In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (77 page)

Sammy never told Bill Harrah, but his feet couldn’t reach the pedals. So he gave the Duesenberg to Altovise, to go beside the Rolls and the Maserati he had already given her.

Love was such a wonderful thing.

As an everyman of entertainment, Sammy had elevated his celebrity to the point that, from the mid-1960s on, he’d play himself on television. In a curious fashion, he had already outgrown the medium despite the fact he was never commercially accepted by it.

In 1968, the Hollywood television producer Norman Lear began imagining a way to adapt the popular British series
Till Death Do Us Part
for American television. Lear’s version would highlight the comical and social ruminations
of a bigoted father and his family living in Queens, New York. A pilot was filmed for ABC, but the network turned it down. Lear was undaunted. He had cast, in the lead roles, Carroll O’Connor, a veteran motion picture character actor, and, as his wife, Jean Stapleton, a stage actress. Lear pleaded with the two to remain available. Finally, CBS picked up the show. Its first airing came on January 12, 1971. Just before the first night’s airing, the network issued a statement to the national viewing audience: “
The program you are about to see is
All in the Family
. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.” The unusual comedy, which addressed issues such as homosexuality, abortion, racism, and interracial marriage, caught on, and by summer’s end, was America’s number 1-rated show. Its nervy appeal was the undeniable attention it paid to race, thrusting the issue right out into the open. Archie Bunker, the name of O’Connor’s character, became, for many blacks, a kind of bogeyman behind a laugh sound track, a dim-witted white man who would never fully respect blacks or other minorities as evidenced by the words—“coon,” “spic,” “dago,” and “spade”—that were often sprinkled into his conversations. The heightened and sensitive insights offered by his more liberal family members raised the show’s laughter. The show’s theme song was titled “Those Were the Days,” a sweetly nostalgic piece of music that harkened back to a simpler—more segregated—America. (Interestingly enough, the song had been written by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, musical collaborators on
Golden Boy
.)

Volumes of mail about
All in the Family
poured into the CBS mail room. The mail cut sharply along racial lines. Many whites had taken to the crusty Archie Bunker character. “Archie Bunker for President” buttons began showing up in many trinket shops across the country. Blacks were alternately amused and alarmed by a show which showed the mental wanderings of an open bigot such as Bunker. Whitney Young, Jr., esteemed head of the National Urban League, derided the series and its showering of racial epithets. Nothing, however, could derail its popularity.

The craze reached the White House. President Nixon watched an episode on May 13, 1971. It was sex, not race, that seemed to unnerve the president. “Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law, married to the screwball daughter.… The son-in-law apparently goes both ways,” Nixon scoffed, his words dropping into his secret tape recorder. Another character Nixon deemed as “
obviously queer. He wears an ascot, and so forth.” (Ironically, Archie was quick to heap praise upon “law-and-order” President Nixon.)

Lear was quick to defend the show, explaining that by showing racist attitudes so openly, one could then begin to understand the folly of them. The reasoning didn’t always catch on. “
It’s a very dangerous show” is how Harvard
psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint—himself black—felt about
All in the Family
. The ratings remained high, and the
All in the Family
rage hardly escaped Sammy. Given his own life, Sammy became an instant fan. And thirteen months after the show’s premiere, he became a guest star.

In the episode, which aired February 19, 1972, Archie is seized with excitement as Sammy Davis, Jr.—played by Sammy Davis, Jr.—having left his briefcase in Archie’s taxi, is on his way to the Bunkers’ house to retrieve it. As Sammy enters the Bunker household, there is verbal interplay about having him in the house. Sammy takes a seat. Before long, amid the chatter, the conversation turns to race:

The quick history lesson seems to stun Archie Bunker.

Sammy, as he’s leaving with his briefcase, poses with Archie for a picture. And in that one magical moment just before the flash goes off, Sammy leans over and—black lips to white cheek—kisses Archie Bunker on the cheek. The laughter on the sound track explodes.

