In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (51 page)

Still, with Hollywood figures so enamored of the play, Davis just knew that a movie version was in the planning. And a movie did get made. In 1949, Irving Rapper directed a screen version of the Yordan play—but the cast was all white. “At the time,” recalls Yordan, who produced the movie, “there was strong prejudice. They said black films had no audience.” “
Opportunity’s golden door,” Ossie Davis now felt, “which was to have led us all to fame, glory, and stardom, had closed before it opened.” Paulette Goddard won the role of Anna. (When casting got under way, Yordan approached Ingrid Bergman’s agent, who was aware of the Negro play. “What do you want, Bergman to play it in blackface?” the agent asked. Yordan was aghast.) In addition to Goddard,
Anna
starred John Ireland, Broderick Crawford, Will Geer, and Oscar Homolka. “They paid Paulette $175,000,” recalls Yordan. “The picture was a flop.”

The playwright Langston Hughes wrote a letter to a friend passing along gossip about another potential movie: “
He told me they are thinking of doing St. Louis Woman in white face in the movies—like Anna Lucasta.”

In 1958, the screen rights to
Anna Lucasta
reverted back to Yordan. That very year, Longridge Enterprises, a fledgling film concern, decided to make an all-Negro
version of
Anna Lucasta
, believing that Negro audiences’ fascination with it still held. It would surely be one of the more intriguing routes a dramatic play had ever taken. Written for—but never performed by—a Polish cast,
Anna
was now about to travel full circle: from its staging by an all-Negro cast, to its all-white film version, now finally back to its original all-Negro presentation.

“They wanted names,” Yordan says of the film company about to make the Negro
Anna
. Both female and male leads—Anna and Danny—would have to be able to sing. For Anna, Yordan wanted Hilda Simms, who wasn’t a big name but surely a unique talent, as she had shown in the Broadway version of the play. The studio nixed Simms. Lenny Hirschan, a young William Morris agent, went over to the La Jolla Playhouse one afternoon to talk to Eartha Kitt, one of his clients, about playing the lead. Kitt was appearing onstage, playing the Tallulah Bankhead role in Thornton Wilder’s
Skin of Our Teeth
. There were few Negro actresses in the country who hadn’t heard of the Anna role. Kitt quickly pounced, and Hirschan convinced the studio to accept her. The choice did not make Yordan happy. She had appeared in three other films, her most recent the 1958 vehicle
St. Louis Blues
. “The camera,” says Yordan, “couldn’t conceal the fact that Eartha was not a beautiful woman.”

The male lead had been played on Broadway by Canada Lee, an actor whose career had been both brave and haunted. Lee—born Leonard Lionel Cornelius Canegate and raised in Harlem—had once been a boxer. The sport cost him an eye. He turned to acting. His first significant role was as Banquo in an all-Negro version of
Macbeth
that was staged by the Negro Federal Theatre Project in 1936. In 1939, Lee appeared on Broadway in
Mamba’s Daughters
, alongside Ethel Waters. When Orson Welles cast his Broadway version of Richard Wright’s
Native Son
in 1940, he chose Lee to play Bigger Thomas. (There were plenty who considered Welles’s interracial casting scandalous.) Three years later Lee appeared in Hitchcock’s
Lifeboat
. But his career came fatefully apart when he was hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his outspokenness on racial stereotyping in films. In 1952, Lee journeyed abroad to make
Cry, the Beloved Country
, a movie based on Alan Paton’s acclaimed novel set in South Africa. Sidney Poitier was also featured in the cast. Lee never made it back to America; he died in London, at the age of forty-five, and various reports claimed he died penniless. Lenny Hirschan suggested William Morris client Sammy Davis, Jr., for the role Lee had made famous on Broadway, and the studio quickly accepted. It would be Sammy’s first starring movie role since childhood. As well, it would be a sort of déjà vu: in the movie, he would be chasing after Anna, as played by Eartha Kitt, the woman he had once chased after in real life in San Francisco.

The studio selected Arnold Laven to direct. Like Yordan, Laven was a native
of Chicago. His best-known film had been
The Rack
, which appeared in 1956 and starred Paul Newman, along with Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Lee Marvin, and Cloris Leachman.

