Fortunately, I found Peter Neubauer, a Freudian so respected in his field, with so many distinguished affiliations, that I could rest assured he was, at least, not some fraud or FBI informant. Peter was old-school, an Austrian Jew who, like Freud, had received his medical training at the University of Vienna. He’d fled the Nazis (like Freud), eventually coming to New York to join the staff at Bellevue Hospital while building a private practice. More important than these impeccable credentials, Peter was wise and warm, perhaps the most empathetic person I’ve ever met. I walked into his office as a patient deeply wounded by poverty, as a thirty-year-old black man riding a wave of enormous and confounding popularity, fame, and wealth, as a political activist struggling to integrate my activism with my professional and personal lives, and haunted, as a father, by the fear that I would fail my children as my father had failed me. I was one very intense patient—an angry and suspicious one at that—and after my painful experience with the Kennedys, it took me a long time to trust Peter deeply enough to let the transference process begin again. But that time passed, and I did come to trust him, and for the next fifty years, I remained his patient, sometimes coming to three or four sessions a week, other times, while on tour, perhaps, letting weeks or months go by between visits. I came not only to trust Peter, but to regard him as in a sense my best friend—a man I loved dearly, whose passing, when it came in 2008, left me truly devastated.
It was Peter who asked to meet my mother, and told me afterward how much he admired her indomitable spirit. But it was also Peter who gently asked how old I had been when my mother had left Dennis in my care. I came to think Peter knew my mother better than I did, and so when I got the idea to move her to L.A., around the time Island in the Sun was released, I felt pleased that Peter approved.
Until then, my mother had refused to let me move her to a better apartment, with her husband, Bill Wright, and their two children. She did accept regular checks, but all the while bemoaned her lot. New York was too cold or too hot, her husband was a no-account, and now my brother, Dennis, was in California, stationed at Camp Pendleton as a U.S. Marine, so she never got to see him. Why not move to the West Coast, then? I suggested. I could see she was intrigued, despite her best effort to hide it, so on my next trip to L.A. I bought her a nice four-bedroom house on Victoria Avenue, close to the Ambassador Hotel and its Cocoanut Grove nightclub, now a fixture on my circuit. I had the place furnished and put TV sets in every room and a new car in the driveway. I didn’t tell her the house and car were hers; I just flew the family out to L.A., installed them in the house, and told them to enjoy a month’s vacation and see how they liked it. When my mother admitted grudgingly that it was rather nice, I had her New York furniture boxed and shipped out there, and arranged to be at the house myself when it arrived. “Welcome home!” I told her. “This is your house.”
My mother was bewildered, but not Bill Wright. He loved it. Bill found handyman work in the neighborhood, and Millie seemed to settle into the paradise that was L.A. in the late 1950s.
I thought I’d made my mother happy at last.
I should have known better.
While I was in L.A., I talked to producers about possible films—not just as Harry Belafonte, but as the principal of my newly formed independent film company, HarBel Productions. To my delight, United Artists pledged some serious money for me to commission scripts and work with writers—on subjects and themes of my choosing. Of course UA might decide not to produce what I came up with, but I liked the way this new approach felt. We were partners in business, with mutual respect and lawyers on both sides of the table. That fall, The New York Times wrote that HarBel “could turn out to be one of the most important developments in the American Negro’s long and drawn-out struggle for representation on the nation’s movie screens.”
In late September, I made my first deal: I would work with independent producer Sol C. Siegel on a film we were calling End of the World, based on a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel called The Purple Cloud, published in 1901 by British writer M. P. Shiel. When MGM sent me the script, I was stunned. Clearly it was written for three white characters: two men and the woman they fight over as the three survivors of a nuclear blast. To offer the role to me seemed a radical move for a Hollywood studio. For me it was a romantic lead, and if the female role went to a white actress, as MGM assured us it would, I would have another chance to contribute to the national conversation on race.
Hopefully, this time with a kissing scene, too.
