Sonny shook his head in agreement and smiled slightly.
“Yeah, maybe, Judge. Maybe.”
The Judge turned to leave but stopped.
“Oh, I forgot. I came here for a reason. I was watching TV. They just announced that Frank Sinatra died.”
Sonny reached Altovise at her mother’s home in Queens the following morning. She’d already heard the news and was considering attending the funeral in Los Angeles. Sonny thought it was a good idea and said he’d have Ann make the flight and hotel reservations. Altovise told Sonny she hadn’t been feeling well in recent days and wasn’t sure if she could travel, but at Sonny’s urging she agreed to go. Sonny sent a condolence card to the Sinatra family on behalf of the Sammy Davis Jr. estate and then called Mort Viner to check funeral arrangements. Sonny was also curious to know if Frank’s death would have any effect on their ongoing Rat Pack business.
Mort laughed.
“Nothing stopping this engine, kid,” Mort said.
Frank Sinatra enjoyed a spectacular career, recording nearly two thousand songs over sixty years. Fifty-one of his albums broke the Top Forty Billboard charts, more than any other artist, including Elvis. A Frank Sinatra song could be found on the charts for thirty consecutive years, from 1965 to 1995, which was another record. Frank also had dozens of film credits, a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award won in 1954 for his role as Pvt. Maggio in From Here to Eternity, nine Grammys, and a Medal of Freedom in 1994—the highest civilian award in the United States. Sinatra was also an astute businessman who built Reprise Records and earned countless millions from smart investments in various ventures, from real estate to gaming.
Mort said that Frank Sinatra was an ongoing concern that ranked with the very best Fortune 500 companies, an enterprise that wouldn’t stop for one second even with the death of its namesake. Bob Finkelstein, said Mort, planned everything down to the single dollar, and Frank Sinatra in death would be just as lucrative as Frank Sinatra in life.
Sonny thought Frank was brilliant.
“He was a hothead,” said Mort. “An arrogant control freak. Dean loved him, but he’d never let him get away with any shit. And your guy? Poor Sammy just couldn’t say no to Frank.”
Sonny told Mort that Altovise was flying out for the funeral, and Mort said he’d keep an eye on her. But the following day, Altovise appeared for an interview on the CBS Saturday Morning Show, and she was incoherent, offering incomprehensible answers to basic questions centering on the relationship between Frank and Sammy. When asked what she thought brought Sammy and Frank together, Altovise talked about how “wonderful it was to reach for the stars.”
And when asked what, if anything, Sammy would say if he were alive to eulogize Frank, her answer was even more nonsensical.
“You may be my leader, but don’t hit me anymore.”
It was a terrible interview, but there wasn’t anything Sonny could do but make sure she boarded her flight for Los Angeles.
The boxes were laid out in no apparent order throughout the room, and Sonny carefully flipped through one of the many containing the estate and other records he received months earlier from Herb Sturman. Sonny had been down this road before, having searched through all the documentation. He didn’t recall any reference to Sammy’s master recordings, but he was desperate. And with no other clues and nowhere else to go, he decided to once again rely on his previous experience more than a decade earlier, when he searched for three years through 7 million documents. Here, with Sammy’s records, he only had to deal with thousands.
He piled the boxes one by one inside a vacant room at the Hillside and slowly and carefully read through each piece of paper, interrupted only by phone calls from a frantic Ron Weisner. Day turned to night and back to day, and the cycle continued again and again with nothing, not a single reference to any master recordings whatsoever. Weary and depressed, Sonny pulled a folder labeled TRANSAMERICAN from the next-to-last box and pulled out a single pink sheet of paper, which said BEKINS MOVING & STORAGE on top. Below, under GOODS RECEIVED, was handwritten: SYNI. It was some kind of invoice and it was dated 1973. Sonny picked up the phone, called the California operator, and asked for the number for Bekins in Los Angeles.
He dialed the number, and when the call was answered, Sonny asked if, by chance, Bekins might have something left over from the 1970s?
“I doubt it,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “What are you looking for?”
“Do you have anything there for SYNI?” said Sonny.
“Hold on a minute.”
