In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (73 page)

With President Johnson battered by the Vietnam War—“Johnson’s War,” the protesters were now dubbing it—Hubert Humphrey received the Democratic presidential nomination that summer in Chicago. But the event was a disaster. Mayor Daley’s riot policemen—Sammy’s
Golden Boy
cast had spied them up close months earlier!—attacked convention goers and even the media. Blood spilled. On television the spectacle looked ghastly. “
The kids screamed and were beaten to the ground, rapped in the genitals by cops swinging billies,” one reporter noted. The Republicans nominated former vice president Richard Nixon. Sammy knew Nixon better than Humphrey. As for Humphrey, he lacked animation on the stump. The citizenry seemed somewhat bewildered by him; his years in LBJ’s shadow had not properly illuminated his natural gifts. It did not help that George Wallace, running himself and ricocheting across the Deep South—uttering fiery and code-worded racist oratory—was yapping at Humphrey’s heels. Humphrey also fretted about how quickly he should distance himself from the administration’s Vietnam policies. He waited until September, which proved too late. Nixon bested Humphrey in a squeaker—43.4 to 42.7 in the popular vote—becoming the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

The atmosphere on the streets alarmed Sammy so much that he decided to, once again, beef up his security detail.

There was hardly a month where Sammy wasn’t seen on the American television screen. His appearances were mostly on comedy specials, sitcoms, and talk shows. Rather than ingratiate himself deeply, he fell back on what he knew: the quip from the stage, mocking the volcanic times upon the land, making fun of race, of black and white.

In the days of the antebellum South, cartoonists often drew Negroes sitting on picket fences, eating watermelon. The image portrayed was of the happy Negro, watermelon seeds dripping from mouths. The watermelon would become a rather bizarre piece of fruit in the annals of the Negro and stereotype.

When Sammy—accompanied by Jay Bernstein—showed up in Moab, Utah, for the start of filming on
Sergeants 3
, both noticed something large and green outside the door of his hotel room. They stared hard. It was a watermelon. A little something from Sinatra, who admitted to the prank. Sammy howled. Ha ha ha.

Appearing on the variety show
Laugh-In
, Sammy is seated at a piano, playing a tune. A flower vase on the piano suddenly breaks. “Now that’s black power!” he
howls out to the nationwide audience. America on fire. Ha ha ha. And you can almost hear the giddy laughter from the suburbs—and the anguish from the inner-city living rooms.

And yet, Sammy was money, and no one knew that better than the NAACP. They’d write those fundraiser letters and he’d scribble his name at the bottom, and the letters went out and the cash rolled back in. He’d been doing it since the early ’50s. And so many times there he’d be on a stage in Kansas City, in Boston, in New York, performing, raising money—and publicizing Sammy.

In 1969, Sammy received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. It represented the organization’s highest award. All those benefits! All that money for “the movement.” Sammy showed at the ceremony wearing a Nehru suit. He resembled an escapee from a high-level cabinet meeting in India. Roy Wilkins, NAACP director, had to raise his arms up and over Sammy’s head—so as not to trifle with the star’s stylishly coiffed Afro—as he draped the medal around the honoree’s neck.

Soul brother Sammy.

S
ammy Davis, Jr., might have become a fine movie actor, but there were two things that conspired against him. First, he lacked the patience it took to sit on a movie set inside a trailer waiting to be summoned for his performance. Great movie actors—Spencer Tracy, Laurence Olivier (from whom Sammy dreamed of taking personal tutorials)—focused inside their idleness. The staccato rhythm of movie acting—scenes shot out of sequence—did nothing to undermine their performances. But that very process bored Sammy. Vaudevillians, who were itchy creatures, didn’t idle; they performed. The second, and perhaps more damaging, was Frank Sinatra, whom Sammy allowed to hijack what might have been an admirable movie career. Before Sinatra came along, Sammy had given two nuanced performances—in
Anna Lucasta
and
Porgy and Bess
—working, on both occasions, with directors who challenged him. More movie roles, however, did not follow. He took to the road; he had mouths—his retinue—to feed! But he loved Hollywood and wanted a movie mogul behind him. His courting of Goldwyn for his
Porgy and Bess
role had been shameless. But along came Sinatra, offering up a string of movies in which Sammy costarred:
Ocean’s 11
,
Sergeants 3
,
Robin and the 7 Hoods
(the latter, it must be said, featured Sammy in a fervid dance-and-gun routine atop a bartop that alone was worth the price of a ticket).