By now, heading up from L.A. to Vegas felt almost like coming home. The Riviera treated me like royalty. I’d settle into the hotel’s largest suite, overlooking the Strip and the desert beyond, do my two shows, then stroll into the casino, still wearing my red satin toreador’s shirt, tight black pants, and mohair jacket. I had a formal, even chilly demeanor that daunted most of the fans who approached me. “Hi, Harry,” they’d begin, but when they felt that distance I projected, they’d start to stammer and call me “Mr. Belafonte” instead. I wasn’t being arrogant; I was protecting myself. As a black star performer in white America, I never knew what was coming at me next. Earlier in my career, I’d heard some doozies. A drunk white southern woman approached me on the casino floor, wrapped her arms around me, and said, “I have to tell you, Mr. Belafonte, having met you and heard you sing tonight, you’ve made me look at coons in a whole new way.” These things happened! I was always polite—I’d shake any stranger’s outstretched hand and say hello—but nearly everyone got the message: Don’t patronize me. Everyone, that is, except Bruce the pit boss.
Bruce was a bulldog of a guy who radiated raw physical power, with slicked-back hair, a flat, sullen face, massive shoulders, and big, restless hands, through whose heavy fingers poker chips flew in an oddly menacing manner, as if he were readying for a fistfight. “Hello, big man,” he’d say as I went by. “When you gonna give us a play?” I knew attitude when I heard it. But what could I do? Complain to the management that the pit boss was calling me “big man”?
Every night, I’d hear the same subtle taunt from Bruce as I walked by. “Hello, big man …” Finally, after the last show of my last night, I stopped at his table. My first month at the Riviera had just earned me about $200,000. “Okay,” I told Bruce. “I’m in for a thousand.”
The game was blackjack, which in those days was played with one deck; not until later would the Vegas casinos start using shoes to prevent brainy players from calculating the odds, as cards got played, of hitting a 20 or 21. I wasn’t a card-counter, but I’d played my share of blackjack in the navy. I’d also played tonk, a fast game similar to gin rummy, and poker. I’d played for money, sometimes for hundreds of dollars a pot. But in those games, I’d kept to my limit—the memory of losing Aunt Liz’s ten dollars to that three-card-monte dealer in Harlem was still all too vivid—so when I lost what I had, I called it a night. More often than not, I won.
That night, my first night ever gambling in Vegas, I started winning, to Bruce’s obvious displeasure. And then I kept winning. As my chips accumulated, I started playing multiple squares—three or four with each hand. A crowd began to gather as Bruce grimly watched the cards being dealt into the night. By 4 a.m. I had $40,000 in chips. That was when Julie and a couple of friends came over to tell me I had to go. “Come on, Harry, we’ve got a plane to catch.” So I had my gate—my excuse to leave. Another dealer came over to take my chips to the cashier’s window as Bruce stood in sullen silence. Back came stacks of bills, more cold cash, by far, than I’d ever held in my hands. Holding that cash felt good. Really good. Too good.
Coolly, I peeled off $1,000 and handed it to the dealer. Then I turned to Bruce, and with my free hand, flipped him a $100 chip. Bruce acted reflexively, catching the chip in one of his meaty hands before he could think. I flashed him a big grin. “That’s for you, big man.”
As we headed out to the airport with cash-stuffed cases, the exhilaration of that score—and my parting line to Bruce—went through me like
an electric charge. I had won. I had won. But in winning, I had reawakened an addiction. Like caffeine, like cocaine, the high from that night had seeped into my veins. I couldn’t wait to get back for more.
Vegas was at the start of its golden era—two decades or more of high rollers and top entertainers. Loyalty was part of what made the place work. I stayed loyal to the Riviera, as did a weirdly eclectic group: Noël Coward for one, Tallulah Bankhead for another … and Marlene Dietrich! Other stars were loyal to other resorts: Jack Benny, for example, always played the Sahara. As for the Sands, it was Dean Martin’s place, and even more so, Frank Sinatra’s.
My friendship with Frank had begun in the formal way that friendships did among Vegas entertainers: by attending each other’s shows. I went up to his suite afterward; he came to mine. He was always courteous, even deferential, but we both knew I wasn’t Rat Pack material. When I walked into his suite, there might be half a dozen guys drinking and joshing around: Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, a few high rollers who might or might not be gangsters, also a few musicians and, more often than not, Sammy Davis, Jr. As soon as I came through that door, I felt the mood change. Everyone toned down and straightened up. I felt like the high school principal making a surprise visit to a popular teacher’s class. The students and that teacher had a camaraderie that I’d just interrupted. Suddenly everyone was on their best behavior. Both the teacher and the class were pleased to see me, but maybe happier to see me go.
