Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr.

by Davis, Sammy

  II

  7

  Being in front of audiences, each of which was going to lift us closer and closer to the top, was a joy. We left Hawaii with almost a thousand dollars saved. I wanted to enjoy every indication of progress so in the cab from the airport to Los Angeles I asked my father, “How about us moving into a better hotel?”

  He looked at me like, yeah, let’s live, and told the driver, “Make that the Morris over on Fifth Street.”

  We ran up the stairs, hardly feeling the weight of our bags, and stopped at my room. I pulled the string on the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was the first room of my own I ever had. It was freshly painted and it had a private bathroom with a toilet and sink. My father glanced around happily. “Makes our old places look like San Quentin.” He started down the hall to his own room and called back to me, “Here’s the showers.”

  Toward the end of the week Mr. Silber said, “I’m sorry things aren’t working out as fast as I’d expected. I hate to suggest it but I can put you into the Cricket Club here in L. A.”

  Will asked, “What’s the money like?”

  I stood up. “Massey, that’s the least of it. Who the hell’s gonna see us at the Cricket Club? My God, we played better places than that before I went into the army.”

  Mr. Silber nodded sympathetically. “I know you did. And it’s only $250 a week, but at least it’ll pay the rent ‘til things get rolling.”

  The door to my room was opening. The hotel manager’s head appeared, then he pushed the door the rest of the way and stepped in, holding a passkey hanging by a chain from a wooden block. My father was behind him in pajamas and bathrobe. The manager left, shaking his head.

  I took off my earphones and turned off the Woody Herman record I’d been listening to.

  “Poppa, what in hell’s goin’ on here? The guy at the desk come by my room and says he’s been knockin’ at your door for ten minutes and he was gonna open your room to quiet you down.” He looked at the drums I was holding between my knees. “When’d you start playin’ bongos?”

  “I picked ‘em up this afternoon.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know, I figured I oughta know how to play ‘em, maybe they’ll work into the act somewhere. I’m sorry they got you out of bed. I was using the earphones so nobody’d hear the record, and I thought I was tapping the drums quietly.”

  He sat on the bed. “You feel like playin’ a little pinochle? Unless you’re tired?”

  “How the hell can I be tired?” I lit a cigarette and paced the room. “I don’t get it, Dad. It’s two weeks since we closed the Cricket and still not a word from Mr. Silber.”

  “He talked to Will today and it ain’t a case of him not tryin’. The fact is clubs ain’t fallin’ all over themselves fightin’ t’book us.”

  “You go back to bed, Dad. I don’t feel much like playing cards.”

  He stood up. “It’s almost five, Poppa. I wouldn’t mess with the drums no more tonight.”

  I flopped on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I felt like a diesel engine with no track.

  The glare of the sun forced my eyes open. I changed out of my wrinkled clothes and went to a cafeteria. The steam table was loaded with eggs, ham, bacon, sausage, cereals, hash, french toast, pancakes. I stopped in front of the pancakes. They were thin and crisp at the edges and little bottles of maple syrup were stacked alongside them. A delicious aroma came wafting up to me. I waited for the counterman, getting hungrier by the second, imagining myself digging into a stack of them … the counterman was coming toward me. I could picture him finding out what I wanted and thinking of “Little Black Sambo” and all the goddamned pancakes he ate, and smiling like “They all love pancakes and watermelon.” I pointed to the ham and eggs.

  I looked around a penny arcade, listening to the sound of rifle shots and an occasional ping! when somebody hit a duck, hating the kinship between myself and the guys loafing around there, killing time. I went into one of the Record Your Own Voice booths, dropped in a quarter and did Billy Eckstine singing “Little White Lies.” The green light went off. I dropped in another quarter and tried Louis Armstrong doing the same song. It was tougher making his sound with a song I’d never heard him do. I played around with Edward G. Robinson’s big speech from Little Caesar and listened to it play back. I liked it. I sang the number one song, “Five Minutes More,” in my own voice. When I opened the curtain about a dozen people were standing there, grinning. I smiled, embarrassed as hell, and beat it.

