Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (78 page)

I watched the rehearsal. It was like a gigantic Ed Sullivan show, with the biggest stars of two continents. There was a chorus of twenty boys and girls—the top popular singers in England, like Cliff Richard and Adam Faith—who did nothing but sing “Tell Me, Pretty Maiden.”

A man had walked up the aisle. “Mr. Davis, my name is Jack Hylton, I’m the producer of the show and I’m delighted to meet you. We’ve put you next-to-closing.” At any other time I’d have expected the honor of being given the star spot and accepted it with satisfaction, but right then all my cool went out the window. He was smiling pleasantly. “Liberace will follow you and close the show with a simple song on the piano.” I wanted to say: Lee doesn’t know how to play a
simple
song, but it was no time for jokes. He said, “You’ll have nine minutes.” Well, that was good. It was a minute more than I’d been told and it would mean that much more I could do to get them.

I sat back and watched an act do a beatnik sketch, and they were sensational. Bruce Forsyth, the M.C., walked onstage and started in with lines and stories and ring-a-ding-ding, and he was brilliant. Talk had always come back from London: They’re old-fashioned. They’re square. Like hell. They are solid, fine performers with no
old-fashioned or anything connected with it. There could be no thinking: They don’t have what we have. Everybody’s got it. And I’m hip that if I went to India there’d be a guy there doing it, and as hip as we are here he’d be that hip there.

Arthur turned to me. “We ain’t out-of-town, old buddy.”

I nodded. This was show business at its best. It was Broadway or Hollywood but with all the dignity of the old vaudeville in which I’d been raised. Despite the sour grapes stuff I’d heard from guys who’d come back after dying in London I always knew that they had to have great performers if for no other reason than variety had lasted twenty years longer in England than in America, and it’s still going strong.

A man onstage peered out into the audience, “Mr. Davis? You’re on next, sir. Rehearsal, please.”

I walked down the aisle and rather than making a leap onto the stage as I would at home I went around through the door which connects the backstage to the audience and walked onstage. Everyone, from the performers and the stagehands to the maids and cleaning women and the people from the office, the press and performers’ friends, had taken seats. As I reached for the microphone the performers began applauding. I never had that kind of courtesy in my life. A performer doesn’t know what courtesy is until he goes to London.

Murphy had ordered dinner sent upstairs at the hotel. I couldn’t look at it. I had the colds, the hots, and I was shaking like a leaf.

Arthur watched me walking up and down the room. “Relax. You saw what happened this afternoon. You wrecked ‘em.”

“Baby, it’s beautiful to be a hit at rehearsal, but it’s a little more comfortable when it happens after the
performance
, right?” I stopped walking. “Hey! Nobody gave me the protocol on what happens if I get introduced to the Queen after the show. Baby, get moving and find someone at the theater who knows these things.”

“What can it be? You shake hands. Why’re you so worried?”

“Arthur, when I was a kid in Harlem nobody told me, ‘Now here’s what you do when you meet the Queen of England!’ ”

The backstage doorman said, “You’re dressing on the third floor, sir. Mr. Cole asked us to put you with him.” He smiled. “The best luck, Mr. Davis.”

At each landing kids leaned out of dressing rooms, calling to me, “You’ll be a smash tonight,” “Don’t worry about a thing,” “You’ll be magnificent!” It was that way with every performer I passed.

Nat was already in the dressing room with his man and Murphy, and George Rhodes, my pianist. I sat down and looked around. Murphy had my clothes and make-up laid out. Nat was sitting across from me, not saying a word, doing some quiet drinking. I looked at the bottle next to him. “Nat, you don’t drink scotch.”

“I’m drinking it tonight.”

“I don’t drink scotch either. Lemme have some.” I poured a water tumbler full of straight scotch, and dumped it, neat. Whack! I felt it land in my stomach but it might have been tomato juice. I looked at Nat and shook my head. “I ain’t
never
been this scared before!”

He said, “Take it easy, we’ve got three hours to kill.”

Arthur burst in. “The place is packed. People are standing in the back, they’re out in the streets….”

