Deconstructing Sammy

by Matt Birkbeck

  “Over there, you should find what you’re looking for, somewhere over there,” said the worker, pointing to a pile of boxes placed in no particular order under the staircase.

  As Sonny drew closer, he could see the boxes were in poor condition. Some were crushed, while several were ripped open and discolored. There were no identifying marks other than the date—9/22/1991—which was the date of the auction. Sonny took his suit jacket off, rolled up his sleeves, and opened the boxes. One by one he pulled out moldy fur coats; broken awards and plaques; several photos; wrinkled shirts, pants, and stage clothes, including a rhinestone-laced jumpsuit. This was all that remained of Sammy Davis Jr., and it had been discarded and forgotten and left to rot in a warehouse. Sonny was struck with a deep sadness and sorrow, and he could feel the anger build from within. Whatever Sonny had previously thought of Sammy, he knew he didn’t deserve this. Sammy’s legacy deserved much more. So Sonny closed his eyes and vowed that he would complete his task and settle the IRS debt and restore Sammy’s estate.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” said a warehouse worker.

  “Yeah,” said Sonny. “Now pack it up. I’m taking it all out of here.”

  The furs and other items were shipped in six new, repackaged boxes addressed to the Hillside Inn. When Sonny returned to his hotel, there was a message from Mark Davis. His mother, May Britt, agreed to meet with Sonny.

  Sonny long sought a meeting with May. He wanted to learn more about what drove Sammy, and who better to learn from than the one woman whom Sammy truly loved.

  May—whose name is pronounced “My”—was a burgeoning actress in the late 1950s, whose credits included starring roles in Murder, Inc. with Peter Falk and The Young Lions with Marlon Brando, when she fell in love with Sammy and married him in November 1960. The union between the blond, blue-eyed beauty and the African-American/Puerto Rican entertainer infuriated much of the nation and technically violated laws against interracial marriage in thirty-one states. The relationship was so controversial, Sammy waited until after the presidential election to marry, so as not to interfere with the candidacy of John F. Kennedy, whom Sammy had openly supported.

  But Sammy’s consideration for Kennedy was cruelly dismissed when Sammy and May were disinvited from the newly elected president’s inaugural celebrations for fear their marriage would anger his Southern supporters. Sammy was devastated. He had once again broken a color barrier, yet his thoughtfulness and courageousness went unrewarded, even by a liberal Catholic president he vigorously supported through numerous performances and considered a friend.

  May converted to Judaism, gave up her acting career, and became a stay-at-home mom. She gave birth to Tracey in 1961 and later adopted Mark and Jeff. The family lived in New York during Sammy’s run on Broadway in Golden Boy, and they later moved to Beverly Hills after the show closed. But Sammy began to tour again and he was unable to remain faithful to May. By 1968, the marriage was long over. Sammy’s carousing, particularly with Lola Falana, and his refusal to spend any time with his family left May with no choice. Her divorce filing cited the lack of a family life and his neglect of Tracey, Mark, and Jeff. Despite the divorce, May declined several marriage proposals from various suitors. She preferred instead to remain alone while quietly raising her children in Lake Tahoe.

  When Sonny arrived for his introduction, May offered a friendly greeting. They spoke briefly about Sammy and his life. At sixty-three, May remained attractive and appeared warm and genuine. She was a devoted mother who was at peace with her decision to give up her show business career. And when she spoke of Sammy, it wasn’t bitter or derogatory. Instead, May remembered a gentle, generous, and trusting man.

  “You know I wish only good things for Altovise,” said May, her distinct accent punctuating each word. “We all know how tragic this has been, for everyone. I hope you are successful.”

  Sonny drew an immediate respect and admiration for May, who was by far one of the nicer people he had met since taking Altovise on as a client. May ended their meeting the way she began, with a smile, and when she left, Sonny’s thoughts turned to Sammy, and all Sonny could do was shake his head and think to himself, “Sammy, how stupid could you have been to give up a woman like May Britt.”

