In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (16 page)

Mastin had worked as part of a duet—Mastin & Richards, they were called—early in his career. And he had also put together shows featuring more than a dozen performers. But he had never worked as part of a trio. And yet, an ability to change had been his secret to survival. He looked around and found himself down to three dancers—and he wasn’t even the most gifted of those three dancers! It didn’t matter. He had the phone numbers, the contacts, the reputation. Theater owners trusted his word. That word had been built up over decades. He had his cane, his suitcases, his top hat, and his word. That was plenty.

So Will Mastin now found himself leading a trio. Six legs—and the most gifted among them the kid in the middle.

Nine or so meals a day. Food and train fare and bookings. Mastin figured it all out—when it would be best to head back to the West Coast; which train lines were friendliest to Negro performers. Every day he pondered questions and plotted strategies.

Another name change took place. This time little Sammy’s name was folded into the whole act itself:

They found work in Hank Keane’s rolling carnival. Keane would put on six shows a day. You grabbed something to eat in between shows. Little Sammy would later remember hearing the echo of the carnival barker in his ears: “
Hey! Here they come! Three little hoofers, hot from Harlem!”

Frank Bolden, a writer for the
Pittsburgh Courier
, remembers the trio when they unexpectedly arrived in Pittsburgh for a performance. “They weren’t booked,” he remembers. “I don’t know if they missed the train or what. They stayed at the Bailey Hotel. That was the Negro hotel. They couldn’t stay in the downtown hotels.” Many had no idea, says Bolden, that a child was part of the Mastin trio. “We were looking for the other adult. Well, it was Sammy.” Sam Sr. and Mastin told jokes, bracketing each other onstage. They also danced, though Bolden remembers Mastin and the elder Davis as being “kind of stiff.” The show seemed to come alive when Sammy was turned loose, dancing and skipping with a ferocity across the stage. He drew whoops and hollers. Those who saw the child were amazed. “In tap dancing, usually one foot favors the other,” says Bolden. “Sammy was good with both of his feet.” Many who had been in the audience clamored afterward to meet the kid who had been onstage. But the kid had other interests. “He spent most of his time eating ice
cream cones,” Bolden says. When those who had seen him perform finally got Sammy’s attention, they were full of praise.

Paul Winik, another dancer crisscrossing the country during the Depression, would remember the trio as tightly knit. Like Sammy, Winik was a kid with a pair of tap shoes and a chaperone on the road. “He used to stand in the wings and watch me dance,” Winik says. “I’d stand in the wings and watch him dance.” Sometimes, backstage, the two of them would dance until they were exhausted, then they’d keep on dancing. They’d practice like athletes, pushing themselves, creating new dance steps as they went along. “We were just two kids thrilled to be doing what we were doing,” Winik recalls. “And he had such appreciation for other dancers’ talents.” Winik sensed the discipline that Mastin and Sam Sr. were instilling in young Sammy. “The father was very hard on him when he missed a step during the show. They were very serious dancers.”

Any act—quartet, duo, trio—knew to keep on the move as much as possible. Acts competed against other acts, especially when it came to inventiveness and novelty. The more you moved about, the higher the likelihood of your act sustaining an element of surprise.

In Boston in 1937 the Mastin trio settled for a while in a rooming house on Columbus Avenue. A restaurant—Mother’s Lunch—was located on the bottom floor, and they frequently ate there, the three of them waltzing through the door, little Sammy’s eyes furiously darting about. Abe Ford, a booking agent, befriended the struggling trio in Boston. “They had trouble when they first started,” Ford would recall. “There were a lot of vaudeville theaters in Boston. There was a woman named Mary Driscoll in charge of the licensing board in Boston. We used to pass Sammy off as a midget. She wouldn’t let anyone perform under the age of twenty-one where liquor was sold.” An act did not always get much time to prove itself. “If they did lousy, they wouldn’t get another job,” says Ford.

