In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (70 page)

There were times, in the aftermath of Rosa’s death, when the phone would ring in Sammy’s house and Rudy, the valet, would pick it up, and it would be Elvera. Why, she was out at the airport, at LAX. No one had realized she was coming. She’d tell Rudy—in that no-nonsense voice of hers—to come fetch her. And he would, and soon after leaving the airport, he would have to inform her that Sammy was out on the road, and when he did, she’d tell him, her voice sharpening, that she did not want to get in anyone’s way. Then, suddenly glancing at Rudy and taking umbrage at his innocent sharing of Sammy’s whereabouts, she’d change her mind. And instead of going to the house, she now wanted to be dropped off at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. And now Rudy felt awful. No matter how much he’d beg her to come stay at the house, she was insistent: the Beverly Wilshire. And he’d pull up to the front door of the hotel and escort her inside, fussing over her. After a few days of sitting around, ordering room service, Elvera would summon Rudy again, and he’d come take her back out to LAX, where she’d board the plane and return home.

On such unannounced visits, it was as if Elvera Davis—with Rosa now
dead—was trying to be a mother again. And, in walking up that trail, she’d become entangled in her own emotions. Rudy remembers several other visits, when she’d be at Sammy’s, and a misunderstanding would occur, over the slightest comment, and it was up and out of there and back to the Beverly Wilshire to wait for her flight home.

It was as if Elvera Davis sometimes possessed the pull of motherhood, but never quite the mettle.

The Beverly Wilshire always sent the bills to her Sammy, as she instructed them to.

The civil rights movement that Sammy had only been glimpsing—unlike Poitier and Belafonte, who seemed spiritually invested in it—was now fully upon the country. It was a movement to celebrate a different kind of beauty from what Madison Avenue advertisers had been flaunting for generations. And included in this beauty was a demand for rights, respect. For Sammy, confusion about such things as the word “Negro” was vanishing. The word that had so much belonged to Sammy’s generation—a
Negro
entertainer, a
Negro
teacher, a
Negro
dance act—was gone. Those kids protesting on college campuses and marching in the South had started demanding another word, one as stark against the word “white” as existed in the English language.

Black.

There had been all those schoolchildren—everywhere, anywhere—made especially famous when Negro psychologist Kenneth Clark had been testifying on behalf of Negro lawyers fighting in the renowned 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
lawsuit which originated in Kansas: the Negro children themselves preferred the white—not black—dolls! And what did that say about a lack of self-esteem?

Now black was dignified. It was the balled fist. It was the Afro. It was Langston Hughes and Curtis Mayfield and Fannie Lou Hamer. It was Martin and Malcolm. It was the struggle in Harlem and the war in Mississippi. It wasn’t “Yes I can”; it was “Yes we will.” And now, black was also beautiful.

“Negro” was old, suddenly antique.

Poof.

Welcome to black America.

The
Golden Boy
fanfare had seeped deeply into Sammy. He began asking the questions about professional fighters, attending boxing matches, placing bets, weaving through Las Vegas fight nights with his entourage. He was juiced up. He was
Golden Boy
down from the Broadway stage, out into the open.

The young actor Harry Belafonte, on left, would often browbeat Sammy into a position of social activism. Here they are attending the “Prayer Pilgrimage” in Washington, D.C. Actress Ruby Dee is on Sammy’s left. Sammy seemed a peculiar sight at the event, snapping photographs in a tireless effort to fit in. Forevermore, he would be considered a latecomer to “the movement.”
(
© THE WASHINGTON POST. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.
)

“
All I need is a manager,” the boxer Sonny Liston announced in 1967. “Somebody with a nice clean record.”

Sammy started bragging, telling those around him he’d manage Liston. Yes, a manager. He was managing Lola Falana, and also a bevy of backup singers. He had watched Will Mastin manage others all his life. He saw no reason why he couldn’t manage the volatile Liston. For years Liston had been linked to gangsters—a puppet, albeit a menacing one, to their dirty dreams.

“Why would Sammy want to get involved with managing a guy nobody wants any part of?” Dick Young, the
New York Daily News
columnist, begged to know.

Ideas flew into Sammy’s mind, and then they flew out. The curse of the vaudevillian. He and Liston never connected. And
Golden Boy
Sammy kept moving.

•     •     •

In whatever city he happened to be in between 1963 and 1967, the staff abided Sammy’s obsession: they’d sit with him and watch
The Fugitive
, an ABC drama that starred David Janssen. The murder mystery didn’t intrigue Sammy as much as the lead character’s rootlessness did. Always on the run, always in motion.

Many blacks had started sporting Afros, a large and bushy hairstyle, a fashion ornament taken from the Africans. Earmark of the Afro was to eschew grease, which straightened the hair. Negroes were now proud to sport a “natural” look. And, in another fashion owed to the African, they started wearing dashikis, loose-fitting shirts seen now on the backs of the protesters at many of the demonstrations going on around the country.

Frank had the Italians, as Dean had the Italians. Their blood lay in the old country. And that blood had powered its way into
l’America
. But what did Sammy have? Some vaudeville memories; a checkered family history in Wilmington, North Carolina; a mother’s brutal Cuban heritage; a vision of old Will Mastin swinging a cane. And he had three children—Tracey and the two adopted boys, Mark and Jeff. (He played the role of father, however, like a well-known actor making cameo appearances in films—brief moments here and there.) Tracey—half black, half white, a child of Hollywood and all the spoils that would come to apply—recalled in later years only one breakfast with her father in her entire life: “But in years to come, whenever I doubted my father’s love, I thought back to that morning, to the smothered pork chops and the shared smiles, and knew the answer. Still, it’s sad in a way that one of the only memories I have of being with my father as a child is that we actually had breakfast together. I had breakfast with Mom just about every day, but I only recall that one time with Pop.”