Filming of
Anna Lucasta
began in May 1958 at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. Sammy was eager and excited, as he was embarking on one of his rare creative ventures without Will Mastin or his father. In the movie, Anna is a prostitute who hangs out around the San Diego naval station. “I wish someone would find me,” she utters in one of her memorable lines. Sammy arrived on the set with all his lines memorized. Yordan watched him whir around. “He had a lot of energy,” he says. Yordan owned a grainy tape of Canada Lee’s Broadway performance as Danny, and he shared it with Sammy. But they were distinctly different actors. Lee was a formal actor. And while he had presence, there seemed to exist in him the insecurity of an athlete turned actor. He acted on direction, not instinct. Sammy was a loose performer; instinct was everything to him, and direction a sort of nuisance. He and Yordan developed a friendship, and after long hours of filming, they often went out to eat together. “The dinners I had with him were at Lucy’s restaurant,” Yordan recalls. “They had private booths, and they were three-quarters concealed. Sammy would mainly talk about all his troubles, his difficulties. That he was so small with all this talent. He felt he always had to fight to measure up to Sinatra.”

Kim Novak’s name came up during their shared meals together. Yordan knew the actress, from Chicago. “He was quite bitter. Harry Cohn had threatened him. He brought that up. Cohn had affiliations with the Chicago mob, and he had them contact [Sammy]. He told me, very bluntly, they threatened to put out his eye if he continued going with Kim.”

As filming continued, Yordan sensed that Kitt, who possessed a fierce competitive streak, was attempting to chew up all the scenery around her—even Sammy, when he got in the way. “But he carried his role, and she couldn’t tower over him,” says Yordan. “He stood up to her.”

The low-budget film completed shooting in less than thirty days. Even before its opening, there was controversy. The Motion Picture Association harrumphed about the movie posters and the way they presented Kitt—in a tight-fitting yellow dress that left little to the imagination. According to the
Hollywood Reporter
, the MPA felt that the ads “
blatantly portray the femme lead as a prostitute,” and further noted that the artwork “emphasizes her posterior.” (Kitt, grateful for any publicity, uttered not a word.) It is clearly Kitt’s picture, and she claims the screen every chance she gets. Sammy’s performance as Danny is fairly loose, but there are times onscreen he does not seem fully focused. (During filming, he had intermittently flown to Las Vegas to give
evening performances.) Critics were kind, if not effusive. “
The story has none of the so-called comic cliches usually associated with Afro-American drama but it is rich with the humor and common sense wisdom of the Negro point of view,” the
Hollywood Reporter
wrote. “
There is no particular feeling that this is a ‘Negro film,’ ” said
Daily Variety
. “The racial character dwindles as the human characters come through. The people are not humorously Negro or pitifully Negro, but people, funny and sad.”

But the Negro film version of
Anna
—which had created such expectation because of its legendary Broadway following, and which had unleashed a torrent of excitement in large urban Negro communities around America—suffered a fate similar to the white version: it flopped. “It was early for an all-black picture,” says Lenny Hirschan, the agent. “It was a family story. It was a modest film.” In one of the more riveting and talked about moments in the movie, there is a furious montage of Sammy on drums—with echoes of his nightclub act. Geography was not kind to the movie: it suffered below the Mason-Dixon line, where it was shown in a scant number of theaters despite the fact that Sammy and Eartha wrote letters to southern theater owners pleading with them not to dismiss the movie based on “
racial grounds.”

The year 1958 saw the beginning of an increase in school and church bombings in the Deep South, due to school integration measures. Earlier that year, the young minister Martin Luther King, Jr., embarked on a pilgrimage to India. He aimed to study the depths of Gandhi’s nonviolence movement, which had shaken the British during India’s battle to wrest itself from colonialism.

With a powerful agency behind him now (never mind the continued intrusiveness of Will Mastin, who turned seventy-nine in 1958) Sammy decided to become one of the first Negro actors to have his own Hollywood office—a shrewd and daring move. It was a small affair, with Jess Rand, Luddy Waters, and her husband, Jim Waters, a not-so-successful actor who had taken on the title “assistant to Sammy.” Having his own office made Sammy feel quite proud. Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte didn’t have offices. But Frank Sinatra had an office, and now Sammy had one. (Will Mastin had never needed an office. His office was the hotel room, the train depot, the bathroom stall, the road.)