The elephant in the room was race. With his black musicians, Frank had an easy, bantering manner. He was always the boss, but he kidded around, and his band members kidded back—just so much, of course, and not any further. Frank wasn’t a racist—far from it—but some of those jokes did touch on race. Add Sammy to the mix, and suddenly the banter took on a new edge. It was Sammy who did that, making fun of himself, playing the clown in Frank’s court—the clown in blackface. He was the one who’d say he was not only short and ugly but black—and Jewish. Now you might hear a joke, from someone in the room, about how were they going to find Sammy in the parking lot after the show unless he flashed a grin? And maybe someone would be headed down to the casino and on his way out rub Sammy’s head for luck.
Only then I’d walk in. And so the mood would settle.
We had a lot in common, Sammy and I. We were about the same age. We’d both made it on raw talent and no training; neither of us knew how to read music. Both of us had broken through in 1951, I at the Village Vanguard in New York, Sammy at Ciro’s in L.A. We’d started performing in Vegas at about the same time, too, both of us playing to white audiences, because that was who came to Vegas. For that matter, neither of us ever sang to black audiences anywhere we played; as high-end entertainers, we played to the people who could afford the tickets, and they were, with rare exceptions, white. How could we do otherwise, when the choice was taking maybe $5,000 a week to play the Apollo or taking $25,000 to $50,000 for a week in Vegas? Only through the mass medium of television did we reach black audiences, and with television, of course, the connection was impossible to measure.
But there the similarities ended. Sammy, with his vaudeville roots, had learned to shuck and jive from an early age, and he just couldn’t seem to drop the act, even as a star in Vegas. Everything about him onstage oozed deference and accommodation. Like Mr. Bojangles, he was, at heart, the poor black entertainer, desperate to please his white overseers. Offstage he had his babes and his booze, but always kept this out of the white venues he played. When he played the Frontier in Vegas, he went along with staying in the colored-only rooming house at the edge of town, and, on order of the management, stayed out of the Frontier’s restaurants and casino. He let himself be governed by the same Jim Crow treatment I’d been met with on my first gig at the Thunderbird and vowed never to accept again.
Sammy had broken color barriers in Vegas, no doubt about it. Each next resort that took a black headline act meant another barrier down. But here, too, there was a difference. I’d broken barriers on my own. Sammy had Frank. It was Frank who’d made Sammy legit to a larger audience, then brought him into the Rat Pack, pushing his star that much higher. Sammy needed Frank not just for his career, but for his entire sense of self-worth. To have Frank include him as one of the Pack was the single greatest honor of his life. And so Sammy, lifelong song-and-dance man that he was, lived to keep the master entertained. He constantly demeaned himself, breaking into his little-black-boy routine. His distress at his blackness, his looks, was forever at play.
By the only yardstick that mattered in Vegas, Sammy was doing better than me; he got paid a bit more by the week. And he had an enormous gift. I couldn’t begin to dance like Sammy; I never tried. But he felt threatened by me, no doubt about it. No other black performer had challenged his turf the way I did, playing the Copa and the Waldorf and the Cocoanut Grove as a solo act, then doing the same in Vegas. All this was an attack on his uniqueness. No other black performer had had access to Sinatra and the Rat Pack before, either. Not Nat King Cole or Billy Eckstine or Louis Armstrong. The fact that I could mix in his circle and still keep my dignity as a black man—that ate away at him.
At the same time, Sammy and I were friends. The brotherhood in Vegas was pretty small, after all. Instinctively, its members supported one another. When he was with Frank, I suspect that Sammy made fun at my expense—how pompous or grand I was. In public he embraced me: “My greatest friend, in whose presence I am humbled.” So I can’t say I was entirely surprised when he asked me to serve as best man at the wedding he’d scheduled in a hurry, to get out from the contract on his life put out by Harry Cohn and the mob.
