In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (76 page)

So he bought the kids off. What did they know of the doors vaudevillians had to pry open? What did they know of blackface? Of dancing on street corners? Of sleepless and motherless nights?

Jack Carter in 1972, during that year of war and revolution: “Sammy cares about his people.” Long pause. “And black people, too.”

There was something else that bewildered Ann Slider about working for Sammy: the gentlemen who sometimes walked through the door, and began whispering, and took seats and remained seated in silence until Sammy arrived. “The mob guys would come in the office, sitting there, talking, waiting for Sammy,” she says. “They’d scare me.”

Sammy made only one movie in 1970, a forgettable venture that he co–executive produced, titled
One More Time
. It was a sequel to
Salt & Pepper
, the equally forgettable crime caper that had starred Sammy and Peter Lawford. What was unique about
One More Time
was its director—Jerry Lewis. It would be the only movie Lewis directed in which he himself did not star. As his career tumbled in various incarnations, Lewis came to imagine himself as something of a Charlie Chaplin figure—an unappreciated auteur. The movie was shot in London. Lewis insisted his sets be open to the public, so
One More Time
had a gaggle of Londoners constantly popping in and out during filming. Lewis worried little about concentration, believing a movie achieved true verisimilitude with ad-libbing and improvisation. Ad-libbing was a dimension of Sammy’s arsenal, and he let loose. He laughed, Jerry laughed, Peter Lawford laughed. They were housed at the tony Mayfair Hotel—where the laughing continued. Alas, the movie studio honchos did not laugh. The film was a mess—although Sammy’s wardrobe, featuring such classic outfits as velvet smoking jacket with high collar—effortlessly caught one’s eye, as did his puffy Afro. “Working with [Sammy], I had ten weeks of ecstasy,” Lewis would remember of that film. (It was on this film set that Sammy offered Lewis the job of directing his autobiography,
Yes I Can
, for the screen. Lewis exuberantly accepted, and loudly announced himself the only man alive who could properly bring the project to
the screen. Tsk, tsk, not to be.) As for
One More Time
, the critics were harsh. Like Chaplin, Lewis hated critics. They all became his mortal enemies. So fuck the critics. “It was a great joy,” he says of the film. “Problem was, Metro released it but didn’t sell it. They just let it come and go.”

In May 1970, Motown released its first Sammy Davis, Jr., album. Titled
Something for Everyone
, it boasted nine singles and was an unmitigated disaster. The album had a beguiling tone, in both content and art design. Among the singles were “Spinning Wheel,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” and “In the Ghetto,” the latter the blatant attempt to introduce Sammy to the black audience—those who might well be living
in
the ghetto. The cover featured Sammy in long robe—the Afro, of course—tinted glasses, a drink and a cigarette in hand. He is surrounded by more than two dozen women. The women—white and black, though mostly white—are dressed in long modish attire, and the fashion effect seems to evoke a commune, or a hippie haven. On the album’s cover there appears a striking blonde who is sucking on a multicolored lollipop. Hovering body-close to Sammy is a soul sister in a gigantic Afro, her arm seductively resting on Sammy’s shoulder. Opening the slipcover, one is treated to a double-truck photo of Sammy, seated, in his robe—only now he has the robe’s hood over his head. He holds a bust, a sculpture—it looks to be Beethoven’s head—in his lap. Sitting behind tinted glasses, surrounded by curvaceous beauties, Sammy resembles a woozy pharoah. It is an album that, with little regret, one might judge by its cover: confusion reigns both inside, in the recordings, and outside, in the artwork. Five years earlier Sammy had recorded
Our Shining Hour
with Count Basie. Now this: he has gone from jazz and jumpy Broadway melodies to Berry Gordy’s musical invention—the black Sammy.

The album received scant airplay and did not yield a single hit. (Gordy asked Marvin Gaye to come up with original songs for Sammy to record. But during this time Gaye—who possessed epic gifts, as evidenced by his landmark 1971 album,
What’s Going On
, in which he sang with rapture about ecology, the Vietnam War, and race—had a not-so-small problem: an addiction to cocaine. His concentration waned, and his songs for Sammy never materialized.)

Sammy worried. There was another album to deliver. “You know, I’m not a Motown singer,” he finally confessed to Sy Marsh. “I can do it, but I’m not comfortable.”

