In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (71 page)

It turned out to mostly be a kind of question-and-answer session, with Brando asking most of the questions, Sammy staring about like a lost child, only happy when his jet was aloft once again. “Sammy sort of disappeared down there,” says Franciosa.

The black female dancers had been trying to tell him in ways subtle and not so subtle during both the
Mr. Wonderful
and
Golden Boy
runs that there was such unexplored juice in his own culture. Now Sammy felt it. He felt it in the kinetic music coming out of the Detroit music publishing offices known as Motown. He felt it in the moxie of Hilly Elkins, how Hilly had felt these political winds and gone crashing into them.

Black was now beautiful. And
Golden Boy
was one of the few recently produced plays that had some of the temper of the times coursing through it—race, sex, edgy drama, beautiful black girls.

Well, why not reassemble
Golden Boy
? Hilly and Sammy could show America what they had done on Broadway.

Hilly scanned the country—finger to the winds—and found his city. He’d take
Golden Boy
right into the heart of civil rights demonstrations and activity; he’d take it, and its interracial cast, into what many believed to be the most segregated city in all of America: Chicago.

The cast and crew convened in New York City early in the year to begin rehearsals. Sammy had told Hilly he wanted Lolly Fountain—his former lover—to be among the cast. Hilly had to buy Lolly out of another Broadway contract: what Sammy wanted, Sammy got.

The news came in the early evening of April 4: Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis, and the assassin was on the run. It happened while King had been standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel
near downtown Memphis. He had gone to the city to assist striking garbage workers.

The murder stunned Sammy and only tightened his already firm beliefs in the dangers that lurked in America. That evening he made appearances on all three major television networks, reminding the viewers, even as the flames were already shooting upward from the rioting, of King’s nonviolent message. Sammy’s eye looked exhausted, his face drawn. Joe Grant, his bodyguard, stuck even closer to him now.

There were riots and protests in more than one hundred cities. There was looting in the nation’s capital. President Johnson ordered out the National Guard.

America’s political leaders had been painfully slow to hear the cries from the inner cities, from the ghettos. The mainstream media had inklings. A month before King’s murder,
Life
magazine had run a cover article: “The Negro and the Cities: The Cry That Will Be Heard.” (The term “black” had not yet been wholly adopted by the media.) The pictures were by longtime
Life
photographer Gordon Parks, who caught hungry Harlem children with lips swollen from eating plaster; going-nowhere youth high on pot in Brooklyn; and Chicago families besieged with poverty.

Black was beautiful, all right—and also angry. A lot of the anger was palpable in Chicago. There was fire in Chicago, and Hilly wanted to be where the fire flamed. On to Chicago! Sammy—sadness and anger sifting inside him as well—became emboldened.

“Sammy had a meeting,” remembers Lolly Fountain, on her way to Chicago with the cast. “He wanted to change the show, make it more relevant to the times.”

The times: they were full of paranoia and disillusionment. The war in Vietnam had left President Johnson in anguish. But the numbers kept rattling from the Department of Defense—that the war was winnable, never mind the body bags. Anguish turned to arrogance and hubris. Johnson sent in more troops, and then more. The kids were marching on college campuses. Johnson seemed to be in some kind of primordial pain. And then he surprised many by announcing he wouldn’t be running for president again.

It would be Nixon versus Humphrey. It would be the youth movement versus whoever stood in their way—parents, politicians, Nixon’s army, Humphrey’s machine, anything to do with the old dogma was to be challenged.

As for the old guard, they didn’t always understand. Sinatra didn’t understand the Rolling Stones, or the Beatles. But they were here to stay. From Berkeley to Greenwich Village, poets were in coffeehouses railing against war, the government, discrimination. Poetry and bullets. Sammy went onstage now with love beads draped around his neck.

The president’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders had issued its report on the 1967 riots. It presented a cornucopia of statistics and proof that America continued to exist in two societies, one black, one white—and vastly unequal for blacks. And now a Negro, a dreamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., lay dead. His had been the first death of a Negro that wobbled the spiritual senses of the country.

With King dead, many wondered if his dream of racial unity would die. The forces behind
Golden Boy
didn’t think so. Sammy and Hilly gathered their integrated cast. They would run with their own dream straight for Chicago. And just wait til Chicagoans heard “No More!”—the very anthem in the play that King himself had liked so much!

