Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (71 page)

“What’s that? Get yourself run out of town?”

“Massey, to two thousand people a night I’m not colored. Sure, they know I’ve got brown skin but they don’t think of me like ‘Colored people? Keep ‘em out.’ I’m not
that
kind of being colored …”

He looked at the floor, resentfully, “How many kinds they think there are?”

“That’s the point. Obviously they don’t
think
about it
at all
. But they see me onstage, speaking to them on their own level, the guy they played gin with out at the cabana. I’m the guy they invite to their homes, to play golf at their clubs—they know me, they feel close to me, some of them even love me. They hear me sing and watch me dance and they think ‘Isn’t he adorable!’ and that’s my moment—and I have to
do
something with it, I can’t waste it—that’s when I have to show them: But remember, I’m colored.

“I
must
. I want to make them equate ‘colored people’ with
me
, an individual they know and maybe understand, instead of with a formless, mysterious mass they instinctively fear and hate.”

He left the dressing room still puzzled and frightened for me and I sat by myself trying to evaluate what had happened. I liked the idea of not in any way glossing over the fact that I’m colored, and I felt an enormous satisfaction at having broken the eternal gentleman’s agreement: the I-know-I’m-colored-and-you-know-it-but-let’s-not-notice-it.

I began adding more racial humor to the act, offering my point of view through my humor, and they were accepting it, giving me standing ovations at almost every performance, and each time it happened, each time I watched those people standing to applaud me I wondered if maybe things are happening faster than we can see from within all the chaos. Granted the audience had only a small percentage of native Southerners but still—it was happening in Florida and it couldn’t possibly have happened five years ago.

I sang, “Georgia … Georgia … ain’t goin’ there.” The laughs kept building. “No sir, if them cats in the sheets want
me
then they gonna have to come and
get
me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if I may be serious for a moment—thank you for being able to laugh with me at these things. Maybe there are some people who’ll say ‘Hey, how can he kid about a serious situation?’ but I think you feel as I do, let’s bring it out in the open where it can be seen for how ridiculous it is. Let’s not hide it in a corner pretending we don’t know it exists. Hatred won’t die of old age. But it can’t stand light, it has to breed in secret, like cancer, like every disease and evil that grows undercover and survives to destroy the people who look away from it.”

The audience applauded their agreement, like they understood what I was doing, that the jokes weren’t just to get laughs. I smiled,
“However
, needless to say, I ain’t goin’ to Mississippi to do this.” They screamed.

“I mean it! I’m not even on the maybe list. Martin Luther King is not only a man I admire to the fullest possible extent but I have the good fortune to call him my friend. I had a few days off after I finished shooting
Porgy
and he was in L.A. and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you take a rest, a little change? Come on home with me. You’ll spend a few days with me in Atlanta.’ I almost
hit
him!”

A man at ringside drawled loudly, “I’ll say one thing for you, boy, you’ve got a sense of humor.”

“Thank you, sir. I need one.” Despite an occasional guy like that, oddly enough the people who laughed the hardest were Southerners.

“This has been a wonderful year for me professionally. I just finished my second motion picture and I did my first dramatic television show. You all know what a nut I am with the guns and the quick-draw quiz. Well, my big ambition is to do a Western. I mean it. I’m not sure if Hollywood’ll ever let me play a cowboy, but if they do,
that’ll
be the time the Indians win!

“I watch television all the time. I’m a nut with it. And do you know what bugs me? Howcum I ain’t never yet seen no colored people on
The Millionaire
?” I paused, “I can just picture that cat who walks around giving out the checks. He goes up to my old neighborhood, 140th Street and Eighth Avenue, he climbs the stairs, it’s nine in the morning and he knocks on the door. ‘My name is Michael Anthony …’ The colored cat looks out at him, ‘You better git outa mah face wakin’ me at no damn nine o’clock.’ ”

The breaking of my speech pattern and dropping into the “illiterate” worked beautifully for me. I could get away with saying, “Well, yeah, Kingfish—” and the colored guy sitting in the audience
didn’t resent it because he’d already heard me speak good English, plus a minute later he heard me using the same formula with a heavy Yiddish inflection. The Jewish guy in the audience didn’t object because I turned around and did a stereotype of the Negro with an Amos ‘n Andy dialect and lines like, “Sapphire … if every woman in Texas looks like your momma—then the Lone Ranger’s gonna be alone for a
long
time!”

