In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (66 page)

Sammy brought together a fine cast for the movie. Louis Armstrong, Ossie Davis, Cicely Tyson—a young New York television actress—Mel Torme, Peter Lawford, and Frank’s boy, Frank Sinatra, Jr. Sammy hired Leo Penn to direct. For supporting the Hollywood Ten—that iconoclastic and brave group of actors and directors who threw caution to the wind during the McCarthy scare—Penn had been blacklisted. In 1957 he started working his way back into the business with a notable role in a Clifford Odets movie,
Story on Page One
. Hollywood did not give out statuettes for moral bravery, but the town could sometimes be strangely sentimental: it was the allegiance-switching Odets himself who had first turned Penn’s name over to the HUAC. Sammy just showed up for work and turned most of the day-to-day work on the movie over to his producers. During that time, the studio tried to fire Ossie Davis. “I made a statement about Vietnam,” Ossie Davis recalls. “They were going to fire me. Sammy said, ‘If you lose one Davis, you’ll lose another.’ I have a great deal of admiration for Sammy.”

The movie was filmed fast, in six weeks, a blurry shooting schedule that mostly took place between midnight and four a.m. Some of the locations Sammy used to film were quite familiar: his penthouse at the Gorham Hotel,
and Small’s Paradise, the kitschy Harlem nightclub owned by basketball star Wilt Chamberlain. The youngsters in the
Golden Boy
cast—Lola Falana, Johnny Brown, Lolly Fountain—loved it when Sammy waved them all onto the movie set. They played extras—with the exception of Lola. She played a real character and got listed in the credits. All received their coveted Screen Actors Guild cards. They couldn’t thank Sammy enough. Sammy’s mother, Elvera, still working in Atlantic City as a barmaid, was also given a role in the movie: barmaid. Shirley Rhodes would look at Sammy some evenings riding to the movie set in the back of the limo after doing his Broadway show, and she’d feel like mothering him: he’d fallen asleep again. But there were parties, champagne, little time for sleep.

Ann Froman designed cowboy boots for Sammy. “They were pewter baby alligator boots that made him look five inches taller. I put a two-inch heel on the outside, and inside the boot I put a platform.” Froman remembers taking her boyfriend—a young and very gifted actor by the name of James Earl Jones, whom she called “Jimmie”—to a party given for the cast of
A Man Called Adam
. “We were at Small’s Paradise in Harlem. Jimmie wanted to meet Sammy. Sammy came over and went out of his way to spend time and talk with us. He wouldn’t look around to see who he might be missing. You felt very loved the minute you met him.” Froman couldn’t figure out how Sammy kept going—from his nightly
Golden Boy
performance to the movie shoot to yet another party. “He always acted like he was on uppers,” she says.

And so he was going and going, as Will Mastin and Sam Sr. had taught him—going and going, as if the pretty things and true things of the world would escape his grasp if he dared close his one eye.

The eye was wide as he stood in the offices of the William Morris Agency in early August and signed a $1 million contract to appear at Harrah’s Club, in Stateline, Nevada. The deal was for eight weeks’ worth of work over a four-year period. “
I can look up there at Harlem where all this started,” he said as he gazed from the twenty-first floor of the Morris agency. “Thirty years ago, I was going around doing one-nighters at ten dollars a night.”

Sammy couldn’t resist the invitation. Never mind that it came during the height of his Broadway run. It was the ever-present thunder in his soul. Harry Belafonte wanted Sammy—along with Sidney Poitier—for a televised tribute to old Harlem. With the country convulsing racially, television executives were suddenly willing to acknowledge that Negroes had a history. Harlem—birthplace of a Negro cultural renaissance decades earlier; at one time home to Elvera Sanchez and Sammy Davis, Sr.—was rife with dramatic and musical possibilities. Executives at CBS gave Belafonte the go-ahead. “
I’ve always felt,”
Belafonte said before the show’s airing, “that television missed a splendid opportunity because it never really did anything on Negro life.” Belafonte’s cast was eclectic. In addition to Poitier and Sammy, there were Duke Ellington, Diahann Carroll, singer Joe Williams, and comedian Nipsey Russell. Belafonte used Langston Hughes’s
The Big Sea
as inspiration, and also hired Hughes as scriptwriter. The result was
The Strollin’ Twenties
, a touching and colorful tribute to the Harlem of a bygone era. There were spirited dance numbers, inventive skits (with Poitier leading the tour), plenty of dancing, and a vocal duet by Sammy and Diahann Carroll. Sammy enjoyed the goings-on, appearing as he did onstage with the very two—Poitier and Belafonte—whom he had always felt he was competing against. Belafonte had always possessed an ability to probe Sammy’s psyche. He knew Sammy would be wonderful in
The Strollin’ Twenties
, and he was not disappointed. “When you looked at Sammy and what a song-and-dance man’s evolution was,” Belafonte says, “no one could hold a candle to him when it came to walking out into an audience and getting to their jugular vein. It was his greatest comfort zone. But once he stepped offstage, all the evils fell back into him.”

