ebook img

In black and white : the life of Sammy Davis, Jr PDF

610 Pages·2003·5.35 MB·English
by  Davis
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview In black and white : the life of Sammy Davis, Jr

ALSO BY WIL HAYGOOD Two on the River (photographs by Stan Grossfeld) King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The Haygoods of Columbus: A Family Memoir THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2003 by Wil Haygood All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Portions of this work previously appeared in Interview Magazine and the Washington Post Magazine. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published matrial: Aflred A. Knopf: Excerpt from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc. Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from the song lyric “Night Song” from Golden Boy words by Lee Adams, music by Charles Strouse. Copyright © 1964 (renewed) by Strada Music. Worldwide rights for Strada Music administered by Helene Blue Musique Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Hal Leonard Corporation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 0-375-40354-x eBook ISBN: 978-0-80417252-3 v3.1 This book is dedicated to Lynn Peterson CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue: Yes He Can 1: Vaudeville Dreams 2: Long Shadows 3: The Kid in the Middle 4: And Sammy Shall Lead Them 5: White Sammy, Black Sammy 6: Through a Glass Eye Brightly 7: The Great White Sammy Way 8: The Wonder of It All 9: A Hitchcockian Affair 10: On to Catfish Row 11: The Sands of Las Vegas and Beyond 12: Sammy and Hilly 13: Golden 14: Fade to Black 15: Mirrors 16: Sammy and Tricky Dick 17: Ode to the Vaudevillian 18: The Ides of Time 19: The Final Curtain Epilogue: Mother of a Motherless Child Source Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments A Note about the Author Marvelous tunes you rang From passion, and death, and birth, You who had laughed and wept On the warm, brown lap of the earth. Now in your untried hands An instrument, terrible, new, Is thrust by a master who frowns, Demanding strange songs of you. God of the White and Black, Grant us great hearts on the way That we may understand Until you have learned to play. DUBOSE HEYWARD Porgy Prologue YES HE CAN y the ever twisting light of fame, he has lived a life both mesmerizing B and distinctly peculiar. Since childhood he has wowed audiences across America as well as in many European locales. He is a veteran of nightclubs, radio, television, and film. Once the star of a trio dance act, for the past six years he has gone solo. There are many from the 1940s and 1950s who watched him grow up—onstage—and feel a kind of surrogate connection with him. His name often drops warmly from their lips. Like kin. Sammy. He has worked like a demon at familiarity. There have been a great many benefits for social causes. He’ll do anything for his pal Frank Sinatra. Likewise for Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He won’t turn away from any Jewish cause, either. He works fifty weeks a year. He suffers from insomnia—not in the sense of a medical malady; he simply abhors sleeping, for there is so much on his mind, so many things he wants to do. He considers idleness a curse. Born of vaudeville, his peripatetic life has come to explode within the slippery parameters of the stardom he has chased ferociously for so many years. He has known it all: fear, pain, love, and hatred. Behind him lie thousands and thousands of motherless nights. He has learned to hoard his raging insecurities, for if onstage he is commanding and confident, offstage he carries a wobbly sense of self. It is 1965, and Sammy Davis, Jr.’s America is afire. There are riots, marches, sit-ins. Assassins have come upon the land. No one blames him for the loaded pistol he carries. Or the umbrella he sometimes strolls with: it can be opened in an instant, exposing a knifelike point capable of inflicting a lethal wound. He is a Negro married to a white woman. The death threats are common. His booking agents rarely send him into the Deep South; he has a colossal fear he will be murdered in either Alabama or Mississippi. Whenever he travels, Joe Grant, his black-belt, karate-kicking bodyguard, accompanies him. But right now, Sammy is ensconced on Broadway, starring in Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy at the Majestic Theatre. (Grant can sometimes be spotted in the theater basement, breaking wooden boards with his bare hands.) The lines are long for Golden Boy; the show is a smash. It is Sammy’s second turn as a Broadway star. This time around, Sammy is portraying a boxer, a fighter. Onstage he is also in love with a white woman. His stage name is Joe; hers is Lorna. J L : OE TO ORNA But you don’t know how I feel? Lorna, when I’m not with you I—bleed, I got a hole bleeding in my side nothing can stop but being with you because the other half is you, rotten, beautiful, the other half is you!—and I’m here on my feet, bleeding—for you— It is, true enough, Odetsian stage speak, the rush of words and emotions and strange syntax, but it is also in some way a mirror of the times. America, having a bellwetherlike year, is herself constantly onstage. Every day there is an angry new protest, and new fears—in Selma, in Los Angeles, in Harlem. The bleeding occurs in a lot of places. Sammy himself is quite aware of the danger in the streets. He hates it when fans rush up to him on his left side. His left eye is sightless from a decade-old car crash, and he worries whether he might, in an instant, have to pull his gun. His heroes are cowboys, and he is extremely adept, as many in Hollywood know, at the quick draw. He has been known to dash off to Connecticut, home of Colt, the firearms maker, to have yet another set of guns—pearl-handled—made especially for him. “Sammy and I wound up with the reputations of being the fastest draws in Hollywood,” says comedian Jerry Lewis, Sammy’s longtime friend, whom Sammy sometimes bested in mock showdowns. “And I was fast.” “Is his gun faster than Wyatt Earp’s?” a magazine article once asked of Sammy. In his dressing room, in front of the mirror, he sometimes practices his

Description:
He was, for decades, one of the most recognizable figures in the cultural landscape, his image epitomizing a golden age of American show business. His career spanned a lifetime, but for years he has remained hidden behind the persona he so vigorously generated, and so fiercely protected. Now, in thi
See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.