In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (8 page)

By 1915, Luisa had found an apartment in Harlem, at 47 West 129th Street. Waves of Negroes had recently started migrating to upper Manhattan. It wasn’t that Luisa followed the plight—or the momentum—of the Negro in New York. In fact, Luisa Sanchez did not keep company with Negroes. Her move to Harlem was purely for economical reasons. The rents were cheaper than in lower Manhattan. Sanchez found work as a personal maid and dresser for Laurette Taylor, a much-admired Broadway actress. Born, like Sanchez, in New York City in 1884, Taylor had made her New York stage debut at the age of nineteen in a production of
From Rags to Riches
. For years she toured the country in stock companies, honing her craft. On December 21, 1912, she opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre—it was that theater’s grand
opening—in
Peg o’ My Heart
, an Irish family drama written by Hartley Manners. Taylor played Peg, and the role made her a star. Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, came to see it and predicted that “
within five years” Taylor would become “the foremost actress” in America. The play ran for 1,250 performances. Taylor had other memorable roles, in
The Devil
,
The Great John Ganton
, and
The Ringmaster
. Her reputation soared. Directors wooed her; she was an incandescent presence on a stage.

Being a personal maid for Taylor came with perks: Sanchez traveled with the actress, dined with her in fine restaurants. There was just enough color in Luisa’s complexion that there were times she’d be mistaken for a nonwhite—perhaps Mediterranean. She took being called Negro or Puerto Rican as the worst kind of insult. “
We don’t serve Negroes,” a restaurateur once said to Sanchez. “I don’t speak English,” she replied, unrolling her stock answer. “I’m Cuban.”

Meeting other actors and actresses—John Barrymore had seemed taken with her beauty—delighted Luisa. Still, she was not one to swoon easily over men or their advances. Her physical beauty was one thing, but inside she seemed possessed of something hard and impenetrable. She did not have a timid tongue, and she was noticeably temperamental. Suitors found out quickly enough she was fiercely independent. Two men, on separate occasions, had each provided Luisa Sanchez with the services of an automobile. Grateful though she may have been, she married neither man, though both had hoped their generosity might move her heart. Relatives believed she had been so shaken by her first marriage that she forever lost faith in the institution.

Luisa Sanchez arrived home early evenings with stories of Broadway glitter, sometimes bearing gifts from Laurette Taylor for her daughters. It is little wonder, then, that sisters Julia and Elvera became wide-eyed when it came to the world of entertainment. They gazed longingly at pictures of show folk. Talk of show business seeped inside of them.

By the time Elvera Sanchez celebrated her tenth birthday, it was apparent that she was becoming the opposite of Julia, her shy older sister. In fact, the characters of the Sanchez girls could not have been more different. Elvera spoke her mind with an edge and in a rush of words. She cared not at all about consequences. In temperament, she was her mother. Elvera went to PS 89, and, from there, to a Catholic school. But school and teachers bored Elvera. She was impetuous, a free spirit. In the eighth grade, she grew increasingly restless. “I went to Catholic school and I was kind of bad and they put me out,” she would recall. Her sister, Julia, had a work permit. Elvera took the permit and forged her own name on it. With that, she began looking for work. She figured the theater—familiar territory to her because of her mother’s work—was as good a place as any to begin. Her hunch proved smart.

Elvera got a job as an errand girl, working for a makeup artist out of the Astor Building, located on Broadway. She delivered packages around Manhattan. And as she ambled along the streets, she couldn’t help but notice the busy world spinning right before her eyes: big noisy streetcars rumbling by; the hustle-bustle of pedestrians, of businessmen and perfume-scented women. “
One day I went all the way down to Fourteenth Street to deliver a package. On the way I stopped at the Automat and ate up all my lunch money because I knew I was going to get a tip from this lady on Fourteenth Street. Well, she fooled me! I walked from Fourteenth Street up to 137th Street! I didn’t know that I could have asked a cop for a nickel.” She’d sit alone in a dinette and order a slice of pie and gawk. She’d stroll the dark streets of Manhattan, a solo journeyer.

The Sanchezes’ move to Harlem had come at a fortunate time. Shortly after their arrival—the community had recently gone from mostly Italian and Jewish to mostly Negro, in one of the more dazzling real estate upheavals in New York history—Harlem came alive with both Negro culture and pride. World War I unleashed some of that pride, as the young men of Harlem went off to Europe to fight. (At the war’s outset, actress Laurette Taylor and her personal maid and assistant, Luisa Sanchez, found themselves stranded in London because of the conflict. Eventually they sailed home.)