  When Altovise heard that the UPS truck had finally arrived, she rushed over from her apartment and tore into the boxes like a child opening gifts on Christmas morning. She pulled out the furs, including a full-length spotted fox, a full-length white mink with exotic trim, another white mink trimmed with white fox, a full-length red fox, a Stone Martin full-length coat, a mahogany mink jacket, a beaver jacket, fox bedspread, and chinchilla coat. In addition, there were several pairs of pants, shirts, and jackets. The boxes and their contents were valued at $75,000, and with each fur came a story behind it, of some gala event in which Sammy and Altovise made grand entrances dressed head to toe in fur. Altovise ignored their poor condition and wrapped one around herself, lifting her arm to her nose, searching for a familiar scent. There was none. Sonny later brought the furs to Anthony Akoury, a local furrier who owned a small corner store on Main Street in nearby Stroudsburg. There, the furs were cleaned, reconditioned, and placed inside a vault. Sonny wished he could fix Altovise just as easily.

  While initially relishing the challenges of her new life, Altovise had once again displayed troubling signs in recent months. At work she carried a cup, and customers complained they could smell the alcohol. During her brief tenure there, Altovise had earned the respect of the owners—so much so they entrusted her with the keys to open in the morning and close at night. It was a responsibility Altovise had never experienced in her life. She had always depended on others, yet here people depended on her. But it wasn’t enough to keep Altovise from drinking, and she eventually lost her job.

  Ann told Sonny that she drove Altovise to a visit with the doctor, but Altovise was drunk and along the way threw up all over herself. She blamed it on a can of soda. Calvin and Sonny later found a water bottle in Altovise’s apartment, filled with vodka. Calvin called Alina Lodge and told them she had relapsed. Alina officials suggested an immediate intervention. Calvin, Ann, and several staff members from Alina met Altovise at her apartment and forced her to go to the Clear Brook Manor forty-five minutes away, in Wilkes-Barre. Like Alina Lodge, Clear Brook treated alcohol and chemical dependency and it would serve as a short-term respite before she would be transferred back to Alina Lodge.

  Altovise’s relapse and Sonny’s inability thus far to complete the deal with the IRS were personal blows. He spent over two years trying to resolve and restore Sammy’s estate while at the same time bring his widow back from what had been a near-death experience. But now, he wondered if a happy ending was even possible. To make matters more complicated, Tracey Davis released a book about her father.

  Two years had passed since the meeting in Los Angeles where Sonny and Altovise had the showdown with Tracey and Bob Finkelstein. Sonny’s firm “no” to Tracey’s request to transfer Altovise’s rights to Sammy’s estate in 1994 sent Tracey into a tizzy. She warned him that someday Altovise would do to him what she did to so many others. Tracey also promised to do anything in her power to keep her father’s name in the public eye, and she decided to strike out on her own with a book titled Sammy Davis Jr.: My Father.

  Tracey had never come to terms with her father’s life, or death, and the 262-page memoir was a painful retelling of a relationship that never existed with a father she never knew. Tracey painted her father as absent and uncaring, a man who ignored his children throughout much of their lives. She credited her mother, May, for keeping the children together and away from Beverly Hills. May even bought a four-bedroom home in Lake Tahoe for $73,000, with her own money, only a block away from the lake.

  Sammy visited only when he performed in nearby Reno or Las Vegas. Christmas and Hanukkah and birthdays would come and go year after year without a visit or even a phone call, the only sign of recognition being a card and cash, w
hich often arrived days late.

  On the rare occasion when Sammy did call, and promised to visit, Tracey told him to forget it.

  “Why, you don’t really care. Why come?”

  Sammy didn’t argue.

  The children attended George Whittell High School and were among the few minority children in the school of three hundred students. The Davis children were also among the few Jewish children in the area. During the holidays May always insisted the children have a Christmas tree to go with a menorah to celebrate Hanukkah. And when Mark and Jeff came of age, they each had their bar mitzvah, which was one of the few events Sammy made time for. But his late arrival for Tracey’s high school graduation caused a twenty-minute delay, and he didn’t show up at all for her college graduation from California State University at Northridge, where she studied journalism and communications. Tracey was the first Davis to receive a college degree, but two days before her big day, Sammy called from New York to ask if she really wanted him there. If not, he’d prefer to save the expense of chartering a plane.

