In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (54 page)

All his movie dreams finally came true: He was but the gifted and rootless son of vaudevillians, and he had stolen the biggest, most beguiling Negro movie of the year.

The resemblance was so astonishing that one did not even have to look close. Sammy met her in Montreal, during an engagement at the Bellevue Casino in late 1959. Joan Stuart was a young Toronto native who had danced with Canada’s National Ballet Company, and made her living singing and dancing. With her blond hair and round face and gorgeousness, she was a dead ringer for Kim Novak. At long last, Sammy had finally found his blonde. They went out, gliding about wintry Toronto, the Canadian scribes close behind. He gave her jewels. In two weeks he was in love, she was in love. He could not see what Negroes were complaining about. His life was so sporting. He told Sam Sr. he had found true love. Big Sam beamed. White women. The prey of little Sammy’s heart—and one now captured. Big Sam called Elvera to tell her the news of their Sammy. “The phone rings,” Elvera remembers, and Sam Sr. went on to tell her that their Sammy was now engaged. Then he told her she was a white woman.

“Tell me what other kinds of girls he knows?” she said.

The engagement was announced on November 5. The plan was to marry the following March.

Word seeped out in Canada that young Joan Stuart’s parents were opposed to her marrying Sammy. “
It’s hard for them to appreciate that we want to marry after knowing each other only ten days,” she said, sounding wonderfully innocent. “
I love her very much and we want to get married,” Sammy insisted.

In America, the year 1959 ended with the young minister Martin Luther King, Jr., vowing to continue the fight for equal rights. “I can’t stop now. History has thrust something upon me from which I cannot turn away.”

Sammy was in Toronto in January 1960, going, for the first time, to meet the parents of his fiancée. The meeting did not go well. Joan Stuart’s father strongly objected to the marriage. He told the couple that he could not sanction an interracial union for his daughter. Stuart’s mother appeared flexible, having made the initial announcement a month earlier about the engagement.
At the time she was merely happy for her daughter, as any mother might be. But now she bent to the will of her husband and was forced to listen to her daughter’s lamentations.

A woman is a sometime thing, George Gershwin had written in his mind while waltzing along the waterfront of Charleston, South Carolina, researching the life of “the unfortunate race” that DuBose Heyward had portrayed.

Like a bantamweight Jack Johnson, Sammy would go on searching for his eternal blonde. And he hardly felt unfortunate knowing so.

Sammy left Toronto with a grin upon his face.

J
ust inside the door of the new decade—the 1960s—sat the ghost, and the ghost was waiting for Will Mastin and Sam Sr. Sammy could not take them any farther. The men who had ironed his clothing, wiped his nose, taught him so much about show business, dragged him back and forth across the country, and stood him right before the eyes of the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson himself, had become relics.

Sam Sr. had grown painfully tired. His heart genuinely was ailing; Rita, now his wife, wanted him home so she could care for him with her nurse’s training. In those last months on the road—the winter of 1959, the cold like knives on the flesh of old men—Sam Sr. was more determined than ever to leave the act. But if he left and Mastin stayed, it would look bizarre to audiences, as it had on previous occasions when Sam Sr. was sick and Mastin still went onstage. Mastin also now had a wife—Germaine Doust, a white Canadian: he had bested Sammy in the sweepstakes!—but she was back in Montreal. The old vaudevillian preferred the road—the glitter of his cuff links and diamond ring, the sheen on the lacquered stage floor, his name in lights, his backside against the seat of the Cadillac—to a soft bed beside his wife. He had recently been moving about with a studied pantomime motion. His ankles, knees, and shoulders hurt. His blood pressure was high; sometimes he was a man swimming in his own dizziness. Nevertheless, he wore his ailments like badges of honor. Damn them all—their stares and their asides. The two of them—Sammy and Sam Sr.—would listen to Will behind his hotel-room door. That tapping of the cane had started up again—tap tap tap. And that only made it harder for the two to say anything. There were still moments, to be sure, during those last months when there was something tender, and indomitable, about the two, Sam Sr. and Will Mastin, standing in yet another dressing room, the glow of the bulbed light touching them just so. But then another telling moment: Will reaching for Sammy’s shoulder—to swipe lint from the jacket, as was his habit—and Sammy gone, hardly feeling the swipe, hungry for the solo life now.

