In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (82 page)

“
What we want is white folks’ technology with black folks’ love,” is how Jesse Jackson put it regarding his efforts to raise economic consciousness among blacks.

In 1974, Sammy made no movies. He decided to turn his attention to a smaller medium.

He was always a fan of television, peering for hours on end into the black box. But he was also a fan of celebrity culture, as starstruck as any fan. In 1975, ABC gave Sammy a ninety-minute talk show, and there he sat, mimicking Mike Douglas and Johnny Carson, hosting his own show,
Sammy and Company
. Johnny Brown, from the
Golden Boy
production, was a member of the show, dovetailing, as it did, into a kind of variety hour as well. There was gabbing, and there were skits. The show aired on Sunday nights. The producers realized the tapings would have to be done around Sammy’s nightclub dates, and the show aired from a variety of locations: New York, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, even Honolulu. The show was syndicated, which meant it was apt to be seen at any given hour of the late night. A nocturnal denizen might turn the set on and catch Sammy jawboning with his guests, united in their silliness, guffawing into the camera, Sammy slapping his knee, the jewelry gleaming, Bob Hope sliding out of view as if he had mistakenly stumbled onto the set of a talk show gone awry. Sammy had been around so long that he could summon potent guest stars. One show featured not only Billy Eckstine, but Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, and Dizzie Gillespie as well.

Going into its second year, however, the show—always a part-time venture for Sammy—seemed to be gasping for air. Viewership declined. In 1977, ABC yanked it, and Sammy complained not one bit. Hell, that was the business, and Sammy knew what Frank knew: riding high in April, shot down in May. Many were surprised it lasted as long as it did.

If May Britt had tired of her budding film career, Altovise went in the other direction—trying to ignite hers. She appeared in
Kingdom of the Spiders
in 1977. Few saw it; fewer still remember it. It starred William Shatner, of
Star Trek
fame, and Woody Strode, an aging black actor who had appeared in
Spartacus
alongside Kirk Douglas, and in some John Ford Westerns. The movie was about a veterinarian who uncovers a horde of tarantulas causing havoc in the Arizona desert. It was what it was.

•     •     •

Alex Haley—the writer
Playboy
had sent to interview Sammy back in 1966—had been working, for years, on his family lineage. Haley was fascinated by his Tennessee hometown and his ancestral roots. To piece together his family history on his mother’s side—all the while working between magazine assignments and the occasional speaking engagement—he combed archives near and distant, and interviewed relatives, and trekked to Africa, all to answer a question: How did the Haleys reach America’s shores? Tracing his family’s roots to a village in Gambia, Haley set about writing his narrative.

It was in the year of America’s Bicentennial when
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
was published. The reviews were stunning. “
It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us,” James Baldwin would write in his review of the book. In workmanlike prose, Haley traced his family’s odyssey from capture in Africa, slave-ship crossing, to slave-cabin living in America. The book received prizes and acclaim. Haley became a celebrity.

The year after its publication, on January 23, 1977, ABC aired the first night of an eight-night showing of the dramatization of Haley’s book. By the end of the telecast, a nation seemed mesmerized, shocked, and stilled. Slavery, in all its horror, had been shown for the first time to mass audiences. The Nielsen ratings showed that parts of the series had been watched by upward of 130 million viewers. Characters from the series—Kunte Kinte, Toby, Kizzy, “Chicken” George, Fiddler—became fodder for touching commentary across the nation. Large questions that had haunted the country—black illiteracy, racism, poverty—suddenly seemed, if not completely answered, then at least partially understood. So colored maids did have a history. And Isaac Murphy, the forgotten black jockey who had won Kentucky Derbies, had a history. And so, too, did Negro cabdrivers everywhere; likewise those souls who had been gathered around Sammy in Alabama, in Mississippi, at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. And so did the old broken-down vaudevillians walking into 9000 Sunset Boulevard—Sammy’s office; they had a history indeed. The black butlers working in the Nixon White House had a history. Rudy Duff, driving Sammy’s grandma around Los Angeles, back and forth to the market before her death, had a history.

Blacks and whites across America, who had, for so long, ignored each other, began talking, discussing
Roots
.

There was something else notable about
Roots
. It provided a bevy of black actors—many of whom had been toiling in their craft for years—with their juiciest roles ever. Among them were Louis Gossett, Jr., Olivia Cole, Leslie Uggams, Ben Vereen, Cicely Tyson, John Amos, and Scatman Crothers. Never
before, in the history of television, had so many black actors been featured in roles with dimension. (The network, realizing how unfamiliar audiences were with black-themed programs, especially of a historical nature, shrewdly cast a wide assortment of known white stars—Ed Asner, George Hamilton, Lorne Greene, Lynda Day George, Chuck Connors, Vic Morrow—and featured them prominently in promos trumpeting the miniseries.) The struggle for decent roles for black actors had been a huge one: Olivia Cole had studied at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and was widely deemed an estimable actress, but Hollywood couldn’t find roles for her.

It began as a kind of quip, Sammy introducing himself to audiences as the only black actor who
didn’t
appear in
Roots
. Ha ha ha. But the more he repeated it, the more a kind of sadness crept into his voice. It hurt that he had not been asked. Still, watching the series, he felt some gratification: years earlier he had cast Cicely Tyson as his love interest in his film
A Man Called Adam
. Louis Gossett, Jr., had appeared in his
Golden Boy
in New York. And Ben Vereen had appeared in his
Golden Boy
in London.

Roots.

There was something missing in Sammy’s life now. Frank Sinatra was nowhere around. First it went on for weeks, then months and months. A painful chill had entered the relationship between him and Sammy.

