In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (35 page)

As soon as he arrived back in Los Angeles, Sammy huddled with Mastin and his father. His confidence was coming on. The legs were just fine. The eye socket still gave him occasional headaches, but he didn’t cry about it.

On January 11 they climbed into the Cadillac and rolled through the night air to Ciro’s. Will was quiet, Sam Sr. fatherly. They’d done this hundreds of times, all through the years. But never like this—the air alive with anticipation and curiosity. When they opened the door to their dressing room, they saw
flowers everywhere. They’d never seen so many flowers before, with so many sentimental notes attached.

Herman Hover always sent out elegant, yet understated, invitations. The typical Ciro’s invite was a beige card with the name “Ciro’s” cursively written in the middle of the card, and in the lower left-hand corner, in dark lettering: “H. D. Hover presents the Will Mastin Trio.”

Sammy, his father, and Will Mastin slipped inside the theater.

Automobiles cruised up to the front of the nightclub and valet attendants rushed to open the doors. Out stepped Cary Grant and wife. And Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. (A year earlier Bogart had had an amazing array of films in release, among them
The Caine Mutiny, The Barefoot Contessa
, and
Sabrina
.) Out stepped Edward G. Robinson and wife; and Mr. and Mrs. Gary Cooper. Another car door swung open and there was Spencer Tracy and wife. Out stepped Dick Powell and his wife, June Allyson, star of so many MGM musicals a decade earlier. Jimmy Cagney came with his wife, Billie. Flashbulbs were crackling. Dean Martin. Flash. Jerry Lewis. Flash. Jeff Chandler. Flash. And there, in the lights, alighting from the car as if rising up from the night itself—flash upon flash upon flash—Marilyn Monroe. The flashes caught her jewelry, her smile, her cleavage. Marilyn was accompanied by Milton Greene, the
Life
photographer, and Amy, his wife.

“There was a line on the Strip,” remembers Jess Rand. “If a bomb would have dropped that night, it was the end of Hollywood. Everyone was rooting for him.”

Inside the nightclub, Hover, dressed in his usual black tux, was floating about, nodding, instructing members of his staff, fussing with the table settings, making eye contact with Sinatra, checking up on his Sammy and Sam Sr. and Mastin.

Leading up to the show, away from Will and Sam Sr., worries had engulfed Sammy. He wondered how the eye patch would play. “When you take off the patch, it’s got to be important,” Jess Rand had told him.

The night before, he phoned Cindy Bitterman. “I spoke to Sammy,” she would recall, “and he was terrified. I said, ‘Don’t worry, even if you sing flat, they’ll embrace you.’ ”

The club had started to fill: chatter, handshakes, the curling of cigarette smoke; the aroma of perfume; the grin on Hover’s large face because of a packed room.

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were seated at a table right below the stage. The two longtime gag artists joked with anyone who came near them. Dean pulled out a deck of cards and began shuffling them.

Outside the club, onlookers had gathered, ogling the arrivals. “There had to be a thousand people outside who couldn’t get in,” remembers Jerry Lewis.

Tony Curtis—pinup boy for a million screaming teenage girls—floated about with his wife Janet Leigh. “It was extraordinary,” Curtis would remember. “There was the excitement of Sammy showing up with one eye. But it was a little bizarre from my point of view. I think the main purpose, for me, was that he was alive.”

Charlie Head, injured in the car accident, was as dapper as anyone. Moving about, he smiled often; he too was happy to be alive. Jeff Chandler looked radiant, his blond head surveying the crowd, nodding to those whom he knew and to strangers as well. There was always, about him, the air of a man who decided fates and destinies. There was only a sprinkling of Negroes in the audience. One stood out: it was Rosa, Sammy’s beloved grandmother. A large woman, she walked about slowly in a dress made of silk. She carried a small purse; her hair looked freshly fussed over. In her lay the river’s source—both a grandmother’s and a mother’s love for little Sammy. The gilded surroundings of Herman Hover’s nightclub did not intimidate Rosa Davis.

Sitting at her table, Amy Greene could not help herself; she grew even more nervous, wondering if Sammy might be overcome by fear. She had goose bumps. “You walked into this tension-filled atmosphere of joy and hope,” she would recall. “Everybody who was anybody was in that place. They had ringside tables. There was the raised balcony. No one knew what we were going to see. It was totally an exploratory exercise.”

