In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (86 page)

The years had piled up, in broken marriages and disenchanted children. But he forged on, pulling on the gold the way he had seen his father and Will Mastin do so many evenings before. The stage was still his, even if the rooms were smaller
.
(
© THE WASHINGTON POST. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.
)

•     •     •

Sammy was feeling mighty nostalgic. The last week of October 1988, he joined Jerry Lewis onstage in Vegas for a string of performances. They referred to themselves as “
the last of the down-fronters,” which meant guys who could walk right down in front of the stage and let you see them up close and not fear it. “Sammy was carrying Jerry,” says Jim Delaney, the former record producer, now turned news columnist, who saw the show.

Director Nick Castle and actor Gregory Hines asked Sammy to be in their movie
Tap
. Filming got under way in 1988, and the movie opened February 10, 1989. Sammy did the promotional movie junket. It was his first one—he never had the time!—since
Porgy and Bess
. “
This movie represents a real part of my life,” he told a journalist in New York City. “There’s a line of honesty in the film, which I like.” Sammy played Little Mo, an aging dancer with dreams of putting together a tap revue.

Critics were mostly kind to the movie, out of deference, it seemed, to its reverence for the lost art of tap. Our first glimpse of Sammy is atop a roof, gardening. The sound of taps brings him downstairs. He walks with a cane. One scene is maudlin but sweetly powerful: a bevy of old tap dancers—Bunny Briggs, Sandman Sims, and Harold Nicholas—do solo tap numbers. Little Mo squares off with the Hines character in a feverish sixty-second duet. And Little Mo dazzles.

In an earlier scene—and here the cinematographer seems to glaze the movie in sepia tones—the Hines character pauses in a room, halted there by the photos on the wall. There are Sammy and Eartha Kitt from
Anna Lucasta
; and Sammy in
Mr. Wonderful
; and Sammy, his father, and Will onstage in yet another photo. It is a kind of ode, an homage to the Will Mastin Trio and the kid who sprang from it.

“If I’m gonna die”—he said in
Taps
—“I wanna die with my tap shoes on.”

Finally he went to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, accompanied by Shirley and Murphy, to have his throat checked. Doctors decided to do a biopsy. He was stoic when the diagnosis came: throat cancer.

His voice began to turn hoarse. His weight dropped. He had no desire to eat. He began a revolving-door round of visits to the hospital for radiation treatments. One day, when he was back home, there was a visitor. It was Dean Martin, who himself had been ailing: liver, ulcers. “He came around to see Sammy,” Shirley says. “They hugged and cried. I don’t know if they thought they’d see each other again.”

Sammy made a commitment to do a TV movie
—The Kid Who Loved Christmas
—and it was to be filmed in Chicago. He’d now have to cancel. “The doctor called me and said, ‘He shouldn’t go,’ ” says Shirley. “I said, ‘You call him.’ He did. Sammy called me back, and said, ‘We’re going.’ ”

It was the hoofer in him. Sickly and weak, he boarded a plane for Chicago. Right into the winter. It was a small role. He played a musician, and soldiered
through his scenes, then it was back to Los Angeles. But not for long. He had given his word: “Then we went to San Diego for a benefit,” says Shirley. “It was the last thing we did.”

George Schlatter—who had been working the floor the night at Ciro’s when Sammy returned from the eye injury, and was now a successful Hollywood producer—started coming by the house to visit. He had never seen Sammy so weak. He told himself he’d put together a Sammy television special. George didn’t care about the past controversies. “I didn’t give a fuck that he hugged Nixon.”

On January 25, Sammy was readmitted to Cedars-Sinai. The doctors told him they had to do a tracheotomy. He told Shirley without his voice he’d rather die. Out of sight from him, she broke down.

His eye, his hip, now his voice. He wanted to try radiation first; maybe save the voice despite the odds given by the doctors.

George Schlatter did what he promised himself. The evening’s event—to be televised later as
Sammy Davis Jr.’s 60th Anniversary Celebration
—was held on November 13 in Hollywood.

Murphy helped Sammy get dressed. Sammy had asked the doctors if he could forgo radiation treatments that day. The treatments zapped his strength.

