In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (64 page)

There are more fight scenes, and they are staged with such verve and skill. Joe Wellington looks to be getting pummeled one instant, then rallying with a ferocious round of punches the next. He falls, he rises, he falls, he rises.

The fight game is starting to bewilder Joe. He has no idea where it is leading, or where he is going with it. Lorna has become a friend he feels he can talk to.

She confesses that she is not in love with Tom. She has, in fact, fallen for Joe, and she too feels trapped. She wonders, deep inside, if her white skin will allow her to love Joe. She becomes emotional. “
Joe, take me somewhere, take me somewhere—oh my God, I’ll fall apart if you don’t hold me,” she pleads.

Joe wants her. He knows he can’t have her. Why, she is his manager’s lady. And she is white. Joe is spinning.

Eddie, the hustler, keeps making promises to Joe—money and more money, TV sets, diamonds. Joe leaves Tom. Now he’ll have both Eddie’s promises and Lorna, his former manager’s girl. Now he will hop over the whole complex racial divide because he has seen the way to his heart. Boxing won’t give him love; Lorna will.

Tom finds out about Lorna’s expressed love for Joe. He is furious, calls Joe brutal names. Lorna cries.

Time passes, and when it does, Lorna is back, telling Joe she has married Tom after all. Joe is crestfallen.

There is soon the announcement of the big fight, the biggest fight of Joe’s career, the fight Eddie has promised. He will be fighting Pepe Lopez—“
the pride of Puerto Rico.”

The big fight scene is at Madison Square Garden. The fight is under way. Joe is getting beaten, badly, punch after punch, the head, the midsection, the orchestra accentuating the punches, the theatergoers cupping their mouths. Then he rallies, and he throws fiery punch after fiery punch, and there is the exalted feeling he is punching for himself, and for Harlem, and for the right to love the white woman that he has lost. He is punching and bleeding and punching until finally the pride of Puerto Rico is down, and quiet, and his eyes are closed and Joe Wellington is jumping up and down and running from corner to corner. A knockout. A rare knockout in the career of Joe Wellington, always more artist in the ring than knockout puncher.

His manager and boxing corner follow him into the dressing room; fans are trailing like victorious soldiers. In his room Joe is quickly surrounded: photographers, reporters, the fans, flashbulbs popping. “
I’m going to go outside my weight and beat up the whole damn world!” Joe yells with mirth and venom. Lorna is gone, and the world is a mess, but he has glory now. Finally, a knockout. Then a boxing official comes into the dressing room. He tells Joe that Lopez is still out, and Joe says of course he’s still out. There are snickers and snickers.

“
I mean he’s dead,” the official says.

There is stunned silence. Nothing can fill the hole that the silence has dropped into. Joe has killed a fighter. Eddie Satin reels, then quickly tells the fighter it is not his fault, but faces are drawn. The horrible news spreads. The punch from Joe Wellington has killed Pepe Lopez. Other photographers and reporters rush in; Eddie yells them out. Lorna makes it through. She wants to console Joe. She is on her knees, in blouse and sweater and skirt and high heels, telling him it is not his fault, it was just a terrible accident. And Joe is mumbling, prancing the room, mumbling, staring, charging at one wall, then another.

“
Oh, Lorna,” he finally says, tears in his voice, “why couldn’t you love me right.”

In the next scene, there is, at first, only the wail of police sirens. There has been a one-car crash. There are no survivors. Joe Wellington was driving. Joe has committed suicide from behind the wheel. He has died for his boxing, and he has died for his Lorna. He has died for Harlem and all the things he could not get his hands on in life. Joe’s father stands with his other son. And there is Lorna, with them, all remembering Joe. Joe’s brother tells his father they’ll take Joe home. Home, says the father, is exactly where Joe belongs.

“
Oh my God,” Lorna says, “he belonged anywhere—anywhere a human being could—walk.”

And they stroll downstage, the three of them, two Negroes and a white woman, into the darkness, making Joe even bigger in death than he was in life, allowing the audience to feel some of the racial fears that have haunted a country.

The lights dim into darkness.

There is applause, and it is thunderous, and it goes on and on. There is something akin to currents of electricity shooting into and out of the audience. The curtain calls begin.

