In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (25 page)

She was blond and she favored pearls, the kind that looped snugly around the neck. She had a movie-star gorgeousness about her. There was something also very tender about her eyes; a forlorn look, as if she prayed to herself that life would give her more than just beauty. Her skin was so proudly white it looked porcelain. He thought it nothing less than a miracle that she loved him back, that she was there, in New York, lying beside him. Helen Gallagher was like something he had seen in one of those beautiful picture magazines he was always thumbing through at newsstands.

He was outside his dressing room, in his billowy shirt, his tight pants, at Bill Miller’s Riviera nightclub in New Jersey. The chorus girls—so white, so lovely—were milling about, getting ready to take the stage. They were adorned in snow-white outfits that had silvery sprinkles on them. Huge and birdlike feathered configurations sat atop their heads. In heels, they towered above him. “The Riviera Beauties,” they were called. Men came from miles to ogle them. “He found me backstage,” Helen Gallagher says. “He came backstage and said, ‘Hi, I’m Sammy Davis, Jr. I just wanted to say hello.’ ” He always began like that, shyly. It was because he had to first get across the swinging bridge of race. Once that was traversed, however, he’d go in for the kill. He offered to take Helen and the chorus girls—the whole crew!—to a Broadway play. Really, he wanted only her, but the other girls could serve as his shields. There was safety in numbers. Sammy and a dozen pretty white girls.

Theatergoers thought he was the chauffeur. He didn’t care. Thirteen Broadway tickets. He was always spending next week’s paycheck. The Broadway play was
Me and Juliet
, a musical, directed by George Abbott. He laughed and she laughed and all the other girls laughed.

“He really wasn’t a superstar then,” Gallagher says. “I could go out between shows and watch him. He was incredible. He sang great. He was an incredible dancer. And he had such charisma with the audience. He had the audience in his hands.”

She was a dancer, a Riviera Beauty, and Sammy’s first love. Helen Gallagher kept their early 1950s romance a secret from her parents, until she could no longer hold it inside. They did not approve, the first of many such endings for Sammy’s romantic interludes
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

Sometimes he’d stand still as a tree onstage, and then break into a sweet little soft-shoe number. It was as if he were dancing inside himself. She felt he was romancing her from the stage.

“He was good enough to perform at the hotels, but not to go into the dining rooms,” Gallagher says. “It drove me crazy.”

It was a funny thing about Bill Miller’s Riviera. She never saw many Negroes in the audience. “[The doormen] could say, ‘We don’t have your reservation.’ ”

He was Negro, she was white, and it was 1953. It had to be a secret. She dared not tell her parents. “I was never uncomfortable with it,” she says of her relationship with Sammy. “But it was an extreme departure for me. I was raised white, Irish Catholic. I must say people stared at us constantly.” One night, feeling brave, he took her to Birdland, that jazzily toxic nightclub in Manhattan. He was wearing his hair processed, with little cowlick-like curls at the
front. His Tony Curtis hairstyle. “People stared us down,” she remembers. Sammy never took Helen to Birdland again.

His words, thoughts, ideas, and movement were all a rush of motion. She wanted, more than anything, for him to slow down. But he could not. “He was always on high speed, like he was rushing through life to the next thing.”

At times, when the two of them were alone, he’d stare at her, her hair and her blue eyes, as if he were studying the interiors of a miniature castle. “He was just fascinated,” she says, “by someone so absolutely his opposite.”

He hustled her up to Harlem, to meet Rosa, his grandmother. It made him feel proud to show her that he had family. Not just Will Mastin and his father, Sam Sr., who were men, and who made up the act, but family, which meant women. “Rosa liked me. She thought I was good for him,” says Gallagher.

As he stood beside her, a mirror nearby, looking at her and himself in profile, something would seem to drain away from Sammy. She would sense it, and it would pain her. “He thought he was ugly, and he wasn’t, because there was so much charm.” She saw a picture of Elvera, his mother, and noticed her beauty, and tried to reassure Sammy of his own looks, which obviously were connected to his mother’s. “I said to him once, ‘Your mother’s very beautiful, and she cares about you.’ And he said, ‘She doesn’t care about me, and she thinks I’m ugly.’ ” She was stunned by the comment.

