In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (81 page)

Champagne in their blood, the strippers would soon be at Sammy’s Beverly Hills home. Everyone would bundle into the Rolls. Strippers in the Rolls, and life was a gas.

He’d tell the comely porn stars that they had met in another life—Sammy believed in reincarnation—and when they would look at him quizzically, completely bewildered, he’d change tactics, telling them they would meet in the afterlife! With the porn stars, Brontë’s Heathcliff was out; references to mysticism and the occult were in. Dexterity had served him well all his life. Sammy told Linda Lovelace he’d manage her career. “Linda Lovelace would come over,” recalls Souza. “Her husband would be sitting downstairs, and she’d be up in the bedroom with Sammy.”

“
Sammy never asked me much about my past, about my growing up, but that would have seemed as ordinary to him as it does to me,” Lovelace would write in
Ordeal
, her honestly titled autobiography. “He was interested in now, in what I was doing with my career at the moment. For a time he seemed intrigued by the thought of my becoming part of his show, but that never came about. He did suggest that I put together a big Las Vegas act.”

Sammy’s aides smirked and laughed coldly, but Sammy was sincere in his sentiments. He could see it: Linda Lovelace onstage, in Las Vegas. Sprung from a world of vaudeville, he imagined most things possible. He could remember as a child seeing fire-eaters and cyclists upon the stage. Sammy contacted Frances Davis, who had appeared in his taped—but aborted—television series back in the 1950s, and asked her to teach the porn star the rudiments of acting, of stage presentation—everything! “He wanted to get something going for her, but she didn’t have any talent,” remembers Frances, who took Sammy’s assignment
seriously. She began with voice, then went on to movement, followed by dance lessons.

Ha ha ha. Linda Lovelace needing pelvic movements? Lovelace finally just stopped showing up for classes.

Never mind. Sammy gave her gifts—gold jewelry, trinkets—whatever he whimsically grabbed from yet another jewelry store. Lovelace respected Sammy, not just his generosity, but his morals: “
He had his own code of marital fidelity—he explained to me that he could do anything except have normal intercourse because that, the act of making love, would be cheating on his wife. What he wanted me to do, then, was to deep-throat him. Because that would not be an act of infidelity.”

Sammy was never ashamed of his pursuits, and least of all his acquaintances. “We’re out to dinner at an Italian restaurant,” recalls Ann Slider. “This woman comes in. Sammy introduces her. All of a sudden it dawns on me: ‘You’re Linda Lovelace!’ ” Laughter all around. “Okay, Ann,” Sammy broke in, “that’s why we don’t take you anywhere.”

The kids—the youth—seemed so energetic. And sometimes he’d get tired. But he had to keep going. And to keep going he began snorting cocaine. It boosted his energy levels. The candy man was now into the white candy.

Jack and Roxanne Carter—longtime friends—went by the house one evening. They were a witty and charming couple. The door opened, then the door closed. They decided not to enter. “He had heavy-metal-music people over,” says Carter.

Sometimes, for days on end, Sammy would disappear, over to Palm Springs, up to San Francisco, somewhere, anywhere, snorting coke, drinking, stretching out a childhood. When he returned once from San Francisco, there was talk of devil worship, the occult. (Both Sammy and Murphy believed in ghosts, and they often—after oh-so-many sips of bourbon—would discuss visions, wispy configurations they swore they had seen in the dark, scurrying down hallways. In his spare time, Murphy walked through cemeteries, and showed up at the funerals of complete strangers.) Sammy began inviting the devil-worshipers to the house, giddily questioning them about their beliefs. Clothes were shed, candles lit, days and nights hazily drifted by. He painted his nails red. The world was suddenly a space odyssey. Why, the entire world had caught up to his world of vaudeville! “I remember one day at the house, those devil-worshipers came,” says Madelyn Rhue. “Altovise and I left and went to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.”

Fear gripped the entourage. Might Sammy accidentally kill himself? Such an event would never happen on purpose, for, as all knew, he loved himself far too much. But there was no denying that devil-worshipers were in the California hills. Shirley Rhodes adopted an attitude: “It’s better to just wait it out.”

