In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (31 page)

Little Betty Thornburg. Little Sammy Davis, Jr. Not just Depression-era children, but Depression-era workers: to hell with that tummy ache—sing, dance, move!

Betty Hutton, song-and-dance lady, took the stage of the Last Frontier dressed in a black evening dress, her shoulders bare. She looked tough and sexy, belting in a voice that had, years earlier, also conquered Broadway. Standing onstage that night—on behalf of onetime child performer Sammy Davis, Jr.—Betty Hutton looked quite proud.

He looked helpless and nearly pitiful in his hospital bed, his head wrapped up, his world gone dark. But he never complained, and he never turned bitter. There were three shifts of nurses, and on every shift, the nurses would take extra care in tending to Sammy. “All the nurses had to go in and say hello to him,” says Henderson. He wanted some music, so Hull found a businessman in San Bernardino to donate some stereo equipment. And the whole hospital got wired with sound. Unable to have the bandages removed until more healing had taken place, Sammy was forced to use his ears as never before. “He loved people around him,” recalls Henderson. “He wanted to know, ‘Who are you and what do you do?’ He identified some people by their voices.” They brought
his fan mail up in sacks and read him letters. He was touched. Some military guy called, said he’d donate one of his eyes to Sammy. Of course it was impossible, but they told Sammy anyway. News of his accident kept humming on radios, from Harlem to Los Angeles. In a way everyone listening belonged to him, just like the country, or so he made himself believe, because he really had no hometown. He was an itinerant. He knew everyone and he knew no one. He could call anyplace home. Anyplace from Syracuse to Chicago to San Francisco to Seattle, wherever there was a theater, the passing of a paycheck from Will’s hand to his; wherever there was a blonde who wanted to slip beneath the covers with him. In a pinch—loneliness?—he’d take a Negro lady in Anywhere, America, and allow her to make him feel wanted and loved.

Virginia Henderson didn’t get over to Los Angeles that much. It was just one big town with a million cars. And true, it was Hollywood, but you could see Hollywood—or at least what it produced—on the black-and-white TV set. San Bernardino was big enough for those who resided there. It had things to do: the annual San Bernardino National Orange Show, for instance. Dr. Fred Hull was crazy about the orange show. He once went and watched an up-and-coming Negro act—the Will Mastin Trio—perform. And he thought they were pretty darn stylish.

But now San Bernardino had something else. Jeff Chandler strolling through the hallways of Community Hospital. And Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. And funnyman Jack Benny. And Eddie Cantor, with those wild eyes, grinning at the nurses. For years Sammy had cheered Hollywood on, slavishly saluting stars, sidling up to them, snapping their photos, his adoration shameless. Now it was being returned. Hollywood wanted Sammy to know how much they loved him too.

Cindy Bitterman and Eileen Barton were in a car in Los Angeles when the news of the accident came over the radio. “We turned around and went immediately to the hospital,” Bitterman recalls. Once at the hospital, they raced right to his room. “It was one of the most horrifying days of our lives to see this kid you love and his head bandaged and he is shaking like a leaf,” Bitterman says. “I had the shakes. One of the nurses had to go get me a pill. I thought this couldn’t happen to one of our friends.”

Cindy Bitterman, an ethereal beauty and Sinatra acquaintance, was one of the few women in Sammy’s life who didn’t want anything from him except to be a friend—a tricky word in the world of show business. She played mother, sister, wife, confidante. “I sat there and just held on to his hand. He had tears coming out of his other eye. I said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of you.’ ” There was one thing about Sammy that Bitterman found rather strange during his ordeal: “Sammy never mentioned his sister”—and his sister was someone she thought he might want by his side at such a time.

On the drive into San Bernardino with Bitterman, Eileen Barton couldn’t help but think how desolate the town seemed to be. “We sat and talked for a couple hours,” she would remember. “He was in the middle of nowhere at that hospital. He was lying there alone. So you can imagine how happy he was to see us.”

Where were Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier? How come he didn’t hear their voices from the side of the bed? Where was Nat King Cole? Couldn’t Dorothy Dandridge get up off her butt and visit? Didn’t she know how wonderful that would be for the photographers? Her lovely face, at bedside? Well, maybe they didn’t love him. His mother couldn’t come. She didn’t have any money. She phoned, though, calling from the bar in Atlantic City, where she was working. Ramona, his sister, couldn’t come either. No money. They couldn’t just up and fly all the way to California. Sammy didn’t have the money to send for them because he, as Tony Curtis knew, “was dead-ass broke.”

