Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (24 page)

I woke up around two o’clock and went down to the pool area. The hotel was jumping: Nat Cole and Sugar Ray Robinson were there and the ball clubs were in town for winter training so the Campanellas and Jackie Robinson were there, too. Arthur was in the swimming pool riding Roy Campanella’s kids around on his shoulders. When Arthur and Monty had checked in with us there’d been a few remarks and some suspicious looks, but now nobody seemed to be giving them a second thought.

I was enjoying the crowd of chicks around me until one of them sighed, wistfully, “Gee, I sure wish I could see your show.” I was embarrassed to be playing a club that wouldn’t let me in either if I weren’t starring there, and I would never do it again, but I wasn’t sorry. Every important date like Miami Beach was bringing me one step closer to the top. Someday they’d want me so badly that I’d be in a position to demand they open the doors to everybody or I won’t play.

I made a date with her for that night and we hit all the colored clubs, had laughs, champagne, and everywhere we went the MC introduced me from the stage. I got back to the room around six in the morning, dead tired, but unable to sleep any better than the night before. I kept telling myself what a swinging night it had been, but it was no good, I’d had a million laughs but no fun. It should
have been, and it would have been if it wasn’t being forced down my throat.

Eddie asked me to join him every night. Sometimes I went with him, sometimes I went back to the Calvert. It didn’t matter. There was a hole in the laughs at each end.

Will closed the dressing room door. “I’m calling a meeting of the Trio. Eddie wants us back next season. He’s offering …”

“The next time
I’m
playing Miami Beach, is never! Not ‘til they let colored people come in as customers. I don’t care how much the money is, I don’t want it!”

He was smiling. “I already told him no.” He waved away my apology. “I’m only telling you so you can enjoy that we’re in a position to pick and choose. And, as long as we’re all in the mood you’ll be glad to hear I turned down another Vegas deal. They’re up to $7500, but they still won’t give us rooms in the hotel.”

“They must be crazy wanting us that badly but expecting us to live in a slum.”

“You won’t believe the nerve they got. They know we won’t go live in Westside any more, so they came up with a compromise, a new thing some of the colored acts have been taking.” He was shaking his head incredulously. “They offered us three first-class, fully-equipped trailers parked on the hotel grounds.”

“Did the Morris office say anything about the Copa?”

“No. Jules Podell who owns the Copa doesn’t move fast. He isn’t ready to come up with an offer yet.”

It only takes 336 hours for two weeks to end. I finished our last show with “Birth of the Blues” as an encore. Harry Richman was calling me back for another bow when someone yelled, “Now
you
sing it, Harry.”

He shook his head. “Friends … you and I have had a lot of good times through all the years we’ve been together, and I’m not reluctant to say that it’s been a lot of years. I remember the day somewhere along the line a man came to me and handed me a piece of paper, a song, and I had no way of knowing then that those thirty-two bars of music would turn out to be the best friend I ever had.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “For the last two weeks I’ve been watching this youngster putting all of his heart and soul into what he’s been giving you and I’ve been trying to think of a way to let him know what an oldtimer like me feels when he sees someone
like him come along. The only way I have is to give him something I love. So I’m turning ‘Birth of the Blues’ over to my young friend, Sammy Davis, Jr. He’s going to go a long way and I want him to take my song along with him. I’ll never sing it again, Sammy. It’s yours and I hope it’s as good to you as it’s been to me.”

I knew that at that moment he meant it, just as I knew that the next day when I was gone he’d be singing it again. But I appreciated it for the gorgeous piece of show business shmaltz that it was.

I packed my dressing room things and Arthur helped me load them into the Corvette. When we’d squeezed all my stuff in he appraised the remaining space. “Even
you
can’t fit in there now.”

“Then, baby, how about if you run them back to the hotel and come back and get me? I can use the time to say good-bye to Eddie and some of the guys inside.”

By four o’clock the bartender had locked up the liquor and everybody was gone except me and the night man who was making his last rounds. I called Arthur at the hotel but his room didn’t answer. At a quarter to five, I said, “There’s no point in your staying to lock up. I can wait outside. He’s sure to be along any minute.”

