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

by Davis, Sammy

  I tried to scoff at the idea of my friendship to Frank being able to affect a national election but a bigot’s vote counts as much as a liberal’s and the smear experts were hungry for weapons like an interracial marriage. There were thousands of people stumping for votes and obviously too many of them were willing to drive their man to the White House in a garbage truck if necessary.

  I hadn’t been in Vegas twenty minutes when I got word that the bookmakers were offering three to one that Frank wouldn’t show at my wedding.

  Frank, Dean, and Peter had come down for the weekend and I was in the steam room with Frank. He asked, “How’s she standing up under all the garbage?”

  “So far so good, I guess. But the momentum keeps picking up as we get closer to the date and I dread the day when somebody’s going to think up a little zingy that’ll penetrate her outer layer of strength. At least if I could be with her to balance it off, but I figure the less we’re seen together until the wedding the less they’ll have to work with. I’m deliberately bringing her down here for only one weekend. Fortunately, she’s busy and excited getting things ready.”

  He nodded. “She’ll be all right. She’ll have her moments but she’ll make it.”

  When I spoke with May between shows she said, “Frank called me a little while ago. Just to say hello and find out how I am.”

  I saw him the next afternoon as he and the guys were leaving. “I talked to May last night, Frank. Thanks.”

  “See you at the wedding, Charley. I’ll leave Hawaii on the fourteenth and be back a day early to make sure I don’t run into weather.”

  One of the Hollywood columns said: “Fox is sitting out May Britt’s contract until it runs out in July.” I suspected that it was one of those carefully planted ‘leaks’ intended as a last-minute warning to her. I’d expected it just as surely as I knew that the next day the studio would release a complete denial saying it was “a totally unfounded rumor” and they’re busily looking for scripts for her. I didn’t mention it on the phone, nor did she.

  I met her at the airport Friday afternoon. “Now here’s the skam: get unpacked and comfortable in some slacks and we’ll have dinner in my room. It’ll be the only time we’ll get to talk until late tonight because I’ve invited some people over after the second show. I’ve got a lot of friends here and they haven’t stopped with ‘When am I gonna meet her?’ ”

  When she got to my suite I sat beside her on the couch. “May. Did you see the Fox thing?”

  Her face blanched and she nodded. She reached into her purse for a cigarette not noticing the open pack I’d put in front of her. She asked, “How do you feel about it?”

  “Horrible. I just don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am.” I looked at the floor and the silence hung thickly between us, a silence of barriers despite all that had grown between us.

  She said, “If I do get dropped by Fox I can always make Italian films. Of course I realize they won’t have the same impact so maybe we won’t have quite as much of the ‘May Britt and Sammy Davis, Jr.’ jazz …”

  “I don’t dig.”

  “You said it was one of the things you liked about me.”

  I looked up. “You mean that jazz about the combination of personalities?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re not seriously worrying about that? I only meant that it’s a pleasant little extra, a kick, but it never had any importance.”

  She studied my face before she spoke. Her voice was quiet, urgent. “If I ask you something, can I get an honest, no-kidding answer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you love me as much … if I weren’t in pictures?”

  “You’ve got to be joking with a line like that.” She shook her head. I reached out and held her face in my hands. “Darling, I’ll love you if you never even go to see a movie.”

  “I’m serious, Sammy. Have you thought about it?”

  “I don’t have to think about it. I love you like I don’t even love myself, and you know that’s love. If I seem depressed about this Fox jazz, and I am, it’s because of the way it happened. If you’d said to me, ‘Hey, I’m bored with pictures, I’m quitting,’ I’d say, ‘Crazy,’ but I don’t want pictures to quit you. I realize that right now the last thing in your mind would be to do a picture. That’s natural. But things are going to calm down and there may come a day when you look at a fan magazine and you see some kid on the cover and you think, ‘Gee, I’m better looking than she is and I’m a better actress,’ and maybe you’ll wish you were able to go back and do one-a-year. Let’s be honest, you don’t exactly hate being Mary Moviestar and you’ve earned your career, you’ve worked hard and you’ve got a great start and,” I forced myself not to turn away. “I don’t want you to look up one day and think, ‘What a heavy price I paid to marry him.’ ”

  The color was coming back into her face. “Well, if you were only bothered about how I felt then we can forget it. As long as you love me then there’s nothing else I want. I couldn’t care less about being in pictures. I’d much rather stay around the house with our babies and be just plain Mrs. Sharlie Brown.”

  I held her in my arms, grateful for the way it had worked out. I thanked God that she’d had the strength to absorb it, but I knew there’d be other things, and because she had all the guts in the world she’d keep trying. She’d made it this time, she’d make it the next time and maybe even the next, but would she eventually crack under it?

  While the waiter served dinner, she brought me up to date. “The acceptances are pouring in. The carpet is down and the fireplace is gorgeous … it looks just like we pictured it would.” Then she became serious. “Sammy, I want to ask you something but I don’t want you to think I’m complaining. It’s about the party tonight. I guess I’d feel pretty rotten if you didn’t want me to meet your friends, but is it always going to be like this? Are there always going to be crowds of people around?”

