by Davis, Sammy
I thought maybe he’d rather not see me. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, walking the streets, alone, an ordinary Joe who’d been a giant. He was fighting to make it back up again but he was doing that by himself, too. The “friends” were gone with all the presents and the money he’d given them. Nobody was helping him. He was walking slowly—a hundred people must have passed him in those few minutes—dozens of them must have been fans who’d screamed for him only a few years ago, but now nobody knew who he was or cared. I was dying to run over to him, but I felt it would be an intrusion. Or, maybe I felt too much for him to want to see him this way.
I didn’t want to walk any more.
I stood in the wings watching Jack Benny’s performance every night. I think he’s the only man in the world who can do nothing but gaze at the people and make them laugh. His legendary genius for timing was the next thing to hypnosis. He’d mold a theater full of people into a little ball and hold them in his hand. And when he was ready—only when he was ready, he would open his hand and as much as say, “Okay, now you laugh.”
Almost always, they roared. But by not setting himself up like “Here comes the joke, folks,” by carefully not preparing them for anything hilarious, if a joke didn’t work he was never left in the position of having to do desperation lines like “I know you’re out there ‘cause I can hear you breathing” or, “But, seriously, folks …”
I saw my mistake in presenting the impressions by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy Cagney.” If on a particular night I didn’t sound exactly like Jimmy Cagney I was in trouble. Without intending to, I’d been creating a “watch this!” atmosphere, setting myself up as Charley Impressionist and I had to be great or I was dead.
I tried it differently. I said, “These are just in fun, they’re satirical impressions of people I dig,” implying that I was just doing them for laughs rather than “Look how much I sound or look like somebody.” And I could feel it paying off before I’d finished the first one. No one knows better than I the impressions I do very well, the ones I do badly and the ones which are just passing. But now when I did one that was just passing, it got laughs instead of polite applause, and when I threw a good one the audience screamed. The whole answer was in how I set it up in their minds and the impressions began working better for me than ever before.
The most influential people in the industry throughout the world are Jack’s close friends and he made a point of seeing to it that I was at dinner with him or in his dressing room to meet them. “These are the people you’ll be dealing with soon, and I want you to know them as friends, first.”
Being with Benny was invaluable, but there was also relative obscurity in the shadow of a performer of his magnitude. There was certainly no shame, in being second to him. He was a “King” and just being with him offered a glory of its own, but it came a year too late and by the time the tour dropped us in Los Angeles I was eager for us to be out on our own again.
At dress rehearsal the director said, “We’re running three minutes over, Eddie.” I began thinking which of our numbers to cut. Mr. Cantor glanced at the list of songs and dances. “Kill my second number.”
Before we went on the air he said “After your act you and I’ll have some fun together onstage, for three minutes.”
My father, Will, and I took our bows. They went off and I stayed on to join Mr. Cantor. They were still applauding when he came on. He hugged me and took a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted my face, beaming at me like a proud father. We hadn’t planned what we were going to do for our three minutes so I just followed his lead, and he was such a great pro that we could have ad-libbed another ten minutes with no trouble at all.
In his dressing room after the show I noticed a gold chain with a gold capsule attached to it. He saw me examining it. “That’s a mezuzah, Sammy, a holy Hebrew charm. We attach them to the doorposts of our homes or wear them for good luck, good health, and happiness. There’s a piece of parchment rolled up inside and on it are twenty-two lines of Deuteronomy, a prayer for the protection of the home.”
“Do you have to be Jewish to wear one?”
“I’m sure the sentiment is what counts. I don’t suppose God cares very much which floor we do our shopping on, just as long as we go to His store. Keep that, Sammy. I’d like you to have it.”
I opened my shirt and hung it around my neck. “Is there anything I’m supposed to do with it—I mean a special prayer?”
“Only what’s in your heart. In our religion we’re not confined to many rituals. That’s a basic part of our belief—that every man should have the freedom to face God in his own way.”
Frank called me at the Sunset Colonial. “Bogie’s having some people over. I want you to meet him.”
The butler escorted us to the living room. Bogart nodded to Frank the way you do to a close friend and shook hands with me. “Glad to see you. Come on in.” He took me over to Lauren Bacall. “This is my wife.”
She smiled. “I’m glad to meet you. I saw you on the Cantor Show and you’re marvelous.”
Bogart said, “Come on and meet the people.” He began steering me around the room. “Mr. Davis, Mr. Tracy. This is the kid I saw on television, Spence, he’s been doin’ me and if he keeps it up he’s gonna get a knuckle sandwich … Say hello to the Grants … Mr. and Mrs. Stewart … Miss Hepburn … Mr. and Mrs. Gable … Miss Garland … okay, now make yourself at home.”
I tried to seem at ease and at home drinking a coke, listening to the conversations, but I found myself gazing like an idiot. There was something so incredible about being in a private home, watching four people casually chatting like anybody would at a party—except they were Jimmy Stewart, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Judy Garland.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Frank. The dignity and the guts of the man! By all standards of show business success he was as down as anybody could be, yet, as he moved around in this incredible group of movie giants, he stood as tall as any of them.
