Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (23 page)

I started going through my mail to get my mind off her. I opened
a manila envelope from NBC and took out a stack of letters and a note: “Dear Mr. Davis, Enclosed please find letters addressed to you in care of the Colgate Comedy Hour. We will forward any further viewer mail.”

I cleared the bed of everything but my fan mail, stretched out comfortably, lit a cigarette and ceremoniously opened the first letter. “Dear lousy nigger, keep your filthy paws off Eddie Cantor he may be a jew but at least he is white and dont come from africa where you should go back to I hope I hope I hope. I wont use that lousy stinking toothpaste no more for fear maybe the like of you has touched it. What is dirt like you doing on our good American earth anyway?” There was no signature.

I fell back on the pillow, soaking wet. How could someone who’d never met me hate me so much that he’d take the trouble to write this? Why?

I opened a few others. The same. I threw the letters in a corner. All I wanted to do was forget them and the bastards who wrote them. I was an idiot to let them bother me. The hell with them.

I turned the pages of a fan magazine trying to lose myself in the Hollywood Hills, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills, trying to imagine myself owning one of those beautiful homes with a swimming pool and a convertible parked in the driveway. I stopped at a picture of a girl stretched out on a diving board. The shape was unmistakable. The Sun Goddess. I should have known that anyone who looked like her could only be out here trying to get into the movies. I thought of the big hellos she’d given me in the lobby and her incredulous stare as the elevator door closed. I really
must
be out of my mind. I turned down
that?
For what? To stay in good with people who call me nigger?

I felt stupid. I hated myself for thinking I could stand in the middle of the road without getting hit by a truck. How did I wind up there, anyway? What the hell had happened to me since I got out of the army? I’m the guy who wasn’t going to let anybody tell me how to live. But they’d started telling me and I’d listened instead of spitting in their eyes the way I should have. I’d played it safe. I wanted to be a star, so I’d as much as made a deal: “You let me ‘make it’ and I’ll play the game.” But suddenly I had an 8 × 10 glossy of the guys I’d made the deal with, whose rules I was following. I could never satisfy the people I’d been trying to appease. How could I not offend them by what I do when my very existence was
offensive to them? There could be no end to it. Don’t be seen at the same tables with white people. Stay away from white women. Don’t touch Eddie Cantor. What next? I wanted to make it, but if that was the price, it was too high. If I’d just thought it out, I’d have known it couldn’t work. It was spelled out for me right in the Bible. “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul?” I’d sold my dignity. Worse still, I’d sold it to people who never believed I had any. And it was no less humiliating that I was the only one who knew what I had done.

I looked for her last name in the magazine. I could feel my hand getting moist on the phone while I waited for the operator to connect me with her room. What the hell was I going to say? She definitely must think I’m a lunatic by now …

“Hello?”

“Uh—hi! This is Sammy Davis, Jr….”

“Well,
hello
!”

“I didn’t think you’d be in your room!”

“Oh? Is that why you called?”

“Look, I know you must think I’m some sort of a nut, but—well, y’see, I was in a big hurry before …”

“I got that impression.”

“What I called about is, well—I thought it would be nice if …”

“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Sammy. We must have a very bad connection. I’m in 418, why don’t you stop by and tell me?”

I walked slowly down the hall toward her room. I stopped a few feet away to make sure the coast was clear. I could feel the skin on my face tightening. I knocked lightly. There was no answer. I knocked again, hard!

I heard her telling me, “The door is open.”

The guy at the Morris office said, “There’s been an avalanche of ‘em. To the station, to Cantor, the sponsor …” The bundles of letters covered his desk. I looked at one, addressed to Eddie Cantor: “Where do you get off wiping that little coon’s face with the same handkerchief you’d put on a good, clean, white, American face?”

“Well, I guess this finishes us with the Cantor show.”

The Morris guy said, “It’s a damned shame. But the sponsors don’t want bad public opinion. Even from bigots. They’ve warned
Cantor that if anything like this happens again they’ll take him off the air.”

“What about other shows?”

He shook his head, grimly sympathetic. “We might as well face the facts. These things don’t stay secret very long.”

There was nothing more to talk about. My father asked, “Y’want a little lunch, Poppa?”

