In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (17 page)

There was no mother-son reunion between Elvera and Sammy in Boston, no evening chat in a hotel lobby, no meal shared in a diner. There were shows to do and other engagements, and before they knew it, both had packed and left Boston, gone their separate ways.

Elvera, however, was getting tired of the traveling and the rootlessness. She had been on the road nearly fifteen years now—all the years, in fact, of Sammy’s life. She’d known chorus girls who had gotten out, taken their sore feet back home, found themselves a man, settled down and married. She knew her career was headed nowhere. The attempt to launch a singing career in Montreal had been a dismal experience. The motel rooms and boardinghouses and train depots started to seem meaningless. That same autumn—1941—Elvera
danced her last paid gig at the Club Paradise in Atlantic City. In Atlantic City, she met and befriended Grace Daniels, a Negro woman who managed the Little Belmont nightclub. Daniels offered her a job as a barmaid, and Elvera accepted it. She had no savings and was quite happy when her new employer advanced her some money to get settled. She aimed to stay put awhile.

She got herself a small apartment on Illinois Avenue. Her salary was twenty dollars a week. Sometimes she was able to double that with tips and pleasant conversation. “
I used to get five-dollar tips from one person!” She could finally start saving a little money and buy herself nice clothes. “
You had a sporting crowd,” she would recall of the Little Belmont. “They would tip lavishly, and they knew how to live.” As time passed, she realized how much she liked living near the ocean. She was all alone. Her son, Sammy, was out on the road, her daughter, Ramona, in Harlem. She and Ramona had never been close. As the years passed, Ramona would grow more curious about why her mother left her with relatives as she took to the road, about why her aunt Julia was always the one tucking her in as a child. Elvera was not one to stage reconnaissance missions of the mind; she didn’t look back, so she had no answers for her inquiring daughter. She had the ever-ready smile of a barmaid; she had some clothes in a closet; she had some broken-apart dreams; and she had her toughness.

Now and then when Elvera returned home from work, bone-tired from standing all those hours on her legs and dodging the constant come-ons from strangers, she’d sit down with a pen and paper. And she’d compose a letter to her son. She had an address in Boston, one in Syracuse, New York, and she had his grandmother’s address in Harlem. They were addresses she had on scraps of paper. All addresses where Sammy had stayed for short spells. “I would write Will Mastin, and Big Sam, to give my letters to Sammy—and my letters would be returned, unopened,” she would say years later, a sliver of sorrow in her high-pitched voice.

So they drifted, Elvera and Sammy, mother and son, like ocean waves—farther and farther away from each other.

Will Mastin, constantly worrying about truancy agents in whatever locale the group played, knew there was vaudeville work up in Montreal, Canada. So he began venturing north of the border, hustling up work there during the early 1940s. The trips in and out of Canada would be supplemented by work in and around the New England states. In Montreal, they took a place on de Bullion Street. The area was in a red-light district populated by hustlers and schemers. Sammy danced feverishly before the Canadians. “
Those were good days,” Sammy would come to recall of Canada. “We had a little status because we were in show business.” They played in French Canadian lodge halls, and they
hardly complained about the pay. Some weeks they earned forty-five dollars among them. “
And we were glad to get those gigs,” Sammy would remember. During lulls in work he’d dance on street corners, an ear listening to the jangle of coins dropped into the hat at his feet. “My father had an after-hours club here in Montreal,” recalls Randy Phillips. “Scalpers used to [sell] Sammy suits. They had no money. They wore stolen clothes.” They played the Midway Theatre and the Starland. Young Sammy wowed the Montreal audiences. Sammy would remember the city as being “
a mecca for vaudevillians.”

One of the things Sammy witnessed in Canada was a far more relaxed attitude among the races, between Negro and white. For the most part the Canadian blacks were from the Caribbean islands; many were Jamaican. White Canadians had no psychological wound regarding the American Negro, and the revelation excited both Mastin and Sam Sr. Both men began dating white women. A whole new social world opened for the two hoofers. Sammy was still a mere teenager, but he had long lived in an adult world. He ate around adults, performed onstage with adults, poked his head in on their conversations. The idea of sex had started to enter his mind. He couldn’t help but take notice of his father and Will Mastin and the Canadian women on their arms. His eyes glinted like a young wolf’s.

White women. Interesting prey.

Will Mastin was a realist. He knew vaudeville was over. He’d arrive in yet another town, and yet another friend from days gone by would be out of the business—or dead. Yet another theater had posted a closing notice. He was not one to look to the past for sentimentality—it paid no bills. Mastin was more fortunate than most acts—he had a member of his trio who was already looking forward to the future. Sammy Jr. was beginning to imagine a whole new world opening before him. He had begun experimenting onstage, grabbing at instruments and playing them, singing songs, improvising. He convinced himself his homework was to watch, so on double and triple bills, he’d chat up the other acts. He’d sit between them during coffee breaks. He’d run to his room and practice what he had seen them do earlier onstage. He’d challenge them to tap contests, his whole body whirring across rehearsal stages. He was surprised at how little sleep he needed. He rushed through some days with candy bars in his pockets; he skipped down staircases using dance steps—just as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson had done in those movies with little Shirley Temple, and just as the legend had taught him in person—then he skipped right back up them.

He began reading audiences, studying their faces. When dancer Paul Winik ran into Sammy again, he could see that the boy had used his time on the road wisely. “Sammy had it all: a dancer, a musician, a singer, a drummer. I remember when either of us knew nothing about the future.”

