In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (79 page)

A camera’s click, and a click heard around the world. Both men held demons, and those demons washed over each other in 1972 when Sammy was wooed and won over by President Nixon. Sammy failed to understand blacks’ distrust of Nixon’s ultraconservative views. The hug at the Republican National Convention, in the glare of the nation’s spotlight, seemed too close to minstrelsy. It seemed to stun large segments of the public. To blacks, it seemed like something out of an Al Jolson scrapbook. The price for Sammy was dear. As for Nixon, the bulb of Watergate would be in high wattage soon enough
.
(
ASSOCIATED PRESS
)

Two nights later the Republican delegates—with whoops and cries—nominated President Nixon for reelection. Afterward, he made his way over to the Republican Youth Rally, where Sammy was performing, was sweating, was singing, was joking. He was in a shirt, opened to a naked chest and tied at the waist, and thin pants with X’s as belt loops: it looked like an outfit a Spanish bullfighter might wear. When Nixon came into view, with his phalanx of Secret Service men, amid shouts of FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! Sammy knew exactly what to do. He’d been in show business all his life. He quieted the crowd. Then: “
Ladies and gentlemen, young voters, the president of the United States.” And they went wild. Nixon was grinning. It was his night. And Sammy, at the other end of the stage, crouched a bit, then leaped over to Nixon and clasped him. It was all so beautifully vaudeville, Sammy suddenly upon the president, a touchy-touchy hug. Why, the public had rarely seen Nixon in such an embrace with his own wife! And Nixon, letting loose with a slow widening grin, towering over Sammy, wrapping his arms across his own chest so awkwardly and yet tenderly like some flushed teenage kid; and all those white delegates and all those Nixon placards and Sammy leaning on the president’s shoulder as if Nixon were kin, family. And who knew how far they went back—to the days of wine and roses and Jules Podell’s Copacabana nightclub!

Nixon and Sammy, in full embrace: the camera flashes blinked with the furiousness of a movie premiere.

Freeze the frame.

Imagine a vaudeville kid—the young Sammy, who used to be required to carry a pass to stroll segregated Miami Beach when he and his father and Will Mastin were performing—who had broken his way into Ciro’s, into television, onto Broadway, into Las Vegas; who had been booed by the southern Democrats at the Kennedy convention in Los Angeles in 1960; who wished only to be loved; who had the strange and beguiling ability to wipe the emotions of black America out of his psyche; who had touched this most impersonal of presidents, made him smile and laugh as he was now doing. Now imagine that kid on a stage with the most powerful man in the whole wide world!

Imagine: the wide hard grins of two survivors—Nixon and Sammy—both with their Kennedy-inflicted pain lodged inside them like a switchblade.

When Nixon finally got around to talking—“
Sammy, I want to apologize for interrupting your performance …”—he had a little remembrance he wished to share with the audience:

The audience howled and whooped and hollered. And Nixon was hardly finished. The shouts seemed to have unleashed something in him. He talked of Sammy’s critics, the ones who, Nixon said, felt Sammy had “sold out” for supporting his presidency. “
Well, let me give you the answer: You aren’t going to buy Sammy Davis, Jr., by inviting him to the White House.” Sammy seemed to melt.

More camera flashes blinked into the night, Mike Curb smiled on the bandstand, and how many in the crowd believed that this—Nixon and Sammy—must be but black America’s approval of Nixon?

Sammy knew well the staying power of a photograph. Within a day, a fortnight, the photo—of Sammy and Nixon, of the embrace—was popping up everywhere: in the Negro press, in the white press, even in the Jewish press. The photograph, taking on its own life, became fixed in the populace’s mind like some kind of cultural ornament.

Television, particularly when tied to a political convention, sent out a powerful message. One of Nixon’s campaign vows was to keep up his attack on busing—to stop the effort being made to get black children into decent school districts. His antibusing crusade had been adopted by Alabama governor George Wallace and a host of other segregationists. So in the span of six months—the February 19 airing of
All in the Family
and the Republican convention in August—Sammy had aligned himself with both Archie Bunker, a symbol of everyman-as-bigot, and Richard Nixon. Who could forget those Supreme Court nominees?

