Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (6 page)

He brought us back to his dressing room, took off his jacket, handed it to his valet, and put on a beautiful robe with his initials on it. His valet opened a curtain in front of a clothes rack. I stared at the floor beneath it. I had never seen so many shoes in one place in my life.

“Whose are those?”

Mr. Robinson was eating a pint of ice cream. “They’re mine, kid.”

I counted them. There were twenty-five pairs of shoes. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. After a while he turned to me, “Lemme see you dance, kid.” Will nodded that it was okay and I did my whole routine.

“That’s good. But make it so the people can understand it. Make it look easy.”

As we walked back to the rooming house Will said, “Mose Gastin,
you just met the biggest in the business.” He stopped walking. “When Bill Robinson plays the Palace he gets
thirty-five hundred dollars a week
. That’s as big as anyone can get.”

Bill Robinson was his own style, but we had to fight for our lives every time the lights went up. We knew that we were booked on the strength of our reputation as a clean act that could be depended on for fast and furious flash dancing. Probably fifty per cent of our flash came from our dread of the word “Cancelled.” There were no unions and at the whim of a theater manager any show could be our last. We played theaters where if an act wasn’t going over someone out front would yell, “The hook! Get the hook!” and a giant hook would swoop out from the wings and drag the performer off the stage. As he went off the audience splattered him with fruit and rotten eggs. Sometimes it was a hundred-pound sandbag that swung down and knocked the performer off his feet in the middle of his act. Hook or sandbag, what made this man get up off the floor and try again at another theater is one of the unanswerables about show people, but they dragged better performers off those stages than many who are stars today.

By the time I was fifteen we’d crossed the country twenty-three times and played so much time in Canada that we were considered residents of Montreal. In 1941 we were booked into the Michigan Theater in Detroit with Tommy Dorsey, to pinch hit for his regular opening act, Tip, Tap & Toe.

A fellow in his twenties, standing near the bulletin board backstage, walked over to us and held out his hand, “Hi’ya. My name’s Frank. I sing with Dorsey.”

I knew Frank Sinatra’s work because he was the vocalist on most of my Tommy Dorsey records. I stood in the wings at each performance, eating up Dorsey’s music. The audiences loved Frank. He had an entirely different style from other band vocalists. He did his numbers easy and simple and he sang the words so that they weren’t just an excuse for him to be singing the melody.

He and I went out for sandwiches a few times between shows, or we sat on the dressing room stairs talking show business. After three days Tip, Tap & Toe got to town and we moved on.

We had a ninety-dollar LaSalle in which we’d been travelling, and often sleeping, and with no bookings we headed toward New York.

Mama was watching us from her window one flight up, shaking her head, calling out, “Here come the gypsies!” I ran up the stairs two at a time and threw my arms around her. She kissed me quickly. “We can have our hellos in a minute. First go down and tell your father to park that junk away from in front of my house.”

I stood in line at the box office of the Paramount Theater watching expensively dressed men paying for tickets as though it meant nothing to them. Then it was my turn. I asked to see the manager and when he came out I smiled, “Do you recognize performers?” He passed me by the ticket taker, but as always, I felt like a moocher for bumming my way in.

After the show I walked up Broadway. A crowd of fans were gathered outside the stage door of the Loew’s State. I could feel the anxiety in the air, like nothing mattered to them except getting a look at the person who was going to walk out of that door. Then the door opened and Bob Hope stepped out and was swallowed up by the crowd until I couldn’t see his beautiful clothes any more or the smile on his face like all this was coming to him and he expected it. I watched him get into a beautiful new car and drive away and I pictured the kind of a place he must be going to, with elevator men and everybody calling him “Sir” and bringing him letters and flowers and anything he wanted.

I hardly felt like I was in the same business. I took the subway uptown and I ran the few blocks from the station, eager to get home and ask my father, “Do you think we’ll ever make the Big Time?”

I was leaning across the kitchen table, looking straight at him. He shook his head slowly, “I don’t know, Poppa. If it’s meant for us to make it then I guess we’ll make it.”

I kept looking at him, needing more, wishing he’d said, “Yes, we’ll make it,” or even, “No. Not a chance.” Anything would have been better than an answer that told me nothing.

He knew I was waiting, hoping, knowing how small-time we were. He looked at me. “Betcha I c’n make y’laugh, Poppa.”

