In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (84 page)

In 1984, Sammy did another movie—
Cannonball Run II
. It was worse than the first, and it made less money. But for sentiment and nostalgia, it was worth a peek: along with Dean again, Shirley MacLaine was in the cast—and Sinatra himself. Sinatra didn’t act much anymore. It was his first movie since 1980. Shirley looked fine; the others did not. Dean appeared lackluster and—even given his usual lushlike stage appearances—genuinely inebriated. Sammy’s face was drawn in. During filming, his hip had been in pain. Sinatra looked embarrassed in his scenes. (It would be his last movie.)

Sammy got enough money to pay some of the IRS debt, and he began to feel sunny again, owing to a string of engagements that awaited him. But then he began to break apart physically. He began hobbling through airports, leaning on a cane, leaning on Murphy, leaning on Shirley. It was the hip; he needed reconstructive surgery. Altovise stayed home. More and more, she remained at home. The marriage was faltering. Sy Marsh suggested a divorce. “I can’t divorce her,” Sammy told him. “We can’t give up what we worked our asses for.” Sammy was referring to himself and Sy—till death do us part.

He went into Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Sinatra called.

“Who’s your doctor?” he snapped, demanding to know.

Just as in the old days. But now Sammy put him off, as gently as possible—and kept his own doctor.

Sy Marsh convinced Sammy to invest in tax shelters. To Sammy it was all mumbo-jumbo: tax shelters; investments; barbecue sauces on the market. Tax shelters were a fancy way of playing hide-and-seek with whatever money one might owe to the federal government.

He gave the go-ahead.

And he picked up another obsession. It was Pac-Man, the video game. He’d sit for hours, playing alone. He was the kid who never got to play such games. “We had one everywhere we went,” says Shirley of the Pac-Man game. “Or the club owners would get one.”

It seemed like yesterday when he and Will and Sam Sr. and George and Shirley were out there, rolling in a bus across the hinterland. Only yesterday. And yet, time could move like a bullet.

Sammy added “Ol’ Man River” to the stage repertoire.

The calendar said 1985.

Christmas morning. Shirley was on the phone.

“Sammy, George is gone,” she said.

“Where’d he go?” Sammy wanted to know.

“He’s dead.”

It was a heart attack. Sammy rushed over—still in his pajamas—and cried with Shirley. He told her he’d take care of everything.

He wanted Jesse. This was Shirley and George. Frank had the Italians, like Dean had the Italians. Sammy had Shirley and George.

When a black dignitary died in America now, it was Jesse Jackson who was called upon. He was becoming a kind of professional eulogist. He was still flying on the aura of Martin Luther King, Jr., and no one begrudged him that, because he worked so tirelessly. Where Jesse went, so did the media—television, radio, the white press, the Negro press. Jesse came out to California and preached beautifully, talking about George’s career as a musician. Sammy rode in the passenger seat—shotgun—as the hearse took George’s body out to the Glendale Cemetery, where he was laid to rest on a hillside.

Shirley thought of retiring. She wondered if she could go on without George.

Sy Marsh wondered if they would be able to go on at all. “The government came into the office—the IRS,” says Marsh. “They said, ‘You cannot be hiding behind a veil.’ ” The tax shelter scheme had been exposed. “I lost a $2 million estate,” says Marsh. “ ‘Piercing the veil,’ they called it.”

Sammy would not lose his house. The house meant so much to him. He had dreamed of it when Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis owned it, and he had dreamed of it when Joan Collins owned it. He called Sinatra; he called Jerry Lewis. “Frank and I tried to lessen the load,” says Lewis. “Moneywise, we had come full circle.” (Because in the beginning—in the 1940s and 1950s—they had loaned him money on his advances. He always repaid—to the day he was supposed to, to the dollar he owed.)

Sy and Molly Marsh moved into an apartment.

On the road, Sammy and Murphy, after the shows, would sit and rest. They’d play Pac-Man. He’d watch the soaps during the day. There was always a local police officer outside his door—security.

The young kids; the youth freaks. They’d catch glimpses of him and gawk. He was like some creaking gnome. Sammy Davis, Jr.: the name meant quite a bit in the American mind-set. He had endured. He’d been in the business for decades. A tap dancer. A singer. And didn’t he write some best-selling book—
Yes I Can
—a long time ago?

