In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (59 page)

When Elkins reached Odets, the playwright had been out of the public
limelight for years. He was, in fact, penning silly TV scripts—one even for Elvis Presley. He was raising two children alone; the kids had to eat. Writing TV scripts, however, was a mighty comedown for Clifford Odets.

Born in Philadelphia and a high school dropout, by the mid-1930s Clifford Odets had established himself as one of the riveting talents of American drama. He began as an actor but grew frustrated and started writing. Poetry came first, then the dramas.
Waiting for Lefty
opened in New York in 1935; Odets was twenty-nine years old. Another play,
Awake and Sing
, premiered that same year. His plays mocked corruption and heralded the little man who was being crushed by the Depression. Odets’s work hissed with a social conscience. “Strike! Strike! Strike!” came the chorus line in
Waiting for Lefty
.

His face peered from the cover of
Time
magazine. There were those who called him a genius. From the tree of fame, fruit dropped: Odets married Luise Rainer, the beautiful Austrian actress.

Odets’s
Golden Boy
opened in 1937, performed by the Group Theatre, a gifted and eclectic outfit of performers that included Elia Kazan, Jules (later John) Garfield, and Lee J. Cobb. Directed by Harold Clurman, the drama ran for 250 performances.
Golden Boy
became a movie a year later, starring William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. Many thought the material played better on stage than screen; critics dismissed the movie while Odets happily pocketed his Hollywood money. There was a New York stage revival of
Golden Boy
in 1952, which Odets himself directed. John Garfield, back from the movies and Hollywood, played the lead role of boxer Joe Bonaparte. Garfield found solace in Odets’s work: he starred in another Odets play,
The Big Knife
, in 1949, this one about corruption and greed in Hollywood. (The film version opened in 1955 and starred Jack Palance, Rod Steiger, and Ida Lupino.)

But with the rise of the communist scare, Odets’s career began an ominous slide. Subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he swore that he had abandoned the Communist Party when they tried to trifle with his plays. He was summoned a second time, and this time he had a name for the committee, and he coughed that name up: J. Edward Bromberg. That was bad enough to Odets’s friends; even worse was the fact that Bromberg was dead. He had been an actor, appearing in some of Odets’s plays, and had died of a heart attack shortly after being called before the committee. Many never forgave the playwright. In the end, the committee still thought Odets belligerent and sarcastic; he served three months in a West Virginia penitentiary.

In January 1955, Odets left New York for Hollywood. He was going there to work on a movie for mogul Harry Cohn. The playwright kept his New York apartment, but years rolled over him in Beverly Hills. One year turned to two, two to four. He avoided New York: he had an aversion to flying, and the ghosts
still whispered there. He had no complaints about the Hollywood weather, either.

Odets sat them around a table covered with magazines, scripts, and cigars, listening to Hilly Elkins and his companions during their visit. He was a towering man, with broad shoulders, deep eyes, and hair like electric wires. Strouse and Adams were in awe of the legendary playwright. Odets prepared a meal. “Fish, which he grilled beautifully,” remembers Elkins. Odets listened, but the playwright wondered about the vicissitudes of the American theater—Odets had often commented that of all his plays, he had made money from only two,
Golden Boy
and
Country Girl
. Odets wondered if anyone cared about him and his vision anymore. But soon enough, Elkins began noticing a rising interest in the writer’s voice. Odets began sharing ideas about the kind of music he envisioned—it would be Brechtian, dark and heavy. Without making a commitment, he kept talking, offering ideas. Strouse sat enthralled. “I thought he was one of the great men of the American theater.” But Strouse was surprised when Elkins bragged to Odets that he already had Sammy. And, for all the positive signals circling at the meeting, Strouse noticed something else: Odets seemed fidgety, bothered by something, perhaps sadness. It left Strouse, young and impressionable, feeling a bit blue himself. “He made you feel he had ruined his life, ruined his days,” says Strouse. “I never met any man more guilt-ridden than Clifford. One got the impression that right away he felt he was doing something immoral by being out in California.” Odets, veering from talk about
Golden Boy
to talk about Hollywood, began regaling his guests with tales of his sexual prowess, which both Strouse and Adams thought weird. “He would talk to us all the time about his sexual exploits,” says Strouse, adding that the bragged-about exploits mostly involved young would-be starlets performing oral sex on Odets. Listening, Strouse felt uncomfortable. Elkins didn’t. Hilly Elkins had heard far darker things in life than a onetime famous playwright bragging about his sexual romps with young California nymphets. Elkins, pouring on the flattery, believing he himself could reinvigorate Clifford Odets, began sensing victory. (Being human, Odets was hardly immune to flattery.) By the time the afternoon ended, Odets had given Elkins the right to mount a new production of
Golden Boy
, and there were hearty hugs all around. Strouse and Adams were overjoyed. There would, they all knew, have to be rewrites, revisions. The play, after all, had been written for an Italian American; now it was to star the hottest Negro entertainer in the world. Then in a gush of enthusiasm, Odets solved the rewriting problem: he volunteered to do it himself. The lion was coming back to Broadway.