  I lugged my record player down the hall to my father’s room and played “Five Minutes More,” watching him, noticing how he cocked his head when I made the high note.

  “That’s not bad singin’, Poppa, not bad at all. ‘Course, it’d help if you could do it where you won’t pick up the sound of cars goin’ by.”

  “Very funny.” I looked at my watch and turned on the radio. The music came pouring out and I sat there absorbing what sounded like a hundred pieces playing the Axel Stordahl arrangement, swelling, softening, opening a path for Frank Sinatra’s voice to come through singing “I’m going to buy a paper doll that I can call my own …” I dropped my do-it-yourself record on the floor, listening, appreciating the professionalism, the way all that music served as no more than a frame for his voice, a frame he didn’t seem to even notice was there. He sang free, unencumbered, as easy as if he were in a shower, yet all the elements fit and came together in a big-time sound that gave me chills.

  When the chorus started doing a Lucky Strike Extra, I reached for the dial knob. “Dad, you wanta hear something unbelievable? Watch this.” I switched from station to station and the same voice came out, “… five minutes more, only five minutes more, only five minutes more in your arms …”

  My father leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Yeah, Poppa, he’s what you calls big!”

  He was “Frankie,” “The Voice” and the “Bow Tie,” he was “loved and idolized by millions.” I read every word I could find about his records, his pictures, his long-term deals, his personal appearances, his homes, his friends, the big openings he made bigger just by appearing. Everyone he knew, everything he did was big, lavish and spectacular. He personified the word “star.”

  “Poppa? You sittin’ there eatin’ yourself up over how he’s doin’?”

  “Oh, come on, Dad. He’s too big to envy. But I just can’t help thinking we were on the same bill with him when nobody knew him either. Now look where he is, and we haven’t budged one goddamned inch. Why can’t it happen for us, too? Okay, not like it did for him, but something, a decent club, a few good theaters, at least a chance …”

  The announcer was signing off the air. “Your Hit Parade has been broadcast from the NBC studios in Hollywood.” I turned it off. “I’m going down there to see him next week.”

  “Hell, he ain’t about to remember you and you ain’t gonna get nowheres near him, anyway. It’s plain ridiculous.”

  “I know he won’t remember me, but I want to watch him work.”

  My best chance for a ticket was in the servicemen’s line, so I got my army uniform out of a box, ironed it, and wearing my Ruptured Duck, the honorable discharge emblem, I went down to NBC three hours early to be sure I’d get in.

  After the show I hurried around the corner to the stage door. There must have been five hundred kids ahead of me, waiting for a look at him. When he appeared, the crowd surged forward like one massive body ready to go right through the side of the building if necessary. Girls were screaming, fainting, pushing, waving pencils and papers in the air. A girl next to me shouted, “I’d faint if I had room to fall down.” She got her laugh and the crowd kept moving. I stood on tiptoe trying to see him. God, he looked like a star. He wasn’t much older than a lot of us but he was so calm, like we were all silly kids and he was a man, sure of himself, completely in control. He acted as if he didn’t know there were hundreds of papers being waved at him. He concentrated on one at a time, signing it, smiling
, and going to the next. He got to me and took my paper. He used a solid gold pen to sign his name. I thanked him and he looked at me. “Don’t I know you?”

  “Well, we were on the bill with you in Detroit about five years ago.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sammy Davis, Jr.”

  “Didn’t you work with your old man and another guy?”

  “That’s us. Remember?” Oh, God! Obviously he remembered.

  “Yeah, sure. I hate ‘Sammy’. I’ll call you Sam. Why don’t you come back next week and see the show? I’ll leave a ticket for you.” The kids were pressing toward him, shoving papers in his face for autographs. He touched me on the arm. “See y’next week, Sam.” He turned back to them and was absorbed by the crowd.

  I was looking for a box office when an NBC guard walked over to me. “Hey, you! The end of the line.”

  “But Frank Sinatra left a ticket for me.” As I said it I was struck by how ridiculous it sounded.

