In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (72 page)

“Sammy, you all right?” Falana asked him once he was seated in the car.

“I’m all right,” he said, unconvincingly.

When he reached his hotel room, Sammy looked as if he might collapse.

“I got to sit down,” he said, touching his upper body and chest. Falana worried she might have to call medics. “I got tired of those niggers hitting me in the chest,” Sammy finally said, his voice stern. “I thought I might have to kill one of those motherfuckers.” Falana and Wilson looked at each other, and stifled their laughter—at least until they were outside of Sammy’s room, where they doubled over laughing.

Sammy was left alone to take a much needed nap.

•     •     •

Early in the Chicago run, Hilly had begun talking to Sammy of extending the musical, taking it to other cities. But Sammy told Hilly he was exhausted, tired of playing the same role night after night. He wanted to get back to nightclubs; he wanted to travel, to once again be upon—as DuBose Heyward of
Porgy and Bess
fame had put it—“the warm, brown lap of the earth.” Hilly had other plans. He told Sammy he was not going to close
Golden Boy
, and reminded Sammy that he had him under a long-term contract. Sammy said he’d just quit. “I’ll sue your ass,” Hilly told him. But in seconds Hilly thought to himself: “There was no replacing Sammy.”

“Okay,” Hilly finally said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll close the show.”

But Hilly had already decided he’d close the show only under one condition, which he shared with Sammy. “You’ve got to agree to do
Golden Boy
in London,” he said to his golden boy, who in turn said that he’d do it under one condition: “You’ve got to do it at the Palladium.”

Of course Sammy the Anglophile knew London, and he knew the Palladium. It was London’s classiest venue. It was first class, just as Sammy traveled and lived.

Sammy’s Joe Wellington was smashing his way through Richard Daley’s riot-torn Chicago—and with a beautiful blonde on his shoulder. At least onstage. At night he was, wisely, seen with Lola Falana. Chicago was no place to challenge the rising black-is-beautiful mantra. Sammy was fully conscious of operating in the backyard of Chicago-based
Ebony
and
Jet
magazines, both longtime chroniclers of his predilection for white women and high white society. The show being a smash, Sammy had become—politically—as intoxicated as Hilly Elkins.

He went out one more time into the mean streets of Chicago. He tried telling some of the Afro-wearing blacks that he had marched; why, he told them he had marched in the mid-1960s in both Alabama and Mississippi. Pride rose in his voice.

“Don’t mean shit today,” one of the black radicals scowled at him. “This is ’68.”

Indeed it was.

He was galloping now, and fast, adopting manners of the movement in both speech and style—the return of the mimic—his words tumbling forth almost musically. He was moving through the movement now, baby; grooving with the soul brothers and soul sisters; getting high on some weed in the early morning hours after performances; sipping on some Scotch, loving on Lola, sweet Lola. It was, baby, the new—poof—all-black Sammy. And the kid from vaudeville was now an honorary Blackstone Ranger!

Draw!

Draw!

Draw!

There was little doubt that Hilly Elkins would come through with Sammy’s demand to book him into London’s renowned Palladium, and he did.
Golden Boy
was scheduled to open June 4, 1968.

Cast and crew packed to go across the ocean. “Being the unpretentious fucker I am,” recalls Hilly Elkins, “I rented a 747.” Sammy and Hilly, black and white, bound for London. The plane lifted, and blue clouds were in view. Someone started rolling some weed. Before long the plane held the pungent smell of marijuana. “By the time we took off,” remembers Hilly, “you could get a ‘contact’ high anyplace on the airplane.”

As always, upon landing, Sammy purchased gifts for the
Golden Boy
cast in anticipation of opening night. Racing store to store, his arm waving over and selecting items, he’d then turn to his assistant Murphy to complete the purchases because he was rushing and rushing.

Having been a longtime friend of
Playboy
magazine founder Hugh Hefner, Sammy took a suite in London at the Playboy Club, his Gucci and Louis Vuitton luggage, musical instruments, and bric-a-brac crowding the suite.