Leather briefcase in hand, Elkins was out the door, smashing through the sunshine, heading back east, giddy with excitement, ideas, plans. He was beside himself. Just wait until the critics got wind of this, of what he had assembled.
Not the theater critics, but the Hilly Elkins critics, because he had them, plenty of them, back east, and they sometimes called him a hustler, a shyster even. But wait til they saw this Hilly Elkins–produced lineup:

Clifford Odets

Sammy Davis, Jr

Charles Strouse

Lee Adams

Broadway

They’d have plenty to cackle about at Sardi’s, that beehive of a Broadway restaurant.

Back in New York City, Elkins feverishly began assembling his team. And never mind that Sammy himself had yet to sign. “Of course, the thousand-pound gorilla was always Sammy,” as Strouse put it. Elkins saw the revival as having social impact. There were so few opportunities on Broadway for Negro performers. This version of
Golden Boy
would be highly integrated. The leading lady would be white. The combination could be explosive and tricky, which is exactly why Elkins liked it. It could also be viewed as mischievous, inasmuch as large segments of the public were still nervous and twitchy about Sammy’s interracial marriage. Elkins signed up Donald McKayle, who was about to become the first Negro choreographer on Broadway. Adams and Strouse were on board to do the score and the lyrics.

In time, Adams and Strouse began to get nervous; they could not work without Sammy’s input. They needed to know what he liked, what he didn’t like. Musically, they needed to know which songs he could take and fly away on. Like Elkins before them, they would have to chase Sammy. They would have to chase him all around the country, from Bill Miller’s Riviera to Danny’s Hideaway, from Sardi’s to the steamroom at the Sands in Las Vegas. “The year before we opened, I think I saw him three hundred times,” Elkins says of Sammy. “I brought Odets to Harrah’s. I brought Strouse to Buffalo. I went to Rochester.”

Strouse—soft-voiced, thin, and shy with a collegiate look—worked hard on scoring the new version of
Golden Boy
. When he felt as if he had accomplished something—something that might please—he’d hop on a plane to go to the star.

All his life, Sammy had been sizing people up: tutors when he was a child; tap dancers when he was a teenager; nightclub managers when he needed money in advance. There was no neutrality in his world. Acquaintances would be sized up, measured, and, according to how much he needed them, either embraced or dismissed. In his world of human relationships, he moved fast.