The nightclub could hold six hundred, and when Hover reached that number—and a little beyond, truth be told—he had to start turning folks away. But not Fred Hull, Sammy’s eye surgeon. Sammy had arranged for special seats for Dr. and Mrs. Hull, and they walked to their seats sneaking peeks at all the movie stars. The Hulls didn’t care much for nightclubs. They were, in fact, making their first visit to Ciro’s. The surroundings—the cigarette girls, the decor—fairly wowed them. The eye doctor could hardly believe his eyes—Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, June Allyson; Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Tony Curtis. He felt a giggle rise up in him.

The newlywed Bonnie Rand couldn’t help but keep swiveling her neck around the room. “It was Hollywood at its height. You were sitting with June Allyson, Jeff Chandler, [Humphrey] Bogart. Everybody was so much for him. Howard Hughes had a table reserved—and didn’t show. [Darryl] Zanuck was there.”

So was Judy Garland. Her brutal and sad decline—pills, alcohol, raging depression—was not far away, but it was rippling; those who knew her well saw the warning signs.

Sinatra sat smoking a cigarette—starlets all around. The dark times were over for him, and many dropped by to shake his hand. His smile had grown tighter these days. It was the past—the being forgotten, begging for a second
chance like some Hoboken bum. The yin and yang of his existence: never forget a slight, and loyalty is all.

As the time for the show neared—Hover checking his watch, nodding at Sinatra—small waves of excitement began wafting through the crowd, from table to table.

There was something almost poetic—a kind of hard-won grandeur—in the way the Will Mastin Trio prepared. In the dressing room there would be small banter, talk about women, what was going on with other acts across the country—all those acts, chased by the ghost. In the dressing room, Will and Sam Sr. were like two old lions in the tall grass of celebrity: there was deliberateness in their movements; they had been at this for a long time; there was no need to rush. Sammy was like the eager cub still, at the grass’s edge, peeking, poking, checking the hallways, reading the telegrams. Nathan, their dresser, laid out their tuxedos. They wore stocking caps on their heads to keep hair particles from falling, to keep their pomaded hair in place. After the suits, Nathan set the patent leather shoes out. The shoes gleamed like springwater. No matter how much Nathan brushed the suits, Will would have to brush his again. It was just his habit, and in his habits, he was meticulous. Their hats were placed in the corner, lest some visitor accidentally sit on one. They poked at their many pairs of cuff links, eyes gazing over which ones to pluck from the case. They took discreet puffs on cigarettes, careful not to allow ash to fly onto their garments, Nathan making sure the ashtrays were in place. They slipped their cuffs into their monogrammed shirtsleeves—WM, SDS, SDJ. Will shined his cane until his old bones told him that was enough. When they were ready, Nathan went from man to man, holding the pants before them. “He’d hold the pants up for each dancer,” says Jess Rand, “and they’d step into them”—so no pants cuffs would touch the floor. “They were meticulous,” adds Rand. First shirts, then pants, then shoes (the last particles of dust swiped from them), then bow ties, then the removal of the stocking caps. For years, just like this: if Cadillac had made human beings instead of cars, here would have stood three of them. They helped one another with the tuxedo jackets. They checked the taps on their shoes. They looked one another over, up and down, chest to chest, front and back. And there they stood—three men, a unit, a family, nodding in acclamation of one another. They smelled of mint and aftershave and talcum powder. Thousands and thousands of nights just like this; only on this night, of course, all was different. Sammy adjusted the eye patch. And both Will and Sam Sr. fixed their eyes on the piece of material. It too must look right. Will grabbed his cane; Sam Sr. raised his hat to his head; and they were out the door now, gliding, like geldings, to the stage, Jess having gone out to clear the pathway.

It was the Will Mastin Trio
Starring
Sammy Davis, Jr.! Sammy was the first to be seen, and right over his shoulders Will and Sam Sr., brought to the stage by Sinatra, who was introducing them.

Standing there onstage, they looked beautiful and satiny, the three of them, back from the brink, because where the kid went, the act went. Everyone knew it. Amy Greene immediately began to worry about the eye, and the smallish Ciro’s stage. “He’s going to fall off the stage,” she whispered. The ovation—before he sang a song, before he danced a step—went on for five minutes. Then five minutes more. He looked out over the gathering, scanning. June Allyson’s face was streaked with tears. Danny Thomas just stared. Dean Martin smiled, Jerry Lewis shrieked.