  Tracey was devastated. What father, she thought, would even ask that question? There are few bigger days in a child’s life, but Sammy considered it irrelevant and dismissed it just like he dismissed everything else about his children. May tried to talk Tracey into attending the ceremony anyway, but to no avail, as Tracey raged, became depressed, and decided to stay home.

  Despite Sammy’s affairs and their divorce, May never spoke ill of her ex-husband. But she didn’t try to sugarcoat his actions to his children, and she let them make up their own minds about their father, which were decidedly negative. It wasn’t until late in Sammy’s life, Tracey wrote, that he finally made an effort to connect with his only daughter. He even gave her away at her 1988 wedding, and they continued to talk right till the end. But two years did not make up for a lost lifetime, and there was no way to mask the simple fact that Tracey really didn’t know her father. She did, on the other hand, have some insight into Altovise, whom she described as an alcoholic, egocentric, gold-digging witch, who had paraded around Hollywood as a star and treated Sammy’s children with disdain.

  Sonny tried to reconcile Tracey’s allegations with what he had observed, yet he still wasn’t convinced that Altovise was as awful as she had been portrayed. The nasty allegations aside, Sonny feared the controversial book would draw an option from an interested producer or film company, which would end any potential plans he had to sell Sammy’s film rights once the tax debt was settled. Sonny had, from his own experiences with Tracey and Mark, privately concluded they had a legitimate grievance in claiming a right to their father’s estate. They were, after all, his children, and Sonny was empathetic to their plight. But Sonny’s commitment was not to Sammy’s children but to Altovise, so he sent another letter to the IRS, in which he copied Calvin, and said that Tracey’s new book combined with the delay in finalizing the agreement could very well shut Altovise out of potential deals, particularly relating to film. Altovise’s future ability to generate income from the rights she may receive from the estate, said Sonny, was tenuous.

  Altovise’s stay at Clear Brook ended in September 1996, and she was readmitted to Alina Lodge and, as during her previous visit there, the few weeks of sobriety led to some clear thinking. So Sonny and Calvin visited with her with news that the IRS deal was still at an impasse with no word yet on whether the government would accept the new amount. Even if it did, Sonny said he didn’t have the money. The Piaget gift was down to $100,000, and combined with the initial payment of $105,000, they were still short over $150,000. They needed to find more money.

  Altovise didn’t want to talk about the settlement. A nurse told her that Sammy was on television the night before, in a movie called One More Time, which aired on cable. It was an old movie from 1970, but Sammy sightings were very few, and the mere mention that he was seen on national television brought a burst of excitement. Sonny returned to the subject matter at hand. Altovise suggested reaching out to Marlo Thomas, Eddie Murphy, and Bob Hope, from whom Altovise previously borrowed $10,000. Sonny didn’t hold out much hope for any more celebrity loans. Calvin shrugged his shoulders and shook his head from side to side. Altovise owed enough people in Hollywood, and it was clear, at least to Calvin, that well had run dry. Altovise had another thought. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a letter.

  “What’s this?” said Sonny.

  “You’re going out to California next week to talk to the IRS again, right? I wrote you a letter with an idea.”

  Sonny took the letter and quickly read through it.

  Altovise wanted Sonny to fly to San Francisco to meet with Bill Choulos. Sonny remembered the name from his files. He was an attorney from San Francisco who represented Sammy and Altovise on several unknown matters, and he was the first attorney Altovise turned to after Sammy died.

  When he finished reading the letter, Sonny looked up at Altovise.

  “Choulos has Sammy’s eye?”

  Altovise wrote in the letter that after Sammy’s funeral she entrusted Choulos with his “prosthesis.” She couldn’t give it to Shirley, or Sammy’s children. Altovise suggested selling the eye to raise money to help pay the IRS debt.

