In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (46 page)

He was an old man with suit bags and an encyclopedia’s worth of memories. Yes, it was tender and even sweet if you were prone to gentle adjectives in describing Will Mastin. But the kids on the bus with him were not so reflective. They were kids, they lived for the moment, there were not enough hours in the day to be reflective. They were chasing and living their own dreams, catching what glitter they could from Sammy’s big-time dreaming—catching a glimpse of Sinatra here, of Ava Gardner over there, of Jerry Lewis backstage. Will had only himself to lean on now. He was deaf to the guffaws coming from behind closed doors. He heard what he had always heard: the footsteps of theatergoers; the sweet little drumbeat signaling the arrival of his Sammy, which had always put him at ease, delivering him from the fear that whirred inside his mind about what catastrophe might befall Sammy, which hustlers might try to steal him in the night while his eyes were closed to the world. And applause—he certainly heard the applause. He also saw what he had always seen: the smiling and excited faces, the sparkle of jewelry out there in the darkness.

Even when Sam Sr. couldn’t go on—his own nagging ailments trailed him town to town—Will Mastin didn’t let it stop him. There he was on some nights, tap-dancing behind Sammy, onstage, shooting the cuffs, absent a sickly Sam Sr.—a trio performing as a duo. It looked strange—so strange that to deliver his son from the embarrassment of it, Sam Sr. told Shirley and others he was going to fake a heart attack backstage. The only words Will Mastin had for Sam Sr. in the aftermath of the faked heart attack was that he should take better care of himself.

Will Mastin was still touching members of the company on the shoulder, directing them to follow him to the bathroom. There, in secrecy, he would pull out wads of cash—the payroll. Will Mastin paid off in the toilet. Sammy used to joke about it—but always out of Mastin’s earshot.

Shirley and George, who had gotten married ten months after joining Sammy, intended to devote themselves to each other and to Sammy. They would stay on the road with him. Sammy seemed to be putting together another family, one distinctly different from his father and Will Mastin. Even if his father and Mastin did not always seem to, Sammy himself paid particular attention to the march of time. “He was torn between those two guys,” Tony Curtis says. “He saw he was headed to another level. Will took offense to that, being made to feel he was just a part of the act. The daddy was willing to do whatever the son wanted.”

The jokes about the two aging hoofers stung. There was one little joke going
about that if folks knew how old Will Mastin really was, why, they’d come out not to see Sammy—but the seventy-eight-year-old man onstage, hoofing! Will Mastin wanted to hold on. Keep the cane in hand; the ghost at bay. Sammy wanted to fly solo, and the prospect excited him even as it frightened him. “He said to me one night,” recalls singer Keely Smith, “that he couldn’t wait until the day came when he could walk out onstage by himself.”

Annie Stevens—wife of conductor Morty Stevens—knew Sammy felt perplexed. The world was cold, and the two men were his family. “Emotionally,” she says, “it was eating at Sammy, but he knew he had to be out on his own.”

On January 14, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died at his home in Los Angeles. His last screen appearance was a year earlier, in
The Harder They Fall
, a Budd Schulberg–written boxing drama in which he played a cynical press agent. For more than two decades, he had been—along with James Cagney—the signature tough guy in American film. The death was from lung cancer; he was fifty-eight. During his last days alive he still smoked; the shots of morphine stayed some of the pain. The last movie he saw on television was
Anchors Aweigh
, which had starred his friend Frank Sinatra; the lyrics for
Anchors
, a musical, were written by
Mr. Wonderful
’s Jule Styne. (Another signature of the gifted Styne was generosity toward other lyricists—thus he had eschewed writing duties on
Mr. Wonderful
in favor of giving the opportunity to Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener, and George Weiss.) Bogart’s passing not only took away a riveting screen persona, it also stopped the evening get-togethers he had long held at his home in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. Among those who gathered were Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall (Bogart’s wife), Sinatra, musician Jimmy Van Heusen (if many believed Sammy patterned himself after Sinatra, there were those who felt Sinatra patterned himself after Van Heusen), Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Once, when they were all gathered together in Las Vegas to see a Noël Coward show, all sleeping off the aftereffects of a night on the town, Bacall told them they all looked like “a rat pack.” The Bogart cohorts had a simple goal: “
the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.” The only Negro who got to peek at the group’s goings-on was the occasional maid or butler.