“No, Dad. I don’t feel like anything. You and Massey go ahead.” I left them and took a cab downtown.

The driver was staring at me in his mirror. When he stopped at a light he turned around for a better look. “I
thought
I saw you on television.” He smiled, “You’re okay.”

“Thanks.” We were approaching a movie theater. “Let me out here, will you, please?”

When I got back to the hotel there were five phone messages from the Morris office. I used the booth in the lobby.

“We’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon. Where’ve you been?”

“I don’t know. I went to a movie. What’s wrong?”

“Cantor called, Cantor himself. He wants to negotiate a contract for you to be on all the rest of his Colgate shows for the season. I guess he’s not a guy that pushes easily. God knows what went on between him and the sponsor but what counts is that he’s got three shows left for the year and you’re on all of them at three thousand each.”

Long after I’d hung up I was still sitting in the phone booth. The man was a pro before I was born and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told me, “We’ll have some fun on the stage together,” but he’d done it anyway because he wanted to point me up, obviously not worrying that some people might not like it.

How could you figure it? Here there were people going out of their way to kick me in the face with nothing to gain by doing it, then along comes a man like Eddie Cantor with everything to lose, but he deals himself into my fight and says, “They’ll have to kick me, too.”

The sign on the hotel said “No Niggers—No Dogs.” I squeezed the prongs of the shade together, pulled it down and leaned back in
my Pullman seat. Everybody’d assured us: “Miami Beach? You’ll have no problems there. It’s like New York.”

Sure!

But the date was serving my purpose: it was the height of the season, every celebrity from New York was in Miami Beach and if you were a top act then this is where you should be playing.

Arthur Silber, Jr., had come along as company. He put down his magazine and glanced out of his window. “Hey, we’re coming to a station. I wonder where we are.”

I raised my shade and looked out. “We’re in a lotta trouble, that’s where we are.”

He grinned. “Whattya mean
we
, colored boy?”

I did an elaborate lean-back and pointed out the window to a sign: “Everybody Welcome but The Nigger and The Jew.”

He swallowed hard. “Well, yeah, Kingfish, like you was saying, we’s in a lotta trouble.”

Morty Stevens pushed open the door of the club car and did the railroad walk down the length of it: legs apart for balance, hands out to steady himself on the chairs he passed. The train lurched and dropped him into the seat next to me. “You ready to start talking about the show?”

“Baby, I’ve been sitting right here. While you were stuffing yourself in the dining car the only conductor I saw was a guy who asked me for a ticket.”

“Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize …”

“Hey, hold it. I was just doing bits with you.”

We worked out physical cues, like a fast tapping of my foot for “Birth of the Blues” and “handlebar cues,” the handlebar being the type of talk I’d start doing with the audience. As soon as Morty’d hear the first few words he’d know which number I wanted.

He asked, “What’d you think of the new arrangement I did?”

“I dug it like Walter Pidgeon dug Greer Garson.” He began smiling with pleasure. “But I have one question: how do I stand on a stage and sing ‘How Are Things In Gloccamorra?’ ”

He blinked, aware for the first time of the ludicrous picture. “Well—I just thought of the music and I knew it would be great for your voice …”

“Yeah, baby, but what about this little brown suit I wear? You think I need a guy to stand up and yell, ‘Hey, folks, it’s a colored elf!’ ”

“I never thought about it like that.”

“Baby, Old Sam has come to the rescue and saved your arrangement from oblivion by a master stroke of savoir faire. I can take the curse off me coming on like Charley Irish by doing an introduction like: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been requested to do a certain song but before I even tell you what it is I want you to know I’m not too thrilled about doing it. This song wasn’t exactly written with me in mind, but a customer asked for it and I want to please, so I hope you’ll bear with me.’ Something like that.”

“Hey, that’s great. Then the handlebar’ll be when you start copping out.”

“I’ll
start
to sing it but if I get into trouble you may hear Barry Fitzgerald finishing it.

