In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (3 page)

The Boyars sat with Sam Sr., fond of playing the horses now, and he was as helpful as he could be. They went and found Will Mastin, head of the vaudeville trio that Sammy had begun his career in as a child performer. Mastin was cautious and weary on a good day; other days he was moody, distant, uncommunicative. White folk had always made him weary. Mastin listened to the Boyars’ questions. He shared a few memories—names of theaters, names of old vaudevillians. Not a word, however, about his own life, his own roots, his own past. What was in it for him? What percentage of the cut? He didn’t know why they wanted to drag up the past. It was useless jawboning. It was over with; life had gone on. They came back again, and it started to wear on him, and he wanted to know why it was taking so long to write the book, to gather the information, and he wondered if anyone was going to read a book about Sammy anyway. A couple of white kids—mere children!—cornering him like that. They stopped coming around, and he was happy when they did.

Nathan Crawford, Sammy’s valet, was also bewildered by the Boyars, by their questions and their tape recorder. He said not a word to them: “Nathan had no use for us.”

The Boyars approached Charlie Head, another member of the entourage, the passenger in the car accident in 1954 when Sammy lost his eye. Certainly
he’d have some insights to offer—vivid memories of the accident and that near-death experience. Charlie Head waved them off. “Can’t tell you why,” says Burt Boyar.

Still, they were awash in Sammy stories. They believed what they heard. A bourbon and Coke in his hand, a cigarette in the other—the hour late, then later—Sammy gabbed and gabbed, and they took all the gabbing as truth.

For Sammy—in addition to tapping unused performance juices in the arena of storytelling—the whole enterprise was cathartic. So many whites didn’t understand him. So many Negroes didn’t understand him! He couldn’t understand why; the Boyars couldn’t understand why. But they asked no penetrating questions. They did not force Sammy down roads he did not wish to go. The Boyars knew no Negroes. They knew no Negro authors, no Negro teachers. They knew only Sammy, and his world—his dresser, his wife, his father, Will Mastin. To them, Harlem—Sammy’s birthplace—might as well have been across the seas, in Peking. So they avoided Uptown.

Harlem unnerved Sammy anyway. Let Wilt Chamberlain and Willie Mays and Harry Belafonte rub shoulders with the denizens of Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, where they were often seen; Sammy preferred the Waldorf—yes, the Waldorf downtown—its large rooms, its menu, its ornate setting. And if Sammy preferred the Waldorf, then what in the world would the Boyars be doing in Harlem? Sammy, into the tape recorder:

The Boyars sat transfixed listening to Sammy. At times he’d alter his voice. He’d sound like a child. Then like a beatnik. Next an English aristocrat. He could sound like Amos ’n’ Andy, which is to say he could sound like a semiliterate hick crawling out of a cotton patch. On and on it went. He took the Boyars into the bygone world of vaudeville. They listened like hostages.

He was seducing them, and at seduction, Sammy was phenomenal.

“Jane and I were probably platonically in love with Sammy,” says Boyar. “You fell in love with Sammy without having a romantic or sexual relationship.”

Boyar, who by now had taken a leave of absence from his column-writing job, began to get worried about Geis Associates. He wasn’t getting the necessary feedback and editorial guidance. “It was a schlock operation,” he would conclude. “It wasn’t the class operation Sammy deserved.” The book-advance money had run out. Three years had gone by. And at the end of those three years—plenty of laughter, plenty of good southern soul food (collard greens, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, corn bread, all of which Sammy’s grandmother Rosa introduced them to; Sammy preferred Italian, like Sinatra), plenty of wonderful wine and lovely parties—there was no finished book and no money left. “I realized we didn’t have the best contract in the world,” says Boyar. He fretted but realized he had to go back to Meredith, his agent.

