by Davis, Sammy
“Baby, if something’s wrong I think you’d better tell me.”
“Nothing, Sam. Really.”
I looked at Jane.
“Okay, fellas, let’s have it.”
Burt hesitated, then said, “It’s not important, it’s just that we’re on the wrong side of the room. The tables they consider best are on the other side of the dance floor. It’s ridiculous but the idea of it …”
We all knew that in this case it was not ridiculous, that it was the stone wall between acceptance and rejection. I had thought that they’d resisted me by habit but once I was there, once they had seen me, they’d accepted me. But they were fighting me on their own terms: the nuance, the veiled insult. Everyone in the room had known I was being insulted, that even a semi-name would immediately have been given a table on the other side. Everywhere I looked I found my hands fumbling with something. I took out my pipe and tobacco pouch to use as a prop, and I filled the pipe slowly, deliberately, trying to appear as though that was all I was concentrating on in the world. As I struck a match the maître d’ seemed to materialize in front of our table.
“We don’t allow pipe smoking.”
I put the pipe down quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
He smiled, like: Of course you didn’t.
Burt said, “Casually turn your head to the right and look at the swinging door, the one to the kitchen. That’s John Perona.”
The owner of El Morocco, a legendary figure in international society, the epitome of so-called sophistication, was hiding behind that door, staring out at me through a little window as though trying to figure out what I was.
I looked away. “Do you think we’ve been here long enough so we can leave?”
When our limousine door closed, Burt told the chauffeur to take us to the Harwyn.
“Baby, do me a favor. Drop me off at the Gorham. Pay my respects at the party, and I’ll see you guys at the apartment whenever you can get away.”
Jane put her hand on my arm. “Sammy … you worked a whole year for this … it’s your party. Don’t let this ruin everything for you.”
They couldn’t understand that there had been nothing to be ruined, that Morocco had only failed to contradict what I had known: I hadn’t gotten what I’d come to New York for. The people at the Harwyn were celebrating the fact that I’d made a show run for a year but that was not what I had wanted to celebrate on my closing night.
“Darling, I’m fine, really. I’m just shot. It’s been a long day.” I smiled. “In the best tradition of Mary Noble, Backstage Wife: The marquee is out and so is he.”
The apartment was dark except for a haze of light coming in through the windows. I sat on the couch, too tired to unbutton my overcoat or to reach for the lamp only a few inches away from my hand. I hadn’t done it. I really hadn’t. And now I was at the end of a long, long road, standing in front of a stone wall a whole world high and a whole world wide.
25
As I passed through the kitchen on my way to the wings, a waiter carrying a tray with bottles of scotch and setups went out of his way to walk alongside me. “We missed you like a son, Sammy, welcome home.” I nodded and he hurried away to his station. Sure, welcome home. They love you better than a son. You’re Santa Claus come to deliver the big tippers. Just don’t let the deliveries slow up. The chorus kids had just come off and as they passed me one of them stopped, winked, and swung her satin-covered bottom at me. “Rub it for luck, Sammy.”
Will was already standing in the wings. He nodded happily to me, then turned back to the audience as though magnetically drawn to them—unconsciously lifting one foot and buffing the already gleaming leather shoe against the sock of his other leg—waiting to go on with all the ready-to-go of a Major Bowes contestant. I looked away from him.
The announcer’s voice blared: “The Chez Paree proudly presents The Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis, Jr.”
Will rushed on.
I watched him doing his old-hat number, selling it as though it mattered, smiling confidently, “giving the people what they want,” and my distaste for the ludicrous picture became mixed with resentment toward my father for leaving me with this. Instead of just once standing up to Will and saying, “It’s over. I’m quitting and so are you,” he’d taken the easy way out. The one time I’d needed him to come through for me he’d come up empty. All I’d gotten was a dramatic scene, a lot of tears, and a pair of baby shoes.
