Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr.

by Davis, Sammy

“No. I’ll do anything in the world for you Mr. Goldwyn, but I won’t work on Yom Kippur.”

  “You’re a real Jew?”

  “Yes, sir. I converted several months ago.”

  “You know what it’ll cost to suspend production for a day? We can’t change the schedule, it’s too late. Twenty-five thousand. Maybe more.”

  “I just learned today that I’m scheduled to shoot on Yom Kippur, sir. I came up as soon as I heard.”

  He threw out his hands. “Sammy—answer me a question. What did I ever do to you?”

  “Sir, you’ve been wonderful and I feel terrible about the problems I’m causing you, but I’ve gone to temple a lot less often than I would have liked because people still look at me like they think it’s a publicity stunt or like they can’t understand it, but I must draw the line on Yom Kippur. It’s one day of the year I won’t work. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  He took off his glasses. “Sammy, you’re a little so and so, but go with your yamalka and your tallis—we’ll work it out somehow.” He sighed, like now he’d seen everything and as I left his office he was behind his desk talking to the four walls, “Directors I can fight. Fires on the set I can fight. Writers, even actors I can fight. But a Jewish colored fellow? This I can’t fight!”

  Charley Head had tired of traveling, and quit the job after Porgy. As it came time to go on the road again I hired a man named Murphy Bennett. I led him into the bedroom and he gazed at the array of camera cases, pipe racks, guns and holsters, tape recorder, twelve suitcases, a six-foot-high trunk and clothes piled high on the bed and on every chair. “I’ll need the lightweight stuff in Florida and the heavier things for the rest of our swing—New York, Toronto, and Buffalo.” He nodded dazedly and I couldn’t help enjoying the way he was looking at everything Alice-in-Wonderland-style.

  Jim Waters looked into the room. “Will Mastin and the people from the Morris office are waiting for you in the Playhouse.”

  I smiled at Murphy. “It’s all yours, baby.”

  Jim, a tall, good-looking actor, had come to work for me in his spare time. He was an intelligent, responsible man; we’d taken four rooms in an office building on Sunset Boulevard and I’d turned all of my business details over to him. I said, “Grab the phones for me while I’m down there, will you, Jim? I wouldn’t want anything to interrupt the fighting.”

  I’d gotten a cable from London: “STILL MOST EAGER TO BOOK YOU HERE. NAME YOUR TERMS. AL BURNETT.” It was at least the tenth contact he’d made with me in three or four years, inviting me to play his club The Pigalle, and I’d had as many offers from the Palladium. I’d given cliché turn-downs like “We’re booked solid” but the fact was, I was afraid of it. What did I know about England and what did they know about me? I’d seen too many important English performers come over here and die like dogs because our audiences hadn’t understood them. Sure, it would be great to have the prestige of being a hit over there—but what if I didn’t make it? Within twenty-four hours the word would be all over American show business. But now my fears of London were balanced by the possibility of making a fresh start there. Maybe if I totally changed my surroundings, if I started from scratch with new people, with new audiences, I might be able to make contact again.

  Sam Bramson was in town from New York and I’d asked him and Will and a few others from the Morris office’s nightclub department to come by. He sighed patiently, “Haven’t we been urging you to do it for years? But not in a nightclub. You’ve got to be presented properly, with the prestige and stature you rate. The Palladium can give that to you, but the Pigalle …” he shrugged and the others nodded agreement.

  Will said, “Sammy, here some of the world’s greatest experts on show business are telling you: play the Palladium. Judy Garland plays there, Danny Kaye plays there, Jack Benny plays there …”

  “Massey, I respect the experience and the judgment of everyone in this room. But I’m the world’s greatest expert on Sammy Davis, Jr. After the decisions are made and the contracts are signed, eventually it’s opening night, and you’ll be here in the States and you’ll all send cables ‘Good luck, Sammy’ and that’s beautiful—but then Sammy has to go onstage and do it. You don’t go on, Massey, Sam Bramson doesn’t go on, Abe Lastfogel doesn’t go on—it’s just me. The music starts, I wait for my cue and I walk onstage a-lone. So, when that moment comes I want to know that I’ve got everything going for me that my thirty years of experience can provide.