And where was the Negro press?

As the days passed, and the time neared for his release, new waves of doubt washed over Sammy. He knew the act really had no money. Or, rather, they had money but it was spent. They owed nightclub owners dates on money they had borrowed in the past. Now there would be a huge hospital bill. Then Dave Duschoff, owner of the Latin Quarter in Philadelphia, flew in. He pulled Dr. Hull aside, told him he’d pay the entire bill, told him not to stint on the entertainer’s hospital care. Then he left. The angels were coming forward. Sammy felt so much better.

But lying in the hospital bed, he realized he’d have to get back to work. He had to take care of his grandmother Rosa, because Rosa had taken such care of him. And he had to take care of Will and his father. Could he do that with just one eye? He wondered and wondered. “Everyone,” remembers his friend Amy Greene, “said his career is finished, it’s over. Who ever heard of a blind song-and-dance man?”

It was Cindy Bitterman who heard the deepest doubts coming from Sammy’s hospital bed. “One night he had a nurse call me,” she remembers. “He was in hysterics. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I have no place to go.’ He said, ‘Am I going to stay in a hotel?’ ” Bitterman didn’t know how to answer. She herself was boarding with her uncle. But she told herself she’d figure something out. “I said, ‘Get some sleep. You’re not going to be on the street.’ ”

Sammy kept hoping for Sinatra. Just by visiting, Sinatra could make things better. Surely that was Frank coming down the hallway just now. Only it wasn’t. It was someone else, and then someone else. Where was Frank?

Cindy Bitterman knew how hurt Sammy was that Sinatra had not yet come to visit. “I kept telling Sammy the reason Frank had not been out to see him
was because he had a bad cold and didn’t want to give him an infection.” But then she couldn’t take it any longer. So she got Sinatra on the phone—out of Sammy’s earshot—and told him to go to San Bernardino because he was hurting Sammy every day he didn’t show. And when she said it, there was an edge in her voice. She was one of the few women who had been in Frank’s life who could talk to him like that.

She left the hospital to go home still angered at Sinatra’s behavior. “When I got back, Frank’s car was in front of my aunt’s house,” she remembers. “He was in a rage. I went into a bigger rage. He wanted to know what I was doing in San Bernardino with Sammy. I said, ‘You don’t understand what you mean in this kid’s life.’ He said, ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ But at five in the morning he comes back to Coldwater Canyon. He was drunk. I came running out in a bathrobe. He started sobbing—not about Sammy, but about what a mess he had made of his life. I said, ‘I don’t want to see you again, because you’re so destructive.’ The next day about two hundred flowers arrived. But what did it mean?”

First he wanted to see Sammy’s doctor. Now. Word had spread that Sinatra was in the hospital. Dr. Hull was summoned. And Dr. Hull talked to Frank. Frank somehow made him feel inadequate. Asked him a lot of questions which put him on edge. Hull sensed condescension in Sinatra’s voice.

“He was Frank,” Hull would remember of their face-to-face meeting.

Just fill in the blanks—all the news clippings, all the horror stories, all the stories of Sinatra’s mercenary ways, slapping folks around, bullying, threatening. The tantrums and the fisticuffs. There was that way he could look at you with that fuck-you-buddy look. And right then, you knew, he was already beyond you, in both thought and action, the legs beginning to walk away. Which is just how he was now beginning to look at Dr. Frank Hull.

He was Frank.

Damn right he was Frank.

Come to check on Smokey, on Sammy, on Charlie, on the kid—whatever name he wanted to call him.

And Sinatra wasn’t finished with this Dr. Fred Hull. He was going to check him out. “He called around and found out my reputation was okay,” says Hull, still snickering decades later about how well his reputation held up against Sinatra’s snooping. Sammy was beside himself when Sinatra finally reached his room. All he heard was the Sinatra voice; his eyes were still bandaged. But it might as well have been a son reconnecting with a long-lost father. Sinatra didn’t have long. He told Sammy he’d be staying with him in Palm Springs when he got out of the hospital. And just like that—a snap of the finger—Sammy had a place to recuperate.

Whatever other demons moved Sinatra, generosity was a genuine part of his signature. To Sinatra it was just a small deed, the least he could do. Nevertheless,
the idea was not his; it was Cindy Bitterman’s. (“[Frank] called me,” Bitterman recalls. “I said, ‘I’m going to ask you something. I want you to invite Sammy to Palm Springs, invite him to stay with you.’ He paused. I said, ‘You’re playing for time. Say yes or no.’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ”)

Then Sinatra was gone, the soft patter of nurses’ shoes trailing him. It was like a scene in a movie, and all that had been required of him was a cameo. In and out. Frank playing Frank. He had things to do.