Helen Gallagher grew up excited to watch tap dancers perform, and had studied tap as a child. She thought the Will Mastin Trio eccentric for merely existing and holding on. “The only other trio I remember at that time were the Dunhill Dancers. I didn’t know any other trios.” Mastin and Sam Sr. intrigued her—quiet men who cared for Sammy. “I once said, ‘Your uncle …,’ and he said, ‘He’s not!’ I guess that was a sensitive spot.”

She wanted to hear of his life, of Harlem, of Negro life, and life on the road. But Sammy did not want to talk of Negro life. It was hard, sometimes unforgiving. He wanted, she felt, to talk of whites, of white people, white America. “He did so want to be white,” she says. “I think he thought he would be accepted more.”

Like Sammy, she knew of other Negro talents on the rise—Belafonte, Poitier, Eckstine. But she noticed how Sammy could wince discussing them. How easy it was for them—with their good looks, their height—to get the girl, the conquest, to disappear into the elevator with the lovely girl on their arm. “He wanted to be them—and white,” she says. She never saw Sammy with Belafonte or Poitier or Eckstine—or any Negro male friends. “He hung out with the white guys.”

When Sammy found out Helen had long had a girlish crush on actor Jeff Chandler, he smiled. A short while later Sammy appeared at the Riviera nightclub to surprise Helen; he had brought along Jeff Chandler, who was visiting
from the West Coast. Only she wasn’t there. It was her day off. “The next night Sammy says, ‘Where’d you go? I brought Jeff to meet you.’ ” Chandler took everyone out to a party at the Sherry Netherland.

His crowd was Jeff Chandler and Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. And Sinatra, when he was lucky enough to get close to him. “He was in absolute awe of them,” says Gallagher. “You would have thought Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were the biggest stars in the world. He was like a child.”

One night he told Helen he had to split, and whoosh, he was gone. He had to tape a radio spot. “I want you to listen to the show,” he had said to her. She sat listening. It was past midnight when she first heard him talking on the radio. “He said, ‘I want to dedicate this song to the girl I love. She knows who she is.’ And he sang ‘My Funny Valentine.’ He didn’t say my name, and that was to protect me, not him. It’s not a song we had ever discussed, but it’s a song I loved.”

He gave her things, gifts. At first it seemed charming, generous. Then it seemed strange and extravagant. “It was like a way of buying people,” she says. “It was generous, but it was overboard. I mean, he used to buy Sinatra things. What the hell did Sinatra ever need?” She felt she knew precisely what Sammy himself needed: “He had a great need to be loved.”

She was sitting in his dressing room one night at the Riviera. She was wearing pearls, a black sleeveless dress. He pulled his camera out—and flash. Her eyes were looking away from the camera’s eye. Still—in the photo, saved all these years later—Helen Gallagher looks ravishing.

They talked of brave things, such as marriage. “He and I probably would have made it had it been a different time,” she says. “He needed to be a star. I remember going to Brooklyn with Sammy and seeing Milton Berle. He said to Sammy, ‘She’s a nice girl, but you two will never be accepted, and she’s going to ruin your career.’ ” Berle’s bluntness shocked Gallagher; she thought Sammy might react with more emotion to the comment, but he did not, retreating behind chuckle and silence.

The subterfuge was painful, the furtive meetings. Helen Gallagher’s parents still didn’t know. Then she decided she didn’t care if they knew. A friend of Helen’s was giving a party on Long Island. She dragged Sammy along. Her parents would be there. “They were not thrilled,” she says. “They just said, ‘Helen, if you marry him you’re letting yourself in for a lot of heartache.’ ”

She’d finger the jewels Sammy had given her, and her conscience would get the better part of her. “He gave me some wonderful jewelry,” she remembers. “When we stopped seeing each other, I didn’t think I should keep it. I took it [all] back to George [Unger] and said, ‘Credit the account. I know he’s always into you for thousands of dollars.’ And he did.” (Unger was Sammy’s favorite jeweler.)

