In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (60 page)

Finally, convinced there was little to lose, Sammy Davis went to the William Morris office in New York City, along with Elkins and Clifford Odets, to sign the contracts. He was now officially returning to Broadway for the 1964 season. There was a party at Sardi’s to celebrate the announcement. Inside the restaurant, amid the clink of champagne glasses, Sammy and Hilly donned boxing gloves. They posed as if each were getting ready to square off. May stood in the middle, in a black sleeveless dress, separating the two. She looked winsome, and loomed taller than both men. Cameras clicked away. “Sammy Davis Jr. As Golden Boy,” the cake made up for the occasion announced.

Hilly had circled the globe trying to make
Golden Boy
a reality. He never once complained of exhaustion. It took him two years to make the deal, but he’d done it.

It was Hilly, more than Sammy, who could sniff the political winds, the changing racial climate in America. When he thought of this
Golden Boy
, Hilly Elkins dreamed of producing something unforgettable.

May had been, from the beginning of the marriage, quite eager to start a family, and in 1961 gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter they named Tracey. She was a beautiful child, cinnamon-colored (May and Sammy had often joked about having “little brown babies”) and had a Bobbsey hairdo. The idea of children intrigued Sammy, but shortly after Tracey’s birth, he hit the road again. May had a nanny, Lessie Jackson, but still, raising the child alone was hard. Sammy implored her to come join him in Philadelphia, in London, in Miami, in Chicago—wherever he happened to be! He himself had been a child on the road! But May would have none of it. She had no intention of ferrying her daughter around the country; children were susceptible to colds and fevers when traveling; children needed a home. When she constantly reminded Sammy of their daughter’s tender age, Sammy seemed befuddled. When he was actually at home, he would allow photographers to snap pictures of him, May, and Tracey, but then he’d be gone again, hearing that siren—Sammy! Sammy! He loved his daughter, and saw proof of it in the bundle of toys he
purchased for her from F. A. O. Schwarz. But toys were toys, and a father was a father. May was bewildered as well as crestfallen, and confided to Shirley Rhodes that she wished Sammy were home more so he could see his daughter grow.

Two years after Tracey’s birth, May decided she wanted her daughter to have a brother. She told Sammy, in no uncertain terms, that she planned to adopt, and when he came off the road, she had already arranged the adoption. Rudy Duff, the new valet Shirley had hired for Sammy—Duff had been working in the local post office and suddenly found himself behind the wheel of Sammy’s Rolls!—drove Sammy and May to the courthouse in Los Angeles for the paperwork. “When I went to the courthouse with them to adopt Mark,” recalls Duff, “I was told to stay outside. They went in a private office.” The new child was also interracial. A year later, liking the noise and feel of a family, May decided to add to it again and adopted another interracial boy, whom they named Jeff—after Jeff Chandler. The adoptions had been so sudden that it was obvious to Sammy that May was steering the domestic ship of their lives. With or without Sammy, she aimed to fill a house with children. Sammy watched it all unfold like a wide-eyed child himself. Now the Davises had three children. At times Sammy eyed them as if he were watching a movie screen—with glee and surprise. In reality, they seemed to puzzle him. He once ventured out to a Little League game to watch Tracey play softball. He picked up a ball to throw with her before the game’s start. Sy Marsh had accompanied him. Marsh felt Sammy was tossing the ball strangely, almost spastically. Then he suddenly realized something: Sammy didn’t play softball as a child. He could barely toss the thing with any form at all. Sy felt embarrassed for Sammy. “I said, ‘Save your energy. Let me do it.’ If you don’t think that tore his heart out!”

To raise children, one had to fasten oneself down at times. Sammy’s sister, Ramona, had known the curse of the vaudevillian. Now Sammy’s own children would.

Sammy came east—the staff trailing—and anchored himself in a rented brownstone on Ninety-third Street. Tracey and Mark were enrolled in the tony and private Dalton School. Jeff was not yet school-age. May was happier than ever to be seeing her husband every night.