Sy Marsh told him not to worry, to just sing. Sammy went back into the recording studio. Tracks were laid down for the follow-up album. Motown executives seemed preoccupied. Marsh could feel it. “We’re recording, but nothing is coming out,” Marsh says of the company’s refusal to release
Sammy’s follow-up singles and album. He requested a meeting with Gordy. “I say, ‘Berry, when the fuck you going to put out our records?’ Berry says, ‘I got a problem. Our salespeople say Sammy doesn’t have the Motown sound.’ I said, ‘Fuck the Motown sound. What about the Sammy sound?’ ” Marsh’s face turned red. “I want all the masters back,” he snapped at Gordy before meeting’s end, referring to the unreleased demo tapes.

When Sy Marsh told Sammy that he had ended the Motown arrangement—a move Motown executives hardly tried to stop—Sammy told him it might be a struggle to get the demo tapes back. A short while later, much to Sammy’s surprise, Gordy had the tapes returned. “You must have caught that nigger in the bed fucking somebody,” Sammy told Marsh.

Sy Marsh was still determined to revive Sammy’s flagging singing career. The Motown fallout also had an effect on Shirley Rhodes. A native of Detroit, where Motown was headquartered—and one of the few black road managers in the country—she had an open line of communication with Berry Gordy. In a chat with Gordy, he suggested Sammy’s music team might be more comfortable with someone like Mike Curb, a young record producer.

Mike Curb’s best-known talent was a young sister-and-brother duo—Marie and Donny Osmond—whose record
One Bad Apple
had made its way onto the R & B charts. The Osmonds were white; Mike Curb was white; the Osmonds were on the R & B charts. “Berry appreciated competition,” Curb says, trying to explain Gordy’s advocacy on his behalf.

Curb was born in Savannah, Georgia, but spent much of his youth in Compton, California. His father was an FBI agent. Young Curb, in a community populated mostly by blacks, listened to a lot of black music while growing up. He was wild for the Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, and Fats Domino, among others. He dropped out of college when he was nineteen, wrote some advertising jingles, made some money, and started Curb Records, his own label. (He produced the music for Roger Corman’s 1966 film
The Wild Angels
, which starred Peter Fonda and Frank’s daughter Nancy Sinatra. A movie critic would say of the film that it was fine to watch “
after about twenty-four beers.”) One of Curb’s wiliest creations was the Mike Curb Congregation, a group of gospel singers he formed to back up his artists. They provided a rather stumping and soulful beat to his label’s music tracks. In 1969, when he was a twenty-five-year-old successful music mogul, Curb merged his label with MGM Records.

Shirley Rhodes got the Mike Curb Congregation to appear with Sammy on a couple of dates. Curb and Sammy struck up a friendship. Sammy confided to Curb how unhappy he had been with Motown. “Sammy really didn’t like R & B music,” says Curb. “I think he felt he had passed it [by].” Curb’s gospel congregation had already recorded “The Candy Man,” an Anthony Newley–Leslie Bricusse composition, but it had not done well. “I was disappointed,”
says Curb of the single’s failure. He had another idea. “We were backstage one night at Caesar’s Palace. I said, ‘Hey Sammy, why don’t you do “The Candy Man”?’ ” Sammy didn’t make a commitment, but Curb felt he was intrigued. Curb had another point to make as Sammy pondered the possibility, and he wasted no time in sharing it. “I said, ‘You remember “High Hopes” with Sinatra?’ That was Sinatra singing with kids. I said, ‘Sinatra did a fun song like that. Why don’t you do a fun song?’ ” The Sinatra link touched Sammy where he was most vulnerable. “Next time I saw him,” says Curb, “he said, ‘Maybe it will be a fun song to do for the kids.’ ”

Sammy and his entourage showed at Curb’s studio space on Fairfax and Melrose in Los Angeles to record “Candy Man.” Curb ushered his congregation into the studio. With the congregation swaying and Sammy singing, Curb felt good. “The thing I learned about Sammy was if he could snap his fingers to something, he could do it.” Curb and those gathered around began snapping their fingers. “After he left, we took the finger snaps and put a Motown-like drum over it real hard. It almost sounded like a combination of ‘High Hopes’ with a Motown drum.” (Sammy never was one for doing more than one recording of a song. He did one take of “Candy Man,” and then bolted.)

