In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (33 page)

Friends and acquaintances began noticing little tics in Sammy, impersonations of Sinatra—in his walk, his selection of hat wear, clothing. He bought the same kind of raincoat that Sinatra wore. “When Sinatra started wearing the white raincoat, Sammy started wearing a white raincoat. But he wanted to outdo Frank—so he added a cane,” says Jess Rand. There were even times when Sammy’s voice would take on a bully’s edge, just like Sinatra’s. “I’ll tell you something,” says Rand. “It’ll haunt me until the day I die. I never saw Sammy rehearse. The only thing I saw him rehearse was the Sinatra walk.”

The Sinatra walk: languid but gritty, the back arched but the rest of the body loose. The walk of a man looking for tender music but easily annoyed in the search.

Mack Miller had been one of Sinatra’s publicists. Miller was also Cindy Bitterman’s uncle, a connection that Sammy was not about to let get by him. “When Sammy found out my uncle had been that close to Frank,” says Cindy Bitterman—and in a voice with no bitterness at Sammy’s obvious shamelessness—“our friendship became tighter.”

There were many in 1954 who—like Sammy—might have wished to be like Francis Albert Sinatra. His was a story wrapped in family, Italian roots, magical lungs, and a critical understanding of the deep valleys where love traveled.

Born December 12, 1915, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Frank Sinatra worked as a copyboy for a newspaper in his youth. Natalie, his mother—known as Dolly to everyone—was a loving but forceful woman who exerted a powerful influence over her only son. She spoiled him, gave him the keys to a 1929 Chrysler. He started a singing group—The Hoboken Four. Then came amateur-hour gigs and radio appearances. Soon it was nightclub work. Harry James, the bandleader, heard about young Sinatra and signed him up. It was 1939—hard times. But Sinatra cut his first recordings that year. He moved on to sing with Tommy Dorsey, a fortuitous move that yielded a number 1 hit—“I’ll Never Smile Again.” Teenage girls and young women were soon swooning over him. He wasn’t classically handsome. He was bony; he might have been any soda-fountain jerk. Except he was not. There was something velvetlike in his lungs; he had spent hours beneath water swimming to strengthen them. Onstage, his lips just inches from the microphone—as if it were a sweet and delicious woman—he was cool, confident, and serious. The eyes were blue and the voice sure. He was the top male vocalist in 1941, according to
Billboard
magazine. While singing, he seemed to be breathing the hurt of others. He listened to and admired Bing Crosby. But he seemed to put more medicine into his songs than
Crosby did. In Pasadena, California, in 1943, a line of police officers had to form a human shield to keep the bobby-soxers from getting to him. Standing before them—dressed in a light-colored suit, white shirt, and bow tie, pointy-toed shoes—he looked sweetly forlorn. An invitation came to him from the Roosevelt White House. “
Fainting, which once was so prevalent, had become a lost art among the ladies,” President Roosevelt told him. “I’m glad you have revived it.” On October 12, 1944, Sinatra was back at the Paramount in New York City for three weeks. Times Square swarmed with fans, an estimated thirty thousand of them. He was hot, and he knew it. For two years—1943 to 1945—he was the lead singer on
Your Hit Parade
, the popular radio program that Sammy, along with millions of others, listened to. In 1940 record sales in America were estimated at $48.4 million. Five years later, in 1945, the take totaled $109 million. It was widely assumed that Sinatra sales played a prominent role in the increase.

Frank Sinatra and Cindy Bitterman. She played the role of blunt-talking sister to Sammy. It is December 8, 1954, Sammy’s twenty-ninth birthday party. The pure joy of his survival from the car crash three weeks earlier can be seen in their eyes. Sammy hovers above them, playing both host and fan at his own party. He raises his camera: photograph by Sammy Davis, Jr
.
(
COURTESY OF PEGGY KING
)

