In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (67 page)

Hilly felt ashamed that Sammy wanted him to reduce the choice to dollars when he knew moral positioning was at stake. He felt torn inside. He got Belafonte on the phone. He told Belafonte what Sammy wanted him to tell him: “I tell him I can’t afford to close the show.”

“Can’t you?” Belafonte asked, in a tone that didn’t so much question Hilly’s clout as his nerve.

The preacher who blasted the moral conscience of a nation wide open needed Sammy—his money and his name. All those fund-raisers. “Get Sammy,” King would cry out, and his lieutenants knew exactly what he meant
.
(
BETTMANN ARCHIVE
)

“Of course I can’t,” Elkins replied.

“I’ll
buy
the night,” Belafonte then said, speaking as one of the few Negro entertainers in America who could afford to make such a vow. Hilly suddenly brightened. Belafonte had given him the perfect answer. The show wouldn’t lose any money. Now Sammy had to go to Selma.

In Selma, tension and fear remained high. A week after Lewis and the others were attacked on the Pettus Bridge, Reverend James Reeb, of Boston, was viciously attacked in Selma during another painful attempt at a march. Two days after he was beaten, he died.

The new Selma-to-Montgomery march was announced for March 21. Belafonte told King and the others that he had Sammy’s commitment. On the morning they were to depart, Belafonte went to the Gorham Hotel to pick up Sammy. Murphy, Sammy’s assistant, told Belafonte that Davis wasn’t around, that he never came in during the previous night. But as he said it, Murphy nodded his head upward, motioning to Belafonte that he should go upstairs and knock on the door. Altering his distinctive and gravelly voice, Belafonte knocked on the door, pretending to be a bellhop. Sammy’s female guest—it was not May—opened the door, and Belafonte saw Sammy cowering beneath
the bedspread, petrified at going to Selma. Belafonte’s voice rose as he spoke to Sammy—scolding like a father to an errant son. He made Sammy feel ashamed of himself. Sammy rose and began to dress for the trip to Selma.

His nerves finally strong enough—Belafonte was not allowing him to back out. Sammy went to get George Rhodes, his musical conductor, who had already agreed to go south. But Rhodes suddenly had a change of mind and backed out at the last minute. “Have a good trip,” Rhodes said. “I ain’t going.”

Americans were being attacked and murdered in Selma. Governor George Wallace was vowing to wage a war against the federal government. Men in small towns were stockpiling weapons. George Rhodes would leave Selma to itself.

Sammy still needed a musician. Charles Strouse, a veteran of the movement before it was a movement—he had accompanied Butterfly McQueen on her southern tour years earlier—volunteered. On the plane, then, it was Sammy, Hilly, Strouse, and Sheila Sullivan, who was Paula Wayne’s understudy in
Golden Boy
—and Hilly’s current girlfriend. In the air, Sammy began knocking back brandy. He talked about women, about his life, the places he had been. “He was reflective,” Strouse recalls. “But he was high.” The plane landed in Atlanta; from there, the group boarded a charter flight that would take them to Selma. When they landed in Selma, and as they were preparing to leave the plane, Sammy, in one of those unconscious and sweet little moments that marked him, grabbed the arm of Sheila Sullivan. Sullivan was as white, and as blond, as Paula Wayne, as May Britt herself. Hilly noticed the scene, of Sammy and his arm around Sullivan, of the waiting media, of the Negroes outside the window awaiting them, and thought better of Sammy’s debut into the Selma twilight with a white lady on his arm. He whispered to Sammy, who dropped his arm. They all began striding through the terminal. “There was an old black man,” remembers Strouse. “He said, ‘You’re Sammy Davis, Jr.’ Sammy said, ‘No, I’m the FBI. I’m here to infiltrate.’ ”

Ha ha ha.

