Sammy Davis Jr.

by Tracey Davis

  I made the decision that today would not be a good day to reminisce with my father, given the emotional roller coaster we were all riding. I planned to revisit in the morning, open the four French doors off the living room to his emerald garden sanctuary, and take Pop out to drink in the air, sit, and talk.

  Frank Sinatra was playing on the stereo in the living room when I returned in the morning. My father was on his Gucci half-moon couch resting. I opened the French doors out to the garden oasis. The nurse assisted my father outside. We sat on a couple of chaise lounges to take in the beauty of the outdoors. We listened faintly to Uncle Frank’s music sent forth from the living room. Pop was happy I was there to tell his tales to, and I was delighted to hear him in good spirits, sharing monologues from his lips to my ears.

  “The first time I met Frank Sinatra was in 1941 at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit,” Pop said without skipping a beat.

  “The Will Mastin Trio was replacing an act for three days and we opened for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Frank. It was the swing era, Trace Face—the Stone Age to you. Frank and I shared a sandwich before showtime. I was the entertainer; Frank was the voice.”

  I added, “Uncle Frank may have been the voice, Pop, but he was also the agitator! You were the go-to-hell guy! Uncle Dean was the make-it-work gentle kind of soul. He seemed to soften everybody up like a Downy sheet in a dryer.”

  Pop could often be found with a camera in hand. Here he is during rehearsals of a Mastin Trio performance.

  “True, Trace, but that was later, in the Vegas days. Back in 1941, it was just me and Frank, the entertainer and the voice. We bonded that day at the Michigan Theatre, talking shop.”

  “Soul brothers for life,” I said. Comedian and actor Pat Cooper told documentarians Sacher and Langer that, “Nobody but Frank Sinatra could have put Sammy Davis where he was. Sinatra, first of all, was never a racist kind of a guy. He cared about everybody being equal. . . . When Frank said, ‘This guy’s great’—they all paid attention.”

  Pop told his story about Uncle Frank: “I remember how Frank used to study Dorsey—examine him like some specimen,” Pop said. “Frank noticed how Dorsey snuck in breaths through an air hole in the side of his mouth while playing the trombone. Frank said he wanted to use that technique to hold his notes longer, keep a stanza going without having to stop for air. Frank’s vocal range was outstanding, smooth, romantic, and rich with nuance. Never occurred to us back in the day that moons later we would be living in the limelight as the Rat Pack in Vegas,” Pop explained.

  “In 1947, we worked the Capitol Theatre in New York. We both had a three-week engagement. We were inseparable. Oh how Uncle Frank would woo those girls with his sultry love songs. Trace Face, girls were screaming from that electric aura that was Sinatra, swooning in lines for autographs.”

  “What was your role in the Tommy Dorsey show, Pop?”

  “I featured impressions of celebrity singers in the opening act. Uncle Frank always encouraged me to sing in my own voice. He was right, in the long run. After the Michigan Theatre, Uncle Frank became a lifelong soul mate and best man at my wedding to your mother,” Pop said.

  “Mom must have taken your breath away in that beautiful wedding dress!” I said.

  “My heart jumped out of its rib cage every time I cast my eyes on your mom. Everyone said, ‘May Britt had a face chiseled like a Swedish goddess.’ Her beauty, her grace, that ‘interracial’ wedding, now that’s a story for another day! But as for Uncle Frank, he did stand up as my best man, was and always will be the best friend I ever had, truly.”

  I could tell all the reminiscing had sucked the wind out of Pop. His eyes were starting to droop. I handed him a throw blanket and said, “Here, Pop, why don’t you catch yourself a little nap.”

  “You’ll be here when I wake, Trace Face?”

  “Perhaps in the powder room, baby is sitting on my bladder.”

  Pop smiled, closed his eyes, and nodded off in his sacred outdoor sanctuary. I made my pregnancy stop to the powder room, returned to sit by Pop, and watch him sleep, so at peace.

  As I gazed out at his lavish Beverly Hills estate, I was beaming with pride at all my father had accomplished in life. I wondered if I would ever be that successful. Flashes of stories my father had shared when he first started making money consumed my mind.

