In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (75 page)

Sammy’s oeuvre consisted of jumpy Broadway show tunes, old jazz standards (“My Funny Valentine,” “April in Paris”), and ballads. He did have a thing for the lushness of a tune, but he was also quick to make a tune over, as he had done with “Hey There,” his first hit. Never a popular singer, he remained, during his career, one who relished the mechanics of singing. It can be said that he genuinely gave his voice to a song, but a great deal of the giving was in the enunciation and theatrics—not to be confused with what lay inside the heart. Sammy could not—and here is but another of the contradictions that coursed through his life—read music, and yet, he sang like a conservatory-trained singer.

If Sammy did not receive proper direction in his singing career, he had only himself to blame. Having allowed Sinatra to march through his life like a commanding general—dispensing advice, movie scripts, record deals—he remained loath to rebel against his principal ally. A string of albums
—At the Coconut Grove
,
The Sounds of ’66
,
That’s All! Sammy Davis Jr. Belts the Best of Broadway
,
Dr. Dolittle
—were all under Sinatra’s Reprise label. On November 7, 1962, Reprise released the single “Me and My Shadow,” a Sammy Davis–Frank Sinatra duet. The song was written by Billy Rose, Dave Dreyer, and Al Jolson. (Jolson, the blackface artist, seemed to be trailing Sammy’s life like smoke through curtains.)

Sammy’s agent, Sy Marsh, chafed at the Reprise arrangement. “He got the leftover shit,” he says of Sammy. “All these guys wrote for Frank. When I came in the picture, I started making demands.” When his demands were not met, Marsh encouraged Sammy to leave Reprise, convincing him he’d find another, more agreeable label elsewhere. It took time, but the phone finally rang. The caller stunned Sy Marsh: it was Berry Gordy, of Motown Records. Marsh was shrewd enough to recognize the psychological tensions of Sammy’s racial persona—he knew few blacks purchased Sammy’s records, or attended his nightclub performances, for that matter—and simply could not imagine such realities being in harmony with the Motown Record company.

In 1959, former auto-plant worker Berry Gordy had founded Motown Records in Detroit. Gordy decided he’d recruit local talent, and would augment their natural gifts by sending them to the Motown in-house “charm school.” Among Gordy’s first hires was Cholly Atkins, who would teach the singers dance steps. (It was the same Atkins who had toured with the Will Mastin Trio decades earlier. What Atkins would begin teaching at Motown, Sammy already knew.) Among the label’s first hits was something Gordy himself wrote—“Lonely Teardrops”—sung by a young Jackie Wilson. Gordy soon had a unique roster of talent—Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Contours, Martha and the Vandellas, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, “Little” Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations. Within a few short years, most would be famous and wildly successful. Gordy called his music the
“Sound of Young America.” It had its millions of white listeners, to be sure, but Motown had the synergy of black America in its veins. Not all of its tunes were ballads and love songs; in 1970, Motown singer Edwin Starr recorded “War!” one of the earliest of the anti-Vietnam songs. That same year the label also released “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam,” a speech that had been recorded by Martin Luther King, Jr. It would be honored with a Grammy Award.

On the surface, the mingling of Sammy and Motown seemed as unlikely as Sammy and the Blackstone Rangers. Motown had soul singers; Sammy’s sound was difficult to categorize—a fusion of nostalgia, jazz, bebop, and Broadway; “middle-of-the-road shit,” in Sy Marsh’s mind—and he sang it to the suburbs. Sammy’s favorite songwriters were Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse—two Brits; Motown’s galaxy of singers were partial to Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland, young black songwriters who had written many of the label’s hits for Diana Ross and the Supremes. And yet, the more Sy Marsh thought about Berry Gordy and Motown—and Sammy’s distant relationship with black America—the more his mind began clicking. He saw a wonderful opportunity: “Here’s a chance to go with the hottest record label for blacks in the world.”

Sammy and Sy hustled off to a meeting with Gordy. Sammy sat listening. For Marsh, his earlier revelation deepened during that meeting: “Here I am with the world’s number one producer—black—and Sammy, the greatest entertainer.” Gordy made a pitch about his stable of songwriters, about how Motown could broaden Sammy’s appeal. Gordy’s label indeed had produced more than two dozen number 1 hits in the past decade. The record mogul offered a two-record deal. “Think about it,” he said, as Sammy and Sy rose to leave.

