Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (62 page)

“Baby, you don’t understand. You’re taking it personally but I need a song like that; it breaks the ice for me. I’m back in clubs and I can’t have Charley Square feeling like I think I’m so godamned chic now that he can’t be in the same room with me. The second I walk onstage he’s got to know I’m gonna tummel around like the Sammy Davis he always knew.”

He looked at me dubiously. “It’s a little hard to believe that you have to do anything except be a good performer.” He shrugged. “But what do
I
know? Nobody’s standing in line to see
met”

“Right, baby. So, you produce the Broadway shows and let
me
worry about the nightclubs.”

His face flushed and he reached for his glass. “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”

A comic playing one of the other clubs pushed his way through the crowded living room toward me. “How’s the skinny Farouk?” He gazed around at the girls, playing it awestruck. “How am I going to adjust when you’re gone? Every night with women hanging from chandeliers, with stuffed under sofas … hey, she’s got to be joking with those footballs under her sweater.” He grinned at me. “This is a regular Fort Knockers! I asked a cab driver where I could find a girl and he brought me
here”
He scanned the room. “You cornered the market on 38’s.”

“Help yourself, baby. Excuse me.” I called Charley aside. “Get ‘em all outa here, will you? But y’see the one standing next to Morty? With the boobs. Tell her to stick around. And the one next to her—the red satin with the long swingin’ legs—have her here tomorrow at noon.”

“Twelve o’clock?”

“That’s when noon usually is. Unless somebody changed it.”

“But you know you won’t be getting up ‘til three or four o’clock. Why have her sit around for nothing?”

“Charley, if I feel like keeping some money in the bank do I need your okay?”

I slipped out of the room and into three a.m. on Dearborn Street, relieved to be away from all the fun I wasn’t having, the laughs that were gloss and veneer, that underneath were only mechanical and blah, like a second helping of dessert. The weeks had dragged by, a mass of days without definition, their one-ness broken only by the hours I was onstage. Between those periods of oasis, I shopped, had parties, dinners, interviews, let crowds gather around me on the street for my autograph—all the things that had always been the ponies on my personal merry-go-round which I still kept spinning, although it wasn’t very merry any more.

There was an empty table in a corner of the Latin Casino.

My glance kept being drawn to it throughout the show. There was another one the next night. And the next. Then it got slightly worse.
The dinner shows were strong but there were always three or four empty tables at the late shows.

It didn’t figure. I’d been away from Philadelphia for over a year.

The Copa was filled for the first week, but by the middle of the second, Julie Podell was closing off part of the room for the late shows so the people who did come wouldn’t realize how empty it was. I wasn’t getting the repeat business I’d always been able to count on, the familiar faces that come back three and four times during a run, and Will was giving me I-told-you-so looks every night as we came downstairs and saw the dance floor wider than it had ever been for us before. Okay, there was a logical reason for it in New York. But what had happened at the Latin? Was Philadelphia so close to New York that the year on Broadway had hurt me there, too?

The last weeks at the Copa dragged mercilessly as I waited to get out on the road again and see what was waiting for me.

Arthur came into the dressing room. “It’s like a morgue downtown. There’s nobody in Vegas except a crowd of Texans on a convention. You’re doing all the business in town. Everybody else is dying.”

He was pressing to sound casual, trying to give me a good reason why I wasn’t doing capacity business, but nobody ever figured out a good
enough
reason. Or a cure for an unidentified sickness. And night after night the symptoms were there, grim and threatening: I was playing Vegas for the first time in over a year, I was at a different hotel and I should have been bigger than ever, but something was choking off the customers just short of capacity. Neither Will nor the club owners paid any attention to what was only a slight dip in business, but if they couldn’t see it as the start of our decline I could. To me those few empty tables represented not the dozen or so people who weren’t there but the hundreds who had not been turned away; the difference between an act that’s on the way up or on the way down.