At dinner, Mama said, “You know my friend, Mrs. Martin, Sammy? Well, Mrs. Martin’s daughter is a nice girl and I told her all about you and she’d like to go on a date with you.”

I’d never asked a girl for a date. They’d made it clear what they thought about my looks. But with the arrangements made I was dying to go.

My father fixed my tie which I’d already fixed ten times, and slipped me an extra five. Mama asked, “Where are you taking her?”

“Down to the Capitol to see the show.” She nodded, properly impressed.

I picked up my girl at her apartment down the street and told her mother, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Martin. I’ll take good care of her. We’re going by taxi.”

I slapped down the money for our tickets and bought us some candy. The stage show was just starting and it was a good one. But when the movie went on I couldn’t relax and enjoy it because I was too involved in trying to get up enough nerve to reach over and hold her hand. I still hadn’t made my move by the time the movie ended but I didn’t care—at least the ordeal was over.

On our way out, she stopped to go to the ladies’ room. We were standing in front of a water fountain in the lobby. “I’ll wait right here,” I said. There was another boy standing there and I smiled at him, wanting him to know that I was waiting for a date, too.

Twenty minutes passed and she didn’t come back. Maybe I’d misunderstood, maybe she was waiting someplace else, but I didn’t dare get out of sight of the water fountain. I asked an usher if he could find out if she was in the ladies’ room. He came back and told me she wasn’t.

I was tired and hungry but I’d told her mother I’d take care of her and I’d said I’d wait for her. I stood there for two hours.

Then I saw my father talking to the ticket taker, pointing to me. I ran out to him and explained what had happened. He nodded. “Come on, Poppa. Mama’s waiting to give you dinner.”

“How’d you know to come down here for me?”

“Mrs. Martin come by the house.”

“How’d Mrs. Martin know? Is she all right, Dad?”

“She’s okay.”

“Well, what happened? Why’d she go?” He didn’t want to tell me but I kept asking.

“Look, Poppa, she ain’t nothin’. She met some kids in the ladies’ room and she got so excited seeing them that she was halfway home before she remembered you was waitin’ for her.”

We sat on the subway and I bit my lips and clenched my fists in my pockets refusing to cry. “She’d have remembered me if I was good looking.”

He put his arm around me. “Hell, that’s plain ridiculous!” I looked at his handsome face. How could he understand. “Listen, Poppa, she’s just a dumb kid that’s got no brain. Lookit how stupid she’s gotta be to do a damn fool thing like that.”

Nothing could change the fact that I had been so unimportant to her that she couldn’t even remember I was waiting for her. And I’d stood there all that time.

I closed my eyes … I was headlining the Paramount. She was sitting up front waving at me, hoping I’d notice her. When I came off, the manager thanked me and handed me a thousand dollars … I stepped out the stage door … the street was crowded with kids screaming for me. I signed a few autographs and pushed my way to my limousine and smiled at my beautiful wife sitting inside happy to be waiting for me. My chauffeur opened the door … she handed a piece of paper through the window, “Oh, please, Mr. Davis. May I have your autograph?” There were tears in her eyes, “Don’t you remember me?” I smiled and signed my name. I motioned to the chauffeur and we drove away.

The train stopped. We were back in Harlem at 140th Street and Eighth Avenue. My father was saying, “Come on, Poppa. Let’s go home.”

Mama called from the kitchen, “That you, Sam? Wash up for dinner.” I heard him answer, “Just gimme a minute to hang up all these clothes.”

I turned off my record player and went through the kitchen, into the bedroom. “Wliere’d you get money for new clothes, Dad?”

He smiled, then opened the closet. It was empty except for the hangers, each with nothing but a pawn ticket hanging from it. “There’s my grey sharkskin, my pin stripe with the English vest, my …” He closed the door. “Hell, Poppa, it’ll pass for a wardrobe ‘til we got somewhere to go in ‘em.”

Our fortunes had hit such a lasting low that we’d been home for five months without getting even a one-nighter. The people Mama worked for had moved out of town and she couldn’t find another
job. For the first time in our lives we were on relief, waiting helplessly for the checks to arrive, hoping every day that Will would come running up the stairs and say, “We’re booked.”

