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

by Davis, Sammy

  “I’ll tell you now. I’ll be playing the Copa in New York later this year and I’m not going to live in Harlem any more than I’m going to live in New Jersey. I know now they’re gonna fight me on it. The guys on the papers’ll start the whole thing about me trying to be white, and the cats on the street’ll read it and say, ‘Yeah, how come he don’t live up here where he belongs?’ But Johnny, there ain’t a one among ‘em that wouldn’t move downtown and into the Waldorf-Astoria if he had the money and if they’d let him in.

  “I’m not going to run up to Harlem and hang around to keep up appearances, either. And I know now what’s gonna happen. The mass Negro’s gonna bitch, ‘He’s not a corner boy.’ And they’re right. I don’t go up to Harlem and just hang on the corner of 125th and Seventh. I never did it when I was a kid and there’s no reason for me to do it now. I’m not about to con my own people into liking me by making regular visits to Harlem and hangin’ around like ‘Hey baby—I ain’t changed. I’m still old Sam. Still colored!”

  The voice that was coming across the desk was warm, friendly. “Sammy, when a fireman goes into a smoke-filled, burning building he wears a gas mask, helmet, rubber coat, and asbestos gloves. As long as you have no intention of changing your approach to life, if you continue to say, ‘I believe I’m right and I’ll stick to what I believe in,’ then at least you should equip yourself accordingly. A magazine or a newspaper seeks the unusual, and in combination with a celebrity, the unusual cannot hope to go unnoticed. If you are the first Negro to move into an all-white neighborhood, it is going to be printed, and the public will react to it; they will reach conclusions and formulate opinions. That is the nature of the beast on all sides of the color spectrum, and we’re not going to change unless we stop thinking and communicating with each other.

  “All I can do for you is promise that in my publications what is reported about you will be done so accurately and fairly. But, it will be reported, and people will approve and disapprove. Some will understand your motives and appreciate them, but some will prefer not to understand. This is the price you must expect to pay for being an individual. As long as you do not run with the pack, as long as you move off in a direction not generally accepted, you will continue to be a controversial figure. You are choosing the road, you should know where it leads.”

  18

  Betty Bogart called me around noon. “Sam, I know it’s short notice, but we just heard you were in town and we’re having a few people up for dinner tonight. Slacks-style. Bring a date if you’d like.”

  “Thanks, Betty. I’m not going with anybody in particular. I’ll come by alone.”

  It was just Frank and a date, Judy Garland and Sid Luft, the Bogarts and me. After dinner I sat in a corner of the living room with Bogie. He said, “You think you’re pretty jazzy with the glen plaid patch.”

  I grinned. “Bogie, let’s face it, either you’re suave or you ain’t. I mean, you’ve gotta admit it is just a little distingué, don’t you?”

  He just looked at me. Abruptly he asked, “How long you gonna keep the goddamned patch on your eye?”

  “Well … I don’t know, it’s only nine months or so and the new eye still doesn’t look very good.”

  “You got the eye underneath it now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lemme see it.”

  I glanced around. “Let’s not scare any women and children.” I lifted the patch. “I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking I may never give it up. I kinda dig it.”

  “It’s a big mistake. Don’t get caught on it. You aren’t too goddamned pretty to look at, and the patch gives you a little feeling like the guy in the shirt ad. You figure it’s glamorous. But you’re getting to like it too much.” He smacked the table three times and the butler came in. “Fix us another drink, please.” He turned back to me. “I’m telling you, take it off as soon as possible. The eye’ll be better than the patch. You’ll be happier.”

  “I’m not so sure. It’s becoming a trademark. I’ve got it on an album cover and it’s fantastic. People spot it right away on the streets. I figure I’ve got a good thing going for me.”

  “Y’wanta keep reminding people about the accident? Y’trying to trade on it?”

  “Hell, no, but I …”

  “Y’wanta walk into a room and have people say, There’s Sammy Davis,’ or do you want ‘em to say, There’s the kid with the patch’?”

