In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (40 page)

The means to enforce Prohibition confused and bewildered many. Undercover agents caught drinking were fired. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York City said it would take 250,000 officers to enforce Prohibition in his city, as well as “
a force of 250,000 men to police the police.” Prohibition would last for much of thirteen years, and during that time, there was danger and tomfoolery, all accompanied by a massive rise in bootleg joints and speakeasies, places where the bubbly could be consumed furtively. These establishments needed protection, a certain kind of muscle. Thus began the rise of the modern gangster, lethal henchmen to safeguard the interests of the nightclub owners, men who collected on outstanding debts. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, there were gang wars, and the spilling of much blood. “
Oh mama, mama, mama,” bootleg gangster Dutch Schultz cried out as he was shot down in New York City on October 23, 1935, by a rival gang boss.

Certain names—Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegel—would become synonymous with the melding of nightclub and gangster. The nightclub business could be a profit-making enterprise but was also very dangerous. Bugsy Siegel learned too well. Siegel borrowed money from mobsters to build the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. There were huge cost overruns. It opened December 26, 1946, amid much fanfare. Jimmy Durante sang and cracked jokes on opening night. George Raft, an actor in gangster movies, boon buddy to Siegel, played the role of shadow host. The club was Siegel’s dream in the desert. Siegel believed—not that he minded the tinhorns—that the film community from Hollywood would crowd the place, keep him swimming in dough. The prostitutes he hired were gorgeous, masquerading—lest he get cracked on a white-slavery charge—as “the help.” But in the weeks and months ahead the Flamingo lost money, a lot of it. And it kept losing money. The dapper Siegel was inattentive to detail. And he was skimming off the top. The mob was quickly onto him. Six months after the casino’s opening—a June night in Beverly Hills, the air sweet with jasmine—Siegel,
sitting downstairs in the home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, was shot dead, his face blown off.

On May 10, 1950, America got a gritty accounting of just how much crime permeated the country, when Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator, launched an investigation into organized crime. The Senate Crime Investigating Committee’s hearings would last a year. Kefauver went all across the country—Philadelphia, New York City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, other locales—gathering evidence. When the hearings reached television, they made for a riveting spectacle. The nation saw, up close, in black and white, an assortment of mobsters, gangsters, even their molls. Virginia Hill was called to testify. She wore a wide-brimmed hat indoors and told stories of European vacations with mobsters. She confessed, however, that she knew nothing of Siegel’s demise. As the weeks passed, the committee was besieged with letters. “
For hour after hour we watched in fascinated distaste the specimens of subhuman scum that squirmed in the glare of their notoriety,” one letter stated. “
A nationwide crime syndicate does exist in the United States of America, despite the protestations of a strangely assorted company of criminals, self-serving politicians, plain blind fools, and others who may be honestly misguided, that there is no such combine,” the Kefauver committee would finally conclude. Kefauver’s work touched a nerve, and the mail poured in. It was overwhelmingly positive, but there were exceptions. “
Wish you were here,” a postcard addressed to him said. It came from Alcatraz. The Kefauver findings left the country no choice but to fully recognize the extent of its criminal underground. “
Infiltration of legitimate business by known hoodlums has progressed to an alarming extent in the United States,” the committee stated.

Many of the nightclubs that flourished across the country were starry places, full of women, booze, and dream-makers. There was the Chez Paree in Chicago and the Coconut Grove in Miami; the Sands in Las Vegas; Bill Miller’s Riviera across the Hudson in New Jersey; Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club in New York City (Billingsley had been a former bootlegger); and the Copacabana—some believed it to be the jewel of them all—also in New York City. Jules Podell ran the Copa. He came up in the bootlegging business, for which he had once been shot. He also had a prison record. The women who worked at the Copa were jaw-dropping beautiful. The long arm of the law was never far from the club’s front door. At the Copa—as at many other nightclubs—there were constant probes by government investigators who believed the clubs were beehives of gangster activity. The LaGuardia administration believed there were behind-the-scenes operatives at the Copa masquerading as “part owners” who were “
disreputable persons engaged in unlawful enterprise.”