Everywhere the young kids. There was one by the name of Billy Crystal. He had joined the cast of
Saturday Night Live
in 1985, and began touring college campuses as a stand-up. A limber young comedian, he had the insouciance of an Al Jolson. Crystal began doing an imitation of Sammy: hunched shoulders, nasal voice, squinting eyes, some hepcat lingo: hey baby, what a gas, hey
chickee. It got laughs. Impressions involved exaggeration, and Crystal milked Sammy’s physical mannerisms. What did those young audiences know of Sammy’s eye incident? What did they know of the massive amounts of dental surgery that gave him that strange overbite?

Some white kid doing black Sammy. Ha ha ha. What goes around comes around: he had made his own name in those early years doing impersonations.

Sammy would look at this impersonator riffing on him, and he’d wonder: did he really look like that—hunched over, the eyes squinting?

There was another young kid—Leon Isaac Kennedy. Sammy started inviting him up to the house.

Kennedy arrived in Hollywood in 1972 from Cleveland, where he had been a popular deejay, known as “Leon the Lover.” It was his intention, upon landing in Hollywood, to become a leading man—a lofty dream for any black actor. He had wormed his way into one of Sammy’s parties, and his moxie touched Sammy. “Sammy was the first big star who befriended me,” Kennedy says.

Sammy kept inviting him back. “You could go by Sammy’s house and on any given night meet the biggest people in the world,” Kennedy says. “The first time I met Liza Minnelli was at Sammy’s. His big parties were the best of the best of the melting pot. Because, no matter, if a black person had a party, it was a ‘black party.’ If a white person had a party, it was a ‘white party.’ At Sammy’s, it was a party of everybody coming together. At Sammy’s house you would have Jim Brown, Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Caesar Romero. All these people. They were great parties.”

Kennedy peppered Sammy with questions about the business, and Sammy was happy to explain some secrets: “He said, ‘Other artists have to worry about hit records. You don’t have to have hit records if you work Vegas.’ ” Kennedy was impressed with Sammy’s ability to identify with young talent. “I remember talking to him about Michael Jackson when
Thriller
came out [in 1982]. He said, ‘I’m going to work that into the Vegas act.’ ”

In 1979, Kennedy got a starring role in
Penitentiary
, a low-budget vehicle in which he played a wrongfully imprisoned boxer. The movie acquired something of a cult following. “Sammy mentioned it on
The Tonight Show
, and that was a great plug.” Kennedy became a leading man, but they were B movies. They played in drive-ins. He didn’t mind, and his hubris soared. (When Kennedy initially arrived in Hollywood, he was carrying
My Wicked, Wicked Ways
, Errol Flynn’s autobiography.) In 1981, Kennedy starred in
Body and Soul
, a remake of the 1947 classic John Garfield boxing movie directed by Robert Rossen. With Garfield, critics raved; with Kennedy, they howled. The cast, along with Kennedy, was an eyebrow-raiser: his beautiful real-life wife, Jayne Kennedy; Rat Packer Peter Lawford; and Muhammad Ali in a cameo.

Five years after
Body and Soul
, Kennedy found himself coproducing and
starring in
Knights of the City
, which he imagined, rather grandiosely, as a “modern-day
West Side Story
.” He wrote a part especially for Sammy. “I’m sitting, and thinking, and I said, ‘This will be the Academy Award–winning performance for Sammy,’ ” recalls Kennedy. Sammy was still ailing a bit from hip surgery, but he was in need of money and accepted the role. “I call him and tell him about the role,” says Kennedy. “He said, ‘I love it. I trust you.’ ”

Before filming got under way, and before Sammy arrived, Kennedy phoned him. There was a little problem: money. He told Sammy he could afford to pay him only $15,000. Ha. Fifteen grand: Sammy’s wrap parties cost as much. The conversation ended. But then Kennedy’s phone rang. It was Sammy. “Leon,” he said, “I’m going to do the movie for you, but it can never be said somebody got Sammy Davis for $15,000. You keep it. When the movie comes out, if it does well, you give me what you want.”

Kennedy thought his movie could pick up some of the steam of the 1983 hit
Flashdance
. It had dancing; it would appeal to a young audience. He believed if his movie caught on it could gross $30 million.

Filming began in Ft. Lauderdale. Sammy arrived with Murphy. “We film three days with Sammy,” recalls Kennedy. “I’m really thinking he’s gonna be nominated for an Academy Award. That’s how great his performance was.” During postproduction, the shenanigans began. One of the producers was arrested and found to owe the IRS millions. The government took possession of the movie prints. After legal wrangling, Kennedy and another producer were finally able to wrest back control of the film. But the new producer wanted the final edit. “He comes out,” says Kennedy, “with the most outlandish idea I ever heard of: We need to cut Sammy out of the film because his character slows the film down.”

