In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (27 page)

Men gave Eartha Kitt things. Being Eartha Kitt, she accepted those things. She was just a sharecropper’s daughter from rural North Carolina, given up in her childhood. Even in the bright lights of La Vien En Rose, she was still a hurt child. She told Sammy—while admiring the diamond on her finger—that she’d ponder his proposal. He turned giddy, laughing inside himself. Monet and Picasso may have confused him, but not diamonds. Women liked diamonds. He didn’t have to read books to know such things.

“The next day,” adds Kitt, “I read in Earl Wilson’s column that he had given me this ring. Now, how would Earl Wilson have known? Sammy had gone to the phone and called Earl Wilson. That put me off. It sounded like a publicity stunt—instead of sincerity.”

Sammy had bought the ring from George Unger, his jeweler. Unger called Rand. “Hey Jess, I got a problem. The kid owes me a lot of money. He took this diamond ring from me.’ I said, ‘Diamond ring? What’s he need a diamond ring for?’ George said, ‘He’s getting engaged to Eartha Kitt.’ ” Neither Unger nor Rand knew that Kitt had huffily told Sammy that the engagement was off, but she’d keep the ring nevertheless. Sammy saw publicity in the whole affair, his name again in the gossip columns. But Rand didn’t like it. He questioned Sammy, and Sammy finally agreed it would be nice to have the ring back; there were already high jewelry debts that needed to be settled. Rand scooted over to Kitt’s hotel room. “It’s a friendship ring,” Kitt, cold-eyed, told him. Rand pondered the comment. “Ain’t that kind of friendship in the world,” he told her. Kitt, unrepentant, kept it. Jess Rand was hardly finished. He phoned Kitt’s press secretary and told her he’d take the whole story to the press, and would make it seem as if Kitt had taken advantage of a gullible Sammy Davis, Jr. “We got the ring back,” says Rand.

•     •     •

Even when handling jewelry, rubbing his fingers across pieces of it, Sammy was caught between the old and the new: old vaudevillians used jewelry for currency, credit, safety—as he had seen as a little child in the backseat rolling along with his father and Mastin, when jewelry was bartered for freedom, to avoid arrest. But to the grown-up Sammy, jewelry—especially diamonds—was to be used for emotional currency and self-esteem. He believed that within the giving of it—the dazzling sparkle—lay the definition of love. Of that, he felt sure.

The contretemps involving Sammy, Eartha Kitt, and Jess Rand regarding the ring was not yet over. Both Rand and Sammy felt Eartha—having been shamed into returning the ring—might unleash a story line to the public that Sammy was immature, a word she often used about Sammy even to him. Rand, in the fever pitch of public relations, decided to preempt what they felt Kitt might do. So Rand, writing as Sammy, wrote an article—“Why I Broke with Eartha Kitt”—and tried to sell it to
Brown
magazine. A part of the contract, written by Rand, who was now billing himself as Sammy’s “news agent,” was indeed curious:
“As Sammy Davis’ news agent, I further agree that BROWN MAGAZINE is in no manner obligated to compensate either Sammy Davis Jr., the Will Mastin Trio or myself for this story which Sammy Davis Jr. is donating to BROWN MAGAZINE exclusively and free of charge.” In addition, there was a rider attached to the contract: “No pictures of Sammy Davis Jr. & any white chorus or Copa girls to be printed in this article or any other.” In Sammy and Rand’s telling, it all came down to Sammy’s busy-busy schedule—record deals, movie discussions, and so on—and there simply being no time for love, or Eartha. Alas,
Brown
took a pass on the article.

Abe Lastfogel’s dream to get his client a television deal paid off in the summer of 1953, when ABC signed Sammy to a $150,000 contract to do a TV pilot. The money, of course, would only be paid out should the pilot sell. Considering TV’s history with Negroes, the odds against success were daunting.

In 1939, the first Negro had starred in a television series. The medium was still fairly new; the star was Ethel Waters—Sammy’s costar in
Rufus Jones for President
, his first movie. NBC named her vehicle simply
The Ethel Waters Show
. Waters, along with costars, performed sketches from
Mamba’s Daughters
, a Broadway play she had starred in. “
Results offered sharp contrasts,”
Variety
would comment about the pioneering show, “all the way from deeply stirring drama to feeble slapstick comedy and not-too-effective scientific lecture. When it was good it was quite good but when it was bad it was capital B.”

After just one episode, the Waters show, without explanation, was yanked. Years would pass before another Negro was featured in a starring role. In 1948, CBS hired Bob Howard, a Negro, who hosted
The Bob Howard Show
. On the show, Howard, a musician, played the piano, all the while stopping to introduce other programs on the network. Howard was not above singing minstrel tunes, such as “Dark Town Strutters.” His show was also short-lived.