If any figure could be imagined standing upon Chicago’s mountaintop in 1968, it was Mayor Richard Daley. For years he had delivered Chicago and much of Illinois to Democratic presidential hopefuls. In turn, he expected to be treated with respect. But in the mid-1960s his administration—in the form of his police department—had begun clashing with protesters over civil rights. Justice Department lawyers from the Johnson White House had pointed out the city’s segregationist housing policies. Daley, who had become mayor in 1956, winced at criticism of his social policies. He was fond of telling Washington officials that they could stack him up against any southern redneck and he’d come out on top; he was fond of reminding them that he ran his city with control and his city worked. Negro activists were unswayed. In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr.—making his most robust foray into northern politics—launched the Chicago Freedom Movement. Its immediate aim was a call for fair housing. Riots erupted that very year in Chicago, further shining a spotlight on the city’s warring factions. In Daley’s mind, rigid segregation was but a way to keep a city running efficiently.

Many of the black inhabitants of Chicago could trace their roots to the epic Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, when droves of Negroes poured into the city looking for jobs. With Daley’s ascendancy to City Hall, there began a housing boom. The boom, however, resulted in the growth of housing projects on the South Side, where black families were crowded—the Henry Horner Homes, Stateway Gardens, Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes. During the boom, Daley slapped down the Dan Ryan Expressway—it kept the blacks from the whites: blacks were on one side of the expressway, whites on the other.

For years, the Negro newspaper the
Chicago Defender
had constantly been at war with the mayor. When young blacks began to suspect that Daley was not moving quickly enough on civil rights, many formed groups—gangs, hodgepodge
organizations that not only skirted and mocked the law but broke it. In time, the reality of gang life permeated some of the rougher black neighborhoods of Chicago. One of those gangs became known as the Blackstone Rangers.

Hilly and Sammy booked their
Golden Boy
production into Chicago’s Civic Auditorium. As soon as the cast arrived, they sensed a city on edge. Chicago’s burgeoning black rights movement was a mishmash. It had King acolyte Jesse Jackson spearheading an antipoverty effort known as Operation Breadbasket. Jackson took an athlete’s delight in challenging Daley’s policies on nearly a daily basis. The legitimate activists mixed in with the illegitimate. And now the Black Panthers swerved into view in their black leather jackets, further complicating the racial life of the city.

“We get off the plane,” remembers Hilly Elkins, “and the newspaper says, ‘Daley Orders Troops to Shoot Looters.’ ” Hilly was a battler, but even he was suddenly besieged with doubts. “I call the NAACP, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier. I said, ‘Hey guys, I want to know, if we do the show, is it good or bad [for Chicago]? I don’t want to incite riots!’ ” He heard the encouragement he needed. And actually, in the days ahead, he and Sammy found that the brew of it all thrilled them.

“Chicago looked like it had been burned down,” remembers Lolly Fountain. “Daley’s men were like these big redneck cops. They had these high black boots on, mirrored sunglasses, these hats.”

Sammy felt both saddened and newly emboldened by King’s death. He believed the death provided him with new opportunities: he’d introduce his America—white America—to this new black America. Cultural juices were loose inside him now, and he salivated with Chicago as an outlet.

Police officers were stationed near the theater—they were actually on city-wide alert—and cast members were required to show identification to enter. “It was like harassment,” Fountain felt.

But the winds Sammy felt were not kind. That phrase “Uncle Tom” was being hurled at him once again. It was a tricky city and time for a black man to be in love with a white woman—even onstage. In black Chicago, Sammy’s interracial love affair onstage didn’t seem progressive; rather, with the tides now shifting regarding racial pride, it seemed regressive! If black was beautiful, why was Joe Wellington, the
Golden Boy
boxer, willing to sacrifice everything for the love of a white woman? Sammy, feeling pressure, began making additional changes to the play. “It was much more militant,” Fountain says of the changes. At one point in the play, even the American flag—just as the Vietnam protesters were doing—was mocked.

To ingratiate himself to the city’s militant political forces, Sammy began inviting inner-city youths to see the show for free. “We’d sit onstage answering
questions about theater,” remembers Fountain. “We had meetings with black writers, leaders in the community. Of course they all wanted money.” Sammy dispensed money—running to his briefcase to grab hundred-dollar bills—in the form of “political contributions.” Ha ha ha. Let them laugh at him now; let them call him an Uncle Tom. He was Sammy—rainmaker!

