In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (55 page)

Sammy decided to introduce his new fiancée abroad.

“
Here she is, fellers,” he said to a contingent of goggle-eyed English reporters—even more sharklike than the American press—while in London. He sounded like a cowboy, mocking the scribes in the land of the King’s English. Once again, however, a cunning Sammy: in London, he was far from the American press, and he was even farther from the prickly American Negro press, which had no full-time correspondents based abroad. At the London press conference to introduce his fiancée, he was grinning, all teeth and victory, his legs moving across the room as if they were oiled. The reporters’ necks were swiveling like chicken necks. Britt strolled in in spiked high heels, wearing a hot-pink summer dress. She had a hypnotic gaze and gave the reporters yet another sensational Sammy story to report. They would report the hell out of it. Before nightfall, the hecklers were on the streets of London. How so many Londoners had loved him onstage! And how so many were in the streets reviling him now—saliva dripping from the corners of their mouths, eyes red, fists balled. At a restaurant, dining with Britt’s parents, he tried smiling away the nervousness and fear on their faces: Nazi marchers had assembled outside the restaurant, protesting announcement of the engagement. It was all just a simple confession of love. A year ago the Canadians had been so kind, so understanding, when he posed for pictures with Joan Stuart. But this wasn’t Canada. The anger stunned May, and she bolted for the States.

He had seen it all before. It was like an old newsreel—white and black and secret sex—and he was both projectionist and star. Friends would wonder where all the hurt went after it got deposited inside his small frame. For Sammy, so much of it was entertainment. He couldn’t help but enjoy it. Still, the one eye was working overtime in and around London now. He had to beware the crazies and the nuts and the pistol-packers. Why, couldn’t they see how lovely she was? How fine a body she possessed? They just didn’t understand. Neither did Britt’s mother, who thought her daughter was only inviting unnecessary danger into her life.

Yes, Sammy was still a happy man. He had a new blonde, and she was wearing his engagement ring. “Sammy Davis to Wed May Britt,” the
New York Times
reported. There was now the possibility of having a real family: a wife, kids. Let the IRS take their damn $56,000. It was a few weeks’ pay. Chump change. And if he couldn’t come up with it fast enough, there was always Skinny D’Amato, or Bill Miller, or Dave Duschoff at the Latin Casino. Nightclub work was lined up for months and months. The movies were calling—actually, it was Sinatra calling. He had sent over a script, something about hustlers robbing the casinos in Las Vegas, easy work, with the filming to be done right there in Vegas. And, of course, there was music, the fingers snapping. A new Sammy album would be landing in the record stores soon. “I Got a Right to Swing!” he would proclaim on it.

Back on American shores in 1960, Sammy, following a string of nightclub appearances, began a Los Angeles engagement at the Huntington Hartford Theatre. Steve Blauner, the MCA entertainment agent, couldn’t resist seeing Sammy perform. He’d seen him a hundred times, from Buffalo to Vegas, and he’d see him a hundred more times if possible. Blauner would marvel at the fact that Davis never seemed to give the same performance twice, that he seemed, onstage, to rebirth himself every night right before the audience’s eyes. The spontaneity could be hell on Sammy’s band members, but the audience members never caught on to that. What Blauner didn’t know, of course, was this: there’d always be a need for Sammy to prove, to himself and the audience, that he was worthy of the lights, the high stage. He had seen so many entertainers fall off the stage, unable to find their way back up. He kept a running list in his mind of which performers were hot, which cold, who was out and who was in, who was on the radio, who was on TV. Who was—to use that old and shameless word of the business—
loved
.

