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

by Davis, Sammy

  “Sammy …” her face was losing the façade of cheerfulness and her voice was starting to quaver. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be so marvelous …” She was trying to fight the tears. “This is so darned rotten.” I held her in my arms stroking her head while she got it out of her system. “A fine Joan of Arc I turned out to be.” Her ears became red and suddenly, abruptly, she pulled herself together and strode briskly across the room. “Okay, that’s enough of that.” She faced me. “I’m sorry. That’s the last time I’ll ever do that to you. I promise. I won’t make it harder for you than it already is.”

  I knew that she meant it, that she’d ache with pain before she’d ever again let on how it bothered her. I knew that as we parted time after time she’d earn medals for guts and bravery. But I couldn’t begin to understand why it should be necessary.

  The applause increased, kept growing louder, but I could only think of it as an ideal shield for the sound of a gunshot. And as I worked I knew that my physical performance was not as good as it should have been. The one thing that had remained constant all these years had finally succumbed to divided attention. Despite the plainclothesmen spread all over the theater, despite every possible precaution, I found myself unable to devote myself as fully to each song, each dance; I was looking for hints of trouble, studying hazy faces in the back of the theater. As I did the impressions my mind’s ear wasn’t tuned entirely to Cagney or Robinson, and as I sang only half of me was absorbed in the words of the song while the other half was praying that somebody hadn’t left a window or a door unlocked at the house. I was afraid. Somewhere out there, in this audience or in the next, was the guy who’d make trouble. Or, worse still, was he in Hollywood, creeping up to the house, planning some horrible thing against May?

  I left the stage exhausted and waited at the phone in the dressing room until I got her on the line, until I heard her voice. I told her I’d call again later when I got to the hotel and we could talk. I sat chained to the chair by fatigue, too tired to get up and change my clothes. Murphy was straightening out the make-up table. He lifted the kleenex box and looked at a stack of hate letters I’d left under it. “Those are the violent ones, baby. Find the local FBI office and get them over there tomorrow like they asked.”

  There was a knock on the door, he turned quickly, leaning his head close to it. “Who is it?”

  “Paul Newer.”

  Paul came in and locked the door behind him. He looked more like a young schoolteacher than a detective. He was tall, wore glasses, and his suit was loose so that his gun and holster wouldn’t bulge. He said, “I moved you into a different suite.”

  “You’re joking. What was wrong with the old one?”

  “As long as we’re going to be together for a year, you should be familiar with basics. You will always occupy a different hotel room than the one in which you’re officially registered.”

  “Baby, isn’t that a little pointless? Eighty room-service waiters and maids’ll know where I am.”

  “Percentages. We keep the odds as low as we can. You will not answer a door even if you think you know who it is. Obviously all packages and mail will be left at the desk, never delivered directly to you. I’ll pick them up and bring them to you.”

  “The bellboys are gonna love that.”

  “We’re not worried about the bellboys. You won’t leave the theater or the hotel without me. Ever. I’ll enter every building or room ahead of you. It’ll be annoying, maybe awkward sometimes, but I’ll be with you from when you wake up until you go to sleep,” he smiled, “and when you’re sleeping I’ll be in the adjoining room.”

  “In other words I ain’t never going to be able to shake you, right?”

  “Till death do us part.”

  Murphy looked up, “Watch your language.”

  The threats didn’t let up, the pickets kept coming back to the theater—I dared not have May join me.

  I sat at the phone knowing that from the moment we’d start talking she’d be waiting for me to say “Pack your bags and come on,” that I’d stall, hating to tell her, yet hating to keep her in suspense. What’s she getting out of marriage besides being made a prisoner?

  I called Burt in New York. “Baby, I need a favor. May digs the Sherry Netherland but I don’t know anybody there and I’m not sure how they might feel about me. I’ll appreciate it if you find out and if possible get me their best suite for the month I’ll be at the Copa.”