It wasn’t just the
Tony Rome
film role offer that Sammy snubbed that hurt Sinatra. It was that one thing that you were never, ever to betray regarding Francis Albert Sinatra—his loyalty. Sammy had begun complaining to friends that Frank was a bully, and too demanding. The East Coast gossips started dropping hints of Sammy’s rebellion into their columns. It had painful echoes of 1959, when Sammy told Chicago radio host Irv Kupcinet virtually the same thing. “You don’t do that to Sinatra without repercussions,” Cindy Bitterman, said, recalling the genesis of the earlier impasse between the two. “Sammy knew better than to do a thing like that.” Sinatra’s memory seemed shorter then; he forgave Sammy in time to be best man at his wedding to May Britt. But the latest infraction was compounded by something else: Frank had heard about the wild parties at Sammy’s house, and the drug use, which he loathed.

And just like that it was over. The two free-falling away from each other as if all the years mattered no more. To be cold-shouldered by Frank Sinatra—by the Sinatra who had aided and assisted you—was no small thing. Imagine some massive ocean liner that had always provided your security suddenly turning wide and abandoning you, dropping you into the sea—such was the power of a Sinatra dismissal. It looked as if each was trying to turn the other into a stranger.

Neither would seek to mend things. Sometimes they’d be at the same black-tie
social event. They kept their distance. Frank’s body language said one thing: Fuck Sammy.

Sammy’s body language was no different: Fuck Frank.

Acquaintances of both men could see that personal pride heaved out of them like swords.

Sammy was performing in Lake Tahoe when word came.

The police estimated the old man had been dead a couple of days. Neighbors knew him to be extremely quiet. He lived on Irolo Street, and sometimes he’d be seen walking around his Hollywood neighborhood, alone. Matter of fact, he was always alone. It was March 1, 1979, when Tom Erlich, a friend, knocking on the door of Will Mastin’s apartment and, getting no answer, became worried. Inside, the old vaudevillian lay breathless. Will Mastin was dead. Sammy and Shirley and her husband, George, and the entire entourage left Nevada to return to California.

In his own way, he was a vaudeville giant. Will Mastin had hoarded his money while working in pickaninny shows in rural Alabama. In those early years he had scuffled with the cockamamie idea of producing Negro vaudeville
shows. He bested the 1920s, and—with a kid in tow—the ’30s as well. He had lived in an age of great invention—the automobile, the airplane, the telephone. It was as if he had walked through a great billowing curtain—starkness and woods and dusty towns on one side, and, on the other, fine wardrobes and his name in lights. He had lived through the passage of profound civil rights laws. But he never participated in one protest march. Will Mastin’s whole life was a march. For years he had worked his face into the kindly smile of the non-threatening Negro as he stepped from train to motel to theater. For years he had dealt with mobsters and fast-talking theatrical operatives, and never conceded his dignity, or authority, over the trio that bore his name. There were a wife and two children, but he was married to show business.

He was born fourteen years after the abolition of slavery, and something about that time of torment seems to have cautioned him against harboring too much happiness or joy. He seemed burdened by melancholy, and was a man who lived completely inside himself. He was a loner. He rarely drank. Will Mastin possessed odd contrasts for a showman. Now and then he’d raise a cigarette to his lips. His lifelong habits were meticulous—arrival at the theater, the laying out of his clothing, the checking of his taps. He believed in the Almighty, but his church was the theater. Here, backstage, he irons a garment
.
(
JESS RAND COLLECTION
)

Upon his death, all the accessories of his trade were still in his apartment—the canes, the hats, the many pairs of cuff links, the lovely suits. And, of course, the tap shoes in which, for decades—and against unimaginable odds—he had clicked his heels and danced the old soft-shoe.

It was a shame, upon his death, that there was no one around to take measure of his life. He had outlived the obituary writers who might have offered the proper tributes. His obits were criminally short. The
Variety
obit, printed March 14, 1979, was a mere three paragraphs. It took less than sixty seconds to read. The Associated Press notice, which ran in a series of newspapers on March 16, 1979, was but seventy-nine words. It was as if he didn’t have a history. It was as if he didn’t have roots. At his death, Will Mastin was one hundred years old.

He died owing no one, free of debt. Not long before his death he had begun giving away much of his money to churches in the Hollywood area.

The funeral was held March 19 at the Little Church of the Flowers in Glendale, California. Following scripture and prayer, there was an organ medley: “As Long As He Needs Me,” followed by “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” Later in the ceremony, Billy Eckstine sang “Dearest.” (Back in the 1940s, when times had been hard for the Mastin trio, Eckstine was generous: he’d drop a little money into Sammy’s palm. Sammy remembered.) Among the final organ selections were “Liza” and “My Daddy, My Uncle and Me.”

When they finally got his stone in the ground—it lay flat—the wording was simple:

Undated. As if he were but a ghost.

•     •     •

Sammy began the 1980s just as he had begun the decade before, and the decade before that—on the road. He opened January 17 for a three-week engagement at Caesars Palace. On Valentine’s Day he strolled onstage at Harrah’s in Reno. He rested his weary body at night by the house on the lake given to him to stay in while performing. On March 5 he opened in Phoenix. On March 13 he opened at the Arena Theatre in Houston. Days sleeping and resting, listening to his music.

In 1980, Sammy entered into a business partnership with his manager, Sy Marsh. “Sammy,” says Marsh, “used to say, ‘There are two captains on this ship.’ ” They named their company SyNI—Sy & I. “Sammy said, ‘ “SyNI,” now that’s a hell of a name for two Jewish guys,’ ” says Marsh.

Now, for the first time, Sammy would own a part of himself, of the business that promoted and marketed Sammy. Only Sammy hated business, or money matters; he loathed things in the mail that needed his immediate attention; he hated overdue bills. Will Mastin used to take care of money matters. But now Will was dead. Now Sammy trusted Sy Marsh.