In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (5 page)

They planned to celebrate. Maybe the Waldorf, maybe “21,” maybe the Carlyle. Everyone knew Burt at the Carlyle; hell, he used to do publicity for the place. But before they could make a move, the phone rang again. It was Straus. “Don’t leave the apartment,” he advised. “I don’t want you to lose my next phone call.” Pause. “You might get the front page of the
New York Times
.” The Boyars couldn’t believe it. They made goo-goo eyes. Laughter stretched their faces. Roger Straus’s prediction was correct: the book was indeed planned for the September 19
Times Book Review
front cover. Its own hat trick indeed. Straus soon had an advance copy of the
Times
review as well. It was written by Martin Duberman, a professor of history at Princeton. “We have recently learned much of the Negro’s mistreatment, but the trials of a single man, when recounted as vividly as Sammy Davis Jr.’s are in his lengthy autobiography, renew and redouble the shock,” wrote Duberman. Duberman liked the book, but he had misgivings, and it was deeper inside the review where those misgivings could be felt. “When one man’s experiences are filtered (to any degree) through someone else’s prose, the experiences themselves are altered. To evaluate this book at all, we must proceed on what we know is a false assumption: that every sentence represents Mr. Davis and no one else. If the portrait is not a fair likeness, he must nonetheless abide by it, for he has allowed the book to bear his name.” Duberman quotes Davis: “Baby, I know everything wrong that I ever do—and I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me why I keep doing it,” and immediately senses falsity in the claim. “If so,” Duberman wonders, “why not share the knowledge with the reader? Why be reticent in the area of how? Can it be that it is now permissible to reveal everything except thought?”

Straus’s sources had certainly done well in getting him advance copies of the
Herald Tribune
and
Times
reviews. (The
Herald Tribune
review was titled “What Made Sammy Run.” It was accompanied by a drawing of Sammy sitting at a piano looking skyward. He seemed melancholy, was wearing suit and tie, with the tie askew. To the discerning eye, he had been sketched into a very Sinatraesque pose.) There was more than enough, in both reviews, to start a publicity campaign. But there was one problem, and it was hardly insignificant. For weeks there had been talk of another New York newspaper strike. The
114-day strike of 1961–62 was brutal, and the new talk, when it began, caught many by surprise. The powerful newspaper print unions—known as the Big Six—were yet again wielding enormous weight. As well, the city was in the midst of a full-throttled mayoral campaign—Congressman John Lindsay (another “golden boy”) had caught the fancy of the
Herald Tribune
editorial writers. (The
Tribune
was also receiving huge plaudits for its series of articles titled “New York City in Crisis.” “
New York is the greatest city in the world—and everything is wrong with it,” was the first line of the series.)

Another strike might cost the closing of other city newspapers—the
Herald Tribune
, even the
Times
, perhaps. “I don’t think it’ll happen,” Straus told Boyar. But it did. And Burt and Jane Boyar and Roger Straus were mortified. They had a book to sell; they had advance copies of stunning reviews that now, it appeared, would not hit the streets. Reviews were not everything, but good reviews surely sold books. Calamity had struck.

Sammy cried upon hearing of the strike. It was showtime, and now it was as if an earthquake had hit the stage he was prepared to go on. To assuage his pain, he bolted town—off to Honolulu—for ten days. (His understudy in
Golden Boy
, Lamont Washington, suddenly became Joe.) Roger Straus broke out in a rash.

Burt Boyar, former child actor, former performer, was cool and steady. He called in chips. He called Milton Berle, who was a longtime Sammy admirer, whom Boyar, as a
TV Guide
columnist, had written about enthusiastically over the years. “Count on me, babe,” Berle told Boyar. “Mr. TV” vowed he’d go on television and trumpet the book. And he did. Clay Felker, working at the
Herald Tribune
, had been Boyar’s onetime roommate. Felker talked fast, seemed plugged in everywhere in Manhattan media circles, and was relentless when he wanted to promote something. No one had seen the
Herald Tribune
review of
Yes I Can
, but Felker made sure they
heard
about it. And he promised Boyar to do a feature on him and Jane and Sammy at strike’s end. Corbett Monica, a comedian and Berle acquaintance, went on
The Tonight Show
and lauded the book. “I’ve just read the most wonderful book on entertainment,” he said, going on and on about
Yes I Can
. The publicity machine kept cranking up, and the publisher took out print ads in Philadelphia, the closest big city to New York. “Meanwhile,” adds Boyar, “on CBS radio, Garry Moore had a daily radio program. He had heard what happened. He was sympathetic. He plugged the book every day.”