It was an array of stars, old Hollywood and new. There were Clint Eastwood and Goldie Hawn. Whitney Houston and Stevie Wonder. Michael Jackson. Of course Sinatra. Sammy was still Hollywood’s biggest fan, and he couldn’t stop himself from looking around. The gathering of so many celebrities deeply touched him. There were montages of him tapping, movie clips. Black-and-white clips of him and Frank and Dean. Carousing at the Sands. Ha ha. Years ago. Watch the draw of the gun; now it’s back in the holster. The years had gone just like that—fast. Sammy bopped his head a bit. The one eye welled up.

Everyone struggled to keep it from feeling like a eulogy; still, at times it did. It was because of his physical appearance. He seemed smaller than ever. He seemed almost weightless.

Afterward, he invited certain guests over to his house. He looked happy, but weak. After they had left, Sammy turned to Murphy. He wanted to go for a ride; Murphy was befuddled. And there they were, in the limo. Sammy wanted to go back over to Cedars-Sinai. There was someone he wanted to see. He glided right by the nurses. No one asked him a question. He walked right into Madelyn Rhue’s room. (The multiple sclerosis had sent her back to the hospital.) She was shocked to see him. And he started to tell her, with such unabashed joy, using his hands for emphasis, and his whispery voice, of the event just held for him, and of the party going on at his home. He told her who was there. “He said to me, ‘Clint Eastwood was in my house! He had a drink in
my house!’ ” He hugged and kissed Madelyn Rhue, and then he and Murphy glided through the night, back home.

Back home that night, Murphy put Sammy to bed.

It was a lovely little question, and they asked it between themselves often, especially upon greeting, though Frank asked Sammy more than Sammy asked Frank: “You got your shoes?”

Translation: You okay?

No one who heard it outside the business really understood it. It wasn’t exactly a question about dancing shoes—tap shoes—at all. It was a question about life—about the family, the bank account, health. It covered everything. If you were okay, then of course you had your shoes. They weren’t in somebody’s glass case.

Days later, Sammy returned to Cedars-Sinai. The radiation treatments couldn’t halt the cancer. They had to take the voice, and scheduled the surgery. He spent weeks hospitalized. Even with the surgery, his condition did not improve. The cancer had him in its grip.

On March 12 he went home, back up into the Hollywood Hills.

S
hirley came by every day. He asked for a video monitor because he was so curious about who had gotten by the front gate and was coming to visit. February and April came and went. On any good afternoon in May—the April rains having come and gone—the climb up to Sammy’s house could be lovely. The flowers—the hyacinths and poinsettias, the irises and tulips—were in such bloom. That first week of May, a great many cars were coming up to Summit Ridge Drive. Hollywood never made any apologies that it was a furtive town.

Sammy was dying. He had stopped eating. He was tiny as a pillow. The rumors of his death slithered like snakes.

He was alive, but bedridden. Some days he was simply knocked out: the morphine. Because he was moody about eating, a feeding tube was inserted, which he frequently pulled out. Friends began sending over food and fruit trays. There was enough to feed a regiment. Someone sent a mogul-like spread: turned out to be from Merv Griffin, the mogul.

The month of May might be a poet’s month, but it was a harsh month for the Davis men. Sam Sr. went May 21, 1988. Now, in May 1990, Sammy lay dying.

Elvera was in New Jersey, and they told her she ought to come on out.

Murphy, as expected, was taking it quite hard. He moved about like a mime. All his dreams—of being a comic, a singer—had been abandoned so he could spend his life with Sammy.

“Shirley was holding court, saying who could go up and see him and who couldn’t,” remembers Steve Blauner. Blauner climbed the stairs, and there lay Sammy, the Sammy who had dressed in long tweed and beatnik glasses back in Manhattan in the ’50s; the same Sammy who had adopted him—the hulking Blauner—like a kid brother. Blauner sat and gazed long as he could take it. “I went outside and cried like a baby.”

Robert Blake came by. Day after day he came. He said little, and he’d sit for
hours. Blake had been a child actor and sometime movie star who gave a powerful performance as one of the killers in the 1967 film
In Cold Blood
, based on Capote’s book. Blake’s career, however, sagged. The television series
Baretta
, which debuted in 1975 and ran to 1978, seemed to revive it. Sammy sang the show’s theme song—“Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow.” But the show was yanked after three years, and Blake went into a depression.

