In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (44 page)

One night Sammy broke free and did a rendition of Cyrano de Bergerac, the accent, just like that, going from southern-tinged Amos ’n’ Andy to French de
Bergerac. Another night, he turned to Carter onstage and said, “Lightly, I toy my hat around, lightly they dwell onstage. Jack, I’m going to show you dramatics!” When stumped by a Sammy ad-lib, Carter would turn to the audience and say, in a drawn-out southern drawl of his Amos ’n’ Andy voice, “Holy mackerel, what am I going to do now?” Night after night, the audiences felt these word duets between Sammy and Carter a hoot. “That is what kept the show going,” Carter says. (Some of the Negroes in the cast were beginning to think Carter did the Amos ’n’ Andy routine with a little too much gusto, and that Sammy accepted it with a little too much glee.) The show was just like vaudeville—no, it was better than vaudeville. Better because the money was better, the working conditions were better, the hotel was nicer.

Another night Sammy’s glass eye fell out. He did a quick pratfall to retrieve it. “When he hit the ground, Will went crazy,” remembers Carter of Mastin’s screaming outburst afterward backstage.

And yet, on another night, the Carter character said “Bow!” to Sammy.

“I will not!” Sammy shot back.

Cast members detected an edge in Sammy’s voice, as if he felt something demeaning had crept into Carter’s tone.

There was something else profoundly amusing about
Mr. Wonderful
. During the second half of the show—the nightclub act truly come to life—known actors and actresses would walk up onstage and take a seat, part of the party at the nightclub. It became a show within a show. Yes, that was Rex Harrison up there. “People,” recalls Jack Carter, “would say, ‘Jesus, that looks like Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews onstage.’ ”

“I walked on the stage in the middle of his number, and the fucking theater came down,” says Jerry Lewis.

The theatrical device kept astonishing audience members. “Everybody knew to come sit on the stage at ten-thirty, and Sammy would come out and do his nightclub act,” says Ryan, the stage manager. “There was nothing else like it before or since.”

Sammy would pause in the middle of the performance and give out baseball scores, or discuss the Democratic convention taking place. “
They don’t do this for you in
My Fair Lady
,” he rightfully quipped.

Never mind that critics blasted the show, Sammy kept them coming back, his sheer force boomeranging their knives. “It was a hodgepodge,” confesses Jerry Lewis of the show. “But nobody could say anything negative about Sammy.”

Columnist Walter Winchell—his own TV program,
The Walter Winchell Show
, had just recently premiered; Sammy had been one of his earliest guests—arrived one night to see the play. Winchell, so powerful as a columnist that when he mentioned a chorus girl’s name in his column she had a good
chance at seeing her salary rise—was a magnet for stunts. When he arrived to see
Mr. Wonderful
, he had a group of newsboys with him, and they drew stares when they paraded down the aisle to their seats. It hardly mattered to Sammy that Winchell remained on the outs with many Negroes owing to his imbroglio regarding Josephine Baker, the Negro chanteuse. Baker had been refused service inside the Stork Club back in 1951 and left in a huff. Winchell was inside the club and did nothing, though later he said he saw none of it and refused to assail Sherman Billingsley, the club’s owner. The tempest boiled over nationwide: Winchell was attacked by the NAACP; Sugar Ray Robinson, a Winchell friend, expressed his anguish; TV host Ed Sullivan went to war with Winchell. Winchell had the heart and pen of the proletariat, true enough, but he was a gossip, and he was thin-skinned. When liberals attacked him over the Baker issue, he erupted into bouts of megalomania, using McCarthy-like tactics to smear the NAACP, other journalists, and many liberals. The backlash against Winchell was fierce, so much so that Winchell believed if he went sashaying through Harlem, his “
blood would flow in the streets.” But that was 1951, this was 1956. To Sammy, Walter Winchell was not a man on the outs with American Negroes, but a big-time, wide-eyed Broadway columnist who just might help him get fans into the seats to see his play.

Midway through the performance he attended, Winchell rose and strode right down the middle of the aisle with the newsboys trailing him. He climbed up on the stage and gave a rip-roaring speech about patriotism, about America and how wonderful she was, about Sammy and how great a performer he happened to be—and on and on and on. It was Winchell; it was theater; it was Sammy; it was
Mr. Wonderful
. (Winchell’s TV show, alas, survived only a few months. On TV, wearing his fedora, smoking cigarettes, talking in a loud carnival-like voice, he looked strange, like an overwrought G-man on some kind of speed-me-up drug.)