I sat on the curb trying to remember exactly what I’d said to Arthur. He couldn’t possibly have misunderstood. He must have had a flat or run out of gas or something. A taxi was cruising up the avenue. I stood up and waved to him. He slowed down and called out, “Sorry. Can’t ride you.” Another cab slowed down but as he got a closer look he stepped on the gas. I watched his tail-lights disappear. There was another cab coming. I shouted, “I’ll pay you double. I have no other way to get home….”

I started walking. It must have been fifteen minutes before I saw another one. I had to try again. I rushed out into the street and held my arm up. He stopped about ten feet in front of me. I was suddenly blinded by a huge beam of light. A man ordered, “Stand right where you are.” He touched my chest, waistband and back pockets. “What’re you up to? You know you’ve got no right being here.”

“I’m Sammy Davis, Jr.” He had one hand resting on the butt of his gun. “I have a card …”

“Let’s see it.” I moved my hand slowly to my inside pocket and drew my wallet out. He looked at the card. “Well why’re you sneaking around here at
this
hour?”

“I’ve been waiting for my friend. He was supposed to pick me up. I don’t know what happened to him.”

He took his hand off the gun and led me over to the car. He leaned in and told his partner. “He’s in the show. Says he’s waiting for somebody to pick him up.”

“Well, what’re we gonna do with him? He can’t stay here.”

“Officer, if you’ll call Eddie Compa—”

“Easy, boy. We’ll handle this.”

The other one said, “What’re we wasting our time for? Get him in the car. We’ll leave him at the bus stop.”

They put me between them. As we drove, the first one talked past me to the other. “I think he’s the one my kid saw on television.”

“What’s he do?”

“I guess he tap dances. I know my kid likes him, and I think I read somewhere that he gets five thousand smackers a week for being here.”

“Where’d you read bull like that?”

“One of the papers. I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t read that, you dreamed it. Five thousand a week! Hell!
I’d
get up and do a dance for that much.”

They were pulling over to a street corner. “Officer, couldn’t you take me somewhere so I could call my friend?”

“No need for that. A bus’ll be along in an hour or so. But don’t you go walking nowhere or we’ll have to lock you up. Just sit on that bench ‘til the bus comes and everything’ll be fine.”

I walked over to the bench and sat down. They didn’t drive away. One of them waved his arm out the window. “Hey, c’mere a minute, boy.”

I walked to the car. He handed me a slip of paper and a pencil.

“Put your autograph on here for my kid.”

As they drove away, I lit a match and looked at my watch. It was 5:20. An hour and a quarter later it was light out and the bus stopped at the corner.

Mama sat in a big easy chair in my dressing room at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, holding court as she did every day for dozens of people from our neighborhood. I sat on the arm of her chair while the women stood around giggling, trying to think of things to say. “I knew you when your grandma used to wheel you in a carriage, Sammy. We’d say, ‘Here comes Rosa Davis and her
Jesus.’ ” She smiled at Mama. “Guess you always knew he’d turn out to be something, didn’t you, Rosa?” Mama gave her a silent, blasé nod which as much as said, “You see I did, so why do you ask such foolish questions?”

Sometimes I stayed off in a corner so I could just enjoy watching her. I knew she was bursting with happiness, but she just sat there, arms folded, her mink jacket draped over the back of her chair, nodding graciously, occasionally smiling and accepting the attention she was getting with all the dignity of a queen completely at home on a throne.

I’d taken a room at The America on West 47th Street, and on my way uptown one morning I left the cab a block early so I could stand across the street from the theater, looking at the long line of people waiting to buy tickets for our early show. A truck went by carrying a billboard for
The Barefoot Contessa
. As hot as we were,
that
would be the capper.
Ava Gardner
, in person, on 125th Street. I went back to the dressing room and looked up the phone number of the Drake Hotel.

