In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (80 page)

As the boos erupted anew, Jackson realized he had underestimated the anger. Sammy’s body began twisting. He wanted to bolt. Jesse could feel his angst, and only held Sammy tighter. Then he told Sammy to sing something, and suggested Sammy sing “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” Given the surroundings, the circumstances, it was a request both funny and meaningful—and nearly Freudian. Sammy had no time to ponder the meaning; he simply began singing. Words caught in his throat; there was snickering. Sy Marsh felt terrible. “Sammy sang a song, came off, said, ‘Fuck ’em. They don’t want me. I don’t want them.’ He got blind drunk that night, and cried.”

The wounds could not but take their toll. Sammy could use a friend. He need look no farther than the White House, where President Nixon again reached out for him. In for a dollar, in for a president. On March 3, Sammy gave a one-man performance at the White House. It was what President Nixon and the first lady billed as one of their “Evenings of Entertainment.” Nixon beamed and tapped his wing-tipped feet; tuxedoed Sammy sang and gyrated onstage. Members of the cabinet and Senate were in attendance, as well as the
Apollo 17
astronauts and their families. Among Sammy’s musical offerings were, of course, “Candy Man,” “Mr. Bojangles”—a tender ode about a vaudevillian who loses everything at the end of his life—and “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” which Sammy was now singing as a kind of personal anthem. He didn’t care about Jesse and his cohorts now; Sammy was grooving in the White House. There was dancing afterward. Sammy—who could, in a mimic’s flash, become an English dandy—squired Pat Nixon across the dance floor as Shirley and George Rhodes beamed. From all those years on the vaudeville circuit, it had come to this moment. Sammy knew it was special: “
This is about as far uptown as I’m ever going to get,” he had quipped before beginning his performance.

Later that night Nixon gave Sammy and Altovise a tour of the White House, pointing out art and artifacts. If only his enemies, black and white, could see him now. Then the Davises prepared for their overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom. They cackled together. In the middle of the night, Sammy became hungry and tiptoed to the kitchen. He saw some blacks, made eye contact with one.
“Brother,” he said, “can I have me a little sandwich upstairs?” There was a nod yes, but no conversation. Just a black butler moving about, carving up some pieces of a Virginia ham. Now why would a black man not wish to make idle chatter with the great Sammy Davis, Jr.? Let them all snicker. He was nibbling on good country ham in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Thirteen days after Sammy’s performance at the White House, on March 16, the Senate began its televised Watergate hearings. They were presided over by North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, a courtly bulldog of a Democrat.

Nixon’s courting of Sammy had proved to be shrewd—and methodical. On May 25, Nixon had Sammy back to the White House, this time with Bob Hope, to entertain returning POWs. This time Nixon hugged Sammy, two grinning men—both in obvious pain, however—captured by the camera’s flash.

In July came testimony that Nixon secretly taped White House conversations.

In October, Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Elliot Richardson, the attorney general, and William Ruckelshaus, his deputy, abruptly quit over the firing. The dragon of Watergate was fully loose now, and the end of Nixon’s presidency irreversible.

Richard Nixon had no curiosity about blacks or ethnic minorities in America. The domestic populace—be they young, long-haired, or black—rattled him. Jews frightened him, sending his paranoia into dark, shameful quarters. (His White House recordings are full of anti-Semitic as well as homophobic rantings.) But the movies and make-believe thrilled him. “
Despite all the polls and all the rest, I think there are still a hell of a lot of people out there, and from what I’ve seen they’re—you know, they, they want to believe, that’s the point, isn’t it?” Nixon asked an aide in the spring of 1973. Nixon wanted to believe that Sammy was black America: If Sammy could make it, then why all the black poverty? Why so many blacks hemmed into inferior housing? Why the drumbeat of complaints from the ghetto? Sammy became Nixon’s envoy to a world Nixon did not understand. Inasmuch as Sammy himself had been fairly new to the rhythms of black America, it was a choice both curious and comedic. (In the White House one afternoon, Sammy took it upon himself to explain to Nixon how the word “colored” had changed to “Negro,” which had now changed to “black.”)