Like the young, athletic-looking guy who’s indulged himself in all
the foods he knew were wrong until finally he looks in the mirror and can no longer kid himself about the jowls and stomach he’s built slowly and surely by piling one layer of fat onto another, I had to face the fact that I’d stretched my luck and talent too far, and all the mistakes had begun to catch up with me: my lousy press, the lunatic spending that had caused the debts which everybody in the world seemed to know about, and the need to make desperation moves like wrong bookings and grabbing for quick money from every variety show on television—until every time anybody turned on his TV set, I was standing there doing Louis Armstrong.

I started to call the Morris office but it would be more dramatic, more effective to fly to L.A. and see them in person.

Sy Marsh sat on the edge of his desk. He was about my age, which was young for top man in the television department.

“Sy, don’t book me on any more variety shows for one year.”

“That’s a hundred thousand dollars you’re throwing away. Can you afford it?”

“No.” I lit a cigarette. “Neither can I afford to blow eight or nine hundred thousand a year from clubs. And if the Morris office can’t see what
must
happen at the rate I’ve been doing variety shows at least I can: the day’s gotta come when I’ll get to a town and instead of people breaking the doors down, the reaction’ll be, Oh, him. Why pay to see him when we just saw him sing, dance, and do the impressions on television last week?’ ”

“God forbid.”

“I’m hip.” I stood up. “Sy, you weren’t with the office when I used to come in here begging them to get me dramatic television, so we’ll start from scratch: Get it for me or I’ll get an agent who can. It’s chips down time! I’ve got to protect my nightclub business so I’m cooling it with the variety shows, but I can’t become America’s Secret; I still need a medium that brings me to the public. I can’t let the people in Chicago and Philly and all the towns I play wonder whatever-happened-to Sammy Davis until I get there once a year or I ain’t gonna do they’re-lined-up-in-the-streets kind of business. That means I
must
have the importance and the impact of major exposure and that can only be one of three things: a big record? We know that’s the maybe of all time. A motion picture or dramatic television? We forget pictures ‘cause it’s been like we’ve got the Ku Klux Klan running the motion picture department here. Obviously they figure I’m not as big or as talented as
Tab Hunter!
Okay. I’ve
never made a picture so I can’t argue with them about box office. But when it comes to television I’ve got a history of accomplishment going for me. It’s right on the record that I lifted the rating of every show I was on. And those ratings were in the South as well as the North so there’s no sponsor who can intelligently say I’m not one bitch of a good buy.” He was staring silently at his desk. “Sy, one thing: don’t tell me it’s touchy.”

“Screw
touchy
. It’s plain godamned stupid that you’re not on a million shows right now. Here they’re fighting like dogs over names half as big as you….” He shrugged. “Well, I guess we both know that the heroes are
on
television, not
in
it. But I’m sure there are guys in the business who won’t go along with that crap.” He picked up a manuscript from his desk and dropped it, thoughtfully. “The one tough thing’ll be to find parts for you. I’ll talk to some of our own writers.”

“This’ll kill you, but how about a Western?”

He nodded. “You were right. It killed me.”

“Baby, I’ll play anything except an Uncle Tom, but don’t brush off the Western thing so fast. Aside from the fact that I happen to be better with the guns than most of the Schwab’s Drugstore cowboys they’re using, it also happens there were a lot of colored cowboys.”

“You serious?”

“The guys who wrote the history books happened to be white, and by a strange coincidence they managed to overlook just about everything any Negro did in and for America except pull barges up the godamned Mississippi. But I’ve got books on the early West, I can sit here and do an hour on authentic stories about Negro cowboys, an entire Negro regiment in the Civil War, dozens of things that have never been used—a wealth of fresh stuff. But let me ask you something: why do I have to play the part of a Negro?”

He looked at me, blankly.

“I’m dead serious. Why do I have to play a part that depends on color? Why can’t I play something where the fact that I’m a Negro has no bearing on the script in any way? Why must a special part be written for a Negro? Or else, an entire script switched so they do
Abie’s Irish Rose
with an all-Negro cast? Y’know something? I
die
every time I read in the papers about some cat on Broadway who says, ‘What we need is integrated theater. Authors should write in more parts for Negroes.’ That’s not integrated theater.
Really
integrated theater will be when an actor—colored or white—is hired
to play a part. Period. Not when a Negro actor is hired to play the part of a Negro who’s in the story strictly
as
a Negro, like when they’re doing a scene in a Harlem bar and the producer tells Casting, ‘Send up one Negro bartender, one Negro bar owner, and some Negro extras for customers.’ I pointed to a script on his desk. “For example: who’s the central character in that?”

