In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (62 page)

Hilly, who had a bad back, would often be forced to issue his orders lying down as a masseuse attended to him. To those who witnessed this, he resembled a man flattened by pressures.

Without a playwright around to update
Golden Boy
, the criticism turned to Peter Coe, the director. Many of the Negroes in the company, emboldened while reading civil rights headlines and watching television newsreels on a daily basis now, wondered if Coe’s British sensibilities were stopping him from realizing the true dramatic leaps the play would have to take to be credible. Sammy—a longtime Anglophile—had hardly a word of criticism for Coe. There were days when Coe seemed unsure and unsettled. Hilly did not like seeing his director indecisive, and wondered if it was just exhaustion. Then he convinced himself that Coe was having a nervous breakdown. Hilly suggested to Coe he take some time off.

Again, Hilly and Sammy conferred. They needed another playwright. And maybe another director. They kept their game faces on; they did not want the company to see them sweat.

It was the silken-faced champ himself, Sugar Ray Robinson. Sammy hired him as a “consultant” to the play, immediately giving the fight scenes in rehearsal a certain verisimilitude. He had Sammy in a corner, teaching him moves—how to throw a punch, how to duck a punch. The entertainer and the fighter. Two Negroes long on the other side of the mirror into which gangster America peered, extracting its coins and profit. “Sammy tried to get everything to be authentic,” says Lola Falana, who was herself awed at the sight of Robinson teaching Sammy about the sweet science.

And now it was Hilly swinging—in search of, at long last, a playwright.

William Gibson had achieved fame with his 1959 Broadway production of
The Miracle Worker
. The play, about a teacher called upon to instruct a blind and deaf six-year-old child—and based on the life of Helen Keller—starred Anne Bancroft and a precocious young actress by the name of Patty Duke.

Both gave astonishing performances, and the play ran on Broadway for 719 performances.

Gibson, who lived in Stockbridge, an hour’s drive from Boston, had been out walking when his wife yelled at him that there was someone phoning from Boston. “My wife said, ‘Do you want to take a call from Hilly Elkins?’ ” recalls Gibson. “I knew the play was trying out in Boston and wasn’t doing very well.” After the phone call, Gibson turned to his wife and asked: “Well, do you want to go to Boston?”

William Gibson, in fact, had a deep and spiritual connection to Odets. Years earlier, when he was starting to embark on a writing career in New York, Gibson had taken a writing course taught by Odets, and found that those early teachings had helped shape him as a writer. News of the playwright’s illness touched him, and he had visited Odets just before his death in California. As a memento for his emotional support as Odets lay dying, Gibson was given Odets’s writing desk.

Upon arriving in Boston, and meeting with Elkins, Sammy, and Coe, who had now returned, Gibson quickly saw for himself that the production was struggling to find an identity. He thought the troubles began with the director. “Coe hadn’t the faintest idea of what black culture was like,” says Gibson. “He asked, ‘Why does the lead character want to get out of Harlem?’ ” To Gibson, such ignorance was unbelievable, and it was all he needed to hear. Gibson told Hilly that Coe should be allowed to direct
Golden Boy
only “if the play ever goes to the moon”—but no longer on earth.

Hilly pleaded with Gibson to tackle the rewriting Odets had begun. Gibson—tall and raw-boned—found himself warming to the idea. (There was also a sentimental reason: Odets had left two children behind; they would be entitled to
Golden Boy
royalties.)

William Gibson was also curious about America, about what he knew and hoped to learn. He knew enough to know of Negro conditions in Harlem; he did not truly know about Negroes in all of America. He did know that there was anger on the streets. Peter Coe was not at all worried about the rioting going on in the urban centers of America. “
This black crisis will pass away,” Coe predicted. Gibson thought that by working on a musical drama with Sammy, he would be pulled right into the racial gulf of the country, and that he couldn’t help but learn things. “I thought I would get a glimpse of America I wasn’t familiar with. On the other hand, all the people in the production end were white.” Coe’s lack of identification with America was one thing, Gibson felt, but he considered it even stranger that the production itself seemed to be operating in a kind of vacuum, as if, beyond Hilly, they all lacked the artistic vision to adapt the play to the times. There was fear, and nerves were on edge: Godfrey Cambridge had been axed. Who would be next?

