In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (37 page)

Sammy invited King to the Copa to see his show.

“The first time I saw the act, I said, ‘My God, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.’ You couldn’t catch your breath. He was the best dancer outside of Fred Astaire.” They talked through long evenings. She heard a wistfulness in Sammy’s voice. “He told me, ‘You’re the girl I should have gone to the high school prom with’ ”—only, of course, there was never a high school, much less a prom.

Peggy King found herself falling in love. She had never met anyone like Sammy—so serious one moment, so silly the next. King’s first album for Columbia was
Girl Meets Boy
—an album of sunny songs. Sammy memorized every single on the album; sometimes he’d break into song, singing those very tunes. Peggy could only break into a smile. She wanted to talk of serious issues, serious matters, and could get frustrated at Sammy’s zigzagging attention span. “I tried to interest Sammy in the Civil War,” King says. “He had a lot of excuses. I said, ‘Do you know Lincoln’s plan was to take all of the slaves and give them to Florida?’ Burl Ives told me this. Burl was a Lincoln fanatic. I told Sammy. He started laughing. He said, ‘You mean I would own the Fontainbleau [the chic Miami Beach hotel] and you would be working for me?’ ”

Manhattan was a city for nightcrawlers. Their meetings were all furtive, always out of the public eye. A rendezvous here, another one there. “He was very protective of me,” she says. “I was everything white middle America represented to him. He was very careful not to be seen alone with me in New York. He thought it would be bad for my career.” They’d sit in his room at the Gorham and talk and talk. They’d watch the moon rise. “I remember he said to me, ‘You probably don’t know what it’s like to be poor.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. We went through a whole winter on Relief.’ He liked hearing that. That put us on a more level playing field.”

She remembers a mostly private party for Edward G. Robinson. She and Sammy were both Robinson fans and were happy to go. Sammy quickly introduced her to Sinatra, who was also there. A cameraman—as if from behind an invisible curtain—suddenly appeared, and positioned himself to snap the both of them, Sammy and Peggy, together. Sinatra saw it all unfolding—Sammy and Peggy King, click click click and right into the gossip columns. Frank knew about scandal. And he wouldn’t let it happen. Striding across the room and bringing all of his guile and quickness and charm with him, he plopped right down right next to Peggy. The camera’s flash went off. And that was the picture: Peggy and Frank—and Frank’s friend, Sammy. Frank and two fans. A harmless snapshot. Frank would not let bad things happen to Sammy. Sammy was his acolyte. Sammy was the little Frank, the reflection in Frank’s eye, and Frank liked that, seeing himself in another man, and that man climbing up the ragged edge of the mountain and Frank trying his best to control the weather on top.

After his breakup with Helen Gallagher, Sammy fell in love with Columbia recording artist Peggy King. He took countless photographs of her, including this one in Manhattan in 1916. King—an inveterate reader of social history—often worried about Sammy’s lack of racial identity. She wondered why he preferred white to black
.
(
COURTESY OF PEGGY KING
)

But over time, Peggy King thought Sinatra had an almost unhealthy hold on Sammy. One night when she was with Sammy and a small group of other
friends, the phone rang. Sammy picked it up. When he hung up, he turned to Peggy: “Can you stay here and take care of the people? Frank just beat up a couple hookers. I have to go.’ ” And whoosh, he was gone. It bewildered her. “He thought Frank was a god. Well, be careful who you pick for your god.”

Sammy started posing her on couches and snapping her picture. Picture after picture after picture. They’d be eating, and down with the fork for Sammy because he was grabbing for the camera. “He could make his own reality,” she says of the pictures. “For that moment, that person belonged to him. He always took pictures. It was compensation for his drawbacks. His way of making beauty.”

In the aftermath of his eye accident, Sammy resumed his passion for photography—only now, ravenously.

“
Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut,” Susan Sontag has written in
On Photography
, her perceptive chronicle of the subject. “Any collection of photographs is an exercise in Surrealist montage and the Surrealist abbreviation of history.”

Surrealism: “A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter.” So says the
American Heritage Dictionary
.

Sammy—the Surrealist.

Oddly, Sammy took very few pictures of Will Mastin and his father. Or, for that matter, of any family members.

There was, forever in Sammy, the belief and conclusion that everyone wanted to be like someone else. Who could be happy as they were? “You don’t have to look like anybody,” he jauntily told Peggy King. “You look like Lana Turner.” While posing her, he’d fret over the way she looked, until he felt she looked just right. Then: click. “The way he took it,” she says of one photograph in which Sammy, to her, wasn’t going for the Lana Turner look, “I look like Kim Novak.”

Sammy introduced Peggy to Rosa, his grandmother. Rosa came to adore Peggy. Will Mastin and Sam Sr. did not. She could feel that she made them nervous and suspicious. “I was a new wave,” she says. “I was away from vaudeville. I was TV. Vaudeville people didn’t like ‘new.’ They did the same act for forty years—same laughs, same pratfalls.”

Every time she tried to befriend Sam Sr. or Will, it went nowhere. “He didn’t like me at all,” she says of Will. “I don’t know why. Maybe because I was encouraging Sammy to read. Sam Sr. didn’t like me either. I was the girl next door. I was dangerous territory. I was everybody’s sweetheart. I was Mary Pickford. I was the innocent. I wasn’t some siren on the screen. Will and Sam didn’t like a lot of Sammy’s friends. I believe they felt Sammy was being pulled into another world—and they couldn’t follow.”