  “Every word you say about the Palladium is true. But those are the exact reasons I don’t want to play there. Look, we all agree I’m not going to London for money, so the only important thing is: what can I accomplish over there? Danny Kaye did as good as any man is going to do at the Palladium—ever! And Judy Garland did it for the women. I’m not going to top them. Nobody is. My one chance for individuality is to come into London differently. By playing the Pigalle I’ll stand out and be judged on my own.

  “I have another reason. I want to create my image for London in the area where I can control it best, my own medium—a nightclub. At the Palladium the headliner comes on, does an hour or so and closes a big show. Well, if I’m going to make it with people who’ve never seen me perform I want to know I’ve got as much time as I need, to do all the things I want to do for them. Maybe it’ll be an hour and a half, maybe two hours—I have no way of knowing ‘til I’m over there. But I can’t be limited. I’ve got to be sure that each audience goes out of there having seen me as I want them to see me. Then maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll like me and they’ll say ‘There ain’t nobody gonna be that good in a nightclub as Sammy Davis.’ ”

  I looked around my suite at the Eden Roc and went into the bedroom to begin unpacking. “Murph!” He didn’t answer.

  He was sitting on a chair in the living room, crying.

  He looked up and smiled, embarrassed. “I know I look foolish, Sammy, it’s just that I never thought I’d see the day I’d walk in the front door of a Miami Beach hotel. When I gave the bellmen the tip,” his eyes flooded with tears again, “they said, ‘Thank you, sir.’ ”

  I felt myself starting to go under with him. “Murphy, you’re working for a star and we go first cabin all the way. Now go down to your room and get into some comfortable clothes and let’s get this jazz unpacked so I can do a show or we’re gonna be living in a cabin!”

  I’d told the stage manager not to announce the act in order to avoid the ludicrous moment after: “the Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis, Jr.,” when only I appeared.

  Morty hit the first few bars of Mr. Wonderful which had become a signature for me, then a fast rhythm thing, an exciting mixture of drums and brass. He kept repeating it, building suspense, and because there was no way of knowing when I’d be coming on, the audience was forced to keep watching the wings. I walked on. I didn’t wait for the applause to stop. I started singing right over it.

  I was in the middle of the show, taking a breather, chatting with the audience; I’d just done Louis Armstrong and I was still holding the over-sized handkerchief that I used as a prop. I dropped it over my head like a hood and spoke through it. “And there’ll be another meeting tomorrow night!”

  Laughter started tentatively in the back of the room and gathered momentum as it rolled toward the stage completely stopping the show.

  When they’d calmed down I said, “I love Miami Beach. I really do. And such nice, friendly people: only this afternoon I went by the pool and guys stuck their heads out of cabanas and shouted, ‘Hi’ya, Sam. Beautiful tan y’got, baby.’ ”

  They screamed.

  Will burst into the dressing room. Murphy left, fast, and Will locked the door. “Sammy, now I know you’re crazy.”

  “What’s wrong, Massey?”

  “Don’t what’s-wrong-Massey me. You tryin’ to get yourself lynched? In all my years around show business I never heard a colored man stand in front of a white audience and do those kinds of jokes. Never!” He looked at me, aghast. “I can’t
believe I really heard you doing jokes about the Ku Klux Klan? And in Florida!”

  I pulled a chair over to him. “Take it easy, Massey. Sit down. You want a drink or something?”

  “Sammy, what got into you? How’d you even think to say those kind of jokes on a stage?”

  “I never thought about it at all. The lines came to me while I was onstage and I thought ‘why not?’ so I did them.” I sat down next to him. “Look, during the show you were watching me when I did those jokes, but I was watching the audience. Those lines weren’t the funniest in the world, but they screamed. You heard them. And there was no race riot. On the contrary. Maybe it’s because Little Rock is on the front pages every day and the racial thing is all anybody talks about, but the fact is that by bringing it out in the open it was like I’d bridged a gap that had been between us like it always is between any colored guy and white guy until one of them acknowledges that there’s something standing there between them.”