After Frank left, Sammy wanted to call someone to share the good news. “So he called me,” says Bitterman. “He was euphoric. I said, ‘Oh my God, Sammy. I’m so happy. While you’re doing that, we’ll find a place for you to live.’ ”

Sammy hated to be left alone. It was worse than hearing no applause from the stage. But his head hurt and his eye hurt and sometimes he needed rest and sleep and the nurses would shoo people from the room. Sometimes, at night, he had problems sleeping. The radiators hissed. He worried about Will and his father. He worried how his grandmother Rosa was taking the news back in New York.

Hospital staff had hung new wallpaper in Sammy’s room—“to pep him up” on the day the bandage was to be removed, says Henderson.

Hull began the process of removing the bandage slowly. An ugly scar swooped across the bridge of Sammy’s nose. The left eye, of course, was gone, a deep dark socket now visible. On the dead eye, the eyelid was lower than the eyelid of the good eye. With the scar and the drooping eyelid, Sammy looked as if he had been in a terrible fight, perhaps with a knife. “Where am I?” he asked Hull, looking around, taking measure of the surroundings. Hull examined the eye socket, and then the good eye. He saw nothing to worry about and believed the healing process would go fine.

Much about Sammy’s future now stood unknown, a fact echoed in the stillness of the room with the doctor and nurses and Mastin and Sam Sr. all focused on Sammy.

The scar would heal. But he would never quite look the same again. The left eye would forever appear askew. Dr. Hull instructed Sammy in the kinds of eye exercises that would be important to his recovery. He warned him there would be problems with depth perception, but he assured him that, in time, he would get used to working with just one eye.

The fear of rejection always crawled beneath Sammy’s skin. He had an overbite, and he had crooked teeth. Now, facially scarred, he couldn’t help but sneak peeks at himself in the mirror. Tony Curtis worried about what effect the loss of the eye might have on Sammy’s psyche: “Sammy never started out as handsome. It was frightening for Sammy,” he says. Poitier and Belafonte and James Dean—Sammy would stare at Dean at Hollywood parties with awe—had currency on good looks. As did Curtis. Female fans nearly dropped at the
sight of them. They were not just handsome; many women found them gorgeous. Sometimes Sammy talked to Curtis about the years before the act found celebrity. “He said it was tough to get girls,” Curtis recalls.

Talent, of course, was a beautiful thing. And it was talent—sheer uncontained talent, the singing and dancing, the all-around entertaining—that made Sammy beautiful. “
Onstage he makes me think of Cary Grant,” Marilyn Monroe said of Sammy.

The country had rumbled along nervously that year.

Senator Joseph McCarthy, the communist hunter, had his tent folded down via national TV—80 million had watched the McCarthy hearings that spring—when he shamed himself by making more ludicrous accusations. Boston lawyer Joseph Welch was army counsel during the hearings. McCarthy—sweaty, fervid—went after a member of Welch’s staff. It was a severe misstep. “
Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” Welch said, a TV audience watching. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last have you no sense of decency?” At that, finally, a nation seemed to gasp.

Will and Sam Sr. never had to worry about any political goings-on. They weren’t trying to be intellectuals or poets or writers or playwrights—all of whom had been victims in the McCarthy witch-hunts. Their politics was entertainment. The only subversive activity they engaged in was trying to get next week’s pay a week early to settle some debts.

A young white kid down in Memphis with a shock of black silky hair and feminine lips was entering the consciousness of the nation’s music scene. Disc jockeys were saying they had never seen anyone quite like Elvis Presley.

In November, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio split. And there were so many who said they were so wonderfully matched when they married eleven months earlier. His baseball heroics, her film stardom, their good looks. But where he was private, she was a publicity geek, klieg lights and flashbulbs serving like some kind of strange oxygen to her. He couldn’t understand it, any of it, so it was over. “
The truth,” Monroe would confide, “is that I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men fool themselves. Men sometimes didn’t bother to find out who I was, and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving someone I wasn’t. When they found this out they would blame me for disillusioning them and fooling them.” Maybe those words actually originated in Marilyn’s mouth. Maybe some hack wrote them out for her, then she uttered them. Still, they were not without an admirable kind of perceptiveness. And so it was: DiMaggio, who had lived a dream, had been fooled by a dream.