One of Abe Ford’s booking assignments was for a show called
Round Up
, which consisted of a variety of vaudeville acts. “We used to put them in
Round Up
. The two of them would come out and they’d introduce Sammy and the house would go wild seeing a little kid like that hoofing the way he hoofed,” Ford says. The agent could easily see that little Sammy’s presence was potent: “It kept the other two guys working.” Ford knew how desperate the times were. “There was no money around,” he says. “Two, three, four dollars a day was a lot of money.” Mastin was determined to keep his act a tap-dance act, and steeled himself against the exotica of other acts that featured contortionists, mind readers, and mystics—the kind of acts he himself had once been fond of.

Financial calamity may always have been a breath away, but Mastin managed to keep up appearances. “Sammy would be in dungarees on the street, but Will—onstage and off—was always a sharp dresser,” says Ford. “Immaculate.

Always with the cane and high hat.” Ford was impressed with the discipline Mastin demanded of the act. “The three of them were never yelling, screaming, like a lot of the acts,” he remembers. “If Will Mastin said, ‘We gotta do this,’ they did it.” Ford never knew how Mastin distributed the payment he received. “We used to pay Will Mastin,” he says. “We’d agree on a price. What he did with it, we don’t know.”

Not long after he first met the trio in Boston, Ford ran into them in Auburn, Maine. “I went up there, to Priscilla’s Ballroom, and who comes out but Will Mastin. They traveled all over New England.”

They were still far down on show billings, but by 1940 they were certainly getting noticed. They appeared at the Metropolitan Theatre in Providence the last week of March that year. “
A couple of jitterbugs billed as Jerry and Lillian appeared exuberantly and vulgarly, and the Will Marsten [
sic
] Trio, starring … Sammy Davis … added their fast tap routine.” Mastin’s name had been misspelled, but what the hell, they made the papers.

By the age of fifteen Sammy had started experimenting onstage. He’d start crooning a popular song. He’d mock the act that had gone on before—he was mimicking, becoming an impersonator. Mastin and his father sometimes shot him cold looks. His improvisations were not discussed. It mattered little to him; he was playing to the audience, and the audience was laughing, slapping their knees. Mastin never had to worry about Sammy getting any of the dance steps in the dance routine wrong. He had them down pat. But after he had finished the rehearsed routine, he’d keep dancing; it was his youthful energy; he simply could not turn himself off. Vaudeville was creativity and invention, and little Sammy instinctively knew it. He heard the whistles, the demands to come back out onstage. And he’d reappear again, and start dancing again. Will Mastin heard the applause—and so did Sammy’s father. At performance’s end, in town after town, on stage after stage, Sammy would do what his father and Will Mastin taught him to do: he would bow—lowering his head, then his waist, all followed by a bend of the knees—like an English prince.

Now and then the three dancers—especially when they were out of work—would find themselves back in New York City, where the booking agents Mastin needed to see were concentrated. Sam Sr. and little Sammy would stay with Rosa at her apartment in Harlem. Mastin—private and aloof when off the road—would find his own room in Harlem. The idea of him staying with the Davises was unthinkable.

Mastin and Sam Sr. could get sentimental about Harlem—its theaters, its speakeasies, its gambling parlors, its show-business veneer. Its churches were lovely, but they were not churchgoing men. As for Sammy, his childhood
memories were scattered around the places he had been, the towns he had slept in; so many had been far away from New York City. Harlem was just another piece of geography to him, a place where his mother’s family resided—though not Elvera herself, who was still on the road.

Two dancers, entertainer and entertainer, father and son. Already little Sammy—as he is called—has seen America, has heard the great steam-rolling engines plowing across the land. When money is low, he taps on street corners, and dazzles. It is 1937; he is twelve years old. Clothing is an integral part of their presentation. Sam Sr. hunts Negro haberdasheries in virtually every town he arrives in; he will pass along the habit to his son
.
(
COURTESY STEVE BLAUNER
)

Unlike his return trips when he was a mere child—and Sam Sr. and Mastin always nervous about him being out of their sight—now Sammy was older and could roam about the city that was his birthplace. Gloria Williams—Sammy’s cousin—would accompany him around town when he returned to Harlem. “I’d ride the A train with Sammy,” Williams recalls. “We’d sing on the train. He wasn’t a star yet.” Even fastened down on a train, Sammy couldn’t stop himself from impromptu performance. He was always loose as a puppet anywhere. He and Gloria sang show tunes, tunes he had heard on the radio, his feet patting against the floor of the train, his head—large and oblong atop his small spindly body—always bopping and bopping. Luisa Sanchez, his tough and bitter grandmother, had little to say to young Sammy when he returned to Harlem. The two had never spent much time together, so to him she was another tall woman whom he did not know much about—just like his mother. Luisa did hang a photo of the trio on the wall in her home.