  “Well, naturally I don’t want that … I guess I’ll get rid of it eventually, but I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Don’t waste too much time. You’re kidding yourself with that trademark crap. You’re using it for a crutch. Don’t fool yourself that wearing a patch over your eye gives you an excuse for not being good-looking.”

  There was no snow, no icicles on the trees or frost on the window, none of the seasonal things which had always been a part of it, but it felt like Christmas. I put on a robe and listened outside Mama’s door. She wasn’t up yet. I walked through the house, opened the door leading from the foyer into the garage and smiled at the sight of the brand new four-door white Cadillac with a red ribbon tied all the way around it. I stood back to see what kind of a first view she’d get. No good. The thing to do would be to take her outside and then open the garage door so she’d catch a look at it all at once with the sunlight shining on it.

  I put a Christmas album on the hi-fi set, loud, and listened outside her door again. She was still sleeping. I opened it a little and did some stumbling and coughing until I heard her moving around, reaching for her glasses. I leaned over the bed and kissed her. “Merry Christmas, Mama.” I handed her a little box containing the car key.

  She was still half-asleep. “I’ll open this when we have Christmas breakfast. Then I can enjoy it.”

  “Okay, you get dressed and I’ll get things started.” I tried to lay out the things she’d need to cook with. Twenty minutes later she came in. “Mama, let’s just have some coffee.”

  “Well … all right, Sammy.”

  “Instant coffee!”

  She was on her second cup but she hadn’t made a move for the box. I picked it up and shook it. I put it down. “Sammy, you push that any closer to me and it’ll be in my cup. I guess I better open it now or you’ll jump out of your skin.”

  “No rush, Mama. Take your time.”

  She held up the key. “Now what’s this for?”

  I shrugged. “Beats me. Let’s look around and see if we can find something it fits.” I tried it on the kitchen door. “Doesn’t fit here. Let’s go outside.”

  “Sammy, what’re you up to?”

  “I’m not up to anything, Mama. It’s Santa Claus.”

  “Don’t tell me about Santa Claus, I couldn’t even make you believe it after you turned three.”

  I ran ahead, out the front door and called back “Maybe we can find something out here.” I turned to open the garage and stopped dead. Somebody had come by in the middle of the night with a can of paint and a brush and had smeared across the front of the garage door: Merry Christmas Nigger!

  “Sammy, you out here?” She was just coming through the front door. I spun around and grabbed her arm, stopping her before she could see it, and pulled her back into the house. I slammed the door closed and locked it against the ghoulish, dripping letters. The smile that had been on Mama’s face was distorted by a stunned bewilderment. “Sammy, what happened?”

  “Mama. Stay inside! Promise me you won’t go out.” She nodded silently and I ran into my bedroom and closed the door. I dialed and waited. “Arthur … the hell it is. Listen …” I took deep breaths to keep my voice from breaking. “I need you. I want you to come over here tomorrow night. I’ll be in Frisco. Bring a gun. Get a cop, someone off duty, I don’t care what it costs, I want him on the hill across the road and I want you in the window … and if anybody comes onto my property … shoot him! Kill him. If anybody comes near my house or wants to bother Mama, then kill him! Stay here every night I’m out of town, please,
Arthur, and kill anybody who comes near my house … that’s the law, they can’t come here.”

  I hung up and sat on the bed staring out the same window I’d looked through less than an hour before. Holy God! Even on Christmas. I had to get my mind off it. I turned on a record. I reached for a book, any book I might lose myself in. I picked up A History of the Jews and opened it in the middle. The first word I saw was “Justice.” That’s a laugh. I skimmed the pages but that same word kept reappearing. I’d read the book before, but I started reading it again, from the beginning.

