Just before the ceremony, a friend of Kim Novak’s slipped Sammy a box with a white bow on top. Inside was a blue plaid blanket with a little silver dove pin. Sammy’s hands shook as he took it out of the box. This was the blanket that he and Kim had somehow made a symbol of their relationship. They’d made love on it, wrapped themselves up in it, and carried it with them on all of their furtive trysts. It was all Sammy could do to keep from weeping on the spot.
At the reception afterward at the Moulin Rouge, away from the press, Sammy started drinking. And then he kept drinking—Jack Daniel’s, straight—and started wailing. As he grew drunker and more belligerent, his bride grew increasingly distraught. It was a dreadful party, more a wake than a wedding, and Julie and I slipped away as soon as we could.
Whatever my presence contributed to the ruse, the press bought the story, which played all over the world. Cohn died of a heart attack the next month, whether from agitation at reading more about Novak’s love life or not, no one could say for sure. As for Loray White, she stayed on in Sammy’s life longer than the contracted year, extracting, in bitterness, a lot more from him than $10,000 and a house before walking away.
In that world capital of quickie weddings, I helped launch another truly terrible marriage that season, only this one was worse, because it involved my old friend and unrequited love Dorothy Dandridge.
Julie and our newborn, David, were with me when Dorothy came to visit us in Vegas. Dorothy was alone again, having broken off her romance with Otto after realizing he had no intention of divorcing his wife, estranged as they might be.
The first night we took her to dinner at the Riviera’s nicest restaurant, Dorothy made a major impression on the maître d’, a Greek named Jack Dennison. That was understating it; the very sight of her sent him right into orbit. This wasn’t as improbable as it might seem. At a top Vegas resort like the Riviera, the maître d’ had a lot of juice. He decided which high rollers got comped for suites and shows; of more interest to Dorothy, he helped book the talent. Dennison sent Dorothy lavish flower arrangements every day of her stay at the resort, and more when she got home. Soon he arranged for her to come perform at the Riviera for far more money than she would have commanded from a more objective booker. Having her there several weeks at a time, he was able to lay on so much devotion that she let him talk her into marrying him.
It was a disastrous choice. Dennison turned out to be pathologically abusive, the very kind of man Dorothy had sought so long to avoid after her first abusive marriage. All the flowers and flattery were just the flip side of a terrible, unquenchable jealousy. Soon he’d cut her off from all her friends, including Julie and me. Julie and I couldn’t forget that it was through us she’d met this creep. Why couldn’t she have traded on her fame to marry well, as Lena Horne had done in marrying Lennie Hayton, the most prominent conductor and arranger at MGM?
All the while, Dorothy’s career was spiraling downward. Aside from Island in the Sun, the only two movies she’d made since her Oscar-nominated role in Carmen Jones were two low-budget flops. When Samuel Goldwyn offered her the chance to play Bess in his movie adaptation of Porgy and Bess, the choice filled her with anxiety. To me, the whole Gershwin production was racially demeaning; when Goldwyn offered me Porgy, I turned him down, and advised Dorothy to do the same. Instead, she signed on, and Sidney Poitier stepped in as Porgy. (Sammy Davis, Jr., took Sporting Life, one of the supporting roles, Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll two of the others; that was about it for Hollywood’s roster of black marquee names at the time.) Just as shooting was about to start, Goldwyn changed directors, from Rouben Mamoulian to … Otto Preminger. Their romance dead and buried, Otto treated Dorothy cruelly on set, often sending her off in tears. Though she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance, the film failed when it came out in 1959, and Dorothy slipped into a serious depression, only made worse by her abusive husband.
Jack Dennison was just one of dozens of rough characters I came to know at the Riviera in that period. Most were mobbed up to some degree, but I treated them all with courtesy—unless, like Dennison, they proved undeserving of it—and nearly all, in return, treated me the same way. Of all of them, the one I liked and knew best was Gus Greenbaum, the Riviera’s manager, a very senior member of the Chicago syndicate.
Greenbaum was a killer; he’d ordered the deaths of at least two associates found to have robbed one of the syndicate’s other Vegas hotels. But to me, and to Julie, he seemed avuncular. He liked me, not only because I brought in more high rollers but because I could engage him in long conversations about Israel. Greenbaum was fascinated by me, but all the more so by Julie, who could talk politics for hours. He took to coming up to our suite every day around 6:00 p.m. just to chat. “How are things going with you two?” he’d ask.
One evening, Greenbaum came in looking rattled. He walked over to the huge bay window. “Hey, Hesh, come over here,” he said. “Hesh” is Yiddish for “Harry.” When I joined him by the window, he said, “Hey, Hesh, you see that?” At that time, the Riviera was the only high-rise building on the Strip. All I could see beyond it was desert: dancing tumbleweeds, and scrub brush, and little sandstorms in the distance. Nothing could have looked more desolate.
“The desert?” I asked. “Yeah, sure, I see it.”
“Buy it,” Greenbaum said quietly.
“Buy it,” I echoed.
“Yeah, buy it. That’s where it’s all going.”
