In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (78 page)

Nixon’s shrewd courting of Sammy continued. The president had another mission: he asked Sammy if he would go to Vietnam to entertain the soldiers. From Mahalia Jackson to ‘Nam; Sammy nearly swooned from the request, and quickly accepted. “Wasn’t a black cat important who ever went to Vietnam,” he bragged rather strangely to Sy Marsh. (Actually, singer James Brown had already visited the troops.)

Putting together a traveling variety show was one of Sammy’s gifts. His Vietnam-bound retinue included upward of two dozen, among them Shirley Rhodes, her husband, George, Altovise (she’d choreograph the shows), Sy Marsh, folk singer Lynn Kellogg, soul singer Blinky Williams, a gaggle of female dancers, and Timmie Rogers—Sammy’s cohort from vaudeville. “Sammy,” remembers Rogers, “said, ‘Timmie, we’re going to Vietnam. The reason I’m asking you is there ain’t no money. Altovise and I are getting a hundred dollars a day and everybody else is getting twenty-five dollars a day.”

Murphy, Sammy’s assistant, was not included on the traveling list. Shirley Rhodes stood next to Sammy as he explained why: “It’s too dangerous, Murphy. You can’t go.”

Sammy loved Murphy, and Murphy loved Sammy. But now Blackstone Ranger Sammy had a job to do. He had to get himself over to Vietnam.

Draw!

Draw!

Murphy begged Shirley to keep an eye on his Sammy.

They loaded up from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. “Went in an army transport plane,” remembers Shirley Rhodes. “We had box lunches. It was awful. From there we went to Hawaii, then Guam, and on to Vietnam.” Sammy looked jittery upon landing—but game, also. “We both were scared,” remembers Altovise.

They roomed in a small house; dinner that first day was fried chicken. And the second and third days also: Shirley started feeling that the Vietnamese cooks thought black folk ate only fried chicken. “We stayed in a little Vietnamese house,” Shirley says. “Sammy and Altovise on one side, George and I on the other.”

In Danang the army built a stage and supplied Sammy with an army band. Sammy performed several shows before large groups of soldiers at a time. He sang and told jokes. He shrank back and watched Lynn Kellogg sing country
tunes. He drenched himself in exhaustion. “He did extra-extra,” says Altovise. He’d tear off his shirt, strut across the stage in his GI getup. He started doing the Black Power salute. He was with the brothers, in the jungle, in ‘Nam; he was as black as they were now. Altovise served as mistress of ceremonies. The GIs ogled her. In hot pants, in Vietnam, on a stage before hundreds of soldiers, she was suddenly the star she had never been in the States. “Hey!” Sammy screamed at the soldiers at one site, “
You gotta ease up on my wife. That ain’t my old lady, that’s my wife, man. Don’t let me come out here and have to cut somebody.”

Whoops of laughter from the GIs.

In the distance, at night, artillery could be heard. “You could hear bullets flying,” remembers Shirley.

They performed at hospitals, rehab centers. Sometimes his audience numbered upward of ten thousand soldiers, waves of men on the ground, their legs crossed, faces upturned to Sammy.

In Long Binh, a UPI reporter trailed the troupe. “The relationship between black and white is better,” Sammy told the reporter. “
I saw some things yesterday I wish people could see at home. Like two cats standing around, one black and one white. These cats are talking and one lights the other’s cigarette—because when they go out in the bush together they face the same thing.”

Sammy, as usual, snapped hundreds of photos while walking down dusty roads with army personnel. He encouraged his hot-pants-wearing dancers to mingle with the troops. And they did. “
They’re very lonesome, and some of them have families that don’t write,” dancer Gigi Gamble confided to Sammy.

Sammy’s mission was twofold: entertain the troops, but also check up on reports of drug abuse. Civil rights leaders back in America were complaining that a disproportionate number of black GIs were being singled out for punishment when caught using drugs. Sammy aimed to check up on the black soldiers. He went to a detoxification center.

“
Motherfucker, w[hat] you doin’ here?” a black GI asked him.

Sammy explained his mission, told them President Nixon had sent him, and they snorted. Back in America, Nixon had meant law and order to a lot of young blacks, the same young blacks in Vietnam.