So one day, Will Mastin called a meeting. (That was another thing: Sammy had grown impatient with Will’s meetings.) Will said he thought it wise if he went back to the West Coast to manage the act from there. And Sam Sr. breathed a sigh of relief, and announced his retirement also. And just like that, the Will Mastin Trio was done. Twenty-three years of nonstop performance, radio, television, Broadway, nightclubs.

No one knew how many club dates they had played—thousands upon thousands. How many strange beds they had slept in; or how many police officers walking the beat in some small town they had had to explain themselves to.

Sam Sr. had his own home in the green hills of Hollywood, and that’s where he went. He drove a lovely soft-top Jaguar, and kept busy playing the horses all over—Del Mar, Santa Anita, across the border in Mexico. Sammy always heard the talk: that his father was a careless spender, that wads of cash just vanished from his pockets and palms like birds let loose skyward. But what could he do? Like father, like son. Big Sam was the old black man walking along the rows of freshly cut hedges in Beverly Hills, his pants creased beautifully, his shoes shined to a gleam, his hair swept back in little waves, his life a miracle. It had been a long journey from the fields of North Carolina.

Will Mastin realized—despite what the
Porgy and Bess
ad that trumpeted Sammy’s rave reviews said in the lower right-hand corner (“Under the Personal Management of Will Mastin”)—that he was no longer needed as manager. He retreated into himself. Now and then he could be seen walking alone up and down Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles—anything to keep his legs moving. He invested some money in real estate up in Fresno. He poked his head in and out of church on Sundays. And sometimes he came over to Sammy’s office. That was, in its own way, quite special. An office to go to. A place to sit and be remembered and let the mind wander. The great Bert Williams and the great Sam Lucas—the legendary minstrel performers—never had an office to go to. Before she died, Bessie Smith never had an office to go to. Neither did Billie Holiday. Generosity was part of Sammy’s signature; he kept his father on the payroll. Mastin’s contract didn’t run out until 1965. Now and then, when someone would come into the office and spot Mastin, and mention the act, having seen it one place or another, he’d rise, slowly, and do a little two-step. He looked old—and proud. But then, moments into the routine, he’d sheepishly lower his eyes, as if he suddenly realized how much the memories hurt.

As the 1960s dawned, Sammy was as happy, and as free, as any Negro in America could possibly hope to be. He never cried over lost love. He swam, instead, into the jaws of the sharks—there were already rumors of yet another white actress he had fallen in love with; he had outstanding debts to nightclub owners;
the IRS was coming after him and Sam Sr. for a $56,000 payment. But he could care less. Money wasn’t really money unless it was getting away from him. When he had to claw and hustle to get it back, to run from city to city, stage to stage, scratching and sweating to retrieve more of it, when he was threatened with penury, is when his adrenaline would start to rush. Only then would he realize the preciousness of money, the sharp and undeniable connection of it to his lifestyle. “He never had enough money,” recalls Bill Miller, the Riviera’s manager, who would front Sammy thousands of dollars over the years. “He was a terrible spendthrift.” Spending habits mattered little to Sammy. The deeper the water’s danger and depth, the better he swam. When he needed money, he could—and on short notice—make bucketfuls of the stuff.

So Sammy was smiling now.

His grandmother Rosa—the onetime servant herself—had servants of her own! Rosa still liked doing her own shopping, tugging on Rudy, the valet, getting him to drive her to the market out there on Central Avenue, where she’d carefully inspect the produce—only the best fruits and vegetables were good enough for her little Sammy.

Now, without his father or Will Mastin, the nightclub marquees said just one word:

Glittery little lightbulbs circling the marquee where his name appeared. Long lines of men and women—the men in fedoras and coats, the women in dresses and pearls—looking up at his name, then whispering about him the way they whispered about prizefighters. The lines were mostly always all white because, to many Negroes, those tickets to see Sammy were just too pricey.

Alone now, without the two old men who had bracketed him and danced beside him for so long, he performed like someone let loose from body restraints. He seemed to have more energy than ever. He was unstoppable.

He was rising like flames in the night.

