In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (36 page)

Then he was finished, and Dick Stabile’s band lowered the volume, and Will hugged him, and his father hugged him, and the flashes were going off, and Marilyn was teary and Judy Garland was teary and Rosa was weeping. They clapped and clapped. And when the clapping died down, when it stopped, when there was just the rolling hum of gratification, looking from his father to Mastin, from Hover to Cooper to Sinatra, the faces blurring—he lifted his arm and reached around his head and pulled the eye patch off. Just like that. It happened so quickly no one realized what he had done. “I don’t think I need this anymore,” he said, and he threw it out into the audience. Ciro’s erupted. “It was an explosion,” says Bonnie. Whistles and applause as the black patch floated through the air. It was snatched by Jess Rand’s outstretched hand.

Janet Leigh gasped at the removal of the patch. “Once the eye patch came off, I never thought about it again,” she would remember. “He just overcame it.”

He stood there, still. They had worried about the eye. Sammy knew he could defeat the loss of the eye. He had always been beautiful at compensation. It was the legs that he needed. His legs and his heart and his hunger saved him, as the combination always had. “People screamed, whistled, and hollered when he finished,” remembers Hugh Benson, a TV executive who was in the audience and was already thinking of ways to get Sammy on network television. Surrounded by stars, he stood there. Stillness did not become him the way it did Sinatra or Nat King Cole; standing still, Sammy was just an explosion waiting to happen. As a kid he had found such comfort in dark movie houses, looking up at the big screen, at all the stars. Herman Hover started walking up on the stage, led by a bevy of people. And they surrounded him and started applauding some more. They grabbed him before he exploded again.

Sammy fairly floated to the dressing room. And it wasn’t long before he was mobbed again. Sinatra and Jeff Chandler and Bogart and all the rest: his father, Sam, and Rita, Sam’s lady. And Rosa, the big grandmother swishing right for Sammy. They made way for her, and she squeezed him tight, her eyes welling up. Charlie Head, the valet, grabbed him, then stood looking at him—two survivors of a car wreck—as if their very existence were nothing less than a miracle. Then Sammy began—as only Sammy could—congratulating
them
, all those around him, as if they themselves had gone through some kind of ordeal. Any praise he received, Sammy always felt compelled to give right back. He caught sight of Jess Rand. The eye patch was in Rand’s pocket. He and Rand locked eyes and smiled. “It was all scripted,” Rand would admit years later about Sammy’s dramatic removal of the eye patch and tossing it to the crowd. Scripted: like some kind of great, thrilling, and wonderful movie moment, truly unforgettable, where the Negro wins, where the Negro rides off into a bright sun.

Well, hooray for Hollywood moxie. The Negro himself had helped write the script!

“That was an emotional night,” Janet Leigh would remember. “He had tremendous courage and will. And a sense of humor.”

Will stood mostly in silence in the dressing room, taking his congratulations. Now and then he could be seen cocking his head toward those whispering in Sammy’s ear. He distrusted so many. He’d often eye Sinatra as if he were the competition for Sammy, but Sinatra had lavished Sammy with such affection—just as he was now doing—so Mastin kept silent about their bond. But Humphrey Bogart was gliding about. Mastin long believed that the roles actors played onscreen represented their true personas. So Bogart—Sam Spade, Captain Queeg, Duke Mantee in
The Desperate Hours
—was someone not to trust. Bogart was a villain come to life if ever there was one. Then there stood Bogart in Mastin’s face. You are “
too damned old for the business,” he told Mastin. Mastin didn’t know if Bogart was joking or not. Only if he had been joking, he would have broken the joke by laughter, which he did not. The look on Bogart’s face was serious. Mastin was insulted and recoiled. The old vaudevillian, squared off against the criminal from the big screen. In another day, he might have thrown words back at Bogart. Or maybe more than words. The scar on Will Mastin’s face wasn’t there from frolicking in the grass. He had founded this act back in 1936. Humphrey Bogart didn’t sign Sammy Davis, Jr.’s, checks; Will Mastin did. The old vaudevillian never spoke to Humphrey Bogart again. (Not that Bogie would have lost any sleep over it.)