By the seventh day of the strike, there was a feeling that, perhaps this time, the unions had overstepped their boundaries. Both the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
had suffered huge circulation losses from the 1962 strike. Mercifully, on the eleventh day, the strike ended, and the presses began to hum again.

Yes I Can
—like other books scheduled for review during the strike—had been dealt a harsh hand. The reviews had been printed, true enough, but they
hadn’t been distributed. Walking along Manhattan streets after the strike’s end, Boyar would notice bundles of newspapers. Wrapped around some of the bundles was the
Herald Tribune
book review section of September 19—the one with the glowing
Yes I Can
review—now being used merely as wrapper paper. The sight crushed him.

The year had already seen a rather eclectic book-publishing season. Norman Mailer, who hadn’t published a book in a decade, was back in bookstores with
An American Dream
. (Boyar, for a fleeting moment, had something in common with the tough-talking Mailer: Scott Meredith was Mailer’s literary agent.) Mailer’s new novel was about a congressman—idealistic, charming, good-looking—and a murderer. “I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946,” began Mailer’s novel. Kennedy continued to haunt deeply, like some big square-jawed ghost upon the land who had exposed, in his own assassination, its derangement. Theodore Sorensen (
Kennedy
) and Arthur Schlesinger (
A Thousand Days
) both had books out about the man and the mysteries inside him. The Sorensen and Schlesinger books were selling very briskly. Truman Capote’s novel
In Cold Blood
was also garnering wide attention. Capote’s book was a documentary account of a 1959 murder that took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a family of four killed by two drifters. The book, brilliantly reported, was dark and mesmerizing. A small, fey man, Capote was a genuinely gifted writer. He was also a product of the American South, and he possessed wild insecurities. “
Something very nice happened to him while he was writing
In Cold Blood
, which was that he was getting more masculine—which was terribly important to him,” Norman Mailer later commented. “It was much more important to him than any other homosexual I’ve known. He really wanted to be a most fearsome little man.”

James Michener’s book
The Source
, a sweeping account of the history of Judaism, was atop the
New York Times
best-seller list in the fiction category.

And then there was
Yes I Can
.

Harper’s Magazine
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
both ran excerpts of Sammy’s book. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
piece was about Sammy and May Britt, owing to the fact that feverish and voyeuristic curiosity about interracial marriages existed across the country.
Ebony
magazine, a favorite of Negro readers, bought an excerpt. The negotiations with
Ebony
got testy: Boyar demanded a cover of Sammy; the magazine refused. There were tense words, verbal exchanges, but in the end Boyar relented. Sammy’s relations with the Negro press were already beyond prickly. In the upper-right-hand corner of the December 1965 issue of
Ebony
(the cover article was “Black Power: New Laws for the Old South”) went the headline heralding the excerpt: “Military Ordeal of Sammy Davis Jr.” His service, of course, was hardly the stuff of a Tuskegee
airman, that crack all-Negro military unit that flew in World War II dropping bombs from the blue skies. In fact, not a gun was shot in Sammy’s stateside military ordeal, save in training exercises.

Maurice Dolbier, dean of the
Herald Tribune
critics, invited Sammy to the
Herald Tribune
author/book lunch. It was a nice coup for Sammy and the Boyars. Only Sammy did not jump up and down. What made Sammy run? The Dolbier book invite did. “For him to stand up and talk to this literary group, well, it started getting him nervous,” Boyar remembers. Sammy was forever insecure about his lack of formal education.