They didn’t need very long to think. Sinatra was the 1940s and 1950s, the past; Berry Gordy was the 1960s—and the future. A press conference was called. “I believe I can make Sammy Davis the world’s biggest recording star,” Gordy announced.

As for Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, they were—poof—gone.

A black wife.

A black recording label.

Sammy’s conversion was streaking.

There were few places across the American landscape where social change had taken shape so vividly as in the Deep South. Blacks had been elected to school boards, to city councils. Sometimes it felt like the walls of Jericho were cracking.

Since 1947 the town leaders of Wilmington, North Carolina, had hosted their annual Azalea Festival. It consisted of parades, garden exhibits, and
plenty of music. The old southern city, hugging the Atlantic Ocean, dressed itself up every springtime to host the festival. In 1978, the event’s organizers invited Sammy Davis, Sr., to be one of its marshals. They contacted Charles Fisher, Sam Sr.’s cousin, who still resided in Wilmington.

Sam Sr. was leading a life of leisure in Beverly Hills, tooling along in his Jaguar with his wife, Rita. He was an old retired tap dancer who played the horses and stopped off at his son’s Hollywood offices now and then. His waist had widened, but he still looked a dandy in his suits. When Charles Fisher reached Sam Sr. and told him that the organizers of the Azalea Festival in his hometown of Wilmington wanted him to be one of the guest marshals, he simply could not believe it. After all, he had left the town as a young man decades before with his heart beating fast, believing police officers were about to arrest him for the confrontation he had had with the white store owner. Sam Sr. listened to Charles, and he pelted him with questions, not believing any of it. And Charles kept talking, trying to sell the city to Sam Sr., telling him it was a changed city, an integrated city now. “Sam thought they were planning a lynch party for him for what had happened” in the past, recalls Fisher. But Sam Sr. finally agreed to the return. (After his conversation with Fisher, however, he phoned another Wilmington relative to make sure the invitation was legit and that there was no trickery involved.)

Sam was greeted by family and festival officials upon his arrival. He fairly beamed. (The festival would run from April 6 to 9.) Rita held his hand. Inasmuch as he had never returned to the city since he’d left, it was a homecoming. Charles, having played intermediary, was delighted—in himself, for pulling Sam Sr. back to his hometown, and also in Wilmington. Sam exchanged pleasantries with festival organizers, then Charles ushered him into his station wagon. “He said, ‘Charlie, take me over to Brooklyn [a section of Wilmington] so I can show Rita where I was born.” And there he stood—the boy who had fled town by train, who had danced the Charleston all over the country, who had sent for his mother to leave Wilmington and come to New York City, who married a showgirl, who raised a boy who became a star. Watching Big Sam show Rita around touched Charles. Everyone got emotional. A meal was prepared; Charles couldn’t help complimenting Sam on the beauty of his wife.

The concert, which featured soap opera stars and singer B. J. Thomas, was held the following evening in the auditorium that had formerly belonged to the all-white high school. A local black fraternity, AKA, performed. Sam Sr. cackled, enjoying it all. “Big Sam danced that evening,” remembers Charles. “Old as he was, he got up and stole the show.”

Before he left Wilmington, Sam Sr.—a son of North Carolina—wanted to leave something behind for the people of his hometown to remember him by.

He left his tap shoes.

•     •     •

In a concession to the youth movement, Sy Marsh figured it was wise to have someone youthful and black on Sammy’s office staff. Sy always feared someone from the Negro press dropping by and seeing only white faces. So he hired Ann Slider, a young black aspiring actress, to be an office assistant. She began work in 1970 at the office on Sunset Boulevard.

Slider, short and perky, was thrilled to be working for Sammy Davis, Jr. Before long, she was greeted with a rather charming, if peculiar, sight: old show-business people—vaudevillians—marching in and out of the office. They were dragging themselves now because of age. They had worked with Sammy when he was with the Will Mastin Trio—in Detroit, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., in Syracuse. They’d rattle off names of cities, and Ann would just smile. But they were not only there for a trip down memory lane. They also wanted to know if there was a check—some money. When Slider would exhibit confusion and sorrow—there was no check; of course there was no check; why would there be a check for someone not currently working with Sammy?—they insisted she keep looking, because they knew there was a check. And in a drawer, or a stack of mail, she would find one check, then another, and another. “I couldn’t believe all the people on the payroll,” she says of the comics, mimics, dancers who danced no more. “Pigmeat Markham was on the payroll. All these vaudeville people.” They would hug her—Sammy was not often around—and simply shuffle on away with a gift from Sammy.