So many wonderful, frozen moments to be captured by the camera’s flash: Sammy in the White House; Sammy in ‘Nam for the president; Sammy and Archie; Sammy at the riotous GOP event—his eye dreamily cascading over all those states’ righter conventioneers! Every time he had entered the convention
hall there was rising applause, and whispering, and pointing, and the turning of heads—because if Sammy was good enough for their law-and-order nominee, for their antibusing nominee to undo what LBJ had done, and that was to march the federal government right into their lives—then, by God, why weren’t other blacks beginning to understand the virtues of Nixon?

Sammy kissed Archie Bunker. He hugged Richard Nixon. All in front of tens of millions of people!

“
Isn’t that a hell of a thing,” Nixon would say at one point in his life, “that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles.”

The Republicans’ unofficial envoys to Hollywood were Donald Rumsfeld, an aide to Nixon, and his wife, Joyce. After the Miami Beach convention, Sammy invited the Rumsfelds back to Las Vegas with him. And there they all were, sitting around the pool, whacking at tennis balls. While in Vegas, Sammy took the Republican couple over to the Hilton to meet Elvis Presley. Donald Rumsfeld thought there was something “weird” about the way Elvis smiled. Leaving the Hilton, out of earshot of Presley and his entourage, Sammy began mimicking the King—the hip-swiveling, the accent. Joyce Rumsfeld howled.

“
What are we going to do with you, Sammy?” she said.

“Well,” Sammy answered—in just the right, prideful, Republican tone—“you’re stuck with me for the next four years.”

Ann Slider kept opening the mail in Sammy’s office. And, in the aftermath of the GOP convention, it was brutal. It quickly unnerved her. The volume of mail was so heavy that she hid some of the stacks, lest Sammy stumble upon them. “A ton of it” came in, Slider says. “Calling him ‘nigger,’ ‘Uncle Tom.’ ” She told Sy Marsh. “Sy said, ‘We can’t tell him.’ I said, ‘He could get killed.’ ” As the days passed—more mail, more hateful phone calls, all because of that moment, that photo, Nixon and Sammy—Slider became defensive, even protective of Sammy. She blamed Curb and his associates: “They used him, and I blame Sy for letting them use him.” The mail kept coming, faster, even nastier. Slider had no choice but to alert the authorities about the death threats.

Sammy would tell interviewers that the president’s programs were good for blacks. Blacks were aghast. The Negro press seemed slightly tickled at Sammy’s predicament—blowing the picture up as if it were some kind of irreversible coronation. Eartha Kitt found herself on a plane with Sammy. She wanted to have words with him, but not on the plane, not to cause a commotion. Kitt was on Nixon’s infamous enemies list, along with Gregory Peck, Bill Cosby, Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, Edward Kennedy, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, and many, many others. They were Democrats, and they were liberal, and they opposed both Nixon and the Vietnam War. Those on the list were often subjected
to audits by the IRS. As soon as the plane landed, Kitt marched right over to Sammy.

“I said, ‘Why? Why?’ ” she remembers of the first words to blurt from her mouth. “I said, ‘So, did you have to kiss him?’ ”

Sammy was befuddled, searching for words as airport strollers gawked at the two celebrities. Kitt pressed on; she was livid; her voice kept rising. And it only rose more when Sammy tried to tell her that Nixon cared about blacks. Then she stormed off.

Sy Marsh had a public relations fiasco on his hands, and he knew it. “Black people would be in the elevator with us, and they’d turn their heads.”

Julian Bond, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives and an ardent opponent of the war, referred to Sammy’s endorsement of Nixon as “
unbelievable, an irrational act.”

Amy Greene, Sammy’s friend for three decades now, was livid about the Sammy-Nixon alliance. “I loathed Richard Nixon,” she says. “I didn’t speak to [Sammy] for nine months. He’d call, and I’d say, ‘I’m not going to talk to you until I get over this.’ ”

Ann Slider cried.

Madelyn Rhue hurt for him but kept quiet. “I never said anything to him about it,” she says of the Nixon imbroglio. “But he got phone calls and he’d say, ‘That’s not what I meant! I meant love, peace, and togetherness.’ ”

Shirley Rhodes became defensive, wondering just what Sammy owed to blacks. “Blacks didn’t support Sammy. White America made him.”

Sammy grew ever more fearful. At one time having lived in mortal fear of white southern bigots, he now worried about black militants. Having once told Alex Haley he felt “trapped in black,” Sammy now faced a different conundrum: trapped in Nixon.