Sinatra, for all his renown in Hollywood, for his
From Here to Eternity
Oscar, never took his film career seriously. He needed—as did Sammy—the warm flesh and presence of bodies, a stage with hungry faces peering up at him, the music of a live audience. In a way, both Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., considered movies a little beneath them, the trick of holding an audience in the palm of a hand their highest self-salute. Sammy appeared in only one movie in 1965, the forgettable
Nightmare in the Sun
, and one movie in 1966,
A Man Called Adam
, the vehicle he produced and starred in while appearing in
Golden Boy
on Broadway. At the time of filming that movie, he was not only
onstage but doing his short-lived television series as well. Little wonder his performance in the movie seems disjointed. Sinatra wanted Sammy’s follow-up to
A Man Called Adam
to be Sinatra’s own
Tony Rome
. “Frank calls me,” recalls agent Sy Marsh, “says, ‘Listen, I want Sammy to do
Tony Rome
with me.’ I say, ‘He can’t. He’s committed to
Sweet Charity
.’ I call Sammy and tell him. He says, ‘Do what you have to do.’ I tell Frank. He says, ‘Okay, fuck him, it’s the last time I’ll do something for him.’ ”

Sinatra aside, Sammy’s best performances always occurred when he was whirring before the camera—in
Porgy and Bess
,
Robin and the 7 Hoods
,
Sweet Charity
. In those films, he offered dazzling bits of performance; he appears both kinetic and sinewy. A musical figure in his offscreen life, Sammy needed to feel and act musical in reel life to cement his confidence that the screen was for him.

The director Richard Donner first gained attention in Hollywood directing episodic television. A onetime actor, he had a feel for performers. Among his earliest efforts was directing episodes of
Wanted Dead or Alive
, a CBS television Western that aired from 1958 to 1961 and made a star of Steve McQueen. Donner liked directing Westerns, and got additional work directing episodes of
The Wild Wild West
, starring Robert Conrad. Sammy agreed to a guest starring role on
The Wild Wild West
but wanted Peter Lawford to appear as well. On his guest stint, Sammy played an undercover Secret Service agent. Donner was beguiled at Sammy’s insistence that his skin color have nothing to do with the role. “It wasn’t a black secret service agent—it was Sammy. It wasn’t a black actor—it was Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s a big difference,” notes Donner. The episode gave Sammy just what he wanted—yet another opportunity to showcase his dazzling quick-draw skills. “I had a crazy time with them,” Donner recalls of the friendship he formed with Sammy and Peter Lawford. Carousing together, the three began joking about opening up a nightclub, then did just that. “We called it ‘Mutha’—for ‘Motherfucker,’ ” says Donner. “I found the building on La Pierre, between Santa Monica and Melrose [in Los Angeles]. It was the old Mitchell camera factory. But we changed the name from ‘Mutha’ to ‘The Factory.’ It was the most ‘in’ private club in the world. I met Ike and Tina Turner at a wedding in Texas. They came and played at the club.” Sammy would swoop into the club, the music blaring, his bony shoulders twisting and turning to the beat, in love with the scene he himself had helped create. It was an ode to a new and hipper Hollywood. At times Donner would find himself just staring at Sammy as he crisscrossed the floor of the nightclub. “Sammy was like a puppet when he walked. But it was wonderful to watch.”

Sammy and his two co-owners were shrewd about the club’s clientele. “You
couldn’t get in,” says Donner. “Every major model and airline stewardess got free membership. We’d get phone calls from the State Department saying a sheikh was coming with twenty women. We made it so exclusive it was ridiculous. Minnesota Fats used to play [pool] there. Sammy was king. Every once and a while he’d get up and sing—or grab the mike and be the emcee.”

And every once in a while the three—Sammy, Peter Lawford, and Donner—would talk of movies. Sammy confided to Donner that he had ambitions to direct. He still hungered to direct a remake of
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, a 1935 British production that starred Leslie Howard, who played two roles in the film: an ordinary British fop, and a brave soul who rescued those undone by the French Revolution. Sammy loved double lives.