This time, America would be watching, and the brave souls who had been on the Pettus Bridge would be joined by thousands more. The event lasted three days. George Wallace could not stop this march, not this time. There were speeches, brave and defiant words, touching words spoken about those who had died. On the final day there was music. Shelley Winters, the actress, borrowed some lights from a nearby air force base. Elaine May and Mike Nichols—the comedy team soon to become an important writing and directing force—were there. So were Leonard Bernstein and Tony Bennett. The musical organizers needed a stage for a concert event and didn’t have one, so they turned to Negro undertakers, who supplied coffins, which, placed side by side, became a makeshift stage. Charles Strouse set up some musical instruments
on it. Leonard Bernstein had turned to Hilly and said, “You’re a producer, so produce!” Elkins needed dressing rooms for the performers; he got some buses, and the performers dressed inside them. King spoke. Sammy performed—first singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—at a nighttime event. “He was scared shitless,” remembers Elkins. But surrounded by so many brave common folk, Sammy became struck by their gallantry, their defiance. He had, during the run of
Golden Boy
, given an interview to Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist. He had spoken of “
a man who, halfway between the worlds of whites and the Negroes, feels at ease with neither the whites nor the Negroes and [is] rejected by both whites and Negroes.” Sammy was, upon the red dirt of Alabama, not halfway between anything; he was just on the side of justice, and embraced. He could feel how much Negroes needed him, needed and wanted him to help them get across all the painful dusty righteous roads. The plain folk of Selma were hanging on to their undocumented courage. They thanked Sammy for coming, they thanked him for his courage.

On the final night of the Selma event, Sammy walked over to Belafonte. “Thank you,” he said softly to Belafonte. And as Belafonte looked down at Sammy Davis’s face, he saw tears.

Back in New York, Sammy and Hilly, still doing wonderful business with
Golden Boy
every night—they were into the six-month run of the production—could not forget Selma. It had introduced them to the movement from a front-line perspective. It had seeped into them. So they decided to do something: they’d host an event, bringing together Broadway performers to raise money for Martin Luther King, Jr., and his movement. Sammy and Hilly would produce it, and Sammy would play host, right at the Majestic Theatre.

Broadway Answers Selma
took place Sunday, April 4, right on the stage of the Majestic. The theater was packed. Stars of the stage were everywhere, joined by a sprinkling of politicians. Sammy laughed, hugged, doubled over, talked movingly of his Selma journey. He was so proud that he had climbed down off the stage and trekked to Selma—albeit reluctantly. But as movingly as the gathered stars gazed at Sammy, he gazed just as movingly right back at them. Celebrities wowed him so. His fawning adulation of others befuddled Strouse, who began wondering what really lurked in the blueness of Sammy’s soul.

“Sammy was one of the most complicated men I ever met,” recalls Strouse. “I never could feel what he was really feeling.”

Barbra Streisand, Jack Benny, Alan Alda, Diana Sands, Maurice Chevalier, John Gielgud, Richard Kiley, Jack Albertson, they were all there, on the stage of the Majestic, kissing Sammy, being hugged by Sammy. And more: Martin
Sheen, Walter Matthau, the old cowboy movie star Dan Duryea. Everyone in theatrical circles seemed to know Duryea had a serious drinking problem. But he—so unexpectedly—did a soft-shoe dance number across the stage, and it was so sublime it was gorgeous—“one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen,” recalls William Gibson.

The event at the theater raised $150,000. Martin Luther King’s command—“Get Sammy”—had come to have a powerful cachet.

Those in the
Golden Boy
cast noticed a change in Sammy after Selma—an ever-so-slight change. Gone were the British affectations. “He went and brought me an Afro wig,” says Lola Falana. “He said, ‘Hey, I got something in the bag for you.’ I said, ‘Sammy, where am I going to wear this?’ He said, ‘You never know, you might need a little more
flair.’
He said, ‘You gotta be in step with the times.’ There was one white wig, and one platinum wig.”

It was considered de rigueur for the
Golden Boy
cast members to rush out and purchase a copy of Sammy’s autobiography,
Yes I Can
. Hilly bought a bunch and gave them out as gifts. Why, it was a wonderful world, this show business: Sammy, the Tony-nominated actor, was, within weeks, a best-selling author.