Was it really Harry Cohn, the volatile Columbia studio chief, who ordered that hit? I can’t prove it, but Sammy sure thought he had. Cohn was furious that Sammy had embarked on a torrid romance with Kim Novak, one of Columbia’s top contract stars. Cohn felt that Novak’s box-office appeal would be severely tarnished if her secret romance with Sammy became known. When the lovebirds insisted on staging more trysts in some of the world’s most expensive hotels, Cohn supposedly called one of his many mob connections and sent out the word that Sammy was to be severely punished. Or so Sammy believed. Sammy had a lot of gambling debts, too, and that might have had something to do with it. All I know is that when he sought me out at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, he was truly terrified.
We drove to the Jersey shore together—I don’t remember why, exactly, but I remember being in the backseat with him as we rolled along the waterfront, just like in the movie—and Sammy told me how much in debt he was to the mob, and how vulnerable to Cohn. Okay, I told him, here’s what we’ll do. Sammy’s record contract was nearly up; I’d just started a record label under Belafonte Enterprises. I would advance him a couple of hundred thousand dollars to pay off some of his markers and give him some breathing room. He would record on my label, and we would use the proceeds to pay back those loans over time. In the car, he told me how touched he was by my offer, that I was going to the plate for him. I remember him saying, “I only have one eye left. They’re not going to get the other one.” But nothing ever came of the idea. Later, I got word back that Sammy had thought it rather presumptuous of me to think I could step into his life and play that much of a role, have that much power over him.
What Sammy feared, more than anything else, was that the mob would go after his good eye. Three years before, he’d lost one of his eyes in a horrific—and bizarre—car accident en route from Vegas to L.A. At the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac, Sammy had driven into a multicar collision that threw him forward. Unfortunately, that particular make of Cadillac had a large bullet-shaped cone protruding from the middle of the steering wheel—a jazzy new design touch. The cone went directly into Sammy’s left eye, destroying it and leaving it dangling on his cheek. He was lucky to be alive; when he recovered, he acquired a glass eye. That day in the car, he told me he’d been threatened directly: Cohn’s thugs would take out his other eye—and break his knees—if he didn�
�t offer convincing proof that his romance with Novak was over. Convincing proof meant more than telling Cohn the two were through. Sammy was going to have to get married, right away, to someone else, and make the press buy it as legit. “You gotta do this for me,” Sammy pleaded. “If you’re there, that’ll validate it.”
Inwardly, I felt put off by the request. Staging a fake marriage, with a real minister and real vows, violated some ethic I hadn’t known I had. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have Frank do it?” I asked.
“No, man, it’s got to be you.”
Sammy kept at me, pointing out, among other reasons, that I knew how terrifying it was to lose an eye, let alone two. That was true; not long before, I’d undergone two operations to fix a retinal detachment in my right eye, the one I’d injured as a child in Jamaica with my grandma Jane’s scissors. I had hardly any vision in that eye as it was, but a little was better than none, which was what I was facing before those two operations. For nearly a month after, I’d had to wear bandages on both eyes when I was at home, then wear special corrective eyeglasses to train my right eye to track with the left one again. “Okay, man,” I said with a sigh, “I’ll play the part.” Only later did I learn Sammy had asked Frank first, but Frank had begged off, saying his efforts would be better spent trying to get the contract hit canceled.
One day in January 1958, an awkward group convened in the Emerald Room of the Sands Hotel in Vegas. The bride was one Loray White, a gorgeous black singer who performed at the Silver Slipper, a small place on the Strip. Sammy had gone out with her once or twice, and guessed, correctly, that she’d be game for this charade. What he didn’t anticipate was that Loray, who had a serious crush on him, would take the offer seriously, even after being advised of the terms: $10,000 and a house in return for marrying him and appearing in public as his wife for a year. Art Silber, Jr., Sammy’s longtime manager, later related in his vivid memoir of life with Sammy, Me and My Shadow, that Loray broke into tears when she heard the proposition. “Sammy, don’t you know I’ve loved you for years?” Loray said. “You don’t have to make a business deal with me. I know we could make this work.” When Sammy told her he was in love with someone else, and there would be no intimacy in this “marriage,” Loray gave him a radiant smile through her tears. “If that’s the only way I can get you, I’ll take it.”
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