He’d starred in half a dozen big pictures that had been completely built around him, and he’d lost it all. But, he had the strength to start all over again completely from scratch. He’d just signed to make From Here to Eternity, accepting a secondary role, without any singing, ready to try for a whole new career as an actor. Being down in the business hadn’t licked him as an individual. Maybe the whole world was saying he’d had it, but he didn’t hear them or care. He was a total individual, measuring himself against nothing but his own standard.
I went into a coffee shop for breakfast. The counterman smiled “Afternoon, Mr. Davis.” I didn’t know him. He began sponging the counter in front of me, even though it had seemed spotless. “I saw you on the Eddie Cantor show. You were real fine.” A man two seats away from me raised his coffee cup, “Enjoyed you a lot. The whole family did.”
In over twenty years of playing nightclubs and theaters nobody had ever before recognized me, cold, like that. But the right presentation on just one television show had done it.
Will was waiting for me at the Morris office. The head of the nightclub department said, “I’ve got great news for you. Sam Bamson just called from the New York office. You’re hot as a pistol in Pittsburgh. They’re completely sold out for your entire engagement. The club started getting calls the night of the Cantor show and they had to close reservations in forty-eight hours. That show was fantastic for you.”
“Do you think we’ll get another shot?”
“We’re almost sure of it. He was tremendously pleased with you.”
I stopped at a newsstand and bought a pile of papers and movie magazines. I picked up my mail at the front desk and as I started toward the elevator the door slid open and there was the Sun Goddess in a pair of white sharkskin slacks that fit like they’d been painted on. The elevator closed behind her and she was coming straight for me, smiling. The best thing was to keep it light—do jokes with her. I shook my head. “You could be arrested for looking like that.” Exactly the wrong t
hing to say.
Her smile expanded. “Well, you can be friendly.”
Oh God, that voice! She made Marilyn Monroe sound like a bus driver. Where the hell was the damned elevator?
“I saw you on television the other night. You were wonderful.”
The elevator opened and I did one of those great suave walk-aways, crashing right into a guy who was coming out. I rolled off of him, fell against the edge of the door and stumbled into the elevator like a graceful drunk, mumbling, “Well, s’long, nice t’have met you.” As the door closed she was gaping at me like I was out of my mind.
I stared out the window, thinking about the rules of society. If she were colored and gave me openings like that—but she isn’t. What’d I need her for? There was nothing about her that was any better than most of the girls I was making it with.
I started going through my mail to get my mind off her. I opened a manila envelope from NBC and took out a stack of letters and a note: “Dear Mr. Davis, Enclosed please find letters addressed to you in care of the Colgate Comedy Hour. We will forward any further viewer mail.”
I cleared the bed of everything but my fan mail, stretched out comfortably, lit a cigarette and ceremoniously opened the first letter. “Dear lousy nigger, keep your filthy paws off Eddie Cantor he may be a jew but at least he is white and dont come from africa where you should go back to I hope I hope I hope. I wont use that lousy stinking toothpaste no more for fear maybe the like of you has touched it. What is dirt like you doing on our good American earth anyway?” There was no signature.
I fell back on the pillow, soaking wet. How could someone who’d never met me hate me so much that he’d take the trouble to write this? Why?
I opened a few others. The same. I threw the letters in a corner. All I wanted to do was forget them and the bastards who wrote them. I was an idiot to let them bother me. The hell with them.
I turned the pages of a fan magazine trying to lose myself in the Hollywood Hills, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills, trying to imagine myself owning one of those beautiful homes with a swimming pool and a convertible parked in the driveway. I stopped at a picture of a girl stretched out on a diving board. The shape was unmistakable. The Sun Goddess. I should have known that anyone who looked like her could only be out here trying to get into the movies. I thought of the big hellos she’d given me in the lobby and her incredulous stare as the elevator door closed. I really must be out of my mind. I turned down that? For what? To stay in good with people who call me nigger?
I felt stupid. I hated myself for thinking I could stand in the middle of the road without getting hit by a truck. How did I wind up there, anyway? What the hell had happened to me since I got out of the army? I’m the guy who wasn’t going to let anybody tell me how to live. But they’d started telling me and I’d listened instead of spitting in their eyes the way I should have. I’d played it safe. I wanted to be a star, so I’d as much as made a deal: “You let me ‘make it’ and I’ll play the game.” But suddenly I had an 8 × 10 glossy of the guys I’d made the deal with, whose rules I was following. I could never satisfy the people I’d been trying to appease. How could I not offend them by what I do when my very existence was offensive to them? There could be no end to it. Don’t be seen at the same tables with white people. Stay away from white women. Don’t touch Eddie Cantor. What next? I wanted to make it, but if that was the price, it was too high. If I’d just thought it out, I’d have known it couldn’t work. It was spelled out for me right in the Bible. “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul?” I’d sold my dignity. Worse still, I’d sold it to people who never believed I had any. And it was no less humiliating that I was the only one who knew what I had done.
I looked for her last name in the magazine. I could feel my hand getting moist on the phone while I waited for the operator to connect me with her room. What the hell was I going to say? She definitely must think I’m a lunatic by now …
“Hello?”