Two traveling show-business families who reek of royalty. The four gentlemen standing are the Ames Brothers. The Will Mastin Trio catches their show at the Copacabana in 1953. Seated in center on the left is Mastin. Directly across from Mastin sit Sam Sr. and his new lady, Rita, a Harlem nurse. Sammy has already begun telling acquaintances how “classy” Rita is
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

The trio would bound into a city and look for the cheapest lodging possible. Young dancer Prince Spencer met the trio for the first time in 1940 in Detroit. “That’s when [Sammy] was wearing a zoot suit,” he says. “He was living at the Carlton Hotel. I was living at a better hotel, called the Norwood, in Detroit. A lot of time I’d cook for him in my room. They put me out of my room for cooking for them. They wanted to save money.”

On December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes flew over Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, drawing America into the war in Europe. Draft notices arrived in mailboxes. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Sammy was still weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday, too young, right now, for war. Will Mastin wasn’t worried; he was, like Sam Sr., beyond age. Some nights they huddled together around the radio, listening to reports of war and shaking their heads in unison. Other nights they listened to
Amos ’n’ Andy
, the popular radio series. Still other nights they listened to boxing, which was usually followed by gentle shadowboxing in the air around them, laughing and playing, but never too
rough with Sammy, lest he strain a muscle, hurt an ankle. Then where would the trio be?

Let other boys chase athletic heroes. Let them sit in cold stadiums on Saturday afternoons rooting as their football gods galloped downfield. Young Sammy was inspired by tap dancers. He made mental notes of the best duets and quartets he saw. He listened to singers on the radio croon deep into the night. He celebrated unknown acts and musicians whom few seemed to know about save himself and small knots of others. His radar zeroed in on talent. And in 1942—ever a searcher, ever a dreamer—Sammy found his lifelong musical hero.

Frank Sinatra, a New Jersey–born singer, had made a name for himself in 1939 with the Tommy Dorsey band. “All or Nothing at All” was one hit; “I’ll Never Smile Again” another. On December 30, 1942, Sinatra appeared on a bill at the Paramount in New York City with Benny Goodman. The young singer caused near riots. Teenage girls fainted. He stood at stage’s edge and looked as if he might take flight like an angel; the shrieks only got louder inside that semi-darkened theater. At another Sinatra appearance—this one at the Capitol—Sammy took his grandmother Rosa to see him. It was as if he were showing her what he hoped to become. He clipped Sinatra articles and kept them in a scrapbook. And wherever he went—town to town—his Sinatra scrapbooks went with him. His father was his father, Will Mastin was Will Mastin. Money came between the three of them. It was different with a true hero. There was something mystical and mysterious about a hero. There must exist a great psychological gulf between hero and acolyte; that gulf is the carpet the acolyte rides in on.

A reed-thin singer, Sinatra looked nearly malnourished. But bobby-soxers fainted over him. He had a voice that seemed to be canyon-wide. And he had a mother back in Hoboken who loved him ferociously.

Sammy would be seen with one hand in his pants pocket, the other hand cupping a cigarette, a loose-fitting suit jacket on with one button buttoned. Just like Sinatra in all those photos. “His idol was Frank Sinatra,” Winik recalls. “He worshiped that man.”

Sammy sat up nights listening to Sinatra, rubbing the edges of his albums, dreaming. “The biggest excitement in the world for him was to hear Sinatra sing,” says Winik.

He’d follow him. He’d honor him. He would even, in time, steal stylistic points from him—the butterfly bow ties, the overcoat slung over the shoulder. He’d send fan notes. Sammy’s twin loves were now comic books and Frank Sinatra. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. let the boy dream, gave him money when he spent all of his own so he could buy fan magazines that featured Sinatra. They didn’t give a damn about Sinatra themselves. Their vaudeville world was gasping for breath. They were rumbling around the country like well-dressed vagabonds.

One was from Hoboken, one from the road. One Italian, one Negro. It became a tender and tough love story, two performers, both fiercely competitive, pouring the juice of life at each other’s feet. “You got your shoes?”
(
AUTHOR
’
S COLLECTION
)

•     •     •

One afternoon, ambling around Los Angeles as he was wont to do—eyeing marquees, stargazing—Sammy met up again with Prince Spencer, the young dancer he had first met in Detroit. Spencer was now a member of the Four Step Brothers, an elegant quartet. (They were not brothers at all; it was merely a stage name.) Prince and Sammy were the same height, the same size. Around one another—and without any urging whatsoever—they’d break into dance steps; they laughed and clapped their hands at each other’s inventiveness. Spencer, a native of Toledo, Ohio, was a phenomenal acrobatic flash dancer. He could jump in the air and touch the tips of his shoes with each fingertip. He
was suave and always well dressed. “They had nothing going,” Spencer would remember of the trio when he met up with them again. “They were glad to be in my company.” Prince had money; he could treat the dancers to a meal. He remembers a particularly sad conversation he had with Sam Sr. “Sam Sr. had to go pawn something to get Sammy something for Easter,” says Spencer.

As Spencer watched the trio, he found himself pondering how it all worked—exactly how Mastin meshed with the father and son; how the father knew when to halt Mastin from working his son too hard; when Sammy himself knew to pull back from the spotlight, lest in his youthful exuberance he vanquish his father and Mastin onstage. “Big Sam worked for Will,” says Spencer. “This was all Will’s ingenuity. Will would hustle up the work. Will’s thinking was, ‘Don’t make this little kid bigger than my act.’ ”