  “All right, Sammy, you did it and it can’t be undone, but promise me one thing: no more.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. There’s something I’ve got to try.”

  “What’s that? Get yourself run out of town?”

  “Massey, to two thousand people a night I’m not colored. Sure, they know I’ve got brown skin but they don’t think of me like ‘Colored people? Keep ‘em out.’ I’m not that kind of being colored …”

  He looked at the floor, resentfully, “How many kinds they think there are?”

  “That’s the point. Obviously they don’t think about it at all. But they see me onstage, speaking to them on their own level, the guy they played gin with out at the cabana. I’m the guy they invite to their homes, to play golf at their clubs—they know me, they feel close to me, some of them even love me. They hear me sing and watch me dance and they think ‘Isn’t he adorable!’ and that’s my moment—and I have to do something with it, I can’t waste it—that’s when I have to show them: But remember, I’m colored.

  “I must. I want to make them equate ‘colored people’ with me, an individual they know and maybe understand, instead of with a formless, mysterious mass they instinctively fear and hate.”

  He left the dressing room still puzzled and frightened for me and I sat by myself trying to evaluate what had happened. I liked the idea of not in any way glossing over the fact that I’m colored, and I felt an enormous satisfaction at having broken the eternal gentleman’s agreement: the I-know-I’m-colored-and-you-know-it-but-let’s-not-notice-it.

  I began adding more racial humor to the act, offering my point of view through my humor, and they were accepting it, giving me standing ovations at almost every performance, and each time it happened, each time I watched those people standing to applaud me I wondered if maybe things are happening faster than we can see from within all the chaos. Granted the audience had only a small percentage of native Southerners but still—it was happening in Florida and it couldn’t possibly have happened five years ago.

  I sang, “Georgia … Georgia … ain’t goin’ there.” The laughs kept building. “No sir, if them cats in the sheets want me then they gonna have to come and get me.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if I may be serious for a moment—thank you for being able to laugh with me at these things. Maybe there are some people who’ll say ‘Hey, how can he kid about a serious situation?’ but I think you feel as I do, let’s bring it out in the open where it can be seen for how ridiculous it is. Let’s not hide it in a corner pretending we don’t know it exists. Hatred won’t die of old age. But it can’t stand light, it has to breed in secret, like cancer, like every disease and evil that grows undercover and survives to destroy the people who look away from it.”

  The audience applauded their agreement, like they understood what I was doing, that the jokes weren’t just to get laughs. I smiled, “However, needless to say, I ain’t goin’ to Mississippi to do this.” They screamed.

  “I mean it! I’m not even on the maybe list. Martin Luther King is not only a man I admire to the fullest possible extent but I have the good fortune to call him my friend. I had a few days off after I finished shooting Porgy and he was in L.A. and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you take a rest, a little change? Come on home with me. You’ll spend a few days with me in Atlanta.’ I almost hit him!”

  A man at ringside drawled loudly, “I’ll say one thing for you, boy, you’ve got a sense of humor.”

  “Thank you, sir. I need one.” Despite an occasional guy like that, oddly enough the people who laughed the hardest were Southerners.

  “This has been a wonderful year for me professionally. I just finished my second motion picture and I did my first dramatic television show. You all know what a nut I am with the guns and the quick-draw quiz. Well, my big ambition is to do a Western. I mean it. I’m not sure if Hollywood’ll ever let me play a cowboy, but if they do, that’ll be the time the Indians win!

  “I watch television all the time. I’m a nut with it. And do you know what bugs me? Howcum I ain’t never yet seen no colored people on The Millionaire?” I paused, “I can just picture that cat who walks around giving out the checks. He goes up to my old neighborhood, 140th Street and Eighth Avenue, he climbs the stairs, it’s nine in the morning and he knocks on the door. ‘My name is Michael Anthony …’ The colored cat looks out at him, ‘You better git outa mah face wakin’ me at no damn nine o’clock.’ ”

  The breaking of my speech pattern and dropping into the “illiterate” worked beautifully for me. I could get away with saying, “Well, yeah, Kingfish—” and the colored guy sitting in the audience didn’t resent it because he’d already heard me speak good English, plus a minute later he heard me using the same formula with a heavy Yiddish inflection. The Jewish guy in the audience didn’t object because I turned around and did a stereotype of the Negro with an Amos ‘n Andy dialect and lines like, “Sapphire … if every woman in Texas looks like your momma—then the Lone Ranger’s gonna be alone for a long time!”