Nightclubs—often fronted by the mob—had to fill their seats, and those
seats were filled by good entertainment. Frank Sinatra once tried to explain his link to gangsters: “
I spent a lot of time working in saloons.… I was a kid.… They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons.”

Every time Sammy began to contemplate his independence from Will Mastin, he ran into something hard to get around—the contract that Mastin had him signed to, which was good until 1965. Will Mastin knew that in his silences—and in his waning physical abilities to perform—the world had come to believe him a fool. He had long conceded Sammy marquee billing—the Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis Jr.—but it remained Mastin’s trio. And the contract stipulated that whatever the act earned, Mastin pocketed one third for performance, and this after the 20 percent he had taken off the top because it was his act.

To be fooled by the old fool: show business.

It was still agreed that Sam Sr. would get one third of the trio’s earnings. The elder Davis held no illusion about his marquee pull. “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty,” he said to Rand one night, as if assuaging the limits of his own ego. “I’m the only guy in the act who can’t have billing.”

The whole act was Sammy—and Sammy got blessed with just slightly more than 26 percent.

Mastin had learned well from other producers over the years. “Will Mastin used to tell me,” says Norma Miller, a Las Vegas showgirl who befriended the trio in their early years, “that if it wasn’t for the kind of contract he had, they would have stolen Sammy.”

“They”: that constantly moving word that always lurked behind the curtains—the big-time entertainment agencies, the smiling agents who ran all the other nightclub acts coast to coast, the likes of Frank Sinatra.

With the nightclub business coming in on the modern era, and with handshakes replaced by written deals, Sammy certainly realized the wisdom of being with the William Morris Agency. It only meant, however, that the agency would book the act, that Mastin would be relieved of that duty. The outlines of the contract would remain in place: Mastin agreed to the agency’s 10 percent fee. It was little sweat off him; he was getting old.

But Sammy needed more money. So he went tugging on the sleeves of nightclub owners—shaking the tree harder—and time and time again, he borrowed money from them. It was money for gifts, for clothes, for women. He wanted money to throw around the way Sinatra threw money around. “I remember one night they played a club and the owner said, ‘Sammy took a $3,000 advance on a $5,000 date,’ ” says Jess Rand. “That left $2,000 minus the
William Morris money. Sam Sr. grabbed Sammy and said, ‘You want to blow your money fine, don’t blow mine.’ ” (Sammy’s FBI file is merely a toothless stack of paperwork. But there are some interesting nuggets—namely the number of death threats against Sammy the bureau had to investigate, because of his failure to repay loans. By the time the bureau leapt into action—and it is anyone’s guess the level of energy they devoted to these threats, given the shadowy nature of it all—Sammy had wisely repaid. There is mention, for instance, in one file of “
a Miami Beach gangster who had threatened the life of Sammy Davis Jr. The related comment indicated that the above individual [the name is blotched out] probably referred to [another blotched name] of Miami, Fla., and concerning a $7,500 debt which reportedly had been paid by Davis.”)

Sammy’s way to pay off his old debts was to commit the trio to future engagements—in the nightclubs whose owners he owed money. Mastin believed these future engagements were just business as usual, simple confirmation of the act’s drawing power. The act’s drawing power was indeed as potent as ever, but it had also been hijacked by Sammy. Finding no way to get out of one bad contract—with Mastin—Sammy entered into many handshake contracts with nightclub owners, most of whom had to answer to mobsters. It was the proverbial deal with the devil, one that often leads to the hallway and the clutches of the tax man. In due time, Sammy would be ushered down that hallway.

It wasn’t long after Sammy’s car accident that Harry Belafonte phoned and asked Sammy to come to Chicago. Having known of other Negro entertainers who had been unable to get out from under unsavory characters—and hearing of Sammy’s piling debts—Belafonte came up with a plan for what he thought might alter Sammy’s financial dependence. Being the most political of the three—Sammy, himself, and Poitier—Belafonte saw a duty born of history and insight to try to save Sammy. “He and I met,” recalls Belafonte.