  “Look, darling, I’ll admit it wasn’t one of my most brilliant moves. I didn’t think it out very well when I invited them and by the time I realized I should have waited at least ‘til tomorrow it was too late to change it. Just bear with me on this one. I’ve had it with the days of thirty and forty people swarming in and out of the Playhouse all the time. But you’ve got to understand that those people were there when I needed them so I can’t just brush everybody off like ‘I don’t need you any more so beat it.’ It’s going to have to be a tapering off process until they get the idea that I’m married, that things have changed and it’s not a free-for-all at Sam’s every night.”

  “That’s all I want. I don’t want to be rude or hurt their feelings either, and I can wait as long as necessary if I can feel I’m not always going to be sharing my husband with a pack of people who knew him before I did. Naturally I want to hold on to whatever real friends we have.”

  When I got to the dressing room I looked through the mail. Somebody had sent me a clipping from one of the hate sheets, a two-panel cartoon. The first panel was a picture of me dressed like a butler, grinning and serving a platter of fried chicken and watermelon to John F. Kennedy. In the second panel I was sitting at the table eating it with him. The caption was: “Will it still be the White House?”

  The party was at its height when a comic came over to May and me. “Hey, Sammy, is that on the level about Dean instead of Frank?” May sat forward. Seeing her interest he explained, “There’s a thing in one of the columns today, something about Dean Martin understudying Frank as Sammy’s best man just in case Frank suddenly gets ‘ill’ and can’t show.” May sat back, noncommittally, and he turned to me, shaking his head angrily, sympathetically, “Man, that’s pretty lousy of him.”

  I said, quietly, “It’s not lousy because it’s not true. If you’re going to believe everything you read I’d better tip you off also that Little Orphan Annie isn’t really still eight years old.”

  I wondered what May must be feeling, constantly hearing that her wedding was something so t
errible that the presence of a friend as best man could create this kind of an uproar. I didn’t have the guts to discuss it with her and by the time I saw her off at the airport on Sunday afternoon we’d talked about everything else in the world, but not that.

  When I got back to the hotel I called the switchboard operator, “I’m not in to anybody except family and long distance.” It seemed impossible that one wedding could cause such a cross-fire of emotions, such problems. And for so many people. But, right or wrong, fair or not, my wedding was giving the Nixon people the opportunity to ridicule Kennedy and possibly hurt him at the polls. And every survey showed that he couldn’t afford to lose a single vote. I could imagine the pressure Frank must be under. He must have eighty guys telling him, “Don’t be a fool. You’ve worked hard for Kennedy, now do you want to louse him up?” He must be getting it from all sides. And the worst of it is it’s understandable. If Frank is identified with Kennedy strongly enough to help draw votes then it follows that if he stands up for me at a controversial interracial marriage only a few weeks before the election there must be some votes he’ll lose for Kennedy. And the innuendo and publicity it’s gotten so far is only a hint of what’ll happen after he appears at the wedding and they have a piece of hard news to work with. They’ll wrap it around his ears in almost every paper in the country.

  How can I call myself his friend when in the name of friendship I’m keeping him in this kind of a bind? If he’s holding out for me like this how can I not be equally his friend and take him off the spot?

  But, aside from the fact that I couldn’t imagine being married without him there, at this point if Frank did not appear it would be almost as bad as if he did. It would backfire, they’d make it look as if the rumors had been true, that somebody on Kennedy’s staff had suggested it. Maybe he’d regain the bigot vote but he’d lose some of the liberals and a lot of the Negro vote.

  There was only one way to take the pressure off everyone concerned. Postpone the wedding. I knew he was back in the States for the weekend, at the Springs with Peter and some of the guys. I placed the call. His man must have answered it in the den and while I waited for him to come to the phone I could hear music and people laughing, then I heard the phone being picked up.

  “Hi’ya, Charley, what’s new?”

  “Frank, I won’t keep you because I know you’ve got people there but I just wanted to let you know that we’re so up to our ears getting the house ready and all that jazz that we’re going to have to put the wedding off a couple of weeks. You wouldn’t believe the problems a poor soul has trying to get married: there’s a hitch getting the Escoffier Room for the reception, the rabbi can’t make it ‘cause he’s already booked for a bar mitzvah … anyway, I don’t know when it’ll be but I’ll give you plenty of notice.”

  “You’re lying, Charley.”

  I hesitated, but it was pointless. “Look, what the hell, it’s best that we postpone it ‘til after the election.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Then, “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to. All the talk …”

  “Screw the talk.”

  “I know, but it’s better this way.”

  When finally he spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper. “I’ll be there whenever it is. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know that, Frank.”

  “You know that I’d never ask you to do a thing like this. Not your wedding. I’d never ask that!”

  “That’s why it’s up to me to be saying it.”