It was a wonderful singer’s life—that is, until the clouds rolled in. In 1947 a series of articles appeared in the press (mostly in the conservative Hearst newspapers), castigating Sinatra for a friendship with gangster Lucky Luciano. The articles were damaging. His record sales began to plummet. Conservative columnists bore in on him. He blamed it on politics, allowing that it was all happening because he was a Democrat. There were whispers he was a commie sympathizer. There were physical brawls with journalists. His marriage to Nancy fell apart. His movie roles had been light comedies, and he had shown promise in them. But now the studios stopped sending scripts. He fell into the arms of Ava Gardner, an undistinguished actress—but voluptuous Hollywood starlet—from tiny Grabton, North Carolina. Hers was a sharecropping family. She had been raised poor, and Hollywood only exposed her insecurities. She had terrible mood swings. Gardner’s first marriage was to former child actor Mickey Rooney. Friends and acquaintances tried to tell Rooney—still riding the fame of his Andy Hardy serials—that Gardner was a gold digger, using him for his popularity, to help grease her way up the Hollywood ladder. At five foot three, the dimunitive Rooney wasn’t Clark Gable, but he was every bit a star. He was deaf to the talk that Gardner might somehow be trying to take advantage of him. They married in 1942. “
Ava does strange things to men,” Mickey would knowingly lament. It lasted less than a year. “
The night we broke up, Ava said, ‘Get the hell out.’ It wasn’t as dramatic as the night she threatened to kill me,” Rooney would write. After Rooney she married bandleader Artie Shaw, and that union did not last long either. With two marriages behind her, there stood Sinatra in the doorway. They married in 1951. She was as domineering as his mother, Dolly, and the boomerang to his psyche was awful. There were public feuds, mutual jealousies. He cowrote a song—“I’m a Fool to Want You”—and everyone knew it was about her. The marriage lasted barely two
years. After its demise he seemed to grow surly, even more temperamental. His agency dropped him. He seemed a man at curbside, in the dark rain. Now the affliction that he had once thought to have cured in so many others—a great loneliness—ailed him. He found it hard to distance himself from friends: he didn’t give a damn about the gangster talk. Loyalty was like an elixir.

His mother, Dolly, was tough as iron. She loved him fiercely, even if she never coddled him.

He fought back. In 1953 he had started recording with Nelson Riddle. The voice was more mature now. An album,
Songs for Young Lovers
, was released at the beginning of 1954. It was a smash. With heartache—his own, not that of others—something rose inside his voice. Loneliness—like the roundhouse you don’t quite see coming—seems to have made him a better performer. The movies did not come after him, he went after them, particularly one role, that of Angelo Maggio in the script from James Jones’s novel
From Here to Eternity
. The studio wanted Eli Wallach, a much-admired Broadway actor, for the role. When Sinatra let his interest be known, the studio was silent. Clark Gable—so shrewd in the ways of Hollywood—told Sinatra to take a screen test, to show some humility. Sinatra said never. But then he relented, took the test, and won the role. His performance—sinewy and physical—drew raves and earned him a best supporting Oscar. The entertainment columnists characterized it as a great comeback. He seemed, right then, the essence of the American male id—fallen only to rise, stronger for inner pain. Gangsters may at times have had his ear, but love—the wicked power of it, for like everyone else he only wanted to be loved—had his heart.

Sinatra had Sammy out to his mother’s house in Hoboken during the 1954 holiday season. Dolly—one could so easily see her Frankie as the mirror of her face—prepared a huge feast. “He’d talk about Frank a lot, the songs he sang, the look,” says Frank Military, who was there during that particular visit. “Sammy was always there with a camera taking pictures of Frank.” (Military sat in an audience at the Copa one night. Sammy had arranged a front-row table. “He’d sing a song and say, ‘Do you think Frank would like this?’ ”)

Sammy was a decade younger than Sinatra. Not that he let the Sinatra powers lower his own competitive edge. “If Frank slept an hour, Sammy slept only fifteen minutes,” says George Schlatter, who had worked at Ciro’s. “Frank smoked Camels, so Sammy smoked Pall Malls—strong and longer.”

Jess Rand remembers the recording session for “Hey There,” Sammy’s first hit. “Sammy turned to me—coldly—and said, ‘When Frank hears this, he’ll eat his heart out.’ ”

Those who entered Sinatra’s private circle were either the dazzlingly talented or those whose ridiculous fawning he simply tolerated. Sammy was rare: he met both requirements. He found the Sinatra vibe hard to turn away from.