Sam Sr. never bent to family obligations. Nor did Will Mastin. Nor did Sinatra. Sammy simply could not picture Sinatra driving the kids off to school in a station wagon.

So he let May go without waging any kind of a battle to keep his marriage intact. There was no attempt at reconciliation.

She was so beautiful in
Blue Angel
, even more so in
The Young Lions
. The wide screen—as it had his father and Will Mastin—bewitched Sammy. May came down off the screen and gave herself to him, and he could not stop himself from falling in love with her image. If only he could have frozen the frame when he spotted her on celluloid. Only life didn’t work like that. He would tell those interviewers during the course of their marriage that May was going to get back onscreen. After all, who could walk away from the glittery lights? But
it was his hunger, not hers. The deeper into marriage she went, the more she figured her film career had been an accident, a series of flukes. She found real magic in domestic life, in her children. She was the antithesis of Elvera, her mother-in-law. She believed nothing could replace her children galloping into her arms.

Sammy had no idea of the breadth of May’s happiness. She wanted to live happily ever after, with her children and her Sammy. But like his father and Will Mastin, he was rarely home. Even when idle on the road, instead of flying home, he’d go off—to gun shows, to film festivals; he’d go visit auto dealers in obscure locales to look at new European cars. He needed the exhaustion of constant movement.

Friends had seen the end coming.

“Sammy openly wanted a movie-star wife,” says his friend and ghostwriter Burt Boyar. “He wanted people to say, ‘Hey, there’s May and Sammy!’ He wanted to step out of a limo at an opening and have everybody scream. He wanted it to be two movie stars.”

There were those who were aghast that he had abandoned her.

“She deserved better than what she got,” says Amy Greene.

“May, to her credit, wanted to be a housewife,” says Boyar. “She began resisting what Sammy wanted. She wanted to have the kids in the back of the station wagon and take the kids off to school. It wasn’t obvious to Sammy that that was who he was marrying.”

Jerry Lewis sat listening to Sammy talk about the end of his marriage, and shook his head.

“He tried to be a family man,” says Lewis. “He told me it wasn’t fun. I said, ‘Sammy, a cunt at night with Chinese food is fun. Family is hard work. It can be a joy, but it is hard work.’ ”

All the while he was fearful of family dynamics, fearful that, as he put it, his life would be “
taken over by them.”

May left him; he left May. The press accounts were echoes of surprise and bewilderment at the breakup of their marriage. She said he must not want a family life any longer, because he never came home. She retreated into her family—minus Sammy. “She became almost an overnight hausfrau,” Shirley Rhodes says. “She wanted kids, dinner at six, let’s go to the zoo, let’s get a motor home and drive across country.”

He did not imagine life as she imagined it. And she had no sense of the clawing he had done to get where he was.

So the words at the end of
Yes I Can
were so much palaver:

He simply never understood the eyes she saw him with, the pride she got from imagining him not as entertainer, but as man. If she saw in him a certain nobility—and she did—he saw in her a certain American victory, the lovely white woman walking in the same sands he walked, the great white feminine shark, beached unto him. “Wasn’t it every black man’s fantasy to have a white woman?” asks Helen Gallagher, Sammy’s onetime beautiful, pre-May, blond lover.

Whether he wanted it to or not, Sammy’s celebrity kept pulling him into the political forces blowing through America. There were discussions with Vice President Humphrey about the urban crisis in America; there were fund-raisers for Martin Luther King, Jr., to keep the civil rights movement in motion; there was a budding friendship with New York senator Robert Kennedy. And still, there were constant musings about the depth of his commitment. The white Sammy and the black Sammy were always at war with each other. “I think Sammy was afraid of the fact—a lot of my colleagues were—of sitting at the table of power,” says Harry Belafonte. “They were nervous about what their image was with those people who held their life strings.”

King, having determined which Hollywood celebrities he could count on to help foster further acceptance of his mass movement, knew he had steady commitments from Marlon Brando and Tony Franciosa in addition to Poitier and Belafonte. Both Brando and Franciosa—attendees at the 1963 March on Washington—had found a moral yardstick within themselves and aimed it directly into the movement.

There were times when Sammy heard of white celebrities preparing to participate in a movement event or rally, and he would grow suspicious and start wondering why he wasn’t approached, wondering if the organizers were doubtful of his own commitment.

Brando was concerned about reports that blacks in Gaston, Alabama, were being mistreated and kept from certain jobs. “Marlon approached me and asked would I like to go with him to Gaston,” Franciosa remembers. “He said he had heard doors were being shut to blacks wanting to work in the factory there. I said yes. Next thing I know Sammy is coming along. I was expecting to buy a ticket for the plane. Sammy said, ‘No no, I’m going to rent a Learjet.’ ”

Sammy’s fear of the Deep South was palpable. He had a gnawing feeling he would be assassinated, and that feeling bemused him as he pondered how blacks might react. “
I don’t care whatever move I make, some of my own people won’t like it,” he had told Alex Haley. “Maybe they’ll like me when I die. But I can’t die like normal; I got to be shot in Mississippi. Like Dick Gregory got shot at Watts. Shoot me—bam! Then they’ll say, ‘I guess he really was on our side.’ ”

“My sense,” says Franciosa,