In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.

ISBN 13: 9780375403545

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Some members of the audience screamed. Sammy continued to dance. He kept the dance and impersonation going all the way off the stage. Sammy, above all, was an entertainer. There were plenty of doctors in the audience, because his audience was entirely white. That was not atypical. Their money was no good in hotels.

Sammy never went to school. He joined his father, Sam Sr.

He spent his early life on the road without a real relationship with his mother, performing shows in small clubs above the Mason Dixon line and sleeping wherever they were allowed. Sometimes that was a bus depot, and sometimes it was a makeshift hotel room like the one above the Chi-Chi. Next up was a stint in the Army, where he was harassed and savagely beaten by the white members of his patrol. As he barnstormed the country, Sammy became infatuated with the biggest stars of the day. None was bigger than Sinatra. Sammy would clip out articles about his idol and put them in a scrapbook to show his grandmother.

Sinatra was, as longtime friend Arthur Silber Jr. He wanted to live like Sinatra did.

It was almost like, if you show them Paris, how do you get them to go back to the farm? From the beginning, Sinatra stood up for Sammy. Some time in the late s, Frank appeared in a theater in New York during the lull of his career. After the show, he heads backstage to pay his respects, and asks Sammy to come see him perform.

About a week passes. No Sammy. Frank then storms back to the theater, tears up his contract and leaves. This was not Sinatra during his peak fame. He needed the gig. Sammy, the boy with the scrapbook, talked about that day a lot over the years. When he was not allowed to stay in the Las Vegas Hotel where he was performing, Sinatra used his clout to enable Sammy to break the color line in Las Vegas.

It was an entry point to Hollywood, the whitewashed world of stardom that eluded so many talented African American entertainers. To enter that world, though, meant leaving part of his past behind. I think Sammy was very smart, smarter than a lot of people give him credit for. He knew who the top agents were, he knew who the top stars were. There was no black equivalent to some of the white movers and shakers that Sammy leaned into. He realized that. He was an unbelievable talent.

Sammy Davis Jr.

On stage, the Rat Pack was notorious for ribbing each other. That extended to their social time, too, as the group was merciless in their pranks and jokes. The brunt of those directed at Sammy were about his skin color. The jokes appeared in films, too. Sammy plays a garbage man. Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising.

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ISBN 13: 9780375403545

You can change your ad preferences anytime. Upcoming SlideShare. Although the film is racked with racist caricature, the 8-year-old Sammy, as Rufus, is vibrant, confident, irrepressible -- what a partner he would have made for the 5-year-old Shirley Temple, soon to be high-stepping with Sammy's idol, Bill Robinson.

In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.

Nothing came of it except that Mastin now featured Little Sammy in his billing. Davis had to wait until -- after two decades on the road -- for his breakthrough. Janis Paige was opening at Ciro's, a much-publicized event and a good bet to be seen by Hollywood powers. As Paige had the only dressing room, the trio was consigned to a corner of the attic.

Still, it was the most elegant place they had ever worked. Fishgall writes that Davis refused to rehearse at the club, not wanting to reveal the power of his performance and frighten the star. After one mock rehearsal, the owner said, ''I still don't know what you boys do.

I'll tell you what. You open the show, make it fast and take only one bow. In the event, they took eight. A stunned Paige had the sense to reverse the order of the show; on the second night, she opened for the trio. Davis won over the crowd with his impersonation of some of the stars present. This was a double victory. Mastin had long ago warned him, ''No colored performer ever did white people in front of white people. Fishgall, who has written biographies of Gregory Peck, James Stewart and Burt Lancaster, treats him as paternalistic and out of synch with the times, and the beneficiary of Davis's insistence on a three-way split that persisted until Haygood's unforgiving portrait depicts Mastin controlling Davis through an ironclad contract he wielded through , which, if it existed, would have violated prohibitions against indentured servitude.

As neither biographer is big on sourcing, the truth is impossible to ascertain. The Cantor show followed.

Wonderful'' , a movie star a dapper, slithering Sportin' Life in ''Porgy and Bess'' and a Rat Pack insider with Frank and Dean, enduring a relentless stream of race jokes in case anyone didn't notice his complexion, and containing his impulses so as not to upstage the alternately munificent and petulant Sinatra. To top it all, he became a best-selling memoirist with the fanciful but still affecting ''Yes I Can. It was a measure of his stature that the marriage did not choke his career. He triumphed again on Broadway ''Golden Boy'' , but his gift for doing everything found few outlets beyond road shows.

Like Jerry Lewis, whose haircut he copied, he was too much on television, pontificating or falling down laughing. Sometimes he affected a broad English accent, as if that weighted his insights. He also kissed Archie Bunker in , which, the biographers agree, represented a big step for race relations. And he embraced Nixon, a story with a personal dimension worth exploring. As vice-president, Nixon had attended the trio's show at the Copa in , introducing himself afterward and impressing Davis.

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