In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (69 page)

Haley, born in 1921 in Ithaca, New York, spent most of his childhood among maternal relatives in Henning, Tennessee. He was precocious enough to finish high school by the age of fifteen. But college bored him, and he left after just two years to join the coast guard. Sailing at sea, he began writing—letters, stories, memories of his southern upbringing. By the time he left the coast guard, in 1959, he had convinced himself he could make a living as a writer. He moved to Greenwich Village, in New York City. He wrote for
Harper’s
, for the
New York Times Magazine
, for
Reader’s Digest
. He became adept at hustling up assignments on his own. In 1962, Haley tracked down Miles Davis—whose 1959 recording
Sketches of Spain
was still the rage—and spent hours and hours with the musician. Haley sold the piece to
Playboy
, and the magazine shaped it into a longish question-and-answer profile. The reaction to the Q & A format was huge and favorable. It was so positive, in fact, that
Playboy
decided to make it a monthly feature—the
Playboy
interview.

To keep the
Playboy
interview newsworthy, editors would scan the country for newsmakers—the more controversial and edgy, the better—then assign a writer to interview them.
Playboy
had assigned Haley to interview Malcolm X in 1962. The Malcolm X interview was nuanced, full of insight, the first piece for the general public that showed a multidimensional Malcolm X, a figure undergoing transformation regarding some of his radical racial ideas. Exiled by Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad, and constantly besieged with death threats, Malcolm X came off as a man both revolutionary and vulnerable. The piece garnered wide attention. Haley and Malcolm X would soon begin collaboration on the latter’s life story.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, published in 1965, would become a best-seller, demanding a reevaluation of Malcolm X’s life. It also saw Haley’s reputation as a writer soar.

In 1966 the editors of
Playboy
thought of another figure for Alex Haley to go after: Sammy Davis, Jr. But Sammy was not easy to catch up to. Haley fired off
letters, and the letters trailed Sammy, from Los Angeles to New Jersey to New York City. Murphy handled media in his usual laissez-faire manner. Haley’s letters took on a more pleading tone. The quarry was elusive: “
I had been trying to get his ear, and his confidence, for two weeks, dogging his tracks from city to city, trying to penetrate both his shell of reticence and the cordon of cronies and coworkers with whom he surrounds himself, waiting in vain for Sammy to alight anywhere long enough to buttonhole him for anything more than a wave and a greeting.”

Sammy finally told Haley to meet him in Philadelphia. Even before they met, Haley had his own reservations about Sammy, about the persona: “I had gone to the assignment secretly feeling that nobody could be that good”

Upon reaching Philadelphia, Haley got himself to the Forrest Theatre, where Sammy was scheduled to begin an engagement. It took Haley only a short time inside Sammy’s dressing room before he realized he had stumbled upon a unique entertainer indeed. The goings-on reminded Haley of “
a jug band accompanied by an animated Ray Charles.” Sammy bounced, moved about, refused to sit down; he’d let his one eye zone in on Haley, only to, seconds later, yank his attention elsewhere. Haley’s eyes widened, and he made notes of it all: “
Sammy puts on dressing room shows that should be recorded, doing sketches of everything he does on stage.” The writer’s curiosity continually rose in Haley. Days with Sammy left him in awe: “
Even his dancers watch him night after night, as if to find his secret.” One evening Haley sat spellbound as Sammy ordered fried chicken for twenty-eight people and viewed a screening of
The Chase
. (Sammy’s
Golden Boy
director, Arthur Penn, had shot the movie, which starred Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Angie Dickinson. Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay, based on a Horton Foote novel. Penn and Hellman—and producer Sam Spiegel—all had volatile creative differences during the making of the movie, and those differences made their way into the gossip columns, intriguing many, including Sammy.) Sammy’s screening ended at three a.m. Haley wasn’t accustomed to such late hours. “
I get so incensed when you see a picture like tonight and then you see a picture like
High Noon
. So simple, so brilliant,” Sammy explained to a tired Haley. The movie-watching prompted Haley to ask Sammy for a list of the movies he deemed great. Sammy rattled them off:
Gunga Din, The Roaring Twenties, Stage Coach, Cover Girl
, and—little surprise—
Wuthering Heights
. They were movies earmarked by themes of dreaminess, battle, guns, and love—all favorites of Sammy’s cinematic mind. Just before five a.m., Sammy shared something else with Haley. He told him he thought
Panhandle
, a little-known 1948 movie with Rod Cameron and Blake Edwards—who would go from acting to a distinguished career as a director—was “
a classic.” The kid vaudevillian who had grown up in theaters watching films had willed himself a historian of little-seen movies.

