In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (83 page)

Marsh wore a Corum solid gold watch on his wrist, a little something Sammy picked up during a shopping spree in London. On the back, in small lettering, it said:

They’d split the profits; it was all kind of wonderful; it was all kind of hazy. Sy would take care of things. Numbers were so cumbersome—and what was a man who never went to school to do about it?

“He had no concept of money,” Marsh says of Sammy. “He had no idea that with $100,000, you’d be taxed $40,000.”

Betty Belle had worked fifteen years as a bookkeeper for CBS when she joined Sammy’s office in 1970, in that same role. She saw the money come in, and she saw the money go out. For years it worried Betty how the books were being kept. The money seemed to be flying in various directions. “When I got a few chances to talk to him about his financial problems,” she says of Sammy, “he would say, ‘I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in my art.’ ”

His art was hardly cheap. It cost $200,000 a year to run the office. “All these salaries to people who were playing handball and shooting pool,” says Belle.

Sammy didn’t mind. Money sat in the alligator briefcase he carried, stacks of it. The only thing, however, was that the stacks of money in the briefcase did
not make the debts go away. In the old days, he’d cash in a marker, huddle with a nightclub owner. Bill Miller or Skinny D’Amato. Yes, the old days were beautiful. But those men were mostly out of the nightclub business. This was a new era, a new decade. There were bean counters. There was accountability.

So he took out another mortgage on his twenty-two-room home.

It was just like 1966 all over again, when the IRS hounded him and his father for those back taxes. There had been tax woes plenty of years. Money that was made was often spent before it was taxed, and so debts accumulated.

When Sammy was worried with exhaustion, the good eye hurt. It became red, and it sagged. Now it was doing both.

Why, it was Amy Greene’s birthday. Sammy would never forget her on such a special day. Only she wished he had; he was broke, she had heard. “He slips me this baby blue velvet case and there is a three-strand pearl necklace with a wonderful antique clasp,” she remembers. “I said, ‘I am not going to take it.’ He said, ‘Yes you are.’ ”

Betty Belle didn’t know what to do. “Many times my own salary check would bounce,” she says. “There were two sets of books—Sammy’s and the corporation’s [SyNI].”

All the bad habits—all the borrowing today against future earnings, all the vaudeville escapades he had dragged with him from the past to the present—were catching up to him. Shirley Rhodes realized things had to be tightened up. “He never had anybody say, ‘No, you can’t, this is it,’ ” she says. “I have taken jewelry back to Cartier and said, ‘He doesn’t want it.’ I took a $13,000 necklace back to Gucci. They said, ‘He liked it when he left.’ I said, ‘Well, he doesn’t like it anymore.’ ”

In the spring of 1980 Sammy and Altovise threw a party. There was no special occasion; it was just a party. Some tents on the lawn; a catered affair; the usual. The guest list, showing Sammy’s taste, was, as always, eclectic: Fred MacMurray and his wife, June Haver; Jack Haley, Jr., and his wife, Liza Minnelli; Edmund O’Brien; Loretta Young; porn star Marilyn Chambers—and an assortment of “
obscure white and black actors,” as Sammy put it. Altovise looked ravishing, gliding about the festivities in a Galanos gown. In a corner, there stood MacMurray and Marilyn Chambers, chatting away. The avuncular father of television’s
My Three Sons
and the porn starlet.

Let Frank have New York, New York; Hollywood was Sammy’s kind of town.

The party bill came to $100,000. Shirley couldn’t get a cent of it back. She cried to Sammy.

When he didn’t understand the accounting is when Sammy really wished he’d gone to school. Then maybe he could understand what Sy Marsh was talking about; what the IRS was trying to explain to him. They were all just words to him. Why worry? He’d get the money. He’d just take to the road.

He didn’t get smaller, but the rooms damn sure seemed to get bigger. He couldn’t sell out. Two shows, and sometimes the audience for the early show was a little on the thin side. There sat Fred Hull, the doctor who had performed the eye surgery, along with his wife. (Backstage, Hull lectured Sammy about the drinking.)

He was boozing too much. He wouldn’t eat. Shirley flew his personal cook into Las Vegas. It was actually Lessie Jackson, who had been his children’s nanny. If anybody could get Sammy to eat—other than his late grandmother Rosa—it was Lessie. Her specialty was southern cuisine—fried chicken, collard greens, pudding, sweet potatoes, hush puppies. And he began to eat, though still not enough.