I walked on, took the handmike and began singing over the applause:
“Hello Joe, whattya know
I just came out of a Broadway show
and it feels wonderful …
It feels wonderful … to be back in
a nightclub again.
“Give me a saloon every time.
Maybe it’s hokey but I like it smokey,
tell me I’m choosey but I dig it boozey,
show me a guy with a broad….”
“Seriously, folks, that song speaks for how I feel. Sure, we had an interesting year on Broadway and I won’t say it wasn’t a joy beating the critics, but I don’t kid myself I’m Rex Harrison: Let’s face it—I’m a saloon guy.” I paused for the applause. “With your very kind permission I’d like to make mention of a gentleman who isn’t with me tonight as he has been all my life. That gentleman, of course, as most of you know, is my father who was taken ill during Mr. Wonderful and was forced to retire to California where he’s enjoying a well-deserved rest from a lifetime of supporting me on this stage …” I smiled Charley Good Son during the applause, then switched to Charley Modest. “I just hope that my humble efforts may satisfy you as well in his absence as when he was here to help and guide me every step of the way.” I held my hands up, preventing more applause. “If I may impose upon you just a bit more may I say that the gentleman to the right of me is the man whose wisdom and show business teachings are so much a part of everything I do on this stage, the man who has given so generously of his vast experience and taught me all the tricks of the trade which he knows so well, and which in my humble opinion account for whatever small success I may have had. I wish you’d help me thank him for his kindness and generosity in remaining on with me, providing me with the support I need so much … ladies and gentlemen, my uncle, my teacher, and my friend: Mr. Will Mastin. Take a bow, Uncle Will.” I led the applause and turned smilingly toward him, respectfully, devotedly, thinking: you ridiculous figure.
I waded through the crowd in my suite at the St. Clair and found George and Jane and Burt. George waved to the crowd, smiling derisively. “Hello, Chicago.”
I folded my arms. “Okay, let’s have it, George. You know what they say: only his best friends’ll tell him.”
He shifted uneasily on the couch. “Well, if you must know, I could’ve lived without that ‘saloon’ song.” He glanced at Jane and Burt, like they’d all been talking about it, then he faced me and shrugged. “Aside from the fact that I think you’re far beyond the point where you need special material opening numbers—”
“You don’t have to soften it, George.”
“Well, I just think that song is in the worst possible taste. It’s phony and patronizing. I kept waiting to find you were kidding, but the whole show had the same attitude, all those little remarks and digs about Broadway—I don’t know about the rest of the audience, but I don’t go to nightclubs to have the performer put me down.”
“Baby, you don’t understand. You’re taking it personally but I need a song like that; it breaks the ice for me. I’m back in clubs and I can’t have Charley Square feeling like I think I’m so godamned chic now that he can’t be in the same room with me. The second I walk onstage he’s got to know I’m gonna tummel around like the Sammy Davis he always knew.”
He looked at me dubiously. “It’s a little hard to believe that you have to do anything except be a good performer.” He shrugged. “But what do I know? Nobody’s standing in line to see met”
“Right, baby. So, you prod
uce the Broadway shows and let me worry about the nightclubs.”
His face flushed and he reached for his glass. “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”
A comic playing one of the other clubs pushed his way through the crowded living room toward me. “How’s the skinny Farouk?” He gazed around at the girls, playing it awestruck. “How am I going to adjust when you’re gone? Every night with women hanging from chandeliers, with stuffed under sofas … hey, she’s got to be joking with those footballs under her sweater.” He grinned at me. “This is a regular Fort Knockers! I asked a cab driver where I could find a girl and he brought me here” He scanned the room. “You cornered the market on 38’s.”
“Help yourself, baby. Excuse me.” I called Charley aside. “Get ‘em all outa here, will you? But y’see the one standing next to Morty? With the boobs. Tell her to stick around. And the one next to her—the red satin with the long swingin’ legs—have her here tomorrow at noon.”
“Twelve o’clock?”
