by Davis, Sammy
I went on every night, turning myself inside out for the audience. They were paying more attention and giving us more respect than ever before, and after every performance I was so exhilarated by our acceptance onstage that I really expected one of the owners to come rushing back saying, “You were great. To hell with the rules. Come on in and have a drink with us.” But it never happened. The other acts could move around the hotel, go out and gamble or sit in the lounge and have a drink, but we had to leave through the kitchen, with the garbage, like thieves in the night. I was dying to grab a look into the casino, just to see what it was like, but I was damned if I’d let anyone see me like a kid with his nose against the candy store window. I wanted to believe “If they don’t want me then I don’t want them either,” but I couldn’t help imagining what it must be like to be wanted, to be able to walk into any casino in town. I kept seeing the warmth in the faces of the people we’d played to that night. How could they like me onstage—and then this?
My father spent his time around the Westside bars and casino but I went to my room trying to ignore the taunting glow of light coming from the Strip, bigger and brighter than ever, until finally the irresistible blaze of it drew me to the window and I gazed across at it knowing it was only three in the morning, which is like noon in Las Vegas, feeling as wide awake as the rest of the town which was rocking with excitement. I pictured myself in the midst of it all, the music, the gaiety, the money piled high on tables, the women in beautiful dresses and diamonds, gambling away fortunes and laughing.
It took a physical effort to tear myself away from the window. I forced it all out of my mind and kept telling myself: Someday …, listening to records and reading until I was tired enough to fall asleep, always wondering when “someday” would be.
Mr. Silber said, “Well, this is it. Ciro’s.” None of us said a word. “Janis Paige will be headlining and I can get you the opening spot. Herman Hover caught the act at Slapsie Maxie’s and he likes it. He won’t meet your price of $550—the most he’ll go for is $500—naturally I told him we’d take it.”
Will said, “He’ll meet our price or we don’t play it.”
“Massey, you can’t be serious?”
“I am. We’re not starving. No point taking a cut just to work a place.”
“A place!? This is Ciro’s, for God’s sake.”
“Then they can afford to pay $550.”
“Well, if fifty lousy dollars means that much to you then take it out of my cut. I’ll gladly …”
“It’s not the money. It’s the idea of the thing. If you cut your price in this business then what’ve you got? If we was hungry it’d be something else.”
I couldn’t believe it. To throw away an opportunity like this over fifty dollars. But he was like a rock, and to make it worse, my father agreed with him. “I’ll quit show business before I’ll go in there for $500. Herman Hover was a dancer for Earl Carroll when I was and he knows we can outdance him every minute of the day.”
I was panicking. “What the hell has that got to do with it? He’s not a dancer any more. He owns the best club out here and we need to play it.”
Late the next afternoon Mr. Silber called Will. “It’s all set. He’ll go for the $550.”
When we signed the contracts we learned that Mr. Hover, well aware of the importance of his club to an act like ours, knew he could get plenty of others to come in at his price, or less. Finally Mr. Silber had said, “Okay, Herman. Don’t tell them and I’ll pay the other $50.” Mr. Hover said, “All right, you win! If you believe in them that much I’ll go for the $550.” He sighed. “What else do you want me to do for them?” “Nothing,” Mr. Silber smiled, “they’ll do the rest.”
10
We had a month to get ready. We found a tailor who’d make us three suits for only a hundred dollars down. We picked out a beautiful plaid and ordered dinner jackets with black satin lapels and black pants.
I went over the act piece by piece. Our construction was sound. My father and Will would go on, then I’d come out and do the opening with them, we’d do individual dances and then I’d swing into the impressions. I’d open with Frank Sinatra. I could really hook the audience with that one because I could do funny physical bits as well as the voice, so I’d have twice as much going for me. Then I’d do Nat Cole, Frankie Laine, Mel Tormé, The Ink Spots, Al Hibbler, Vaughn Monroe, and close with Louis Armstrong. He was the only one to end on because it was the strongest impression and it would be hard to follow with another singer. Then I’d switch to movie stars. I’d been using a big cigar as a prop for Edward G. Robinson and it always got a laugh. I wanted a bigger one for a bigger laugh. I found a private cigar maker in downtown L.A. and paid him five dollars to roll me a fourteen-inch cigar.