  When he called back and told me I had it and there’d been no resistance at all I called May. “Darling, your husband might just turn out to be one of the great idea men of his time. Instead of you coming all the way over here where there’s still some pressure—and the fact is there’s nothing to do—I’m booked on the flight to L.A. right after the show Saturday night. I’ll get to the house by one or two o’clock, there’s no show on Sunday so I’ll be able to stay home until late Monday afternoon. I’ll do the same thing the next weekend,” I rushed on, “and in-between I figure I can do a few quickie trips over like Tuesday and Thursday. If I didn’t have certain interviews and stuff that I’ve got to do here I’d commute every day.”

  “Hey, that’s great.” Her voice didn’t falter.

  “And, what’s your favorite hotel in New York?”

  “The Sherry Netherland.”

  “Well, I reserved a gorgeous suite for us there, facing Central Park.”

  When we hung up an hour later I glanced through the papers. One of the Broadway columns said, “The S.D. Jr. marriage is rumored wobbly already. Two days after the ceremony he went on to Frisco and left her at home in L.A.”

  I fell into the strict routine Paul had set up. He came everywhere with me, he was introduced as a friend, but he was always facing the entrance, always sitting between me and the door.

  As the time came to leave for the road, I looked back over the empty threats, and was tempted to tell May, “Come on, we’ll go together and take our chances.” But I resisted it, reminding myself that the extra weeks together weren’t worth risking the years beyond them and as I kissed her good-bye after spending two beautiful days at the house I found it more difficult to leave her than ever before; almost impossible to explain away as merely “a precaution” the expensive need for constant security, to do it with a laugh, to play down my longing for her, yet make her know that I didn’t want to go anywhere without her, and to expect her to accept indefinitely the fact that we had to wait for the future before we could enjoy the simple pleasure of being together.

  I moved through Idlewild Airport counting the smiles, the hard looks, weighing them all, one against the other, conducting a private poll. From city to city I’d been measuring reactions of cops, cab drivers—everybody, wondering how much business I was going to do; would they stay away because of the marriage? Have I gone over the line this time and done something they just won’t be able to accept?

  I went directly to the Copa on the pretense of wanting to check the lights, and casually asked, “How do the reservations look?”

  Bruno grinned, “We haven’t had anything like this all year. The boys are going to pay their mortgages on this month.”

  I walked around the corner to the Sherry Netherland. The man at the desk slid the registration pad toward me and extended his hand. “A pleasure to have you with us, Mr. Davis.”

  Waiting for the elevator a young couple smiled. The door opened and a dowager-type saw me and did a double take, like she hoped she was wrong.

  Murphy was at a desk in the living room, separating the mail into two piles. I glanced at one of the letters. “Many of these?”

  “No, Sammy, just a few. Really. Maybe one out of twenty. The rest are beautiful. Some of them even have little poems wishing you happiness.”

  “When May gets here don’t even bring the mail upstairs. Take it to the dressing room and screen it there.”

  Standing backstage I felt more than the usual opening-night tensions. Bob Melvin, the comedian I’d been using on the bill w
ith me, was on the floor and I stood near the kitchen listening, trying to feel the way the crowd was going to be.

  Julie Podell came over to me. “Sammy? Have a drink?” He rapped the service bar with his pinky ring. “What’re you drinking?”

  “Nothing, thanks. I’ll just stand with you.”

  He raised his glass. “To the Mrs.” He downed his drink and, gesturing toward the audience, growled, “They’re killing me for tables. I had to yank the production number. How in the hell can I get eight girls on a floor the size of a postage stamp?”

  The lights went down and John and Nathan rushed onto the darkened stage to arrange my props. George Rhodes and Michael Silva moved quickly and efficiently to their places on the bandstand. I stood in the back, taking a last few drags on a cigarette, holding it cupped in my hand, letting the heat of its ember penetrate the chill that had swept over me. There was a hush, then the first sound of music, and the lights went up on the stage I had to fill. The applause began, I saw the heads turning, straining toward the spot where I’d appear. I waited, listening to them calling for me—then I was on the floor, standing among them, hearing their welcome grow stronger.