It wasn’t just a kiss. It was more like the thunder hooves of history rolled up into a kiss. Blacks and whites did not kiss on American television. It was taboo. That one man had kissed another man was an even deeper taboo. That Sammy Davis, Jr.—much of his own life mired in episodes involving interracial sex and matrimony, enraging both blacks and whites over the years—had kissed Archie Bunker, celebrated as archetype of the American bigot, seemed a joke so majestically cruel that many did not know whether to laugh or cry. One thing was for sure: many millions watched. The Sammy Davis–Archie Bunker episode of
All in the Family
became one of the highest-rated television half hours in the medium’s history.

The mail into CBS—and into Sammy’s office—came with lightning speed. And it was nasty. The network had imagined a sophisticated response to its creative history lesson, as Norman Lear himself did. But they imagined wrong. The controversy bewildered Sammy. He had a black wife! Didn’t they read the papers? Didn’t they scan the magazines?
All in the Family
was entertainment!

Four months after the show’s airing, the fissures could still be felt. One
black-oriented magazine featured a photo of Sammy and Archie inside and asked: “
Is Archie Bunker the Real White America?”

Altovise Gore may not have known the answer to the question Sammy had so gleefully asked her—“Who is the thirty-seventh president of the United States?”—but Sammy himself knew, and for someone who never went to school, it made him proud he knew: Richard Milhous Nixon. The same Richard Nixon who had come to visit Sammy at the Copa so many years before; the same Nixon who had invited Sammy to visit the White House when he was vice president.

Richard Nixon did not come as easily to glitter and stars as Jack Kennedy, his nemesis and the first modern president who openly courted Hollywood. Against Kennedy’s savoir faire, Nixon appeared but a foil for satirists: he was the man seen on the beach in wing tips. His body language was stiff, his smile frozen. He seemed a man constantly emerging from a wall of alabaster. And yet, in terms of cinema, consider his roots: he was born in a place called Yorba Linda, a mere twenty-five miles from Hollywood, that land of film and the tricky camera.
“You see,” Nixon wrote in a 1938 letter to actress Patricia Neal, “I too live in a world of make-believe.”

The whiff and struggle of the 1960s still lay upon the Nixon White House. He had Vietnam to grapple with—he had vowed to end the war—and the youthful culture in the streets. Blacks, almost universally, loathed the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Nixon had nominated two southern judges—Clement Haynesworth and Harold Carswell—to the Supreme Court and watched as an uproar flared about their past links to segregationists. The two nominees were rebuffed. That only enlarged the wound felt by blacks when Nixon refused to name a black to his cabinet—unlike LBJ, who had been the first to do so. (It was Robert Weaver, as LBJ’s HUD secretary.) In 1971, the Congressional Black Caucus—the symbolic representative on Capitol Hill of black America—boycotted Nixon’s State of the Union address to protest his policies, which they felt were undermining the War on Poverty, an earmark of Lyndon Johnson’s administrations. “
Flush Model Cities and [the] Great Society along with it,” Nixon had once directed an aide.

But to those who felt Nixon suffered from cultural myopia, there was always trickling evidence to prove otherwise. He invited Elvis Presley to the White House. Presley showed in sequins and sunglasses—the outfit had a carnival-like look—and pridefully left with a badge, Nixon having made him an honorary law enforcement official. And Nixon had invited James Brown—the soul-singing James Brown of the ear-catching lyric “Say it loud / I’m black and I’m proud”—to the White House. If Nixon could get the King of Soul into the
White House, primping with the very song that had been adopted by blacks as a kind of anthem, well, what did that say to the Congressional Black Caucus and his other black critics? The White House hadn’t been shy in letting fly the photos of Nixon and Presley, and they certainly were not shy in releasing the photos of Nixon and Brown.

Nixon believed that criticism that painted him as out of touch with culture—high or low—had been unleashed by Kennedy partisans. He would never be able to claim Sinatra—nor did he wish to. Sinatra was too shady: the gangster scent. Sammy was a different matter.

Nixon dispatched Bob Brown, one of the few blacks working in the White House, to Beverly Hills to ask Sammy if he would accept a seat on the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity. Every president had put together such councils: little bite, but great public relations. “
We’ve got Jim Brown [the football star] with us, and we’ve got James Brown, we’ve got good people, but the president wants you,” Brown said in his pitch to Sammy.