The closer Nixon got to Sammy, the more apparent it became he did not
understand the entertainer at all. “
You aren’t going to buy Sammy Davis, Jr., by inviting him to the White House,” Nixon had said in Miami Beach. But Nixon was wrong: you could buy Sammy. Not in a vicious or completely immoral manner—not, say, in the manner Nixon would seek to buy off Watergate conspirators. But if you
could
get to the soft spot in Sammy’s heart—insecurity—and linger there, shadowing him with threat (Sinatra) or power (Nixon), then his heartstrings would race to his head, leading him to dangerous and sentimental conclusions that had little to do with reason. And those conclusions—he was being loved!—set him up to be bought. Nixon and Sammy played against each other’s torments. With Watergate draping all around him, Nixon needed friends. He sulked along the corridors of the White House, many nights alone. But then, there, within reach—within a camera’s flash—was his old Copa pal, Sammy. Webbed between black and white, Sammy reached in desperate romantic directions—Judaism in the mid-’50s, Black Power in the mid-’60s, Nixon now—to stabilize his insecurities. It was the quick thinking of a stage veteran, the light of survival.

But this particular light was quickly turning black, with all the meanings inherent in that word—that one word that was so frightening and confusing to Sammy.

T
he constant and shrill voice of blacks deriding Sammy for his support of Nixon was one thing. The Watergate prosecutors were quite another. The evidence was astonishing; “high crimes and misdemeanors” had taken place. Nixon held on in the early summer months of 1974. The cartoonists had a high good time. There was one cartoon in the form of a “Ten Most Wanted” poster—Nixon’s face in all ten frames. On August 8, 1974, the thirty-seventh president of the United States announced his resignation. The next morning he helicoptered away from the White House lawn, his arm awkwardly waving a farewell.

Those who had shuttled past Sammy earlier with bewildering looks on their faces—as if they were right on the lip of a cutting comment about him and Nixon—now were nervy enough to bring their questions out into the open. An autograph-seeker coming his way? Not exactly—just another Nixon-hater. Sammy squinted the one eye, and looked for his able assistant Murphy to drag him away from the inquisitor. But time after time he was corralled, and quizzed. “
The flak got so hot at one stage,” Sammy would come to recall, “I think I was pretty close to a nervous breakdown.”

The truth is that not since President Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to the White House on the evening of October 16, 1901, had a president and a black man been so entangled and talked about in a slice of national discourse. History, however, had now turned over on itself: in 1901, Roosevelt was pilloried for the invitation to Washington, as evidenced by a dispatch in the
Memphis Scimitar
:

Seventy-one years later it was the guest himself—Sammy Davis, Jr.—who was being assailed.

With the vanishing of Nixon, Sammy decided it best to dust his hands of Republicans. Four more years of Republicans, he had gleefully told the Rumsfelds! Ha ha ha! Not anymore. Back to the Democratic fold! He began bragging up Senator Edward M. Kennedy for the next presidential sweepstakes.

The world was changing—again—and Sammy could see it and feel it. “
Fucking youth freaks,” is how he derisively referred to the kids in the streets. He turned fifty on December 8, 1975. Where did all those yesterdays go?

For his fiftieth birthday, Altovise threw a party. Everyone had to come in costume—children’s costumes. Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, came with Wes Craven, a young screenwriter and aspiring film director. They were both in blackface, and wearing wigs. Sammy stamped his feet and laughed out loud. (Sammy was costumed in a pair of children’s pajamas.) Late into the evening, the birthday celebrant wanted to treat everyone to a movie, and so they all settled down and watched a porn flick, glancing back and forth between the screen and the star of the movie, who sat among them.

Sammy rarely saw his own kids. Seeing his friends dressed in children’s costumes at the party only made him feel older. He started drinking more. He began playing more golf. So many contradictions.

Two years earlier he had lent his name to a golf tournament in Hartford, Connecticut. It was now known as the Sammy Davis, Jr., Greater Hartford Open. Golf was just another stage and microphone. But it was a shrewd stage: middle America and rich America—white America—played golf, lots of it. Sammy danced around the course like an elastic gnome, swinging a gold-plated club at balls, bending over in laughter, his wrist jewelry glinting. He was making history again—the first black to have corporate sponsorship of his own golf tournament. But after Nixon, not a lot of blacks were mindful of Sammy’s history-making ventures.