“That’s when noon usually is. Unless somebody changed it.”
“But you know you won’t be getting up ‘til three or four o’clock. Why have her sit around for nothing?”
“Charley, if I feel like keeping some money in the bank do I need your okay?”
I slipped out of the room and into three a.m. on Dearborn Street, relieved to be away from all the fun I wasn’t having, the laughs that were gloss and veneer, that underneath were only mechanical and blah, like a second helping of dessert. The weeks had dragged by, a mass of days without definition, their one-ness broken only by the hours I was onstage. Between those periods of oasis, I shopped, had parties, dinners, interviews, let crowds gather around me on the street for my autograph—all the things that had always been the ponies on my personal merry-go-round which I still kept spinning, although it wasn’t very merry any more.
There was an empty table in a corner of the Latin Casino.
My glance kept being drawn to it throughout the show. There was another one the next night. And the next. Then it got slightly worse. The dinner shows were strong but there were always three or four empty tables at the late shows.
It didn’t figure. I’d been away from Philadelphia for over a year.
The Copa was filled for the first week, but by the middle of the second, Julie Podell was closing off part of the room for the late shows so the people who did come wouldn’t realize how empty it was. I wasn’t getting the repeat business I’d always been able to count on, the familiar faces that come back three and four times during a run, and Will was giving me I-told-you-so looks every night as we came downstairs and saw the dance floor wider than it had ever been for us before. Okay, there was a logical reason for it in New York. But what had happened at the Latin? Was Philadelphia so close to New York that the year on Broadway had hurt me there, too?
The last weeks at the Copa dragged mercilessly as I waited to get out on the road again and see what was waiting for me.
Arthur came into the dressing room. “It’s like a morgue downtown. There’s nobody in Vegas except a crowd of Texans on a convention. You’re doing all the business in town. Everybody else is dying.”
He was pressing to sound casual, trying to give me a good reason why I wasn’t doing capacity business, but nobody ever figured out a good enough reason. Or a cure for an unidentified sickness. And night after night the symptoms were there, grim and threatening: I was playing Vegas for the first time in over a year, I was at a different hotel and I should have been bigger than ever, but something was choking off the customers just short of capacity. Neither Will nor the club owners paid any attention to what was only a slight dip in business, but if they couldn’t see it as the start of our decline I could. To me those few empty tables represented not the dozen or so people who weren’t there but the hundreds who had not been turned away; the difference between an act that’s on the way up or on the way down.
Like the young, athletic-looking guy who’s indulged himself in all the foods he knew were wrong until finally he looks in the mirror and can no longer kid himself about the jowls and stomach he’s built slowly and surely by piling one layer of fat onto another, I had to face the fact that I’d stretched my luck and talent too far, and all the mistakes had begun to catch up with me: my lousy press, the lunatic spending that had caused the debts which everybody in the world seemed to know about, and the need to make desperation moves like wrong bookings and grabbing for quick money from every variety show on television—until every time anybody turned on his TV set, I was standing there doing Louis Armstrong.
I started to call the Morris office but it would be more dramatic, more effective to fly to L.A. and see them in person.
Sy Marsh sat on the edge of his desk. He was about my age, which was young for top man in the television department.
“Sy, don’t book me on any more variety shows for one year.”
“That’s a hundred thousand dollars you’re throwing away. Can you afford it?”
“No.” I lit a cigarette. “Neither can I afford to blow eight or nine hundred thousand a year from clubs. And if the Morris office can’t see what must happen at the rate I’ve been doing variety shows at least I can: the day’s gotta come when I’ll get to a town and instead of people breaking the doors down, the reaction’ll be, Oh, him. Why pay to see him when we just saw him sing, dance, and do the impressions on television last week?’ ”
“God forbid.”