  “You’re a better man than I am, Charley. I don’t know if I could do this for you, or for anyone …”

  “You’ve been doing it, haven’t you?” There was a long silence, then I heard him put down the phone. A few seconds later Peter was on the line. There were no jokes. None of the usual insults we do with each other.

  He said, “Frank can’t talk any more.”

  If he got that choked up now—if he could break down in the middle of a phone call then the pressure on him must have been even greater than I’d imagined.

  “Charley?”

  “Yes, Peter?”

  “Charley, I … it’s beautiful of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  We hung up. I’d died a little inside, not from the decision I’d finally made; it had happened when I’d realized the necessity of making a decision.

  May would be getting to her house soon. Somehow I’d have to make her understand. I stared at her picture on my night-table. What can I say to her? “We’re postponing our marriage because it’s so repulsive to some people that they won’t want to vote for Kennedy. You understand, don’t you, darling?” How does a man explain this to the one person in the world above all others from whom he wants respect and admiration?

  I got into my car and drove aimlessly around downtown Vegas, racked by the picture of her excitement of the past few weeks, the rushing around and getting the house ready, waiting for her parents to arrive from Sweden, sending out the invitations, fitting her dress … the sooner I faced it the faster it would be behind us. I went into a drugstore and sat down in a phone booth.

  Her excitement soared through the phone. “Sharlie Brown, our first presents arrived over the weekend. There are six of them here. One is from George and Gracie Burns, the others must have their names inside and I haven’t touched them. I can’t wait ‘til you get home so we can open them together.”

  “May, I have something important to tell you, but before I do I want you to know that this is the first and only thing that concerns us both that I’ll ever do without consulting you. But I had no choice this time. It’s a decision I had to make myself….” As I explained it, I knew by her silence that she was hurt and saddened. “Darling, it boils down to this: over a period of almost twenty years Frank has been aces high, aces up—everything a guy could be to me. There’s nothing in the world he wants from me, nothing I can do for him except be his friend. Ninety-nine per cent of the others come and go and you act nice and help them if it’s convenient, but Frank is a friend, and now he needs something from me, so there can be no evaluating, no hesitating, no limit. It’s got to be to the end of the earth and back for him if he needs it.”

  “I understand. And I agree with you. There was nothing else to do.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you first.”

  “I know it’s not easy to suddenly start thinking differently than you always have, and I know you’re trying. When do you think we can get married?”

  “Well, the one-man show opens at the Huntington Hartford on the 26th and closes November 12th. The election’ll be over so why don’t we get married the next morning, Sunday.”

  “Fine.”

  “I guess you realize that this means we can’t have a honeymoon, either. It’s too late to juggle dates around. I have to open in San Francisco on Tuesday the 15th.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s not important at all.”

  “Look, maybe it won’t be so terrible. I’m only doing one show a night in San Francisco so it’s not like I’ll be stuck in a club till three in the morning. I’ll get the Presidential suite at the Fairmont and at least we can have the next best thing to a real honeymoon.”

  “That sounds great.”

  I could only whisper into the phone. “I’ll make it up to you, darling. I swear to God I will.”

  When we hung up I slammed my fist against the phone with all the strength I had, and it hurt. I hit it again, and again, and again. Dear God, will it ever end? Will I ever be able to be like everybody else?

  The next morning we sent telegrams to everyone who’d received an invitation: “THE WEDDING OF MISS MAY BRITT WILKENS AND MR. SAMMY DAVIS, JR. WILL BE POSTPONED UNTIL SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13TH. WE SINCERELY HOPE YOUR ATTENDANCE WILL BE POSSIBLE FOR THE WEDDING RECEPTION AT THE BEVERLY HILTON HOTEL ON THIS DAY AT 4:00 P.M. RSVP 9057 DICKS STREET, LOS ANGELES 46, CALIFORNIA. MR. AND MRS. ERNST HUGO WILKENS.”

  I’d signed with Ro
gers and Cowan, a large Hollywood publicity office, and they sent an announcement to the press: “The Sammy Davis, Jr.-May Britt wedding has been postponed due to a legal technicality in Miss Britt’s Mexican divorce from her previous husband.”

  That was the lie and that’s how we told it. We let nobody in on it.

  I checked into the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and started rehearsals for the one-man show at the Huntington Hartford.

  On the evening of the opening I took a nap on the couch in the dressing room. I was awakened by a knocking on the door. The stage doorman put on the light. “Mr. Davis … I’m sorry to wake you …” He was trembling.

  I sat up. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been getting phone calls. I didn’t want to upset you, but …”

  “What kind of calls?”

  “Well, the first one was this morning. He said, ‘We’ve got guns and hand grenades and we’re coming to blow up the place.’ It sounded like a kid so I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then an hour later there was another one …” He looked away from me. “They said, ‘Is that so-and-so bastard still gonna open there? There’s a bomb in the theater right now.’ I called the police. They’ve been going over every inch of the theater and they haven’t found anything so far. But I just got another call and this one said, ‘We’ll fix him and well get his so-and-so girl friend, too.’ I figured you should know, so you can take precautions.”