The show also presented Langston Hughes to a national television audience. The poet, whose verse had long offered a lyrical song to the odyssey of Negro America, would be dead within fifteen months. At rehearsals for the show, Hughes watched with a gleam in his eyes—his gaze darting from Harry to Sidney to Sammy. He sat dressed in a dark shirt, beige tie, and dark tweedy jacket. The Negro Buddha of verse. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. He smoked a cigarette. Arguably, he was America’s first Negro writer to earn his living solely on his words. He never had to teach, nor scrub his way across the fields of daily journalism. He wrote poetry, plays, librettos, fiction, and nonfiction. He wrote autobiographies. He translated the work of foreign writers. Langston Hughes had invested his art in Negro culture before it became vogue to do so.

“
Put down the 1920s,” Hughes would write, “for the rise of Roland Hayes, who packed Carnegie Hall, the rise of Paul Robeson in New York and London, of Florence Mills over two continents, of Rose McClendon in Broadway parts that never measured up to her, the booming voice of Bessie Smith and the low moan of Clara on thousands of records and the rise of that grand comedienne of song, Ethel Waters, singing ‘Charlie’s elected now! He’s in right for sure!’ ” (Ethel Waters was now touring the country with evangelist Billy Graham, singing, crying out, reviving the faithful. Those gathered to hear her might have been disappointed that, since 1957, she had stopped singing her famous “Stormy Weather.” She said her life was sunny now.)

Such was the excitement about
The Strollin’ Twenties
that Sammy and Harry and Sidney were invited to shoot a
Life
magazine cover heralding the telecast. The photographer was Philippe Halsman, who had shot the photos for
Yes I Can
, Sammy’s soon-to-be-published autobiography.

“GREATEST NEGRO STARS TEAM UP,” the
Life
cover of February 4, 1966, proclaimed. In the cover shot, Poitier and Belafonte are dressed conservatively; Belafonte is in a suit, Poitier in a vest, shirt, tie, and slacks. The two are leaning on a ladder, with Sammy to their left, his look completely different: he is dressed in a beige suit and a red satin bow tie, and he’s wearing a white derby hat at a rakish angle atop his head. His mouth is in a wide grin; his eyes are closed. It is the look of a vaudevillian. He seems to still be in character—from his childhood. Unbeknownst to both Poitier and Belafonte, Sammy has never left vaudeville.

The
Golden Boy
ensemble recorded their cast album for Capitol Records. The album impressively captured the sweaty and rhythmic sounds of boxing, the hissing of rope jumping and training, the sureness of voices—Sammy’s, Paula Wayne’s, the crooner Billy Daniels’s. The Broadway cast recording was listed as an Epic production “in association with the Will Mastin Trio, Inc.”

The year 1965, however, would bring to an end the Sammy–Will Mastin legal entanglement, and Sammy couldn’t be happier.

Hilly did not want to bother Sammy with the latest rumor—that someone intended to kidnap him. It was silly, insane, but the times were bizarre and strange. Hilly alerted the New York police about the kidnapping threat; an extra security guard was posted at the theater.

The theater was a salve for Sammy—at least for the most part. “He’d call me so many nights from New York,” recalls Jerry Lewis. “Not to tell me that he was doing this great show, but that there was a letter in his dressing room where someone had called him ‘nigger.’ And someone else saying he should die. I said, ‘If one letter stops you, they win.’ ”