Looking around Sammy’s office, one of the things one noticed was that there was not one Negro face in sight. The staff was segregated—all white! (Shirley Rhodes was part of the road crew.) Sammy’s father wondered about the wisdom of that, so phone calls were made. “A friend of mine in Chicago said, ‘Sammy needs someone to work in the office,’ ” recalls Jean Flemming, who was hired. “They needed a black face.”

Flemming eagerly packed and headed for Los Angeles. She felt a tinge of cultural pride. Soon, however, her mood shifted, and worries began. Hollywood was sending not scripts to Sammy Davis’s office but something else. They were bills, stacks and stacks of them. Nothing now made Sammy feel better than gliding into a nightclub—the Crescendo, Ciro’s, the Mocambo—sitting down with friends, ordering food and drink, and more drink, then rising, turning to the manager, and telling him to send the bill to “my office.” And sure enough, those bills came, and Jean Flemming opened them. “We were forever late paying the bills,” she remembers. Sammy blithely shrugged it all off. In and out of more nightclubs he went, racking up more bills. He loved reserving tables, then having bottles of Scotch lined up on the tables for his arriving guests. Flemming went to Mastin, who began a struggle to keep the trio’s debts separate from Sammy’s. “Will had the money. You’d go to Uncle Will for the money. Sam Sr. was a gambler. My paycheck used to bounce. I was only getting sixty dollars a week.” Sammy thought the Hollywood glitter in Flemming’s eyes might calm her, but, she says, “I wasn’t interested in meeting Judy Garland. I just wanted my check to clear.” One of many times her paycheck bounced, she told her husband in a forlorn voice that it must be a mistake. “My husband—and I’ll never forget his words—said, ‘You’re goddamn right it’s a mistake.’ ”

Sammy had astounding clothing bills that Flemming winced at as well. “He was always having stuff made up that he couldn’t pay for.”

Now and then Sammy and Loray were seen out in Los Angeles, her fur rubbing against his cheeks. Into the flash of the cameras she smiled and smiled. One evening Sinatra was the escort—his way, perhaps, of making up for missing the wedding. Flemming was bewildered by the marriage, principally because, as she knew, it was a sham. Sammy lived in one house, Loray in another, on Sunset Plaza Drive, where Sammy was obliged to pay the rent as well as other bills. They led separate lives. “Loray would call her boyfriend at night and go to sleep with the phone off the hook,” says Flemming. “The first phone bill I saw there were thirty-nine [long-distance] phone calls. I asked Loray, ‘How can you talk that long?’ She said, ‘I fell asleep.’ The bill was five hundred-something dollars. That was 1958!”

A marriage made in fear was bound to boomerang. “She had a sweet deal,” Flemming says of White. “But she went crazy. She [had been] making minimum wage at the Silver Slipper. Sammy bought her a convertible Ford. He bought her a ring nice enough to photograph. He got her a house on Sunset overlooking the city.” If Flemming wasn’t opening restaurant bills for Sammy, she seemed to be opening shopping bills for Loray. “Loray’s bills were coming in, and they were overwhelming.”

In September, nine months after the marriage, Loray White announced to the press she was going to file for divorce. The drama had gone on just long
enough to make the press think it had been an honorable attempt at marriage. “Sammy gave her $10,000,” says Sy Marsh, one of Sammy’s agents. “He never even lived with her one day. He had so much pussy he didn’t need her.” Flemming sensed, before White’s rehearsed announcement to the press, that White suddenly had misgivings, that she wanted to veer from the script and try a genuine marriage. “She decides that she’s in love with Sammy. She was only in love with Sammy because she couldn’t have him.”

“
It was doomed from the start,” Sammy would come to reminisce about the marriage—like Emily Brontë exposing the fate of Heathcliff and Catherine.

Now and then, long after the announcement of the divorce, Loray would drop by Sammy’s Los Angeles office. She was a curious sight. Sammy had missed sending a support check, and she needed the money; she was thinking of writing a book about her marriage; perhaps someone they knew was looking for a singer. Mostly—with all the flashbulbs dimmed, with the fantasy evaporated, with Sammy himself gone—she just seemed lonely. Such a malady hardly afflicted Sammy. “After his divorce from Loray,” says Maggie Hathaway, “Sammy was being introduced to all the blue-eyed, blond white girls.”

In all her time watching and working for Sammy, certain feelings began to overwhelm Jean Flemming about her employer. She began to feel a strange kind of pity about Sammy. “He was different in black,” she says, “than he was in white. He thought he
was
white.”