Sammy emerged like a woozy child from a briar patch. And when he did, Sy Marsh, now his manager, as Sammy had convinced Marsh to work exclusively for him, was waiting. There were bills, and more bills. Bills for the lobsters for the parties that Sammy couldn’t quite remember had taken place. Construction bills for the new additions to the property. Jewelry bills from Cartier and Dunhill and fancy Parisian stores. Sometimes Shirley could do little but howl at the shopping sprees. George once had an itch for a slot machine. No one, however, could purchase a slot machine. “One day the door rings and there’s a slot machine,” recalls Shirley. “It was against the law to own them. Sammy bribed someone.”

He had a line of credit with Sy Devore, his personal tailor.

He had a line of credit at Gucci.

John Souza, Sammy’s security man, had a dog, and the dog died. Souza was crestfallen. To help ease the pain, Sammy gave him a gift, a Gucci watch: “To my main man John,” it said on the back.

“We’d go into Gucci, here in Beverly Hills,” remembers Sy Marsh. “Sammy sees a black leather couch. He says, ‘Damn, look at that couch. I’d like to buy that! Get me the manager.’ [The manager says] ‘It’s not for sale, Mr. Davis.’ Sammy said, ‘Call Mr. Gucci, tell him I want to buy the couch.’ They call Emilio Gucci. Gucci, in Italy, says, ‘If Sammy Davis, Jr., wants to buy the couch, sell it to him.’ Sammy then said, ‘I want to be liberal. You got a white couch?’ ”

The couches—one black, one white—sat in his sunken living room. Guests commented exuberantly about them. Sammy would grin: Gucci, baby. Gucci.

Money grew on trees. Sy Marsh told Sammy the trees were getting bare. There were tax bills.

Having come up in the world of vaudeville—the pay often given in cash, in brown envelopes—Sammy continued to see money as a mere game, and he had been playing and winning at the game for so long. There was always a place to get money to stay in the game—nightclub owners, other entertainers; money flying from one pocket was simply replaced by the money coming into another pocket. He had money in his alligator briefcase—tens and twenties, hundred-dollar bills.

“More champagne!” Sy Marsh recalls Sammy hollering as the strippers would cavort around the house.

Sammy would throw the strippers hundred-dollar bills. It was just money, and it grew inside vaudeville dreams, and on the stages of Las Vegas, and in the hushed backrooms of the Copa, and beneath the roof of Bill Miller’s Riviera. It grew in the pockets of Broadway producers. It grew in the dirt that lay over the graves of Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. It grew in the shadowy eyes of nightclub owner Skinny D’Amato: Need anything?

When Liza Minnelli married Jack Haley, Jr., in 1974—two children of Hollywood
celebrity, such a sweet boon to Sammy’s sense of tinseltown history!—Sammy gave them a little gift. It was $25,000.

Twenty-five Gs.

It was just money.

He’d whistle while being driven in and out of Nevada. The desert was so open, and the owners took care of him in Lake Tahoe, in Reno, in Vegas. Plenty of casino owners were Republicans. Republicans were businessmen, and hadn’t they seen him on TV, hugging Nixon?

He changed his shows. He used to close with the song “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” But now he was closing them with remembrances of a ghost.

Record producer Mike Curb had not disappointed Sammy in his vow to make it possible for him to record “Mr. Bojangles.”

Because of its title, there were those who thought the song a tribute to Bill Robinson, the famed tap dancer who died in 1949. In reality, the only connection was to the Robinson nickname—Bojangles—which was a nickname many street-corner performers were prone to adopt. Robinson himself, while having been a vaudevillian, died with money. He lived his life in high hat and tails; once he had made it, he never fell from grace. The “Mr. Bojangles” of the song Sammy was now singing had something of the Will Mastin in him, something of the Sammy Davis, Sr., in him—and it circled Sammy like a sky full of memory.

The song was written by Jerry Jeff Walker, a young songwriter who had a fetching way with a lyric. Walker left his New York home in 1959, a seventeen-year-old on the doorstep of the ’60s—and roamed the country in a cowboy hat. He had a guitar. He performed in minstrel shows—they were more like county fairs. Road musicians, with their vagabond nature, would sometimes find themselves in jail, and it was in jail in New Orleans that Jerry Jeff Walker met a man who had once performed on the streets. The image of the man stuck with Walker, who wrote a song about him and called it “Mr. Bojangles.” In 1968, he got it recorded while taping a radio show in New York City on WBAI-FM. It was a sweet, plaintive tune about a vaudevillian. It really caught on in 1971 when it was recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a group of Texans in straw hats who sang hip country music.