Bogart had always liked Sammy. It was a tough and tender kind of admiration. A visit backstage at Ciro’s in ’54; an invitation up to his home, where there was talk about show business; yet another invitation to a holiday party. He could see Sammy coming on. Humphrey Bogart was not an emotional man, but he had always been known for his candor, his nasal-soaked words delivered quick, as if they had been lined up so his tongue could knock them down like miniature bowling balls. Bogart had always whispered—aloud, even in the face of Will Mastin himself—that the kid should go solo.

The tough-guy movie gangster would not live to see the solo flight of Sammy—nor Sammy’s being welcomed into a quicker, sleeker version of the rat pack Bogie himself had stirred into being.

Christmas week of 1957 found Sammy back at the Sands in Las Vegas. “
Sammy Davis Jr. uncorks another supercharged show in his latest Copa room appearance, this time reshuffling his repertoire considerably since the last time around,”
Variety
noted in its review. But deeper in the write-up there were hints of the fragility of Sammy’s partners, his father and Will Mastin: “Davis Sr. is still out of the act because of illness, but Will Mastin is on hand with his consistently fine softshoe routines.”

In Chicago eight weeks later, critics picked up on a report in the
Chicago Tribune
that Sammy was about to permanently go solo. A rift ensued; Sammy accused the press of misquoting him. The press was hungry for a story, and the possible breakup of the Will Mastin Trio was news, even if gossip rather than fact. Sammy called a press conference. To the sharp ear, there was ambivalence in his denials. He “
definitely” intended to work as a solo act in the future, he told the press—“but it won’t be the result of any [family] rift.”

Imagine: a friend in every city. In Cleveland her name was Betty Isard. They met in 1959. She was lovely and, of course, blond.

The movie merely featured Armstrong. Its star was actually Danny Kaye. It was a biopic about jazz trumpeter Red Nichols. The critics thought it too sentimental. Sammy must have made mental notes: In 1966 he would make his
own jazz-themed movie.
A Man Called Adam
, and would cast Armstrong in a featured role.

Isard would stare at the Jewish star Sammy wore on his chest. She wondered what prompted his conversion. “He said, ‘I need all the help I can get.’ He said he liked Jewish people because they helped him the most. He said he wouldn’t be where he was if it weren’t for Jewish people.”

She fell for him and didn’t know why. She did not think he was particularly handsome. “One night we went to a big nightclub. We were at a long table. He turned around and grabbed me and pulled me into the kitchen. He said, ‘I would love to give you a kiss like you never had.’ Then he said, ‘Forget it,’ and went back to the table.”

He was Sammy, which meant he was soon gone. “I was so unhappy when he left,” she remembers.

W
ith his wading deeper and deeper into the consciousness of America, Martin Luther King, Jr., began to attract celebrities and stars to his cause. With celebrities came media attention. On May 17, 1957, King starred at a “prayer pilgrimage” in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. More than twenty thousand showed. Among them were young actors Ruby Dee, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier—and Sammy Davis, Jr. Sammy—as always—was going places where Mastin and his father lacked the desire to go. Belafonte had formed an almost brotherly bond with King. “I became very central to this theme pointing directly into the heart of black culture,” says Belafonte. “I began to debate folk, hit on folk. I tried to assuage their fears and place their fears in the agenda of dignity.” Of the Negro stars at the pilgrimage, both King and Belafonte realized that the one who had the easiest rapport with whites was Sammy. It was the cachet of his powerful and intoxicating nightclub act, his success on Broadway. In his pursuit of equality for the Negro, the young minister decided Sammy could definitely help. Belafonte knew as much: “Sammy could sing, and dance, and do one-liners. He was the torch”

In time—on those occasions when his Southern Christian Leadership Conference needed a quick infusion of cash, needed someone with star power to appear at a fund-raiser—King would often turn to Belafonte and utter just two words: “Get Sammy.”