I’d noticed in Vegas that half of the first impression was wasted because the audience wasn’t ready for it. I went through the newspapers looking for a current event on which I might be able to hang a topical joke to use as a bridge between the wild dancing and the impressions so the audience would be settled down and prepared for the quieter stuff.
On the afternoon of the opening we went to the club for rehearsal with the band. The sign out front said “JANIS PAIGE,” then, underneath in smaller letters, “The Will Mastin Trio.”
The stage manager said, “I’ll show you where you’ll be dressing.” We followed him upstairs. “We’ve only got space for one real dressing room so naturally it goes to the star. The other acts always change up here.” We were in the attic where they stored the signs and extra tables. One corner of it was fixed up with a light, a mirror and a clothes tree. The three of us burst out laughing. We wouldn’t have cared if it had been a phone booth but it was funny—a part of the glamour of Ciro’s the public didn’t see.
“By the way,” he said, “under no conditions can you take more than two bows. Even if the audience calls you back. It’s in Miss Paige’s contract.”
Dick Stabile, the band leader, also introduced the acts. He told us, “Nobody pays any attention to opening acts here but I’ll gag it up a little and get their attention for you.”
It was Academy Awards night so there was going to be only one show, at midnight. I had dinner early, then went back to the hotel and took a nap and a long hot bath until finally it was time to go back to the club.
Will said, “You two go on upstairs. I’ll be along in a minute. I want to look around here a bit.”
My father and I went ahead. There was still almost an hour to kill but we began dressing leisurely. Will came upstairs at a run. “Well, I’ve seen it all now.” He was out of breath from excitement. “I walked around backstage and took a peep out front and you oughta see what’s going on. This place is loaded with the biggest names in the business from Martin and Lewis right on down the line. They all came over from the Academy Awards.”
I’d known it was going to be a pretty big opening because Janis Paige was very “in” with the Hollywood group, but I should have realized that with half of Hollywood out on the town Ciro’s was the logical place for them to wind up their evening. “What’s it like down there, Massey?”
“Elegant! We never played anything like this before, I can tell you that. It’s got the French menus and the captains in tails and the customers are dressed to the teeth. This place is about as high class as you can get, and they got the highest class prices, too. I saw one of those menus …”
He was still talking but I leaned back in my chair and began picturing it for myself. I could imagine the stars sitting in the audience when we came out. I could hear them applauding us and yelling for more….
There is never a night that a supporting act opens anywhere that he, she, or they don’t think, “This is the night. This is the time we hit that stage and the audience won’t let us off. They’ll stand up and cheer and no act will be able to follow us. Then, tomorrow night we’ll be the star attraction, the Headliners, and we’ll close the show. And from then on, we’ll be stars.” This is the dream of eve
ry supporting act just as every Broadway understudy fancies the night Ethel Merman will be caught in a blizzard in Connecticut and she’ll have to go on in her place, and she’ll be so great that the critics will cheer “Better than Merman!” and columnists will rush to their papers to report “A star is born!” It happens only once in a thousand openings, to only one out of thousands of performers—just often enough to keep the dream alive in all the others.
But the kind of applause that would make that happen, the kind that was thundering in my imagination couldn’t possibly come just from doing a dance or sounding like Jimmy Stewart. There had to be that extra thing, the communication between performer and audience that’s so strong he gets right inside of them and they like him personally, they feel for him. I tried to picture myself in front of the audience, touching the people, manipulating their emotions the way I’d watched Mickey and Frank do over and over again—but how?
