Sammy Davis Jr. Page 2

  Pop’s eyes lit up, “Oh Lord, then it all came to a screeching halt at the Liberty Theatre down on Forty-Second Street! Here we are doing our act, making an impression, audience is loving it, then boom! Two beastly women and three white cops climb onstage. Guess they figured out I wasn’t a midget! I hear my father yell, ‘Run boy!’ as the cops throw your grandfather to the ground and handcuff him. So I slipped through the officers, the midget that I was, and man, did I run!”

  Black performers often appeared in blackface in the early twentieth century. This is one of dad’s very first professional photos.

  My father on stage in the early 1930s

  “Where did you run to, Pop?” I asked.

  “Home to Mama! Where else? Hey, that was the way it was in show biz at the time. If you had to run, you had to run. Heck, there were adult performers running. Colored folk running was nothing to be embarrassed about. Just had to run sometimes, sign of the times.” Dad smirked.

  “What happened to Grandpa?”

  “He was thrown in jail. Released with a date for a court appearance. Uncle Will got away somehow. Funny, even thirty years later, when I bought your grandpa that fine house in Beverly Hills next to his doctor’s house, he still slept with a shotgun under his bed!” Pop laughed.

  “I used to say to my father: ‘Dad, who’s coming over here to getcha? Your doctor? You gonna shoot him?’”

  “And what did Grandpa say?” I asked.

  “He would say: ‘Son, you know nothin’ about no safety, no how. You? You’re gonna talk smack to me! You? Who sits with his back to the door still! Who’s coming to get you, son?’” Pop laughed as he reminisced.

  “What happened after Grandpa was thrown in jail over the dancing midget fiasco?” I asked.

  “My father was to appear in court. Mama said: ‘Ain’t no one walking into that courtroom but me!’ Mama stormed into that Harlem court on fire. Told the judge that my own mother, Elvera Sanchez, was chorus girlin’ somewhere, no tellin’ where she was. Mama said the only person fit to take care of little ole Sammy was Mama herself! The judge had work documents from the house Mama cleaned with little white kids she raised, so he gave Mama full custody of me.” Dad smiled.

  “Mama must have loved having that power,” I said.

  “Oh, Trace Face, that day Mama came marching through our Harlem door on 140th Street and Eighth Ave like she was queen of the castle. Mama boasted to everybody, ‘The judge said his own mother and father ain’t capable of raising him, so he gave Sammy to me. Legal!’” Pop roared, slapping his knee.

  “Bet Grandpa and Uncle Will respected Mama after all that!” I said.

  “Utmost respect and a few little white lies to get us back into show business. Uncle Will made up some story about a big gig he lined up in Boston for us, paying money. Mama believed him and so did I,” my father explained.

  “Mama started asking me questions like, ‘While you on the road, you ever been hungry, Sammy?’ I told her the truth, ‘No, Mama—Daddy and Massey been hungry, but never me,’” Pop said. He often called Uncle Will “Massey” back in the day.

  “My father started packing bags and grabbed me to go. I said, ‘Where we goin’, Daddy?’ He said, ‘We’re going back into show business, son!’ And off we went.”

  My father’s oeuvre of work as an entertainer was vast. But back in the 1930s and early ’40s, Boston was no show business treat for Pop. The Will Mastin Trio was homeless, sleeping on benches in train stations. Uncle Will would go up to the ticket counter every couple of hours to ask a bogus question, so they wouldn’t be thrown in jail for loitering.

  The Mastin Trio in the late ’40s: Sammy Davis Sr., my father, and Will Mastin.

  Uncle Dean, Pop, and Uncle Frank at their best.

  My father in the “ring-a-ding” ’60s.

  When the train station closed, the Trio moved to a nearby open bus station to catch some shut-eye on their benches. When it came time to eat, there was only enough money at the restaurants to order Pop a meal, so his dad and Uncle Will would leave with empty stomachs. On a lucky night, his father might put together enough money for a beer, anything to help ease the hunger pains.