And then they leaned into the audience, shoulders outward, and began their show. “Sammy opened with a thirty-foot knee slide,” recalls George Schlatter, who booked talent for Ciro’s and stood watching in rapt attention that night. The knee slide elicited a cacophonous round of applause. “He did a tap routine. Tore up the stage. Did impressions of everybody in the audience. Danced some more. Then went into straight songs.” Bonnie Rand sat mesmerized. “He just took the audience and sucked them in.”

He sang “Glad to Be Home,” segued into “Birth of the Blues.” Mastin and Sam Sr. were in the background, doing gingerlike steps, “shooting the cuffs.” But he was beyond them; he was stylistically dismissing them. Bartenders would pour drinks and glance up at the show and the pandemonium. Flashes were going off. “It was such an excess,” says Amy Greene. “He didn’t sing three songs, he did six.”

He did spins. And twirls. “It was only one show that night, and it was an explosion,” says Bonnie Rand.

He sang “Hey There.” He sang “Black Magic” once, then he sang it again. He’d spot a celebrity in the crowd—Gary Cooper—and do a dead-on impersonation.

He sang “Stand Up and Fight,” a rousing number from the
Carmen Jones
movie. He sang—this one for Frank—“I Get a Kick Out of You.”

“He put the patch on his eye and came onstage and drove them crazy,” says dancer Maurice Hines. “Wasn’t nothing they could do after that except play”

‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

He tapped and tapped; he grabbed for musical instruments and began playing them. He stood, soaking in applause, staring around the room. Then he’d look to his sides at Will and his father, his face having to swivel a little extra now because of the blind side. The band kept playing just the right kind of thumping music, music to keep up with his movements across the stage. He was giving them all he had. He was giving them more than Will and his father thought he had—and they believed he had more to give than anyone they had
ever seen give. He would not, could not, let them or himself down on this night.

Sam Sr. was proud as a father might be proud of a son. But it went even deeper for Will Mastin—well-heeled white Hollywood saluting him like this. And how could any of them know from how far back in the woods he had come? This was better than vaudeville; this was better than running from all the ghosts of the past. This was redemption and salvation. He had founded this act, put it together, kept it together through lean times, blizzards, rainstorms. Hadn’t he collected wood for fireplaces when they were cold? Hadn’t he gone without decent meals at times? The stars out there who had met him and thought he was moody, distant, had to give him his respect now. This was show business. And he kept shooting the cuffs, moving his feet, seventy-six years old now. An old man living alone in a hotel. He felt tired but light as a butterfly. And on this Ciro’s stage he’d dance as long as Sammy danced. Rosa was breathing and sighing heavily. She couldn’t take her eyes off her little Sammy. She would look over her shoulders at the stars and feel warmth climb up inside of her.

Sinatra admired the sheer unrehearsed magic of the act. Hell, he had been noticing it for years. He looked around, saw the adulation. He couldn’t help it if moments of sourness crept into his gut: Hollywood was two-faced, mercurial. He had tasted the whole buffet. But he didn’t let it ruin the moment of the night. He smiled the way everyone smiled. Judy Garland teared up, her eyes bright as champagne. Sammy wouldn’t stop. He sang some more and danced some more—all as if for dear life. Amy Greene did not have to worry about his falling off the stage. He had played a million stages. He knew where every square foot of the stage was located. He was smart that way—back and forth he went, kept going, kept sliding, twirling, dancing. Jimmy Cagney loved dancers; he’d gotten his Oscar for playing song-and-dance man George M. Cohan in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
. And he always told anyone who cared to know that he remained just a dancer. Cagney sat transfixed. Bogart felt proud, very proud, and he couldn’t wait to see Sammy backstage because he actually had a little advice he wished to lay on him.

“The joy he had of doing impersonations of Gable, Cooper, Bogart, and seeing the stars’ reactions of a black man impersonating them was something,” says George Schlatter.

Sammy was onstage for an hour, then twenty minutes more, then twenty minutes longer. Allan Grant, the
Life
photographer sent to cover the opening, snapped away, even turning his camera on the audience. Sammy knew them all—at least, being a sieve of movies and movie trivia, he knew their movies and their roles, which meant, to his cinematic mind, that he knew them as well. They were his Hollywood, and he wished only to please them forever.