A couple of weeks before the scheduled luncheon, Sammy had been slightly injured in one of his
Golden Boy
fight scenes. And just days before the author/book lunch, he began reminding Boyar that he had been hurt. Something about his neck, his arms, his shoulders. He wanted Boyar and anyone else around to know that he hurt. And if they didn’t believe him, it was too bad. He checked himself into Mt. Sinai Hospital. Boyar sensed something awry. The
Herald Tribune
had been running full-page ads about the upcoming lunch featuring Sammy. Boyar fretted Sammy might try to pull out of the event, feigning illness. “He used hospitals as excuses to not do anything he didn’t want to do,” says Boyar.

On the very day of the event, Sammy phoned Boyar and told him he wasn’t going to attend. Boyar couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He raced to Davis’s apartment, the taxi zooming along, Boyar’s blood rushing. “I’m not going to let you embarrass yourself,” he told Sammy. But Sammy told Boyar he doubted he could talk well enough to address the audience. At such times, his childlike voice would return, tiny and heated. “You’re talking to me,” Boyar snapped. “You can talk to them just fine.” May, in the apartment, allowed her lovely Swedish face to turn cold at Boyar’s words. She did not want her husband doing something he did not want to do. She consoled him while Boyar bore on. “I’ve never been so forceful with Sammy,” says Boyar. “I was in too much awe of him.” Finally, rising like a wounded prizefighter, Sammy got dressed.

In the gleaming Cadillac limousine taking them over to the Waldorf, Sammy sat stiffly in his neck brace. May, who didn’t understand the demands on her husband’s time, fumed. “You’re sucking my husband’s blood!” she screamed at Boyar. She had always been so unemotional—and now this.

Sammy stiffly got out of the limousine. Boyar coaxed him along, comforted him with words as best he could. Roger Straus was in the audience. His assistant, Peggy Miller, was also there. Miller saw Davis and the brace around his neck. “We all said, ‘What the hell is that about?’ ” she says.

Always, whenever he entered a room, there were stares. Always, finger pointing, elbows nudging sides, whispers. “He followed two very polished speakers,” says Boyar. “One was Walker Percy. These people really knew how to
talk. They’re book people. Sammy is called to speak. Sammy said, ‘I feel so diminutive.’ He was using words I never heard him use. He did fifteen minutes. They were spellbound. He talked off the cuff for fifteen minutes to these two thousand people and pulled it off magnificently.”

“Everybody screamed, yelled, and carried on,” remembers Peggy Miller. May sat there and smiled her movie-star smile. That’s why she loved him—the gift he had, the way he gave himself to the moment, how he rose. How other women looked at him so admiringly. She didn’t understand America, but she understood admiration, and stardom.

In the limousine, heading home—the license plate had a mere five letters,
SAMMY
—Sammy tossed the neck brace aside.

The reviews kept rolling in. The
New Yorker
claimed
Yes I Can
was “
an adroitly balanced mixture of show-biz humility (no truly humble man ever writes a book about himself) and cosmic egotism (Mr. Davis speaks of his talents, which are certainly multitudinous, as an ‘awesome gift’).” The magazine allowed, however, that “one is never sure, from page to page, which Sammy Davis will be on deck.”

Burt Boyar began to feel momentum building around the book. The initial print run was twenty-five thousand copies, and already they were headed back to press for another twenty-five thousand.

Sammy gave a copy of
Yes I Can
to Sinatra. Sammy highlighted, in yellow marker—the way a college student highlights a textbook—all the passages about Frank. It was a smart move; Frank was busy. He might read the damn thing, he might not. The highlighted scenes were memories of when Sammy met Frank, raw and naked fawning:

Frank didn’t read the fan magazines, and he didn’t read books about himself. Nobody knew why. Nobody knew Frank’s mind but Frank.

The
Los Angeles Times
and the
Philadelphia Bulletin
and a host of other daily newspapers praised
Yes I Can
. While reading the particularly good reviews, Burt Boyar was known to start sobbing, tears streaking his face. Seeing him like that, so emotional, only unleashed Jane’s own tears of joy. And there they sat, holding hands, dropping salty tears all because of and for their Sammy. The
Christian Science Monitor
offered praise as well. But there were unsettling observations in the
Monitor
review: “
So it does not matter that the writing of
Yes I Can
is sometimes pedestrian, that it reads in places like a grade-B novel, that it’s melodramatic, and that its incidents seem now and then far-fetched. It contains some basic truths that override such flaws.”