Sammy complained to Murphy that his side hurt, so Murphy accompanied him to a doctor in Reno. It was jaundice of the liver. Boozing too much indeed. The doctors told Sammy that he’d have to quit. He put the warning into his shows, joking about having to stop drinking, swirling the contents of a cup in his hand: soda pop. Ha ha ha.

And he sang “Mr. Bojangles.”

One afternoon, while in Vegas, Sammy got a sudden, childlike hankering for a dog. John Souza drove him over to the dog pound. One of the workers pointed out a mutt. The mutt had a handicap: it was blind in one eye. Sammy took the one-eyed mutt home. Between dog and dog owner, two eyes.

It did not surprise doctors that drinkers with small bodies—150 pounds or less—suffered greater liver damage than drinkers with larger bodies. Often the drinkers with smaller bodies had no appetite; they were malnourished without realizing it. “He was the first one,” says Shirley of Sammy, “to say, ‘Let’s eat! Let’s go to lunch.’ And he wouldn’t eat anything.” What was paradoxical to medical professionals was that only one in ten drinkers—those who drank more than just casually—seemed to suffer liver damage. It was as if the other nine had the light of medical luck shining upon them. For Sammy, the dice had come up craps: he was the one in ten. The liver was on its way to killing him.

On the road now, Sammy became a fan of soap operas, idling in hotel rooms, gazing in silence at the TV screen. (At home he’d keep several televisions going at once.) The soaps appealed to him because they were as close to live television as one could get. It was stand-around vaudeville, performers in nice suits
playing at their twisty plots and cliff hangers. “I’d call Sammy, say I needed a gig,” remembers pianist Rudi Eagan. “He’d say, ‘Come over after three, I watch the soaps.’ ”

Money tight, Sammy came up with bizarre moneymaking ventures. As the mailing stated:

Barbecue sauces, spices, other sauces. He was listed as chairman of the board. Finally—like Frank—chairman of the board. The venture went bust. (Friends snickered behind Sammy’s back that he had become obsessive with cooking Italian food for one reason: Frank cooked Italian.)

John Souza tried to implore Sammy to explore grilling food—chops on the grill. “He’d say, ‘I don’t do charcoal. I don’t like charcoal.’ ”

In the days of vaudeville, Negro performers used to carry around little sacks of charcoal. They’d use it to “black” their faces up darker—just like white performers.

So the hell with charcoal.

The money Sammy made from his television appearances—the guest spots on the half-hour shows, the comical turns on someone’s variety show—was nothing: $10,000 here, $10,000 there. “Sammy would do a television show and spend more on the wrap party than he made for the show,” says Madelyn Rhue.

He sold the Rolls.

But he purchased an Andy Warhol original, the famous one of the Campbell’s soup can. He paid $12,000. Betty Belle, the bookkeeper, couldn’t believe it. “Twelve thousand for a painting of a Campbell’s soup can!”

He sold the building he had purchased years earlier with an eye toward directing Altovise in her own movies.

Things were not so good between him and Altovise. They had begun arguing about just how “open” an open marriage should be. “She would call from L.A.,” John Souza says, “and say, ‘Tell Sammy I’m coming in and to get rid of whoever he’s got with him there.’ ”

Sy sent over a script. It was a far cry from
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. Sammy went to Atlanta in 1981 and shot a Hal Needham–directed movie,
The Cannonball Run
, with Burt Reynolds as the marquee star. It was a reunion of sorts
for Sammy: Dean Martin also starred. Dean was always simpatico with Sammy, and never liked the manner in which Sinatra dominated him. There would be Dean slyly rolling his eyes as Frank engaged in yet another putdown of Sammy. Sammy never saw the denigration; he only saw the past: Frank at the Capitol Theatre, 1942, sending for the Will Mastin Trio.

“In the Rat Pack, it was Dean who Sammy felt love from,” says actress Madelyn Rhue. “Dean didn’t call him ‘Smokey.’ He loved Sammy, and Sammy knew it.”

Everybody loves somebody.

In
The Cannonball Run
, he and Dean played crooks—masquerading as priests—on a cross-country escapade with an odd assortment of characters in chase. Among others in the cast were Terry Bradshaw, Peter Fonda, Jackie Chan, and Roger Moore. Sammy was slumming—again. In the old days the movie slumming was for Frank, now it was just for laughs. He was the only black with a sizable role in the cast. The critics howled at the movie, which was a mess. But it turned a robust profit, grossing $37 million.