The narrator of the song rhapsodized about having met Mr. Bojangles in that cell in New Orleans:

Bojangles was a hoofer in ragged clothes. He confessed to drinking—“I drinks a bit”—and being reduced to singing for bar tips.

Sammy sang it with studied precision, whistling at the beginning of the song, as if whistling back through the ages.

When performing this song, Sammy, who usually sang to the back of the audience, altered his voice to such a gentle tone that it seemed as if he were singing to himself. “When he did ‘Bojangles’ the first time onstage,” recalls Sy Marsh, “he came off, looked at me, and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? They gave you a standing ovation.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy standing around at the end and the parade passes him by.’ ”

But Sammy could not stop singing the song. It was as if a gravitational pull had claimed him.

Let Bob Dylan and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Frankie Laine record “Mr. Bojangles,” as they all did. But it was Sammy who raised the vaudevillian from the dead into flesh. It was Sammy who had been there.

Yes, a song about a ghost. An old gray-haired hoofer reminiscing in a Louisiana jail cell, left with memories of his minstrel shows, ghosts upon the memory. Some of those ghosts were still walking into Sammy’s office in Hollywood and picked up checks from his secretary Ann Slider.

Sammy began closing his shows standing in the middle of the stage, a derby atop his head, in a stilled pose, his hands spread wide, one foot flat, the other on its tippy toe, the band’s last bars of the song fading gently. Imagine—he seemed to be saying to his audiences—an old broken-down vaudevillian; broken down yet prideful; imagine him—and know he does not need your pity, because he remains capable of doing a little bit of lovely soft-shoe. And then, from the frozen pose, came movement: a twirl, one foot crossing in front of the other, the arms akimbo, a quick pirouette across the stage, the cane in hand. And he’d freeze again, and start whistling. He’d stay frozen for a while. And audience members would drop tears.

They had many songs among them, hundreds and hundreds of songs. It is true that some songs they seemed to yawn through, as if slouching toward the beating
of yet another contractual deadline. A lot of going-nowhere singles on Frank’s Reprise label. One for the road, baby. And another, and another. But many songs were different. Some they went deeper on. Some could now stop the populace in its tracks. You’d hear the song, walking beneath an open window as it floated from the radio, or maybe echoing from the black-and-white television set. Wherever, you’d know it was one of them.

“New York, New York”—Frank.

“Everybody Loves Somebody”—Dean.

“Mr. Bojangles”—Sammy.

Now each had a song that would follow him into—and beyond—death.

Women and love and fame, they sometimes felt, had betrayed them, hurt them. The world was crazy: some fool kidnapping Frank’s boy, Frank Jr., like that back in 1963, scaring the bejesus out of Frank until the boy got released unharmed. The world was puny: the feds busting Dino Jr. like that, back in 1974, for trying to sell those combat rifles. The arrest got wide publicity. “
The whole thing was innocent,” the elder Martin felt compelled to say. The world was hypocritical: all those blacks coming after Sammy, anguishing his heart, because of Nixon! After all that money he had helped raise for the movement!

They were men who spent a lot of their lives in hotel rooms. And never mind the people around them—stalwart Murphy, always by Sammy’s side, setting up the fruit tray, pouring the bourbon; Frank’s people, Dean’s people—hotels and hotel rooms tended to be sad places. The songs, however, were a constant. The songs never betrayed them. Never the songs.

Sammy’s film career now seemed to be unofficially dead. There would be three years between the Jerry Lewis–directed fiasco,
One More Time
, and Sammy’s next screen appearance. And even that film—the 1973
Save the Children—
wasn’t a starring role but a collaborative effort made at the behest of Jesse Jackson. The movie, released a year after it was made, was a filmed concert of Chicago’s 1972 Operation PUSH Exposition. Jackson, turning on efforts to promote black economic strength while still engaging in King-like spiritual crusades, rarely held events without a plan to make money for his antipoverty crusade.
Save the Children
then became a rocking and swaying concert, as an assortment of musical artists performed during Jackson’s Expo. Among the headliners were Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, the
Temptations, Roberta Flack, and Sammy. Sammy moved about awkwardly in such soul-stirring, mostly black environments, wondering if he were truly respected or slyly mocked, given his dilettante-like associations with black folk. Such confusion saw him sharing his Black Power salute in Chicago in a kind of macho pantomime, which drew chuckles.