Sammy’s celebrity always seemed to conceal something—that something lay behind his vulnerability—and King realized it. “I always wanted to take care of him. I didn’t want anybody to hurt him.” Her genuine joy came in introducing Sammy to books, the pleasure of reading. She realized he needed goading to read. “He hadn’t read
Huckleberry Finn
,” King says. “He’d seen the movie and pretended he had read the book. I made him do a list of about thirty books to read.”

Sammy had fallen hard for
Wuthering Heights
, the 1939 William Wyler–directed movie that starred Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Catherine. But he fell harder for Emily Brontë’s novel, originally published in 1847. “He called me ‘Cathy,’ from
Wuthering Heights
,” says King. “That was my nickname.”

The doomed Brontë lovers fascinated Sammy, how the two of them in the novel would keep going—and loving—in turmoil, in blackened storms, in deceit. Brontë’s novel was the first classic that shook Sammy. Its powers overwhelmed him, as it had so many others. “
It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality,” Virginia Woolf would write of Brontë’s novel. “Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”

Sammy and King recited, back and forth, in English accents, passages from the novel. Sammy liked reversing roles, and often he mouthed the beautiful words of Catherine: “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after … gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

So he loved Heathcliff and Catherine, the skies they lit—all for love—and darkened. He now came to words and poems as if they had just recently been invented. For Sammy, prose was a great discovery.

He tossed a little brown paper bag at King one day while in his Gorham suite. She imagined it might be candy, some mints maybe. “When I opened it, there was this Cartier watch. It said, ‘From Heathcliff to Catherine.’ ”

All his life, however, he would remain self-conscious, because of his lack of formal education, about his ability to write. Not just prose pieces, but anything at all. “He would never attempt to write a letter,” says King.

The word came out from his mouth one evening: marriage. It just dropped like some big object from a rooftop. He giggled, she giggled, then when her ardor seemed not to match his, he said something about both of them being pelted with if it ever happened, and the subject was changed.

Peggy King knew nightclub acts made decent money. But Sammy was often low on cash, and she never understood where his money went. “He was always
saying, ‘I’ll pick up the check.’ And he didn’t have any money. Ladies used to carry a little money. I had to do it with him.”

One night she had something personal to tell Sammy, something she wanted him to keep secret. Peggy King told Sammy that she had been adopted. Yes, her parents had left her to the vagaries of the cold world. “What difference does it make who your parents are?” Sammy asked her—and in a manner so blithe that she was immediately taken aback. It wasn’t until years after they met that Sammy even told Peggy he had a sister. (Eventually she would meet both Elvera and Ramona. “They were so secretive and deceitful,” King says.)

Hard as she tried, King could never get used to Sammy’s moods, the childlike way in which he went in and out of emotions. Sometimes her phone would ring. It would be Sammy. “I need you, Peggy!” he would scream. She’d rush over, wherever he was; she wanted to save him from whatever bedeviled him at the moment; she loved him. She’d arrive, rush in, ask him in panted breath what was the matter, and he’d look at her blankly. He had forgotten, there was no problem; like a child, he had gone on to other momentary pursuits.

There was another bag with something in it from him to her. In the bag, a box. Inside the box, a diamond ring. Speechless, she blushed. She put it on, admiring it, then she blushed some more. (Later, she went to give the diamond ring back. “He would not take it back.”)

There were times—sitting in another nightclub watching Sammy—when King would wonder to herself when he was going to go solo. She sensed the shifting tide of his emotions. “He knew there was this [solo] career out there,” she says. “I told him over and over there were movies and Broadway shows in his future.”

Like so many others, Peggy King became a part of Sammy’s underground world. Operating in two societies, he had a romantic view of the white world—and why not, with Sinatra crooning, with Catherine still believing in Heathcliff? The black world could be so unromantic.

“I think Sammy was very cunning,” King says. “I believe he tried to place himself with people he could learn from. I was ‘America’ to him.”

She came to feel a kind of sadness about him. She couldn’t help feeling that Sammy desperately wanted to be someone else. She’d often wonder about his past, where he had been, how he got from there to here. “It was like the little lost childhood, and he was the ‘littlest’ lost child.”

How wonderful to be so deep in another culture, in the juicy world of white America. Sammy had already gone beyond Bert Williams; he had given himself another dimension, and with a camera around his neck, a copy of
Wuthering Heights
in his possession, he was outrunning the ghosts. It made no difference who your parents were—so he thought.

Sammy had to try several glass eyes before he felt comfortable. In between new fittings, he would don his eye patch. During an engagement at the New Frontier in Las Vegas in 1955, he tells Will Mastin (center) and his father that he is finished, once and for all, with the patch, that the eye he now wears fits quite well. Note the chromed traveling trunk in the background, in which are packed some of the accoutrements of the trio’s trade: a written listing of dance numbers, spare taps for their shoes, medicinal lotions, hair tonics. Mastin wears a monogrammed shirt and specially designed cufflinks that say “500 CLUB”—the name of the mob-connected Atlantic City nightclub where they have had success
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)