Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (15 page)

Mickey Rooney walked into the Grand Ballroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel at twelve o’clock sharp. Will nudged me and pointed to his watch. “Now that’s a pro for you.” I got a light-headed feeling when I saw him come in with that go-go-go walk, just like he did in the movies. He faced the company and said, “Hi, my name is Mickey Rooney!” Then he started shaking hands saying hello to us one by one.

I thought: it’s nice of him not to take the attitude that he’s a big star and everybody knows who he is; it was so warm for somebody that important and that famous to say, Hi, I’d like to meet you and this is my name. I liked it. Yeah. When I make it, when I can walk into a room and everybody will know who I am just by looking at me, then I’ll say, “Hi, my name is Sammy Davis, Jr….”

He was standing in front of me, his hand out.

“Hi, my name is Sammy Davis, Jr.” Oh, God! I tried to recover. “My name’s Sammy, Mr. Rooney.”

“The name is Mickey.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Damn! I
never
find anybody who’s shorter than me.
Everybody’s
taller. Even you. And you’re a midget!”

He ran through a single he was going to be doing, then the production numbers with the girls, songs from the MGM musicals he’d made with Judy Garland. I’d seen every one of them, I had the albums and I knew every sound by heart, but seeing him doing them in person, so close, without the help of music, lights, costumes, nothing but his talent … he was incredible. The entire cast stood up to applaud him. After rehearsal he told Mr. Stefel, “I want Sam to work with me in the act.” He turned to me, “What can you do besides the dancing?”

“I play drums, a little trumpet, I do some impressions….”

“You’re kidding! Who do you do?”

“Well, I’ve been doing Danny Kaye. The ‘Melody in 4F’ thing.”

Sam Stefel cut in, “
You’ll
do all the impressions, Mickey. They were hired to dance.”

“Sam, what are you bitching about? Let the kid do it.”

Stefel was firm. “We don’t need it. We bought a dance act and we want a dance act. You’ll do all the impressions and that’s final.”

On opening night, Mickey came to our dressing room and motioned for me to come out in the hall. “Look, Sam, about that Danny Kaye impression, at least sneak it in tonight till we can make it a regular thing. Do it over your dance for the first show when the critics are there so they’ll get to see it.” He ducked down the stairs before I could thank him.

I told my father and Will about it. “My God, what a generous, thoughtful thing.”

The curtain went up on the big opening production number: twenty Roxyettes, hands on each other’s hips like a train, the classic number they’d done at the Roxy, with tail lights hanging from each of their behinds. Will went on dressed as a porter, and I came out swinging a lantern, shouting, “Train leaving on Track 29, All aboarddd!!!” It was a six-minute scene, and the next spot on the bill was our dance number.

The tempo of the first notes of our music was a fast and furious rat-a-tat machine gun speed, and we never slowed down for the ten
minutes we were on. And in the middle of it, I was doing Danny Kaye’s git-gat-gattle better than I’d ever done it. We worked so desperately that it was like our feet never touched the ground until we were in the wings. We went back for our bow and were rushing off when Mickey walked on. He was the first man I ever saw walk onto a stage without being introduced. There was no announcer doing a “well, folks, here he is … Mickey Rooney!” When they saw him, the applause doubled but he didn’t acknowledge it, as though it were all for us. He called me back and I did a little step with him. He was pointing me up, showing his fans that he liked me so that automatically they’d like me, too.

I was going to bed at four in the morning when the landlord pounded on my door. He was half-asleep and burning mad. “There’s a damned fool on the phone who keeps saying he’s Mickey Rooney. I hung up on him twice but he keeps calling back. Now you get down there and tell him if he calls again….”

Mickey was tremendously excited. He had the reviews and he read them to me, not what they said about him, he skipped over that and read only what they’d written about us. “The best dance act to hit Boston in years.” “Berry Brothers, Nicholas Brothers better forget it!” “The kid in the middle is funny!”

I stood in the wings watching every show Mickey did, soaking up his tremendous knowledge of the business, totally awestruck by his talent. He was the multi-talented guy who had to do everything: sing, dance, comedy, impressions, drums, trumpet, everything! And he did them all well. Nor could anybody out-act Mickey when he wanted to act. He’d do a vignette and make the people cry or laugh as he chose. Show after show I watched him devastate audiences with his talent and his energy. Mickey was the performer I admired more than any in the world.