Blauner arrived at the theater in a tuxedo. He went inside and made his way to Sammy’s dressing room. “I go backstage to wish him well,” recalls Blauner. With Sammy, there was always the bear hug, given and received. But once back out in the theater, Blauner heard noises in the lobby and beyond, in the direction
of the front door. An imposing man at six foot five inches, Blauner could always see over the heads of others in front of him. He made his way toward the commotion, and there, right out the front door, he saw the whole scene. Picketers had gathered, and they were parading, men in brown shirts and brown pants. They wore armbands with Nazi insignia. One held a barking black dog on a leash. There were gawkers, and theatergoers wanting to purchase tickets, all joined by the small group of Nazis. In London, Sammy had bragged to the British press that Americans would not protest his marriage to Britt, that there would be no picketers as there were on the streets of London. Now George Lincoln Rockwell had sent out a quartet of “soldiers” from his American Nazi Party to tell Sammy Davis what they thought of his engagement to the beautiful, blond May Britt. By the time Blauner reached the picketers on the sidewalk—one of their placards said “Sammy Davis Jew-nior”—his emotions had escalated. “I go crazy. I take my glasses off and go for them. I knocked one over a car and took the poster he was carrying and broke it over my knee.” The gawkers stumbled backward, forced to make room. There were shrieks, hands cupped over mouths, bodies flying. Blauner had big arms, big hands, and he was swinging, one man against four. One huge and suddenly perspiring emotional military vet who loved little Sammy—whaling against four stunned Nazis. Word raced back to Sammy to stay inside. He didn’t resist. Blauner pinned one of the Nazis on the ground. The other Nazis lunged for him, but a small, elderly man blocked their path, sacrificing his body so Blauner could continue to throw his thick fists at the Nazi beneath him. “Next thing I know,” Blauner recalls, “the police knocked me off of him.” The crowd, on Blauner’s side, began yelling at the police, and during the commotion, Blauner was shoved inside the theater, staving off an arrest. The Nazis went home. Sammy went on, and gave every patron their money’s worth. “
Mob Routs Nazis at Davis Show” said the
Los Angeles Mirror
headline.

After Los Angeles, Sammy found himself back in Las Vegas. Sinatra had corralled him, along with Peter Lawford and Dean Martin and Joey Bishop, for twenty days of performances at the Sands. Sinatra had a small stake in the hotel. They arrived in a private jet. There’d also be a movie,
Ocean’s 11
, to shoot after the shows. Studio publicity didn’t say it, but they might as well have: casting by Sinatra. Dean, Peter, Joey, and Henry Silva were all part of the cast, along with Sammy and Angie Dickinson. It was Sammy who had suggested to Sinatra that he cast Dickinson: he’d gone wild for her performance in the cowboy picture
Rio Bravo
—she played John Wayne’s love interest—released in 1959.

It is hard, nearly impossible, to redirect the course of a relationship between men away from its beginnings. Sammy was hungry, chasing Frank for advice, for any type of assistance, so happy to beg all those years ago. Frank was cocky and fulfilled, gracious enough to have lent a hand and assisted Sammy in his
rise. But, forever thereafter, Sinatra was on top of the relationship, and Sammy beholden.

Up onstage, the lights catching their pretty white shirts and the sheen in the lapels of their tuxedo jackets, they were enormously watchable. Dean moved like an old man. Sinatra moved like a man happily watching himself in the mirror. As for Sammy, he moved with the quick and unexplainable movements of something feral, something suddenly set free. “Here,” Dean says onstage to Frank one night into their Sands engagement, having lifted Sammy, holding him in his arms like a hurt fawn, “
this award just came for you from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Liquor was sliding down throats, laughter and spittle just flying, Sammy cackling almost orgasmically. There would, sure enough, come a time when the jokes, especially the watermelon jokes, would start to sound a little mean to Sammy’s ears. His emotions—kept hidden in those little out-of-the way eddies where hurt flowed and stored itself in the dark, waiting to explode—would eventually erupt. There would come a time when he would loathe the word “Frank,” and the word “Sinatra,” when he could no longer keep anything hidden.

But not now.

Now there was only the stage of the Sands, and good sweet tingling and wild laughter. There was, to be sure, much beauty to Sammy and Sinatra’s relationship. So much in it, and of it, was right: Sinatra ignoring the casino owners, the naysayers, who didn’t want the Negro around, all the talk falling from lips about Sammy chasing white women, which threatened the white men. And Sinatra never-minding all the southern Democrats and the whispers about Sammy possibly marrying that white actress, and how would that look, now, right now, with the senator from Massachusetts, Jack Kennedy, brother-in-law to Peter Lawford, running for president and, in fact, sitting in the audience at the Sands. No, Sinatra would worry about none of that; he’d just sing “High Hopes,” and the others would croon in, laughing, the high rollers in the audience slapping themselves, tobacco smoke rolling over them like lazy gray bubbles, all of them, Frank, Dean, Peter, Joey, and Sammy, bouncing around onstage like men on a floating mattress: the Rat Pack. The owners, the bellhops, the women, no one could do enough for them, but they tried, and they tried hard.

