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

by Davis, Sammy

  “You’re joking with all this …”

  “Don’t get hysterical, baby. Just some of the little niceties of life. Hey, whattya say we call Room Service? We can watch television and have dinner right here. How about steak, salad, and coffee?”

  “Great.”

  I got Room Service on the phone. “Darling, this is Sammy Davis, Jr. I’d like to order some dinner…. Oh? … Why, yes, fine. Thank you.”

  Morty was looking at me when I hung up. “How come you didn’t order?”

  “Baby, I wish you had a little more class. How can you order dinner until they send up a Captain with the menu?”

  We were finishing our coffee when Jess Rand called. “I’ve got some wild news for you. I arranged for you to have a layout in Look magazine.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “You’re damned right. I set up a dinner for tomorrow night with the photographer, Milton Greene.”

  “You’re kidding. He’s like an idol of mine in photography.”

  “Well, anyway, Look assigned him to shoot you at the Copa, during the show. But he wants to get together with you first.”

  The operator buzzed me back as soon as I hung up. “Mr. Davis, did you want service on the line?”

  I rested the phone back on its cradle, and turned slowly. “Morty, from now on when you call, it may take a while to get me.” I crossed my legs and puffed on my pipe. “You’ll have to give your name and then the operator’ll have to tell me who it is and … well, who knows, I mean I can’t be expected to be in a telephone mood all the time.”

  Will closed the dressing room door. “Sammy, I want a word with you. You and your father are spending money like you’re plain drunk.”

  “I can’t talk about what my dad’s doing. That’s his business.”

  “Then we’ll just talk about you. The way you’re buying clothes and jewels and records and hi-fi sets all over the place and spreading yourself out in a hotel suite … why you’re acting like you believe the mint is working overtime just for you.”

  “Don’t you think maybe you’re exaggerating it just a little bit?”

  “Am I? Why, you must’ve spent five thousand dollars this week alone.”

  “So what? It’s only a week’s salary.”

  “It’s five weeks’ salary. Sure we’re making $5000 a week but we’re splitting it three ways and we’re supposed to only take a thousand a week apiece in salary and put the rest aside for agents and taxes and expenses. But this week alone you’ve already borrowed three thousand from me in cash, plus you drew your salary, plus I know you’ve got a whole lot of charge accounts because you’ve been letting them send the bills to the Morris office. Now I told them to go ahead and pay ‘em, but you gotta cut down. I’m afraid to see what it totals up to.”

  “What’s the difference? So it’ll take me a few weeks to catch up. How many weeks a year will we be playing New York anyway? Look, I’m having a little splurge. I can cut down when we hit the smaller towns where they don’t have these kind of stores. And by then I’ll have everything I need, anyway.”

  “I certainly hope so. You’ve got to start thinking some about the future.”

  “I am thinking about the future.”

  “When you buy yourself ten suits at a time?”

  “That’s right. I’m a star! And I’ve got to look like one. When I walk down the street I want people to say, ‘Hey, that’s Sammy Davis, Jr.’ I don’t want to look like the guy next door who blends in like he isn’t there. Nobody goes to clubs to see the guy next door and I can’t be a star just the few hours we’re on the stage. I can’t turn it on and off like a light. I’ve got to feel like a star every minute I’m awake.”

  “Sammy, what’s the name of that comic who was sitting outside?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “That’s the difference! You don’t even know his name and you gave him a hundred dollars.”

  “Massey, he’s a performer and a good one, too. If he needed a few bucks badly enough to have to ask for it well, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t turn him down.”

  “I’m not saying don’t help people. But you’re overdoing it. Why, the word’ll get around there’s a damned fool at the Copa handing out money and he doesn’t even want to know your name!”

  “Maybe. But it would’ve been a long walk back to South Side if the Wessons hadn’t helped us in Chicago. And I can’t forget what it was like when I had to ask B and he came through for us.”

  “I can’t forget it either, Sammy. And it could happen again. That’s why you’ve gotta be more careful with your money.”