My father did an elaborate sniffing of the air. “Smells like turkey ‘n dumplings tonight, Mama.” She gave him a look and put the bowl of neckbones and greens on the table, the same meal we’d had every night for eight weeks because Mama could buy neckbones at five pounds for eight cents. There was a knock on the door and she smiled, “That’ll be Nathan.”

There he was, hat askew on his head, hanging drunkenly to the door frame to keep from falling down. He staggered into the front room, weaving and stumbling. We all watched him until he found a chair to collapse into, then my father gave him a round of applause. “Not bad, Nat. It ain’t what you’d call good, but it ain’t bad neither.”

Nathan Crawford, a lifelong friend of my father was, besides the relief checks, our main means of support. He and my father had grown up together in North Carolina and Nathan had settled in New York where he was a foreman in a plant making pipe racks for the garment industry. Once a week he arrived at Mama’s and turned over half of his thirty-five-dollar-a-week salary as if she were his own mother. He wanted nothing in return. He sat around for awhile or stayed for dinner. Occasionally he dropped in during the week, but every Friday at five o’clock he arrived weaving and spinning. The ridiculous part of it is that Nathan never touched a drop in his life. He’s just a big ham who loves doing a drunk act. He’d “sober up” as soon as he hit the chair and stay that way until the next week.

The handwriting on the wall was saying, “You’re out of the business.” Months passed and we went nowhere but to the pawnshop until everything we owned was there except our radio, the last link between us and show business.

My father and I killed our evenings sitting in the kitchen near the stove, listening to the radio and playing pinochle, with him still trying to cheat me as though we were playing for $100,000 a hand. I looked forward all day to Jack Eigen’s celebrity interview program from the lounge of the Copacabana. I never tired of listening to the celebrities. When they talked show business they weren’t dreaming as we always were. These people were making movies, hit records,
doing radio, and starring on Broadway. Eigen’s slogan, or catch-phrase, was “I’m at the Copa, where are you?” That killed me. And almost every time he said it I threw down my cards and shouted back, “I’m in my goddamned hole in Harlem, that’s where I am.” But I kept listening, trying to forget we weren’t working, that we were nobodies.

With vaudeville dead and even the Palace running movies, variety acts like ours were moving into nightclubs, and
the
top-drawer club was the Copacabana. Everything else was either the way up or the way down.

I lost interest in the pinochle and listened to Jimmy Durante describing his new home in Hollywood, then George Raft talking about the picture he’d just made … and the sound of people laughing and clinking glasses in the background … Joe E. Lewis was just passing through New York and he’d dropped in for a drink and to say hello….

I asked my father, “You think we’ll ever play it?”

His answer was the same as always, “Hell, I dunno. If we’re meant to play it, we’ll play it.”

We listened to them talking about “the glamorous Copa” and the fabulous homes stars had just bought or were building, with swimming pools and golf courses. I couldn’t even swim, but oh God how I wanted just to see a home with a swimming pool. I looked around our railroad flat with the windows closed in the back room to keep out the smell of the garbage that people threw out of their windows. I snapped off the radio. “Come on, Dad.” He knew where I wanted to go. We did it all the time. We only had fare for one way so we whistled as we walked. It took us a while to get there but we had nothing but time.

It was a freezing night, but we stood in the doorway of a building at 15 East 60th Street, directly across from the Copa, watching the people going inside, the doorman helping them out of their limousines and cabs, tipping his hat, holding the door open for them until they disappeared inside, laughing. Why shouldn’t they laugh? They had everything, importance, clothes and jewelry like I’d never seen anywhere but in movies. God, they were beautiful.

We waited to see them again when they came out. I clenched my fists. “Someday I’ll play that place, so help me God. I’m gonna have Mama there and when we go home, there won’t be a goddamned
empty icebox. And I won’t have to wait ‘til Easter to buy a new suit. I’ll buy them whenever I want them, ten at a time … I’m gonna be a star.”

Then, all the way home on the A train, I wondered—will I ever be a star?

The music stopped abruptly: “We interrupt this program for an urgent news bulletin: The Japanese Air Force has just bombed Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt is expected to issue a declaration of war … The United States is at war with Japan …” I put down the piece of birthday cake I was holding and looked from face to face around the room at my Uncle Bubba’s place where we were celebrating my sixteenth birthday on Sunday, a day early. “We repeat, the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt is expected to issue a declaration of war….”