My father was dressed and standing against the wall, absorbed in his own thoughts.
“Dad, how do you touch them?”
He looked up and gave me what I’d gotten so many times before, the helpless look, the groping for words and explanations that simply were not his to give and then finally, “Well—you give ‘em your best and—well that’s all you can do, son.”
I was sorry I’d asked and again put him in the position of being unable to come through for me. I nodded like “I guess that’s it,” but we both knew it wasn’t and I leaned back in the chair, wondering, “What is it? How do you touch them?”
Will said, “We better go down, now.” At the bottom of the stairs, we took a final look at each other. My father reached down and picked a piece of lint off my pants. Then he stood there for a second looking at me, smiling. “You think we’re too high class for the room, Poppa?”
As we got backstage I could hear the nightclub sounds: hundreds of forks and knives scraping dinner plates, cups sliding onto saucers, a thousand swirling ice cubes clinking against the sides of glasses, the hiss of soda bottles being opened, the like-no-other-sound of champagne corks popping, the slooshing of the bottles sliding into buckets of ice, cigarette lighters clicking open, hundreds of voices talking and laughing—the place was packed.
We were so nervous we were doing bits with each other to break the tension, the corniest lines in the world. “Hey, Massey, you nervous?”
He shrugged. “I ain’t nervous.”
“Well, maybe you ain’t nervous but yo’ knees sho’ is.”
My father asked, “You nervous, Poppa?”
“Hell, I ain’t nervous ‘bout nothin’.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, you better git nervous ‘cause we’s in a lotta trouble …”
We were lapsing into the deepest Amos ‘n’ Andy talk, something Negroes do among themselves when they’re nervous but happy. Maybe there’s a psychological reason behind it, perhaps it makes us feel safe, closer to our roots. I don’t know. But there are times when “colored talk” serves the moment as nothing else can.
The musicians were putting our music on their stands. Dick Stabile began our introduction. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think you’re going to be knocked out by these guys who are coming on now. I played their music this afternoon and they’re something to watch. Here they come …” He hit the first few notes of “Dancing Shoes,” our opening number. Once again this was the important show, it was all the shows we would ever do in our lives. My father and Will moved out into our opening number and they were never better. Eight bars later I joined them and we might have been barefoot on hot sand, our feet weren’t on the stage as much as they were in the air. We’d started probably faster than any act this crowd had ever seen and we kept increasing the pace, trying as we never had before. We finished the opening number, and characteristic of colored acts we didn’t wait to enjoy the applause before we were off and dancing again, first Will, then my dad and then me. We were fighting for our lives and our frenzy of movement got to the audience from the moment we started until soon it was like they were out of breath trying to keep up with us. The applause was great when my father and Will finished their numbers. Then they stepped back. As I introduced the impressions my speech was perfect. I did Sinatra and they screamed. I went through the rest of the singers, and by the time I finished Satchmo they were pounding the tables so hard I could see the silverware jumping up and down. I switched into the movie stars, first Bogart, then Garfield—suddenly I felt the whole room shifting toward me. They were no longer just sitting back watching, amused. From one second to another they’d become involved with me. They were reacting to everything, catching every inflection, every little move and gesture, concentrating, leaning in as though they wanted to push, to help. I was touching them. It was the most glorious moment I’d ever known—I was really honest to God touching them.
We swung into our dances again, never letting them catch up with us or grow tired of anything, switching and changing the pace like broken field runners going the whole hundred yards.
When we finished, after being on for forty minutes, they wouldn’t let us stay off. It was as though they knew something big was happening to us and they wanted to be a part of it. They kept applauding, and began beating on the tables with knives and forks and their fists, screaming for us to come back. My father and Will stood in the wings, hesitating. We’d already taken our two bows but a man with a gun couldn’t have held me back. I looked at my father. “To hell with her contract. I ain’t gonna miss this for nobody!!!” We went out twice more. They kept shouting for an encore. I’d already done every impression I’d ever tried. But we had to do something so I did Jerry Lewis which I had never done before. The sight of a colored Jerry Lewis was the absolute topper. It was over. When I heard that scream I knew we’d had it. There was nothing we could do that would top that!
