In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (42 page)

In the firmament of the 1950s, nightclubs and Broadway were big. Someone who could make it in both venues would be a kind of king.

The rehearsals were going well. There were moments when Styne was genuinely pleased. Bock and Weiss were achieving excellent results. Styne would remember: “Sammy wanted to do an Astaire number, and in three days Bock and Weiss completed it … ‘Too Close for Comfort.’ Pure Astaire.”

Sammy was ensconced in a penthouse at the Gorham Hotel. “It sounds great,” remembers Jess Rand, “but it was a funky place.”

While a Negro dance act and their featured performer prepared to take on Broadway, time rolled on.

Jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker died in New York City March 12, 1955. He collapsed while watching a flickering TV screen at the home of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The coroner estimated him to be in his late fifties, early sixties. He was thirty-four. Drugs had ground him down. He was buried in Kansas City, his home. There were ghostly sweet placards posted in Manhattan: “Bird Lives.” Ralph Ellison believed that Parker’s “
greatest significance was for the educated white middle-class youth whose reaction to the inconsistencies of American life was the stance of casting off its education, language, dress, manners and moral standards: a revolt, apolitical in nature, which finds its most dramatic instance in the figure of the so-called white hipster.”

Two weeks following the death of Bird, Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
—about a southern family embroiled in the dramatic flappings of sex and deceit—opened on Broadway. It starred Ben Gazzara and Barbara Bel Geddes. Burl Ives played Big Daddy; Big Mama was played by Mildred Dunnock. “
Time moves by so fast, nothing can outrun it,” Big Mama opined.

Children were asking their parents about the new color TV sets on the market. In California, something called Disneyland had risen from the ground up.

In San Francisco and in Greenwich Village—not too many places in between—the Beats were afoot, poets and rebels and dreamers. One of the more celebrated of the clan, Allen Ginsberg, credited yearlong sessions of psychotherapy with his insights. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another Beat, had written a poem titled “Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower.”

There were those still predicting Elvis Presley would come and go.

The blunt comic Lenny Bruce was either angry or subversive. Many did not know what to make of him.

In Princeton, New Jersey, the genius Albert Einstein, who at times wore a Mickey Mouse hat and loved mugging for photographers, died at the age of seventy-six.

Marian Anderson became the first Negro to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City.

In St. Bernard, Louisiana, eight couples were indicted by a grand jury. Their crime: interracial marriage.

In the Deep South, violence against Negroes had been unleashed. None had been more riveting to the media than the murder of Emmett Till on August 24. Till, a fourteen-year-old Negro youth, had been in Money, Mississippi, visiting relatives. He waltzed into a grocery store where Carolyn Bryant worked. (A French newspaper would later refer to Bryant as “
a crossroads Marilyn Monroe.”) Till was reported to have made a come-on to Bryant before leaving the store. When Bryant’s husband, Roy, found out, he was livid and determined to find Till. He gathered a friend, J. W. Milam, and set about to find the youth. Milam and Bryant found Till and immediately took him away to a barn. The boy was tortured. “Mama, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy,” someone heard him cry out. Till was taken to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, where he was shot with a .45, had a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan roped around his neck, and dumped into the river, where he sank. It took three days to find the body. “
Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box so horribly battered and waterlogged that this sickening sight is your son—lynched?” cried his mother, Mamie Bradley, to the press. An old and gnarly man by the name of Moses Wright stood up in court and identified one of Till’s murderers. “Dar he,” he had said, pointing, his words semiliterate, his heart heroic. An all-white jury acquitted the murderers.

The saga of Emmett Till spread everywhere in America. From library to bus stop, from schoolroom to college campus. It seemed but a prelude of things to come: On March 24 of that year, a fifteen-year-old Negro girl by the name of Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to move to the back of a city bus. Her arrest preceded, by nine months, the arrest of seamstress Rosa Parks, whose name, and not Colvin’s, would be etched in the contours of history in the record of the celebrated Montgomery bus boycott.

