In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (50 page)

Inside the Sands on Sammy’s wedding day, it was as if a camera were rolling and no one could stop it. Sammy had picked a near stranger to marry. Everyone was slightly bewildered, but the champagne flowed and flowed. When the bride finally arrived—forty minutes late, after having been fussed over by her happy mother—she was attired in a two-piece dress with a raised collar and a paper-thin hat that lay almost flat upon her head. It was fashionable, in an avant-garde way. It was her wedding day, and Loray White was smiling. She had plenty of reasons. As if overnight, Loray White was now in the arms of one of the biggest Negro stars in America. Why, a mere month earlier, she had no idea he cared about her—let alone loved her! It was a wonderful world. After the ceremony, Loray fed Belafonte a piece of wedding cake—Sammy standing between them, his face contorted like a clown’s, and wearing his too-thick glasses—and the cameras clicked away. “Harry was the token black,” says Bonnie Rand. “That whole wedding was staged.”

A whole wedding, acted out, not at all about love or genuine heart flutterings. All of it floating by as if a dream, Sammy jumping up and down like the vaudeville kid he had been.

Sinatra didn’t show: the foolishness of it all.

The reception for the 150 guests was held in the Emerald Room of the
Sands. There was glitter, the blowing of kisses. It all had the panache of a shotgun wedding merged with a nightclub soirée.

Sammy was no fool. This was a unique opportunity for publicity. He had a Negro bride, so a call had been placed to
Ebony
magazine. Something for the Negro readers, to build up much-needed positive Negro sentiment.

The bride and groom’s families posed behind the three-tiered wedding cake. There were plastic ducks in the middle of the cake. There was one word stretched across the front of the cake: “HAPPINESS.”

Sammy gave his new bride a mink coat—white—as a wedding gift. It was a Sinatra-like move—and it cost him three grand.

“
Wedding of Sammy Davis Jr., Loray White surprised entertainment world,”
Ebony
would report in an understated headline.

After the wedding, and nightfall, and the completion of his performance, Sammy sat with Jess and Bonnie Rand. The hour grew late, then later. Loray White—Mrs. Sammy Davis, Jr.—had retired to their bridal suite. It seemed, to the Rands, that Sammy was paralyzed with fear. He did not want to go to his wife. When he finally did, it was nearly three a.m., and he returned just hours later for breakfast. There was no joy on his face.

Jess Rand uttered not a word about the behind-the-scenes maneuvers and fears that had precipitated the wedding. He knew the cat was in the bag, and the bag was rolling away in the river.

Sammy told former lover Helen Gallagher that he had gotten married. “Yeah, to someone you knew for two days,” she snapped to him. He felt ashamed and told her that he feared Harry Cohn was going to have someone kill him if he didn’t marry White.

“There was a wedding, but there was no consummation of a marriage,” record executive Joe Delaney, a Sammy acquaintance, said. “It served its purpose. It took the heat off Sammy.”

Heat, mystery, bad dreams, guns.

Draw!

Draw!

Harry Cohn died of a heart attack on February 27, 1958, a mere six weeks after Sammy’s wedding. The funeral was on the lot at Columbia. Playwright Clifford Odets—
the cat’s in the bag
—who had done script doctoring on some of Cohn’s pictures, wrote the eulogy; Danny Kaye delivered it. More than two thousand attended, among them comic Red Skelton.
“Well,” said Skelton, “it only proves what they always say—give the public something they want to see and they’ll come out for it.”