I wanted to do impressions of Step’n Fetchit and Willy Best and I found a way to work them in so that they might say something. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve made wonderful progress racially. Organizations like the NAACP asked the movie studios, ‘Please don’t always show the Negro as a slow, lazy, shuffling guy,’ and Hollywood stopped using the Step’n Fetchit-type characters. Now, on a personal level I’m very happy about it, but professionally I miss them. They were wonderful performers …”

With that kind of an introduction I had told the audience that it’s not logical or right to think of Negroes only as the old-fashioned stereotypes, and I’d indicated how even Hollywood has helped to stamp out these racially sneering things. Without direct lecture, without pleading or protest, a seed was planted.

I finished the impressions and cued Morty for a ballad. As the music started I walked over to George Rhodes, my pianist. “George, I know how sensitive you are, but would you mind playing on some of the
white
keys?”

From a performing standpoint every comic or humorist must have a point of view. Mine was, for me, the most satisfying part of the shows. I had been given access to ears that would listen, and through the racial humor I was telling them exactly what I believed in, and they were accepting it—giving me an important reason for standing on that stage.

I drove out to Fox to have lunch at the commissary. With two picture credits and a third ready to start shooting in Vegas in a month I wasn’t looking through the candy store window any more. One of the kids at the table was an actress, Barbara Luna, whom I talk to like a kid sister. She was working in a remake of
The Blue Angel
. We were eating and talking when a tall girl with long blonde hair walked in and sat down at a table by herself. She was in costume and wearing make-up from a picture. Her hair was very straight and I dug the dramatic way it framed her face, which was unbelievably beautiful. I nudged Barbara. “Oh God.”

She followed my gaze across the room. “That’s May Britt.”

“Now that’s a girl! Yeah. I mean that’s a
girl”

“Forget it.”

“I saw her in
The Young Lions
and she was wild looking, but in person she’s unbelievable.”

“Forget it.”

I looked around at Barbara. “Hey, wait a minute. Whattya mean ‘forget it’? A beautiful girl walks in and I just …”

“I mean: for-get-it! I see her on the set every day, she’s a nice girl but she doesn’t do anything but work. She goes nowhere with nobody!”

A few nights later I was in my Jag, heading down Santa Monica not sure where I felt like going for dinner. I stopped at a light. May Britt was walking across the street. There was no missing the style of her hair. She was wearing a bluish-grey skirt, a button-down collar man’s shirt and a jacket. She stood very straight and walked with a driving energy. There was an older woman with her, probably her mother. I watched them buy tickets at a movie theater and go inside.

There was a loud knocking on the roof of my car. A cop was leaning in my window. “Shall we dance, Sammy?” The light had changed and the cars behind me were honking their horns. “Excuse me, officer.” I grinned like an idiot and drove away.

I pulled into the parking lot at Patsy’s Villa Capri. Maybe I’d bump into Frank or some of the buddies. I looked around inside. Nobody I knew. I took a booth and sat by myself, talking to the drink I’d ordered: How’s this for being a star? A whole city of people and I’m sitting here with
you!

I saw Judy and Jay Kanter coming in and waved for them to join me. We’d been buddies for years and we were close enough so that I didn’t have to be “on” with them. I sat there with my head hanging into my drink.

Jay asked, “You got troubles?”

“Nothing serious, baby, just a case of the humbles. I just feel like sitting here and having a little booze with you guys.”

Judy asked, “How’s your love life?”

I answered her through clenched teeth. “Listen, I saw a girl tonight …”

Jay got interested. “Who’d you see? Who is it now?”

“It’s not a who-is-it-now. Her name’s May Britt and she’s …”

Judy threw out her hands. “Forget it.”

“Hey! What’s this ‘forget it’ jazz? Every time I mention her name it’s like I’m Robespierre plotting to swipe the Queen’s diamond studs.”

Jay was shaking his head. “You haven’t got a prayer. She’s so straight that nobody even goes over to say hello to her. And the best
have tried. She’s not interested in dating, parties, nothing! She’s strictly work. She’s getting a divorce from some kid who’s got millions and she won’t take a nickel from him. Sam, this is an unusual girl.”

