In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (32 page)

Joltin’ Joe climbed into his car, a navy blue Cadillac, and glided away from it all.

A new kind of TV news show premiered in the nation’s capital the third week of November. It was called
Face the Nation
.

Many school districts across the country were still refusing to enforce the Supreme Court’s May ruling striking down “separate but equal” schools. The Earl Warren haters—he was the chief justice—grew by the day.

On Broadway, a musical called
By the Beautiful Sea
was still running. It starred Shirley Booth as a softhearted former vaudevillian helping out actors on Coney Island. New York critic George Jean Nathan described the show in rather beguiling prose: “
The show is largely of the kind that tries to boost itself into some life by periodically bringing on the routine chubby Negress singer who while rendering the routine saucy ditties pumps her avoirdupois up and down like a tureen of demented meringue to an accompaniment of the usual dental and ocular exuberance and that further purveys the usual cute little colored boy in dance steps with the leading lady.” Another musical,
The Pajama Game
, was also still running on Broadway. One of its featured songs was “Hey There,” now being sung from the airwaves by Sammy Davis and given an extra dose of sentiment from the deejays. The musical was about a strike in a pajama factory. Carol Haney was one of the stars. One night her understudy went on. The understudy was a smash. Her name was Shirley MacLaine.

Elia Kazan’s
On the Waterfront
was in the can, being prepared for release. Studio executives were high on the picture. It was about waterfront shenanigans, mob intimidation, and broken dreams. The stars were Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Marlon Brando. (Kazan, Saint, and Brando would all eventually win Oscars.)

Down in Montgomery, Alabama, a young Negro minister by the name of Martin Luther King received a letter—as much a letter as a warning—from his father: “
You see, young man, you are becoming very popular. As I told you, you must be very much in prayer. Persons like yourself are the ones the devil turns all of his forces aloose to destroy.”

Eight days after entering the hospital, Sammy was discharged. He wore an eye patch. He walked gingerly, from weakness and the lingering effect of the bruise to his leg. Some reporter asked Will Mastin when Sammy might be ready to get back to work. “
Whenever he’s ready,” offered the taciturn Mastin. “There’s no rush. When his eye muscles are strong enough and when he says he wants to go to work, that will be the time.” Mastin privately hoped sooner rather than later.

The act had no money coming in. And they had already had to cancel weeks’ worth of work. Mastin knew that show business could be a cold affair. There were nightclub owners who’d forget you overnight, no matter what promises they made to a performer lying in a hospital bed flat on his back. There were other hot acts out there, climbing up the ladder just to snatch your billing. Why, hadn’t the Will Mastin Trio shoved other acts to the side, into the background, farther down the marquee billing? Ask Janis Paige about Ciro’s and Sammy Davis, Jr. Will Mastin worried what lay ahead.

Nurses loaded all of Sammy’s fan mail into huge sacks. He told the hospital staff he’d be back. He felt they had saved his life. He was always over-grateful, his thank-yous always epic. When Henderson and Hull mentioned their hopes for a new hospital someday, Sammy said he’d like to help. They didn’t exactly know what he meant, but it made them smile.

The Negroes who worked in the kitchen sought him out, to press their flesh against his. The world was dangerous; they wanted him to be careful.

He was alive. He had one good eye. His father and Will Mastin considered it divine. They loved him, and they needed him. Sometimes there were those who spent time with them who thought they needed him more than they loved him. Especially when an argument broke out among the three—more often than not the arguments were about Sammy’s wasteful spending habits. But sometimes it was just family being family—argument and disagreement the flip side of unity and togetherness. But now, with him leaving the hospital, the two wanted to show him how much they loved him, so they had gone out and purchased a little something for Sammy. He saw it before he touched it. So what if they were getting older. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. could still produce magic: it was a Cadillac—convertible, lime green. Just like the smashed-up one. As if none of it ever happened. Sammy smiled. Will and Sam Sr. brightened.