In Atlantic City, Elvera argued with customers who berated her son for his support of the president. “You would have thought Sammy was the only black to support Nixon,” she would say.

Nixon’s appointment of Sammy to the UNICEF board came in handy. It got Sammy out of America and to Europe, where he gave concerts and promoted UNICEF for several weeks before returning stateside.

Flying was still considered a rather luxurious way to travel, and Sammy never saw a lot of black air travelers in the 1960s and early 1970s. He did see plenty of black bellhops. They’d rush and slap his back, shake his hand:
Hey Sammy! Brother Sammy! Sammaaayyy!
Only now they were not doing that anymore. They were ignoring him, as were the few black travelers he did see. Maybe it was Nixon. Maybe it was Archie Bunker. Maybe it was the frozen camera image of him and May Britt. Maybe it was all of it combined. Mostly, it was Nixon.

Sy Marsh contacted Jesse Jackson.

Ever since King’s death, Jackson had been rising as a black leader. He was coltish and young in 1968 when the bullets took King. He was also brash, and with a galaxy of civil rights leaders—Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph—showing telltale signs of age, Jackson galloped into the spotlight. He played the role of hearty nemesis to Chicago mayor Richard Daley, then saw fit to anoint himself troubleshooter across urban America, wading into confrontations, quelling riots. With his large bobbing Afro—and, often, his leather jacket, with a medallion bouncing upon his chest—he had the insouciance of a soul singer looking for a stage. An older generation was respectful of his presence because of his links to King, even if some members of King’s camp thought him too hungry for media attention. He had marched, he had been there when the bullets came, and he could preach—an important source of pride to Southerners. Jackson’s sermons had the lilt of both poet and rebel. From his base in Chicago, he often depended on celebrities—Ossie Davis, Bill Cosby, Roberta Flack, B. B. King, Sammy—to fund his operations and ventures. With Sammy having given Jackson’s Operation PUSH plenty of money in the past, a desperate Sy Marsh told Jackson that Sammy really needed help. He needed a way out of the Nixon mess. “Jesse said, ‘If you can come up with $25,000 for my charity, then [have Sammy] come to Chicago.’ ”

There was one problem: Sammy didn’t have $25,000 in his account.

“I had to borrow the money from Vegas,” says Marsh.

With Jesse’s money in hand, Sammy, a few of his musicians, Altovise, and Sy Marsh headed east. Sammy would perform. He’d kill Jesse’s people—the brothers and the sisters—with kindness. And once he was performing, they’d like him; they’d understand about politics and entertainment.

There were seven thousand on hand at the PUSH convention. Some had attended the Democratic convention at Miami Beach with Jesse—carrying their placards, pushing for a more open party plank. They were eager and energized, vowing to march against any more cuts Nixon was proposing in his domestic budget that might affect the poor and the disenfranchised. Sy Marsh slipped Jesse the check for twenty-five grand backstage. And then there was Jesse. To see him onstage, before his people, was like seeing a minister before a large and swaying congregation. A decade earlier he was participating in student sit-ins at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. Who knew then how history would arc itself? King down; freedom ringing; Jesse rising. He raised the microphone to his mouth: “
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a surprise. Brother Sammy Davis is here.” Jesse motioned for Sammy with a raise of the arm. Sammy strode out into a sea of black faces in their Afros, many wearing their dashikis. Democrats, to be sure, although there were some third-party dreamers. Brother Sammy now among them.

“Sammy walks out,” recalls Sy Marsh, “and they booed him. Sammy is in a state of shock.”

Sammy swung his head from side to side of the building, looking for the boos, the anger, the one eye like a laser beam. “
It struck me as with physical force, knocking the wind out of me,” Sammy would recall. “It grew louder.” Jesse seemed momentarily startled. He quickly flung his arm around Sammy—like a big bear protecting a threatened cub. Jesse’s ferocious grip was so full of on-the-spot love it seemed to weaken Sammy. He seemed to be shrinking inside his denim jacket. The boos and catcalls rained on. “Brothers,” Jackson said, waving his arm upward for quiet,
“if it wasn’t for people like Sammy Davis you wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t have PUSH today. Now, I expected some foolish people were going to react like this because the man hugged the president of the United States. So what? Look at what this gigantic little man has committed himself to over all these years.”