  “Ah, Trace Face, in those days, we were on the road, homeless and hungry, sleeping in terminals, hopping trains without no tickets. We paid our dues. Nothing like the scrumptious, delectable Sands Hotel ’60s days in Vegas,” Dad explained.

  Six years after my father died, in 1996, the Sands Hotel was imploded to make way for the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. In an off-camera conversation, the Emmy-winning filmmakers of Biography: The Rat Pack, Luke Sacher and Carole Langer spoke with Vegas singer and dancer Claude Trenier, who said, “It’s not like it used to be. I liked the old Vegas. I’m sorry they tore down the Rat Pack room, and the Sands, and the Dunes. . . . These were landmarks! And what kills me, it seemed like the new breed wanted to tear out anything that reminded them of the old Vegas. They wouldn’t have the new Vegas if it wasn’t for the old Vegas.”

  Back in its prime, Pop says, “The Sands was our ‘Rat Pack’ oasis, our home away from home. I hung out with Uncle Frank, Uncle Dean, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and celebrities galore in a 3,000-square-foot plush suite. We ordered everything on the room service menu—spread out buffet style. Huge bowls of cigarettes with every brand in it—my Pall Malls or Camels unfiltered—whatever I needed, wanted, at my fingertips. When I was drinking, always had a Coke with bourbon on fresh ice handed to me by hotel staff standing by—or Strawberry Crush when I was on the straight and narrow. Rat Pack lifestyle. We owned Vegas, baby. We even had a private celebrity pool, not on the ground floor, mind you.”

  “Pop, you always liked everything first class. Even now, I wonder, why you pay for all this stuff?”

  “Because I can, Trace Face, because I can.”

  In the 1930s and early 1940s the rise of motion pictures began stealing the light from vaudeville stars. My father, who claimed he was just turning five years old at the time of filming (the press mistake him to have been seven), made his big screen debut in “Rufus Jones for President,” a musical short with Ethel Waters. Pop performed a little tap number, singing around a stand-up microphone, dressed in his Sunday best with a top hat and all. A bona fide five-year-old professional, he never missed a beat or a step. Pop always joked, “The film stunted my growth. I could fit in the same darn suit today!”

  But Pop continued to travel throughout the country as his father and Uncle Will trained Pop on tap dancing, singing, and how to engage the audience with a confident patter and a wide smile. My father told me the same story he once told talk-show host Richard Bey, “In those days in show business, speaking medically, the job was not to be a specialist, but a general practitioner—you had to do a little bit of everything, know how to say a line, sing a song, tap a dance, do a joke. It was part and parcel to our business.”

  Gradually my father became the trio’s star, leading the act to larger and larger clubs. Uncle Will decided their pay would be split three ways. Years later, after Pop became a solo artist, he still split his pay three ways, paying Uncle Will and his father until the day they died. Pop was kindhearted, lavish, and generous to a fault. When my father was invited to private dinner parties he wouldn’t just show up with three dozen roses, he would arrive with a gift from Tiffany’s—that was Sammy Davis, Jr. style.

  “I created my own rules, Trace Face. I danced, sung, joked, or impersonated my way through the color barrier. Like the time my father and Uncle Will told me I couldn’t do an impression of James Cagney or any white artists. I couldn’t see any sense to it and did it anyway. I did a Cagney walk to center stage, spread my legs apart in a classic Cagney stance and said, ‘All right . . . you dirty rats!’ There was a startled pause and then a roaring applause. Backstage, my own father apologized for being wrong, laughed, and hugged me. See, Trace, in those days we had TOBA—that was an abbreviation for ‘Tough On Black Artists,’ and the ‘A’ . . . didn’t always stand for ‘Art
ist.’”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “I don’t know who made up the rules for ‘colored’ performers. But if you were colored you would never address the audience when you walked onstage. There was this invisible wall colored entertainers were not allowed to cross. When we worked downtown at the Paramount, the Roxy, Loew’s State, the Capitol Theatre, the Strand, the ‘colored acts’ would come on the stage talking to each other like, ‘Why ya yesterday say ta me . . .’ This really got on my nerves. So, I went to the opposite extreme. I would walk onstage sounding like Laurence Olivier—‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen . . .’ It was a personal challenge, too. I wanted to see how well I could speak with no formal education.”