First, the dancers—really just kids, but on Broadway now—and they are beaming. Hell, Johnny Brown, up from understudy to replace Godfrey Cambridge, went to school right down the street, at the New York High School for Performing Arts. And here he stands, onstage, with family in the audience. Then the old pros come out—Kenneth Tobey and Ted Beniades. Charles Welch and Roy Glenn. They’re stage vets with Hollywood experience behind them. Jamie Rogers, who played Pepe Lopez, the pride of Puerto Rico, glides out. Then Lola Falana, in her gold pants, a blazing look in her eyes: she’ll never be just a gypsy again. The applause keeps coming. Billy Daniels floats out, the veteran nightclub performer making his Broadway debut, having given a performance as wicked and hard as it was meant to be. “It’s
real
,” Daniels had told Gibson at one of the final previews. He was trying to tell William Gibson that Negroes would not be ashamed; that Harlem could identify with this
Golden Boy
. There is Paula Wayne. She never knew how close she came to losing the role. But she has performed more than ably; the bigots hurling the insults at her during the out-of-town tryouts never forced her to quit. There is only one performer left. And the other actors spread, because here he comes, bouncy, cat-quick, the star, Joe Wellington, Sammy Davis, Jr., and everyone rises, and he looks around the Majestic, and even if he has been doing this all his life, even if this is the only life he truly knows, it still gives him chills, the joy he can bring from a stage, the way it lifts him up.

“I am what I am,” Joe Wellington the boxer had said.

The man standing before them—elfin, fool, Uncle Tom, genius, Negro, brilliant, nigger, Jew; twelve guys, in fact, to William Gibson—is what he is: a star. Because of his one eye, he has to swivel his neck hard right to left to bring the whole audience into view.

Hilly is beaming, and so too are William Gibson and Charles Strouse and Lee Adams. Negro hands touching white hands onstage—and in the audience. Eyes are becoming moist. Maybe there were no more places that taught kids how to bow onstage. But Sammy Davis, Jr., knows how to bow. He can bow like an English gentleman. And he does. The cast can’t take their eyes off him. Paula Wayne now loves him more than she ever imagined she could. Lola long ago told herself he was the reason she got into show business. Johnny Brown loves him and Billy Daniels loves him. May, his wife, sitting in the audience, loves him. He is nothing but beautiful, bowing and bowing. Maybe more than the mere wonderful execution of a play is swirling around everyone, onstage and off. Maybe it has something to do with what is going on outside the theater, across America, in the ghettos, in Harlem. There are woes, racial woes. Just months before the
Golden Boy
opening, there were riots in Harlem: a white policeman had shot a Negro youth. Nearly five hundred were arrested. There are civil rights workers who have been murdered, who are as dead as Joe Wellington is dead, down in Mississippi, in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana. America is not at peace. And maybe this—this night, theatrical as it is—is something of an antidote.

Did they really doubt that he’d give them his best, as he had always done? Arthur Penn, who had floor-managed some of those early Eddie Cantor shows, now was seeing the same Sammy he had seen back then: inventive, thrilling, surprising. Arthur Penn is beaming. They are roaring now in their seats.
Golden Boy
smells like a hit. Hilly knows it. The motherfucker smells like a hit.

They wait—friends, autograph-seekers, family—outside his dressing room. The line stretches and stretches. They wait and they cry. They cry for themselves and for America. They whisper his name as they cry. Sammy. Oh Sammy. His mother, Elvera, is moving like a shark around the theater. She is still a stranger to him. But success and victory soften things—at least for a while they do. Inside the dressing room, they come, and he can’t stop hugging the staff; and Hilly, especially Hilly, because it was Hilly who came to London, and it was Hilly who—in Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit—had taken the racial insults so personally. Sammy wants to see everybody. He hands out gifts to cast and crew: jeweled radios shaped like pianos. (Hilly has no intention of being outdone by Sammy: he gives everyone silver Tiffany key rings.) May is smiling gloriously and nearly wordless. May, the white lady married to the Negro who had died in the play for his love of a white woman. Maybe it is just too much for her to digest, to take in.

William Gibson had seen his allegory long before the others. “In the play,” he would recall, “if you’re going to kill the guy by suicide, it’s because love has failed him. White failed black.”