Television producer Aaron Spelling wanted him for a General Electric drama in 1961. Sammy was playing at the Sands. Filming would take place during the day, early morning. His shows at the Sands sometimes didn’t end until the wee morning hours. There was no shuttle plane service, so he’d have to pull out of the drama. Only there was no way he’d pull out. His hunger precluded his doing such a thing.

“No one thought he could make it after the show,” remembers Warren
Cowan, the Sinatra publicity maven. But Sammy wanted the role badly, and he assured Spelling he’d be on the set every morning. He hired an ambulance and driver, and every night, the ambulance took him from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He slept in the ambulance. He never missed a day of filming. “I always thought that was brilliant,” says Cowan.

The road crew was all Sammy’s now. He was bending them to his will. Shirley and Rudy and Murphy no longer worked for Will and Sam Sr. They worked for him. They were not blood family, but they had made him their life. They were the ones who constructed the wall around him, the ones who put him to sleep at night, who closed the door gently. He was in the third decade of his life, and there were many nights when he still loved being tucked in. What did loyalty and love mean anyway, if your own mother had abandoned you? He had stood in a mental hospital in Connecticut—quiet, lovely, expensive—and said to his sister, Ramona, “Don’t let the hate kill you.” She had suffered a nervous breakdown; she wondered if their parents even cared for her. Sammy told her that she had to survive, as he had survived. Then he quietly paid the hospital bill and rushed back to the coast. Sometimes—even though there was still much of the child in him—he could sound so wise. Well, he had been on the road since childhood. He knew life was strange; there were people who had honest faces but cruel hearts. Shirley and Murphy and Rudy would protect him from the cruel hearts of others. He could not depend on the red blood of family. “I remember being in Atlantic City with Sammy,” recalls Cindy Bitterman. “Sammy said, ‘I have to go see my mother tomorrow, so round up the gang.’ I said, ‘What do you mean. Can’t you go see your mother by yourself?’ He said, ‘No, once you meet her, you’ll see why.’ Then he said, ‘And after five minutes or so, you have to say, “Okay, let’s go, Sammy, you’ve got a radio interview to do.” ‘”

So to survive and keep going he’d depend on the family who surrounded him now, rolling across the great and gift-giving American landscape with him. Pots and pans jangling on the bus, Shirley and George in love and on the road, Murphy drowning his own dreams of singing to be by Sammy’s side, the country flashing by them all like postcards. It was, in its own way, as lovely and gritty as vaudeville—but without the desperation.

Sometimes they found themselves flying, floating through the clouds. There were not many Negroes up that high. And Sammy would be cackling, hungry as ever to prove himself. He just couldn’t wait for the plane to land, to take the city below, the stage that awaited him.

Let the decade close. Sammy was happy. He had broken nightclub records. It mattered little to him that he had to slip through backdoors and side doors as he was playing those first-class clubs.

He had so much now: a cook and a valet and an administrative staff and
endless bookings. But there was something missing. He wanted a wife. The attempts at marriage had gone so wrong; diamond rings out the window. He wanted a real marriage, with love, unlike the farce with Loray White, and the hole in the wake of Joan Stuart. As the decade came to a close, as luck would have it, Sammy had a new lady. Like so many of the others, she was willowy, beautiful, and blond. She was May (pronounced “My”) Britt, a Swedish-born Hollywood actress. The romance had been quick, and already Sammy was swooning about the future. Marriage plans had been discussed. “
It won’t be a mammoth affair, I assure you,” he told some reporters while relaxing in his hotel suite in Windsor, Ontario, that summer, “but I’ve a lot of friends who I am sure will want to attend when I set the definite date.”

With the black-white wedding sure to unleash protests, and feeling he would need a more powerful figure to handle media relations, Sammy—with a nudge from Sinatra—coldly dropped Jess Rand. Theirs was a relationship fostered before the Will Mastin Trio saw its name in lights. Rand had not only worked for Sammy in press relations and publicity, but had helped guide the trio by plotting strategy as they moved back and forth across the country. Sammy hired Warren Cowan, the powerful Los Angeles public relations figure. Cowan had plenty of clients. His best known: Frank Sinatra. Rand never forgave the brutal dismissal by Sammy, and their relationship would never be mended.