In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (52 page)

During those times, hardly a season passed that the country did not experience a violent racial murder. In May 1959, Mack Charles Parker was pulled from the Poplarville, Mississippi, jail where he was being held on charges of raping a white woman. His body was found a short time later—disfigured—in the Pearl River. His mother, Eliza Parker, fearing for her own safety, was forced to flee the state.

Racial unrest veered from the deadly to the absurd. When the Boston Red Sox sent its only Negro player, Jerry Green, down to the minors in the spring of 1959, protestors gathered outside Fenway Park. They had company. “
We want a pennant, not a white team,” one of the signs supportive of the Negro player said. Joe Cronin, the American League Baseball president, defended the Red Sox and its owner, Tom Yawkey. Yawkey, Cronin announced, was not prejudiced, because he had “
colored help on his South Carolina plantation and takes excellent care of them, pays good salaries, and they are all very happy.” Then from the absurd to the bizarre: An eerie chuckle came from the stacks of the Alabama public library system. Segregationists demanded that
The Rabbit’s
Wedding
, a children’s book, be removed from the open shelves. Their complaint: interracial marriage—among rabbits! Garth Williams, the author, was dumbfounded. “
I was completely unaware that animals with white fur were considered blood relations to white human beings.”

In the year of the white rabbit, acquaintances of Sammy’s who stopped by his house in the weeks after his divorce were surprised at whom they would see, frequently eating Rosa’s delicious meals: Kim Novak. Theirs was the longest of movie fadeouts. “She was up there eating collard greens,” says Flemming, who saw Novak there once.

“She was quite simple,” says Philip Yordan of Novak. “Nothing complicated about her at all. She was a star. She did what she wanted.”

There would be many film roles in the career of Sammy Davis, Jr., but none would he bring to life so electrifyingly as one born in the mind of DuBose Heyward.

Heyward was a white Charleston, South Carolina, insurance salesman struck by the plight of Negroes who lived on the darker edges of society there. Born in 1885 to a family long removed from its once comfortable position in society, Heyward was a sickly youngster—he had polio—and a high school dropout. His first decent job was working in a steamship warehouse in Charleston. He saw Negroes everywhere: “
Negroes in long lines trucking cotton on the wharves; dim figures in a deserted warehouse squatting over a crap game; spirituals bringing me up short to listen against the wall of a dilapidated church that I had to pass on the way to work.” Though the job lasted only one year, the work was colorful, and the presence of so many Negroes seemed to fasten to his mind. Afterward, he went into the insurance business and did well. Having saved some money, he spent more time writing short stories and poetry. Negro life fascinated him, and tales of the southern Negro threaded his work. In September 1925 his first novel,
Porgy
, was published. It told the story of Porgy and Bess, two Negroes, and their lives on Cabbage Row amid schemers, hustlers, and gamblers. Porgy is crippled and fights robustly—using his great upper-body strength—for his Bess. One of the novel’s more sinister figures is Sportin’ Life, who wears a derby and sells “happy dust”—cocaine. The book would become a critical success (“
The best novel of the season by an American author,” said the
Chicago Daily News
) and land on many bestseller lists. Cecil B. DeMille was interested in Heyward’s novel for a movie, but plans fell apart. George Gershwin entered the picture, determined to turn it into an opera. Instead, first came a theatrical play, which opened on Broadway on October 10, 1927. Reviews were favorable; many thought Heyward’s depiction of what he referred to as “an unfortunate race” was generally sympathetic. Al
Jolson bought the radio rights and dreamed of taking the drama to the big screen, where he’d play Porgy in blackface. (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a great acting duo, also desired to play Porgy and Bess in blackface, but theater operatives dissuaded them from the idea.) It took the stock market crash of 1929 to send Al Jolson off in other directions.

Heyward had a fascination with family in his novel, with the pains engulfed within. “Hush, little baby, don’ yo cry,” he would write. “Mudder an’ fadder born to die.”

