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

by Davis, Sammy

  “You really oughta, Sammy. No reason for you to have to put up with drunks talking and calling for more booze—hell, you’re a great artist, you’re too big for that.” He smiled awkwardly. “Well … see you tomorrow night, boss.”

  “Good night, John.”

  I lay still, wishing the answer could be as simple as a clause in a contract but knowing that the audiences had to write that clause themselves, that you can’t make people listen to you. So many times I’d seen comics begging attention with panic lines like: “Just keep eating folks, I’ll still be here when you look up,” and “I know you’re out there ‘cause I can hear you breathing,” lines that are not only corny in their own fashion but they’re a death rattle. Once you have to say “Hey, please listen to my act,” then it’s too late.

  I lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed remembering all the years they’d been so engrossed in my show that it had never occurred to them to eat or drink while I was on. Then, I reheard the lack of excitement downstairs, and for the hundredth time in a month I reviewed every move I’d made onstage. Point by point I was as good a technician as I’d ever been, maybe as I’d grown older I’d become even better. But I wasn’t touching them any more.

  I called John back into the room. “Tomorrow night I want you to tape the act. From the beginning to the end. I’m planning a special kind of an album and I want to hear some of the off-the-wall stuff I do. As a matter of fact, do both shows.”

  He gave me the tapes the next night. I went straight back to the Warwick, alone. I threaded the machine. I poured a coke, lit a cigarette, and stared at the “Play” button until I gathered up the nerve to press it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m thrilled to be back at the Copa … the one place I really think of as home … your kind attention to Mr. Mastin whose teachings and unerring advice … and now our humble offering of … with your very kind permission may we beg your indulgence during our humble rendition of…” I sat dead still, stunned, repulsed by what I was hearing. It went on and on—the nauseatingly humble this and humble that until even an idiot would know it was pure arrogance, reeking of insincerity, of “Charley Star” putting the audience down. I was doing the one thing I knew could never succeed on a stage: being totally dishonest.

  I listened to the second tape, finding it impossible to associate myself with the mechanical man gushing sentimental statements without a shred of real sentiment attached to them. Every word sounded tinny, every emotion was a pretense, a sham that screamed of guile. I waited painfully for the songs and dances as reprieves from the fraud, hoping that after each break it would change course, but the voice kept coming back in a relentless drone of “show biz sincerity,” out and out phoniness, that cut through me like a knife. I heard myself doing lines that should have reached out and caught their hearts but nothing happened; I lost most of the hushed silences I’d always been able to create; jokes that were clever and funny got laughs—but not the screams you get from people who really like you. The beautiful one-ness which had existed between me and the audience, the ability to touch them, was buried beneath layer upon layer of dishonesty.

  I pressed the re-wind button and as the spools jerked and reversed, pulling back the words, my mind raced back over the past year, to all the audiences who’d heard this, who’d come to see somebody they like and had been cheated, offered a fiction, a counterfeit man. When they could no longer find what had first made them like me, then I had nothing going for me but my physical performance. And that’s not enough. Once the novelty of any performer has worn off, once he’s been around a few times and the people have seen what he does, then he’s on the way down the moment he hits the top—unless he has that extra thing going for him, the intangible that makes his audiences care for him. Jerry can do the same jokes, be the same idiot kid, because the people see something that makes them love him. Frank has it in a different way—the strength, the independence, the unbending “right or wrong this is how I am” kind of honesty.

  Obviously the audiences couldn’t put their fingers on what was missing as I could, they wouldn’t analyze it and say “Hey, this kid’s a phony,” but they didn’t have to know why they weren’t excited or why they weren’t telling their friends “You’ve got to get over to the Copa and see Sammy Davis.”

  All the desperation for dramatic television and movies was like giving vitamin pills to a man who’d been cutting his own throat.

  I rewound the first show and turned it on, listening to it clinically, stopping the machine and writing down every hokey or insincere line.