  “Oh, come on, Massey. It’s not going to happen again. We’ve made it for sure this time, and we’re going to keep on making it. My God, we’ve got enough offers to keep us working two hundred weeks this year. Nothing can stop us now!”

  “The only thing that sure is money in the bank! Don’t you see that you’ve been working the Copa for nothing?”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You’ve got nothing left, so you’ve worked for nothing.”

  “The way I see it you’re the one who’s working for nothing. Look at that suit you’re wearing. It’s the same one you wore four years ago. And you’re still living in the cheapest room you can get at The America, right? We’re making $5000 a week and what’ve you got to show for it? A bank book?”

  “That’s what I work for.”

  “Well, it’s not what I work for. The money has never been my payoff for a week’s work. Never! When we were starving from one town to another I wasn’t thinking, ‘Someday I’ll have a pile of money.’ I was thinking, ‘Someday we’ll make it and I’ll live like a human being. I’ll go where I want to go and I’ll be able to do anything I want to do!’ I’ve got no complaints about this week. I’ve got everything I wanted out of it.”

  “Poppa? What’s got six legs and is big in Harlem?” He was stretched out on a bed in the dressing room holding a copy of the Amsterdam News, waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Us.”

  I gave him a look, and took the paper he was offering. “Damn! I’ve heard about hometown boys making good but this is ridiculous!”

  He smiled happily, his hands clasped behind his head, tapping his toes together thoughtfully. “Yeah. I’d’ve figured we’d have t’knock off the whole Ku Klux Klan t’come home in this kinda style.”

  The cab dropped me at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, and I went into the Baby Grand. Nipsey Russell introduced me from the stage, finished MC’ing the show, and sat down with me, smiling, “Welcome to the small time.”

  “Still no bites from downtown?”

  He shook his head. “Still playing the back of the bus.”

  “A guy with your talent …”

  “Thanks, Sammy, but they just don’t want me. Maybe someday. ‘Til then I’m not complaining. I work steady. I’ve got wine, women, and the thin-skinned sensitivity of an armadillo.”

  “It’s wrong, Nips. You’ve got something to offer.”

  “That’s the funny part of it, isn’t it? The Mountain comes to Mohammed.” He gestured around the room which was seventy per cent filled with white people.

  It was time for his next show. I sat at the table alone, listening to the sharp, often brilliant, comedy he was doing. Laugh for laugh he could stand against almost any of the big name comedians. He wasn’t doing “my wife is so fat that—” He was really saying something. I tried to understand why acts like ours could get booked “downtown” but he couldn’t. It was obvious. We came in dancing. Without planning it that way we offered something they would accept from a Negro. Nat Cole came in singing. They’d accept that, too. Louis Armstrong was a jazz musician. The same thing. But a humorist was different. They weren’t ready for an articulate man who could face them on their own level and offer ideas.

  I left the Baby Grand and started walking west on 125th Street. Some kids spotted me and fell in alongside of me. “You’re Sammy
Davis.” I nodded and smiled. He nodded, satisfied, and they kept walking with me. We passed an all-night barber shop and a guy came to the door with shaving cream on his face. “Hey, Sammy, whattya say?”

  I waved back. “Whattya say, baby!”

  I stopped at a barbecue stand and ordered some ribs. A crowd started gathering. “You’re top man at the Copa, huh, Sammy?” “You really know movie stars?” “You read about yourself in the papers?” “Hey, Sammy, there ain’t nothing you can’t have, right?”

  Every question was asked with a smile and the hope that the answer was yes. They were catching every move I made, digging my clothes, the jewelry—but without envy of me as an individual, as much as a wistful wondering what it was like. They clustered around me, their faces impassioned by what I represented: I was the guy who’d broken out, I’d made it downtown. They’d seen us on television and read about us at Ciro’s, The Chez, Miami, and the Riviera, and now the Copa. They knew we were making it in the white man’s world, and if you were making it there then you were something else.