  I stood motionless, looking at the familiar faces. We were old friends who’d seen a lot of years together, good ones and bad, and it was a glorious thing to see them rising to applaud me, nodding, smiling, even before I’d begun dancing or singing.

  As I swung through the first few numbers I knew that whatever had afflicted my personality had passed, gone as unexpectedly as it had come. And the reason was clear: I’d taken a stand in life, not through courage but out of necessity. I had opened the only door available to me and I’d walked through it with May into the limelight or into oblivion, whichever it might be, but together. There’d been no compromise, simply, “I have done what I believe in and here I stand, good, bad or indifferent, I hope you will still like me but if you don’t, I will regret it but I cannot change.” I wasn’t hedging any more, trying to please everyone, and my missing rapport with the audience had returned with all the intensity it had ever had, perhaps more.

  I looked out at the people jamming the club. I’d prepared myself to find them gone, but there they were, en masse, as much as saying, “Yeah, Sam, go. Do what you want to do. We like you any way you play it.”

  When you look at people and you feel the great good fortune of what they have done for you, and you realize that here you are by their grace and here you may stay by their grace you begin to understand the meaning of humility. All the books I’d read, the philosophers, the poets, all the careers I’d studied, the plays, the movies, all these never taught me. I guess you can’t learn it that way. It just happens to you one lucky day when God gives you pause to appreciate what surrounds you. Suddenly you see the beauty and the cooling shade of a tree instead of the fact that leaves fall and have to be raked up.

  When it happens to you the word “humility” is thrown away. You can’t use it any more, certainly not commercially, for effect on a stage. It becomes something felt deep inside you which may transmit to the people in its own unspoken way.

  I moved around the tightly packed dressing room saying hello to the people who’d come upstairs. As the crowd shifted, making room for new arrivals, I walked over to where George Gilbert was sitting with Jane and Burt. I lowered my voice. “Shall we discuss how a small, colored, Jewish lad has become the darling of the 400?”

  “It’s wonderful,” muttered Jane, squashed into a corner, “but must you have them here all at once?”

  I saw Evelyn Cunningham at the door and hurried across the room to greet her. She introduced me to her husband Cam. We talked for about fifteen minutes and when they were ready to leave I said, “Evelyn, I appreciate you coming up here like this.” I smiled. “I never exactly enjoyed being an outcast.”

  As we shook hands she said, “I’d love to meet your wife. Why don’t you bring her up to our apartment some night next week?”

  Her visit and the invitation to her home seemed to crystalize the approval I’d been sensing from areas where I’d never before had it. It seemed incredible that marriage to a white woman would bring the Negro people so solidly behind me. Yet, the same person who’d battered me bloody in her column for as long as I could remember seemed to have been trying to let me know, “I don’t care who you married as long as it’s on the level.” Certainly not all of the white or Negro people believed in what I had done, the only logical answer was that they respected the honesty of it and, at least, my right to believe in it.

  May said, “Sammy? What is it you want more than anything else in the whole world?”

  “I want you to get your Swedish fanny on a plane and get here, fast.”

  “What else?” She was stifling a giddiness that kept creeping into her voice. “Something we want so badly….” I could almost see her smiling through the phone.

  “Darling … do you mean little brown babies?”

  “That’s what I mean, Sharlie Brown. I knew about it this morning but I wanted to tell it to you when I saw you so I didn’t say anything the other times you called but I just couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.”

  Her plane landed at seven in the evening. I drove out with Jane and Burt, and Paul, to meet her. It was close to show time as the car neared the city. I said, “Darling, you’d better drop me at the club. Paul will go back to the hotel with you and Jane and Burt; you can get comfortable, rest, and I’ll come over between shows.”

  “But I was hoping I’d see your second show tonight.”

  I tensed, “Well … I figured you’d be tired after the trip….”

  “Sammy, I haven’t seen your show since we’ve been married. Don’t you want me to see it?”