“Uh—hi! This is Sammy Davis, Jr….”
“Well, hello!”
“I didn’t think you’d be in your room!”
“Oh? Is that why you called?”
“Look, I know you must think I’m some sort of a nut, but—well, y’see, I was in a big hurry before …”
“I got that impression.”
“What I called about is, well—I thought it would be nice if …”
“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Sammy. We must have a very bad connection. I’m in 418, why don’t you stop by and tell me?”
I walked slowly down the hall toward her room. I stopped a few feet away to make sure the coast was clear. I could feel the skin on my face tightening. I knocked lightly. There was no answer. I knocked again, hard!
I heard her telling me, “The door is open.”
The guy at the Morris office said, “There’s been an avalanche of ‘em. To the station, to Cantor, the sponsor …” The bundles of letters covered his desk. I looked at one, addressed to Eddie Cantor: “Where do you get off wiping that little coon’s face with the same handkerchief you’d put on a good, clean, white, American face?”
“Well, I guess this finishes us with the Cantor show.”
The Morris guy said, “It’s a damned shame. But the sponsors don’t want bad public opinion. Even from bigots. They’ve warned Cantor that if anything like this happens again they’ll take him off the air.”
“What about other shows?”
He shook his head, grimly sympathetic. “We might as well face the facts. These things don’t stay secret very long.”
There was nothing more to talk about. My father asked, “Y’want a little lunch, Poppa?”
“No, Dad. I don’t feel like anything. You and Massey go ahead.” I left them and took a cab downtown.
The driver was staring at me in his mirror. When he stopped at a light he turned around for a better look. “I thought I saw you on television.” He smiled, “You’re okay.”
“Thanks.” We were approaching a movie theater. “Let me out here, will you, please?”
When I got back to the hotel there were five phone messages from the Morris office. I used the booth in the lobby.
“We’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon. Where’ve you been?”
“I don’t know. I went to a movie. What’s wrong?”
“Cantor called, Cantor himself. He wants to negotiate a contract for you to be on all the rest of his Colgate shows for the season. I guess he’s not a guy that pushes easily. God knows what went on between him and the sponsor but what counts is that he’s got three shows left for the year and you’re on all of them at three thousand each.”
Long after I’d hung up I was still sitting in the phone booth. The man was a pro before I was born and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told me, “We’ll have some fun on the stage together,” but he’d done it anyway because he wanted to point me up, obviously not worrying that some people might not like it.
How could you figure it? Here there were people going out of their way to kick me in the face with nothing to gain by doing it, then along comes a man like Eddie Cantor with everything to lose, but he deals himself into my fight and says, “They’ll have to kick me, too.”
The sign on the hotel said “No Niggers—No Dogs.” I squeezed the prongs of the shade together, pulled it down and leaned back in my Pullman seat. Everybody’d assured us: “Miami Beach? You’ll have no problems there. It’s like New York.”
Sure!
But the date was serving my purpose: it was the height of the season, every celebrity from New York was in Miami Beach and if you were a top act then this is where you should be playing.
Arthur Silber, Jr., had come along as company. He put down his magazine and glanced out of his window. “Hey, we’re coming to a station. I wonder where we are.”
I raised my shade and looked out. “We’re in a lotta trouble, that’s where we are.”
He grinned. “Whatt
ya mean we, colored boy?”
I did an elaborate lean-back and pointed out the window to a sign: “Everybody Welcome but The Nigger and The Jew.”
He swallowed hard. “Well, yeah, Kingfish, like you was saying, we’s in a lotta trouble.”
Morty Stevens pushed open the door of the club car and did the railroad walk down the length of it: legs apart for balance, hands out to steady himself on the chairs he passed. The train lurched and dropped him into the seat next to me. “You ready to start talking about the show?”
“Baby, I’ve been sitting right here. While you were stuffing yourself in the dining car the only conductor I saw was a guy who asked me for a ticket.”
“Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize …”
“Hey, hold it. I was just doing bits with you.”
We worked out physical cues, like a fast tapping of my foot for “Birth of the Blues” and “handlebar cues,” the handlebar being the type of talk I’d start doing with the audience. As soon as Morty’d hear the first few words he’d know which number I wanted.
He asked, “What’d you think of the new arrangement I did?”
“I dug it like Walter Pidgeon dug Greer Garson.” He began smiling with pleasure. “But I have one question: how do I stand on a stage and sing ‘How Are Things In Gloccamorra?’ ”
He blinked, aware for the first time of the ludicrous picture. “Well—I just thought of the music and I knew it would be great for your voice …”
“Yeah, baby, but what about this little brown suit I wear? You think I need a guy to stand up and yell, ‘Hey, folks, it’s a colored elf!’ ”
“I never thought about it like that.”
“Baby, Old Sam has come to the rescue and saved your arrangement from oblivion by a master stroke of savoir faire. I can take the curse off me coming on like Charley Irish by doing an introduction like: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been requested to do a certain song but before I even tell you what it is I want you to know I’m not too thrilled about doing it. This song wasn’t exactly written with me in mind, but a customer asked for it and I want to please, so I hope you’ll bear with me.’ Something like that.”