J
ohn Barry Ryan III came from old money. His father and grandfather had never had to work. His great-grandfather—Robert Fortune Ryan—had been one of the robber barons. Young John Barry Ryan III was a rebel, and he was, indeed, constantly looking for causes. Thrown out of St. Paul’s in 1947, he ended up at Yale. Yale lasted a year. “I resigned college,” was his explanation. His parents knew people with connections—like John Wilson, an esteemed director. Wilson directed a musical that Jule Styne produced called
Make a Wish
. Ryan got a job on that show and befriended Styne. Theater charmed him, so he had finally found a cause.

Styne hired Ryan to stage-manage
Mr. Wonderful
. Ryan had just enough of the rich-boy bohemia pedigree to make Styne believe he would be a perfect man Friday for Sammy. “I want you to be with Sammy all the time,” Styne told Ryan. “I think you guys will get along.”

Ryan first encountered Sammy at the Gorham. Ryan arrived dressed in a preppy blue blazer and slacks. “I get off the elevator, and I start down the hallway,” Ryan recalls. “This thug was sitting outside Sammy’s room in a chair. I get in. Both doors fling open from another room. Sammy is standing there—bare to his waist—with blue jeans on with a gun belt with two guns in it. He screams ‘Draw!’ at the top of his lungs. I’m standing there looking at this guy. It was so weird. The apartment was full of girls and guys and jewelry dealers. They all start laughing. I’m looking down the barrel of these two guns and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m spending time with this maniac?’ ” Ryan’s eyes kept ricocheting from the guys to the girls, back to Sammy. The rich boy had suddenly been thrown into a carnival of hijinks, child’s play, dames, shadowy characters. He grew to love it. “Jule paid me $420 a week, what I think was then the biggest sum of money a stage manager had been paid. In those days that was stunning.”

When Sammy first arrived to meet the cast, he was with his father and
Mastin. Striding in together, they looked connected, inseparable. Three cats, new to Broadway, cool and confident, with money in their pockets. “I saw this guy come in with his father and uncle and I went, ‘Whoo, okay,’ ” says Chita Rivera.

Claude Thompson, another dancer, young and Negro, was spellbound by Sammy and his father. “There were nice moments seeing Sammy hold on to his daddy,” Thompson would remember of seeing Sammy walk across the rehearsal stage to touch his father. For Thompson and others in the cast, there sometimes seemed to be two productions going on simultaneously. Many afternoons, Sammy simply did not want to stop rehearsing. “Will would say, ‘Come on, son, let’s go eat.’ I was envious. I had never had that kind of relationship with my family,” says Thompson.

The cast of
Mr. Wonderful
had simply never been around a figure like Sammy. From the beginning, he gave it his all. His energy burned. “Sammy was odd for us because we had never met anybody like him,” recalls Rivera. “His talent was unlike anything we had ever seen. And his stamina. And he came from nightclubs, and we didn’t know what that was about.” The cast, just like director Jack Donohue, looked wide-eyed at Sammy during rehearsals. He had never given the same nightclub performance more than once. He aimed to dazzle, even in rehearsals. “There was something new every day,” says Rivera.

They were younger than he was, these dancers, but he exhausted them. They’d notice something about him during rehearsals: the unselfishness. He was full of compliments. But then he’d wow them with his own skills and gifts. He didn’t go to the New York High School for Performing Arts, and he didn’t go to Juilliard. He went out on the road when he was a child. That was his school. And if you cornered him, he could tell you some authentic stories about Bill “Bojangles” Robinson himself. He was a star, and yet, he never forgot the joy and giddiness of marching toward stardom, reaching for it, the craving it unleashed inside of him. He understood why they looked at him the way they did.

After rehearsals, Sammy would often invite cast members to his “funky” penthouse at the Gorham. And there, they’d party, talk, laugh. He was full of questions: Where were they from? What were their families like? A company of dancers charmed him—the closeness they seemed to share. Many had families in New York City. He did too—but not really. So he envied them. “I never was up so late in my life,” says Rivera. “He’d invite the kids over to the apartment, and we’d sit up till six in the morning.” They hung on to his words, his conversations about books, movies, singers, Sinatra. “Sammy was Sammy,” says Ryan, “this brilliant, talented nightclub performer who could do everything.”