  More than ever I saw the affinity between the Jew and the Negro. The Jews had been oppressed for three thousand years instead of three hundred like us, but the rest was very much the same. I went through page after page, reading of their oppressions, their centuries of enslavement; I traced them from one end of the world to the other, despised and rejected, searching for a home, for equality and human dignity, suffering the loneliness of being unwanted, surviving the destruction of their homes and their temples, the burning of their books. For thousands of years they hung onto their beliefs, enduring the scorn, the intolerance, the abuses against them because they were “different,” time and again losing everything, but never their belief in themselves and in their right to have rights, asking nothing but for people to leave them alone, to get off their backs. I looked at the name of the man who had written the book. Abram Leon Sachar. I felt like sending him a note: “Abe, I know how you feel.”

  I got hung up on one paragraph. “The Jews would not die. Three centuries of prophetic teaching had given them an unwavering spirit of resignation and had created in them a will to live which no disaster could crush.” I kept reading it over and over again, wondering what those teachings had been. What had they learned that gave them that strength?

  “… Rabbi, I don’t know if I’ve been describing it right. I read the books around the clock and it was like ‘Yeah!’ and ‘I’m not the only one it’s happened to.’ I don’t mean ‘misery loves company’ but there was something about seeing what your people lived through that made me able to detach myself from what was going on around me and measure my problems for what they really were. I came to thank you and tell you what I suddenly got out of them. They’re nothing like what I expected. Maybe this’ll sound odd to you but it’s not like ‘religion,’ like something that’s a separate part of your life and on Sunday you get it over with because it’s got to be done, or even if you like it, it’s a once-a-week or even a once-a-day thing. It’s more like basic rules for everyday living and it’s odd, I’m not a Jew but so much of it is what I believe in—ideas I’d love to be able to live up to. It was all there, straight and familiar, confirming so much that I’d learned the hard way, like fight for what you believe in, suffer for it if you have to but don’t let go of your ideas—’cause if you do, then you’ve got nothing!

  “I love the attitude that man is made in God’s image and that he has unlimited potential, and that ‘In God’s world all things are possible.’ I love the idea that we can all reach for the brass ring and we can keep stretching until we’re tall enough to reach it. This has been my thinking all my life and it’s a joy to open a book and see that not everybody puts different people in separate cubbyholes and looks at them like ‘How dare they’ if they try to break out. And there’s none of the things I hate, like ‘Well, it’s up to fate’ and ‘If it’s meant to be.’ I admire an attitude of: it is meant to be if you’ll go out and get it done. I love your thinking about not waiting around for a Messiah to come and straighten everything out, that the Messiah is not an individual but mankind collectively and that it’s up to them to create the kind of a world that’ll be like a Kingdom of Heaven right here.”

  Rabbi Fine poured some coffee from a small electric stove on his desk and handed me a cup. I sat back in the chair. “There was a boy I treated badly and then he died and when it happened I’d have given anything I own to have said ‘Hey, I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer.’ But it was too late. He was dead. Gone. That night I prayed for God to forgive me. But I had the feeling that even if God would forgive me, my friend wasn’t going to know anything about it. Then last week I was going through the books and one of the lines came up and whacked me pretty hard: ‘God does not intervene to redeem man’s duties to his fellow man.’

  “I memorized certain things, one in particular, The difference between love and hate is understanding.’ I kept thinking about it and I realized that it was something I’d found out in the army, something I’d seen a dozen times since then, but I just hadn’t known the words for it. Can you know what a hunk of truth like that does for a guy like me? If I can keep that in mind it’s like a bulletproof vest. I know for a fact that when I meet someone who doesn’t like me, who hates my guts, that if I sit with him for a while my chances of changing his mind are pretty good. I’ve just got to give him an opportunity to see what he didn’t know or think about before. I realize that there are certain people who are never going to like me, not on toast or on rye. If two World Wars didn’t wipe out blind hatred then I know I’m not about to. Nor do I really care that much about trying with certain guys. If I look at it calmly and think, then I know that their prejudice is a crutch, it’s an equalizer that some guys need—they’re getting kicked around and they’ve got to let it out on somebody so they find someone they can kick around. Okay, but when the guy calls you the name normally you don’t smile and think, ‘Relax, Charley, it’s his crutch.’ All you know is he just hit you over the head and you want to hit him back, and whether you do or not, it’s exhausting. But now, let him hit me with his crutch. I’m wearing a steel hat. If I find somebody hating me because he doesn’t want to understand me, then I’m not going to hate him, because I will understand him. I’m not going to let him insult me and then exhaust me, too.”