The visits to Harlem for the trio were always brief—those pesty truant officers!—then whoosh, the three of them, Will, Sam Sr., and Sammy, gone again, their backsides bending into a taxi, then a train, Sammy always moving quick, moving as if he were chasing grasshoppers.

With his father and Mastin, he moved about the country constantly now, unaware of what it meant to have roots. His place of identity would be the road. Al Grey, Sammy’s childhood friend, remembers seeing the trio in Los Angeles. “I remember they stayed at the Morris Hotel on Fifth Street. Sammy would dance on the corner, had a hat he’d lay on the walk, and he’d get pennies and nickels.” In all the years to come, staying put, being idle, would make Sammy nervous, fidgety. (In even later years—and with absolute glee—he would sign some of his very brief missives to friends as “Zorro”: was here, but now gone. Fare thee well.)

Sammy continued to have no idea of his mother’s whereabouts. All he knew was, like him, she was dancing; she was trying to make a living. Like him, she was moving back and forth across the landscape, a dream still inside of her.

Back in Boston for much of 1941, Sammy, his father, and Mastin moved into yet another rooming house in the South End section of the city. Mabel Robinson, a young singer and pianist, lived across the street. “They were lean days,” she would remember. “Sammy would come over and we’d cook. Then he’d go to work with Mastin and his father.” She sensed that the trio had financial woes. “His father borrowed money from me to get to work,” she says. “I loaned them money. Sam Sr. seemed to be a ladies’ man.” There were times when Robinson and others would hear a pounding sound coming from the apartment
where the Davises lived. “[Sammy] had drums,” she says, “and he practiced them.” She and other friends would sit and watch Sammy dance and just marvel. “Sammy Davis, Jr., was a beautiful dancer. Without Sammy, [Mastin and Sam Sr.] wouldn’t have been anywhere.” Sammy struck her as somewhat of a loner. He did not hang out with other teenagers. “Every day we’d feed him,” Robinson says. “We didn’t mind. We were all show people.” Even though Robinson was only a few years older than young Sammy, he insisted on calling her “Mrs. Robinson.” “He was well mannered,” she says. When Robinson got a singing engagement in Harlem that year, Sammy asked her to go by and check on his grandmother. “I never heard him talk about his mother. I heard him talk about his grandmother a lot.”

In 1941, Elvera Davis found herself in Boston, working on a bill with Buck and Bubbles, a renowned song and dance act that had been in vaudeville since 1912. In their early years the duo often donned blackface. Fred Astaire was one of their biggest admirers. Sammy was always eager—actually, he was ravenous—to watch other performers, and, being in Boston himself at the time, as soon as he heard Buck and Bubbles were in the city he hustled over to the theater to see them. He stood in the wings. He was always jumpy and loose and happy standing in the wings, watching other performers. While there, he saw her. Could it really be? It was indeed her. She was onstage dancing; he hadn’t seen her in a long time; it was Elvera, his mother. Both were quite surprised. “Sammy would come specifically to look at Bubbles,” Elvera would recall. “Bubbles was the dancer and Buck played the piano. If you were in a town and you could arrange it, you’d go see other performers. Well, one night we went to see Sammy’s show. Sammy did his whole act based on what Bubbles had done. He’d copy anybody. Bubbles said to me later, ‘I don’t want him coming here standing in the wings watching me anymore.’ ” Sammy stole what he could and poured it into his own manic performance, jangling it to the point where it felt to him that his own originality overpowered what he had stolen.