  One story that always made me smile was at the Roadhouse in Waterford, Connecticut, in the early 1940s. Pop and Burt and Jane Boyar wrote about it in his autobiography, Yes I Can. A half-dollar flew toward Pop, a teenager, onstage. He danced to it, picked it up, flipped it in the air, caught it, and put it in his pocket without losing a beat. The audience cheered, and suddenly it started to rain money. Dad was so weighted down by coins in his pocket he could barely dance through the closing act. He was living his dream.

  But money didn’t always buy happiness. Pop was a fish out of water with kids his own age. He was the oddball, the misfit, didn’t know the first thing about real life.

  My mom had a glamorous career in movies before she met my dad. She was touted as a “new” Swedish goddess in the style of Greta Garbo.

  One time he was in a candy store in Harlem in the 1940s. Some of his peers were trading baseball cards. Pop didn’t have a clue what a baseball card was since he was on the stage since the age of three, performing vaudeville instead of going to school. The kids started taunting Pop, humiliating him. My father tried to impress his peers by buying ten packs of baseball cards, a hundred in all. But the kids continued to laugh at him when he traded away his top players. That day, Pop ran home to Mama, and cried himself to sleep.

  Years later, after all of Harlem knew he was a rising star, my father bumped into those same peers at the same candy shop. This time they all wanted his autograph. Just like Pop, he never held a grudge. He smiled, signed their autographs, and killed ‘em with kindness. Pop had style and class. He also had the attitude of “You think I can’t do this? Done. And watch out, folks, because one day I will buy and sell your sorry butts.”

  My grandfather and Uncle Will always tried to shield Pop, at least in his early years, from any form of hatred from his peers or the public. His father would explain away slights and snubs as sheer jealousy. They were determined to free Pop from the limitations of prejudice, particularly the racial ignorance heavily prevalent back in the day.

  Pop’s first real taste of racial injustice was at El Rancho Hotel in Las Vegas in the 1940s. It’s torn down now but it opened big on April 3, 1941, on the southwest corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara. For a time it was the largest hotel in Las Vegas, with 110 rooms.

  The Will Mastin Trio was pulling in $500 a week for their act, but the hotel would not allow “colored” entertainers to book a room, or even use the dressing rooms. The Mastin Trio had to wait out by the swimming pool between acts. Colored people could not gamble in the casinos, dine, or drink in the hotel restaurants and bars. House rules always sent the trio to the west side of Vegas to a colored boarding house.

  The “colored” boarding house was a shack made of wooden crates run by a landlady named Ms. Cartwright. Ms. Cartwright capitalized on the fact that her boarding house was the only place in town colored entertainers could stay in Vegas. She charged a fortune for a room, twice as much as a room at El Rancho Hotel, with one perk—she would press your clothes.

  Pop would ask his father, “Why are we staying here?” His father, relentlessly shielding young Sammy from racial adversity, would simply tell Pop the same ole line, “Oh hell, son, they’re just jealous of our act.”

  Pop would later recount in a 1989 interview on Terry Wogan’s BBC show that “in the ’50s, every black star that worked Vegas, that helped build it up, who would pack a joint—I’m talking Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, the Mills Brothers—were not allowed to eat there, could not walk through the front door of the casino, gamble, nothing. You would perform, get out of the casino by the side door, and head to the ghetto.”

  Claude Tr
enier said, “I remember an incident at the Riviera. Billy Eckstine went in there—he and his manager—at the craps table, and the guy says, ‘You can’t play. We don’t serve niggers here.’ Billy Eckstine socked him right in his jaw. Oh, we ran into that quite a bit . . . we had to go out and sit out by the swimming pool until our next appearance. They didn’t have dressing rooms or nothing for us. When we lived here, we had to go on the west side—to the colored boarding house.”

  Many years later, once Pop’s eyes were opened to the real sign of the times, he refused to entertain at places that practiced racial discrimination. He made certain it was in his contract that the trio would be allowed room, board, full use of the facilities, and would permit colored people in his audience. But he always had mixed emotions about that.