  The crowd parted for me at my first step forward. They followed me to the sidewalk as a cab pulled up. I waved good-bye, got in, and told the driver, “The Warwick on 54th Street, baby.”

  “Anything you say, Sammy.”

  I turned around and waved again to the crowd that was still standing at the curb watching me go downtown.

  What had once been a simple matter of my father, Will and me packing two or three suitcases and leaving town unnoticed, now took on the proportions of a troop movement. On closing night I handed out gold watches engraved “Thanks, Sammy Jr.” to the captains and key staff guys at the Copa. The next day Jess left for the coast by plane. We were going to rent a house in Hollywood, so Mama went in Will’s car with him, my father, Peewee, and Nathan. Morty and I left by train, and John took off in a truck we’d bought, loaded with drums, vibraphones, props, sound equipment, stage wardrobes, a box of photography equipment, tape recorder, hi-fi sets, a crate of records, and a 280-pound box of music.

  13

  The real estate broker drove me straight to the colored section of Los Angeles.

  “Nothing up in the hills, in the Hollywood section?”

  “Well—you see—uh …”

  “I see.”

  “Mr. Davis, try to understand. If you were buying it would be a lot simpler. An outright sale—well these things can be handled. But renting presents certain additional problems….”

  Obviously I wasn’t big enough yet. “Will you take me back to the Sunset Colonial, please.”

  “But don’t you want to see any of these?”

  “I don’t have to.”

  I was never again going to live in a ghetto. Not even if the wall around it were made of solid gold.

  I took a cab to my father’s apartment. “I’m sorry, Mama. You’ll just have to stay here with Dad and Peewee for a little while until I can work this out somehow.”

  My father spoke softly. “Sammy, they ain’t about to let you have a house up there in the hills. Not to buy, not to rent. No way. So, why tear yourself apart over it? You can’t change these things.”

  There was nothing to be accomplished by arguing with him.

  We were booked as summer replacements for Eddie Cantor’s Colgate shows, so we spent the summer playing clubs around L.A. and San Francisco. I’d started recording for Decca and “Hey There,” one of my first sides with them, was starting to appear on all the record charts.

  Tony, Janet, and Jeff were buddies I could be with endlessly, and my friendship with Frank was becoming really precious to me. I could relax with him more than I had in the early days, but I was still “the kid” to him and he was still “Sinatra” to me. He took me up to the Bogarts a few times and those were always beautiful evenings. Bogart might have been color blind. He decided on somebody with his second level of understanding. There was no “he’s a this” or “he’s a that.” Bogart got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.

  I was dating anyone I wanted to, not “white girls” or “colored girls”—girls! If I saw one I liked and got the nod and she happened to be white there’d be a voice saying, “Hold it. She’s trouble.” Then there was another voice that answered. He was the swinger. “Go, baby. If she wants you and you want her then damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Go.” And I went, playing both sides of town, each with its little extra kick: on one side, the satisfaction of knowing that nobody was telling me how to live, on the other, peace of mind and the joy I got out of the fantastic attention my own people were giving me. I hit those hot downtown bars empty handed, but when I left I was the Pied Piper of the Sunset Colonial, heading home with the freshest, best-looking tomatoes in the whole grocery store skipping along behind me.

  Then the summer was over. The bed, every chair and every table in my room was loaded with clothes. I sat down on a suitcase in the middle of it all, exhausted by the sight of it and the thought of going through this scene all the way across the country. A beautiful thought crossed my mind. A valet. A gentleman’s gentleman: “Judson, I’ll be traveling in the gray mohair. You can pack all the rest, baby. I’m going out now. See you at the train.”

  The phone rang. “Sammy, I’m at the Morris office and something just came up. How fast can you get down here?”

  “I’m in the middle of packing, Massey, I’m not dressed.”

  “Then get dressed. You’ll be glad you did.”

  The receptionist led me to the room where Will and my father were waiting with one of the agents from the nightclub department.

  Will said, “We’re playing Vegas. We’ll be working the Old Frontier and we’ll be living at the Old Frontier! In the best suites they got!”

