In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (6 page)

They wanted to do a book tour. Jane and Burt and Sammy. But Sammy couldn’t because of his
Golden Boy
demands. Then Boyar realized something: “Sammy was a living book tour.” Which meant, if cornered in a hotel lobby, dressing room, nightclub, or street corner, and the subject of his book arose, he’d sell a dozen books, then a dozen more, and a dozen more after that with his enthusiasm and exuberance. Roger Straus wanted to have a book party at the Lotus Club, but they still fretted about lost ads during the newspaper strike, and instead decided to spend the book-party money on new ads. There was one semiprivate signing in Manhattan. A couple came over to Sammy and complimented him on the writing of the book. “
I didn’t write it,” he told the fans while pointing out the Boyars. “They did. Go compliment them.” He could, in a charming way, be so brutally honest.

When the new
Golden Boy
ads were made up, Sammy made sure they mentioned the release of
Yes I Can
. Hilly Elkins, the
Golden Boy
producer, didn’t mind one bit. He’d hawk the book with the same energy he was using to hawk his Broadway show. One merchandising paw scratching the other.

On October 31, six weeks after its publication,
Yes I Can
jumped onto the
New York Times
best-seller list, at number 7. The appearance on the list made Roger Straus look uncanny. The reading public became enamored of
Yes I Can
, and it stayed in the top 10 throughout the month of November. On December 5, the book reached number 4.
Yes I Can
also hopped onto the
Publishers Weekly
best-seller list. These were stunning feats for a book that, at one time, couldn’t find a publisher. Pocket Books snapped up paperback rights for $300,000, at the time a whopping sum.

The success of the book couldn’t hide its flaws, of course. A review in
Negro Digest
would wonder what wounds Sammy’s “
tiny rejected spirit” must have suffered from the absence of a mother. There is little, as well, about Sam Sr. or Will Mastin in the book. There is little about the Cuban blood that coursed through the family history. Even Jess Rand, the dutiful press agent cum advisor, receives scarcely a mention. There is next to nothing about Sammy’s sister, Ramona. (He didn’t tell Peggy King, the singer, that he had a sister until years
after they had known each other!) There is nothing in
Yes I Can
about all the broken engagements—to Chita Rivera, to Peggy King, to Helen Gallagher, to Eartha Kitt. Kitt received a copy of
Yes I Can
in the mail; “I got a bad feeling when I touched it,” she would say. “I put my hands on the pages and didn’t have a good feeling.”

There is nothing in the book about Sammy’s lust for white women—save his wedding to May Britt, presented as an old-fashioned love story, absent, of course, Sammy’s enormous psychic wounds around identity.

Cindy Bitterman, nee Bays, also doesn’t appear in the book. “Sammy didn’t put my name in the book because Frank would have killed him,” she later confided.

Sinatra’s animosity didn’t have anything to do with suspicions of romance between Sammy and Cindy, because there was none. They were truly platonic. It was simply the way Sammy made Frank nervous with regard to Frank’s former girlfriends, and Sammy’s inability to stop himself. Frank hadn’t forgotten the way Sammy once sent his former wife Ava Gardner diamonds. Kim Novak—also one of Frank’s former intimates—was also a very touchy subject. (Sammy went out of his way in the book to deny a romance with Novak, but that didn’t make their affair any less real.) Cindy herself used to be Frank’s girl. Once, inside Danny’s Hideaway, someone snapped a photo, an eye-patch-wearing Sammy—it was in the aftermath of the car crash—seated elbow to elbow with Cindy. When Cindy later showed the photo to Sammy, he took it and tore her from the picture, then gave the picture back to her. He told her he didn’t want anyone to get the wrong impression. So—Sammy and Cindy? Not at all. But who knew how Frank’s mind worked during those late-night hours when the wine was rolling around inside him and old sad songs were circling his brainwaves?

Yes, Frank was busy. He wasn’t going to sit down and plow through some 630-page book about Sammy. Sinatra did take Sammy and the Boyars out to dinner to celebrate the book’s publication. They went to Jilly’s in Manhattan. Sinatra uttered hardly a word about the book. Fuck the book; he thought life was bigger than books. “Jane was sitting next to him,” Burt Boyar says. “She wasn’t eating. He turned to her and said, ‘Eat your food, Janie.’ ” (He couldn’t help it: Janie. He could be so condescending—so Sinatra.)

Yes I Can
is a book about a child entertainer who grows to manhood on the stage. Written by a former child actor, by a newspaperman working for a horse-racing newspaper, it has a horse-racing motif: dust, gallops around the corner, setbacks, comebacks, the firing of guns, fans up out of the seats! It is an apolitical book, quite unlike another autobiography, Dick Gregory’s
Nigger
, published less than a year earlier. The tone of
Yes I Can
is one of uplift, optimism. Where there is hurt, it is Sammy’s own hurt. It is certainly not a book in
which an individual makes an attempt to probe his own psyche. Sammy makes countless allusions to his life and important moments in his life by matching them with maudlin scenes from Hollywood movies. There is a tearjerker scene of his attempt at suicide, foot to the pedal, and an aborted drive off a cliff. A heartbreaking scene: only it never happened. His friends and colleagues recall no suicide attempts, ever. (Even in his darkest moments, Sammy still hungered for life.)