Sonny heard what sounded like the ruffling of papers. Then the voice returned. “No, we don’t.”
“How about Transamerican?” said Sonny.
The clerk put the phone down and looked through the papers again before picking up.
“Yeah, I think we do. It’s from really long ago, but I think we still have it in one of our other storage facilities. I’m going to have to get back to you.”
Sonny left his name and number, and waited.
More than four hundred friends and relatives bid a tearful farewell to Frank Sinatra on May 20, 1998. Tony Curtis, Joey Bishop, Lee Iacocca, Tom Selleck, Red Buttons, Larry King, Jack Lemmon, and Quincy Jones were among the mourners. Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck spoke, as did Frank Sinatra Jr., who took umbrage at the longstanding controversy over his father’s alleged mob ties and announced that President Clinton ordered that the casket be buried draped in an American flag. Honorary pallbearers included Tony Bennett, Ernest Borgnine, Wayne Newton, Steve Lawrence, Eliot Weisman, and Don Rickles.
Mia Farrow and Liza Minnelli both sobbed as they filed out of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Sonny saw snippets of the funeral on CNN. He thought it looked like a tribute to royalty. His mind was elsewhere, patiently awaiting word from Bekins. In the interim he helped his parents prepare for the upcoming weekend, which promised a full house. In the midst of cleaning chickens and inspecting rooms, he received an urgent call from California. It was the Bekins clerk, and he had good news. Two large storage containers belonging to Transamerican Entertainment had been located at one of their suburban storage facilities. The account had been opened under the name of SYNI in 1973, when four file cabinets, contents unknown, were stored.
“Who was paying for it?” said Sonny.
“No one. It’s been delinquent for a while.”
Sonny couldn’t believe his luck. What storage facility, he asked himself, would keep something that hadn’t been paid for? Especially when the unknown items in question belonged to Sammy Davis Jr.
The clerk said sixty-two more items were added to the storage lot in April 1977. The inbound inventory described the contents as “trunk,” “case,” “dish ctn,” “trans file,” and “cartons.” All the items were classified as PBO, which indicated they were prepackaged by the owner, and the contents unknown to Bekins. The property was relocated by Bekins to another warehouse facility in 1979. In January 1982, the corporate name of the storage container was officially changed from SYNI to TRANSAMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT. In July 1985 five more cartons of unknown, prepacked items were deposited into what were now two large containers. At different times, particularly during the late 1980s, various people were authorized to move items in and out of the containers. But in November 1989 the account was marked delinquent, because the most recent bill, for $1,077.16, had gone unpaid.
Shirley Rhodes, representing herself as president of Transamerican, informed Bekins that due to Sammy’s unfortunate illness, the account could not be settled. Under the terms of its contract, Bekins had the right to sell the goods at auction. Instead, knowing who owned the property, they kept the containers in storage, where they gathered dust for nearly ten years. No one had any idea what was inside the containers, but the storage bill now exceeded $18,000, and for Sonny to gain access, he had to prove Altovise had ownership by faxing a copy of the Compromise of Claim and Indemnification Agreement and negotiating a compromise settlement of $5,000.
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p; On June 5, 1998, Sonny faxed the paperwork and wired the money, along with a promise of another $3,500 in the event there were any valuable items inside. Three days later, he received a fax from Bekins, acknowledging receipt of the paperwork and money. All Bekins needed was advance notice prior to inspection to move the containers from their current location to Bekins’ suburban Carson, California, warehouse. Two days later, on June 10, Sonny arrived in Los Angeles and rushed there from the airport. When he arrived at Bekins, he was led to the middle of the vast warehouse, where he stood before two large metal containers, positioned next to each other, each roughly eight feet high and ten feet wide. Each was covered in a thin layer of dust and marked with a label: TRANSAMERICAN.
Sonny watched nervously as a Bekins employee used a bolt cutter to slice through the lock of one container. But the double doors wouldn’t open. A crowbar was used, and Sonny watched as the doors slowly were pried open, with a sound like a squeaking sonnet, while white light bathed the containers and illuminated the dust particles. Once the doors were opened, Sonny squinted, but he couldn’t see past the falling dust. He moved closer and stood in the doorway. It was musty, but Sonny could see boxes and clothes and other items lined up on each side, and he was speechless.