  I wanted to do impressions of Step’n Fetchit and Willy Best and I found a way to work them in so that they might say something. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve made wonderful progress racially. Organizations like the NAACP asked the movie studios, ‘Please don’t always show the Negro as a slow, lazy, shuffling guy,’ and Hollywood stopped using the Step’n Fetchit-type characters. Now, on a personal level I’m very happy about it, but professionally I miss them. They were wonderful performers …”

  With that kind of an introduction I had told the audience that it’s not logical or right to think of Negroes only as the old-fashioned stereotypes, and I’d indicated how even Hollywood has helped to stamp out these racially sneering things. Without direct lecture, without pleading or protest, a seed was planted.

  I finished the impressions and cued Morty for a ballad. As the music started I walked over to George Rhodes, my pianist. “George, I know how sensitive you are, but would you mind playing on some of the white keys?”

  From a performing standpoint every comic or humorist must have a point of view. Mine was, for me, the most satisfying part of the shows. I had been given access to ears that would listen, and through the racial humor I was telling them exactly what I believed in, and they were accepting it—giving me an important reason for standing on that stage.

  29

  I drove out to Fox to have lunch at the commissary. With two picture credits and a third ready to start shooting in Vegas in a month I wasn’t looking through the candy store window any more. One of the kids at the table was an actress, Barbara Luna, whom I talk to like a kid sister. She was working in a remake of The Blue Angel. We were eating and talking when a tall girl with long blonde hair walked in and sat down at a table by herself. She was in costume and wearing make-up from a picture. Her hair was very straight and I dug the dramatic way it framed her face, which was unbelievably beautiful. I nudged Barbara. “Oh God.”

  She followed my gaze across the room. “That’s May Britt.”
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br />   “Now that’s a girl! Yeah. I mean that’s a girl”

  “Forget it.”

  “I saw her in The Young Lions and she was wild looking, but in person she’s unbelievable.”

  “Forget it.”

  I looked around at Barbara. “Hey, wait a minute. Whattya mean ‘forget it’? A beautiful girl walks in and I just …”

  “I mean: for-get-it! I see her on the set every day, she’s a nice girl but she doesn’t do anything but work. She goes nowhere with nobody!”

  A few nights later I was in my Jag, heading down Santa Monica not sure where I felt like going for dinner. I stopped at a light. May Britt was walking across the street. There was no missing the style of her hair. She was wearing a bluish-grey skirt, a button-down collar man’s shirt and a jacket. She stood very straight and walked with a driving energy. There was an older woman with her, probably her mother. I watched them buy tickets at a movie theater and go inside.

  There was a loud knocking on the roof of my car. A cop was leaning in my window. “Shall we dance, Sammy?” The light had changed and the cars behind me were honking their horns. “Excuse me, officer.” I grinned like an idiot and drove away.

  I pulled into the parking lot at Patsy’s Villa Capri. Maybe I’d bump into Frank or some of the buddies. I looked around inside. Nobody I knew. I took a booth and sat by myself, talking to the drink I’d ordered: How’s this for being a star? A whole city of people and I’m sitting here with you!

  I saw Judy and Jay Kanter coming in and waved for them to join me. We’d been buddies for years and we were close enough so that I didn’t have to be “on” with them. I sat there with my head hanging into my drink.

  Jay asked, “You got troubles?”

  “Nothing serious, baby, just a case of the humbles. I just feel like sitting here and having a little booze with you guys.”

  Judy asked, “How’s your love life?”

  I answered her through clenched teeth. “Listen, I saw a girl tonight …”