  I taped the shows the next night and locked myself in my room to hear them. The sound of my voice hit me like a wet towel: whap! All the phony things I’d memorized and been careful not to say were gone, but unwittingly I’d invented new ones.

  Night after night I threaded the machine, pressed the button and out poured the same hollowness. No matter how many words and phrases I eliminated, they were replaced by other words, other phrases, equally phony and equally damaging. No matter how carefully I guarded against them, no matter how sure I was that I’d succeeded in stamping them out, the tape caught them, saved them, and threw them back at me. It wasn’t my act that had changed, it was me. It wasn’t the words that were wrong but the attitude which continued to create them. It wasn’t something I could operate on and cut out like a piece of business or a speech affectation; it had dug in far deeper than that. It was a malignancy throughout my whole personality.

  I’d become a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. And I could see the history of it.

  Whatever happened offstage, I looked forward to my shows like another man waits for the weekend or a summer vacation, knowing that when I was in the wings waiting to go on, I’d first begin to feel whole and that finally, in conjunction with the audience, I would come alive. When I walked onstage, when I stood amidst my audiences and I saw their faces and knew I was home, where they liked me, I could relax—it was as though I could take off a coat. Then, when I had to leave that warmth and acceptance, when I had to leave the stage, I put on the coat again.

  But no one can remain two distinct personalities. No one can sneer at people all day long and then for a few hours a night separate them and say “But these are ‘audience’ so they’re different.” You can only con people if you have no respect for them, and the more you con them and get away with it the less respect you have for people in general. The saloon song I’d had written after Mr. Wonderful was proof of how it could not be confined to the streets or to the dressing room crowd. Phoniness, the lack of respect, had become a habit, a reflex, and there had been a transition within me, a shift of balance so slight that I hadn’t seen it happening and the “con man” began creeping onstage until gradually but inevitably he overpowered the honest performer and I was no longer able to take off the coat. I had stopped playing the role and become the character.

  I remember becoming aware that I wasn’t the “nice kid” that had always been my stock in trade. I knew that I had to make the audience believe that I was nice, humble, warm—any number of things which once I had been but was no longer, and to accomplish it I’d reached for everything that had worked for me in the past: they’d always liked the relationship between my father, Will, and me so I’d grabbed for it, using the same words; I played “the kid,” I flattered the audience—I did a dozen things I’d done when we were coming up and I did them exactly the same as I’d done them when they’d worked, when the emotions had been real. But as I acted them out, as I recited words remembered, the people recognized the difference, and all the statements and sentiments I utilized for effect, all the words which once I had meant, fell hollow, like all echoes.

  I did my shows, straining to be nice, to feel nice so I could come across nice, but the tapes kept proving the lie. I tried to change, to make it real. I heard about a bellboy in the hotel whose wife needed an operation and I gave him a thousand dollars. Will hadn’t been feeling well so I flew a specialist down from Boston to examine
him. I made a list of people I knew cared about me and I called them all over the country just to say hello. But even as I did these things I knew they were pointless: nothing I could think to do was for anybody but myself, no compassion I felt was for anybody but me and each audience was perceptive enough to recognize and refuse to accept a kind of honesty that wears a mask. And I had no choice but to wear a mask because they would never accept what I really felt.

  Night after night there was nothing I could do but sit by myself after the shows, staring at the foot-high stack of tapes—the coffin of anything good I had been—listening to my own voice destroying everything I’d built. Show by show it got thicker and deeper and the more I tried to struggle out of it, the more honest I tried to be—the more dishonest it came across. It had grown onto me like a barnacle and it was eventually going to pull me under.

  I threw no party on closing night. I stayed alone in my $100 a day suite wondering how long before I couldn’t afford this kind of luxury, looking through the penthouse window, immune to the majesty and beauty of the city below, trying to anticipate the future like a man who’s been told he’s got two years to live. If I was lucky and if I played my cards right and didn’t come back to the same places too often maybe I could even stretch it into three. It wouldn’t happen overnight—I had too much name, too much momentum—but it had to happen.