“I’m hip.” I stood up. “Sy, you weren’t with the office when I used to come in here begging them to get me dramatic television, so we’ll start from scratch: Get it for me or I’ll get an agent who can. It’s chips down time! I’ve got to protect my nightclub business so I’m cooling it with the variety shows, but I can’t become America’s Secret; I still need a medium that brings me to the public. I can’t let the people in Chicago and Philly and all the towns I play wonder whatever-happened-to Sammy Davis until I get there once a year or I ain’t gonna do they’re-lined-up-in-the-streets kind of business. That means I must have the importance and the impact of major exposure and that can only be one of three things: a big record? We know that’s the maybe of all time. A motion picture or dramatic television? We forget pictures ‘cause it’s been like we’ve got the Ku Klux Klan running the motion picture department here. Obviously they figure I’m not as big or as talented as Tab Hunter! Okay. I’ve never made a picture so I can’t argue with them about box office. But when it comes to television I’ve got a history of accomplishment going for me. It’s right on the record that I lifted the rating of every show I was on. And those ratings were in the South as well as the North so there’s no sponsor who can intelligently say I’m not one bitch of a good buy.” He was staring silently at his desk. “Sy, one thing: don’t tell me it’s touchy.”
“Screw touchy. It’s plain godamned stupid that you’re not on a million shows right now. Here they’re fighting like dogs over names half as big as you….” He shrugged. “Well, I guess we both know that the heroes are on television, not in it. But I’m sure there are guys in the business who won’t go along with that crap.” He picked up a manuscript from his desk and dropped it, thoughtfully. “The one tough thing’ll be to find parts for you. I’ll talk to some of our own writers.”
“This’ll kill you, but how about a Western?”
He nodded. “You were right. It killed me.”
“Baby, I’ll play anything except an Uncle Tom, but don’t brush off the Western thing so fast. Aside from the fact that I happen to be better with the guns than most of the Schwab’s Drugstore cowboys they’re using, it also happens there were a lot of colored cowboys.”
“You serious?”
“The guys who wrote the history books happened to be white, and by a strange coincidence they managed to overlook just about everything any Negro did in and for America except pull barges up the godamned Mississippi. But I’ve got books on the early West, I can sit here and do an hour on authentic stories about Negro cow
boys, an entire Negro regiment in the Civil War, dozens of things that have never been used—a wealth of fresh stuff. But let me ask you something: why do I have to play the part of a Negro?”
He looked at me, blankly.
“I’m dead serious. Why do I have to play a part that depends on color? Why can’t I play something where the fact that I’m a Negro has no bearing on the script in any way? Why must a special part be written for a Negro? Or else, an entire script switched so they do Abie’s Irish Rose with an all-Negro cast? Y’know something? I die every time I read in the papers about some cat on Broadway who says, ‘What we need is integrated theater. Authors should write in more parts for Negroes.’ That’s not integrated theater. Really integrated theater will be when an actor—colored or white—is hired to play a part. Period. Not when a Negro actor is hired to play the part of a Negro who’s in the story strictly as a Negro, like when they’re doing a scene in a Harlem bar and the producer tells Casting, ‘Send up one Negro bartender, one Negro bar owner, and some Negro extras for customers.’ I pointed to a script on his desk. “For example: who’s the central character in that?”
He smiled. “An aging film actress.”
“Okay, baby, what about the one underneath?”
“A mobster.”
“Why can’t I play that? Is there anything in the script that makes it necessary to the story line that this guy is white?”
“No.”
“Then isn’t it wrong that they’d never think to call a Negro to play him? Or a cop, or a doctor, a soldier, a judge, or a lawyer—with no emphasis on color, no mention of it? I don’t say do illogical or far-out things like showing a Negro doctor making a house call to a white family—although God knows it would be beautiful—but certainly if there’s a scene in a hospital and you have doctors and nurses walking around, why not cast it as it is, with colored doctors and nurses too? If you’re doing a hospital do a hospital! But they don’t. According to dramatic television there are almost no colored people in America. And that’s about a twenty-million-person difference with what the census shows. How’s that for being overlooked?”