Inside the containers were many of Sammy’s outfits he wore onstage, and other custom clothing. There were audio and video tapes, and black leather portfolios with SDJ monogrammed in gold, which were used as scrapbooks. Some dated back to 1952 and included newspaper and magazine reviews of Sammy’s performances. Sammy kept the books himself, and he had one for the years covering Mr. Wonderful and for Porgy & Bess, and another one for the Rat Pack years of 1960–1961. Other portfolios featured stories and reviews going back to the 1950s. Each portfolio was meticulously arranged, with the story or review neatly cut from the publication and carefully glued in perfect position.
One portfolio included clippings of news stories from 1967. It began on April 22, 1967, with a clip from Where magazine, touting “Sensational Sammy Davis Jr. Highlights the Entertainment” at the Palestra in Philadelphia. A San Francisco Examiner story from May 30, 1967, was headlined: “May Britt Says Marriage Ended Her Film Career.” Sammy’s name, mentioned only once in the story, was underlined in red pencil. Sammy underlined his name in every story. And he collected anything and everything that mentioned his name or had some tie to him from dozens of newspapers and magazines throughout the United States, including the Daily Sun in Miami Beach, the Chicago Defender, the Evening Star in Washington, DC, the Cincinnati Post, and Rocky Mountain News in Denver.
Sammy also kept lyric and song sheets from performances dating back to the 1960s, along with conductors’ lists. Each sheet contained a song list for the evening’s performance, along with standbys in case Sammy didn’t feel like singing a particular song.
There were countless photos, many of Sammy performing or accompanied by some other star, such as Dean or Frank or even Jerry Lewis. Others were warm family photos of Sammy with May and their children when they lived in New York in the mid-1960s while a separate portfolio included racy photos of showgirls taken by Sammy himself. An avid photographer, Sammy took hundreds of pictures of women in various states of dress and undress, posing on couches, in beds, and in bathtubs.
It was a treasure trove of Sammy memorabilia that also included reels of recording tape, which, like everything else, were kept safely wrapped in boxes and identified by year and label.
The two containers were filled with important, historical Sammy Davis Jr. items that no one, not even the IRS, knew about. Sonny couldn’t believe his good fortune. But he was also confused. How, he thought, could this happen? This was Sammy’s legacy, a mother lode, yet it was abandoned by the very people charged with handling his affairs. People who claimed they cared for him just let it all go.
Sonny immediately asked to be taken to the office, where he called Ron Weisner. When Weisner arrived and saw the tapes, he knew what they were.
“Holy shit,” said Weisner. “The masters!”
Weisner cataloged the tapes one by one, removed them, and placed them in a separate storage facility. The following afternoon, Sonny returned to Bekins with Mark Davis.
Mark’s troubled history with his father drew great empathy from Sonny. And despite his anger, Mark made a concerted effort to help Sonny, who was grateful, and he wanted Mark to be among the first to see the previously unknown treasure he discovered.
“Looks like a bunch of shit to me,” said Mark.
But his initial bravado quickly faded as he browsed through the many items, and his hurt and anger morphed into wonderment and surprise, and within minutes Mark was like a child rummaging through Christmas presents. He read through several scrapbooks, touched the clothing, and yelled “Wow!” as he dug into the boxes containing Sammy’s photos. His father’s history was here, and it was the closest he had felt to him in years. He held one framed photo of his smiling father and wept. It was a younger Sammy, taken in the mid-1960s, and he was posed in a sea of white women. Mark caressed the frame with his fingers, and then stroked the front of the photo as tears fell from the corners of his eyes. Mark spent hours inside the containers combing through the material, placing each item carefully back in its original position.
Altovise’s arrival produced a far less emotional response. She was businesslike, and looked upon the contents like an insect inspecting its prey.
“Can we sell it?” she said.
Sonny said they found the masters, which meant the Rhino deal would go forward. And the memorabilia could, perhaps, be placed in a Sammy Davis Jr. museum, maybe in Las Vegas. Sonny said he would contact Sotheby’s to have it all appraised.
“Well, make sure we put my name on the ownership ticket,” she said.
