Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (65 page)

The usual crowd was jamming the Copa dressing room when I got upstairs between shows. I went into the bedroom, “Charley, get out there and close that godamned window. And make sure the radiators are up.”

“But, you’ve got people out there …”

“I didn’t ask for a guest list. I said close the window.”

He was shaking his head. “I can’t keep up with you. You always said I should make guests comfortable. Well they were too hot.”

“Don’t try to keep up with me ‘cause you’ll never be able to! Now I want it
hot
in these rooms. That’s how I like it, that’s how it’ll be. Right?” I put on a robe and went into the next room, poured a coke, turned on the TV set, and sat down in a chair facing it. I could see some of them were disappointed. Tough. If they want entertainment let them go downstairs and pay for it.

After about twenty minutes one of the guys said gingerly, “Sam, it’s kinda warm in here.” He’d opened his collar and his neck and face glistened with sweat. “Y’think we could open the window for a minute?”

“I’m sorry, baby. The heat’s good for my throat.”

“Oh. Sure! Of course.”

“But you go downstairs if you’re uncomfortable. I’ll catch you in the Lounge after the second.”

“No. It’s not that bad. Really. I don’t mind at all.”

I watched him cross the room and explain it to his girl. Her face fell. She caught me looking and smiled over. I lit my Sherlock Holmes pipe and watched them out of the corner of my eye. They’re unbelievable. I’m ignoring them, their hair is curling from the heat, their clothes are getting wrinkled, they’re actually suffering, but still they don’t leave, they just sit here staring at me. It’s fantastic. They’re like moths around a flame. They get singed, burned—but still they come back for more.

As I opened the second show, a cloud of cigar smoke billowed toward me from the table at center ringside. I smiled at the guys boozing and making out with chicks while I was performing. A few tables away a man had his back to me and was eating his dinner. It’s your money, buddy. I cued Morty for a ballad to quiet the room, to lure attention, but the conversations kept humming over the sound I was making….

I stood in the wings waiting for the applause to build before going out to take a bow, remembering the bursts of sound that had always snapped me back, the banging on tables, the heads turned watching the spot where I’d reappear. I mopped my face, stalling, and as I heard the sound diminishing I knew I couldn’t leave them on
that
. I ran on, taking no bow, as though the show hadn’t been over. I cued Morty. The guys in the band gaped and hurried to re-open the
music. I glared at them and smiled to the audience, “We’ll now do a few bars of that popular song ‘The Search.’ ”

I started with a jam session and began building, selecting numbers carefully, using only the sure-things, trying to lift them out of their seats if only by sheer strength, digging down deeper than ever before to entertain them, to get them involved, to get response—but it was as though I were playing handball with an orange. No matter what I did I couldn’t find the power to gather them all up in one lump the way I’d once been able to. I was aware of the tension behind me on the bandstand, and I could feel the guys watching me, knowing I wasn’t going to make it. I’d done an extra hour and twenty minutes, the longest show in my life, when I finally cued Morty for “Black Magic.” As I roared through the number, straining every muscle and nerve in a last effort to reach the people, searching their faces for a touch of the excitement that used to be there, I saw a man looking at his watch.

Will was in the wings as I came off, his face a mask of bewilderment. As I was passing him he put his hand on my arm to stop me. “Sammy …” it was half-gasp, half-whisper, “you did two hours and thirty minutes.”

“You don’t like it? You’re the manager. Fire me!” I started walking but I turned back. “And you can tell Morty Stevens that I don’t need him to second-guess me. Until his name is out front he’ll let
me
decide when the show is over.”

I lay on the bed in the dressing room, still dressed, staring at the ceiling. Big John opened the door a crack, came in, and closed it behind him. “Sammy, y’know what I was thinkin’ you oughta have?”

“A lock on my door?”

“No fooling, Sammy, I was thinking you should have a clause in your contract sayin’ the waiters can’t serve while you’re on. Hell, all the big stars got it. They don’t have to put up with guys dropping glasses and bangin’ knives and forks around while they’re performing …”

This big gruff man was looking at me with sympathy he couldn’t conceal, trying to make it sound like something he’d thought of for no particular reason. I was grateful for the loyalty that had brought him to my defense. “Thanks, John. I’ll give it some thought.”