Gibson thought the play had a “schizophrenic quality” going that could be
ruinous. He believed much of that schizophrenia began with Sammy, whom Gibson wished to mentally unravel for himself: “He was married to May Britt, the whitest girl you ever saw.” Gibson had to traverse tricky ground, and he knew he couldn’t avoid Sammy while doing it. “Sammy was the one who mattered. He was the economic power behind it. Sammy was the law.”

The more Hilly and Sammy listened to the insightful Gibson, the more they realized that Coe would have to go. “Hilly and Sammy told me I had to tell Peter Coe he was fired,” says Strouse. “I hated to do it.” An exhausted Coe left without an argument.

Hilly and Gibson had indeed begun whispering about a replacement director. Hilly invited Arthur Penn, who had directed Gibson’s
Miracle Worker
on Broadway, to come to Boston. He told Penn he merely wanted him to watch the play and offer his reactions, but he had every intention of trying to persuade Penn to direct
Golden Boy
.

Gibson was now officially aboard. He returned to his home in the woods of Stockbridge and set about rewriting the play on the desk of its original author. He figured the only way he could do it was to bring the racial issues of the play out into the open. He told himself there would be more heart and more aching in the play. “I rewrote it day and night. I redid the whole first act.”

In the woods, with the death of Odets and the living and breathing Sammy in his mind, William Gibson felt energized. For him, race may have been virgin intellectual territory, but it was also intoxicating because there was so much to explore. He returned to Boston and showed Hilly and Sammy the first act, which he had rewritten. They were mightily impressed.

The more Gibson watched Sammy, watched him interact with the cast, bounce in and out of the theater, the more he listened to the beatniklike language rolling from his mouth, watched Sammy unloose himself from the white world to glide into the Negro world, only to—just like a finger snap—glide back into the white world again, the more entranced he found himself. “Sammy was one of the most extraordinary guys I ever met in my life,” Gibson says. “When I went to Sammy, I talked to him and told him what I thought was wrong with the play. Sammy said, ‘Hilly, I want that guy.’ Hilly put pressure on me to do the script. After I came back to Boston, I remember I said to my wife, ‘I have to get rid of some of my prejudices against nightclub performers.’ ”

Sammy liked new, and he liked invention. Gibson was new. The focus on
Golden Boy
as a racial drama made Sammy nervous, but the nervousness lost out to excitement about the newness, to witnessing the creation of something.

Gibson raced back to his home in Stockbridge while the
Golden Boy
company remained in Boston. He vowed to complete the rewriting of the second act. Going back and forth, it took him ten days of feverish work to rewrite the entire play. It was no longer a play about a boxer grappling with giving up his
life because he felt wronged by the world. Now it was a play about a boxer who no longer wanted to live because of a love affair that couldn’t be consummated because the disease of racism was far more lethal and destructive than his fists. Sammy didn’t want to be a Negro in the play; he simply wanted to be Sammy. But Gibson—his wife, Margaret, was a noted psychoanalyst—knew better. “Once you had Sammy, you couldn’t ignore the fact of interracial romance in the play,” recalls Gibson.

In the rewritten play, Gibson had now put Sammy’s real-life infatuation with white women onstage, for all the world to see. It was, sure enough, art imitating life—only it was far richer.

Sometimes Sammy, sleeping next to his white wife at night, worried if Gibson might be reading too much into his life. Gibson, sleeping next to his psychoanalyst wife, slept like a baby.

“The play,” says Gibson, “now seemed about the black and white allegory of America.”

Arthur Penn sat watching the play in rehearsals, making notes, his eyes twittering. But he would make no commitment to direct. His indecision did not amuse Hilly Elkins.

Hilly sat watching the play night after night, answering the worries of investors, who were hearing the mixed reports from the road. Like many producers, Hilly began spending money out of his own pocket. “I was in such deep shit,” he recalls. “I was literally a quarter million dollars over” budget. Hilly was still jittery enough to consider wholesale changes. He and Gibson began worrying if Paula Wayne would be up to the added dramatic emphasis in the new version of the play. They decided she would not, so they invited Anne Bancroft to come to Boston and consider taking over the female lead. Bancroft came, and declined the offer. Mel Brooks, her husband, told her she would be “cheapening” herself to jump into the role. Wayne was safe.