Finally, pages arrived from Odets, but they were incomplete pieces. Hilly Elkins couldn’t mount a play with bits and pieces of dialogue and sketchy scenes. Odets swore he was coming east, that he had more material to show. But weeks came and went, and still no Odets. Elkins began to harangue the great playwright. Odets gently reminded Elkins of his hesitancy to fly. Elkins’s voice would rise through telephone wires; he had money on the line; he had
Sammy Davis lined up, a theater booked, rehearsals to begin! Odets finally boarded a plane and flew to New York.

They tracked Sammy down at the Latin Casino in Philadelphia, where he was appearing onstage. Sammy arranged for everyone to have a table right up front, and he was proud to introduce them to the audience. Strouse and Adams and Elkins watched Odets watching Sammy. It was clear to them that the playwright was bowled over, that he could suddenly see his Joe Bonaparte in the body of Sammy Davis, Jr. After Sammy’s performance, Odets—towering over tables—rushed over to Sammy. “
I’m going to write this in your
mouth,”
he proclaimed. His finger was poking Sammy’s scrawny chest. What Odets had just told Sammy meant simply that he had every intention of jazzing the play up, giving it a new texture and language that would fit Sammy Davis, Jr. And from that moment on, Odets was energized. He had seen Sammy live; now he could see his play as a musical. Sammy hugged Odets—hugged the man so that the promise would come true, hugged the man so he would be true to his word, hugged the legendary playwright for coming. They shared drinks. Then they talked into the night. Then they all went their own ways, the dream alive and real now.

Hilly Elkins still had no leading lady. The role was widely coveted. But it was Odets who kept prolonging the audition process because his rewrites were not coming in.

Lee Grant was interested. So were Tuesday Weld and Lee Remick. They were all beautiful. They were all ingenues. It was Strouse who suggested Paula Wayne come in to audition. Strouse had first seen Wayne on Broadway in
Best Foot Forward
. Wayne was, like many a struggling actress, looking for her breakout role. She made extra money dubbing Italian movies into English. She lived in a small apartment on West End Avenue. Another struggling actress by the name of Liza Minnelli was her roommate. Liza’s mother, Judy Garland, hadn’t paid her daughter’s rent at the Barbizon, so Liza had to hustle up a place to stay. She was appearing in a play with Wayne, who offered her housing. Theater folk liked Wayne’s energy. Vincent Sardi, owner of Sardi’s restaurant, would feed her when she was hungry.

“They brought in every star they could think of,” Wayne would recall about her audition. “I never dreamt I’d get that part. It was almost too big to contemplate.”

Wayne was superstitious. Every time she auditioned, she wore the same clothing. One by one, actresses were eliminated. The process could be gut-wrenching. Again and again, Wayne—who had also sung in nightclubs—was called back. “Then came the great day I was going to sing for Sammy Davis. This day, there was nobody but me. I can feel it like it just happened. I got up on the stage, standing in the middle of the Majestic Theatre. And Sammy
Davis starts walking toward me. My throat closed. I started to cry. I ran out of the theater. I ran into Sardi’s. I was crying my heart out.”

The sight of Sammy had unnerved her, and she suffered a panic attack. Those in the theater—Sammy, Hilly, others—froze. The stage manager gave chase.

“I was overwhelmed. I’m from Oklahoma. I had never met a great star.”

The maître d’ on duty at Sardi’s tried calming her down. The stage manager went back and told Sammy she was at Sardi’s. And then there he was, the great star, the slicked black hair, the tiny giant. Show business was a killer, and at such times, he could be so understanding, so touching.

“He said, ‘What happened, hon?’ He sat there with me, ten to fifteen minutes. Everyone was sitting in that theater, waiting to see if Ms. Wayne would calm down. Sammy held my hand. Then he said, ‘You ready to sing?’ ”

Paula Wayne, led by Sammy Davis, Jr., walked back across the street, into the theater, up on the stage, and started singing. She wowed them all.

After auditioning 236 hopefuls, Sammy and Hilly had finally found their leading lady.

“I thought to myself,” Wayne would recall, “I’ve got the part of the decade.”

Who didn’t notice, who couldn’t see, who dared mention it, lest it seem a little impolite, that Paula Wayne was as beautiful—and as blond—as May Britt herself?