He smiled. “An aging film actress.”

“Okay, baby, what about the one underneath?”

“A mobster.”

“Why can’t I play
that?
Is there anything in the script that makes it necessary to the story line that this guy is white?”

“No.”

“Then isn’t it wrong that they’d never think to call a Negro to play him? Or a cop, or a doctor, a soldier, a judge, or a lawyer—with no emphasis on color, no mention of it? I don’t say do illogical or far-out things like showing a Negro doctor making a house call to a white family—although God knows it would be beautiful—but certainly if there’s a scene in a hospital and you have doctors and nurses walking around, why not cast it as it
is
, with colored doctors and nurses too? If you’re doing a hospital
do a hospital!
But they don’t. According to dramatic television there are almost no colored people in America. And that’s about a twenty-million-person difference with what the census shows. How’s
that
for being overlooked?”

“It’s ridiculous. But I guess the reason is that the sponsors aren’t going to stick their necks out and take a chance on jarring customers in the Southern markets.”

“Baby, have you any idea how jarring it must be for about five million colored kids who sit in front of a television set hour after hour and they almost never see anybody who looks like them? It’s like they and their families and their friends just plain don’t exist.”

About an hour later we were shaking hands and he was saying, “I’ll really try for you. Somehow we’ll get you on,” and I was dying to believe that maybe I’d finally found a guy who’d go to bat for me.

I called him from Vegas the next night. “Y’know what you were saying about how tough it is finding parts for me? Well, I was just watching
Twilight Zone
and I’ve got a story idea that if Rod Serling liked I think would work.”

“What is it?”

“The central character is a hater, the bigot of all time; he doesn’t
even like
movies
in color. He’s a big man in a small Southern town where he’s head of the Klan
and
White Citizens Council. Scene one: he’s making a speech at one of their meetings—we bring the camera right in on him and he’s screaming for a lynching or a bombing and you all but see the venom oozing out of him. Scene two: he leaves the meeting and on the way home he has an automobile accident. Scene three: he wakes up in a hospital, he’s cut and burned and his arms are bandaged like a mummy. He’s lucky to be alive but he’s not getting the attention he wants; he’s yelling how important he is but nobody gives a damn. He decides he’ll go out in the hall to raise hell. He drags himself out of bed and as he passes the dresser he stops dead in front of the mirror. He’s colored! The same guy, the same face, the same everything—except he’s colored and there’s nothing he can do about it for the rest of his life. He’s in the Twilight Zone.”

Sy gasped. “It’s a bitch. It’s beautiful. I’ll get on it right away. And maybe I’ve got something else that looks pretty good. I talked to a guy, a director who’s only done pictures but he’s going to be doing a half-hour anthology series and he’s very interested in you. He wants to have dinner with you the next time you’re in town.”

I knew as he was telling it to me that before he could sound excited over an untried director and a series that wasn’t even on the air yet, he must have struck out up and down the line. This was the consolation prize and it wasn’t exactly Playhouse 90. “Look, Sy, let’s not take a chance he’ll cool off. Why don’t we invite him down here for the weekend? You think he’d come?”

“Well, sure, but …”

“If he’s married invite his old lady, too. I’ll wire you the dough for the plane tickets.”

I sat up in bed. “You’re calling to tell me I was so charming he wants me to do all the old Arlene Francis shows, right?”

“Sam … I’ll give it to you straight. On the plane back to L.A. last night he opened up and told me he didn’t think he could get you past the sponsor. Too touchy,’ he said.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“I guess the whole thing was just because he wanted to meet Sammy Davis, Jr. I’m sorry, Sam. I’ll make it up to you. I promise I will.”