The white GIs—just as their parents had done—guffawed at Sammy, slapping their knees, gazing. Many black GIs distrusted him. They read the Negro press; they knew Sammy’s image. Several in the detox unit—never mind his marriage to Altovise—made loud noises about his marriage to May Britt. Sammy pleaded for understanding. But many rolled their eyes, complained to him about “the white man,” about Nixon, about being hooked on dope. Standing next to Sammy, listening to him offer counsel against drug use, Sy Marsh, who knew of Sammy’s own drug use, could hardly barely stifle a chuckle.

Some afternoons, rising in a helicopter—plenty of military protection for Sammy, on orders from the State Department—Sammy would arrive at a small camp with American GIs. As soon as the chopper landed, he’d hop out, wade into a group of soldiers, put out the cigarette, and just start strumming his guitar, just singing. He had a canteen on his belt loop. “See a kid, he’d sing a song,” remembers Sy Marsh.

There were moments when Sammy would get lost in himself, in performing on dirt around some soldiers who’d rather be a million other places than Vietnam. He was a vaudevillian all over again. He’d work tirelessly to get smiles. And yet, there were times when he’d turn to Timmie Rogers and start wondering—in a fearful voice—if the Vietcong were going to sneak up on them at night.

Before Sammy left, he asked some of the soldiers if there was anything he could do for them. Someone answered it’d be nice if they could get some ice cream. Ice cream in the jungle. Ha ha.

There was little doubt, when the trip came to a close, that it all had thrilled Sammy. The cinema-loving cowboy versus Indian, good guy versus bad guy—Sammy.

When Sammy arrived back in America in March, he couldn’t wait to tell friends about his experience in Vietnam. Madelyn Rhue, the actress, sat listening. He told her about the blacks and whites, about how they were bonding in the jungle, at war; he told her about the boys on dope; he told her about the songs he sang. And as he sat telling her, his eyes welled. “When he went to Vietnam, he came back and cried,” she says. Some of the soldiers had given him phone numbers and pleaded with him to call their loved ones when he reached the States. He made as many calls as he could. Most of the parents didn’t believe it was him; when they were convinced it really was, he’d deliver a greeting from their son or daughter.

He was invited back to the White House to give his report about his Vietnam trip. “
I can’t discuss too much about my findings there, but I’ve already made my report to the president,” he said later, sounding like a member of the president’s inner circle. “I made some promises to some people in Vietnam and I mean to keep them. We’d have rap sessions with no officers present—just enlisted personnel. I’d sit and talk with them and after an hour or so they felt there was a rapport, that I cared enough, and then they’d rap with me. They told me the good things and the bad. I wanted to find out because I wanted to come back knowledgeable.”

A group of black Republicans had coaxed Sammy earlier, so at his meeting with Nixon, Sammy invited the president to a Washington dinner organized
by those same black Republicans. Nixon shied from all-black events—even those staged by Republicans. He told Sammy he had to think about it. And when he surprisingly came, black Republicans, their heads swiveling in amazement, had to concede that Sammy had done something no black had ever been able to do: he had, in some strange, beguiling, unfathomable way, touched Richard Nixon. At the dinner, Sammy was introduced to Brigadier General Daniel “Chappie” James, the highest-ranking black in the armed forces. Sammy asked that powerful man—Altovise with him—if there was any way to get ice cream to the troops in Vietnam. James, long known as a severe man, looked strangely at Sammy.

Although Nixon performed behind the curtains, in the shadows—a fiend for secrecy—and Sammy operated out in the open—a fiend for the lights—one’s genius sucked at the other’s. They were both entertainers. Nixon understood power; power made Sammy vulnerable. Race confused Nixon, and caught Sammy in its web. Nixon needed Sammy’s aura—the white Sammy—and Sammy welcomed Nixon’s power to salve his insecurities—the black Sammy. In a way they were both homeless men, spirits set loose in the world. They had long proved themselves eternal searchers, hungrier than their demons. “
He never learned where his home was,” Henry Kissinger had once remarked of Nixon.