  I didn’t need to play the tapes anymore to hear the tinniness, I could see it in every face at every club at every stop along our swing from New York to Los Angeles. I unpacked some of my books on Judaism, books I hadn’t looked at in almost a year. “Humility depends upon both thought and action. A man must be humble at heart before he can adopt the ways of the meek. Whoever wishes to conduct himself humbly without being humble at heart is only an evil pretender and in the company of those hypocrites who are the bane of mankind.” It was like a finger wagging at me, telling me what I knew was wrong, but not how to fix it.

  Rabbi Nussbaum asked, “Why, Sammy?” and as I heard his voice I was aware that it was the first time he’d spoken for at least an hour.

  “There’re a hundred reasons.”

  “Give me just a few.”

  “I want to make a change in my life, in my thinking—a complete overhaul.”

  “And you sincerely believe that conversion would be the thing to do it for you?”

  “Rabbi, it’s got to!” I was embarrassed by the loudness of my voice—the desperation it revealed. “Rabbi, I’m not going to bore you to death with my problems but I’ve got to have something to grab ahold of, something solid that I can depend on.” I stood up and leaned across his desk. “I know what I am and I don’t like what I am; I know what’s in the books and I like what’s in the books. I want to change but I can’t do it alone. I’ve been trying to be a Jew in my heart but that’s not enough. I can’t stay on the outside looking in. I’ve had that all my life, Rabbi, and I just can’t go that route anymore. I’ve got to get on the inside where I can feel it and participate in it. I know there’s more good in people and in life than I can see and I’ve got to find a way to see it, to make contact again. I’ve read and I’ve studied and I’ve called myself a Jew. Everything you said. I’ve tried to feel like a Jew, I really have, but I know it can’t work until I know I really am a Jew. Please. Don’t turn me away.”

  I sat down and leaned my head against the back of the chair, staring at the ceiling. There was a long silence, then I heard the desk drawer open and close. He wrote something on a sheet of paper and slid it across to me. It said: “Sammy Davis, Jr. is a Jew.” He’d signed it. He wasn’t smiling or waiting for me to laugh, as if it were a gag, yet obviously it wasn’t the real thing. I read it again, stalling, trying to understand. “I don’t get it, Rabbi.”

  “Do you feel any better? Different? Does this solve any of your problems?” He crumpled the paper and dropped it into a wastebasket. “I hope you’ll forgive the dramatics, Sammy. I was only trying to illustrate that I cannot make you a different person merely by signing a piece of paper.”

  “Then it’s a turn-down, right?”

  For an instant his eyes showed pain. “Sammy, try to understand that you’re as much as asking for a diploma instead of the education it represents. If I let you delude yourself into believing that you have found what you need then you’ll stop looking and it will never be yours to serve you as we both believe it can. You’re grasping wildly for something to keep you afloat and I want urgently to give it to you. I’ll clear my calendar to suit your needs, I’ll give you all the time you need, I’ll do anything to help you, but I will not give you a meaningless piece of paper and let you walk out of here believing it to be your lifeline. I will not encourage you to hold onto something which has no substance and cannot possibly support you.”

  “Well, that’s all fine and I appreciate what you mean but it’s not like I just read a pamphlet on Judaism and I came over and said, ‘Hey, I wanta be one of these.’ This has been going on for years with me. I’ve read the books by the dozens, I believe in the ideas—I can recite them to you.”