  “By integration we lost a great deal and we gained a great deal,” Pop told Terry Wogan. “When everything started to integrate, in terms of acceptance . . . we lost the ghetto, which was all our culture. There was the colored barbershop, and I say ‘colored’ because that was the terminology used in those days. The ‘colored’ rooming house where we all stayed, there was community. We all suffered the same indignities; it brought us, as black performers, closer together. We shared experiences and we hung out. As soon as it started to open up, and everyone could stay at the hotel they were working in, we very rarely saw each other anymore. And it’s a shame we lost that; it’s too bad we couldn’t have maintained a little balance.”

  Unfortunately, during World War II, my father no longer had my grandfather and Uncle Will to protect and shelter him from the racial injustice in the army. In 1943, my father joined the Infantry Basic Training Center at Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  My father was a gun enthusiast and an avid movie nut. He pictured himself as an aerial gunner in the Air Corps, a little guy in a cockpit with his scarf blowing in the wind, shooting at the enemy like in some old Hollywood movie. But Pop never had any schooling, so when he took his exams for the Air Corps, it was clear that he couldn’t write and could barely read. He could not join the only black unit, the Tuskegee Airmen, as they had graduated with the highest honors.

  Dad was sent to the Infantry Basic Training Center. The infantry of his dreams it was not. But at least he didn’t have to read and write. My father was a patriot and agreed to defend his country. What he did not expect was to defend himself against enemies within his own military unit—bigots in his own barracks. It turned out to be an awakening he would never forget.

  “What are you up to, Pregasaurus?” Pop woke from his power nap.

  “Just watching you nap, Pop. Brain cells churning . . . ,” I said.

  “What’s on your mind, Trace Face?”

  In the army Dad learned to use his talent as a weapon against racial prejudice.

  Frank Sinatra may have been King of the Bobbysoxers in the 1940s, but Dad made some young female fans of his own.

  “I was thinking about the time you were in the army,” I explained.

  “Been there, done that!” Pop said.

  “Stories, Pop, I want to hear the stories . . . again!” I begged. I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, not just read about it in his interviews and books.

  “Awwww, grab me another Strawberry Crush and maybe I’ll indulge you but keep in mind, viewer discretion is advised!”

  I smiled and went inside to the bar. The nurse handed me pills for my father to take with his Strawberry Crush. I placed his drink and pills next to his chaise lounge out by his sacred garden and pool. He swallowed the pills as I sat next to him.

  “Your turn,” I said to my father.

  “Well, Trace Face, I was seventeen when I joined the army, all of five foot six inches and one hundred twenty pounds. All the soldiers were twice my size. A little lost, I politely ask a white PFC sitting on the barracks’ steps where Building Two Hundred Two was located. He sized me up and down, reluctantly told me it is two buildings down followed by ‘And I’m not your buddy, you black bastard!’”

  “What an entrance you made, Pop. Dignity down the drain.”

  “Overnight the world was different. It wasn’t one color anymore. The protection I’d gotten from my father and Uncle Will was a farce. I appreciated their loving hope to shield me from prejudice, hate, bigotry—but they were wrong. It was as if I’d walked through a swinging door for seventeen years, a door which they had always secretly held open,” Pop explained.

  “I realized then that you can pass legislation for desegregation, but you can’t legislate people’s minds. It’s like hacking off the top of a weed: After we do it, we’ve got to get down and pull out the roots, get to the heart of the ignorance and intolerance, so it won’t keep growing,” Pop said.

  “When I arrived at Unit Barracks Two Hundred Two, a corporal checked my name off his clipboard and told me to wait on the sidelines until they ‘figure out what to do with me.’ White kids showed up, simply walked inside and took the first bunk they saw. Another colored kid, tall, with his gear, was sent to sit on the side by me. We shook hands. His name was Edward. We both knew trouble was stirring.”

  “So what happened, Pop?” I asked.

  “Felt like a lifetime that me and this colored kid waited outside the barracks watching the last white kid march in. We sat outside a screen door, as we were ordered.”

  “We could hear the corporal address the unit. He said, ‘Folks, we got a problem, we got niggers outside assigned to this company. I’ll stick ‘em down there, but move your gear so I can give ‘em the last two bunks.’”