Sonny placed Altovise’s name on the Bekins log book as the owner. He had some reservations, given that his legal bill had climbed above half a million dollars. He had the pledge agreement with Altovise, which gave him ownership and interest in Sammy’s estate in the event of nonpayment of his bill, and he could have placed his name on the contents as a coowner, but he didn’t.
CHAPTER 18
The Rhino Records contract was finally signed on August 28, 1998, and it gave Rhino all publishing rights to Sammy-owned post-1964 recordings. Ownership of many other songs, including “The Candy Man,” still remained with their respective record companies. In the case of “The Candy Man,” that was Mike Curb. But the fortunate discovery of the masters yielded other Sammy recordings, the earliest a 1949 single called “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.” There were dozens of other tracks Sammy recorded in the 1950s, many for albums under the Decca label, including “That Old Black Magic,” a 1955 single, and “The Lady Is a Tramp,” from his 1960 album I Gotta Right to Swing. Sammy’s old friend Morty Stevens conducted the orchestra for those and many of Sammy’s other early recordings.
The wealth of music found in the containers spurred Rhino to include the pre-1964 recordings. Sonny and Weisner still had to negotiate the release of Sammy recordings owned by various record companies, in order to include them in the planned box set, but with the promise of new royalties there was little resistance.
By the end of 1998, Sonny had negotiated several other deals for Sammy’s estate. Along with the Rhino and Global Icons money were checks for $20,000 for Sammy’s share of “The Summit” video, another Sinatra endeavor in which Sonny simply received a check from Eliot Weisman with no explanation other than “this is what you get.”
There was also $67,171 from Curb Records, which was an initial payment on monies due from delinquent royalties, along with smaller checks from others, including $3,500 from Coca-Cola for the use of Sammy’s image in a television commercial. Sammy’s estate received over $850,000, by far the best year Sammy Davis Jr. had, dead or alive, since the Together Again tour a decade earlier.
Expenses included a final payment of $253,000 to the IRS and $248,000 in legal bills, including a small payment to Sonny, who was finally able t
o recover some of the money owed to him for his four-year representation. Other expenses included over $50,000 for Altovise’s bills, including her rent, car, and medical insurance, and the balance sheet for the year saw the estate ahead $135,056. Sonny was more than pleased. The only monies due the IRS for each of the next five years would be 40 percent of earnings over $100,000. For 1998, that meant another payment of $14,022.
The debt was settled, and Sammy’s estate was under Altovise’s control. For 1999, Sonny estimated revenues would top $1 million due mostly to planned ventures with the estates of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin with ideas to create Rat Pack hotels and a revival of Rat Pack shows.
Sonny also incorporated in October 1998 the Sammy Davis Jr. Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit that would perpetuate Sammy’s name through donations to various charities. The foundation would appoint a board of directors, solicit start-up money, and prepare to fund-raise and produce Sammy-themed programs. The best part for Sonny was that Altovise agreed to make the foundation a family affair and sought participation from Sammy’s children. Sonny even offered Mark Davis a paid job, contingent on current projects coming to fruition. Along with the planned Broadway musical and TV mini-series, and with Sammy’s seventy-fifth birthday coming up in 2000, Sonny believed the foundation would help reestablish Sammy’s position as one of the, if not the, greatest entertainers of the twentieth century. And ever-mindful of the 40 percent payments to the IRS, Sonny envisioned deals that would accrue payments over several years, at least through 2003, at which time the IRS would be finally gone and every penny would go to Sammy’s estate.
It was a good plan. At least Sonny thought so. Altovise had different ideas. For the past year, and ignoring Sonny’s advice, she returned to the role of Mrs. Sammy Davis Jr. with a vengeance, agreeing to numerous interviews to discuss her late husband and his career while planning to resurrect her own career as a dancer and actress. But she hadn’t danced in years, and her acting “career” amounted to bit roles in 1970s television shows like CHiPs and Charlie’s Angels and several forgettable movies, among them Kingdom of the Spiders with William Shatner in 1977 and Can’t Stop the Music with Bruce Jenner and Valerie Perrine in 1980.
Deconstructing Sammy Page 22