That Sammy had an affinity for white women was hardly of concern to King. King himself—as the FBI duly noted—partook of the same pleasurable pursuits.

The Morris agency had a revolving door of agents assigned to Sammy. The latest was Sy Marsh. It took Marsh himself little time to recognize Sammy’s appeal to white women. “The women used to say to me, ‘Sy, when he walks out onstage, you realize how unattractive he is, but one and a half hours later he’s six feet tall, and handsome.’ ”

Buddy Bregman—Jule Styne’s nephew—had been raised in a well-to-do
family in Chicago where there were servants and a private plane for the family’s use. In Hollywood, as a musical arranger, he quickly became something of a prodigy. On NBC’s
Eddie Fisher Show
in 1957, it was the Buddy Bregman Orchestra providing the music. Young Bregman drew the attention of the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Jane Powell, Bobby Darin, Sinatra, and, among others, Sammy. (Sinatra had one word for Bregman: “Genius.”) After the
Mr. Wonderful
run, Bregman was happy to bump into Sammy again out in Hollywood. They both dressed like surfer kids in their Sunday best—argyle sweaters, khakis, loafers; Sammy in horn-rimmed glasses to complete the look. One thing Bregman had in common with Sammy was their mutual fascination with blondes. Sammy wooed and won; Bregman less so. “I hated him for it,” says Bregman. “It used to drive me crazy.” Bregman believed Sammy took the black-white color scheme to extremes. “Sammy had black silk sheets. It was the ‘white girl on the black silk sheet’ thing.”

Ever since his childhood, Sammy dreamed cinematically, in movie time. Practically raised in movie houses—his head tossed back, his eyes wide—he let movie stars and bits of dialogue guide the sweep of his imagination. The films of the 1950s touched him deeply. Many were high-minded melodramas, and they featured a stunning array of talent: Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman; inventive directors like Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock. Sammy loved the clean whiteness of those films—the sparkling jewels, the mink coat, the shadows, the love both thwarted and won. And he adored the women in those ’50s dramas: Janet Leigh, Barbara Rush, Rhonda Fleming. Sammy carried his cameras everywhere; he imagined himself someday producing gorgeous photo books of all the actors and actresses. He knew them all—sometimes personally, like Janet Leigh—but always their movies. Deanna Durbin. Kim Novak. Of course a Negro male could not get close to one of those screen sirens, not in the flesh. It was unheard of, even unimagined. And yet, there was an innocence to Sammy’s dreams. They were as romantic as they were gallant, and they served to lead him down unimagined roads.

Kim Novak first caught the public’s attention in 1955. That was the year the twenty-two-year-old starred opposite Frank Sinatra in the Otto Preminger–directed
Man with the Golden Arm
, a gritty tale about a heroin addict (played by Sinatra). Then came her appearance in the screen version of
Picnic
, based on the William Inge play of the same name. She played a Kansas girl who gets swept off her feet by a drifter, portrayed by William Holden. The small-town girl wants to be appreciated for more than her looks, and hopes the drifter will whisk her away, praying that he sees more in her than the myopic denizens of her little town. Inge, having been born in Independence, Kansas, knew the midwestern milieu well. When the Novak character dances
with Holden—her hips moving with silky and raw seduction—it becomes one of the greatest heated moments of a dance duet ever filmed.

The wide CinemaScope screen quickly turned Kim Novak into a sex symbol. Blond and big-boned, Novak also possessed an airiness, not unlike that of Marilyn Monroe, to whom some were quick to make comparisons—even to the point of ridiculing her talent. (Novak’s given name at birth, in fact, was Marilyn; to Hollywood, “Kim” sounded better.) Novak, however, was not weighed down with Monroe’s self-absorption. Soon enough she was on magazine covers. There were lavish photo spreads—the hot young Hollywood actress drove a bone white convertible Corvette. There were studio publicists assigned to her, and they kept the star-making machine humming.