Sammy sized up Strouse quickly and had his way with him. “I was very shy,
and playing songs for Sammy Davis rattled me,” Strouse would recall years later. On one visit Strouse caught Sammy at a Las Vegas casino, regaling waiters and waitresses, drinking, the Sammy laughter bouncing off walls, the shoulders rolling like pinballs. Strouse was too nervous to interrupt. So he lay back, soundless as a kitten. Then Sammy turned and spotted him. Sensing the awkward shyness, Sammy pounced and demanded to know what the young scrubbed-faced musician had brought to share with him. “In Las Vegas I had to play in front of the waiters and chorus girls. I would be hanging around and Sammy would say, ‘Let me hear that new song!’ ” Away from Sinatra, Sammy could become Sinatra. Sammy wouldn’t budge, playing the big shot, needling young Strouse. And then Strouse would start humming, finger-tapping, explaining, pausing, trying to retain Sammy’s attention. He never knew if he was pleasing Sammy or not. His impromptu performance over, he’d leave, only to return, days or weeks later, when a new version of a score was ready, one that Sammy might like a little more, and repeat the process all over again.

“I met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in the steamroom in Vegas,” says Strouse. “Everybody was naked. I went down there, security was heavy. I finally went in there. I noticed Frank was bullying Sammy. Frank would tell him a joke and hit him hard, and say, ‘That’s funny, Sam!’ ” Strouse would wince. Later, unaware of where he found the gall to do it, Strouse spoke to Sammy about the roughhousing Sinatra had enjoyed at his expense. “I told Sammy I thought he was letting Frank bully him. I asked him why. He told me it was because Frank was so loyal and loving to him when he had needed it.”

Elkins’s creative team began settling on musical numbers. All day long, often at night as well, jingles would be floating in and out of the heads of Adams and Strouse. Odets was busy doing rewrites—or, at least, that’s what he kept telling Hilly Elkins. Elkins didn’t see the rewrites, nor was he demanding to see them. After all, Odets had written the play, and who better to update it than Odets himself? Elkins plowed forward. He lined up his investors. He reminded the doubters that Sammy had kept the mediocre
Mr. Wonderful
running on Broadway a full year—and it could have gone on longer if he hadn’t had to get back to nightclubbing! There were casting calls—dancers, supporting actors and actresses to be hired. The all-important leading lady had to be hired. In between it all, Elkins, Strouse, and Adams had planes to catch—Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Paris—that would take the creative team to wherever Sammy happened to be at the time. They were all working hard, around the clock. They were all in a dark tunnel. Sammy was the light at the end. But there was fear in the tunnel. Fear about Sammy’s real commitment. “The goal was so magical,” recalls Strouse. “There were a couple years we worked with him, but there was always, in the back of my mind, the nightmare he wouldn’t do it.”

In nightclubs, Sammy’s salary was a princely sum. Broadway was Broadway, but to Sammy Davis, Jr., Broadway was a financial sacrifice. His agents balked while Sammy danced from nightclub to nightclub as Hilly charged on. Sammy was smashing records at the Copacabana. “Sammy wouldn’t sign the dotted line,” remembers Strouse. “He was making $40,000 a week. His agents did not want to give that up.”

Both Albert Popwell and Sally Neal—caught here by Sammy’s camera during a rehearsal—were dancers in his
Golden Boy.
They were from a younger generation and were quick to challenge Sammy’s politics, which they thought were too timid. How were they to know that Sammy was one of the secret financial weapons in the civil rights movement?
 (
COURTESY SALLY NEAL
)

Without Sammy, there would be no
Golden Boy
.

The thousand-pound gorilla was playing coy. But Elkins was relentless. He began putting his production in place as if Sammy were all but signed. Potential directors were contacted. Casting notices had been placed in the theatrical trade publications. It didn’t matter that there was still nothing in the mail from Clifford Odets. Great playwrights were moody, they worked on their own clock. Hilly waited to hear from Odets, and Hilly could be patient. He would not bother the great man.

Sammy’s agents tried to steer him away from
Golden Boy
. But he found the idea of a return to Broadway intoxicating. It would be his show, his stage—no more Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis Jr. A boxing musical built around him. It could be fun. As well, there were movie studios in New York City; he might get movie work. Maybe even some TV work. There would be ways to make up the financial loss of appearing on Broadway. Besides, May had been complaining about his moving around so much, every week away from home, working and working. On Broadway, Sammy would have to stay put.