And five months after Sammy’s wedding,
Vertigo
was released. Kim Novak—guided by Hitchcock’s swooping camera work and a moody Bernard Herrmann musical score—would receive some of the best reviews of her young career. The movie is awash in double-dealing and trickery, lies and whispers, movement in the shadows. It revolves around a retired detective, played by Jimmy Stewart, trying to transform a living woman into the image of his dead wife. It is a heartbreaking grasp for elusive beauty. It is about the wicked trickery the imagination can play on itself in the name of love. The film has a kind of poetic madness to it. In one of the more intriguing movie posters created for the movie, Stewart is sitting in a chair, his arms folded tightly around a blonde. Her lips are gently kissing his, her eyes closed. Behind the
chair in which Stewart is seated, there is another woman, this one a brunette, a dark mole on the left side of her lovely face. Our retired cop, already suffering from vertigo—a fear of heights—has been bedeviled by beauty. Both women are played by Novak. A dual-roled performance—not unlike her secret affair with Sammy, an affair that she had to pretend did not exist.

On January 10, 1958, Sammy married Loray White, a Las Vegas lounge singer, at the Sands Hotel. It was an arranged marriage for reasons owing to gangsters, a Hollywood mogul, and Sammy’s beguiling relationship with actress Kim Novak. Sinatra avoided the wedding festivities but played host to the couple at the Villa Capri in Hollywood two days after they married. Sammy and his new bride—as Sinatra was aware—barely knew each other
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

Vertigo would have been anathema to Sammy. He craved heights.

“
When audiences left a Hitchcock movie, they would often translate those fears to the dark shadows cast across the streets where they lived.” Those words were written by a onetime child vaudeville performer who loved movies and Hollywood and white flesh and life itself. They were written by Sammy Davis, Jr., in a gushy little book,
Hollywood in a Suitcase
, he wrote in 1980 that no one bothered to notice.

Before their breakup, Kim Novak knitted a stuffed llama and presented it as a gift to Sammy. He nearly choked up. He would keep it for the rest of his life.

In the end, their relationship simply seems to have run out of energy. It was never for public consumption, and the breakup before his marriage was just as quiet, akin to a movie-screen fadeout—the two lovers in shadow in the distance. And yet, now and then, when Loray had come and gone, Novak would be spotted at Sammy’s home.

In high school back in Chicago, young Marilyn Novak, just a few years before she became Kim, wrote a poem. She composed it while sitting at a train station, all alone. It is a plaintive piece, titled “A Train Makes Me Lonely,” and speaks of love, loss, even hope. It seems to echo, as well, bravery versus fear. It partially reads:

S
ammy himself desperately wanted to break into movies. It took an invented Polish family to get him there. In the summer of 1936, twenty-three-year-old Philip Yordan—born in Chicago and educated at the University of Illinois—made his way to Los Angeles. It was the Depression; he thought he had nothing to lose, a young man pulling up stakes. He had shifted his career plans from wanting to be a lawyer to wanting to be a writer. In Los Angeles, he sat down with his typewriter. The story that flowed from him was about a girl he’d known back in his native Chicago. Her name was Elizabeth Halley. She had a foul mouth and was absolutely gorgeous. She also had to prostitute herself at times to make ends meet. Yordan took her out on dates. He had no business with her, and knew it, but he fell deeply in love. He’d sit in virtual silence listening to her life story. “She was a very sad person,” Yordan would recall. She had been raped, and a child was born. She fell in love with the doctor who delivered the child. But the doctor himself had a tortuous history: he had his medical license revoked for participating in plastic surgery on the face of gangster John Dillinger. “She was hopelessly in love with the doctor,” says Yordan, himself hopelessly in love with Elizabeth Halley. It was the stuff of drama. “She was the inspiration for the play,” he says of
Anna Lucasta
, which he wrote and finished during those first months in Los Angeles.

Yordan found an agent, and his play began making the rounds. Antoinette Perry, the revered actress and director, optioned it. But she couldn’t get it produced, and it languished. Some feared its themes of prostitution and explosive family entanglement were scaring away producers. Yordan had to make a living, and he soon turned his attention to writing screenplays; one about gangster John Dillinger was building inside him.