America’s doughboys entered World War I with nary a moment to waste. Germany had nearly broken the back of France before it was pushed back by American and European forces. It was the war of General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, who had once chased the Apache through Arizona, and who had once led Negro soldiers in Cuba: “Black Jack” was meant as an epithet; he didn’t seem to mind. It was the war of young Ernest Hemingway, far from famous yet, who served with the Italian army and got hit by shrapnel: by war’s end, he’d have plenty of stories to put into the novels that would come. And it was the war of James Reese Europe, revered around Manhattan before the war as a society musician partial to wearing white suits and shoes to match. Europe signed up with the 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem. (Among members of that outfit would be a vaudevillian by the name of Will Mastin, who was destined to discover Sammy Davis, Jr..)

The Germans referred to Harlem’s soldiers as “
bloodthirsty black men.” The French were more delicate: “hellfighters,” they called them. On February 17, 1919, the men, who had fought so gallantly—more than six consecutive months in the muddy trenches—staged a shoulder-to-shoulder march up Fifth Avenue into Harlem. They were thirteen hundred strong, and Lieutenant James Reese Europe—survivor of a German poison-gas attack in the war—was leading them. They came home having been awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French. They came home having led the Allied march through mud to the Rhine. And they came home highstepping down Fifth Avenue to a drum-roll
and to women with tears in their eyes. Press baron William Randolph Hearst and a bevy of other dignitaries were among the onlookers.

“
The tide of khaki and black turned west on 110th Street to Lenox Avenue, then north again into the heart of Harlem,” a chronicler of that march wrote. “At 125th Street, the coiled, white rattlesnake insignia of the regiment hissed from thousands of lapels, bonnets, and windows. A field of pennants, flags, banners, and scarves thrashed about the soldiers like elephant grass in a gale, threatening to engulf them. In front of the unofficial reviewing stand at 130th Street, Europe’s sixty-piece band broke into ‘Here Comes My Daddy’ to the extravagant delight of the crowd.”

Before war’s beginning there had been those who wondered—given the Negroes’ low standing on the socioeconomic ladder—whether, if called to fight, they would give their all. There now seemed little reason to ponder again the Negro sentiment concerning patriotism. “Black Jack” knew it: the Negro fought. Harlemites talked about the march for weeks on end. They would also come to mourn the fate of James Reese Europe. Less than three months after his triumphant march into Harlem, Europe was stabbed in the neck with a penknife by a fellow musician, who had started an argument with him while in Boston. Europe thought the wound was minor, but he bled to death hours after the stabbing. He received a public funeral in New York City. “
Before Jim Europe came to New York the colored man knew nothing but Negro dances and porter’s work,” a grieving man told the
New York Tribune
. “All that has been changed. Jim Europe was the living open sesame to the colored.… He took them from their porter’s places and raised them to positions of importance as real musicians.”

The downtown Negro churches that had relocated to Harlem after World War I—bringing their congregations with them—found opportunistic real estate agents, who began to welcome Negroes to Harlem in larger numbers than ever.

There seemed to be much to enjoy in the growing Harlem. In time, scores of musicians and dancers began to arrive. “The Negro race is dancing itself to death,” a Harlem minister had earlier said of the goings-on.

It was the neon glare of the Harlem theaters, especially the Lafayette and Lincoln Theatres, that soon caught the eye of the young Elvera Sanchez. You could look up at the Lafayette and notice, against the darkened sky, the word “
VAUDEVILLE
” twinkling in white neon light. The Lincoln had previously hosted white vaudeville acts for its white customers, but when the Negro drama critic Lester Walton leased it, he opened the theater to everyone. It was the men who dressed in snappy suits and raccoon coats and the women who wore silk that made Elvera pause in her Friday and Saturday walks along Harlem’s streets. In teeming Harlem there were garden-rooftop parties. There were tango teas. Spindly legged dancers were doing the Texas Tommy, the
turkey trot. From every nightclub, music spilled forth. Elvera was mesmerized. Soon enough—and for the first time in her life—she found herself inside a dance hall. It was called the Hoofers Club. “I had never danced,” she recalled. And now she was hooked. She had a dancer’s lithe physique, long arms and long legs. She had large and pretty eyes, a prominent nose. At the Hoofers Club, Elvera became a habitué. The owners of the club were in the habit of sending out invitations to musicians to come and play. Their jam sessions were known to be exuberant. “
You knew,” someone remarked about Coleman Hawkins playing his saxophone at the Hoofers Club, “he’d come in to carve somebody.” (The lingo simply meant Hawkins would dazzle everyone with his horn.)