It was treacly. It was kiddielike. Children’s voices are everywhere on the tune, yelping sweetly. It was corny. It had a fairy-tale lilt to it:

And the disc jockeys began playing it. No, it wasn’t being piped into Berry Gordy’s urban America. But the kids liked it, and what the kids liked, their parents had to buy. And out there in the suburbs their parents bought “Candy Man.” And they kept buying it. And who is to say that against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and racial unrest—so much strife, so much disenchantment—that a fairy-tale tune didn’t have a place? A fairy-tale tune sung by a middle-aged vaudevillian who never had a childhood of his own. The tune started climbing the
Billboard
charts. It became infectious, both a joke and a surprise hit. With a hit, one has to hit the road, and Sammy did. Shirley Rhodes couldn’t believe it. Sy Marsh couldn’t believe it: the middle-of-the-road shit was hot. Berry Gordy reached Sy Marsh by phone. “He says, ‘I see
your guy’s on the charts.’ I said, ‘Berry, you called our stuff “white bread.” Well, this is white bread. But we’re on the charts.”

From Berry Gordy back to Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, from black back to—poof—white bread.

Out on tour, singing “Candy Man,” Sammy would be holding the mike in one hand, a bucket in the other. In the bucket there was candy, hundreds of pieces of wrapped candy. He’d start flinging the candy into the audience, all the while singing. The crowds went wild. “I was going to milk the fuck out of it,” says Sy Marsh, who came up with the idea.

Growing more and more stunned by the record’s success, Berry Gordy phoned Marsh again. “Are you guys buying up all those records?” Gordy asked Marsh.

On March 11, 1972, “Candy Man” reached number 1 on the
Billboard
charts. “The one thing he always wanted,” says Mike Curb, “was a number one record.” Curb joined Sammy on tour in celebration. “It was euphoric,” he recalls. “When you get the number one record with a legend like Sammy—and with your own group—it’s like something you think about the rest of your life.”

Sammy had no intention of losing sight of Mike Curb. “Sammy said, ‘What’s that song about the vaudeville guy?’ ” recalls Curb. “I said, ‘ “Mr. Bojangles”?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I went out and bought it for him.”

“Frank Sinatra has a cold,” went the famously titled Gay Talese
Esquire
article about the singer.

Well, Sammy Davis, Jr., has a high-spending wife.

In “Candy Man” he had a hit record, and it was a good thing. Sammy always spent money he didn’t have; absent Will Mastin he spent foolishly, in part because he simply had more money to spend.

“I said to him one day,” recalls Jerry Lewis, “ ‘Sammy, at the end of this week you’ll be $20,000 richer. Now tell me, why have you gone out and bought $30,000 worth of jewelry?’ ”

“Why not?” answered the vaudevillian who had had so little early in life.

Now Sammy had a wife who was in lockstep with his spending sprees. She didn’t marry him for his money. Of course she didn’t. One grocery bill—and there would be many, many other bills—caught the attention of Sy Marsh. It was for $5,200. A lot of caviar, a lot of lobster; a lot of a lot of things. The bills—food, furniture—worried Marsh. And they worried Shirley Rhodes. They did not worry Sammy: “
She was in my league,” he felt of his wife’s spending habits. “I was almost proud of her.”

He showed her how proud. In the driveway for his wife sat a Rolls-Royce
and—because, well, maybe some mornings she’d like to zip along a little faster, maybe along the Pacific Coast Highway, which hugged the ocean—a Maserati.

Sammy described Altovise to
Women’s Wear Daily
as “
my rock and my reason.”

She wanted to be an actress. Sammy put her in touch with agents. The contacts yielded no roles. So he bought an empty building in Los Angeles and said he’d use it as space to make—direct—his own movies. And he’d cast and direct his wife in those movies!

Yes I can.

He adored Reno, Nevada. It had an edge, it had landscape, it had the Sierra in the distance. And it had Bill Harrah, who owned Harrah’s. Bill Harrah took care of Sammy because Sammy always packed his place. Harrah put Sammy up in a house, and the house looked out onto a lake. And inside the house there was the finest food, the best champagne. “One day I get a call from Bill Harrah,” says Sy Marsh. “He said, ‘I want to do something for Sammy. What would get him excited?’ ” Marsh’s loss for words caused Harrah to interject: “He said, ‘Sy, do you know about the Duesenberg? It’s a handmade car. Doesn’t go on the assembly line. It’ll take a year to make.’ I said, ‘Terrific.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell him.’ ”

One evening, a year later, the car arrived. Sammy was onstage, the car sitting out back of the hotel. Between the first and second shows, Marsh pulled Sammy aside. “I said, ‘Bill wants to meet with you,’ We go out back. There’s a spotlight, and there’s this candy-apple red convertible Duesenberg. Sammy looks at the thing and goes, ‘Holy shit!’ He thought it was Bill Harrah’s car. Sammy said, ‘Bill, that’s a son of a bitch!’ Bill said, ‘Sammy, you like it that much, it’s yours.’ He handed him the keys. Sammy is practically crying.”