Then they’re all out the door into the limos heading to Danny’s Hideaway for the after-party. They want to see the reviews. They can’t wait for the
Times
to hit the streets, and the
Herald Tribune
. They pour into Danny’s, stars and stars. Robert Mitchum is there. So is Shirley Jones. The showgirls are dressed divinely. Danny is Danny Stradella: he loves Sammy too. For so long Sammy had been bringing business to his restaurant. Danny could sense this was a special night. The corks kept popping. “They took the place apart,” he would recall. Charles Strouse can’t wait for the reviews; he is too antsy. Then he got some news. “Harold Arlen, the songwriter, called me and said the first reviews were terrific.” The first reviews were the TV reviews. But television is television, its own transparent medium. Everyone is waiting for the newspapers. They start coming. “
The theatrical form of
Golden Boy
as a musical is as crisp as a left jab and as jolting as a right uppercut,” writes Howard Taubman in the
Times
. The critics are not bashful about letting their fight metaphors fly. The
Times
man goes on to praise Davis’s acting. “For Mr. Davis is a lot more than a nightclub performer. He can act as well as sing and dance.” They wanted Sammy Davis the actor, so he gave them Sammy Davis the actor. Hours pass. More reviews; more shrieks of joy; more champagne. “We read the reviews that night at Sardi’s, and Sammy cried and cried,” remembers his friend Amy Greene. She watched and listened as Hilly read some reviews aloud. Now Hilly was all peacock. “May was sitting next to Sammy,” remembers Greene, “glowing like a white snow maiden.”

The night folded around them all. The boxer Joe Wellington had referred to all the lights twinkling above New York City as “diamonds in the air.”

A day later New York columnist Dick Schaap would write a column, a retrospective look at what had taken place: “Death Watch with the Golden Boy,” the column is titled. It is about the disappointment of some of those who had been rooting for
Golden Boy
to fail. And how hurt they were now. “
The death watch is a standard Broadway ritual, and it must have been designed to bring out vultures,” Schaap wrote. “The vultures had a chance for a big kill this time.” Schaap went on to theorize that that was perhaps why Sinatra, or Dean Martin, or Peter Lawford, or Joey Bishop—the Rat Pack—hadn’t shown up: they imagined a disaster; they heard about the out-of-town reviews; they didn’t want to throw failure in Sammy’s face. Instead, it all had come out another way. “There are some people,” Schaap wrote in a memorable turn of phrase as he finished off the column, “who can not stand the sight of no blood.”

•     •     •

The phones were ringing. Ticket orders were escalating. Hilly looked brilliant now. The sellout performances were stacking up. He had a hit. And he also had Sammy under contract for two years, which was a coup. “You had to take Sammy whenever you could get him, because you might not be able to get him for another twenty years,” Gibson said. Hilly ordered more publicity pictures, more billboards. He had to order a replacement billboard for the picture of Sammy and Paula embracing in jubilant laughter that was behind glass in front of the Majestic, though: someone had riddled it with bullets. The bigots. Hilly cursed, had the picture removed and replaced. More pictures and more radio spots and more photo layouts, whatever it took to keep the fever running high and higher. Someone sent human feces in the mail to Sammy. Hilly couldn’t bear to tell him, so he didn’t.

May was happy. At least many thought so. Sammy was her life now. She had let one dream die—her film career—to make a family. No one blamed her. Hollywood forgot her.

Sammy walks New York City now like a king. The diamonds in the air are everywhere, and they are shining upon him.

Every night, backstage, there were stars. Sinatra finally came. He had to; the buzz was too magnificent to stay away. Martin Luther King, Jr., came. A song in the show—“No More”—had caught his attention, and he told Charles Strouse how much he liked it. No more agony; no more second-class citizenship; no more sitting in the back of the bus: you were free to make any number of metaphorical allusions to the song. “Dr. King said to me that was his favorite song,” recalls Strouse. Dancer Sally Neal had rushed to get a glimpse of King. “I remember following him out the door, watching him walk across the street.” Cassius Clay, not yet Muhammad Ali, came, shadowboxing, gliding, looking pretty and creamy and huge. Sammy shrank like a child. He couldn’t help himself: stars bedeviled him still, even though he too was a star. Jerry Lewis came. “He made it something it wasn’t,” Lewis felt of Sammy’s performance. Evelyn Cunningham, the writer for the
Pittsburgh Courier
, came. She had written something critical of Sammy, though not
Golden Boy
. It had upset Sammy. “Sammy, I don’t care what you think, I still love you,” she said on the night she came. And that was all he needed to hear to hug her, to forgive her. She was moved by the play. Burt and Jane Boyar came. They were doubly excited—for Sammy and his performance, and because his autobiography,
Yes I Can
, which they had ghostwritten, would be published soon.