There were new cast members for the London production. Gloria DeHaven was signed to play the role of Lorna, Sammy’s love interest. DeHaven had been a child vaudeville performer, and had made her screen debut in 1936 at the age of eleven in Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times
. In the 1940s she appeared in a series of Hollywood musicals; her sultry beauty cast a glow from the screen. But the decline of the Hollywood musical forced her to turn to the stage for work. There was another reason Hilly Elkins matched her with Sammy: she was petite, the prerequisite for Sammy’s leading ladies. Lon Satton would be playing the role of Eddie Satin that had been played by Billy Daniels in New York. Satton had appeared on the American screen in the Sidney Poitier vehicle
For the Love of Ivy
. He also would be understudying Sammy’s Joe Wellington. Physically, the role would not be a stretch for Satton. He had boxed professionally while an undergraduate in college. Lolly Fountain and Altovise Gore had also come to London. And so did Lola Falana, whose stature was now prominently billed: “…  and Lola Falana.”

Given that Emily Brontë was his favorite author, and her novel
Wuthering Heights
his favorite book, it is little wonder that London was Sammy’s favorite city. He had long considered his 1961 and 1962 Command Performances before the queen highlights of his show-business career. He liked the fact that William Shakespeare was an Englishman. The audiences touched him. “
You know they
don’t applaud you until the end of the show,” he said of Londoners. “You work hard and they sit there … you know they are digging you but no applause, they just enjoy you quietly … and then you are engulfed in a wave of applause.” London’s sartorial fervor—men smoking pipes, swinging walking sticks, wearing derbies, dressed in tailor-made suits from Saville Row—appealed to Sammy’s sense of style. He wasted little time in discarding his Chicago wardrobe—jeans and dashikis—for the sophisticated threads of London. He was soon hobnobbing with friends—Peter O’Toole, Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse—and carousing in and around Piccadilly Square. His English accent, perfected by mimicry, resurfaced. “He’d speak with an English accent in a minute,” recalls Falana.

The London production was directed by Michael Thoma, but Sammy awarded himself an unbilled codirecting title. It meant little more than the waving of his arms and the nodding of his head during rehearsals. He was at play, and quite enjoying himself. Well-dressed Londoners flocked to Sammy’s June 4 opening at the bulb-lit Palladium.

Then, just two days into the run, grim news came from America. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, having swept the California primary in the race for the White House, was fatally shot on June 6 in Los Angeles. Sammy had campaigned for Kennedy, had visited with him and his family at Kennedy’s Hickory Hills estate in Virginia. Kennedy, drawing on the poor and disenfranchised, on blacks and Indians, Chicanos and migrant workers, had appealed to Sammy’s sense of inventiveness and tender spirit. Black and white seemed a cure-all to Robert Kennedy. (Often, before his journeys into the Deep South, Sammy would phone Kennedy, telling him where he was headed, leaving the impression—especially in his own mind—that if harm came to him, Kennedy would, like a game of cowboys and Indians, direct a rescue party to go get him.)

It was clear to cast members that the assassination stunned Sammy. He looked depressed and overwhelmed. He took a night off. Then he resumed performing.

Performing was how Sammy coped. It was how he survived.

One evening Sinatra sat in the audience. Yes, it was a small world: back in 1944, Frank had appeared onscreen with Gloria DeHaven in
Step Lively
. Frank Sinatra never looked as easy on English soil as Sammy. He didn’t understand the music. The Beatles, their offices right on Savile Row, still confused him. After the show, Sinatra took Sammy and DeHaven and other cast members out to dinner at the White Elephant, one of London’s finest restaurants. The night was long, and the next day he was gone.

Sammy had nothing on Frank when it came to disappearing.

When Sammy escorted a group of cast members out to dinner, there would
often be a kind of pleading look in his eyes as dinner wound down, as if he would crumble if his guests left too early. “Sammy was very needy,” recalls Marguerite DeLain, another
Golden Boy
dancer who followed the show from New York to London. “He did not want to be alone. He had a sense of abandonment. People who have that need applause. All those things you don’t get from parents, you try to get from the world.” Other times—to keep a crowd around him—he’d rent out whole movie theaters. “We’d get these movie prints sent from the United States,” recalls Fountain. “You’d go to this private theater. He’d have sandwiches, food, drinks. He’d sit down and show one picture after another.”