Now and then Will Mastin or Sam Sr. would come to the office, old dignified men, still dressing sharply. “Mainly, they were there to pick up checks,” says Slider. She’d engage them in small conversation. “I said to Will one day, ‘Teach me how to tap-dance.’ He got up and showed me some steps.” When Sam Sr. would bump into Mastin at the office, he’d start talking about “family,” and beg Will to come spend the holidays with him and Sammy. Will listened, nodded, and went about his way. They’d be lucky to see him in a year’s passing.

Sam Sr.—unlike Will—adored the public. He did quite a bit of fishing now. He’d get himself down to Redondo Beach, and climb aboard the public boat with his fishing gear. It wasn’t just any fishing gear, it was Abercrombie & Fitch. A five-hundred-dollar rod and reel. And he wasn’t one for scruffy fishing attire. “The dad was dressed impeccably,” recalls Mike Green, a young UCLA medical resident then who used to go on the fishing boat along with his buddies and who befriended Sam Sr. The aging entertainer would regale them with vaudeville stories. There was warmth in his voice as he talked about Sam Jr. “Here we were dressed in Levi’s, and the dad was out there in a two-piece suit,” says Green. But the trips would always end embarrassingly; Sam Sr. would always get drunk. “He would be unconscious by the time we’d get off the boat,” says Green. “They literally had to carry him off the boat.”

•     •     •

Ann Slider found it hard to get used to the volume of phone calls ringing in Sammy’s office concerning old bills. “When I first started there, I was appalled at the phone calls that came in from creditors,” she says. “Sy would say, ‘We’re going to take care of it.’ ”

But she found a huge amount of joy in opening up Sammy’s fan mail. The volume of mail so astonished her that she finally decided to do something. “There was so much mail, boxes and boxes of mail that was never looked at. So I started the Sammy Davis Fan Club. I had posters made, jewelry, medallions.”

On the occasions she tried telling Sammy about the fan club, he’d hunch his shoulders, seem a little uninterested. She didn’t exactly realize he’d been gathering fans since the age of five.

“People were just in love with him,” says Slider. “There was some little girl who had been in a coma and her mother put a Sammy tune on for her. And she began to move. I told him that story one day. He was in the office shooting pool. He just had no idea people loved him so much.”

But the longer Ann Slider worked for Sammy, the more his name came up outside the office, mostly in little asides made to her by her friends. And those little asides were not salutes but criticisms. They were denigrating comments about all the times Sammy allowed himself to be the foil of racial jokes on the television screen. Slider’s friends thought they were but insults covered in laughter. So her friends asked her about Sammy’s mind-set. And the constant questions thrown at her began to make Ann herself pay closer attention to his television appearances. And she began, like her friends, to wonder about the self-deprecation; how Sammy seemed to be actually embracing the mockery. She was youthful, and her youth propelled her to take risks: she was going to talk to Sammy about the image he was portraying on television—the image he was portraying to America. But first she talked to Jackie, the other secretary in the office—who happened to be white. Jackie’s reaction surprised Ann: “She was in agreement about the way he acted.” Jackie also thought he demeaned himself.

Slider found herself in a quiet moment with her boss. “I told him that when I see him on shows and he’s grinning, well, it really isn’t necessary for him to do that.” She told him her friends felt uneasy—especially her black friends. Then, just as quickly, she told him Jackie—the white secretary—felt the same way. Sammy seemed perplexed, searching for words, an answer. “He started to tell me these are people who helped him and opened doors for him,” she says of those she thought were mocking Sammy—the talk show hosts, the aging white comedians. The moment became even more awkward, until all there was left was a strange silence, suddenly overtaken once again by office noises.

It had to hurt Sammy—the king of the empire—to be assailed in such a manner. The black secretary and the white secretary—both peering right into
him. He was confused, so he did what he had long done in the past. He reached for gifts. “The next day he sent me a Sony tape recorder,” Slider says. “He was on his way to Japan. And when he came back he gave Jackie a beautiful Omega watch and he gave me a hand-carved bracelet watch. I had it appraised later. It was worth $5,000.”