  “But Grandpa and Uncle Will taught you everything else about the stage, how to tap, sing, capture an audience?” I asked.

  “Pretty much, Trace Face—until the night I got to watch the best in the business. It was in the early 1940s at the Plymouth Theatre in Boston. We did our opening act, stood in the wings. The great Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson took the stage. His dancing was different than I had ever seen. He didn’t do the routine flat-footed buck and wing. He skated on the balls of his feet. He had this shuffle-tap style that flew him backward faster than most could tap forward. My jaw just dropped open,” he explained.

  “Is that why singing ‘Mr. Bojangles’ was always the signature segment of your shows, Pop?”

  Dad performed “Mr. Bojangles” with more feeling than he did any of his other songs.

  “Oh, it was deeper than that, Trace! After the show, we went back to Bill Robinson’s dressing room. He had a valet helping him put on this silky monogrammed robe. Beautiful! I counted twenty-five pairs of the finest shoes laid out on the floor. Right then and there, I knew when I became a star, I would not just have one pair of Sunday best shoes. I would have a collection of designer shoes. Jerry Lewis and I used to talk about how when we became stars we would buy not one, but five pairs of shoes at the same time. We would do the same with suits, hats, bow ties. Tailors were sweet candy to us.”

  “You do have quite the wardrobe, Dad.”

  “Anyway, after I counted twenty-five pairs of Mr. Bojangles’ finest shoes, he says to me: ‘Lemme see you dance, kid.’ My knees buckled, but I gained my composure and did a little tap number. That was the beginning of my tutorials with the best in the business, I was a young star in training.” Pop smiled.

  “Inspired by the best,” I added.

  “Bill Robinson was the cream of the crop—old school. Do you remember my sixtieth anniversary tribute, the one you couldn’t attend a couple of months ago because you got in that horrible car crash?”

  “Yeah, almost lost the baby, Pop,” I said.

  “If you had lost my grandchild, you would have lost me.”

  “I know, Pop . . . we’re okay. The crash was my first childbirth lesson: I learned to breathe, count, and swear all at the same time! So tell me about the tribute.”

  “Well, at the sixtieth anniversary they did a montage of footage with voice-overs of me talking about ‘Mr. Bojangles.’”

  Pop continued, “Fact was, I could not do a show without including ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ Every finale, I performed that number. It was very special to me, hit close to home. I almost feel like it was written for me, but it was not. Nor was it written about Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, as some people say.”

  “Who wrote it?” I asked.

  “Jerry Jeff Walker of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for his 1968 album,” Pop explained. “Jerry composed it about a white homeless vagrant he met in jail who called himself Mr. Bojangles. This white guy was down and out, drunk, talking about how his dog up and died after fifteen years traveling around together, making a buck off the remains of his talents wherever he could. So the inmates tried to cheer him up, asked him to dance across the jail cell. So I did my own heartfelt version of it. You remember my version, Trace Face?”

  “Of course, Pop! I only watched you perform it a zillion times! You always whistled the melody opening that number.” I remembered.

  “Start out soft, make the audience strain to hear you, that’s how you captivate them.” Dad said.

  “That song always makes me want to cry.”

  “Cry?”

  “After your finale, fans would swarm me, ‘Oh, you’re Sammy Davis, Jr.’s daughter, you’re so beautiful, blah, blah, blah . . .’ it was just overwhelming.”

  “You’re too sensitive, Trace Face!”

  I’ll never forget how Dad got me to sing that song with him on the spot that day—impromptu duet. Our indelible performance was a precious rhapsody that I would tell my children about in years to come.

  Pop went on to explain, “I did ‘Bojangles’ the first time live with Tom Jones, in 1970, on his television show. In that skit, Tom sang the song by himself, while I silently played the part of Mr. Bojangles, dancing and doing routines in sync with the lyrics.”