  “You mean right in the hotel?”

  “And free of charge besides, and that includes food and drink and $7500 a week.”

  I resented the excitement I felt over it. “I don’t know, Massey, I just don’t know if anything’s worth crawling in there like ‘Gee, sir, y’mean you’ll really let us live at your goddamned hotel?’ ”

  “Sammy, we’re not crawling to nobody.”

  The Morris guy smiled. “Crawling. It’s not good business to pass up an attraction that’ll bring people to the tables. To get you now, they’ll break their necks, let alone a ridiculous custom.”

  “When do they want us?”

  “They’re asking for November.” He looked at a sheet of paper on his desk. “That means you play Detroit, Chicago, Atlantic City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Boston, and then into Vegas. That’s twelve straight weeks with no day off except for travelling….”

  I wasn’t looking for days off. If Vegas could open up to us like that then it was just a matter of time until the whole country would open up, and I couldn’t wait to hit the road and sing and dance my head off toward that moment.

  It was a gorgeous crisp November morning as I stepped off the train in Las Vegas. My father and Will were waiting for me on the platform. I searched their faces. “Well?”

  My father made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “The best.”

  “No problems?”

  Will shook his head. “They’re bending over backwards.” I put my arms around both their shoulders and we walked through the station.

  They stopped in front of a beautiful, brand new Cadillac convertible. I looked at my father. “Damn! You musta hit a eight-horse parlay to get your hands on this baby!”

  He tossed me the key. “Well, seein’ as you like her, she’s yours. Will and me bought it for you as a sorta advance birthday present.” I took a slow walk around the car and stopped in front of the “S.DJr.” they’d had painted on the door. “Well, climb in, Poppa, and let’s see if she drives.”

  They slid in alongside me and I put the top down. “Might as well let ‘em see who owns this boat.” I put it in gear and we rolled away from the station. I ran my fingers over a clear plastic cone which jutted out from the center of the steering wheel, enclosing the Cadilla
c emblem. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Will said, “Don’t thank us, Sammy. Thank show business. That’s where it all come from.”

  I couldn’t get serious if my life depended on it. We stopped for a light and I pulled out the ash tray. “Hey, fellas, whatta we do when this gets filled up?”

  My father came right in on cue. “We throws this car away and gets us a new one.”

  Will smiled. “You boys keep doing old jokes like that and we’ll be back riding buses.”

  As we got onto The Strip, I slowed down. “We just drive straight up to the front entrance, right?”

  My father laughed. “Like we own the place.” He was as giddy as I had been a minute before. “We don’t even have t’bother parking the car. They got a man standin’ there just to do that and all you do is slip him a silver dollar and he tips his hat and says, Thank you, sir.’ ”

  As we approached the hotel I saw the big sign out front, “THE WILL MASTIN TRIO featuring SAMMY DAVIS, JR.” I turned into the driveway and pulled up in front of the entrance. A doorman hurried over and opened my door. “I’ll take care of it for you, Mr. Davis.” I gave him a five and he tipped his hat. “Thanks, Mr. Davis.” A bellman came over. “Take your luggage, Mr. Davis?” I pointed to a cab just pulling up. “It’s in that one, baby. My valet will give it to you.”

  The door closed and we were alone in a huge, beautiful suite. I collapsed onto the bed, kicking my legs in the air. “I don’t never wanta leave this room! I’d sign a contract to stay here for the rest of my natural!” I got up and looked around. There was a large basket of flowers in the living room. The card read: “Welcome to the Old Frontier” and was signed by the manager.

  My father was standing behind a bar in the corner of the room. “Glasses, ice, soda, cokes, scotch, bourbon … hell, they didn’t slip up on nothin’.”

  “Well, I guess this is about as First Cabin as anyone can ever hope to go.”

  Charley Head, the man I’d hired in L.A., came in leading four bellmen carrying my luggage. I walked my father and Will to the door. “How about your rooms?”