I looked out at the jam-packed theater. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet a lady who took the trouble to come up here from downtown. This lady is the brightest light in all of Hollywood …” They were looking around, sensing it was going to be someone big. I kept building the suspense. “She is in town to publicize her newest motion picture,
The Barefoot Contessa…
” Then the buzzing really started and they were turning back and forth with question-mark looks, having mental arguments with themselves, like, “He can’t mean Ava Gardner. It must be someone else in the picture …” “Well, who else could it be?” “Hell, this cat ain’t about t’get no Ava Gardner to come uptown—is he?” I kept building it, and every word was like I was pumping air into a balloon. When they were all but leaning out of their seats I paused and laid it on them: “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss
Ava Gardner!”

There was utter stillness. The Love Goddess of the World was walking toward me, a smile on her face, diamonds in her hair, swathed in a skin-tight gown which was not just revealing, but elegant—and at the same time so sexy it was frightening.

The audience started whistling and shouting. She put her arm around my waist and they exploded, stamping and jumping up and down in their seats until I could actually feel the theater rocking!
Never before had a star of this magnitude come to Harlem and they were going out of their minds, and I was thinking, “I can die right now because I ain’t
never
gonna see an audience this excited again!”

Ava was smiling as cool as ice cream, knowing what this would mean to me, playing it right to the hilt for me with her arm still around my waist, best-of-friends style.

I finally had to put up my hands for quiet but it took a full five minutes before they settled down enough for Ava to say, “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to be here, and how grateful I am for your very generous reception. I know that we share a mutual respect for this great entertainer who so kindly invited me to come here. Incidentally, I’m in a picture called
The Barefoot Contessa
and if you don’t mind, I’d love to take my shoes off …” She kicked them off and that started it all over again. When they quieted down she spoke for a few more minutes, waved good-bye and did one of those tippy-toe walks off on the balls of her feet. Every eye in the place was watching her very feminine departure and I summed up what everybody was thinking. “Well—if you’re gonna be a girl,
be a girl!”

She was waiting in my dressing room with her escort, William B. Williams, and a guy from United Artists. “Ava, I can’t tell you how grateful I am. You wanta talk about making somebody a big man?”

William B. asked, “How about a little drink?”

The street outside the stage door was entirely blocked with people standing on stoops, on cars and literally climbing up lamp posts for a look at her. With the help of twenty policemen who’d rushed over on a riot call, we were finally able to get through to her limousine.

We had a drink at the Shalimar, a nearby bar. They were going on to Birdland and asked me to join them but I knew that word of this evening had already spread all over Harlem and I wanted to stick around and take some bows. I went over to the Baby Grand and gorged myself on admiration.

Jess Rand, who’d been working for us since before Miami, called me at the hotel, excited. “Sam, the editors at
Our World
heard about Ava Gardner coming up to the Apollo and they said if you can get her to pose for a picture with you they’ll use it for the cover of their Christmas issue. They want you dressed up like Santa Claus standing near her while she sits in a chair with a pencil like she’s making up a Christmas list. Her studio wants to build her in the Negro market, so they’re writing a by-line story for her to okay
called ‘Why I Dig Sammy Davis, Jr.’—it goes into why she thinks you’re such a great performer, and all that kinda jazz.”

“Well, if the studio wants it then why don’t
they
ask her?”

“Chicky, they’re tickled silly she’s making the p.a. tour to promote the picture and they’re not asking any extra favors. But they figure if it came from you it would be like a personal thing….”

She was waiting for us in her suite. A press agent from United Artists neutralized me with the Santa Claus suit and two photographers took pictures for twenty minutes. When we were ready to leave I thanked her. “But you don’t wanta give me that autographed picture you promised me at least a year ago, right?”

She laughed. “I only have those glossies the studio sends out. But we can take a picture together right now if you like.”

We posed for a few shots of us talking together. The guy from United Artists happened to be standing so that half of him was sure to be in the picture but I didn’t ask him to move away, I felt enough like Charley Fan already. When the photographer was through I told him, “Baby, lemme have that roll of film, will you?”

“I’ll develop it for you.”

“Well, look, please be careful. Don’t let it get into the wrong hands. It could make trouble for her.”