Gershwin never lost sight of
Porgy
, and in time he and Heyward were at work on the operatic adaptation. Gershwin even made a trip to some of the sea islands surrounding Charleston to view the Gullah population, Negroes descended from slaves who had never left the islands; anyone attempting to create something of the Heyward novel would certainly benefit from trying to understand them. Gershwin sat one evening with a throng of Negroes singing spirituals around a fire. He became sweaty and inspired. DuBose Heyward was with him. “
I think he is the only white man in America who could have done it,” Heyward would remark. While in South Carolina, Gershwin began composing at a feverish clip.

By mid-1935, Gershwin had his opera finished. The first premiere was staged in Boston. It met with resounding success. “
You’ve done it—you’re the Abraham Lincoln of Negro music,” J. Rosamond Johnson, a Negro assistant conductor, told him. A critic for the
Boston American
would write: “
When the cries of genius subside, George Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
will take its place indubitably as the ‘first’ American opera.” It opened in New York on October 10, and the reviews were stunning. Gershwin had melded, for all to see, the rhythms and folklore of Negro life in the South. In time the word “classic” would become attached to
Porgy and Bess
. Negroes would rise to fame among its ranks—Leontyne Price (“
a Bess of vocal glory”), William Warfield (Porgy), and Cab Calloway (Sportin’ Life), to name a few.

Over the years, there were world tours arranged, none more notable than those led by Robert Breen, general director of the American National Theatre and Academy. Breen—who once directed John Barrymore in
Hamlet
, in a staging performed at the Hollywood Bowl—was an admirer of experimental theater, and thought theater belonged on the international stage. In early 1956 he took a
Porgy and Bess
cast to Moscow. The company was eighty strong, and included Truman Capote, a young writer on assignment for the
New Yorker
. Capote wore a yellow scarf as protection from the Russian winter winds, and everyone was amused at his fey accent. He looked askance at the Negro cast, wondering why they would laud a production that, in his mind, mocked them, especially with the song “Oh, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’.” In turn, the Negroes believed that, behind their backs, Capote was disparaging them as “Uncle
Toms.” Soon enough, cast members and administrators alike believed Capote, with his scathing comments under his breath, had come along to sabotage their production. The writer appeared in the lobby of the Leningrad Hotel one day, a throng of Russians buzzing about. At his colorful clothing and rather feminine walk, heads swiveled. A Russian’s voice—speaking in accented English—rose above the din:
“Ve have dem like dat in de Soviet too, but ve hide dem.”

Over the years, nearly ninety film producers had shown interest in
Porgy
, but nothing had ever materialized. Harry Cohn had gone so far as to say Al Jolson would play Porgy, with Rita Hayworth as Bess, and Fred Astaire as Sportin’ Life—all in blackface. But since the premiere of
Porgy
, America had undergone some significant changes. For one, blackface was no longer acceptable.

On May 8, 1957, an announcement came from Hollywood: Samuel Goldwyn had purchased the screen rights to
Porgy and Bess
. He promised a lavish production. With roles for Negroes in film so scarce, every role—especially the principal roles of Porgy, Bess, and Sportin’ Life—would be coveted.

The Hollywood branch of the NAACP, however, would have quite a bit to say about the DuBose Heyward novel that Goldwyn planned to bring to the screen.

Was there really a Porgy? a Bess? a Sportin’ Life? Well, an old Kentucky stable hand may have died anonymously, having sprung “Uncle Tom” into the vernacular, but DuBose Heyward was a touch more generous in acknowledging his inspiration for Porgy. While reading the
Charleston News and Courier
one morning, Heyward noticed an item:

The item fascinated Heyward. “
Just think of that old wreck having enough manhood to do a thing like that,” he uttered to his sister. As far back as 1928, Heyward gave recognition to Smalls in the form of a dedication: “
To Smalls, I make acknowledgment of my obligation. From contemplation of his real, and
deeply moving tragedy, sprang Porgy, a creature of my imagination … upon whom, being my own creation, I could impose my own … conception of a summer of aspiration, devotion and heartbreak across the color wall.”