There was another interesting role to be cast in
Golden Boy
, that of a female Negro dancer who ultimately catches the eye of the Sammy character, the second female lead. Sammy thought of Frances Davis, who, before her marriage to the brilliant jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, had been Frances Taylor and had filmed Sammy’s long-ago 1954 television pilot alongside him. Miles, aside from being complex and moody, was dangerously controlling. Sammy went to Philadelphia and told Miles he thought Frances would be wonderful in
Golden Boy
; nodding, Miles listened behind his dark glasses. Sammy kept talking and Miles kept listening—in silence. “Miles didn’t give him an answer then,” says Frances Davis. “We were leaving the next day. Miles still didn’t answer. Normally, we would leave around noon. We left at nine the next morning. That was the answer. I was heartbroken again.”

Hilly selected Peter Coe, an Englishman, to direct the play. Coe had won raves for his direction of the Broadway musical
Oliver!
The rising young Harlem-born comedian Godfrey Cambridge was cast in the featured role of Sammy’s brother. Cambridge received a Tony nomination in 1961 for appearing in Ossie Davis’s
Purlie Victorious
, a farcical look at southern life on a plantation that had skirted nervously around the issue of sex. The
New York Mirror
described it as “
burlesque without the strippers.”

Sammy went down to Puerto Rico. He sat in a nightclub and watched his
friend Billy Daniels, the singer, perform. Of course he couldn’t just watch. He hopped up on the stage, did a number on the drums, a cigarette in his mouth, the elegant Daniels waving his hands like bird wings. Daniels, renowned for his version of “Black Magic,” had never played Broadway. Sammy was trying to convince him to make his debut in
Golden Boy
, playing the role of Eddie Satin, the smooth and mysterious boxing promoter. (It was clear that Sammy, as much as Hilly, was putting this production together.) Daniels joined the production.

The promised rewrites were still not coming fast enough, and Hilly grew angry. Odets would sit and chat for hours about wine, offering long discourses, then veer off into chatter about Hollywood, and Hilly would wait him out, until finally he realized something—Odets was afraid. Even the lyricist Lee Adams could feel it. “Odets was aware that making a musical was a different animal than a play,” says Adams. “His biggest problem was writing concisely. He’d do a scene of fifteen fine pages. We’d say, ‘Cliff, we need three pages.’ He’d say, ‘Oh my.’ ”

The great playwright of the 1930s, the onetime boy wonder, was wracked with fear—of New York City, the critics, his play. Would
Golden Boy
still stand up? The leading man was no longer white and Italian, but a Negro. There would be interracial themes to explore. And there was the real-life drama of Negroes, from Harlem to Mississippi, going on the march for their rights and freedom. In one of the early meetings, Sammy had said that race wouldn’t matter in the play. He drew strange stares. Hilly Elkins knew, better than anyone, that a play about black and white without backbone would surely be attacked. Hilly demanded rewrites from Odets now on a daily basis.

Inside the rehearsal hall, there was a feverish energy. Cigarette smoke was everywhere. Sammy flitted about, sometimes in a tweed suit jacket with a corncob pipe poking from the breast pocket. Many thought it was a strange outfit, and they only stared harder as he made his way to the dressing room. He was getting carried away with his British affectations and could not help himself. The young Strouse, who favored argyle sweaters, tapped his fingers, hummed, worked on the music. Some days May silently watched rehearsals in the dark, Sammy’s assistants checking on her, keeping her comfortable. Hilly sat like a general struggling with battle plans for war. He cursed; he smoked; he dreamed of opening night; he cursed some more. Odets had come out of the sunny climes of Beverly Hills for this—a kinetic leading man whom he wasn’t sure he could write well enough for; a producer barking in his ear; and race riots brewing across America as a backdrop to his play.

But they were professionals, and they forged on. From the beginning, Sammy and Hilly let it be known they wanted to make the musical look—and feel—as authentic as possible. There were weekends when Strouse, Adams, Sammy, and Coe would check out the boxing matches at Madison Square Garden. They wanted Sammy to move like a pro in the ring onstage.