Davis Sammy - In black and white : the life of Sammy Davis, Jr

Marvelous tunes you rang

From passion, and death, and birth,

You who had laughed and wept

On the warm, brown lap of the earth.

Now in your untried hands

An instrument, terrible, new,

Is thrust by a master who frowns,

Demanding strange songs of you.

God of the White and Black,

Grant us great hearts on the way

That we may understand

Until you have learned to play.

D U B OSE H EYWARD

Porgy

B y the ever twisting light of fame, he has lived a life both mesmerizing and distinctly peculiar. Since childhood he has wowed audiences across America as well as in many European locales. He is a veteran of nightclubs, radio, television, and film. Once the star of a trio dance act, for the past six years he has gone solo. There are many from the 1940s and 1950s who watched him grow uponstageand feel a kind of surrogate connection with him. His name often drops warmly from their lips. Like kin.

Sammy.

He has worked like a demon at familiarity. There have been a great many benefits for social causes. Hell do anything for his pal Frank Sinatra. Likewise for Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He wont turn away from any Jewish cause, either. He works fifty weeks a year. He suffers from insomnianot in the sense of a medical malady; he simply abhors sleeping, for there is so much on his mind, so many things he wants to do. He considers idleness a curse. Born of vaudeville, his peripatetic life has come to explode within the slippery parameters of the stardom he has chased ferociously for so many years. He has known it all: fear, pain, love, and hatred. Behind him lie thousands and thousands of motherless nights. He has learned to hoard his raging insecurities, for if onstage he is commanding and confident, offstage he carries a wobbly sense of self.

It is 1965, and Sammy Davis, Jr.s America is afire. There are riots, marches, sit-ins. Assassins have come upon the land. No one blames him for the loaded pistol he carries. Or the umbrella he sometimes strolls with: it can be opened in an instant, exposing a knifelike point capable of inflicting a lethal wound. He is a Negro married to a white woman. The death threats are common. His booking agents rarely send him into the Deep South; he has a colossal fear he will be murdered in either Alabama or Mississippi. Whenever he travels, Joe Grant, his black-belt, karate-kicking bodyguard, accompanies him. But right now, Sammy is ensconced on Broadway, starring in Clifford Odetss Golden Boy at the Majestic Theatre. (Grant can sometimes be spotted in the theater basement, breaking wooden boards with his bare hands.) The lines are long for Golden Boy; the show is a smash. It is Sammys second turn as a Broadway star. This time around, Sammy is portraying a boxer, a fighter. Onstage he is also in love with a white woman. His stage name is Joe; hers is Lorna.

J OE TO L ORNA :

But you dont know how I feel? Lorna, when Im not with you Ibleed, I got a hole bleeding in my side nothing can stop but being with you because the other half is you, rotten, beautiful, the other half is you!and Im here on my feet, bleedingfor you

It is, true enough, Odetsian stage speak, the rush of words and emotions and strange syntax, but it is also in some way a mirror of the times. America, having a bellwetherlike year, is herself constantly onstage. Every day there is an angry new protest, and new fearsin Selma, in Los Angeles, in Harlem. The bleeding occurs in a lot of places. Sammy himself is quite aware of the danger in the streets. He hates it when fans rush up to him on his left side. His left eye is sightless from a decade-old car crash, and he worries whether he might, in an instant, have to pull his gun. His heroes are cowboys, and he is extremely adept, as many in Hollywood know, at the quick draw. He has been known to dash off to Connecticut, home of Colt, the firearms maker, to have yet another set of gunspearl-handledmade especially for him.

Sammy and I wound up with the reputations of being the fastest draws in Hollywood, says comedian Jerry Lewis, Sammys longtime friend, whom Sammy sometimes bested in mock showdowns. And I was fast.

Is his gun faster than Wyatt Earps? a magazine article once asked of Sammy.

In his dressing room, in front of the mirror, he sometimes practices his quick draw. Two seconds: the hand snatching the gun out, then twirling it back into the holster. Two seconds. Dont fuck with Sammy.

The big, wonderful, and edgy Golden Boy productionSammy has already sent some of the proceeds down to Selma, to aid in the movementsuits him just fine, with its mixture of race and sex. With Sammy, there are always new dramas to battle old ones. And always a drama inside the ongoing drama, whatever it happens to be. Thunder in the soul delights him.

So: a twirling gun glints in a dressing-room mirror.

Draw!

Draw!

Draw!

But who is Sammy Davis, Jr.? What forces propelled him into being? How has he come to be proclaimedby many, even in his own ego-ridden professionthe worlds greatest entertainer? And why have there been so many motherless nights?

Eleven months into his Golden Boy run, Sammys autobiography was, at long last, ready for publication. The bookYes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis Jr.had been more than five years in the making. An almost cultlike curiosity had grown around it. That the country was rife with turmoil could hardly stop the books publication now. But there lay, around the creation and publication of this book, hundreds of hidden little dramas. And those dramas, like much of Sammys life, veered from the comic to the tragic, from the sweetly sublime to the ashes of vaudeville. They illuminated Sammys ferocious determination in how he wished to present himself to the American reading publica motherless Negro absent a culture, more white than black.