Nixon threw yet another bouquet to Sammy: a job promoting UNICEF. They were, Nixon and Sammy, entertaining each other. And when Nixon asked Sammy if he’d be willing to campaign for his reelection, again Sammy rushed out an answer.

It was such an honor; how could he say no; of course he would! He’d give a performance in a city, then go to some stalwart Republican’s home—$500 a plate—and be waltzed around the home with his vaudeville grin. “
There was no selling in campaigning for Nixon,” as Sammy would recall. “I would simply attend Republican affairs. I’d be in a town and the man there would call and say, ‘Sam, we’re having a fund-raising cocktail party, will you come by?’ ‘Of course I will,’ and I would go by … and socialize. Sometimes, it was ‘Sam, will you sing a song?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ”

Given that Sammy’s relations with the Negro press were often prickly—and that Nixon’s relations with blacks were acrimonious—one might have thought Sammy’s budding alliance with Nixon might anger the owners of the Negro press. But hardly. The Negro press, while striking notes of advocacy journalism when it came to civil rights, had, since the days of Republican Abraham Lincoln, remained sentimental toward the Republican Party: it was the Republican Party that so often—and still—contributed generously to the advertising budgets of the Negro press barons.

Senator George McGovern of South Dakota was the front-runner for the
Democratic ticket. His task would be formidable: in some polls, Nixon was ahead of all Democratic challengers by at least twenty points. What Frank Sinatra had done for Kennedy, Sammy was now doing for Nixon. Spreading the gospel.

In the wee hours of the morning, on June 17, 1972, there was a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington at the Watergate complex. The police arrested five men. Among the items confiscated from them were cameras, tear-gas guns, lock picks, and rolls of film. Given that it was an election year, the summertime story drew attention, and the
Washington Post
put it on the front page. The first words in an ocean of words to come.

The Democrats had a strange campaign season. McGovern—who Nixon charged was fostering an aura of “
amnesty, acid and abortion”—had chosen Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. The revelation that Eagleton had once undergone shock treatments for depression alarmed many, and McGovern was forced to drop him in favor of Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver. The Republicans prepared for their Miami Beach nominating convention as if it were a mere formality before four more years in the White House. Nixon’s lead in the polls remained in the double digits. The war in Vietnam, as Nixon had promised, was ending.

Sammy’s “Candy Man” was still humming on the airwaves. It yielded him, in 1972, his first gold record. After all those years, all those recording sessions. Sammy and Sy Marsh were both overwhelmed.

Mike Curb had intriguing musical tastes, and, as the son of an FBI agent, a political affiliation that was hardly surprising: he was a devoted Republican. The White House knew the name Mike Curb, and it was the White House on the telephone. “Nixon, the president, called me and said his favorite record was ‘Candy Man,’ ” recalls Curb. “He asked me if Sammy and the Curb Congregation would perform in Miami at the Republican convention. I said, ‘My group will perform. I don’t manage Sammy. Sy Marsh does.’ ” But before he hung up the phone, Curb told President Nixon that his record company was thinking of a suitable venue to present Sammy with his gold record. Curb mentioned that Miami Beach, during the convention, might be a possibility, then he asked the president if he’d phone Sammy and invite him down. “[Nixon] said, ‘I’d love to do that. I love Sammy Davis, Jr.’ ”

The Republicans booked Sammy into a suite at the Playboy Hotel in Miami. He flew in on an oil company’s private jet. The business moguls arrived like geese. And on the second day of the convention, Sammy was seated not just anywhere, but in the private Nixon family box, with Edward Cox and his wife, Tricia, the president’s daughter; Tricia’s sister, Julie, and her husband, Lt. David Eisenhower; and First Lady Pat Nixon herself. Sammy Davis, Jr., in a plaid tailor-made suit, white shirt, and dotted tie, his lapels festooned with buttons (“I’m from Montana,” “Try a Virgin”), a cigarette in his hand, two jeweled
rings on each hand, sat with the whitest family in America. This was better than being Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier. This was power. This was salve for the hurt from the Kennedys. This was better than hamming it up with Frank and Dean. Hell, this was power and entertainment—the elixir that made color vanish!