Sammy liked mystery, and he seemed to know just what to give the public. He had propelled Jane and Burt Boyar to write the book he wanted them to write. Sans introspection. He was so seductive that way. He had goaded his father and Will Mastin to change the dance act, to turn it to his strengths, and they did. He knew how to play to the audience. And the audience liked—no, loved—a tearjerker. So he gave them a tearjerker. And he gave them all the headlines—May, Frank, the Negro press—but little underneath. He gave them a book that skirted, only fleetingly, along the fault lines of race in America. It was on the best-seller lists. Folks were making money. Why complain? As a performance,
Yes I Can
was amazing. It wasn’t literature, but it was being promoted by a literary house. It wasn’t introspective, but it was hard to put down. It wasn’t all the truth, but why bring a man to his knees over a few little lies? Or a few big lies?

Sharp-tongued comic Lenny Bruce had a routine that had him playing a judge and that ended with his passing a harsh sentence on Sammy for his distance from the civil rights movement: “
Strip him of his Jewish star, his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor—thirty years in Biloxi!”

Biloxi? Let Lenny Bruce go to Biloxi! Mississippi frightened Sammy, and not without reason: in June 1964, the Klan had murdered two whites and a Negro—one of the whites a Jew—down in Mississippi. When the three—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—disappeared, a lot of locals, whites, said they were probably just engaged in some prank to attract media attention. Turned out they’d been released from a Neshoba County jail and murdered on the evening of June 20. “
Are you that nigger lover?” one of the Klansmen had asked Michael Schwerner. “Sir, I know just how you feel,” Schwerner is reported to have said before the bullet tore into his skull.

The hell with Mississippi. Mississippi was otherwordly. Once, in Mississippi, Dick Gregory held up his memoir and said to a gathered audience, “Take a ‘nigger’ to bed with you tonight.” There was laughter aplenty, but a lot of it was of the nervous kind.

Sammy’s whole America—the America that he loved—was one big nightclub. He had to keep them in their seats. They’d hate him, they’d take away their love, they’d never come back through the nightclub doors. “Sammy could
read an audience in two seconds flat,” says his longtime friend Jess Rand. “It was amazing. He would know right away what kind of house it was.” So why wouldn’t he know what kind of reading public lay beyond the nightclub doors?

And why drag them through his family torments, or the obsession with white women?

Fifty thousand copies in print, and another twenty-five thousand on the way!

One reviewer castigated the book for not being full of indictments against society’s ills. Actually, the book was full of indictments. There were indictments against hotel doormen—though not against Mississippi sheriffs. There were indictments against those who ridiculed Sammy because he was not more handsome. Couldn’t the critics see he was standing up for the little man, for the man who lacked handsomeness, for the man with one eye?
Yes I Can
is an indictment against the bully in society. It is an indictment against anti-Semitism. It even has a square middle-class white couple as bookends, as coauthors.

Sammy, in the finished book, on page 251:

Negroes may have been quite proud of the wave of independence that, in 1957, began sweeping through African nations. They could, in fact, find in that continent-away movement some seedlings of the American civil rights movement that was now under way. Sammy viewed Africa through a different set of lenses. He related to the Boyars a stopover visit to Africa on his way back from Australia. Sinatra had asked him to rush back to do a little event on behalf of Senator Jack Kennedy.

Sammy goes from angst against Negroes to an Amos ’n’ Andy–like reflection of a visit to Africa that could have been uttered by a Mississippi sheriff.

So he wanted it both ways.

He was the visible invisible man.

From Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
:

The fuss about the lack of racial depth in the book? Well, Sammy, Jane, and Burt just didn’t understand any of it. “We didn’t write it as a racial book,” says Boyar.

Roger Straus suggested to Burt that he open the book with the 1954 car crash. Sounded good, so he did:

He came back from the car crash. America liked comebacks. Hadn’t Sinatra come back?

Between hardcover and paperback,
Yes I Can
remained on the best-seller lists for a full year. “It was different,” Straus would admit. “It had legs.” In a way,
Yes I Can
, one of the trickiest autobiographies ever written, legitimized Sammy even further. It is, however, a book without history. Written by two whites—accompanied, shall we say, by the Negro, Sammy, on piano—its very shallowness gave it a kind of slippery and escapist art. Sympathy-wise, it went for the jugular. He was just a Negro trying to partake of the American Dream. A converted Jew trying to love everybody. He loved blondes, but who didn’t? Well, maybe those so-called Negro radicals H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael and Dick Gregory didn’t. But he didn’t admire them anyway.

America liked moxie. America liked showmanship. Sammy might not always have liked what he saw when he looked in the mirror at himself, but he had a full vision of what America, on the other side of that mirror, liked.

Sammy, awhile back, before they decided on a title for his book, came up with one
—Don’t Call Me Nigger
.

Call him anything else. White. Entertainer. Sammy. Smokey—which is actually what Sinatra called him. Jew. He so loved Jews. “He wanted to know what it was that made them survive,” says Boyar.

Sammy was surviving. And he was surviving quite well in the suburbs of America. Out there,
Yes I Can
was hot. That is to say, it was being gobbled up in places like Waukegan, Illinois; Utica, New York; Bangor, Maine. “Out there”—in the suburbs, where the white citizenry resided—fascinated Sammy.

A whole year of the phenomenon of Sammy. Not only in the nightclubs—but in the high schools where teachers were assigning the book, and in those suburban households. Sammy was deliriously happy.

Draw!

Draw!

Draw!

“White folks loved him because he didn’t threaten them,” Dick Gregory believed. Roger Straus imagined some of the book’s success was due to its fortuitous timing. “It’s a story of America emerging from the postwar syndrome,” he says.
Yes I Can
was indeed published during a time of turmoil in America’s streets. “It came at a time when it was important for a black man to be a hero in his own time,” Straus says.