  “Then one of the guys piped up, ‘Hey, that’s right next to me! I ain’t sleepin’ next to no dinge!’ The corporal made it clear who was in charge of the unit, but the same guy kept mouthing off, ‘I’m only sayin’ I didn’t join no nigger army,’” Pop recalled.

  “All the guys started shouting about how they ain’t sharing no toilet can with no nigger, and what the hell’s the army need ‘em niggers for, just to steal us blind while we sleep? The corporal quieted them down with a simple, ‘Knock it off. I don’t want ‘em anymore than you do, but we’re stuck with ‘em. That’s orders,’” Pop said.

  “The corporal motioned us in with our gear ‘on the double.’ My legs were shaking, trembling. As he marched us down the aisle—eyes glaring on either side of us—soldiers guarded their cots spaced about three feet apart. The corporal pointed to the last two beds on one side, separated from the rest by about six feet with one empty cot between us and the white soldiers. It was as if we had the plague and were being quarantined.”

  To the delight of thousands, Dad performed at Lankenheath Air Base in 1960. This was a far cry from the performances he did while in the army himself during World War II.

  Years after the humiliation and discrimination of his experiences at Fort Francis, my father was warmly received on military bases as a superstar.

  “A sergeant marched in. He announced his name, Sergeant Williams. He glanced at the space between the beds. He gave a cold stare to the corporal and said, ‘What the hell is that?’ The corporal whispered quietly to the sergeant about how he was trying to deal with the nigger problem.”

  “Sergeant Williams was fuming, ‘There is only one way we do things here and that is the army way! You have sixty seconds to replace the beds with exactly three feet of space, to the inch, between every cot in this barracks. Move!’ For a brief moment, I felt safe.”

  “Sergeant Williams asked us questions: When did we arrive? How long did it take for us to get our bunks? Did you choose your bunks? Then the sergeant told us to move our gear one bunk closer to the white soldiers. He addressed the whole unit, ‘No man here is better than the next man unless he’s got the rank to prove it!’”

  “I remember years later, George Rhodes, my conductor and arranger, told me he was surprised that with all the racial tension I endured, I never turned around and hated right back. I think that was because when I reached out for help, there was always some white guy like Sergeant
Williams or Frank Sinatra, who helped me back up. The black press would scrutinize me for it, but believe me, those cats saved the day for me.”

  “Sergeant Williams sounds like a good man, Dad,” I said.

  “From then on, I knew as long as Sergeant Williams was around we ‘colored’ folks would be safe,” Pop added.

  “But the minute the sergeant left, the soldiers tried to turn us into their slaves—making us polish their boots and such. I refused to do it and was teased as the ‘uppity nigger boy.’ Edward on the other hand, was not going to put up a fight for his own dignity, and I had no right to judge his desire to hide his pain. ‘Yes, suh!’ said Edward, ‘Glad t’do ‘em, suh.’ I felt like I was on an island all alone,” explained my father.

  “Pop, I can’t even imagine the horror of it all. How you lifted yourself up out of that muck and survived it is unfathomable!” I said.

  “That’s only the prelude to the circus act. Your grandfather had given me an expensive one hundred twenty–buck gold watch to take with me to the army. I treasured it. The white soldiers got a hold of my watch on the first day in the barracks. They tossed it back and forth to each other, over my head, laughing as I chased after it. You know how little I was—still am! These white cats were huge.

  “Eventually, Jennings, the biggest bigot of them all, ground my watch into the floor with the heel of his boot. He crushed the glass, twisted the gold, and broke the hands off. It was mangled in pieces. I picked up the remains, went to my bed, and wrapped it in paper. Jennings shouted behind me, ‘You can always steal another, nigger boy!’ The whole incident crushed me, deeply,” Pop said solemnly.

  “How does somebody do that to someone?” I was disgusted.

  “Because they can, because they could, back in the day. Every night I would lay in bed, wondering what is it about skin that made people hate so much. But it was far deeper than skin; to these white cats, I was a different breed,” my father explained.