There were times when Jule Styne sat in the theater with a puzzled look on his face, as if even he were not quite sure of what he had created. “My uncle was a fabulous man,” says Buddy Bregman of Styne. Bregman—who had met Sammy earlier on the West Coast—liked hanging around the theater during the
Mr. Wonderful
run. “Jule would go get the shoeshine man right outside the theater and ask about the show. Jule would say to him, ‘What do you think?’ Jule would talk to people at Lindy’s. He’d get little snippets from people.” Even well into the show Styne was apt to adopt more changes. One week he announced some new changes, told Sammy they should rehearse them immediately. “They decide to try them at Wednesday’s matinee when all the bar mitzvah ladies were there,” Bregman remembers. “Jule is at the back of the theater. Halfway through the first act he realizes this is so fucking awful and says, ‘What have I done?’ The curtain goes down on the first act. Sammy goes offstage
and grabs a cigarette. Jule’s screaming, ‘It’s horrible!’ Sammy says, ‘Goddammit, motherfucker, we’re going to finish it.’ ”

Mr. Wonderful
would surely have closed with a leading man of lesser talents than Sammy’s. He had not let the Will Mastin Trio fold, and he would not let
Mr. Wonderful
fold. There were lines at the ticket booth during the day, at the stage door seeking autographs at night.

“Sammy and Jule said, ‘Screw the critics,’ ” recalls Amy Greene. “Sammy began to do local TV. He brought people into the theater. It was packed every night. He literally saved the show.” Greene saw the effect the show had on Sammy. “It was like a child let loose in a candy factory. He was carousing all night long. He was young, talented, a rich celebrity. He had any woman he wanted.”

John Barry Ryan had seen many a Broadway production, but nothing like this. “His success in what he was doing was so without parallel,” he says of Sammy. “A young man who survived black nightclubs and a ghastly auto accident, and then Broadway—how much did it matter that the reviews were terrible? I don’t think very much.”

Cast members were awed and beguiled. “I was a little snot sitting there watching a nightclub performer in a Broadway show,” says Rivera. “I thought the theater was being ruined. But I learned some things: genius is genius.”

The show became so popular that Jule Styne went back to Skinny D’Amato and asked to have Sammy longer. It was all such fun; Sammy was sending hundreds into the nightclubs because he mentioned the names of friendly nightclubs in all the gossip columns he made it into. “You can have Sammy 365 days,” D’Amato offered. “But on the 365th day he opens at the Chez Paree in Chicago.”

Need anything?

Sammy couldn’t stop himself from moving. He burned like weeds around the entire company.

Once the evening was over, it was out the stage door, signing the autographs, getting to the car, tugging at Jack Carter. “We’d go to Atlantic City on weekends,” recalls Carter. “We’d drive and be there at midnight. We’d party until seven in the morning.”

There were times during the show’s run when he’d do “breakfast shows” at nightclubs over in New Jersey, an early-morning show for nightclubbers still awake—starting to repay some of Skinny’s debts at the 500 Club. He’d take the whole cast on excursions. With no notice, Sammy was apt to announce to the kids in the show he was taking them out—they must hurry hurry hurry and get ready—to the Copa. And there he was, dressed in a beautiful suit, leading
them, turning heads, talking, the voice fine and modulated, talking up his musical, slapping Jule Styne on the back, his strides faster than a kid scooting into Yankee Stadium, then finally, there, at the appointed destination, his head moving like a bird’s, quick, in dartlike fashion, the one eye assessing the environs. Then pulling out chairs, ordering drinks, and more drinks. “People would do things like move tables ringside for his party,” remembers Olga James. “It was exciting to have ringside seats.”

Josephine Premice, a Haitian-born New York dancer, would see Sammy around the Manhattan nightclubs at the time. “He loved sitting with a table full of beautiful women,” Premice would remember. Sammy seemed to adore Premice’s French accent, which would make him erupt into his very own, quite skilled, British accent. He was, of course, doing what he had a peculiar gift of doing: sizing people up, claiming those he wanted to claim, engaging in mimicry. “Sammy,” says Jack Carter, “collected actors and actresses. He loved them.”

Yes, he loved them. And they loved him, because celebrity and fame are things to love. At least until they break your heart.