The plot of
Mr. Wonderful
was straightforward. Sammy would play Charlie Welch, a small-time singer and nightclub performer who is afraid of the big
time because of an inferiority complex. He finds a mentor, played by Jack Carter, and finally is on his way. By play’s end, he is huge, playing a successful nightclub performer not unlike—voilà!—Sammy Davis, Jr., himself. Jule Styne was no fool: Sammy Davis on Broadway playing a nightclub performer rising against the odds had a certain kind of autobiographical ring.

Will and Sam Sr. would play subsidiary roles in the musical. Cast members were bewildered by the two aging men. “Sam Sr.,” says Ryan, “was a kind of invisible man. He thought of himself as part of the furniture.” Will Mastin, of course, was different.

For the first time in his life, Will Mastin had been taken off the road. He was a man accustomed to motion. Now he was being anchored. Still, he held his dignity aloft. “Will did not think of himself as part of the furniture,” remembers Ryan. “Will thought of himself as the Founding Father of the whole thing.”

Mastin and Sam Sr. seemed content with their small roles. The two men were too old to express overt excitement about things. Mastin had come from another century. Giddiness was not part of his repertoire. And these were kids, reckless youth. But when told that Jack Carter would play the role of Sammy’s manager in the play, Mastin arched his back. He was the damn manager of Sammy Davis! “Will insisted on a meeting with Jule Styne because he was manager of Sammy Davis,” recalls Dorothy Dicker, Styne’s assistant. “He couldn’t put together this was a fictional play.” Mastin was reassured, but would remain wary of the entire enterprise. He felt he was in a sea of double-talkers. “He was paranoid about Sammy,” says Dicker. “He didn’t want to lose his meal ticket.”

Ryan tried to befriend Mastin. The task was huge. “There was very little you could talk to Will Mastin about,” says Ryan. “The idea—particularly to a white person—of Will thinking he and you had anything in common was very slight. You felt the presence of the bitterness that he carried around.”

But Chita Rivera grew to love the trio of Sammy, his father, and Mastin. Whatever it was that had kept them together on the road all these years, she herself witnessed up close. “I’m Latin. We like our family, our support system. He came with his. Surrounded by support. I loved seeing him flanked by Will and his father. Oh, it was so chic and smart.”

Two old men, led by Sammy’s youthful power, all in from the wicked world of nightclubs and bistros, preparing for Broadway. “It was an amazing situation, watching it unfold,” Rivera says.

They’d help one another with their suit jackets. They’d whisper among themselves—conspirators against the outside world. They’d give one another stage direction. They’d direct silent nods toward one another.

Sammy’s leading lady, Olga James—she possessed a kind of Lolita-like beauty—was less than a year out of Juilliard. The world of the Negro performer
was small indeed. James had actually gotten to know Sammy while staying at the Sunset Colonial in Hollywood. “The next time I encountered Sammy was in New York after the film [
Carmen Jones
] had come out,” James says. “Somewhere in between Sammy had lost his eye. He struck me as extremely lonely.” James came by her role in
Mr. Wonderful
rather fortuitously. Her New York City roommate—the two resided at the Devon Hotel—was Cissy Rose. They had both been performing during basketball-game intermissions. One day Rose ran into Jack Carter, who mentioned that Jule Styne was looking for a leading lady for Sammy’s Broadway debut. The role was coveted, and James soon wanted it badly. She had already put together a nightclub act. A friend from
Carmen Jones
had a friend who knew Jule Styne; the friend happened to be Ruth Dubonnet, the fairy princess. Dubonnet came and heard James sing, was impressed, and helped put in motion her audition. Styne also found himself charmed, and James won the part. Aside from her talent, there was something else attractive about the pairing of Olga James and Sammy Davis: she was, like Sammy, diminutive in height.

If others in the cast were constantly being bowled over by Sammy’s talent, James was not. She had already seen it. “I knew of Sammy’s reputation as a big nightclub star from having worked in Atlantic City.” Something, however, did still her: Mastin and Sam Sr. She couldn’t help but notice the dynamics of the trio. Mastin and Sam Sr. struck James as being somewhat odd characters. “Will Mastin, by this time, is an old man. Sam Sr. is younger and more approachable. Will seemed to stay in the background and watch. I don’t know what he was watchful of—whether it was Sammy or his reputation.” Another performer, Albert Popwell, had similar feelings: “Will Mastin was a strange individual. He hardly ever smiled.”