“Look, for years I’ve been forced to go down a straight track even when I saw the bridge was out. But now that I’ve got you it’s like all of a sudden there’s a steering wheel: I see trouble? wham, I fling you the cue and off we go in a different direction. So let’s develop antennae for each other, a private radar going between us. Let’s get these cues memorized so good that when you’re sleeping if the guy in the next room starts tapping his foot you’ll start conducting ‘Birth of the Blues.’ ”

The red caps passed us by, grabbing for white people’s luggage. We watched one straining under a load of suitcases, followed by the people who owned it, a thick woman in a frilly cotton dress that was fighting to reach around her, and a man in a shiny blue suit with brown shoes. My father sighed, “Trouble with some colored people is they’re plain prejudiced. Now that red cap’s gonna catch himself a white two-bits and he ain’t never gonna know it coulda been a colored five-spot.”

Will said, “No point waiting all day. We’ll carry our own.”

Arthur, Morty, and I were bringing up the rear. As we neared the end of the platform a heavy set cab driver rushed past us, bumped into Will from behind, and knocked the suitcases out of his hands. “Outa my way, niggah.” Will stood motionless, struggling to regain his shattered dignity. I lunged after the cab driver but a hand caught my arm. Will was looking into my eyes. “That won’t get us nothing, Sammy. But, thank you.” He let go of my arm and picked up his bags.

There was a big sign on the wall of the station building: “WELCOME
TO MIAMI.” Inside, to the left and right were the waiting rooms: “WHITE,” “COLORED.”

The Lord Calvert was a first-rate, second-class hotel in the heart of the Negro section of the city of Miami. Eddie Compadre, one of the bosses of the Beachcomber, looked around my room. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s fine. Everything’s crazy.”

He handed me a car key and pointed out the window to a bright red, brand-new Corvette in the parking lot. ‘That’s yours as long as you’re here. Only white cabs can cross the bridge from Miami onto the Beach and they aren’t allowed to ride colored guys.” He was telling it to me fast, like a man jumping into cold water. “Here, I got you these cards from the Police Department. There’s a curfew on the Beach for all colored people and they can arrest you unless you show ‘em this card which explains you got a right ‘cause you’re working there….”

“But there’s a desegregation law!”

He looked at me, sympatico. “Not if they don’t wanta enforce it. But you’ll be in the club most of the time anyway and naturally the place is yours.”

The Beachcomber was owned by Sophie Tucker and Harry Richman but it was run for them by Eddie and two other professional club operators. Harry Richman MC’d the shows and I met him backstage as I was coming in on opening night. He said, “I hear you do a great job with ‘Birth of the Blues.’ Give ‘em hell, cousin. That song was good to me.”

Arthur came into the dressing room and handed me a newspaper. “There’s a guy peddling this in front of the club.” The headline was “NIGGER ON THE BEACH” and the story was titled, “Stamp Out Sammy Davis, Jr.” It said, “The black people are an un-American disease which threatens to spread all over the Beach …”

“Baby, do me a favor, will you? Go out front and see what Eddie can do about this.”

It was a six-page hate-sheet and as I sat down to read it my father said quietly, “You’re gonna wrinkle your pants, Poppa. No point upsettin’ yourself over fools like that, son. C’mon, we gotta go on now, anyway.” The chorus kids and the backstage guys were giving me sympathy looks like “How can he possibly do a show now?”

I did three encores. Arthur was waiting in the dressing room when we got off. “Well, the guy is gone, but who do you think
chased him? Only Milton Berle. I’m walking outside with Eddie when Berle gets out of a car. He hears the guy shouting ‘Nigger on the Beach,’ walks over, takes one look at the headline and smashes the guy in the mouth, a shot that knocks him right off his feet. The papers go flying in the air and Berle is kicking them into a mud hole. The guy gets up and runs like a thief. Berle! He was beautiful. Everybody starts applauding but he didn’t even look around.”

Eddie came back after the second show. “Whattya say we bum around with some of the guys? We’ll have some laughs.” I knew he was trying to make me feel that I didn’t have to run back to the hotel. He took me to a few jazz spots where I was tuned in half to the music and half to the people around us, looking for a raised eyebrow, listening for a comment. Nobody said anything but they didn’t have to, the pressure was there.

I fell into bed, exhausted, and lay staring into the darkness above me until I became aware of the ceiling turning white with the first rays of morning sun.