Everyone rolled from Ciro’s to the Villa Capri, site of the after-party. There was champagne, and more salutes. Amy Greene overheard someone say that watching Sammy perform that night had been like watching “a Charlie Chaplin movie.” Amid the salutes, Sammy realized he had to get to a phone. There was someone he desperately wanted to call. Soon as he reached her, he started telling her all about it, about Sinatra’s presence, about the stars who had come out to see him, about what he did onstage. He told her about the new spin moves he had come up with. And the sight of him doing spin moves even in her imagination made Cindy Bitterman shriek through those telephone wires. “Who knew he could do spins?” she says. “He called me at five in the morning. He was in heaven.”

The press reviews were astounding. “
It was Sammy Davis Jr.’s night,” crowed
Variety
. “The lad who lost an eye came back in whirlwind style to pack Herman Hover’s posh spot to the gunwales opening night and receive one of the greatest ovations ever handed a performer, any place.” The review went on: “Singer, dancer, mimic, musician, whatever Sammy is for the moment he’s entirely to the crowd’s taste.”

Sammy was a survivor. He had been wounded and come back. This was a kind of salvation.

Well-wishers greet Sammy following his boffo comeback performance at Ciro’s on January 11, 1955. (He has temporarily slipped his eyepatch back on.) The man in sunglasses is Charlie Head, the valet who was in the backseat of the car Sammy was driving when he crashed. At far left stands Sam Sr., wearing a triumphant grin
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

Less in reality and more in the heartstrings, Sammy had entered the world of Hollywood reverence. It was as if he had vaulted over the sad and painful world of Hollywood and the Negro. Since Hattie McDaniel had become the first Negro to receive an Oscar, in 1939 for her mammy role in
Gone with the Wind
, roles for Negroes had not gotten much better. Lena Horne, a nightclub singer—and former Cotton Club chorus girl—was the first Negro to sign a long-term movie studio contract. But MGM was fearful of her—seemingly of both her beauty and her color; she was relegated to small roles in small movies and had her scenes clipped from movies that played below the Mason-Dixon line. She made
Duchess of Idaho
in 1950, then vanished from the screen for six years, believed to be a victim of the blacklist because of her associations with
Paul Robeson. Robeson, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers University, had reached acclaim on Broadway in two Eugene O’Neill plays,
All God’s Chillun Got Wings
and
The Emperor Jones
. With astonishing range, he excelled both in recitals and dramatic stage work. There were film roles with all-Negro casts. But Robeson had an affinity to Stalinist Russia, and by the advent of the cold war, he too was blacklisted, his passport taken away. Negroes simply had no precedent for success in Hollywood. Many did not hunger to be of the place. But Sammy was an exception. And he skidded along the border of Negro Hollywood and white Hollywood—as if the Negro past meant nothing to him. With his talent, he killed his naïveté. Coming out of vaudeville, where stereotype had helped draw laughs and keep his family working, he looked past history and into the beyond, and in the beyond he saw James Cagney and Gary Cooper and June Allyson; he saw Dean Martin and Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum applauding him. On his night at Ciro’s he felt connected to those in the audience; he was theirs. To get to this place, he had survived a damaging childhood. He had carried two old men back and forth across the country. He had left blood on a highway. He had the grit of vaudeville in one pocket, and the hard coin of the future he hoped for in the other. The loss of the eye had been his crucible, and he had met it and soared above it. Adversity—as it had in the past and would do in the future—propelled Sammy forward.

The winds were shifting now. Herman Hover’s phone was ringing off the hook. Everyone wanted tickets to catch Sammy’s Ciro’s engagement. Sammy was hot. Other calls came in; other nightclub owners wanted to talk. They had to talk with Will.

Mastin kept polishing his cane. He’d now have to watch Sammy soar—and still hold on to him. The old vaudevillian didn’t want to die—not now.