We’d taken eight bows. I was hugging Massey and my dad, half-laughing, half-crying. “I touched them, Dad, I touched them!” He understood. “Yes, Poppa, you touched ‘em. And they reached out and touched you, too.” He was right. Oh, God, he was right. They really had!
Janis Paige was in the wings waiting to go on to close the show, giving us glares like the world has never seen. She was so upset she sang off key for fifteen minutes. She couldn’t even get their attention. It was strictly our night, there was a post-pandemonium atmosphere out there and she was just one girl coming on to sing after three strong, hungry men had just given the show of their lives. No one could have followed us then.
We stayed up until eight o’clock and the three of us went out and bought every newspaper and trade paper that had just come out. We brought them back to Will’s room. I turned to Herb Stein’s review in the Hollywood Reporter and read out loud: “Once in a long time an artist hits town and sends the place on its ear. Such a one is young Sammy Davis, Jr. of the Will Mastin Trio at Ciro’s.” Paul Coates’ column in the Mirror: “The surprise sensation of the show was the Will Mastin Trio, a father-uncle-son combination that is the greatest act Hollywood has seen in some months … left the audiences begging for more.” And Daily Variety: “The Will Mastin Trio is a riotous group of Negro song and dance men whose enthusiasm, brightness, and obvious love for show business combine to form an infectious charm which wins the audience in a flash … walloping success….”
Will was reading the Los Angeles Times. “Listen to this from Walter Ames’ column: The Will Mastin Trio, featuring dynamic Sammy Davis, Jr., are such show-stoppers at Ciro’s that star Janis Paige has relinquished the closing spot to them.’ ”
It was almost nine o’clock. We called Mr. Silber. “It’s true,” he said. “I thought you’d be sleeping or I’d have called you. Starting tonight you close the show. It would be impossible to continue the way it was. Naturally she keeps top billing but Hover’s putting your name in the same size letters. That’s a big concession because her contract guarantees her name to be fifty per cent larger than the supporting act, but it was the only thing to do.”
He congratu
lated each of us. To me he said, “You’ve earned what’s happened and nobody could be happier for you than I am. I know how you guys worked to get to this point. I know how hard it’s been.”
I was shocked to hear myself saying, “It wasn’t that bad.” Only a few weeks before we had been in Vegas feeling abused, hurt, and angry. At that time I could have made a list of every bug-infested mattress we’d slept on for ten thousand nights. I knew every heartache, frustration, and pain, every brush-off which had tormented us for twenty-three years. They had scarred deep, and forgetting them seemed as impossible as undoing them. But as we sat in Will’s room reading those reviews the novocaine of success had already begun numbing our memories, making the past indistinct until miraculously there were no yesterdays.
A quiet tension filled the dressing room as we got ready. I nudged my father. “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if last night never really happened and tonight is the opening?”
As we hit the stage I could feel something going for us that we’d never had before. The audience was presold by word of mouth and the reviews, we weren’t starting from scratch any more, we didn’t have to get lucky and strike that one moment in a million when you go off like a Roman candle. We had only to confirm what they’d heard, and it’s a lot easier to please the public when the experts have already said you’re good.
The night before, we’d gotten our strength from sheer desperation. This was still in evidence. We worked with everything we had, as hard, maybe harder but with the added power of knowing we belonged. We weren’t trying to kill the ball any more and we gave an absolutely flawless performance.
I was hanging my jacket on a hook in our “dressing room” when I heard someone clearing his throat. Jerry Lewis was banging his fist against the wall. He grinned. “I’d knock on the door if you had one. May I come in?”
“Mr. Lewis! Of course. Please!” I pulled up a chair and almost pushed him into it.