Sammy would find other loves—other funny valentines—and so would she. But Helen Gallagher was his real first love. And it is that love—if the poets and the balladeers are to be believed—that wounds the most, leaves the deepest scar. The kind of love that anchors itself inside you, even as you walk away with the memories: blond, blue-eyed Helen Gallagher, who wore pretty dresses, and pearls, and whose skin was so white, and who had small tap dancer’s feet.

She had wanted the Negro in him, the black man. And that was something he couldn’t give her. He wanted to give her the white Sammy, because his nose was pressed against the white world—Frank and Jeff Chandler and Tony Curtis showing him the view. It was a heaven and peek-of-hell existence. Being an impersonator and mimic, Sammy heard voices, and he gave those voices a home inside himself. Milton Berle: “…  she’s going to ruin your career.” So he walked away. Friends could sense his sadness.

When in pain, Sammy listened to music for hours on end, jazz and bebop. (“And believe it or not,” he told
Ebony
magazine, “I’ve got every record Frank Sinatra ever cut in his career.”) When his friends convinced him to talk about something that had saddened him, Sammy’s voice rose into its tiny, childlike register. He learned how to mimic emotions as well as voices. It was a deft ability—though not without a certain kind of danger.

Genes are mysterious and sometimes funny and inexplicable things. Inside the body, they are powered by forces both alien and intimate. Consider Sammy Davis, Jr., and his father and mother. His father was a quiet man. He had started out in life ambitious, winning dance contests. But once employed—more steadily than not—with the likes of Will Mastin, his ardor cooled. He had no more dreams to chase. He was a dancer, and he had a manager in Mastin, and that was good enough. He hummed along in life, his boy by his side, his good bottle of liquor tucked away. Where Will Mastin went, he went.

Elvera Davis was just the opposite of Sam Sr. She chased after her own future. She left home and family; the fires she started, she let rage. In pursuing her dream, she was possessed of a willful purpose. Her belief in herself was supreme. She packed her bags and climbed aboard train after train. A vision of her children crying out in the night did not slow her forward motion. She was all about execution. Of Elvera’s two children, the one most like her—willful, determined, and with a messianic belief in self—was Sammy. In drifting apart, there was also something that fused them together. It is quite possible that a child dropped onto an ever-widening path of seeking constant approval never stops hearing a kind of hum, an echo from beyond. And that echo becomes the maternal knock against the conscience.
Can’t you see me? Can’t you hear me?
It
becomes a sound that constantly escapes the width of the path, and the knock keeps echoing and echoing. Sammy had no idea that behind a bar in Atlantic City was the woman who obsessed him. Elvera Davis had driven herself out on the vaudeville road without a Will Mastin, without a father. For more than a decade she had been out there, searching, alone. That she never reached her goals was hardly any sin. She would certainly not be the last whose ambition outstripped her talent.

More than a decade, nearly four thousand days and nights, a woman searching, a woman alone. It took sheer will.

Elvera’s ferociousness had become Sammy’s.

By the end of 1953, Sammy, his father, Will Mastin, and Jess Rand had two homes: the Americana Hotel on West Forty-seventh in New York City, and the Sunset Colonial Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The Sunset Colonial room made Rand nervous. You could pick the lock with a butter knife. But it was the one hotel on Sunset Boulevard that was friendly to its Negro clientele.

Rand was curious why Sammy always had a camera swinging. He found out soon enough as Sammy dragged him to the Hollywood nightclubs and he snapped pictures of the stars. “He’d take the picture, and he’d send them a picture,” says Rand. Sammy once spotted Humphrey Bogart inside a Hollywood nightclub. “Pick up Bogart’s check,” Sammy instructed Rand. Bogie was impressed with Sammy’s eagerness. “Bogart used to have Sammy over to his house for Christmas,” says Rand, who became astonished at Sammy’s ability to ingratiate himself into the lives of others. “Sammy was like Zelig—he always happened to be ‘there.’ I remember going to a party one night and Marlon Brando was sitting on the floor talking with Wally Cox. Sammy stepped over them and said, ‘Mr. Brando, I’m Sammy Davis, Jr. I do impressions of you in my act.’ Brando said, ‘Stop doing it.’ ”