Will Mastin could hardly keep up with Sammy’s offstage alliances. Gangsters, in all their dangerous grandeur, glided around Negro ambitions as if those ambitions didn’t even exist. Gangsters owned the Negro boxer in America. And gangsters frightened the old vaudevillian.

Something bad is gonna happen …

Sam Giancana—a Chicago-based mob boss—liked Sammy. He used to call him, supposedly with affection, “Nigger weasel.” Sammy, who had Giancana’s private phone number, had had to call upon him more than once. Jess Rand remembers Giancana giving Sammy money to settle old debts. “I told Sammy he was making the biggest mistake of his life.”

Sammy’s friends—Peggy King, Cindy Bitterman, and others—also saw his dalliance with gangsters, and it made them very nervous. “I used to tell him,” says King, “ ‘You can be in show business and not be involved with the mob.’ ”

Maybe not if you were trying to escape an ironclad contract and an old man—Will Mastin—to whom your father felt you owed everything in life. An old man who, at one time, had made it possible for your very own mother to eat and survive.

“Sammy never had enough money,” says Bill Miller, who ran the Riviera in New Jersey. “He was a terrible spendthrift.” Sammy once racked up a $35,000 debt at the Waldorf during an engagement. The Waldorf summoned Miller, hoping he could help settle things. “They said to me, ‘See if you can collect it,’ ” recalls Miller. “I came in and spoke to Sammy. I arranged to pay half the price of the $35,000 debt.” Which meant, of course, that Sammy would be returning to Bill Miller’s Riviera because Bill Miller was into Sammy yet again.

Sammy’s relentless spending angered his father. There were loud words, father-son fights. “He would lie about money, and his father beat him up a few times—rightfully so,” says Cindy Bitterman. “He didn’t know he was playing with fire. That’s how stupid he was.”

“If the act made a thousand dollars,” says Jess Rand, “Sammy would spend nine hundred. It pissed everybody off.”

The William Morris Agency—which had many of the hottest nightclub acts around—was happy to sign Sammy. He was assigned to Abbie Greschler, the agent for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. After Greschler he was assigned to Lenny Hirschan. But always, in the shadows, stood George Wood. Wood often handled business—when the word “business” was known to take on a rather dark edge—for Sinatra. And more times than a few, George Wood would have to intercede with underworld figures to extricate Sammy from conflicts.

Wood started out booking show-business acts in the hurly-burly days of
Prohibition. He was smooth, well spoken, and familiar with the ways of the underworld. He dined with gamblers and gangsters. When Prohibition ended, Wood took his unique skills to Abe Lastfogel, who, in 1930, was appointed to run the New York offices of the Morris agency. Lastfogel sent Wood into the nightclubs—familiar terrain—to scout talent. Wood went about his job, completely at ease in the shadows and the company of unsavory characters. One of his close friends was known to be Frank Costello, a gangster who had a stake in the Copacabana, and who had testified at the Kefauver hearings, and whose autobiography Wood was trying to sell. (A biographer of the Morris agency would come to describe Wood as Lastfogel’s “
emissary to the mob.”)

The Morris agency’s roster of nightclub acts was illustrious—Sophie Tucker, Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante were among them. One of Lastfogel’s esteemed agents was Johnny Hyde, who discovered Norma Jean Baker, who became Marilyn Monroe. With his gift for dexterity, Lastfogel put Wood to work watching over his unpredictable clients, of whom Sammy was one. “He knew all the heavies,” Jess Rand says of Wood.

When Sammy couldn’t get out of debt fast enough, he called Wood, and Wood solved the problem. Sammy felt at ease with him. He even believed Wood might become a more equitable Will Mastin. Sammy went to Wood in 1953 because he needed money—$25,000. He pleaded with Wood not to mention it to his father or Will. Wood assured Sammy he would not mention it, simply because he was not going to give him the money. The agent then left town on a business trip. While he was away, Sammy made another appeal to the Morris office—not bothering to tell them of Wood’s refusal to grant the $25,000—and got it. Sammy felt all-powerful. He felt like Frank.