Читать книгу Rat Pack Confidential - Shawn Levy - Страница 10

For someone who would take orders, Frank could always count on Sammy.

Sammy Davis Jr. was the kind of guy about whom God seemed not to have been able to make up his mind. On the face of things, by his own reckoning, he had more strikes against him than you could count—he was short, maimed, ugly, black, Jewish, gaudy, uneducated. But he could do anything: song, dance, pantomime, impressions, jokes, and even, in a manner of speaking, drama. He overcame so much that his merely being there among them was an epochal triumph: He was the Jackie Robinson of showbiz.

And yet when he saw himself in a mirror he was disgusted: “I gotta get bigger,” he’d implore himself. “I gotta get better.”

He was so used to being excluded that he was willing to kill himself with work to be let in. He’d suffer all manner of indignities: Frank’s clumsy racial jokes; years of Jim Crow treatment in theaters, hotels, and restaurants; the nigger-baiting of high-rolling southerners in Vegas casinos; a patently bogus marriage to a black dancer intended to quiet journalists about his taste for white girls; the explicit disdain of mobsters and other bosses. But he kept at it, convinced that sheer will and talent would stop the world saying no.

Who was he trying to impress? His mother, a showgirl, was a cipher in his life, a ghost whose approval he never seems to have missed; his father, a small-time song-and-dance man, he eclipsed when still a boy. All the know-it-alls, naysayers, and bigots who’d ever discouraged him he’d silenced with sheer talent, guts, and drive. The gods themselves nodded with pleasure upon him: “This kid’s the greatest entertainer,” declared Groucho Marx at Hollywood’s Jewish mecca of leisure, the Hillcrest Country Club, one afternoon, “and this goes for you, too, Jolson” (to which Jolie merely responded with a smile). He was not only the first black man through the door but one of the all-time greats, regardless of origin.

Yet he felt hollow: All the money and fame and sex and sycophants in the world still couldn’t squelch the nagging inner sense that he was a nothing—and that if he could only rouse a little more out of himself, he could finally be a something. He sang that he was “133 pounds of confidence,” that he was “Gonna Build a Mountain,” that he had “a lot of livin’ to do,” and he sounded like he meant it. But each garish boast gave off a vibe of whistling past a graveyard; in his heart of hearts, he could never vanquish the sense that all the work he’d done to get so far could be snuffed out by a mere wave of Fate’s lordly white hand.

Sammy was the baby of the Rat Pack, born four days before Frank’s tenth birthday, and that banal fact—more than race, size, taste, line of work, personal habits, common friends, political leanings, money, sex, or power—was the single governing factor in their relationship. Frank was always the big brother allowing the kid, Sammy, to hang out with the older guys; Sammy was always the precocious little brat tugging feverishly at his idol’s sleeve. Neither had actual siblings, but they filled those roles for each other: Frank needed to be the patron as much as Sammy needed to be patronized. Everything about their mutual solicitude, affection, and trust, every aspect of their difference and of their symbiosis, lay in germ form in the simple age difference between them.

Uniquely among his peers in Frank’s circle, Sammy was a showbiz brat. His mom, Puerto Rican-born Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, was so committed to her career as a chorus girl that she worked until two weeks before her child arrived; as soon as she was able to return to the stage, she left the kid with relatives in Brooklyn and hit the road along with Sammy Sr., who was the lead male dancer in Will Mastin’s vaudeville act.

After that, there was barely a whiff of Elvera in her son’s life. She and Big Sam split for good not long after their son was born, which might have made Sammy’s story another “deprived baby beats the world to win his mama’s love” yarn but for the fact that Big Sam and Mastin, with the approval of Sammy’s extremely protective grandma, Rosa Davis, took the boy on the road with them from the time he was three and provided him with as big and loving a family as most children ever have. Chorus girls, singers, comics, and musicians were his society; dressing rooms, boarding-houses, and buses his playgrounds. He never attended so much as a day of kindergarten in his life—Big Sam and Mastin hid him from child welfare authorities by gluing whiskers on him and billing him as a midget—but he was steeped in a showbiz curriculum virtually from birth.

