you.”

Lolly Fountain would run into other Negroes during the play. She’d be up in Harlem having something to eat. She just knew they wanted to talk about Sammy, how beautiful he was in
Golden Boy
. “Oh,” someone said to her one day, “you’re working with that one-eyed monkey.” The words stunned her. She
wondered if Negroes hated Sammy the way bigots did. “I think Sammy was smart enough to know he had no common link to blacks.”

Sammy couldn’t, and didn’t, keep still. A play on Broadway might have been enough to keep Hilly and Arthur Penn and Lee Adams and Charles Strouse occupied, but not Sammy Davis, Jr. He had no idea how to waste time, how to shove time out the window for a few hours, half of a day. Time would be seized, even if, at certain moments, Shirley Rhodes could see the play—the very psychology of it—wearing on Sammy. “It was real tough,” she says. “It worked on him mentally.” But he powered himself onward.

And he pushed himself right before the cameras for his movie. Sammy hired Ike Jones to coproduce
A Man Called Adam
alongside him. Jones was an anomaly in Hollywood: a black producer. He had been a famed athlete in college out in California. He was handsome enough to be a Negro leading man, but there were virtually no roles for Negro leading men. The tiny few that were available went to Belafonte or Poitier. Jones had something in common with Sammy—his love of a white woman. Her name was Inger Stevens and she was a Swedish-born actress. Jones and Stevens had married in 1961. The marriage received no publicity because it was done in secret. It was only after Stevens’ death—from an overdose of barbituates in 1970—that word seeped out she had been married to a black man. The subterfuge seemed only to add to the tragedy. She was thirty-six years old.