Sammy, at long last, felt loved. Some of it was sympathy, he knew, but he was throwing the sympathy back at them every night, and giving them talent. Night after night. Every star in Hollywood seemed to be lining up to catch his show. It was fearlessness on display. Night after night, Will and his father stood behind him and watched; he was just a blur to them onstage now, though ever so gracious, turning to them, extending his arms, dripping them with applause meant for him.

Night after night he drew crowds to Ciro’s. The lines were long, then longer. “
Never dug you before,” said the telegram from a famous young actor. “Dug you tonight. Marlon Brando.”

Pulling the French cuffs on his sleeves to show a peek, adjusting his bow tie, looking at himself in the mirror through one eye, checking the taps on his shoes, nodding to Jess Rand, then to Nathan Crawford, he was ready. And he walked his father and Will Mastin onto the Ciro’s stage to give Hollywood what it most respected—a star.

An eye for an eye, then—and an eye for fame.

“The eye didn’t stop him,” says Maggie Hathaway, the sometime actress whose home Sammy retreated to for many of his dalliances. “He kept on making love to white girls.”

Shalom.

After Ciro’s the trio flew east for an engagement at the Copa. Sammy loved the Copa. They packed the house. “In the main, socko,”
Variety
magazine said about that engagement.
Time
magazine wrote him up in its April 18, 1955, edition: “
In a time when entertainers are often shoved onstage as a result of a hit record, without any experience, Sammy Davis Jr. is a seasoned pro. His dancing is a study of fine rhythm and agility, his timing precise, his ad libs are deft.” (
Time
would go on to describe Will Mastin as being “60-odd.” In fact, he was seventy-six.) Sammy shared with the magazine his performing philosophy. “I never studied anything I do. I just wake up in the morning thinking it would be good to do Bing Crosby, and I can do him.”

He took a suite at the Gorham Hotel for his stay in Manhattan. He began discussions with MGM to star in a musical,
St. Louis Woman
. (The discussions went nowhere because of the demands made by Will Mastin.) There were inquiries beginning to trickle in from Broadway impresarios. The world was opening anew, and he could feel it.
Down Beat
magazine named him one of its “New Stars” on the cover of its March 23, 1955, issue.

At times he was still struggling with the eye. He had taken to wearing glasses all the time now. They were thick glasses, the kind some beatniks and TV host David Garroway wore. Sammy owned several replacement plastic eyes. One had been designed a bloodshot-red color to match his good eye when it was bloodshot from overnight drinking.

Since television had come of age as he came of age, the medium fascinated Sammy. When he peered inside the box, he rummaged for people to meet. Sammy found it both easy and simple to fall in love with someone he had seen on the television screen. He often fell in love with voices and images. That way, before he met them, he told himself what he wanted to tell himself: they they might not covet his looks, but they’d adore his talent. With his newfound celebrity, Sammy could reach inside the TV screens and pull people out.

He became a fan of
The George Gobel Show
. Gobel’s show premiered October 2, 1954, on NBC. The comedy variety show featured two appealing young stars—Eddie Fisher and Peggy King. King was an ingenue, many believed the next Judy Garland. Blond and adorable, she was totally at ease in front of the camera.

Born in Ohio, she sang with big-band leaders Charlie Spivak and Ralph
Flanagan onstage. She wore white gloves when she sang. In 1951 she heard that Mel Torme had signed with CBS to host a musical variety show. It would be among the first shows to be broadcast in color. She wangled an audition. “I knew every girl singer would be there.” She got the role, had her TV break, and even signed a movie contract with Columbia. She couldn’t resist the entreaty from the Gobel show producers. Her audition impressed them, and she had the part. In no time at all, fan letters poured in to the network. “Three weeks later I couldn’t walk on the street,” she says of the fame that followed her. She was commonly referred to as “pretty perky Peggy King.” Sammy sent Ed Golin, a friend and press agent, to find pretty, perky Peggy because he just had to meet her. “He reeled off for me the last fifteen songs I had done on
The George Gobel
Show,” when they first met, King recalls. “That’s pretty flattering. And he had my albums.”