A new car to take him forward, and an eye left behind, Sammy and the others climbed into the shiny Cadillac. Hospital staff members stood waving.

Then the Cadillac vanished down the road.

Dr. Fred Hull’s work was hardly finished. He went about the work of ordering a prosthetic eye for Sammy.

The history of prosthetic eye making had been an arduous one, dating from sixteenth-century Europe. The first process involved metal and gold; those injured would have a metal ball painted, fastened to a rope tied around their head to keep it in place. Eventually, glass was put to use. Still, the fake eye was clunky and uncomfortable. In the nineteenth century, Ludwig Mueller-Uri, a German, revolutionized the process of prosthetic eye making. He had a strong impetus: his small son had lost an eye. Mueller-Uri’s occupation was also quite fortuitous; he was a glassblower who sometimes made eyes for dolls. With his son’s need of a model eye, he turned his hobby into a mission. He wanted to make an artificial eye that looked human, lifelike. He began to use “bone glass,” which provided the useful effect of a glint to the eye. Later, the use of acrylic would make the eye even more authentic-looking. It was a pair of these acrylic eyes that blind and deaf Helen Keller—who would become a celebrated lecturer on behalf of the handicapped—took to wearing. “
No longer did Helen Keller have to be photographed in profile, and from then on, most photographs would show her gazing straight ahead,” a Keller biographer would write. “She was often described in newspaper interviews as having ‘big, wide,
open, blue eyes,’ few reporters realizing that such a luminous countenance came out of a box.” But the glass that Mueller-Uri used could not be imported from Germany during and right after World War II. Still, Mueller-Uri’s invention had inspired American technicians, who constructed their own plastic eyes for wide use.

Days after Sammy was released from the hospital in San Bernardino, Jess Rand, on left, hosts a party for him. Film star Jeff Chandler is on Sammy’s left. (The woman on Chandler’s left was a party crasher; the host had never met her before.) Seated next to Marilyn Monroe is renowned photographer Milton Greene. Whenever Sammy found himself in a photo with Monroe, he would soon begin denying rumors that they were having an affair. The denial was Sammy’s way of titillating the tabloids—inasmuch as the rumor found a life only in Sammy’s breathless denial of it
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

“I went with him to the doctor who was doing the prosthetic,” recalls Jerry Lewis. Upon seeing the eye fitted into Sammy’s facial socket, Lewis immediately complimented him—lest Sammy become despondent over the way he now looked. “Sammy said to me, ‘If the prosthetic looks so good, maybe
you
should have it done.’ ”

It lay 120 miles east of Los Angeles, just a spit of land, a desert oasis. The weather was nearly perfect. There were hot springs and palm trees and plenty of Mexicans to work the land, to tend the eucalyptus and mimosas that dotted the gardens. There was not much talk of Hollywood or movie deals. You came to Palm Springs to breathe the air, and you came to feel blessed of your good fortune.

Frank Sinatra much appreciated the resortlike feel of the place. There were often guests at his Palm Springs hideaway to keep him company. They were treated like royalty—lavish spreads of food, cheeses, innumerable wines, gift boxes in each guest room. The servants were smooth operators; everyone’s privacy was highly respected, just as Frank demanded. Sometimes Sinatra had programs printed up: when to meet in the bar, what the evening’s activities would be.

“He’d take armies out to dinner,” says Roxanne Carter, a guest at the compound.

He didn’t play much of his own music on the record player. He was too classy for that; he did, however, have a thing for Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and their music often wafted through the house.

Recuperating in Palm Springs was a wonderful tonic for Sammy. He had never known such comfort, such pampering. He whiled away his time listening to music and idling by the swimming pool, where he fretted about his future. It was Sinatra who kept him calm and made him feel everything would be all right. Sammy’s awe for Sinatra—already immense—only deepened. “He was so relieved that he was alive and that he could still work,” Tony Curtis says. Sammy returned to Los Angeles following several weeks in Palm Springs. He was now wearing an eye patch. He got the idea from his memory of Wiley Post, a pilot who wore one and who died in a plane crash with Will Rogers.