  Pop started to relate the song to himself—a speech I had heard him announce in public before. “‘Bojangles’ was special because I hated the song. Well, I should say, I had a love-hate relationship with the song. I was afraid to do it because that was always my fear—that I’d end up like Mr. Bojangles . . . drunk, alone, dancing in a jail cell.”

  “Surprise, surprise! You didn’t end up drunk dancing in a jail cell!” I told Pop.

  “But I still had the fear. I told the press, my fans, when I would do that number some nights, I would get so hung up on it. One night in Vegas, I said, ‘Oh my God! That’s me! I’m projecting! That’s how I’ll be when I’m seventy years old. I’ll be working little joints, talking about what I used to be—and that’ll be the end of it.’ That man, that culmination of different black performers, minstrels that I’d known—performers who got hooked on junk, who got wiped out by alcohol, got wiped out by the changing of times—I’d seen them disappear, great dancers. But, Trace Face, I wouldn’t end a show without ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ It was deep in my heart and soul, a spiritual journey through life.”

  “No one performed it better than you, Pop,” I said.

  “Damn straight.” He cajoled and howled, hoping that his own laughter would distract us from the onslaught of his medical condition. I saw the exhaustion in my father’s eyes, fatigue was setting in. It was time to rest and refresh.

  “Hey, Pop, let me grab you a Strawberry Crush to perk you up,” I said.

  I headed over to the downstairs bar. I grabbed my father a Strawberry Crush and myself another Coke. I couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes. By the time I returned to sit on the couch, Pop had nodded off. The radiation was taking its toll. It hit me yet again: my father was ill, he was dying, and our tête-à-têtes that I cherished so, would one day cease to be.

  Tears welled up in my eyes, as I placed a throw blanket over him, tucked a soft pillow under his head, kissed him on the forehead, and whispered, “I love you, Popsicle.” I proceeded to the kitchen to tell Lessie Lee and the nurse to watch over him, that I would return in the morning.

  Every time I walked out his front door it felt like an apocalyptic warning. I would take a moment to glance at the moon pasted in the evening sky, praying that throat cancer would not desecrate my father into a coma by morning. As I climbed my pregnant body into my car, I wondered if that would be the last time I would ever see Pop. But I did not want to invite that notion in. I trusted my father would stick it out long enough to see the birth of his grandchild. Nothing would keep him from that sacred moment, not even the grim reaper himself.

  When I returned to my father’s home the following day, I came with my husband, Guy Garner. Guy was six foot three inches, handsome and half Italian. Guy loved Dad as much as I did, and they were very close. They had often had “movie nights” together. Lessie Lee marched upstairs to the master bedroom to announce our arrival. She came out and motioned us up the stairs.

  “What’s up, Guy, getting taller?” My father joked, sitting up in bed. Guy smiled.

&nbs
p; “Pop, Guy and I have something to tell you . . .” I said, choking up. Guy had to finish for me.

  “Mr. D,” he said, “we found out we are having a boy. We decided to name our baby Sam, after you.”

  There was a moment of silence. Pop and I locked eyes. Then my father trembled, broke down, and burst into tears. “Thanks for my gift,” he said in a soft whisper.

  Guy and I went back downstairs so as not to cry convulsively in front of my father. By the time we got downstairs, my father’s doctors had arrived. He asked to have a word with me outside.

  Three doctors and Pop’s assistant, Murphy, explained that my father would not be alive when our baby was born. I should not have any false hope. I knew they were trying to prepare me, but I didn’t believe one word. I trusted God now. I trusted in the revelation that I would one day place Dad’s newborn grandson in his lap.

  One more thing, they added, your father wants you to be responsible for his wishes. What wishes? I thought. He is in so much pain, the doctors announced, we will have to up his morphine level, but it will ease out with the overloading—the morphine will eventually stop his heart.

  I went back up to my father’s bedroom, only to find his window wide open. Pop had overheard the doctor. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m not going anywhere until I see my grandson. I’m staying around to see Sam. After that, I have nothing left to live for.”

  I kissed Dad on the forehead, and went back downstairs in tears. I trusted my father’s determination and his will—more than the stinging words out of medical mouths.