“Sammy and I played together,” Jack Carter recalls of an outing at Sammy’s tournament. “When we got to the eighteenth hole, a mob [of people] was around. I took the golf bag off my cart. We picked up Sammy and put him in the bag. The crowd was screaming. We took him over to Frank, in the bag. The crowd screamed [for] three hours.”

In the end—poof—Sammy decided it best to be in the company of those so-called youth freaks. The wave of youth, of everything young, was so colossal, and he had no intention of being left behind. He sought out new friends, and these new friends were far younger than himself. Many were actors and actresses—only they acted in various stages of undress. Sammy had become fascinated with the world of porn. He instructed Ann Slider, his office assistant, to keep a Rolodex of the studios in town that specialized in making porn films. She’d call from the office—her voice pitched low—and they’d send their latest movies for Sammy to view. At home, Rudy, the valet, would set up the projector. And then Sammy, Altovise, and friends would loll on the couch, the naked bodies bouncing onscreen, Sammy studying them like a scientist looking at molecules. Once things had seized him—gadgets, Sinatra in his youth, tap dancing, now pornography—he grabbed ahold of them fiercely until they adequately spent his sense of wonder and curiosity.

In 1972, an X-rated movie titled
Deep Throat
was released. (
Washington Post
reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward used the movie title to identify their unknown source who helped them crack the Watergate scandal, insuring that “Deep Throat” would enter the vernacular beyond the world of film.) The movie quickly became a kind of sneering classic. Its freckle-faced female lead, Linda Lovelace—Bronx-born, and the daughter of a policeman—possessed alarming skills at fellatio, a man’s organ wholly disappearing inside her mouth. Because she did not gag, the act seemed something akin to magic. “
How does she do it?” no less an authority than Vincent Canby of the
New York Times
wondered. “The film has less to do with the manifold pleasure of sex than with physical engineering.”

The place to see porn in Hollywood—and Sammy wanted to see
Deep Throat
on the large screen—was the Pussycat Theatre, over on Santa Monica Boulevard. He would not, of course, enter the theater with the flick showing. The autograph hounds! So to watch
Deep Throat
he rented the place out, and, along with Altovise, accompanied a gaggle of friends. The movie enthralled Sammy, so much so that he got in contact with its star and invited her to his home, first for his fiftieth birthday party—she was the porn star in attendance that night—then on many other occasions. It wasn’t long before Lovelace—with Altovise’s approval—was sharing a bed with Sammy. Nights at the house became fun-filled hours of bacchanalia. Little Sammy, the onetime critic of the wild youth movement, now one of its captains. “
And I liked it,” he would come to confess, “having everyone thinking that there wasn’t a porn star on the screen that I hadn’t partied with or didn’t know—clutching on for dear life to the image of swinger.”

John Souza, working security for Sammy, would sometimes wheel the limousine right up to the Palomino Club—a strip club in Las Vegas—and park it. He and Sammy would stride inside and take seats at a table. “We’d come back
with six girls,” remembers Souza. “First thing out of his mouth was, ‘Watch the jewelry.’ He said to me, ‘Pick one of these broads.’ I said, ‘I’m not interested, Sammy.’ I was married.”

When a night of revelry was about to turn a corner, into the arena of debauchery and naked bodies, Sammy would nod to the innocents that it was high time for them to leave. “Whenever there was that kind of thing, I wasn’t allowed to remain in the house,” says actress Madelyn Rhue. “Sammy always looked out for me.”

He invited porn stars to his own shows—free admission; a seat at Sammy’s table!—and they came, trailing him around Los Angeles, all the way to Las Vegas, hitching themselves to his entourage. A gaggle of young whites—the porn world was overwhelmingly white—in Nehru suits and polyester. Their unashamed freedom excited Sammy. He was swinging, and swinging maniacally.

“He loved strip shows,” says Molly Marsh, Sy’s wife. “He would send champagne backstage.”