Dicker would stand watching as the play neared its end, with Sammy at the microphone singing “Birth of the Blues.” Women swooned. Dicker had a twin sister—Charlotte—and she was often present at the theater as well. At times both of them—unmarried—would stand ogling Sammy, a habit not unnoticed by other cast members. “I don’t know if it was sexual,” Dorothy Dicker herself says of Sammy’s attractiveness to women, “or if he was just so damn talented.” The Dicker twins were also identically disheveled. They looked like down-on-their-luck beatniks. “They never took care of themselves,” says Buddy Bregman, Styne’s nephew. “Sammy paid attention to them purely out of kindness.”

Not everyone fell under the Sammy spell. Dancer Sally Neal—who had studied at the esteemed High School for Performing Arts—would often find herself wondering about Sammy’s conscience. “We did this number in
Mr. Wonderful
called ‘Miami,’ and I put my hands on the white guy’s shoulder. Afterward, Sammy called a meeting, right on the stage, and said, ‘We live in discriminatory times, and white and Negro can’t be holding hands.’ But I thought this was Sammy’s way of just disciplining me because I wasn’t with his group of people. Sammy was a weird kind of person. If he couldn’t have you, he didn’t want no one else to have you.”

Sammy indeed believed love was for sale, backstage, coast to coast, everywhere. And: “He was blonde-infatuated,” Jack Carter says.

True, but he made exceptions.

Chita Rivera was brunette. And Sammy loved her and just knew she loved him, so he bought her a diamond ring. He’d marry her, just as he had thought of marrying Eartha Kitt, and just as he had thought of marrying Peggy King.

He was free to dream, and the brighter the diamond, the higher the dream. About marriage: “Sure we talked about it,” says Rivera, a beauty who sported a bobbed hairdo. She was in love too. “Everything about him was so much bigger than the fact that he had only one eye, that he was five foot four. He was so big you got swept away by him.”

Chita and others in the cast were curiously beguiled by the Sammy–Will Mastin relationship. Mastin seemed to see beyond the glitter and gossip-column notices, seeing not forward but backward, into the past. “I think Will’s presence for Sammy was both hugely difficult,” says stage manager Ryan, “and yet a constant reminder to Sammy that he came from a world which Will had always struggled with and driven himself through and held this act together despite discrimination, wars, segregation, and God knows what.”

Whereas Mastin and Sam Sr. were always at the theater early, it wasn’t always so for the star. One late Sammy arrival stands out. “This kid—the second assistant stage manager—was checking people in at the stage door,” recalls Ryan.

To Ryan, it represented a painful and yet tender moment. “This was Will saying, ‘I’m in charge here.’ ”

•     •     •

Steve Blauner, who would become singer Bobby Darin’s manager, was in the military, on a base near Buffalo, and constantly dreamed of how he could meet Sammy Davis, Jr. In his room—he lived in the Officers Club—were pictures and clippings from
Mr. Wonderful
. Blauner admired and studied the lost world of vaudeville. He kept a scrapbook on Al Jolson. Blauner himself did some performing, small things, children’s hospitals. They were comedy routines. Sometimes Blauner—white, tall, and hulking—brazenly did his act in blackface. “I didn’t know better.” By the time 1956 rolled around, he was deeply under the spell of Sammy. On a three-day weekend pass, he traveled to New York City and got a ticket to see
Mr. Wonderful
. But first he went to take in a show at the Copa. At the Copa, seated at a table—Blauner can’t believe it—is Sammy Davis, Jr., himself. He couldn’t just keep still. “I walk across the lounge, and say, ‘Mr. Davis, the way you feel about Frank Sinatra is the way I feel about you.’ He stands up for twenty minutes. He says to me, ‘I got a table, second show, every night of the engagement. What night do you want to be my guest?’ ” (Sammy was referring to Sinatra’s upcoming Copa engagement.) Like Frank, Sammy giveth. Sammy gave Blauner his secretary’s phone number and told him to call her. He said the next time he was in New York City they’d hang out together. But of course he must have said that to everyone, Blauner thought. It was such bullshit. Such wonderful, magical, amazing, unbelievable, thrilling bullshit. Nevertheless, Blauner was game enough to call the secretary weeks later. A meeting was set up. “I’m supposed to meet Sammy in front of the stage door,” he recalls of his arrival back into New York City. “I say to myself, ‘He’s not going to remember me.’ And here comes Sammy walking down the alleyway wearing a Chesterfield coat above the knees, and he must have been carrying six cameras. He says, ‘Come on, Steve,’ like he’s been knowing me.”