Sammy and Lawford sometimes hashed out movie ideas for themselves. (“Sammy and Peter wanted to show people they were stars
without
Frank,” says Jay Bernstein.) One evening the two turned to Donner with something on their minds. “They said, ‘We’d love to do a movie with you,’ ” Donner says. Their idea was a film about two London disco-club owners and their run-ins with nightclub rivals. It would be a comedy, a farce. Inside the Factory they began imagining scenes, bits of dialogue. Sammy longed to play a Londoner. “We were writing
Salt & Pepper
” inside the club, Donner says. Donner finally hired Michael Pertwee, an English playwright and screenwriter, for the major writing job. “While the writing was being done,” Donner recalls, “Sammy was on the road all the time. We joined him in Oahu [Hawaii].”

As he got to know Sammy, Donner found something rather strange in the entertainer’s voice: “He always talked ‘white.’ I think at that point that was just Sammy. I don’t think it was an affectation.”

Donner went to London in 1968 to prepare for filming of
Salt & Pepper—
Lawford was salt, Sammy pepper. Ha ha. The movie would be shot at Shepperdon Studios. When Sammy arrived, he was giddy, as ever, to be back in London. Among the items in his prepared wardrobe were derbies, pinstriped suits, narrow trousers, and walking sticks. “The wardrobe on the picture disappeared fast as it was made,” says Donner. Sammy was seen on the streets of London in costume. A modern-day Heathcliff! Sammy immediately hit the nightspots. In fact, they had jolly good fun. And they gave young Donner reason to worry:

Donner simply found it impossible to ignore Sammy’s charm, his astounding energy. Restaurant bills, nightclub tabs—Sammy said send the bills to him! “They owed everybody,” Donner says of Sammy and Lawford. “Money burned a hole in Sammy’s pocket.” Donner would sit in the restaurants where Sammy sometimes gathered cast and crew members and he’d listen to the racial jokes. With Sammy around, it was open season on racial verbal patter. Donner would listen to the jokes and nearly squirm—wondering how Sammy could raise himself up with his powerful talent, then alternately lower himself by succumbing to the demeaning put-downs: “That’s the genius,” believed Donner.

The London street crowds—friend or foe—energized Sammy. “I remember him getting out of cars in London,” says Donner. “He’d walk out there. It wasn’t artificial happiness. He loved it. It was like insulin in his arm.”

There was the matter of acting discipline, which Donner found wanting. “They would become childishly temperamental,” he says of Sammy and Lawford. “Peter bent to Sammy’s demands.” The two Rat Packers knew Donner was director, but they were—as Sinatra had so often been—the producers! “Filming was brutal,” Donner says.

•     •     •

Donner was left with one thought about Sammy when filming ended: “I think he would have given anything to be white.” In a strange way, the revelation endeared Sammy to him. “To know him was to love him. To experience him was to know his pain.”

Even as good movie roles eluded Sammy, he continued to dream. He had announced plans in February 1973 to film
The Legend of Isaac Murphy
. Murphy was a black jockey who won the Kentucky Derby in 1884—and went on to tally many other notable victories, among them three American Derbies, becoming one of the most celebrated jockeys of his time. Sammy, of course, needed to look no further than his own family circle for insight into the racing profession: Will Mastin and Sam Sr. had always been drawn to horses and stables. But in 1973, Hollywood was swooning over its production of a stream of urban-oriented films featuring blacks far removed from historical figures. These were the so-called black exploitation movies, and they featured the meanderings of a mélange of characters—pimps, thieves, con artists, hustlers, and Robin Hood criminals. Their titles were rather exotic—
Superfly
,
Friday Foster
,
Cleopatra Jones
. Having traveled in the rarefied world of working with such A-list names as Otto Preminger, Sinatra, and Harry Belafonte, Sammy steered clear of the black exploitation films. Never mind that these movies provided many blacks with their first starring roles, the movies themselves seemed to grate on Sammy. “
We should show all the sides,” he said of the black-themed movies and their propensity for glorifying crime. He had a point, but not a true understanding of blacks in Hollywood and the travails of the past.