“I told him, ‘You got to use it to your advantage,’ ” Keely Smith says. She suggested he keep wearing the patch “and make jokes about it.”

But he couldn’t quite make jokes about it yet—nor could his friends. “I was
devastated,” Helen Gallagher would recall. “I felt terrible. He said, ‘As if I don’t have enough strikes against me, now I have this.’ He was depressed.”

Sammy already had two commitments lined up. Jess Rand was going to be getting married in December, and Sammy would be best man. He also had to begin rehearsals. Herman Hover, manager of Ciro’s, had promised the act—at Sinatra’s instigation—that they had a Ciro’s engagement as soon as Sammy felt well enough to perform. The trio’s appearances there with Janis Paige years earlier were still fondly remembered. There were, of course, those who began to wonder if the loss of an eye would diminish Sammy’s ability. They wondered what toll it might take on his nerve. Hover would give him time to prepare, booking the act’s appearance for early January.

On December 2, Jess Rand threw a birthday party for himself, his last as a single man. His wedding to pretty Bonnie Byrnes was a week away. Sammy liked parties; he showed at Jess’s wearing his eye patch. Beneath it could be seen a large white bandage still covering his eye. It looked frightful, as did the scar across his nose. It seemed as much a coming-out party for Sammy as a birthday party. Many of Rand’s and Sammy’s friends were there, giving the evening a feeling of warmth and celebration for both of them. A surprise guest was Elvera, Sammy’s mother, who had come in from Atlantic City. “She told me if I ever got married, she’d dance with me,” says Jess Rand—and Elvera, the former showgirl, did. She could still cut a step. (She had had to borrow money from the owner of the bar she worked at in Atlantic City to fly to the West Coast. It was her first time seeing Sammy since the accident.) Jeff Chandler looked, as always, smoothly elegant. The breathless woman huddling near photographer Milton Greene was Marilyn Monroe. She wore a black dress with spaghetti straps, and looked both seductive and hazy. Sammy smoked and sipped his drink and chatted away the evening. He liked nothing better than to be surrounded by the famous, by fame itself, by those who had been and were still as hungry as he was for whatever mystical gratification lay on the other side of the magazines and on TV and radio. All they could do was deliver the superficial; they could show the homes and the money spent and the Cadillacs purchased. It was what the public couldn’t see—the juice inside the body, the large appetite that never seemed to get filled—that he very much liked. Holding on to fame itself was far more valuable than any money resulting from that fame. Will and Sam Sr. never understood why Sammy spent money he didn’t have. But it was because fame was sweeter than money in the bank. Will and Sam Sr., who had stared into the dark and challenging eye of vaudeville, who had cut their dance steps on the Depression, rarely thought along those lines. Money was tangible, money was safety, to be valued and kept secure in the money belt.

During that West Coast visit, Sam Sr. once again asked Elvera for a divorce.

He confided to her that he wanted to marry Rita Kirkland, his new lady friend. He had met Rita in his doctor’s office in Harlem, where she worked as a nurse. A petite woman—her friends called her Pee Wee—she had caramel-colored skin and lovely social graces. Elvera said she’d give him a divorce, but the price would be $10,000. Sam Sr. scoffed, and Elvera flew back home.

On December 8, 1954, Sammy Davis, Jr., turned twenty-nine years old. He celebrated it in his new home, on Evanview Drive. It wasn’t lavish at all by Hollywood standards—four bedrooms and a guest house—but it was quite comfortable. Jess Rand had to rent the house in his own name in order to outfox the real estate agents, who wouldn’t rent to Negroes. Sammy celebrated in his first home by throwing a party. As soon as she arrived, Cindy Bitterman could tell how happy Sammy was to be there. “Judy Garland was there,” Bitterman remembers. “Sinatra was there. The place was very crowded. I had gotten there with Bob Neal, a wealthy guy from Texas.” Everyone admired the place, complimenting Sammy, who fussed over his guests, tending to the stars.