  “He’s a lawyer, right?” said Sonny.

  Altovise didn’t respond. Her disposition suddenly changed, as reality set in. Only it wasn’t the reality of the world learning that she wanted to sell the eye. It was something far more ominous.

  Sammy had known Bill Choulos for years. His real name was Vasilios Choulos and he was a powerful attorney who gained fame for representing prominent counterculture figures during the 1960s, including Lenny Bruce, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dr. Timothy Leary.

  Choulos also represented another high-profile client, Jack Ruby.

  Ruby was the Texas nightclub owner who shot Lee Harvey Oswald in November 1963 as Oswald was being transferred to the Dallas County prison following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A stunned nation, grieving over the sudden and tragic loss of its president, watched in horror on live television as Ruby lunged, gun in hand, toward Oswald, who fell, mortally wounded. Ruby’s alleged mob connections drew cries of a conspiracy, and it was Choulos who immediately flew down to Dallas with famed attorney Melvin Belli to take on the Ruby defense, pro bono.

  The flamboyant Belli was the lead attorney when the case went to trial in 1964, but even Belli couldn’t argue Ruby’s guilt and he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The conviction was overturned in 1966, but before Ruby could be given a new trial, he was transferred to a prison hospital, where he died in January 1967 of lung cancer.

  Choulos was also involved in the brazen escape of a suspected CIA operative from a Mexican prison. Choulos flew aboard a Bell helicopter that suddenly appeared over Mexico City’s Santa Maria Acatitla prison in 1971. Inmates were inside, watching a movie, while curious guards noticed that the helicopter appeared to be similar in design and color to the one used by the Mexican attorney general. Believing it was a surprise visit, many of the guards stood at attention. But as the copter set down in the middle of the prison yard, two prisoners ran out of Cell Block 10 and boarded the copter, which quickly took off. The escapees were Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a Venezuelan counterfeiter, and Joel David Kaplan, who had been convicted in 1962 for murdering his business partner, Louis Vidal Jr. Vidal was involved in drugs and gunrunning, while Kaplan was a member of a prestigious family that made its fortune in the 1920s selling molasses during Prohibition. Kaplan’s uncle, Jacob M. Kaplan, had formed a fund in his name in 1945 for public and private grants. But the J. M. Kaplan Fund, according to a 1964 congressional investigation, served as a conduit for CIA money to Latin America, and Mexican authorities claimed Joel David Kaplan was a CIA agent whose escape was facilitated by agency officials.

  Even within the confines of an alcoholic treatment center, Altovise could see clearly that Sammy knew people she did not want to discuss or even acknowledge, and chief among t
hem was Bill Choulos.

  “You know what, you’re right. Let’s leave this alone,” she said. “I need to get back to my room. I’m not feeling well.”

  The drive back to Pennsylvania was quiet. Neither Sonny nor Calvin had much to say. But as they approached the Delaware Water Gap, Calvin decided it was time to tell Sonny about his startling conversation with Altovise the previous winter, when she relayed the intimate, and shocking, details of her troubled marriage.

  Sonny couldn’t understand the psychology behind subjecting a wife to such degradation and humiliation. Sammy was always portrayed as gentle, trusting, and generous, yet his cruel treatment of Altovise, as described by Calvin, went contrary to common decency, even if she was a willing partner. Sonny didn’t have an answer, but whatever the explanation might be, for a moment, he wished he had never met Altovise.

  Sonny returned to Los Angeles for another meeting with the IRS on October 28, 1996. He had written the week before, asking for the meeting to finally agree to terms of the settlement. When he arrived, the IRS asked for additional documents, including Sammy and Altovise’s 1983 taxes. Sonny was miffed. The issues at hand included settlement of the outstanding tax bill along with submissions for Altovise’s returns from 1991 through 1995. He had no idea why the IRS had a sudden interest in 1983, and their agent Daryl Frerking wouldn’t discuss it. The latest wrinkle was yet another irritant in a long, drawn-out process. When Sonny returned to Pennsylvania, there was an urgent message waiting for him from Ann Hoehne.