In later years, Sammy looked back on his tender introduction to showbiz as an idyll, but it was a terrifically difficult era. The Chitlin Circuit, as the route of black vaudeville and burlesque houses was known, never paid what the white theaters did; moreover, Sammy broke in when all forms of live entertainment were taking a hit from talking movies, radio, and recorded music. Scuttling back and forth between sporadic, low-paying jobs, Big Sam and Mastin frequently went without food so that their little protégé might not go hungry—and even then his supper might consist of a mustard sandwich and a glass of water. With grim regularity, they all returned to Harlem to sit waiting for new offers of work, which became even less steady with the advent of the Depression.

This was hell for Mastin, by all accounts a decent, intelligent, gifted man who’d risen to a position of respect within the narrow world of black showbiz. Although he never crossed over to broad white appeal, Mastin was a success, able to keep dozens of people on the road with him throughout the twenties. When he had to dissolve his traveling show to a two-man act featuring just himself and Big Sam, he surely felt as though he’d shrunk in the world; trouper that he was, though, he never let on, least of all to Sammy, that there was anything small about the small time.

And Sammy would’ve noticed if he had, because he was watching. He spent his early years studying acts from the wings, then imitating what he’d seen for the backstage entertainment of his makeshift family. He was a natural, and Mastin and Big Sam quickly realized it would give the show a lift if they put the little ham onstage. They slathered him in blackface and sat him in a prima donna’s lap while she sang “Sonny Boy,” the Al Jolson hit; mugging and mimicking during her sober reading of the song, Sammy brought down the house.

In time, he would master little comic bits, dance steps, vocal impressions, and songs of his own, and his skills grew along with his exposure. From special billing—“Will Mastin’s Gang featuring Little Sammy”—he became a full-fledged part of the act, the Will Mastin Trio, with all three sharing equally in the profits. They were flash dancers: Cat-quick and athletic, they could do time steps together or improvise wild solos, all energy, all arms, legs, and deferential smiles; for six or eight minutes a night, they could wring an audience limp with their sheer gutty bravado.

It was as a member of the trio that Sammy found himself in Detroit in the dog days of 1941, a substitute opening act for the Tommy Dorsey band. As he wandered backstage marveling at the size of Dorsey’s operation, Sammy was offered a handshake by a skinny white guy in his twenties: “Hiya. My name’s Frank. I sing with Dorsey”

“That might sound like nothing much,” Sammy recalled later, “but the average top vocalist in those days wouldn’t give the time of day to a Negro supporting act.” And Frank did more: For the next few nights, until the regular opening act returned, he would sit with Sammy in his dressing room shooting the breeze, talking about the show life. The kid couldn’t believe his luck.

But if meeting Sinatra was a glimpse of a raceless Eden, the next few years were a crushing racist hell. Sammy was drafted into an army that was a cesspool of bigotry. He felt it the moment he arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for basic training.

“Excuse me, buddy,” he asked a white private he came across while trying to find his way around. “Can you tell me where 202 is?”

“Two buildings down. And I’m not your buddy, you black bastard!”

It was a slap in the face, but it was only the beginning. For two years, Sammy was denigrated, demeaned, and, truly, tortured. He was segregated by a corporal who created a no-man’s-land between his bed and those of white soldiers. His expensive chronograph watch (a going-away gift from Mastin and Big Sam) was ground into useless pieces under a bigot’s boot. He was nearly tricked into drinking a bottle of urine offered to him as a conciliatory beer; his tormentors reacted to his refusal to imbibe it by pouring it on him. He was lured to an out-of-the-way building and held against his will while “Coon” and “I’m a Nigger” were inscribed on his face and chest with white paint.

And there were the beatings. “I had been drafted into the army to fight,” he remembered, “and I did.” He was goaded frequently into using his fists as a means of settling the score with the pigs who abused him, breaking his nose twice, scoring his knuckles with cuts.

Only when he was asked by an officer to take part in a show for the troops could he lift his spirit above the dreadful situation. At first, he didn’t want to expose himself on a stage and entertain the very people who’d been mistreating him, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to perform. George M. Cohan Jr. was also stationed in Cheyenne and convinced Sammy to help him create a touring production that would visit a number of military installations. Sammy threw himself into the work with a kind of violence, seeking release, vindication, and even revenge by being the best song-and-dance man anyone had ever seen.

“My talent was the weapon,” he recalled, “the power, the way for me to fight.” For the last eight months of his service time, the show was continually on the road, far from his most virulent antagonists. It kept him sane, maybe even alive.