  The rabbi was laughing. “I’ve heard of personally applying a philosophy but you just made a pretzel out of it.”

  “Don’t knock it, Rabbi. It’s working. Y’know my friend with the gun, and the cop I told you about?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hired a painter instead.”

  “Sammy, you seem to enjoy the Jewish philosophy. I didn’t give you much about our theology.”

  “Well, there was some, and here’s where you’re going to think I’m out of my mind entirely, but as I read about the three levels of Judaism, the Orthodox, the Conservative, and the Reform—I hope you won’t take offense, but it’s something like the way I do my act. I do my shows to suit each audience. I give them what I feel they want. I’m not comparing religion to show business, only the approach, and maybe you can see how Judaism does sort of the same thing. It’s broken down so that the individual can have what he needs. The religion serves the man, it’s there to make his life a little better, not to tell him, ‘Hey, God’s over here, three shows on Sunday and you’d better catch him or you blew it and you go downstairs.’ I’m not knocking the others. Obviously they work for millions of people, but I appreciate the flexibility of Judaism. You don’t put a guy in a box and say, ‘Now here’s how to worship God.’ ” I looked at a piece of paper I had. “ ‘God, where shall I find thee? Wherever the mind is free to follow its own bent.’ Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “Yes, but you must not oversimplify Judaism. We place less emphasis on rules of worship than on rules of personal conduct. But we have many symbols, much ritual and ceremony which we enjoy as remembrances of particular times in our history. We remember in tribute to those before us and it gives perspective to where we are today.”

  I hated to break the pleasant atmosphere of near camaraderie of the past two weeks but I couldn’t put it off any longer. “Rabbi, we can talk openly, can’t we?”

  He leaned back in his big leather chair and smiled. “I certainly hope so.”

  “Well, I’ve been coming to services, we’ve spent hours and hours talking Judaism and I’ve read all the books you gave me until I was blue in the face—and y’gotta admit, with
my face that’s not easy—in other words, obviously I’m pretty interested, right? But at no time in all our talks have you ever once said, or even hinted, ‘Hey, why don’t you convert? Become a Jew.’ ”

  “Sammy, converting to Judaism is a monumental move. Particularly for you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Don’t be sensitive. You know there are many Negro Jews and that I wasn’t thinking about that. But you’re publicity prone. An immediate conversion might very possibly create the opinion that you’re doing this as a publicity stunt.”

  “Oh, you can’t believe that?”

  “I resent that question. You should know that I wouldn’t waste my time or thought on you if I even suspected that. I know your sincerity, but there are many who won’t and they’ll deride you and make a mockery of something which has begun to have significance to you.

  “There’s no need to rush into formal conversion. For a while be a Jew at heart. You can be just as good a Jew if you really believe in it without having a document to make it official.”

  “Rabbi, all my life I went in back doors….”

  “It’s not the back door. When you’ve had enough time to be absolutely sure, then come in the front door. But don’t rush through it. When you get back to Hollywood you should look up Rabbi Max Nussbaum. He’s one person I really believe you should meet in your quest for a kinship to Judaism.”

  He was not a man to whom I wanted to give quick answers.

  “Rabbi Nussbaum, religion is something I did without for over twenty years, but in a remote way it’s like a policeman or the fire department: you may not use them often but when you need them you’d better know how to find them. I don’t know how much Rabbi Fine told you about how I got interested in Judaism—it was strictly by accident. But when I started getting an idea of what it was all about I kept reading and I’ve developed a tremendous feeling for it, and for the first time in my life I see the hope of filling the void I’ve always had where religion was concerned.”