  The guard was giving me a “Yeah, sure” look, but he took me over to the Guest Relations desk. They went through a stack of envelopes. There was nothing for me.

  I was almost out the door when a uniformed page came running up to me and asked my name. He looked at an envelope. “Then this must be for you.” It had one word on it. “Sam.”

  He ushered me through a private door to a seat in the front row of the reserved section. And after the show he removed me from the line that was moving slowly up the aisle. “Mr. Sinatra would like you to come to his dressing room.”

  It was at least five times the size of my room at the Morris, with a bed, easy chair, a couch, icebox, bar, and phonograph. I could see into the tiled bathroom. It had a stall shower and a bathtub, and the rich, thick towels were initialed FS. Someone gave me a coke. Important-looking people were coming in.

  “Beautiful show, Francis …”

  “… that last song, Frank.”

  “You were in great voice, baby, great!”

  They must have been sponsors or NBC executives and they introduced themselves to me as if I must be somebody because I was in there, too.

  He had the aura of a king about him and that’s how people were treating him. Anything he said made them laugh. And me, too. Half the talk was inside jokes about the business, jokes I didn’t begin to understand, but just being there was so exciting that everything he said seemed wonderful and funny. I kept thinking, “I can speak to Frank Sinatra and he’ll answer me.” But I couldn’t think of anything clever enough to say so I just watched him, smiling and laughing at his every word.

  He didn’t say anything directly to me and I was beginning to wonder if he remembered who I was and that he’d sent for me, but as he was leaving he turned to me. “Hey, Sam. Maybe next week you’ll come around and watch rehearsal.” He put his arm around my shoulder and we walked out the stage door together and into the mob of screaming kids. He was reaching for his gold pen to sign autographs. He smiled at me and spoke over the uproar around us, “So long, Sam. Keep in touch.”

  Will said, “Glad you’re back, Sammy. I was just telling Big Sam nothing’s happening and there’s no sense just sitting here not even making expenses, so I called Joe Daniels and he’s set us for a tour of the North at $250 a week.”

  “But, Massey, it’s the same lousy dead end—we’ll be buried there. Who’ll see us?”

  I looked up, knowing that I’d hurt him, that there was nothing else he could do and he’d expected me to be glad just to be working. “I’m sorry, Massey, you’re right.”

  He spoke softly. “Sammy, there’s nothing lousy about being booked twenty out of twenty-one weeks.”

  My father came into the dressing room and flopped onto a chair. “Well, I covered every street downtown. Nothin’!” He started taking off his shoes, rubbing his feet. “Tomorrow I’ll go back over to Mrs. Clark’s and see if she’s expectin’ anything to open up. Meantime, guess we’ll have to sleep in here.”

  1929

  With Ethel Waters in Rufus Jones for President

  As Rufus in Rufus Jones for President

  1933

  1938

  Mama and my father

  My father, “my uncle” and me

  Will Mastin

  Nathan Crawford

  The Will Mastin Trio featuring Sammy Davis, Jr., 1950

  The late forties

  Sam Davis, Sr.

  Wih Frank, at the Capitol Theater, 1947

  With Will, Jeff Chandler, and my father. Jeff was like a big brother to me.

  Murphy Bennett

  Morty Stevens.

  It was always easy with Morty

  Arthur Silber, Jr.

  Mickey Ebony Magazine

  Will asked, “You mean there’s nothing in the whole city of Spokane?”

  “There ain’t that many colored rooming houses to start with.”

  “What about a hotel?”

  “Ain’t a single colored hotel around.”

  Colored side of town? Colored rooming house, colored hotels? Colored, colored, colored! And the way they were accepting it, so matter of factly. “Whattya mean colored rooming house? Why must it always be colored rooming houses and colored hotels …?”

  “Now Poppa, you know better’n this.”

  “I do like hell! Why do we always have to be pushed in a corner somewhere? Why do we have to live colored lives?” I was out of my chair, pacing our dressing room. “Y’mean we have to let people say, ‘You’re colored so you gotta sleep in your dressing room’? Where, Dad? Where do we sleep? On the goddamned floor?”