  He stood up and looked out the window for a moment, then turned to me. “The first time we met I told you not to expect to find Judaism in books, I warned you they would give you the philosophies and the theology but that it was up to you to translate them into religion. Do you remember?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to say that it hasn’t happened. Further, you’re looking to Judaism as a quick cure for your problems. You’re coming to me for a bandage to cover a sore, a crutch to lean on, a pill to remove a headache. But Judaism is not a symptomatic cure. It cannot be taken internally like a tranquilizer. On the contrary, it must start from within and work its way out. Judaism is a philosophy, an approach to God and to life, a way of thinking, a state of mind. As a scholar of that philosophy I can help you to understand our principles, I can lead you to them, but only you can adopt them as your own. A rabbi is only a teacher. I don’t speak to God any more than any man can speak to Him. I can’t put religion into you. All I can do is help you to find it and then sign a paper attesting to the fact that in my opinion you have found this particular approach to life. But I cannot make you a Jew. Only you can do that. And you have not yet done it.”

  “But I think I have.”

  “Sammy, that is your desperation speaking, not your intellect. You didn’t walk in here and say, ‘Rabbi, I’m a Jew because I think and feel as one.’ You didn’t ask me to certify something which has already taken place within you, you’ve asked me to make it happen.”

  I avoided his eyes, knowing he was right, that I’d kidded myself it could work and taken a wild stab, like everything I’d been trying. It was embarrassing and I tried to laugh it off but the sound I made wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t feel very pleasant. “Well, I guess that’s it folks. It’s turn-in-the-books time.”

  His voice softened. “Sammy, it’s entirely your choice, but you have such a feeling, such an understanding for Judaism that it would be a pity to have come this far, and then abandon it.”

  “Rabbi, I don’t have much time left.” I hated the melodramatic sound of that. “What I mean is I leave for Vegas in a few days. You don’t suppose we could swing it by then?”

  He sat down behind his desk. “Isn’t it time for you to stop fooling yourself?” I looked away. “Sammy, think back over our conversations. You’ve told me about friends you have but have not, about happiness you should have but have not. We’ve talked for hours and you’ve itemized all the points of your life, ticking them off one by one. And what do they add up to? A twenty-four-hour-a-day vacuum with the single exception of your career. Hasn’t it yet occurred to you why your life is like this? Isn’t it likely that your career is the only thing to which you have given of yourself, that your audiences are the only people you have ever placed before yourself? By your own admission you’ve bought most of your friends and you’ve never had a relationship with a woman that was based on anythi
ng but carnal desire. You’ve built a gaudy house of cards and now you look around in surprise at seeing it topple. You see chaos but I can be more objective. I see justice. You’ve worked hard at your profession, you’ve been true to it and you became a star. But you gave no thought or consideration to anything else, so you have nothing else. Should I let you approach Judaism in that same way? Would I be doing you a favor if I were to help you create another pitifully vacuous experience? And this one would be the worst of all. Where would you turn when your last resort has failed?”

  “I’ve got a better question. Where do I turn now?”

  “To yourself.”

  I stood up. “I’ve been there. There’s nobody home.”

  “Try again. You’re the only person capable of shaping your life. Don’t just read the books. Practice them. Don’t just come to services and say prayers which are pointless unless they reflect a life which emulates the ways of God. I shouldn’t have to tell you these things. You know them. If you believe in our philosophy then follow it, give it a fair opportunity to serve you.”

  “Rabbi, there’s nothing I’d like better. I’ve been trying for years but it just doesn’t seem to take. I guess I must be in pretty bad shape.”

  He stood up and walked across the room with me. “There have been worse. There have been men who didn’t know they were in bad shape. There have been men who didn’t have the power to alter their thinking.” At the door he said, “Neither I nor Judaism would suffer if you tried it and it failed. Only you would lose.”

  “I was going to ask you when you think I’ll be ready but I guess that’s a ridiculous question. It sounds like I’m trying to cook a chicken.”

  He smiled. “You’ll know before I do. You’ll become a Jew long before I put a piece of paper in your hand. And although I look forward to that day, you will not be the slightest bit better a Jew than you were the day before. As a matter of fact when you know you’re ready you won’t even rush in here to get the certificate. You won’t need it then because you’ll have what it represents.”