“I went to Scott and said, ‘We’re with the wrong publisher.’ He said, ‘No, no, you’re not.’ I said, ‘No, Scott, Sammy’s left this with me and I can’t do this to him.’ I said, ‘I have to talk to Bernard Geis and extricate myself from this.’ ” Meredith told Boyar that if he talked to Geis in an effort to get out of the contract, he would no longer represent him. Boyar, naive enough not to realize the possible ramifications of Meredith’s threat, gathered his nerve and went to see Geis. He didn’t want Geis to think he was bolting because it was a “schlock” operation, so he told the publisher he didn’t have enough money, that he needed more, that it was costly to keep up with Sammy Davis, Jr. Geis told Boyar he could give him no more money. So Boyar told him he wanted out of the contract. Geis said that would be fine, that he understood, and would release him from the contract. But there was a caveat. Boyar would have to return the entire $25,000 advance. Unfamiliar with book deal making, Boyar was stunned. He didn’t have the money. His palms got sweaty. He rushed to Jane, and it was Jane who rescued the both of them: she borrowed money from her father to repay Geis.

By the time 1963 rolled around, Burt and Jane were obsessed with their unsold book. They now had no publisher, and they had no agent. “By the time we broke from Geis we had a thousand pages written,” recalls Boyar.

A thousand pages. It was starting to feel like the
War and Peace
of a Negro entertainer. “It was our work, our love,” Boyar confesses.

They took to carting the thousand-page untitled, unclaimed, and seemingly unwanted manuscript with them around Manhattan, fearful if they left it in their apartment it might be stolen, ruining them. “Jane and I are now deeply, emotionally involved in getting this story told,” says Boyar. A hatcheck girl once stopped them at the St. Regis Hotel. She told them she’d be happy to take the suitcase they were carrying so it would be out of the way of the diners. They protested vehemently: their book rested inside the suitcase, and under no conditions would they let it out of their sight. Perhaps if they had been solo writers—Burt alone, or Jane alone—desperation might have set in, a feeling
that the walls were closing in. But they were a team, a unit. They leaned on each other. Their finances might have dipped precipitously low, but not their confidence.

When they were ready and feeling confident they had done the best they could, they flew out to Los Angeles to show Sammy the manuscript. “Jane and I wrote three pages of anti-Winchell stuff, because Winchell had been hard on Sammy,” recalls Boyar. By 1963, Walter Winchell’s potent column-writing days were coming to an end. The
New York Mirror
, which ran his column, had folded. Winchell was dodging several libel suits. Younger newspaper editors looked on him as a relic, as out of fashion as the fedora that he wore. He was an old man now, trying to cadge press credentials to get to some faraway place called Vietnam. Still, none of that mattered to Sammy. He believed in comebacks. Winchell—a former vaudevillian—might make a comeback. He might rise again. So what if he was, figuratively, dead: Sammy wasn’t about to tap-dance on the grave of a former powerful newspaper columnist. He might need Walter someday. On the margins of the pages where the material critical of Winchell appeared, Sammy scribbled—“Hot. Oh hot. Too hot.”

“That’s the only thing we took out of the book,” says Boyar.

The Boyars made their way back east after sharing the mostly finished autobiography with Sammy. They eventually found another agent in Carl Brandt. Brandt was part of a Manhattan literary agency that his father and mother owned. The agency—Brandt & Brandt—was noted for its large backlist of specialized books, most notably the cowboy novels written by Max Brand. Davis’s life story intrigued the young Carl Brandt, who had worked in Mississippi in the mid-1950s for the
Delta Democrat Times
, a bravely liberal newspaper owned by Hodding Carter, Sr. Sitting in New York City on the cusp of the explosive 1960s, Brandt sensed something about the hoped-for publication of the Sammy Davis manuscript: “I thought it was perfect timing.” He was confident he could sell the book.

He and the Boyars hit the pavement in New York City. “We went with Carl to every publisher in New York,” Boyar remembers. And every publisher in New York turned them down. Harcourt Brace said they would not even care to read the manuscript. Brandt and Boyar were perplexed.

Publishers were in the business of making money. And they needed to see, and imagine, how they would make their money. They could not exactly see their way to categorizing the Sammy Davis book. Was it a tell-all? How much about Sinatra? Was it biography masquerading as autobiography?

Carl Brandt, fearing he had absolutely nothing to lose, invited Boyar and Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux to join him at the Copacabana one
night so he could introduce them. “Who else has he published?” the naive and ill-informed Boyar asked Brandt about Straus, whose firm had published some of the more esteemed authors in the world of literature.