“Now
you
hold it. You don’t think maybe you’re exaggerating just a
little
bit?”

They wouldn’t even bother to answer me. They gave me you-poor-fool looks, smiled at each other, shrugged and turned back to their veal parmesan. I sat there watching them eat, trying to think of some way to open the conversation again. I took the fork out of Jay’s hand. “Baby, let’s talk sense. I’ve been around this town a few years, too, right? Now there just can’t be a chick that looks this good that ain’t swingin’ with
somebody!”

He gave me the blank stare and shook his head like: You wanta be an idiot? Okay. Be an idiot.

I got back to the coast again about three weeks later, and had some kids over to the Playhouse. Rudy Duff, a man I’d hired to drive for Mama and to look after her, was making drinks and running the movies and it was one of those pleasant kind of evenings. Barbara Luna came by with some kook she’d run into at Schwab’s Drugstore and I watched her dying of boredom with him. Her date meant no more to her than all the nameless chicks had ever meant to me. I felt sorry for her, like we were both on the same island.

I took her aside. “Barbara, let me ask you something. You ain’t never gonna introduce me to May Britt, right? I mean you don’t want to arrange anything for old Sam, do you? Maybe help a pal …”

She looked suprised. “I know May Britt. I worked with her in
Blue Angel.”

“Nut! I was in the commissary with you, remember? And by the way, I caught a screening of the picture and it stinks. But she was good. And she looks—well, she looks like
too much!”

“Yeah, she’s great looking. What’d you have in mind?”

I sat down next to her. “I just want to meet her. That’s all. Simple, innocent, nice. Listen, I’ll make up a party for Dinah Washington’s closing at the Cloisters next week. Then we’ll all come over here afterwards and … well, we’ll just let nature take its course.”

“Great. I’ll give you her phone number and you can invite her.”

“No good. I need an opening. With this girl if I call her cold it’s a
definite turn-down and maybe even a hang-up of the phone and a broken eardrum. You’ve got to call her for me.”

“Well, if you wanta make a whole thing of it,” she shrugged, “all right, I’ll try to get in touch with her.”

Three days passed and no call from Barbara. I got her on the phone. “You didn’t do it yet, right?”

“What’s wrong, Sammy?”

“Wrong? Who said anything’s wrong? I just called to tell you I’m receiving the Celibacy Award at the Hollywood Bowl next week and I hope you can attend the ceremony!”

“Oh gee, Sam, I forgot.”

“You
forgot
?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been so hung up with things. You know how it is.”

“No, I
don’t
know how it is.”

“Okay, get off the phone so I can call her.” She called me right back, “Well, I spoke to her.”

“She can’t make it, right?”

“It’s not that. She said, ‘If he wants to talk to me why doesn’t he call me himself?’ ”

“Whattya mean?” I knew exactly what she meant.

Someone answered, briskly, “Tell me!”

Tell me? What the hell is
that
?

Again the voice said, “Tell me.”

How Swedish can you get? “May I speak with Miss Britt, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

From her voice
alone
I wished I had on a heavy sweater. “This is Sammy Davis, Jr.”

“Oh, hello there.” Some of the chill disappeared. She was still a little crisp, but she didn’t sound angry that I’d called.

I gave her the Orson Welles voice, resonant, full of timbre: “Miss Britt, you don’t know me …”

“I know that.” Oh, swell. I needed this. She said, “But I’ve seen you perform. At the Moulin Rouge. I thought your show was marvelous.”

Hey, this is going to be all right. She didn’t have to say that. “Miss Britt, I’m having a little party—I mean a large party, at The Cloisters, Thursday night, and I wonder if I might have the pleasure
of your company.” I rushed in with a little protection. “Barbara Luna will be there.”

“I’d like to come but my mother’s visiting me from Sweden.”

“I’d be delighted to have you bring her along, if you like.”

“If you wouldn’t mind. Thank you very much. That will be fine.”

I spent the next few days planning every move, inviting just the right people to dress up the party. I invited no attractive single guys. I cast it like a schoolgirl setting up her sweet-sixteen party.