Meanwhile, his unproduced
Anna Lucasta
found its way east, landing, oddly enough, atop the desk of Frederick O’Neal at the American Negro Theatre
in Harlem. All the white theatrical troupes had turned it down. The American Negro Theatre was considered avant-garde, a unique blend of idealism and financial sacrifice. O’Neal founded it along with Abram Hill, a writer, in 1940. One of the goals of the theater was to “
portray Negro life as they honestly saw it.” It was a financial cooperative, meaning everyone shared in expenses. Those members who found work outside it were asked to donate 2 percent of their earnings back to the theater. In 1942, the company added a training program, and among its early graduates were the young Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. It was Yordan’s agent—knowing that the ANT was a kind of experimental theater—who had sent
Anna Lucasta
to O’Neal. O’Neal was at first nervous, knowing that the play had been written about a Polish-American family. He asked Yordan what he thought of staging it with an all-Negro cast. “
Go ahead,” Yordan told him, “do anything you like.”

The troupe soon began rehearsals in its home—the basement of the Harlem public library. Ruby Dee, a young college student and actress, was witness to the transformation of the Yordan play from Polish to Negro. “
I remember watching [director] Harry Gribble and some of the actors during rehearsal as they improvised on the script—making up dialogue on the spot, throwing out scenes, and creating new ones. There was much writing, rewriting, then hopping up onstage to try it all out.”

The ANT production opened June 8, 1944, in Harlem. The audiences grew, and it became a hit. Night after night, crowds flocked to the library basement to see
Anna
. O’Neal was as surprised as anyone. “
People began to come up to Harlem to see it, and eight people were bidding for the rights to present it on Broadway,” he would recall.

The space in the basement of the Harlem library could hardly accommodate demand for the play. The all-Negro version of
Anna Lucasta
opened on Broadway on August 30, 1944—less than three months after its off-Broadway premiere. O’Neal starred, and the beautiful Hilda Simms played Anna. The drama was still running strong at the end of its first year. With its themes of family drama and sexual dynamics,
Anna
had struck a nerve with audiences both Negro and white, but its all-Negro cast had a prideful appeal to blacks. Road companies were formed. Sidney Poitier joined one of them; his travels with the cast—to Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania—introduced him to the American landscape. “
In St. Louis all the female members of the cast checked into the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls, a kind of resident hotel for colored women, while all the men checked into a local colored hotel,” Poitier would recall.

Another young and gifted actor, Ossie Davis, also joined a road company of
Anna
. Davis was raised in Waycross, Georgia, and had attended Howard University, where he studied under Alain Locke, who had been so influential during
the 1930s Harlem Renaissance. But after Howard, Davis sojourned to New York City and suffered mightily. He spent time sleeping on the streets. In 1946 he won the lead role in
Jeb
, a play by Robert Ardrey. But not until
Anna
could he even dream about the possibility of making a living in the theater. He found himself in Chicago with an
Anna
touring company. “
Chicago, at that time always in short supply of theater, took its theater more seriously than New York,” Davis would recall. “The black community had pounced on
Anna
like a leopard from ambush, hungry to make a kill. Actors were treated like demigods—we could do no wrong.” Davis had no complaints with the traveling accommodations for the
Anna
company: “
The company had a Pullman sleeping car, just for us, and each actor had a berth in the sleeping car. When we moved from one city to the next, that Pullman would be hitched up to a train that happened to be going in that direction. Some of us had trunks as well as suitcases, all of which were carried along with the set and physical properties for the production.” They reached Los Angeles, where, initially, Davis was exuberant about the Hollywood reception given to
Anna
. There were bouquets and curtain calls; Charlie Chaplin sat in the audience one evening. Davis’s exuberance was short-lived. He recalled: “
Hollywood’s lavish opening-night welcome did not extend to hotel accommodations. Some members of the cast were from Los Angeles, and they had no problem. The rest of us were parceled out among various black families, who were glad to rent their guest rooms to entertainers on the road. I wound up on San Sedro Street, down near the railroad station, where there was lodging for railroad sleeping car porters.”