Never in his life had Sammy Davis, Jr., wound up on the cutting-room floor.

“I go to Sammy and say, ‘Sammy, I’ve run into all types of personal problems with this movie.’ He says, ‘I’ve heard.’ I say, ‘Its worse than that. They’ve cut you out of the film.’ He says, ‘How could you allow that to happen? You’re the producer and the star.’ ” The conversation degenerated from there.

For his work on the movie, Sammy never received a dime. He was an entertainer, and he had gone slumming in a B movie, and paid the price.

He now hated outdoors, especially the cold winds whipping—it was as if those winds were directed right at his hip joints. And his eye hurt. He missed George, his musical conductor. Sometimes he and Shirley would start reminiscing about George. There’d be a torrent of laughter, a flood of tears.

He was spending hours in the kitchen while on the road, cooking in the presidential suite of the hotel, mixing his sauces, stirring his creations in his large pots and pans. Invited guests raved about his chili. “He took an entire kitchen on the road,” says Shirley.

But he still wouldn’t eat.

When the White House phoned, his spirits lifted.

He would be receiving the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ 1987 Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement. An announcement of any award charmed Sammy—blowing away, at least temporarily, some of the ash of his insecurity. He shared the news with Sam Sr., who was quite happy. Big Sam had been ailing. It was his heart; he had been fitted with a pacemaker.

President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, would host the Kennedy Center event. Along with Sammy, the honorees included Perry Como, Bette Davis, Nathan Milstein, and Alwin Nikolais.

There was something about those Republicans. They bestowed such affection on Sammy! First Nixon, now Reagan. How could he—ever searching for love—not be appreciative? But an overwhelming majority of blacks held no affection for Reagan, who often told anecdotal stories about “welfare queens” and poor inner-city men driving Cadillacs, tales interpreted by many blacks as offensive and full of stereotype. But to Sammy, who was such a chronicler of Hollywood, Reagan was the actor from
Kings Row
and
Knute Rockne—All American
. Sinatra, now a Republican too, used to drag Sammy to those political fund-raisers when Reagan was governor of California. Reagan and Nixon: two longtime denizens of that land of make-believe; California dreamers. (Years earlier, when Sammy was just getting his start in Hollywood as an actor, and was so happy to get a role on General Electric Theater, it was Ronald Reagan who had introduced the episode he appeared on. Reagan and Nixon both knew quite a bit about camera angles.)

Sammy came to Washington, checked into the hotel, sat facing a
Washington Post
reporter, and that name came out, rolling like a boulder: Nixon. “First of all, I’m not the only black celebrity that was involved in campaigning for the president,” he said, feeling such a need to explain. “
Secondly, I wasn’t bucking for publicity or anything else.” Sammy was in the autumn of his years as a performer now. He confided to the reporter how he admired the way Maurice Chevalier lived his life. “
When he didn’t want to work, he’d go sit in his beautiful villa outside of Paris. There he’d sit, for two or three years, and when the urge hit him, he’d come back to do nine o’clock theater in New York, two pianos, you know? He’d put his straw hat on, and he was charming, and beautiful, and then he’d disappear again. He didn’t do it for the money.”

Sammy, however, did it for the money.

He was thrilled at the Kennedy Center honor, and he had Altovise on his arm. His face beamed; his hip hurt. (Harry Belafonte would receive the Kennedy honor in 1989; Sidney Poitier in 1995. But Sammy, the vaudeville kid, had beat both to the honors! Ha ha.)

Afterward, Sammy returned to California for a second hip operation.

•     •     •

In 1988, Sammy made a guest appearance on
The Cosby Show
, comedian Bill Cosby’s highly rated family sitcom. He played a father worried incessantly about his daughter, who was soon to give birth. Sammy came up with the name for his daughter in the episode. Her name was Luisa Sanchez—the name of Sammy’s real-life grandmother, his mother’s mother. Sammy, it seemed, was trying to acknowledge his roots.

O
n May 21, 1988, in these Hollywood Hills, Sam Sr. died. Went in his sleep, his Jag in the garage. Like Mastin, he had lived a lifetime on the road, hustling and dancing across the American landscape. “After Sam Sr. died, we were at Sammy’s house,” recalls Virginia Capehart, the longtime family friend. “He had a little alcove, and was sitting in there all alone. He said, ‘I wish I could find someone to love me for me, not for what I can do for them. Love me for me.’ I said, ‘Rita [Sammy’s stepmother] did.’ He said, ‘Yes, Rita did.’ ”