“Only if I can partner with you,” I said, only half joking.
Greenbaum shook his head. “You don’t want to partner with me, Hesh,” he said. “Just buy it.”
Days later, the Riviera’s attorney, Harvey Silbert, came up to my room looking very depressed. “Gus has been murdered,” he said. “In Arizona. They tied him up and cut his throat, so we know it was a hit.”
It was common knowledge, Harvey told me, that Greenbaum had gotten sloppy in recent months. Drinking, drugs, womanizing, and gambling had led him to start skimming from the Riviera’s casino operations. When his bosses in Chicago had caught on, Greenbaum knew his days were numbered. He’d gone down to Phoenix with his wife on a leave of absence, hoping just to fade away. But you didn’t do that with the mob. The grim twist was that Greenbaum’s wife had had her throat slashed, too. That was unheard of in mob hits; you didn’t kill your target’s family. Harvey guessed that Greenbaum’s killers had been torturing him for information when his wife unexpectedly walked in. They’d had no choice, he theorized, but to murder her, too.
The news shook me to my boots. What I kept thinking about, over the next days, were those fateful words by the bay window: “You don’t want to partner with me.”
I would keep playing Vegas at least one month a year through the 1960s, eventually moving over to the new Caesars Palace, as would Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack. But I was cutting down on the club circuit now. I felt profoundly grateful to the rooms that had helped make my name, the shining lights of that great nightclub era: the Waldorf’s Empire Room and the Copacabana in Manhattan; the Palmer House in Chicago; the Venetian Room in San Francisco; and the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. But I’d spent the better part of a decade on that circuit without much relief. I wanted to think out my next move. I knew I wanted to dig a lot deeper with folk music. I wanted to do more, too, for social causes—not just write checks and appear at the occasional rally, but find some more profound way to make use of my fame, as Paul Robeson had done before me.
Instead of doing the usual clubs again, I launched my first tour of Europe. The one stop I hesitated to make was Berlin. Frank Sinatra had canceled plans to sing in Germany and said he wouldn’t care if the country turned into a parking lot. I understood how he felt. Any American who’d lived through World War II—and certainly any American who’d seen wartime service in Europe—had a deeply ingrained resistance to seeing Germans as anything but Nazis. My conductor and arranger, Bob DeCormier, felt even more strongly than I did. Bob had had part of his righ
t arm shot away in the Battle of the Bulge. He’d lost his mobility with that arm; it had healed in a fixed position, though fortunately one that allowed him to hold a baton, which he could then lift and lower. Bob was appalled at the thought of playing in Berlin. But George Marek, the head of RCA, urged us to get over our qualms. Sales were good in Germany, and could, he felt, get a whole lot better if we appeared.
In late June 1958, I went over on the Île de France with Julie and David, along with Bob DeCormier and his wife, Louise. First we spent four weeks sightseeing together. Then, in early August, I did a week of concerts at London’s Gaumont State Theatre, performing for four thousand fans so enthusiastic that they nearly destroyed the place. (They did manage to tear the doors off a foreign sports car I’d arrived in.)
Paul Robeson, as it happened, was making a triumphant return to London, too. For eight years he’d been denied the right to travel outside the United States, his passport held by the FBI under the McCarran Act, because of his public statements of solidarity with the Russian people and other political views deemed subversive by J. Edgar Hoover. In the interim, I’d arranged and paid for Robeson to broadcast across the United States–Canadian border at a peace rally, where he spoke to throngs of Europeans who were trying without luck to get U.S. visas because they came from Iron Curtain countries. On another occasion, I’d financed and organized a broadcast from Robeson’s brother’s AME Zion Church in New York, in which Robeson sang to an audience of Welsh coal miners, one of his most loyal constituencies. He conducted that whole concert by long-distance shortwave telephone. Now, his passport returned at last as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found the judgment unconstitutional, Robeson had arrived in England to the hero’s welcome he deserved. By chance, his big return concert, at Royal Albert Hall, was on the same night as the first of mine at the Gaumont State.
To the press, the presence of two black American singer-activists in London concerts the same night offered an irresistible chance to conjure up a bogus controversy. BELAFONTE LAUDED; ROBESON DECRIED, read one headline the next day. In the tabloids’ version, Robeson was the old man, over the hill, his voice diminished; I was the new Robeson. Part of the spin was that Robeson was more confrontational in his politics; I was gentle and warm. Angered, I called a press conference to denounce the stories. It was clear to me, I said, that this smear was the work of anti-communists convinced Robeson was red. Nevertheless, one English reporter persisted, wouldn’t it be fair to call my singing more … lighthearted than Robeson’s? I took umbrage at that. “It’s because Robeson made his protest that we can be more lighthearted now,” I said. “In fact, if there had been no Robeson, there would have been no me.”
Robeson came to hear me on my second night at the Gaumont State. After the show, he came backstage to greet me, his massive figure filling the doorway of my dressing room just as the U.S. ambassador attempted to get through. There was an awkward moment: Who would go first? Robeson deferred to the ambassador. “Please, go ahead, I can wait,” he said to this factotum of the government that had caused him such grief. “Anyway,” he added, utterly deadpan, “our conversation will take much longer. We have much more to talk about.”