The show was starting. I could hear the music. Nat was on the bill before me, closing the first half, and he started dressing. When it was time for him to go downstairs I wished him luck, and stood on the third floor landing to listen.

Nat is the personification of sophistication and calm. When he walks on, whatever nervousness he may feel stays inside of him, it never shows, and it was comforting to hear his smooth, mellow voice—like a touch of home. I started to relax. Then suddenly he cracked. “Oh, God!” Nat Cole has never cracked in his life! He has perfect control at all times, under any conditions. Even when he’s hoarse, he knows how to play with his voice so that it doesn’t come out rough, it becomes even more resonant, a little lower, and richer—never cracking!

He came back upstairs, dripping wet, shaking his head miserably, “I don’t
never
want to do
that
no more! Not
ever!”
He collapsed into a chair and pulled his tie open. “Man, they is
out
there tonight!” He beckoned to his valet. “Give me a drink.”

I was Charley Trembles but ten times worse than before, like I had a vibrating machine in my mouth and someone just plugged it in. “Whhhhh—wwwwwhattya mean ‘they is out there’?”

He looked at me, “Get yourself another drink and sit down. Everybody else get out.” He closed the door. “Now listen good. When you get out on the stage you
go
for it. Don’t hold back nothin’, ‘cause they’s
ready!
There ain’t
nothin’
happened down there yet. You is it! They is waitin’ fo’
you!”
He’d been talking “colored” to emphasize his point, and to relieve some of the urgency, but now he settled down to business. “When you come on,
take your bows slow and easy. Don’t let anything rush you. Do you remember what that cat told us before about don’t look at the Queen? Forget it!
Damn
protocol. You give her a sneaky little peek out of your good eye, otherwise you’ll be looking for her when you should be worrying about your song. And at the end of your act they’re going to try to rush you off. Don’t let them. Just take and tear them apart!” He took another shot of scotch. He must have had a dozen in the past three hours but he was cold sober.
“And
, if you don’t kill ‘em, if you don’t, I’m gonna take my fist and beat you to death.”

He was beautiful. He knew that if ever I needed someone from home to encourage me, someone on my own level as a performer, someone who knew me well, I needed it then.

“Now, when it’s over and you do your bow, bow to the Queen last. Bow here, here, here, and then give her one of them—I know you know how to bow with all that gracious bull you do—so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“What did
you
do, Nat?”

He reached for the bottle again. “I didn’t do
none
of that. That’s how I know you should do it.”

The second half of the show had started and I went downstairs a few minutes early to stand in the wings and get a look at the audience. It was like a movie scene: diamonds were dripping all over the place, almost every man there was wearing a red sash across his chest with medals hanging down and walrus mustaches—they didn’t look anything like my kind of audience.

I watched Charlie Drake onstage. He seemed like Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, and Marcel Marceau rolled into one, plus The Keystone Kops, with the pie throwing. He was doing a silent sketch, a slapstick-vaudeville thing with balloons, and the people were falling out of their seats.

Bruce Forsyth whispered, “You’re next. Walk onstage while Charlie’s finishing and stand behind the closed curtains in back of him.”

Charlie was in the wings and he gave me a wave like “Good luck.” Bruce was onstage to introduce me. The audience was starting to buzz. I stared straight ahead at the threads of the curtain in front of me, trying to clear my mind of everything.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Al Burnett.”

What the hell is that? Nobody told me Al was going to be on. His voice came through the curtain between us. “Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have been a performer and a nightclub owner for the better part of my life, and as a nightclub owner I have contracted the finest entertainers available. Three years ago I saw a young man perform in America. I wanted the pleasure of this moment, and thanks to all concerned—to Mr. Hylton, to all the people here at the Royal Command Performance, the pleasure is mine. Ladies and Gentlemen, the greatest entertainer in the world: Sammy Davis, Jr.”

Our wedding day. My father, my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Hugo Wilkens

A few minutes before the ceremony. In the living room of my home. Peter, Frank, Rabbi William Kramer

Gunnel von Essen