Between shows we played gin and there was always a record player going. He had a wire recorder and we ad-libbed all kinds of bits into it, and wrote songs, including an entire score for a musical.

Mickey was upstairs in his dressing room and I was downstairs when I heard him shout: “Sam! Get your tail the hell up here!”

I made the stairs three at a time. “What’s the matter, Mickey, what’s wrong.”

He was leaning against the wall. “Tell me something, are you going to play a little gin or not?” He dealt the cards. “I cleared it with Sam for you to do more of the impressions. Do about four
minutes of them.” He smiled. “And slip in a little trumpet when you do Louis Armstrong.”

He kept encouraging me to build up our act and he made it possible by clearing more and more time for me onstage.

As we left the theater one night he looked at the sign out front, “The Mickey Rooney Show” with pictures of him in different poses, and told Sam Stefel, “I want some of those pictures out. Instead of them, put The Will Mastin Trio, starring Sammy Davis, Jr.’ ”

He was taking space away from himself to make room for me. I tried to thank him but he cut me off. “Let’s not get sickening about this.”

On Christmas Eve we were playing Cleveland, and Mickey took over a banquet room and threw a party for the troupe. We all brought gifts, mostly gags and corny toys, and the party was really moving when a voice shouting “Hey!” cut through the laughter. A guy, obviously from another party in the hotel, wearing a pointed party hat with a string under his chin, staggered into the room, and leaning against a chair with one hand, holding a glass in the other, stared at me, my father and Will. “What the hell’s goin’ on here with niggers and white women?”

Mickey was out of his chair, sailing across the room and on top of the guy, slugging him. It took four of us to pull him off. He sat down, depressed.

The presents hadn’t been given out yet but he said, “Okay, folks, that’s it. The party’s over.”

As they said good night to Mickey, they looked at me consolingly, but it was impossible for them to understand the worst of it, the humiliation of knowing that because of me everybody’s Christmas had been ruined.

We were going into our last month of the tour when Mickey told me, “We’ve got to close for a month or so. MGM wants me to do another Andy Hardy thing. But when that’s finished I’m going to do a script called
Killer McCoy
. It’s a remake of the old Robert Taylor picture
The Crowd Roars
and I want you as the fighter. I think you could play the hell out of it. I’ll talk to them as soon as I get out there.”

Our trio played two weeks in Reno. Mr. Silber and his son Arthur came out and I spent every spare minute with Art working out fake fights, stunt-man style, with grunts, groans and falling over tables, all the things I’d have to know for the picture.

When we picked up the tour Mickey had no news on the picture yet. We were back in our routine of song writing, playing gin between shows, and me standing in the wings at every performance. There were so many tangible things I could get from watching Mickey work: the use of a topical joke, using the people in the show for various effects, the little “class” touches that he had. But his greatest power was his ability to “touch” the audience. When Mickey was onstage, he might have been pulling levers labeled “Cry!” and “Laugh!” He could work the audience like clay, molding them the way he wanted them. But it wasn’t only because he’s a fine actor, there was something more, and night after night I tried to understand it.

I asked my father, “How do you
touch
an audience?”

He said, “Well, I been in this business all my life and there’s only one way. You go out there and you do your show the best you can and if you’re good you’ll touch ‘em and if you’re bad they’ll know it.”

Will didn’t understand either. They tried to give me answers but they were as much as saying, “A bird flies by flapping his wings.” But how does he flap them that makes it different than when I flap my arms? How come I don’t fly, too? How did Mickey get inside of every person who watched him so that he wasn’t just another performer to them? What was it about him that made them open up and care so much?

We were at the Loew’s State in New York, our last stop on the tour, and Mickey and I were playing gin in his dressing room. “Sam, about the picture. I heard from them last night. It’s out.” I kept shuffling the cards, trying not to react and make it tougher for him. He said, “I could give you a lot of crap about it, but honest-open MGM doesn’t want to use you. They fought it tooth and nail. They don’t know you and they don’t know if you can act.” He looked at me with sadness. “I don’t think they want a colored fellow. They told me, ‘Use a Mexican kid, it’s less problems.’ ”

I walked uptown after our last show that night. Knowing Mickey I could imagine how he’d fought for me with his position as he had with his fists but still, someone who’d never met me, never seen me, could throw the whole dream down the drain by saying, “Use a Mexican kid. It’s less problems.” It wasn’t “How good is he?” There was no “Let him do a screen test.” Just plain, cold “No. He’s a problem.”