But when he got out, his eyes having been opened to his situation as a black man with grand aspirations in America, he found himself increasingly crushed by the gap between his ambitions and his opportunities. He was befriended by Mickey Rooney, who, though still one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, was unable to get him movie work. He winced at the ebonic clichés employed by performers on the Chitlin Circuit. In reaction, he adopted a stage manner so patently artificial that he sounded, in his own words, like “a colored Laurence Olivier.” Even the tone-deaf Jerry Lewis was to encourage him to forgo his “with your kind permission we would now like to indulge” routine, but Sammy only did so after, typically, listening for several self-lacerating hours to tape recordings of his own inflated persiflage. And he reacted with despair and self-loathing whenever he was confronted with the insidious—and frequently overt—limits placed upon him in the Jim Crow era.

Nowhere were these barriers more painfully imposed than in Las Vegas, where the Will Mastin Trio debuted in 1944. Vegas was still a cowboy town, “the Mississippi of the West,” as blacks unfortunate enough to live there called it. The black population, whose members swelled the ranks of janitors, porters, and maids at the emerging hotel-casinos on the Los Angeles Highway (which had yet to be christened the Strip), was restricted to living, eating, shopping, and gambling in a downtrodden district known as Westside—a Tobacco Road of unpaved streets bereft of even wooden sidewalks, lined by shacks that lacked fire service, telephones, and, in many cases, electricity and indoor plumbing.

Sammy ought to have been used to segregation. The trio arrived in Vegas not long after a stint in Spokane, where they were forced, for lack of a black rooming house, to sleep in their dressing room. But Vegas galled him more than anything he’d experienced before, in part because of the appalling contrast between the glamour of the Last Frontier hotel and the shack in which he was forced to spend all of his offstage time, and in part because the gaiety and glitz of the casino—which he wasn’t allowed to walk through or even see—had an almost visceral allure for him.

As in the past, the only time he ever felt lifted out of himself and his miserable situation was onstage—“for 20 minutes, twice a night, our skin had no color.” As in the past, he fought off his frustrations and the indignities of racism with ferocious performances—“I was vibrating with energy and I couldn’t wait to get on the stage. I worked with the strength of 10 men.” But never, as he dreamed might happen, did a casino manager or owner grow so enamored of his performance that he broke the color line by offering him a drink and a chance to try his luck at the tables.

And so it went. He forced himself higher and higher in the ranks of showbiz, garnering accolades, cutting records, standing out a bit more from Big Sam and Mastin with each performance, getting paid a little better with each gig. At the same time, he was hustled by cops to the backs of movie theaters, snubbed at the doors of the Copacabana and Lindy’s, barred even from men’s rooms in some of the theaters he packed with paying customers. If he grew to hate himself in some twisted fashion, he could hardly be blamed.

But repeatedly he found in his corner that skinny guy he’d met in Detroit. When Sammy was in the army, Frank had become a monster star, and when he was discharged and caught up with Mastin and Big Sam in Los Angeles, he made his way over to NBC studios in Hollywood, resplendent in his dress uniform, to watch Sinatra perform his weekly stint on Your Hit Parade. After the show, he waited out back with the bobby-soxers and autograph hounds and sheepishly offered Sinatra a piece of paper to sign.

“Didn’t you work with your old man and another guy?” Frank asked, and he invited him to the next few shows, letting Sammy drink in rehearsals and backstage ambiance until another gig dragged the Mastin Trio back onto the road.

Two years later, Frank insisted that Sidney Piermont, manager of New York’s Capitol Theater, book the Mastins as his opening act at $1,250 a week—a sum that staggered Mastin and Big Sam. Sinatra never told Sammy that he was behind the act’s being hired—Piermont had wanted the Nicholas Brothers and then gagged at the price Sinatra wanted to pay Mastin—but in every other respect he treated Sammy like a peer throughout the engagement. They parted bosom pals: “Remember,” Frank told Sammy as he left for his next booking—and this was his most profound gesture of friendship—“if anybody hits you, let me know.”

But in the early fifties, no one, it seemed, wanted to hit Sammy. He was the quickest-rising star in nightclubs and theaters, particularly among the New York and L.A. cognoscenti. In 1951, the Will Mastin Trio opened at Ciro’s, the hot Sunset Strip nightclub. The room was packed with Hollywood royalty, and Sammy and Company couldn’t do enough. Dancing, singing, little comic bits, everything was a hit, nothing more so than Sammy’s impersonations of such white stars as Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant, and Humphrey Bogart. The same good fortune followed at an engagement at the Copacabana, the dream club of Sammy’s youth, some months later. He was on the map to stay.