  “Now Poppa, that’s how it is and there ain’t no use fightin’ it. That’s how people are.”

  “Nobody has to tell me about people. I got the word. I found out how they are. And it ain’t ‘cause they’re jealous we’re in show business.” He backed up, hurt. As I was saying it I was sorry, but the heat was pouring out of my body. “I’ll get us a room. In the whitest goddamned hotel in town.”

  As I spun through the revolving door, I glanced at the clean lobby, the uniformed bellboys and the elevators. This is the kind of place I’m going to stay in. I sauntered up to the front desk and practically yawned, “I’d like three single rooms for the next ten days. We’re appearing in the show downtown …”

  “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we’re entirely filled. There isn’t a vacancy. As a matter of fact, the manager had to turn his own personal suite over to a guest, a steady guest who arrived unexpectedly.”

  He’s really turning me down. I’d known it would happen, yet I hadn’t really believed it would.

  “… swamped. Truly swamped. Busiest we’ve seen it in …”

  I didn’t want his room any more but I couldn’t back down now. My air of “show biz” and world traveller had disappeared and I stood there, frozen, staring at him. A moment before it had been impersonal, I was just a nuisance to be handled as he’d probably handled others before me, but I wasn’t taking the gentle way out, playing the game, smiling: “Well, thank you very much,” like I’d tried and lost; and now he began perspiring around his forehead, doing “nervous hotel clerk” bits, coughing, looking around for the assistant manager and pretending to check the list of rooms. I guess this is what I’d wanted—to make it hard for him, to embarrass him. But there was no satisfaction.

  The revolving door seemed so much heavier as I pushed my way to the outside.

  “… nervy nigger wanted a room. Some crust.” A bellboy was telling the story to the doorman and he didn’t care a bit that I’d heard him. “Go on,” he said, “get outta here. Go back where you belong.” The face wasn’t grinning or leering or mocking, it just looked at me with the kind of contempt you have for something you dispose of with a D.D.T. spray gun.

  All the strength in the world was in my body as I hurtled toward that face and hit it.

  I was sitting on the ground smelling that awful, dry, dusty smell like I had when Jennings broke my nose. The doorman helped me up. I nodded my thanks and
walked back to the theater. I should have been embarrassed returning like this after all my big talk, but all I could think was that my nose was broken and I had to keep the blood from staining my shirt.

  My father and Will were waiting for me outside the stage door. There was nothing to say.

  We made beds on the floor out of canvas tarpaulins, used our overcoats for blankets, and I made a pillow out of a rolled up pair of pants. All I’d accomplished was to get my damned nose broken so that for at least two weeks I’d be limited in what I could do onstage. I’d slid back and tried to hit an idea with my fists. I couldn’t make that mistake again. Every drop of my physical and mental strength had to be concentrated on just one thing.

  At breakfast I told Will: “I’d like to put in impressions of Jimmy Cagney and Durante and Edward G. Robinson.”

  He put down his coffee cup. “Sammy, what’s the matter with you? You want to do impressions of white people?”

  “Why not?”

  “You just can’t.” He was shaking his head. “They’ll think you’re making fun of them. No colored performer ever did white people in front of white people.”

  “But I did them in the army and they went over great.”

  “That’s a whole other story. Those soldiers are hungry for shows plus the fact of getting ‘em free, but this is show business and when the people put down their money they don’t want to sit there wonderin’ if you’re trying to insult ‘em. You just stick with Satchmo and B and Step’n Fetchit. Don’t fool with those others, not for white audiences. I’ve watched what’ll go over and what won’t for nearly forty years and you can’t get away with something like that.”

  “Massey, I won’t argue with you. You’re the boss of the act. But it seems to me that all that should matter is if they’re good or not.”

  “I don’t mean t’say I told you so, but you also thought we wouldn’t have t’sleep on the floor of our dressing room ‘cause it wasn’t right. Sammy, what’s right and what’s wrong don’t always have say over what is.”