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

610 Pages·2003·5.35 MB·English

by  Davis

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