All his life, he told himself, he had worked for a home like the one he had in the Hollywood Hills. Twenty-two rooms, the stretch balcony, the sunken living room, the dozen closets, the maid and butler quarters. It did not really matter to him that he wasn’t there a lot. Others were. His house became a kind of haven for writers, musicians, various performers. Those in need.

There was certainly a need in Atlanta. Black children were missing, some being murdered. The story began to dominate nationwide news in March and April of 1981. The missing children, you might say, helped bring Frank and Sammy back together. They forgot about the anger—actually, Frank forgot, allowing the mending to take place. And there went the big beautiful Sinatra arm around Sammy’s shoulders, bringing him back into the fold.

Clearing the deck of everything in sight, just him and Sammy. And just Frank inside Sammy’s one eye. “
The state of Georgia had never before exhibited so intense an interest in Black life or Black death,” the writer James Baldwin said—rather cryptically. A reward fund was set up. Sammy—he’d show the “brothers and the sisters” how much he cared—flew to Atlanta with Sinatra to give a concert, with the proceeds going to the reward fund. David Levering Lewis, who had written a well-received book,
When Harlem Was in Vogue
, about the Harlem Renaissance, happened to be in Atlanta, working on a book about the administration of Mayor Maynard Jackson. “Somehow,” says Lewis, “I was assigned to travel with Sammy. We spent an evening going about. Had lunch, sat, and talked. For me, it was wonderful. He was a fabulously interesting guy.
When Harlem Was in Vogue
had just come out. I tried to get him interested in the book. Of course this was all in his blood. He talked about ‘Bojangles’ and the impact he had on him. It was like, ‘You want to tell me
about the Harlem Renaissance? Well, let me tell
you
about the Harlem Renaissance.’ ” On June 21, 1981, Atlanta police arrested a freelance photographer by the name of Wayne Williams in connection with the murders. He was convicted of just two of the killings, enough to put him behind bars for life. (There were twenty-two other missing and presumed murdered at the hands of Williams. The killings both saddened and befuddled black Atlantans, many of whom had wondered if some bigot were behind the murder. Williams was black.)

When Madelyn Rhue confided to Sammy in 1974 that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he insisted she move in with him. His staff would watch over her. The invite—so generous, so quickly given—left her speechless, and she feigned indifference. But he insisted, and she came. Her bedroom was “the Kennedy room”—a room Sammy had decorated in lovely pink tones. Rhue so enjoyed Sammy’s home. “Sammy would have these wonderful parties with the Nicholas Brothers and the comic Redd Foxx. Everyone would be black but me. I loved it. They had stories they would spellbind you with. They’d talk about the old days at MGM. They tapped in the living room. Sammy would get up and tap. They were like history lessons.” When Rhue’s health deteriorated, Sammy bought a van for her, equipped for a wheelchair.

In 1981, Jim Davis, a writer who Sammy met through Amy Greene, was working on a book about Myrna Loy and was on his way to Los Angeles. Sammy invited him to live in the guest house on his property. “Sammy was never there,” Davis remembers. “The staff was so thrilled if I’d go eat something. Altovise would stop and get lobster at Nick’s Fish Market for fifty bucks.”

Looking around the home, taking Sammy’s lifestyle in, made Davis wonder about certain things. He once asked Sammy, during one of his rare visits home, everyone sitting by the pool, if he knew how much it cost monthly to heat the pool. Sammy had never heard such a question.

“No,” he answered.

“It’s $10,000 a month,” Jim Davis told him.

Sammy didn’t give a hoot about how much it cost to heat his swimming pool. Hell, he didn’t even know how to swim. He cared only if those diving into the pool were happy. And if they loved him, well, that was nice also.

All those activists from SNCC, from SCLC, from “the movement,” who’d bunk at his house. His marriage was not the only thing open; so was his home.

And now the IRS was talking to Sy Marsh about taking the houses—Sy’s
and
Sammy’s. It was SyNI: they were not paying taxes, and the books were a mess. Rudi Eagan, the pianist who sometimes traveled with Sammy, saw a
strange scene in Sammy’s hotel room one evening while on the road. “Sammy’s jewelry was spread all over the room—the bed, the rug—estimating the cost of it for the IRS.”