  “Of course I do.” I’d been completely wrapped up in the excitement of seeing her and the happiness of a baby coming, but now there was the sobering realization that subconsciously I’d been hoping to avoid her coming to the club. I was dying to have her sitting out front, but lurking behind that pleasure was the question of how the audience would treat her when they saw us in the same room. It was one thing for them to say, “Wonderful. Be happy,” but it was something else for them to actually see us together. That’s the part that even some of the liberals couldn’t take, the contrast. That’s what bothered them.

  “Well, then, do it this way: Jane and Burt can drop you and Paul at the hotel, swing back to their place and change clothes, the car can wait for them, they’ll pick you up and you’ll all come to the dressing room. You’ll sit with me ‘til I’m ready to go on and then you’ll go downstairs.”

  “And at eleven forty-five we’ll have shuffleboard on the Promenade Deck.”

  “What’s that, Jane?”

  When I got to the club I called downstairs to Bruno, “Baby, hold a center ring for my wife for the second, please. For four. And Bruno, do me a favor, be sure you know exactly who’s sitting at the tables to the left, right, and directly behind her.”

  At 11:45 I walked them from the dressing room to the elevator and watched the door close after them. Please, God.

  I called Bruno again. “Baby, she’s on her way down with Burt and Jane and my guy Paul. Will you make sure she doesn’t get caught in a crowd? Can you have some of the guys escort her to the table?”

  “I’ve had two captains waiting at the elevator for the last ten minutes. Relax. Khrushchev couldn’t get to her.”

  Murphy had filled my cigarette case and was holding it out to me. I put it in my pocket and stood in the living room, staring unseeing at the television set.

  Murphy called out, “Sammy, it’s Bruno.”

  I grabbed the phone. “What’s wrong?”

  He was shouting over the crowd noises in the background. “Nothing.

  I just thought you’d like to know that when she came in the audience applauded her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the people applauded the missus as she walked to her table. They stood up and gave her a hand
. In all my years I never saw it happen. Except for DiMaggio.”

  The second I hit the stage I could see the audience glancing from me to her and back again. Despite the protection of Paul and every captain and waiter in the room, seeing her in the midst of a crowd was even worse than when I’d known she was at home on the coast. I went through the act, leaning on professionalism—watching, looking for pressure spots, dreading the moment somebody would have one drink too many and say or do something he might not do if he were sober. I did an hour and ten minutes and left the stage, drained, exhausted by the impossible chore of trying to be an entertainer and a bodyguard at the same time.

  I told the room service waiter to put the table in front of the window overlooking Central Park. When May was seated I stood back a few feet and adjusted the view-finder, getting her into focus.

  She frowned. “Are you going to take my picture before breakfast?”

  “Yes. I want to get a picture of my wife sitting at a breakfast table, no make-up, pregnant, and the most beautiful sight in the world.”

  She beamed. “Do you really think that?”

  I caught that smile and put down the camera. “Yes, I do. And that’s the last compliment you’re going to get until three o’clock this afternoon.” I sat down across from her. “Do you wanta know what a thrill it is after thirty years on the road to look across the table in a hotel room and see you instead of Murphy Bennett?” She smiled happily and began opening a boiled egg. I said, “I don’t want to do expectant-father bits, but what kind of a diet did the doctor say you should be on?”

  “Just good food.” She looked up. “Do you have to go anywhere today?”

  “Nope. Today it’s a definite sit-around, lazy-style, just me and my wife. We’ll watch a little television, read the papers …”

  “Boy, that sounds great.” She smiled, “Mr. and Mrs. Sharlie Brown at home.” She tapped the second egg with her spoon, and studied it. “I’m really not too dying to have this egg. I sure wish I hadn’t ordered it …” She stared at it, spoon poised indecisively. She put down the spoon. “My husband makes twenty-five thousand dollars a week. I don’t have to eat this egg.” She pushed it away. “Boy, I’m sure glad to get that off my neck.”