Back in the early 1950s, before Blake achieved any kind of film success, and was often between roles, he’d take off, traveling for a spell around the country with three Negro dancers—the Will Mastin Trio. Shirley and George got a kick out of his company. He seemed so kind, and he seemed in need of emotional comfort. Bobby Blake—whose real name was Michael Gubitosi—knew vaudeville, and his story was far from pretty. His parents forced him upon the stage, sometimes administering beatings. He was one of the child actors in the
Our Gang
series. His parents took most of his money. He’d tell all of these stories later in life in the midst of his drinking and drug woes. Little Michael Gubitosi had suffered unto the dreams of others. Now he’d come up to the house and ask Shirley if she needed anything—anything at all. Then he’d take his seat near Sammy’s bed. He sat there looking at another ex–child actor. “I remember Robert Blake was sitting there waiting for Sammy to die,” says Blauner.

It was Lola; Lola Falana. She wanted to see Sammy. She had been battling multiple sclerosis. Once, before Sammy’s illness, she had started showing signs of improving, and she called Shirley. She was living, quietly, in Las Vegas. Sammy was appearing at Caesar’s Palace. She wanted to show him she was walking again. “I called Shirley and said, ‘Do you think it’ll be all right if I come to say hello to Sammy?’ They said, ‘We’ll have our people bring you up.’ ” She stood outside the dressing-room door, and someone swung it open. Sammy was inside, jawing with friends.

“I was in white boots, white pants, white top. He looked at me. If all the emotions of a heart and soul could be in one perfect eye, it was there. He stood up, slowly, as if the wind might blow him over. He said, ‘You okay? You need help?’ I said, ‘Stay there, Sammy.’ He was crying. I was crying. Everybody was crying. I think whatever weaknesses there might have been in his faith, he thanked God right there.” She credited Sammy with some of her physical revival. “I believe, with all my heart, that Sammy prayed for me. When I got multiple sclerosis, he said to me, ‘I don’t pray that much, but I said to God, “I know I’ve tried your patience, but this friend of mine, if you would just heal her, if you would help her, I’d turn my face to you the rest of my life.” ‘ As I got well, he was so happy.”

Now Sammy was dying, and she wanted to see him. Before she went into the room, Shirley pulled Falana aside. “When you go in, don’t be upset if he doesn’t recognize you. We just think he’s now in that twilight place. But at least
you can say you came to say good-bye.” Shirley bent and told Sammy that Lola was in the room. “His eyes came to me,” Falana recalls. “Once again, with that one eye, he smiled the biggest smile—the brightest light I ever seen on his face. Then his eyes just went back up into his head.”

Burt and Jane Boyar were still coauthoring books, still traveling—Paris, Monaco, London. They didn’t come to the house. They had visited Sammy earlier, at the hospital, shortly after the tracheotomy. “He looked gorgeous, dressed in silk pajamas. True to form, being Sammy,” says Burt Boyar. “He received us looking like a little king.” The Boyars had sat smiling at Sammy, at each other, memories of Manhattan and the Copa and staying up all night working on the book about a rising Negro entertainer that had seized them in their youth and was titled
Yes I Can
. They knew they’d never see him alive again. “We kissed him good-bye.”

The cars kept coming up the driveway.

Jack Carter and his wife, Roxanne, came. It pained Roxanne that Altovise was often not around. “When Sammy was dying, Altovise was running off to the islands,” she says. “She had a disease.” It was her drinking, which had become heavy, which everyone seemed to know about.

Sinatra came. When he was on your side, and if you were in need, in distress, he would give anything to help. But health and life were not his to give. After his visits, other guests would see him out in the driveway, standing, alone, the head down.

The summer wind. And Sammy lay dying.

At night, the last thing Sammy would see during all the years he lived in this house—because he kept it on a stand next to his bed—was a picture of ten-year-old Judy Garland. At that age, just like him, she was out on the road, hustling, working, helping to put food on the table, trying to make the grown-ups who said they loved her happy. She was a child in glass slippers trying to get home. As for those ruby-red slippers Judy Garland wore in
The Wizard of Oz
, well, Sammy had those in a glass case in his house.

There were some camera trucks circling outside the driveway. Awaiting word.

May Britt, who lately had begun spending more and more time back in her native Sweden, came by. She and Sammy had remained cordial since the divorce.

Peter Brown, the cowboy, came by. Shook some hands, hugged Shirley, looked in on Sammy.