“You really oughta, Sammy. No reason for you to have to put up
with drunks talking and calling for more booze—hell, you’re a great artist, you’re too big for that.” He smiled awkwardly. “Well … see you tomorrow night, boss.”

“Good night, John.”

I lay still, wishing the answer could be as simple as a clause in a contract but knowing that the audiences had to write that clause themselves, that you can’t
make
people listen to you. So many times I’d seen comics begging attention with panic lines like: “Just keep eating folks, I’ll still be here when you look up,” and “I know you’re out there ‘cause I can hear you breathing,” lines that are not only corny in their own fashion but they’re a death rattle. Once you have to say “Hey, please listen to my act,” then it’s too late.

I lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed remembering all the years they’d been so engrossed in my show that it had never occurred to them to eat or drink while I was on. Then, I reheard the lack of excitement downstairs, and for the hundredth time in a month I reviewed every move I’d made onstage. Point by point I was as good a technician as I’d ever been, maybe as I’d grown older I’d become even better. But I wasn’t touching them any more.

I called John back into the room. “Tomorrow night I want you to tape the act. From the beginning to the end. I’m planning a special kind of an album and I want to hear some of the off-the-wall stuff I do. As a matter of fact, do both shows.”

He gave me the tapes the next night. I went straight back to the Warwick, alone. I threaded the machine. I poured a coke, lit a cigarette, and stared at the “Play” button until I gathered up the nerve to press it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m thrilled to be back at the Copa … the one place I really think of as home … your kind attention to Mr. Mastin whose teachings and unerring advice … and now our humble offering of … with your very kind permission may we beg your indulgence during our humble rendition of…” I sat dead still, stunned, repulsed by what I was hearing. It went on and on—the nauseatingly humble this and humble that until even an idiot would know it was pure arrogance, reeking of insincerity, of “Charley Star” putting the audience down. I was doing the one thing I knew could never succeed on a stage: being totally dishonest.

I listened to the second tape, finding it impossible to associate myself with the mechanical man gushing sentimental statements without a shred of real sentiment attached to them. Every word
sounded tinny, every emotion was a pretense, a sham that screamed of guile. I waited painfully for the songs and dances as reprieves from the fraud, hoping that after each break it would change course, but the voice kept coming back in a relentless drone of “show biz sincerity,” out and out phoniness, that cut through me like a knife. I heard myself doing lines that should have reached out and caught their hearts but nothing happened; I lost most of the hushed silences I’d always been able to create; jokes that were clever and funny got laughs—but not the screams you get from people who really like you. The beautiful one-ness which had existed between me and the audience, the ability to touch them, was buried beneath layer upon layer of dishonesty.

I pressed the re-wind button and as the spools jerked and reversed, pulling back the words, my mind raced back over the past year, to all the audiences who’d heard this, who’d come to see somebody they like and had been cheated, offered a fiction, a counterfeit man. When they could no longer find what had first made them like me, then I had nothing going for me but my physical performance. And that’s not enough. Once the novelty of any performer has worn off, once he’s been around a few times and the people have seen what he does, then he’s on the way down the moment he hits the top—unless he has that extra thing going for him, the intangible that makes his audiences care for him. Jerry can do the same jokes, be the same idiot kid, because the people see something that makes them love him. Frank has it in a different way—the strength, the independence, the unbending “right or wrong this is how I am” kind of honesty.

Obviously the audiences couldn’t put their fingers on what was missing as I could, they wouldn’t analyze it and say “Hey, this kid’s a phony,” but they didn’t have to know
why
they weren’t excited or
why
they weren’t telling their friends “You’ve got to get over to the Copa and see Sammy Davis.”

All the desperation for dramatic television and movies was like giving vitamin pills to a man who’d been cutting his own throat.

I rewound the first show and turned it on, listening to it clinically, stopping the machine and writing down every hokey or insincere line.