And there they were, a portrait frozen in time, as if age would never catch them, right beneath the giant
SANDS
lettering in front of the hotel: Sinatra on the far left, hands in pockets, looking like the richest man on earth, with that I-own-the-men-in-this-photo smile on his face; Dean, to the right of Frank, looking as if he has just rushed into view, looking impatient, as if he’ll give the photographer one click—fuck what Frank says—and bolt; and, panning to the far right, Bishop, almost invisible and just happy to be there; and, on Bishop’s
right, Lawford, taller than everyone else, looking as blocky as a nightclub bouncer. And there, smack in the middle, in a double-breasted suit, the only one with tie loosened, the only one with a little cock of the knee, the smile looking so easy, as if it’s melting right into the lens, stands Sammy. His waist looks about as wide as a silver dollar. He looks itchy, because he has always been itchy, wanting to go, to run someplace. They seem, especially the three to the left—Frank, Dean, and Sammy—to be plotting something inviting, something secretive. They look as if they are on the deck of a ship, and it is on the verge of sailing backward, away from everything normal and quiet and serene, into something better, and riskier, into a whole other America, into something that didn’t even have its catchall name yet: the sixties. There are many, in living rooms across Negro America, who believe Sammy to be the most gifted of the group, but they will never tell him because they loathe him for his acquaintances with white women. Sammy now alternately floats into consciousness as Negro America’s gift and, at times, her shame. He had already seen Negro life from down off the stage, where troubles and heartache brewed, where life was unpredictable and totally separated from the white world. Onstage, life looked wonderful and seductive. Sammy could look out of the good eye and see how life, up high, looked so good for Frank. Life up onstage was a feast, Negro life in segregated America a chore. His singular passion did not lie in wanting to be a Negro, but in being a wonderful, always-hungry, and unforgettable entertainer.

Filming of
Ocean’s 11
went smooth enough. Sammy played the garbageman who picks the loot up and drives it away from the casinos. He also sang the title song, “Ocean’s 11,” his voice sounding, as always, too epic for such a small body.

Sammy was the youngest member of the Rat Pack. Sinatra was ten years older, Martin eight, Bishop seven, and Lawford two. In their midst, Sammy was all athlete. He imbued the group with a sense of movement and motion. Without Sammy, they’d have looked about as nimble as a barbershop quartet. He’d glide across the stage of the Sands, doing Fred Astaire poses—arms wide, knees bent, head cocked—yanking the attention of the audience, imbuing the pack with youthful bursts of energy. He looked like something from a Roy DeCarava photograph. He could not steal the spotlight every night, not if he wanted to keep Frank happy, so just as often he subsumed himself, crawled inside himself, allowing his talents to languish, merely offering the one-liner, or the opening lyrics of some song that would be quickly and comically interrupted by Dean or Frank. He had the ability to bust the evening wide open, just as he had done for years on stages with his father and Mastin. But Frank was moody, and Sammy chose his moments carefully. What price to disappear? Especially for the vaudevillian—a known klieg light snatcher? What
price to dilute oneself? When he had picked a moment, when he could no longer contain himself, Sammy just went, soaring, like some skinny penguin, right by Frank and Dean and Peter and Joey. He’d freeze at one end of the stage—then, like something shot out from a painting, he’d bolt back across to the other end. He gave the Rat Pack dimension. Without him, they were four white guys carousing on a stage. He gave them edge. He gave them black and white.

Sammy was on a carousel now, going around and around. Harry Belafonte was watching, and so was Sidney Poitier, his only rivals as superstar Negro entertainers. They did not like what they saw. “Harry, Sidney, and Sammy were very close,” says Shirley Rhodes. “But they took umbrage at Frank putting his arms around Sammy. They felt Sammy had defected to Frank.”

There were currents of protest in Las Vegas that summer. Two months after Sammy and Frank and the others had departed the Sands, the nightclub owners relented and began allowing Negroes into the clubs on the strip. The NAACP had threatened to send marchers over if the casino owners would not open their doors to Negroes. The owners hardly wanted that kind of publicity. In the end, the old civil rights organization—and not the Rat Pack—had the last laugh. An integration decree was signed on the west side of Las Vegas, at the Negro-populated Moulin Rouge nightclub itself. They called it the Moulin Rouge Agreement.