And it was in London that Sammy began an affair with dancer Altovise Gore. It made for interesting chatter among the company, inasmuch as there were now, on the scene, three paramours: Lola Falana, Lolly Fountain, and Gore. Sammy no longer had doubts: black was beautiful. “I used to say,” recalls DeLain, who saw the goings-on, “ ‘Mr. Davis loves confusion.’ ”

London itself had changed since Sammy’s last visit, in 1962, in part because Africa had begun the process of decolonization. In Nigeria, the Biafran War was taking place, covered widely in the British press. A Pan-African conference took place in London during Sammy’s
Golden Boy
run, and he hustled over to it, excited as a child. African students were there in large numbers; tension was in the air. Lolly Fountain remembers spotting Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian exile and writer, at the conference. Just as he had long been torn between white and black, Sammy now had to ponder his old London—pipes and Savile Row suits—and the new London: rebellion fueled by African students and fiery liberals. He hated to lose one in favor of another.

For the first time in modern times, the policies of the British government were being questioned. The protest movement, however, unleashed another movement—a white Nazi brigade. Sammy, paradoxically, was caught between a nascent black Pan-African movement and the bobbing heads of racists. It hardly helped that tabloids had seemed to portray his quandary in advance, excerpting, as they did, portions of Sammy’s
Yes I Can
, and not just any portions, but the parts of the book about Sammy and May. Billboards trumpeting the excerpts had shown Sammy and May Britt; there were even photos splashed about of Sammy and Kim Novak! The potency of interracial sex was titillation enough for the Nazis, and they began to picket Sammy at the Palladium, spewing epithets at cast members and at the star himself.

Slowly but surely, resentment began building against
Golden Boy
. During changeover scenes—lights out, everyone dressing in darkness—odd things began to happen. Actors were knocked down, unaware of where the belligerent blow had come from. Sandbags suddenly fell from the ceiling. Cast members grew frightened and sensed conspiratorial goings-on. “Taxi drivers spit on
you,” remembers Fountain. It was still the London where, in the sixties, during a bout of campaigning, a Tory candidate had uttered: “If you want a nigger neighbor, vote Labour.”

Sammy and Hilly constantly tried to reassure the cast. More bodyguards were placed at the theater. Any odd movement toward the stage from a member of the audience would draw quick attention from the bodyguards. Fountain and others, however, could be forgiven their fright on the night when a man glided down the aisle, and, freezing cast members, walked right up onstage. The man served Sammy with a summons. It turned out that several London department stores—oh how he loved those Turnbull & Asser shirts, those Savile Row suits!—were exhausted trying to collect the money Sammy owed them. “Sammy went on with the show,” Fountain recalls of the moment. “But he was really shaken.” (To take care of his debt, Sammy phoned Prince Spencer—his dancing buddy from the 1940s—and his wife, Jerri, whom he considered family. “He needed money,” recalls Jerri. “He was too proud to go to Sinatra. We wired him several thousand dollars.” Not long after returning stateside, Sammy made his way to Chicago to visit the Spencers. “He came into the room, pulled up his dashiki, and laid all the money on the table,” says Jerri.)

When Fountain left the London production of
Golden Boy
, Sammy gave her a pendant. It was from Asprey, the store that made jewelry for the royal family.

When Sammy returned to America at the end of his
Golden Boy
London run, he knew he was returning to a different and now ever-spinning America. Robert Kennedy—gone. Martin—gone. Both within two months of each other. Whenever asked, Sammy had swung his puppet’s body around the country for both, raising money. Almost daily now, there were antiwar protests on college campuses and street corners. The Black Power movement was in full flight. Taking earnest measure of its reality, Sammy reappeared sporting an Afro—and with a black girlfriend, Altovise Gore. Drawing on his mimicry skills, he quickly dropped the tendency to use British inflections in his language and began speaking, once again, in the voice of the urban black.

Helen Gallagher, his former blond lover, ran into Sammy in 1968 at the Copa in New York City. He spotted her and sent her a note to come backstage. “I go backstage,” she remembers. “Everybody’s black. He says, ‘This is my soul brother, this is my soul sister.’ I said, ‘Why, you little black bastard. I knew you when you were white.’ ” There was awkard silence, the soul brothers and soul sisters looking at Sammy, wondering what he might say, how he might put the blond white lady in her place. Then it comes, the rising whoosh and spread of Sammy’s unctuous laughter to rip away the embarrassment.