Late one night—around two a.m., as Hilly Elkins remembers—Arthur Penn found himself sitting in Elkins’s hotel suite. Penn began mumbling to himself—in Hebrew. Hilly now realized Penn did not particularly like the play. And Hilly had had enough of Penn’s indecisiveness; they were being pilloried in the press; money was on the line. Hilly, his complexion growing redder by the second, grabbed Penn by his shirt collar.

“Are you going to direct this motherfucker, or what?” he yelled at Penn.

Hilly was grimacing. His back was in pain. His hands were still at Penn’s neck.

“Of course,” Penn replied.

So now they had a director.

•     •     •

It was off to Detroit, with both Arthur Penn and William Gibson aboard. Sammy was his usual calm self, a man at home on the move, at total ease entering and exiting old theaters. He had a way of making up a family whenever he had to. “When you were in a show with Sammy,” says
Golden Boy
dancer Sally Neal, “everybody was important—the usher, the person selling the tickets.”

In Detroit, they unloaded at the Fisher Theatre, an old structure in that gritty city. Between Boston and Detroit, there had, of course, been no way, or time, to adapt
Golden Boy
to Gibson’s rewrites. So the company adopted a grueling plan: they would give the Detroit theatergoers the Odets version of the play in their scheduled evening performance. But during the day, they would rehearse the new Gibson version. “Finally,” recalls Elkins, “at some point, we had most of the show changes in place.”

Penn was driving Sammy and Paula Wayne hard. Sammy always had a glass in his hand, sipping from it. It was liquor. (Penn asked him one day if he could get rid of the glass. “No way,” Sammy answered.) Arthur Penn intended to get dramatic performances from both Sammy and Paula.
Golden Boy
was a musical, true enough, and Penn did not question their singing voices; it was their acting range that worried him. He would tell the two of them to go off by themselves and concentrate and focus. Sammy found it difficult to sit still, had no idea what Penn was talking about. Focus? Sammy was Sammy, and his splintered mind was his genius. But if Arthur Penn wanted Sammy Davis, Jr., the actor, instead of the nightclub musical performer, then Sammy would give Penn what he wanted. “He learned so fast,” Elkins remembers. As for Paula Wayne, some days she did seem fragile. There were those who thought it just a performer’s fussiness. Gibson thought otherwise: “Paula was in love with Sammy.”

There were some beautiful moments taking place, and both cast and crew could feel it. Many began noticing Johnny Brown, the understudy who had taken over for the fired Godfrey Cambridge. In the early rehearsals, the chubby Brown “couldn’t get two feet together,” says Elkins. But somehow the feet got lighter. “The first night he went on, he was bloody marvelous,” remembers Elkins, of Brown’s out-of-town tryout. The Strouse and Adams musical number, “Don’t Forget 127th Street”—about remembering one’s Harlem roots—was bringing down the house. “I think it was some of our best work,” Strouse says.

Gibson would be sitting in the theater, watching a rehearsal, and all of a sudden Sammy would slide across the stage floor and hop, in one fluid slithery motion, atop the piano. Gibson’s back would arch up: he just couldn’t understand how a one-eyed man could make such a move. Sammy was so hyper Gibson believed he didn’t sleep. “He was filled with energy all the time.”

In Detroit, Sammy vanished some evenings to a recording studio, where he
was laying down tracks on an album with Count Basie. And then there were those times when Sammy just vanished, leaving everyone nervous. “When we were on the road,” remembers Gibson, “Sammy would take off for a weekend and do a concert somewhere. He would go do these shows and come back rejuvenated.” Once back, having settled everyone’s nerves, Sammy had stories to tell. He regaled the cast and crew with stories of his life. Sammy would brag to Gibson about future plans. Gibson listened wide-eyed. “Sammy wanted to be a big shot in the dramatic world. He was always hankering for a big movie role.” Sinatra sailed in and out of many of Sammy’s conversations. “I remember,” recalls Gibson, “Sammy saying to me about Frank, ‘He’s my leader. He’s my leader.’ He said it like they were a Boy Scout troop. He would say it with a certain satirical bent.” More and more, Gibson felt Sammy Davis, Jr., was “twelve different guys.”

But it was in Detroit where Hilly, Sammy, and William Gibson began realizing they had a play worthy of Broadway. The ticket lines were long, and the buzz was not only good, but spirited as well.