I taped the shows the next night and locked myself in my room to hear them. The sound of my voice hit me like a wet towel: whap!
All the phony things I’d memorized and been careful not to say were gone, but unwittingly I’d invented new ones.

Night after night I threaded the machine, pressed the button and out poured the same hollowness. No matter how many words and phrases I eliminated, they were replaced by other words, other phrases, equally phony and equally damaging. No matter how carefully I guarded against them, no matter how sure I was that I’d succeeded in stamping them out, the tape caught them, saved them, and threw them back at me. It wasn’t my act that had changed, it was me. It wasn’t the words that were wrong but the attitude which continued to create them. It wasn’t something I could operate on and cut out like a piece of business or a speech affectation; it had dug in far deeper than that. It was a malignancy throughout my whole personality.

I’d become a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. And I could see the history of it.

Whatever happened offstage, I looked forward to my shows like another man waits for the weekend or a summer vacation, knowing that when I was in the wings waiting to go on, I’d first begin to feel whole and that finally, in conjunction with the audience, I would come alive. When I walked onstage, when I stood amidst my audiences and I saw their faces and knew I was home, where they liked me, I could relax—it was as though I could take off a coat. Then, when I had to leave that warmth and acceptance, when I had to leave the stage, I put on the coat again.

But no one can remain two distinct personalities. No one can sneer at people all day long and then for a few hours a night separate them and say “But these are ‘audience’ so they’re different.” You can only con people if you have no respect for them, and the more you con them and get away with it the less respect you have for people in general. The saloon song I’d had written after
Mr. Wonderful
was proof of how it could not be confined to the streets or to the dressing room crowd. Phoniness, the lack of respect, had become a habit, a reflex, and there had been a transition within me, a shift of balance so slight that I hadn’t seen it happening and the “con man” began creeping onstage until gradually but inevitably he overpowered the honest performer and I was no longer able to take off the coat. I had stopped playing the role and become the character.

I remember becoming aware that I wasn’t the “nice kid” that had
always been my stock in trade. I knew that I had to make the audience believe that I was nice, humble, warm—any number of things which once I had been but was no longer, and to accomplish it I’d reached for everything that had worked for me in the past: they’d always liked the relationship between my father, Will, and me so I’d grabbed for it, using the same words; I played “the kid,” I flattered the audience—I did a dozen things I’d done when we were coming up and I did them exactly the same as I’d done them when they’d worked, when the emotions had been real. But as I acted them out, as I recited words remembered, the people recognized the difference, and all the statements and sentiments I utilized for effect, all the words which once I had meant, fell hollow, like all echoes.

I did my shows, straining to be nice, to
feel
nice so I could come across nice, but the tapes kept proving the lie. I tried to change, to make it real. I heard about a bellboy in the hotel whose wife needed an operation and I gave him a thousand dollars. Will hadn’t been feeling well so I flew a specialist down from Boston to examine him. I made a list of people I knew cared about me and I called them all over the country just to say hello. But even as I did these things I knew they were pointless: nothing I could think to do was for anybody but myself, no compassion I felt was for anybody but me and each audience was perceptive enough to recognize and refuse to accept a kind of honesty that wears a mask. And I had no choice but to wear a mask because they would never accept what I really felt.

Night after night there was nothing I could do but sit by myself after the shows, staring at the foot-high stack of tapes—the coffin of anything good I had been—listening to my own voice destroying everything I’d built. Show by show it got thicker and deeper and the more I tried to struggle out of it, the more honest I tried to be—the more dishonest it came across. It had grown onto me like a barnacle and it was eventually going to pull me under.

I threw no party on closing night. I stayed alone in my $100 a day suite wondering how long before I couldn’t afford this kind of luxury, looking through the penthouse window, immune to the majesty and beauty of the city below, trying to anticipate the future like a man who’s been told he’s got two years to live. If I was lucky and if I played my cards right and didn’t come back to the same places too often maybe I could even stretch it into three. It wouldn’t
happen overnight—I had too much name, too much momentum—but it had to happen.