The DuMont network, which began airing in 1946, was smaller than the other networks and also more willing to take risks. The network had a progressive streak. In 1948, DuMont introduced
The Laytons
, a show starring a Negro maid played by Amanda Randolph. (Television—like the movies—had catapulted the Negro maid into a kind of backhanded cultural icon of the Negro race.) The high hopes for the Randolph vehicle never materialized, and the show lasted less than a year. The same year, CBS introduced
Sugar Hill Times
, a Negro variety show that featured, among others, Timmie Rogers. Rogers and others in the cast found steady work—at least for thirteen months, after which the show was canceled. Its setbacks aside, DuMont was not finished in its attempts to integrate the world of early television. The network offered a program featuring Hazel Scott. And there were those who suddenly thought that Scott, a pianist born in Trinidad and celebrated in New York City’s swanky café society, might usher in a new type of show for the Negro woman. In 1950 the network gave Scott her own show. Scott, who was married at the time to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, would simply play herself—a sophisticate in evening wear—tapping out tunes and singing. “
Hazel Scott has a neat little show in this modest package,”
Variety
would report. “Most engaging element in the air is the Scott personality, which is dignified, yet relaxed, and versatile.” When Scott’s name surfaced during an FBI investigation of communist sympathizers linked to the entertainment industry, the fate of her show seemed a foregone conclusion. Her husband, the enterprising Powell, encouraged her to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Scott, a flinty personality, was eager to do so. “
We should not be written off by the vicious slanders of little and petty men,” she told the committee, speaking for herself and other artists. “We are one of your most effective and irreplaceable instruments in the grim struggle ahead. We will be much more useful to America if we do not enter this battle covered with the mud of slander and the filth of scandal.” It was a brave appearance, but Scott failed to realize it was too late; the mud had already been thrown. Within three months her show was off the air. (Scott would spend much of the remainder of the decade in Europe.)

Television wasted little time in getting back to what it knew best when it came to Negro performance: the matronly maid hovering around the white family. Ethel Waters was summoned again, this time in 1950 to play the title
role of
Beulah
. The show, which had originally been a hit radio series, quickly became popular. That did not, however, mean that Waters—both moody and blunt—was content. By the second season she said she was tired of the “
white folks kitchen comedy role,” and abandoned the part. Her replacement was Hattie McDaniel, who had been the first Negro to win an Oscar for her mammy role in the 1939 film
Gone with the Wind
. McDaniel, raised in Denver, had traveled alongside her father in her youth, performing with him in
The Henry McDaniel Minstrel Show
. By the time she took over the
Beulah
role, however, she was ailing. Hollywood’s Oscar-winning maid—who had supported herself in her early Hollywood years by washing dishes—died in 1952 from breast cancer. Louise Beavers, whose movie career was launched in 1927 in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, succeeded McDaniel. Beavers herself had played the mammy role in more than one hundred motion pictures. If Sam Lucas was an “Uncle Tom” for the ages, then Louise Beavers was certainly a mammy for the ages.

Blackface was now passé. Still, Negro culture—warped and presented with stereotype on both radio and TV—made audiences laugh. On the evening of June 28, 1951, American TV received a funny-bone jolt that proved powerful. That night CBS debuted
Amos ’n’ Andy
, a comedy spinoff from the wildly popular radio series of the same name that had been running for more than two decades. On radio, Amos and Andy had been played by white actors with painful Negro dialects. The show’s fans were legion—among them Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, George Bernard Shaw (“
There are three things,” Shaw once said, “which I shall never forget about America—the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls, and
Amos ’n’ Andy
”), Frank Sinatra—and all three members of the Will Mastin Trio. Before the show premiered on TV, the two white actors who had performed on radio pleaded for an opportunity to repeat their roles on TV—in blackface. Television executives nixed the idea. Who better to play the roles than Negroes—themselves starved for TV opportunities?

Actually, despite its two-character title,
Amos ’n’ Andy
consisted of three primary players: Amos, played by Alvin Childress; Andy, played by Spencer Williams; and Kingfish, played by Tim Moore. The dialect was semiliterate, and the humor slapstick and stereotypical:

Amos ’n’ Andy
may have become a cultural phenomenon, but it was not without its detractors, chief among them the NAACP, which had been waging a long campaign to have the show canceled. Having the characters hidden on radio was one thing; to have them shown to millions of television viewers on a weekly basis was quite another. “
An entire race of 15,000,000 Americans,” the NAACP proclaimed, “are being slandered each week by this one-sided caricature.” The pressure showed no signs of lessening and led CBS to cancel
Amos ’n’ Andy
in 1953. It was the same year ABC signed Sammy to his television contract.

For months, television executives had worked on a format for Sammy. Mastin insisted he and Sam Sr. have roles in the show. The request stumped the executives. Finally, they came up with an idea. The show would be about a traveling musical act, a trio—just like the Will Mastin Trio! There would be skits and dancing, all revolving around the three show-business figures who made up the Lightfoot family. Sammy would need a love interest. He told TV executives he had just the actress in mind.

A gathering of vaudevillians. The legendary comic Jack Benny invited the Will Mastin Trio to go out on the road with him in 1953, then again in 1954
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

He remembered the strikingly beautiful Frances Taylor, whom he had met at Ciro’s when she was dancing with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe. Taylor was in Chicago, dancing as one half of Nicks & Taylor, when Sammy reached her and asked her to be in the pilot. She accepted without hesitation. Taylor was something of an ingénue herself, trained in classical ballet. She had been the first Negro ballerina to perform with the Paris Opera. Other cast members were Ruth Attaway and Frederick O’Neal. O’Neal, of course, had been one of the founders of the highly respected, Harlem-based American Negro Theatre. The producers came up with a name for the show:
Three for the Road
. Mastin didn’t like it and had another suggestion:
Three for the Road—with the Will Mastin Trio
. The producers raised an eyebrow. Mastin reminded
them that he had Sammy under contract, and threatened that he might bolt. So the producers relented.