On the surface, the Davis autobiography would not seem an easy fit for the literary house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. But it was exactly that cut-against-the-grain approach that fascinated the agent. “It occurred to me,” remembers Brandt, “what would be more illogical than to have Roger [Straus] do it?”

Brandt had an in with Straus. Brandt’s mother was Carol Hill. Hill—dynamic and smart—had been the East Coast story editor for Metro Goldwyn Mayer before she married Carl Brandt, Sr. In 1948, while with MGM, Hill hired a scout in New York City to look for book properties. That scout was Roger Straus. Hill later ran her own literary agency—“a Tiffany-like agency,” as Roger Straus would remember—before merging with Carl Brandt’s agency after their marriage. The marriage yielded a son, Carl Jr., who was now squiring the Boyars around town.

Brandt found himself very much intrigued with not only Sammy but the Boyars as well. They appeared obsessed with their unpublished manuscript. They deemed themselves writers; they deemed Sammy a writer. A troika of writers. “The whole notion of having an autobiography written by three people was interesting,” Brandt recalls. “This wasn’t an ‘as-told-to’ book.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux had eclectic tastes and an intriguing history. Its reputation began to soar in 1949 following publication of Shirley Jackson’s
The Lottery
. In 1950 the house published
Look Younger, Live Longer
, by Gayelord Hauser. It wasn’t a literary book at all, but it sold a bundle—450,000 copies—proving that literary aspirations could coexist alongside commercial winners. The company had undergone various name changes—Farrar and Rinehart; Farrar, Straus and Young; Farrar, Straus and Cudahy—and on September 21, 1964, became known as Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The publishing house—located in Union Square, in rather grubby quarters—had produced the likes of T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, and Randall Jarrell, books and authors whom Roger Straus admired. Straus was partial to ascots and drove a convertible Mercedes-Benz. However, he was not a denizen of nightclubs. “I’m not a nightclub boy,” Straus would admit years later. “I wasn’t a Morocco or Stork Club aficionado.” On the night the Boyars and Brandt took Straus to the Copacabana, Sammy was—but of course!—performing.

And there he was, crooning, the hips swiveling, his gaze going from table to table, the voice changing in octave, the pure entertainer singing “Hey There” and “Black Magic,” then doing his mimicry. Roger Straus had never seen anything like it. He sat in astonishment. Sammy simply cast his spell. “This is,” Straus said, leaning over to Boyar, “a tour de force, isn’t it?” And in that moment, that moment of nightclub performance and literary imagination,
Roger Straus, distinguished publisher of Henry James, thought he might be able to publish a book about an entertainer—who just happened to be a Negro. Straus was falling under the Sammy spell, just as the Boyars had done. “He was charming,” Straus says. “He made friends fast. He liked people and showed it.”

When Straus finally got his hands on the manuscript to read, he deemed it publishable. “It was a helluva story,” Straus would remember. “It needs cutting here and there,” is all he told Jane and Burt.

The Boyars now had a publishing home and—as improbable as it seemed—had gone from Geis to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Straus understood why other publishing houses had turned the manuscript down. “If you’re doing a celebrity book, the celebrity book most likely is going to be of the type, ‘Did Marilyn Monroe fuck John Jones on Saturday night?’ But here was a book by and about a celebrity that wasn’t a muckraking book, but was a portrait about a talented man who led a hard life.”

Straus told Brandt he would commence negotiations.

The drama, however, was hardly over.

Carl Brandt wanted to have a larger voice in the literary agency and became entangled in a battle with Carol, his mother. At the same time, Carol had grown weary of Carl and his unpublished manuscript about Sammy Davis, Jr. In fact, she got tired of the whole enterprise, the way it seemed to be engulfing her office. “There are times when families shouldn’t be in business, and that was one of those times,” Brandt recalls. Just before negotiations were to begin with Farrar, Straus, the Boyars received a telegram from Carl’s mother, informing them that Carl no longer represented the book. “She said, ‘You will get rid of this book. It will not be in this office,’ ” recalls Carl.

Jane and Burt, just like that, went from having an agent to not having one. The Boyars became nervous. Roger Straus calmed them. He also offered $40,000. The Boyars and Sammy split the advance three ways. And finally they were in the Farrar, Straus fold.