I went into the bedroom, closed the door and sat down on the bed, rubbing the skin on my hand, staring, wondering.

Before I was aware that I was on my feet I’d jumped up and hit the wall with all my strength. My fist crashed through the thin plaster between rooms. When I took it out I could see Mama through the hole I’d made. She was looking at the wall, shaking her head helplessly, not knowing what was wrong, nor asking.

The last curtain had fallen. Mickey and I walked downstairs together and said good-bye on the street outside the stage entrance. I watched him walking toward the limousine that was waiting for him. At the car door he hesitated, then turned and came back. “Listen, Sam—about that lousy deal on the picture. I tried everything. You know that, don’t you? A few years ago it couldn’t have happened, but I’m not too well-entrenched any more. The truth is the Hardy picture isn’t doing so well. The day of the series pictures like
Kildare
and
Hardy
—it’s over. I’m not King of the Box Office any more. Andy Hardy’s dead.” He nodded grimly. “I made the mistake of going into the army. I guess the times have passed me by.”

“Aw, come on, Mick, you’re still the most talented man in the world.”

“Talent isn’t enough.” He was silent for a moment, then he shrugged, put out his hand again and smiled. “So long, buddy. What the hell. Maybe one day we’ll get our innings.”

We were booked right into the Strand Theater on Broadway with Billie Holliday and Count Basie. Will came up to Mama’s the day before the opening. “I just stopped by the theater and they said we gotta cut down to twelve minutes.”

I slammed my fork onto the table. “The hell with that! Let someone else cut their act. We’re doing twenty minutes.”

“Now, Sammy, don’t talk foolish. We’re only the opening act. We can’t get away with trying to run the whole show….”

“Will’s right, Poppa. We gotta go out there and give ‘em twelve minutes like they want and not look for no trouble.”

“Trouble? I just want to be seen.”

“Who’ll see us if we get canceled after the first show, Sammy?”

“Nobody’ll cancel us if we’re good enough.”

We did twenty minutes. The audience was still applauding. Billie Holliday was waiting to follow us and I was embarrassed to face her, but she smiled and took my arm. “Come on, little man, you’d better carry me on or they’ll never calm down.”

One look at the house manager’s face and I knew Will had been right, and now, as the axe was about to fall, I couldn’t believe my own nerve.

“Where the hell do you guys get off disobeying my orders? What kind of a honky-tonk do you think this is?”

Will stepped forward. “We’re sorry. We really are. We’ll cut it right down to twelve minutes….”

“Well, you’re damned good’n lucky you went over so big. Keep the act as is and we’ll cut eight minutes somewhere else.”

I felt like an animal, fit and ready for the jungle, more powerful, more able to meet the world than I’d ever felt in my life. Will mopped his brow like “phew” and my father fell into a chair and sighed, “We sure got lucky that time.” I was reeling drunk from the success of it. I felt like I was a man and they were kids. “That wasn’t luck! Let me tell you something, Dad, Will. This is how it’s gonna be for us from now on. We’re gonna take what we want. We can be the dirtiest bastards in the world as long as we’ve got what that audience wants.”

“Wait a minute, Sammy …”

“Wait nothing. What we just saw is how life is. If you ‘make it’ you can have anything! But if you don’t you can be the nicest guy in the world and they won’t book you to play the men’s room at intermission. Well, I’m gonna make it. And when I do what’ll you bet they’ll like me? They’ll like me even if they hate my guts!”

Neither of them said another word. They were looking at me as though seeing me for the first time. I think I was seeing myself for the first time. And I liked it. I liked not “taking it” and I liked winning.

We left the Strand on an express train and rode it right into the yards. After weeks of waiting around for poverty we wound up in Boston at a sailor haven called The Silver Dollar Bar for $110 a week. We floundered around New England making a round trip back to the world of two-dollar hotel rooms and deadly dull dates which I’d really believed we’d seen for the last time, as far away from “New York” as we’d ever been.