It was intoxicating. And in its web, he spun and spun. “Over the years, I watched Sammy dress like Frank, walk like Frank, smoke like Frank,” says Cindy Bitterman. “He wanted to be a little Frank, which I found pathetic.”

In 1954, Sammy was still boyish and childlike. He was not quite famous, but he was in the room where fame’s candle certainly burned. His was a dazzling nightclub kind of fame. Movies still eluded him, though he had gotten onto the record charts. He moved across the country like lightning, picking up converts, singing, dancing, mimicking. And now, with an injury, he stood webbed between darkness and light, between achieving fame and, suddenly, the raw punch of misfortune. There now seemed nothing on earth—except death, which had touched him but not claimed him—that could slow him. He himself allowed for no dark thoughts, no dark imaginings.

His one continuing vice, if it can be called a vice, was relentless sexual pleasure. “Pussy is pussy,” says Tony Curtis. “I don’t care what color. And Sammy loved that stuff.”

Especially if it was white.

Bonnie Byrnes—Jess Rand’s fiancée—was a UCLA graduate. A petite and attractive brunette, she kept herself in wonderful shape by playing plenty of tennis, and she had the winsome smile of Audrey Hepburn. Rand met Byrnes in 1952 in New York; she was in from California on Thanksgiving vacation. In their early conversations, he thought she was being coy, distant; he imagined she would be a challenge to woo. He wanted to make an impression with the first date. Two tickets, him and her—“a deuce table right up at the stage,” as he would remember—Bill Miller’s Riviera: Sinatra onstage. In time Rand’s courtship of Bonnie seemed always intertwined with his work and travels with the Will Mastin Trio. Bonnie never complained. She got a kick out of hanging out with the group. Sammy made her laugh, completely charmed her. “After the shows he liked to stay up all night,” she would recall. “I was teaching school. He’d do things to make you want to stay up. He’d get everybody in pajama tops; he’d say, ‘Put this on, be comfortable.’ We’d start doing Shakespeare,
Hamlet
,
Macbeth
. By the time we got through, it was four in the morning. Then the next night Sammy would turn on the tape recorder [from the previous night]. You’d say, ‘My God, that’s me!’ ”

Whenever Bonnie could, she’d get on the road to see Jess. Actually, she found herself just as excited to spend more time with the trio. “He was a giant to me onstage,” she says of Sammy. “We were so young.” The more time she spent with the group, however, the more she noticed differences between Sammy and his father. “They were like night and day. Senior didn’t have to prove himself. He knew he was a star. He knew he was a success as a man, a person.
I think Sammy Jr. didn’t have that confidence. One man was sure of himself, and one was not.”

There was something else that Bonnie Rand noticed: “He was a homely little kid,” she says of Sammy, “until he got onstage. And then he was beautiful.”

Bonnie looked radiant on her wedding day—December 11—at the Brentwood Country Club. Best man Sammy huddled with Jess out of sight before the start of the ceremony. The eye patch was jolting to those who had not seen it before. Sammy’s one-button tuxedo matched the black of the patch. The flower in his lapel looked like a puff of white smoke. Sammy—and not Rand—seemed fidgety, nervous. “You want to split? You don’t want to get married,” he told Rand. The groom thought Sammy was kidding, talking just to ease the nervousness. But he was not. “Sammy had a limo and tried to get me to walk out on the wedding,” says Rand.

Sammy feared losing anyone close to him.

The wedding ceremony itself was a wonderful affair. Sam Sr. showed—but not Will Mastin. Sammy crooned—a microphone in his hand, his bow tie loosened at the neck—while couples swooned against each other on the dance floor. He sang “Hey There” and “Birth of the Blues,” rummaging through his list. Jess had one special request—“My Funny Valentine”—so he sang that one too, and with much emotion. (When Jess finally got around to telling Bonnie of Sammy’s attempt to hijack her wedding, she was not at all amused.)

Sammy returned to rehearsals for his upcoming Ciro’s engagement. He kept outsiders and the curious away. Onstage he had to face the reality, and face it alone, that one side of his vision was missing. His energy was back, but his friend Amy Greene sensed his fear. “All that month it was unacceptable for anyone to come into the rehearsal hall,” she recalls. “He had one eye now. He didn’t know. Within himself, it was uncharted territory.”