When the Tony Awards were announced, Sammy and Hilly were ecstatic.
Golden Boy
was nominated for best musical, Sammy for best lead performance in a musical. Hilly was nominated for best producer of a musical. And Donald McKayle, the young Negro choreographer Elkins had taken a chance on, was nominated for choreography. Sammy and Hilly had effectively dulled the critics’ knives. Hilly wasted little time in ordering yet another publicity blitz, touting the nominations. While there were four nominees in the best musical performance category, there was a feeling that the competition would be between Sammy and Zero Mostel, star of
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Three months into the run of
Golden Boy
, 1964 turned over into 1965. In reality, more got turned over during those months than just household calendars. The sixties suddenly became “the sixties.” Old women, young men, children gave of themselves to a cause. Negroes were boycotting businesses in
southern towns. In January and February of 1965, ministers and civil rights activists were trying to register voters in Selma, Alabama. “
Our cry to the state of Alabama is a simple one,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said. “Give us the ballot!” President Lyndon Johnson sent Lady Bird Johnson on a train throughout the South, where she pleaded with her fellow Southerners to abide by the new desegregation laws of the land. She was met with deaf ears. America was suddenly a land of Negroes who were rising and falling and, sometimes, shot and bloodied only to rise again. Medgar Evers fell and stayed down. But Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi kept rising, and so did King. In many households, King had become a king overnight after his 1963 Lincoln Memorial address. (J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI concluded, however, that King was little more than a villain.) And there was the Muslim Malcolm X, of the clinched teeth, the angular body, the finger perpetually pointing outward from an outstretched arm. “
I’m a field Negro,” Malcolm X cryptically announced, offering an analogy. “If the master won’t treat me right and he’s sick, I’ll tell the doctor to go the other way.”

On March 7, a group of Negroes—minus Martin Luther King, Jr., who had, at his staff’s pleading, stayed away because of a series of death threats—convened in Selma and began to march. They aimed themselves toward Montgomery, fifty miles away. The weary and the brave—beauticians, janitors, students, teachers. They’d go as far as their legs would take them, just one foot in front of the next. John Lewis, a young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee stalwart, would recall that the beginnings of the march made him think of “
Gandhi’s march to the sea.” When they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers noticed a convoy of Alabama state troopers. Other men had been deputized and had joined them. Confederate flags were held aloft. The marchers were ordered to turn around. On either side of them rose bridge railings; down below, water. Some of the marchers, up front, noticed something strange: troopers with tear gas masks. Instead of turning around, the marchers decided to kneel and pray. But before their knees touched the ground, the troopers set upon them. Billy clubs were swung, heads cracked, whips swung, tear gas canisters opened. Men and women screamed and tried retreating, tripping over one another, but the troopers kept coming, swinging. Newsmen in the distance were stunned. The marchers had to run, as fast as they could, to get back into Selma, to one of the Negro churches. They were chased by men on horseback, the hooves of horses slapping at ankles. When they finally reached a church, and gathered themselves, and looked around, the sight was miserable: blood everywhere. Mothers crying, fathers looking for sons and daughters. At a church meeting later that evening, John Lewis addressed the gathering. Blood was matted in his hair. “
I don’t know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam,” he said. “I don’t see how he can send troops to the
Congo. I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.”

Later that night, ABC Television cut into its showing of
Judgment at Nuremberg
to report the clash. It seemed a cruel and bizarre bit of cinema: newsreel footage of Negroes being beaten amid shouts of “Get those goddammed niggers!” sliced in between a television movie about Nazi atrocities.

Johnson sent Justice Department officials to Selma to investigate. King and his deputies quickly arrived, now determined to hold a massive Selma-to-Montgomery march. When Harry Belafonte found out, he knew he would have to be a part of it. Then came the familiar King refrain—“Get Sammy”—as he had told Belafonte in the past when the movement needed Sammy’s presence.

It took only days, and with a court victory ensuring their safety for another march, Belafonte had to get Sammy—quick. No one, however, in the spring of 1965, could get Sammy quick. He was on Broadway. Belafonte phoned Hilly Elkins.

“Hilly,” Elkins recalls Belafonte saying, “I’m calling on behalf of Dr. King. King would like Sammy and you to come with us.”

Hilly was flattered. He admired King; like everyone, he followed the movement in the papers, on television. He’d have to tell Sammy right away. Elkins’s office, which was in the Lincoln Hotel—“a real shithole”—happened to be attached to the Majestic. Hilly could walk from his office to the stage door of the Majestic in only minutes. “I go down to the dressing room, tell Sammy that Dr. King wants us to join him in Selma,” says Elkins. “Sammy said, ‘I ain’t going to Selma.’ I say, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘They’re going to kill me.’ ” And “they,” of course, were all the folk who had sent him and May hate mail, who had turned their noses up at him walking through airports, who had sneered at him at the swank clubs and restaurants, who were far to the other side of the thumping American civil rights movement. They were out there, in full force. He knew. Listening, Elkins blanched. He had to think fast, a disposition that came easily to him. He had seen the death threats that came to the Majestic for Sammy, so he could not laugh away Sammy’s fears. And yet, he had to give a plausible answer to Belafonte. He bid for time to think by asking Sammy what he should tell Belafonte. “Tell them you can’t afford to close the show,” Sammy told Elkins.