The grapevine of Negro America was hardly brittle. It held fast and strong east to west, north to south. The word went out: Negro Harlem was alive.

Duke Ellington arrived in 1922 from the nation’s capital. Born to middle-class parents, Ellington had been playing the piano since the age of seven. In New York City, he joined Elmer Snowden’s band, a band he was soon destined to take over. Fats Waller was playing before the curtain rose on vaudeville shows at the Lincoln on West 135th Street. The Tennessee-born Bessie Smith was wailing. Smith, who drove her very own customized car, recorded for the Columbia Record Company. “
Up in Harlem ev’ry Saturday night / When the high brows git together it’s just too tight,” went one of her ditties. A stretch along West 133rd—just four blocks from the Sanchezes—became known as “Jungle Alley,” for its number of nightspots. One hot spot, known as the Clam House, featured a performer by the name of “Gladys Bentley.” A young Harlem artist, not yet famous—although fame would find Romare Bearden, as it would find so many others beginning to gather—would recall: “
 ‘Gladys Bentley’ was a woman dressed as a man. You also had a male performer who called himself ‘Gloria Swanson.’ So Harlem was like Berlin, where they had such things going on in cabarets at the time.”

It wasn’t long at all before whites began cruising into Harlem, especially after the downtown clubs closed for the night. In the deep nighttime, Harlem opened like a flower. You might, on any night of the week, catch a glimpse of Tallulah Bankhead or Joan Crawford or Hoagy Carmichael or Artie Shaw emerging from one of the hip nightspots.

But the new arrivals—writers and poets and painters—seemed to be nonstop indeed. Langston Hughes showed up in 1921. W. E. B. Du Bois would publish Hughes’s soul-stirring poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” that very year. From then on, it seemed, the Negro in America had found a new muse. Hughes, caramel-colored and possessing an easy grin, took to hanging out at the Harlem Y with a parrot atop his shoulder.

A young girl—a young Elvera Sanchez—waltzing along the streets of Harlem couldn’t help but become intoxicated by it all, the whiff of culture, the
aroma of a certain kind of exalted nightlife. Eric Walrond, another young Negro writer new to the scene, thought of Harlem as “
a sociological El Dorado.”

If there was one individual who might have touched the consciousness of every young and excitable Negro girl in Harlem who dreamed of show business, it was surely Florence Mills. Mills had broken numerous racial barriers in New York theaters. She was the first to headline a show at the Palace Theatre downtown. Daughter of former slaves, she performed as a pickaninny with white vaudevillians as a child. She endured backbreaking working conditions, but seemed suffused with a pride to uplift Negroes through her entertaining. In 1921 she had her breakthrough in
Shuffle Along
, a black musical written by the team of Noble Sissle—who had been a sergeant in the 369th Regiment—and Eubie Blake. White audiences had never seen anything like
Shuffle Along
, melding, as it did, Negro music and dance in a sophisticated manner.

But swoon as she might, Elvera was at war with her show-business dreams and her mother, Luisa, who felt smothered by Negro Harlem. Luisa Sanchez spent her time in the white world with Laurette Taylor. Luisa Sanchez traveled. She dined at the table with gifted thespians. These were not pastimes—travel and dining—she engaged in with Negroes. Negro New York with its theaters and salons might have spoken of culture indeed, but it was not Luisa’s culture. She felt her culture much closer to white America than Negro America. And yet, Elvera Sanchez saw and heard so much of this growing Negro Harlem. It intoxicated her: “
Right around the corner where the Abyssinian Church is now was the Marcus Garvey Building. They had a low building. I could get into my kitchen window and look into 138th Street and I could see all the buildings,” she later said. She frequented the movie houses along Lenox Avenue with her girlfriends. “
We’d go there on Saturday, and it was five cents. You could sit there all day long for five cents,” Sanchez recalled.