Haley got a peek in Sammy’s book bag and spied, in addition to three James Bond novels, the following:
Basic Judaism
,
Yes I Can
,
A Treasury of Great Poems
,
The American Indian Wars
,
A Gift of Prophecy
,
The Marquis de Sade
, and
Wuthering Heights
. Sammy later confided—and he seemed here to be trying to make a literary connection with Negro writer Haley—that he had read the works of novelist Richard Wright. “
They made me feel something about being black that I had never really felt before,” he explained to Haley. “It made me uncomfortable, made me feel trapped in black, you know, in a white society that had created you the way it wanted, and still hated you.”

Sammy lamented that there were not more hours in the day. If there were, he’d read more books! As it was, he carried what he could and read them simultaneously. A boring passage from one book would force him to drop that book aside and immediately snatch another one up.

Haley went riding in Sammy’s limousine. It had an assortment of buttons, varied features. Sammy twisted and touched every button within reach. Haley took notes: “intercom drive, console bar, stereo/45 rpm, ice bucket, holders records/armrest taperecorder, television—moves up and down, telephone, no glare windows—to keep glare off television.” So many tricks! Haley seemed amused that a Negro could live so lavishly; at Haley’s amusement, Sammy could only smile. He lived like Sinatra. The world—at least nearly so—on a string.

Two Negroes, the writer and the entertainer, lapping it up in America. Haley couldn’t stop from cackling. Ha ha ha. Alexander Palmer Haley was a long way from Henning, Tennessee.

Sammy’s humor, however, was another thing, a painful mixture of slapstick layered over race. “If I’m in the dark,” he told Haley, “and I hear a chain rattling, I will say ‘Who dat?’ ”

On any given moment, Sammy could sound as if his touchstone to slavery were humor. He sounded not unlike Bert Williams, the blackface vaudeville comedian.

Sammy took a phone call from Vice President Hubert Humphrey while in Haley’s presence. He saw Haley scribbling the exchange down. Humphrey asked Sammy if he’d consider going to Vietnam to entertain the troops. Such a request served to elevate Sammy’s sense of self. Raising his voice so Haley could get it all down, he quickly agreed. (Since the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, on August 7, 1964, Johnson had escalated American involvement in the Southeast Asia conflict.)

Haley watched Sammy perform onstage and was transfixed. When Sammy knew someone was watching him for the first time, he exhausted himself—even more than his usual exhaustive effort. It was another child-held vaudevillian curse—to overperform, lest you be disliked, booed, chased away. After one show, Haley, worn out, looked forward to relaxing with Sammy in the dressing
room: the great entertainer would surely need to relax. Instead, there was energy, noise, commotion, analysis. “Alex,” Sammy told the writer, “these are our most productive hours. After a show our minds are sharpest.”

Haley the Tennessee hick and late-night Sammy. Sammy had Haley right where he wanted him: awed and beguiled.

Glancing one moment down at Sammy’s feet, Haley made a note of Sammy’s shoes: “Go go boots … black suede.”

“I got a little depressed the other day, and I went out and bought me something,” Sammy said to Haley on yet another occasion, holding out three new watches for him to admire.

Ha ha ha. Just like Sinatra.

Sammy riffed with Haley about his own life, about his work ethic, his marriage (already irreparably damaged, even if, to Haley, he did sound giddy as a newlywed), movie roles. “Until we get to the point where a Negro can play a heavy—as [Richard] Widmark plays a heavy—then we haven’t arrived.… [E]very time I get to play a heavy, I do. [And] not a Negro heavy just because he’s a Negro.”

Haley trailed a bopping Sammy into a March, 16, 1966, press conference. “Nobody said anything about my suntan,” Sammy cracked.

Haley seemed genuinely surprised when Sammy told him he carried a gun. Sammy reminded Haley that Dick Gregory had gotten shot, out in Los Angeles during the Watts riots. “
They let me carry one in New York, the hardest state to get a gun permit in, because they realized that I get some kind of threat about every day of my life,” he told Haley.