Sammy did not think of Carswell and Haynesworth, whose very nominations had struck fear into the heart of black America. And he did not think of the Congressional Black Caucus and their animus toward Nixon. Sammy thought of none of that.

The White House was power! The president needed him! The vaudevillian who had never attended school couldn’t resist.

Sammy arrived at the White House on July 1, 1971, to officially accept his position on the council. He yuk-yukked with Nixon as the camera flashes went off. (Within hours, the White House photo of Sammy and Nixon was out on the wires.) In subsequent visits as a member of the council, Sammy loved sweeping into the Executive Office Building. Pulling open his Gucci briefcase, chatting up Bob Brown and the other black businessmen on the council, Sammy walked like Sinatra: summoned by presidents. Nixon’s contribution to black America was business opportunity upon business opportunity. Successful businesses yielded money. Republicans knew money. And Sammy couldn’t argue with the sweetness of money. When the meetings adjourned, Sammy would hobnob with James Brown and other council members. Hearty slaps and soul-brother handshakes—the thumb slapping against the palm of the other hand, then the viselike grip. Ha ha ha. Nixon’s soul brothers.

Nixon—ever thinking of reelection, of votes, and also mindful of how long and full of heartbreak his journey to the White House had been—was hardly finished with the courting of Sammy.

When gospel singer Mahalia Jackson died of a heart attack in Chicago on January 27, 1972, the White House, reaching Sammy in Las Vegas, where he was performing, asked him if he’d represent President Nixon at the funeral. Sammy immediately agreed—it was the president calling!—but told
the White House he’d have to be back in Las Vegas after the funeral to continue his engagement. The White House told Sammy they’d take care of all transportation.

Mahalia Jackson, born in New Orleans in 1911, was raised listening to Bessie Smith’s blues and so-called sanctified music—music of the black church. Jackson’s mother died when she was four years old, and Jackson moved to Chicago in 1927 to live with relatives. In Chicago she formed the Johnson Gospel Singers and became its featured soloist. She launched her gospel recording career in 1937 with Decca Records. More than two dozen albums would follow. In Chicago, radio show host Studs Terkel, wild about her voice, constantly played her music. She played before a Carnegie Hall audience in 1951; many were brought to tears. Many more trembled when she sang at the 1963 March on Washington, King nodding his head so reverently at the sound of her pretty voice.

In Chicago, where Jackson’s funeral was held on February 1, at McCormick Place, Sammy—as befitting his status as President Nixon’s representative—was seated between Mayor Daley and his wife. Thousands were in attendance. After the ceremony, Sammy was driven back to the private plane on which he’d flown to Chicago—compliments of the Nixon White House.

Early in her career, Mahalia Jackson had begun singing a song that always seemed special to her. She’d sing it time and time again in that full-throated voice of hers. The song was called “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

The images—of body bags, bamboo swinging in the Vietnam countryside, rice paddies and billowing smoke from bombs, TV reporters and their staccato voices trying to explain the conflict back into American homes, and more body bags—wouldn’t go away. Nixon had come into office promising a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. But he was dealing with an emotional public, and he knew it. In November 1969—Nixon’s first year in office—700,000 antiwar demonstrators had massed in the nation’s capital. Two years later, war was still being waged in Southeast Asia. The Paris Peace Talks, orchestrated by Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had gotten under way, but without conclusive results. So the war, despite intermittent American troop withdrawals, droned on.

On May 4, at Kent State University, antiwar protesters torched the ROTC building. National Guard troops stormed the campus. Before they departed, they had killed four students, among them an ROTC cadet. The tragedy sparked wide protests on college campuses nationwide. Nixon agonized. One night he left the White House to go visit the Lincoln Memorial. He saw an assortment of demonstrators camping out, dressed in the eye-catching multicolored
dress of the day. “
I know that most of you think I’m an SOB,” Nixon said, pumping flesh, “but I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.” At one point Nixon talked of the gulf that existed between blacks and whites in America. The kids stared in bewilderment. Various mentions of the event would seep out to the media, all giving an indication of an incoherent Nixon.