DuBose Heyward died in 1940, and thus did not live to see
Porgy
make it to the screen. Much of his writing life had been spent pondering the fate of the Negro. He cowrote the screenplay for
The Emperor Jones
, a 1933 film in which Paul Robeson starred. He also wrote
Mamba’s Daughters
, which Ethel Waters appeared in onstage. Taking more than his white southern upbringing would seem to have allowed him, Heyward wrote of Negroes with an unexpected tenderness and understanding.

Sportin’ Life became history’s flamboyant hustler; Bess, its brokenhearted sweetheart; Porgy, its prideful beggar. “
Porgy lived in the Golden Age,” Heyward would write. “Not the Golden Age of a remote and legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed.”

Samuel Goldwyn brought in an assortment of writers to take a crack at the screenplay for
Porgy
, and he finally settled on the version written by N. Richard Nash. Nash had scripted
The Rainmaker
, a well-received 1956 drama that starred Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. (Nash also wrote the play, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.) When Goldwyn had an acceptable screenplay, he sought a director. Frank Capra and Elia Kazan both passed. He finally chose Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed the first staged
Porgy and Bess
. Mamoulian was Russian-born and had acquired a reputation for directing complex operas in Rochester, New York. Casting got under way. And once that began, the NAACP went into action.

The civil rights organization castigated
Porgy and Bess
, drawing attention to its tales of Negro drug use, fornication, gambling, and murder. Harry Belafonte, politically sensitive, turned down the lead role. “I rejected it,” Belafonte says. “DuBose Heyward wrote a very racist story. The leading man was on his knees. The second leading man was a cocaine pusher. The third man was a hustler. The leading lady was a prostitute. What makes
Porgy and Bess
work is the remarkable music. But the images were highly distasteful.”

The leading role was next offered to Sidney Poitier. Poitier also declined. “
I had a considerable aversion to
Porgy and Bess
because of its inherent racial attitudes.” Goldwyn asked Poitier for a private meeting; Poitier agreed to meet but still refused the role. The few Negro stars in Hollywood seemed to be running from the movie. Pearl Bailey said she might accept a role—but not if any of the female cast members wore a bandanna, which reeked of plantation
dress. Finally, after Poitier’s agent put fear into him by telling him Goldwyn could blackball his career, Poitier signed on for the lead. Goldwyn, obviously sensing possible trouble and believing that a “
quiet boycott” existed among Negro talent, donated $1,000 to the NAACP. Dorothy Dandridge, the most visible Negro female star in Hollywood, agreed to play Bess. Still, the third largest role in the movie, that of Sportin’ Life, remained to be filled.

Belafonte remained steadfast in his sentiments that the movie not be made. “
In a period of calm, perhaps this picture could be viewed historically. But skins are still too thin and emotions still too sensitive for a lot of
Uncle Toms in
Porgy & Bess
to be shown now,” he told an interviewer.

Sammy convinced himself that the role of Sportin’ Life was his and his only. He practiced all the Gershwin songs from the
Porgy and Bess
songbook. He skipped around his home singing as he practiced drawing his six-shooters. When he heard of a party Judy Garland was giving, and that Goldwyn would be in attendance, Sammy Davis, Jr.—the newly minted Jew—went to meet Samuel Goldwyn, the old Jew. (Goldwyn privately considered Sammy just a Negro comic who spent all his time aping Jerry Lewis onstage.) When Sammy arrived, not only was Goldwyn there, but so was Lee Gershwin, wife of Ira. Sammy bopped about, shaking hands, spotting Goldwyn. He got himself near the piano and sang several Gershwin tunes, with Garland hovering nearby.

“Swear on your life you’ll never use him,” Lee Gershwin said to Goldwyn, out of Sammy’s earshot.

“
Him?” Goldwyn said. “That monkey?”

The phone from the Goldwyn studios did not ring in Sammy Davis’s Beverly Hills office. Goldwyn wanted Cab Calloway—who had starred as Sportin’ Life on its road tour—for his movie. Sammy was worried, but fiercely determined. “Sammy knows one thing,” says Jess Rand. “He wants to be Sportin’ Life. I was a Gershwin fanatic. I saw the original
Porgy and Bess
with Avon Long. I knew this [role] was Sammy.” The Morris agency began thinking of ways to get Goldwyn’s attention.