Another day—Haley spent two weeks trailing Sammy—the writer sat in a corner listening as Sammy went about untying his bow tie and crooning:

Haley thought one of the more poignant moments was watching while Sammy signed autographs, the patter of rain beating outside, Negro and white admirers circling the entertainer.

The
Playboy
interview, which Haley had begun conducting in the spring, appeared in the magazine’s December 1966 issue. Haley had been presented with a list of questions by
Playboy
editors to throw at Sammy. More than a few zingers made it into the published version.

“Have you ever wished that you weren’t a Negro?”

“You’d just like to look like everybody else so that people wouldn’t automatically start hating you a block away,” Sammy answered in the magazine’s pages. “White cat sees you walking down the street, maybe from across the street, and he never saw you before in his life, and he’s not even close enough to distinguish anything about you except that you’re not his color—and just for that, right there, snap, bop, bap, he HATES you! That’s the injustice of it, that’s what makes you cry out inside, sometimes, ‘Damn, I wish I wasn’t black!’ ”

Another question: “As you know, there was a widespread feeling among both whites and Negroes that you were marrying May in order to gain status in white society.”

The question seemed to genuinely unnerve Sammy. “For the information of those who may not have been able to figure out yet why I DID marry May—despite everything we knew we were letting ourselves in for—it was love, sweet love, baby.”

And yet another question—just like certain others in the interview—which threaded right into Sammy’s wobbly sense of racial identity: “Your night-club and theater audiences are predominantly white,” Haley asked. “Do you think there may be some element of race consciousness in your compulsion to win their approval?”

“No question about it,” Sammy answered. “I always go on stage anticipating what people out there may be feeling against me emotionally. I want to rob them of what they’re sitting there thinking: NEGRO.”

By the time Sammy’s
Playboy
interview appeared, May had left New York City and flown to California with the children. By then “love, sweet love, baby” was a thing of the past. The turn of events hardly surprised Sy Marsh, Sammy’s agent: “He was on the road fifty weeks a year. He was fucking everything he could get his hands on.”

May Britt had finally realized that her husband—trapped in black—no longer wanted to be married.

It had been a difficult year. NBC canceled
The Sammy Davis Jr. Show
that spring; the last telecast aired April 22, 1966. It had been the first variety show hosted by a black in the 1960s, and it had been an uphill battle from the beginning. There were several weeks, following the show’s premiere, that Sammy himself could not appear on his own show because of a previous contract with ABC. “I thought the best thing I could do was get everybody to tune in,” recalls Jay Bernstein, who did publicity for Sammy and the show. “It was the worst thing I could have done. Everybody tuned in.” And when they did, there was no Sammy. Viewership fell off. It hardly helped that the show was pitted against two highly popular CBS comedies—
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Gomer Pyle
.

The initial episode, however, was quite memorable, featuring Hollywood’s extravagant couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Judy Garland appeared on two other shows. Inasmuch as the show was taped during Sammy’s
Golden Boy
run, Sammy made it somewhat of a family affair: he brought his
Golden Boy
musical conductor, George Rhodes, aboard, along with some
Golden Boy
dancers. Despite the show’s failure, it certainly pointed up Sammy’s stamina.

So May was gone. Other painful shadows and realities were now upon him. His grandmother Rosa died in 1966. And she was the one woman he knew had loved him unconditionally. “When Rosa died, he was devastated,” says actress Madelyn Rhue. “Rosa was a Jewish grandmother, and she was the nanny everyone wanted.” The last year of Rosa’s life had been simple and sweet: she only wanted to be driven around now and then, mostly down from Beverly Hills into South Central Los Angeles. She’d see plenty of Negro faces there, like her friend Virginia Capehart. Capehart was living a spinster’s life now, happy to see Rosa’s car pulling up to her apartment. “Rosa would sit in the dining room and look at the traffic,” Capehart remembers. “It made her think of New York.” After her outings, Rosa liked climbing back in her car, and there she’d be, rolling home and hoping that Sammy might be back from the road. But he was rarely there. It was just like in the old days: her little Sammy, gone into the wind. Rosa’s car, her driver, her medical bills—everything was paid for by her Sammy. The car was a bone white Cadillac sedan—that dream car of the American Negro.