There was nevertheless a feeling of vertigo to it all. Although all the right people came to his shows, although he was welcome in the homes of Hollywood’s crown royalty, he sensed a distance between himself and the fellow to whom all this good fortune fell, an inner gap separating the real man from the personality he’d become. He became famous for his tight pants, his extravagant spending, his largesse, his energy. But he’d also become infamous, in the tabloid press, as a consort—often only rumored—of white actresses, and the black press could be cutting in their comments about his seeming disregard for his race.

He was calculating and savvy enough to know that all publicity was good publicity—he was thrilled that his name made for hot ink—but he was wounded by the unfairness at the root of it. His race excluded him from a number of opportunities, so he created his own success; his success lifted him out of his race and made him a star simply because of his sheer talent; yet his talent could never entirely erase his race and, in fact, made him more visible as a black man and thus more open to injustice and prejudice. He walked a perilous line between one self, the black man who could be snubbed at the doors of exclusive New York nightclubs, and another self, the showbiz whirligig whom everybody wanted a piece of. He couldn’t avoid being “Sammy Davis Jr.,” even when “Sammy Davis Jr.” was the butt of jokes, gossip, and irrational hate.

Success, money, career offers, work—all this kept the doubts at bay for some of the time, but he was still profoundly susceptible to anxiety about his hold on his life. He would read reviews and compare them to previous notices from the same critics; he would call up clubs he was playing and ask, his voice disguised, if it was still possible to get a table for that evening’s performance, collapsing in secret gratitude at the news that his shows were sold out. He was such a lost, addled soul that he began seeking answers in, of all places, Judaism, the religion of so many of the showbiz uncles who’d taken him so readily under their wings. He knew he could never escape who he was, but he kept searching for ways to somehow, maybe, evolve out of it.

Little by little, barriers fell as to the sheer force of his talent. In 1954, the Mastin Trio was invited not only to play the Frontier but to stay there, to eat, gamble, and socialize among the white customers and make a whopping $7,500 a week besides. Sammy would have to commute back and forth to L.A., where he was doing some record work, but it was a dream gig and they leapt at it. You simply couldn’t do any better than that.

Which was why it was so tragic, the car crash. Driving his Cadillac convertible to Los Angeles late on the night of November 19, 1954, listening to his own hit record “Hey There” on the radio, Sammy crossed into oncoming traffic in order to avoid a car that was making a U-turn right there in front of him on the highway. In the ensuing collision, his head hit the steering wheel. A stylized cone of chrome sticking out of the center of it like a battering ram put out his left eye.

His thoughts upon seeing his own mangled face in a piece of broken mirror as rescuers came to fetch him? “They’re going to hate me again.”

He was rushed to a hospital near Palm Springs, and Hollywood rushed to his side. Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh waited on him as he was in surgery; Frank visited constantly, as did a steady parade of showbiz lights; Jeff Chandler took the stage in his stead in Las Vegas—and nobody complained.

And when he came back, at Ciro’s, dancing and singing and gagging with maybe even more energy than before, not to mention a rakish eye patch, the world clapped its hands raw and cried with affection for him. The accident turned out to be the thing that put him over the top; he could do it all, even beat death. It was like Frank dying on-screen in From Here to Eternity: It made him forever more.

An entire Broadway show, Mr. Wonderful, was built around him. There was a rags-to-riches story to it, and Chita Rivera and Jack Carter had parts, but the point of it was Sammy’s nightclub-style performance in the second act, a partially scripted, partially free-form extravaganza of the sort that Al Jolson used to deliver when he was still in the legitimate theater. Mastin and Big Sam were on the stage with him, but it was Sammy’s name on the marquee. He did benefits, TV spots, radio appearances; he partied every night in restaurants and clubs and later in his hotel suite; he became a notorious tomcat on the prowl.

Soon enough, he was so big that the movies came calling. He played Sportin’ Life in Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess, and, in a great legends-of-Hollywood yarn, stunned producer Samuel Goldwyn into silence by declaring that he refused to work on Yom Kippur. “Directors I can fight,” Goldwyn lamented. “Fires on the set I can fight. Writers, even actors I can fight. But a Jewish colored fellow? This I can’t fight!”

A Jewish colored fellow: a whirling dervish: an up-and-coming superstar: just as he’d always dreamed.