The fact that he was now an author hardly prohibited Sammy from trumpeting other books. He had additional hardcover recommendations. At the Majestic Theatre one afternoon he asked Lolly Fountain if she had read anything by the Marquis de Sade. She had not. Sammy—his eyes gleaming—gave her the complete works of that French chronicler of lust and debauchery.

The Negro dancers were circling Sammy. His marriage vows had weakened beyond repair. May looked the other way. And stopped coming to the theater.

“He always wanted to be a part of, to be accepted,” dancer Lola Falana says. Sammy told Falana—who had created so much buzz with her breakthrough role—that he’d manage her, a mere complement to his secret dream of managing prizefighters. He’d send her out into the world—like some beautiful soaring bird. He’d make her a star. “Sammy said, ‘You’re not just a little dancer, are you?’ I said, ‘No sir, I’m not.’ He said, ‘Well, if you’re gonna go out there, you’re not gonna do it without my help. They’ll eat you alive.’ ”

He was talking about the sharks, the critics. He knew where they swam.

Rumors were rumors. And May Britt turned an ear away from them. She had been in show business for years—she knew to steel herself against them. She busied herself with the kids.

Roger Straus, Sammy’s publisher, worried what effect marital discord and a possible breakup—he had also heard the rumors—might have on sales of
Yes I Can
, but, of course, there was nothing he could do.

Sammy had started telling friends that May’s lifestyle bored him.

It was becoming apparent that it was all about more than the Afro wigs Sammy had bought for Falana. He simply could no longer resist the black girls, with their Negroness, their large bobbing Afros, their seductiveness, their pride.

Whenever there was an audition for a new dancer to replace one who had left the production, the tryout session would be crowded, crew members ogling the dancers. One Negro dancer who arrived was Altovise Gore. She had been in several New York productions and was a graduate of New York City’s High School for Performing Arts. Musical actor Robert Guillaume, who befriended Gore, thought of her as “one of these fresh unspoiled girls full of life and humor.” Sammy took notice of the new arrival, his interest in Negro girls now quite constant.

Sammy’s interest in Negro girls paralleled something else far more profound.

Sammy’s America had changed right before his eye. Epic events had unfolded.
Yes I Can
was finished in 1962. It lay unpublished for three years. And during those three years, up to 1965, nothing less than a cultural and social revolution had occurred across the American landscape. Negroes were now on the march. A movement had gotten under way, in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Los Angeles, in New Orleans, at the old slave market in St. Augustine, Florida. Old men were marching, old women, children—Sammy. It wasn’t so much the “but thank God we ain’t what we was” of Sammy’s epigraph in
Yes I Can
anymore, in itself a kind of acceptance of the status quo. Now the epigraph was up from the streets and it was something far bolder—“We Shall Overcome.” There were now few urban areas in America where racial violence had not erupted; and where it had not erupted, it was simmering.

Negro churches were burned to the ground in the South. Alabama governor George Wallace was drawing large white rallies. Change was everywhere, sudden change. If Sammy had looked, he would have noticed it off-Broadway, in downtown New York, at the St. Marks Playhouse. There, a playwright by the name of LeRoi Jones had two plays,
The Toilet
and
The Slave
, which, when they opened in 1965, had shocked the senses. They attacked racism with a fierceness rarely evidenced on the New York stage. The
New York Journal-American
said that to witness them was “
a terrifying evening in the theatre this season, or any other for that matter.” There was another play that season,
Day of Absence
, by Douglas Turner Ward. In it, the Negro actors wore whiteface—a satirical variation of blackface. If they’d looked uptown, they’d have seen a Negro actor by the name of Sammy Davis, Jr., who had worn blackface as a little child. Not for satire—but for keeps.

Everywhere, change.

Medgar Evers, dead. Shot with an Enfield rifle close to midnight on June 11,
1963. The voting rights crusader was alighting from his car in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home. The fragrance of mint julips in the air, blood in the driveway.

Those three young men—Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney—dead in Mississippi.