The black and white controversy, however, was hardly bad for
Golden Boy
business. Theatergoers flooded the Civic Auditorium. Every night was the same: “We sold out,” says Elkins, who was intoxicated by it.

Sammy, as always, drew the curious backstage, especially other Negro stars and performers. It had been happening for years: in city after city, Negro performers would seek him out. It wasn’t because of his politics—which they often considered bewildering—or the Sinatra fawning, or even the conversion to Judaism, but because he was Sammy, and they wanted to pay homage to his beginnings, his vaudeville odyssey, and his talent. He was an
insider
. Sammy was the brilliant puppet swinging from the string of white consciousness. Sammy had overcome. Not, mind you, in ways the “brothers and the sisters” always admired, but he had overcome. Trumpeter Miles Davis was a frequent
Golden Boy
backstage visitor in Chicago. He’d watch Sammy from behind his dark glasses—nodding, with a faint little smile at his lips.

Giddy with energy during the Chicago run and growing ever more curious about the Black Power movement, Sammy would often invite blacks onstage after the show’s performance—the times were too serious for him to offer more song and more dance as he had done in days gone by—and they talked about whatever the gathering wanted to talk about. Even local black leaders were happy to come to the theater and meet with him. “They discussed politics, ways to defuse what was going on,” remembers Fountain. Sammy began disbursing free tickets like confetti. Hilly didn’t mind, at least up to a point. He wanted Sammy to realize he wasn’t exactly running a charity.

Then in walked the Blackstone Rangers. They wanted to talk to Sammy about everything: politics, working within the system, revolution. And sometimes Sammy would just riff, ruminating about his boyhood memories of playing Chicago; race; the death of Martin. Sometimes he sounded a little melancholy—as if he himself were searching.

The Rangers were one of the most notorious criminal gangs in Chicago, battling with other gangs from the myriad city housing projects. They also, however, had an intuitive leader, Jeff Fort, who managed to bag a federal job-training grant in 1967 from the Office of Economic Opportunity. Fort’s position—he was a master at manipulating white guilt—was that he could keep a lid on the simmering racial tensions in the city. Sammy gave the Rangers a financial contribution, and they heartily accepted—although some of them secretly wondered if he was trying to compromise them. Sammy seemed confused, and knew better not to hand over jewelry. The Rangers had
already begun discussing possible business dealings Sammy could enter with them. Sammy’s eye glinted. These were real gangsters—the blood of Sammy’s imagination! And, in no time at all, Sammy invested in a liquor store run by the Blackstone Rangers. “Sammy,” remembers Lola Falana, who was in Chicago with the
Golden Boy
cast, “seriously wanted to get
down
and be black.”

The Blackstone Rangers wanted to honor Sammy, and they invited him to become an honorary member. It meant he would have to go through an initiation process. More eager than ever to dive into black culture—any realm of it, now—thrilled Sammy.

Dancers Lester Wilson and Falana accompanied Sammy to the initiation ceremony, held at a secret Chicago location. Walking into the room, Sammy, Falana, and Wilson all noticed that the faces on the Blackstone Rangers were serious, some grim. There was not the usual bonhomie that greeted Sammy upon entering a room. Celebrity worship did not appeal to the Blackstone Rangers. Falana noticed that Sammy quickly adopted a macho posture—the back arched, the shoulders firm, his own face hardening. The gang members stood in two lines, facing each other—the formation of a gauntlet. “Part of the initation,” recalls Falana, “was he had to go through this long line, like an aisle.” Falana and Wilson stood back, out of the way. Every member would guide Sammy in the secret Blackstone Ranger handshake. That hardly worried Falana, but what followed the handshake did: it was a hard punch to Sammy’s chest. By the third punch Falana began looking at Lester Wilson. “The line was so long.” Bam. She could not only see but hear the fists slamming into Sammy’s bony chest. Bam. Wilson’s eyes widened with worry. Bam. When Sammy finished going down one side of the line, he was turned to face the other line, then he proceeded down it. He was silent, and seemed to be shrinking within himself. Bam. Bam. Bam. “Me and Lester stood there and wondered if Sammy was going to make it,” Falana recalls. “We kept saying to each other, ‘You think he can make it?’ He didn’t blink, kept a stiff upper lip.” When Sammy had traveled the gauntlet, it was time for him to go. The Blackstone Rangers did not want to engage in small talk. Falana and Wilson instinctively grabbed Sammy’s arms, but he pulled away.