Even from the air, Germany seemed a different world: gray and lifeless. When our prop plane landed at the Berlin airport, a small gathering of reporters awaited us, but otherwise the place seemed almost deserted. Bob DeCormier and I slid into the back of a big open-air touring car, followed by several others. The wartime rubble was gone, but every block had gaping, open lots, like missing teeth, where bombs had fallen. We were in West Berlin, of course, but even here, martial law applied, forbidding more than a handful of citizens to congregate in any public place. That, we were told, was why only a few fans awaited us outside our hotel, waving but silent as we disembarked.
When Bob and I had checked in to our respective suites, he came over to check out mine, and we sat for a while talking over the upcoming show. From the street below, we could hear a faint hum, like a swarm of mosquitoes. The hum grew louder, until we realized it was a chant. It sounded like Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! My windows had wooden shutters, which were closed, so I walked over and opened them. Below, on the street, were thousands of college-aged students, massed in flagrant violation of martial law. And what they were shouting was … Har-ry! Har-ry! Har-ry!
Still, we had second thoughts when we got to the theater. The orchestra awaiting us for rehearsal was a sea of German faces, all about our age. All Bob could think, as he stood in front of them with his baton in the air, was Which one of you motherfuckers shot me? He brought down his baton, with his injured right arm, and the music began, but his discomfort was all too clear. Finally, during a break, a trombonist came over to him. “You and I have worked together before,” he told Bob.
Bob was startled. “Really?” he said.
The trombonist nodded. “I was part of the Free German forces in Belgium after the Battle of the Bulge. I played with you in the house band at that joint in Brussels where they gave out free booze and food.”
Bob brightened, and so did I when he introduced me to the trombonist. Now he saw the orchestra a bit differently.
That night, the acclaim we got was like no other I’d ever received. When I got to the Hebrew folk song “Hava Nageela,” the crowd roared and started singing—shouting, really—with me, clapping and stamping their feet. It was, I realized, the closest song in my repertoire to a German beer-hall song, with its chantlike syncopation. But how strange was that, a German audience giddily singing a Jewish anthem only thirteen years after the war?
That giddy response, I knew, was about more than music. My presence symbolized my solidarity, as an American, with West Berliners, but with East Berliners, too—with all those oppressed by the Cold War. It showed that a top American entertainer cared enough about them to seek them out and embrace them, at a time when America seemed both formidable and remote. And the gratitude I felt in return from those German audiences—the warmth and love—would be among my greatest rewards as an entertainer.
Another highlight of that European swing came in Brussels, where my performance inaugurated the American pavilion of the World’s Fair—the first World’s Fair since before the war. To my delight, America’s greatest ambassador came to hear me sing. Eleanor Roosevelt and I had corresponded since meeting one night the year before, during one of my Waldorf engagements, when she told me she’d seen me as a fledgling actor at the American Negro Theatre in that spring 1948 production of Sojourner Truth. After the Brussels concert, she wrote about me in her “My Day” column. “He was received with tremendous applause and came back and did one encore. I think the audience would have brought him back indefinitely, though the hour was already very late, but the management finally turned the lights on, so the crowd had to leave.” The next day, Mrs. Roosevelt came to visit Julie and me at our hotel, and dandled little David on her knee as she discussed world affairs. David responded by urinating on her. Julie and I were appalled, but not Mrs. Roosevelt; she just laughed and made a joke of it. “Well, little man! Thanks for your opinion!”
On my return that fall, I agreed to join another march on Washington—another harbinger of the great march to come. Like the one that would change the world in 1963, this march was organized by A. Philip Randolph, the legendary head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose Harlem parades I’d watched with such awe as a child. Randolph envisioned a mass rally of students, once again demanding peacefully but pointedly of President Eisenhower that he follow through on the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and integrate the public schools and colleges of the South. I traveled from New York to Washington with a thousand students, to join a gathering of ten thousand in all at the Washington Monument. The scheduled headliner was Dr. King, but he was recovering from being stabbed in New York, so at Randolph’s urging, I stepped into the breach and delivered an impromptu speech. I felt my stomach tighten as I stepped to the microphone, but as I heard my vo
ice carry over the crowd, I let the flow of my phrases rise and fall with their own momentum, as I’d heard Martin do so often; I was no King, but I trusted my passion to get me through, and it did.
We had no permit to march to the White House that day, but we did anyway. We’d asked President Eisenhower to meet with us, and he had declined; that day he’d arranged to be in Georgia playing golf. With the television cameras rolling, I went up to one of the White House guards and said that on behalf of the thousands of Americans with me, I’d come to see the president. The president, I was told, was not available. Well, then, I said, here’s a petition, with thousands of signatures, asking him to assure that the Supreme Court’s ruling on public school integration be heeded at last. Would he see that this petition reached the president? The guard, studiously ignoring the television cameras, said he would. “Are you sure the president will get it?” The television cameras bore witness to the guard’s reply. “Yes,” he said, “I’ll make sure he sees it.”
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