“Sammy was very smart, maybe the smartest man I’ve ever known,” says Boyar. “Certainly a genius—an entertainment genius. He just understood everything about show business. He just never stopped studying it.”
But being on tour from the age of three had taken its toll: for one thing, Davis never really learned how to write, although he was a voracious reader. He read constantly during his conversion to Judaism, after the November 1954 car accident that cost him his left eye. Sy Marsh, a top William Morris agent who left the agency to become Davis’s business partner, says that “till the day he died he could sign his name, but he couldn’t write. He never personalized autographs to anyone, because he couldn’t spell people’s names and he was embarrassed.”
Davis encountered serious racism in the army. “I had been drafted into the army to fight, and I did . . . with Southerners and Southwesterners who got their kicks out of needling me. . . . I must have had a knockdown, drag-out fight every two days,” he told the Boyars during the writing of Yes I Can. His nose was broken countless times and permanently flattened; he was given beer to drink by his “buddies” that was laced with urine. Only when he was assigned to Special Services, for which he performed in camp shows around the country, did the acts of violence diminish. Even then he would search the audience every night for troublemakers. “I had to make [the audience] acknowledge me,” he told the Boyars. “I was ready to stay onstage for hours . . . dancing down the barriers between us.”
Arthur Silber Jr. met Davis in 1946, when Silber’s father became the agent for the Will Mastin Trio. Davis had just come out of the army, and Arthur was still in high school. After a year and a half of college, Silber went on the road with Davis and the two became close friends. “Sammy was just a kid at heart,” Silber told me at his home in North Hollywood, where he’s writing a memoir about the years he spent touring with Davis. “We used to stage fights—we were really good at it, especially fast draw and gunplay. We broke up a restaurant once in Hawaii with our fake fights.”
It was still “the Will Mastin Trio with Sammy Davis Jr.” at the time, even though Davis had started to push ahead of his father and “uncle.” Silber described them as “just a glorified dance act at the time. Mastin was very determined to keep the name ‘Will Mastin’ out in front.” Mastin and Sam Davis Sr. had grown up in show business as part of a “colored revue” known as Holiday in Dixieland; they had learned what they were allowed to do and what could get them run out of town: no speaking directly to the audience, no impressions of white people. So when Sammy wanted to do impressions and sing, they told him, “You can’t do it.” They insisted, “You don’t even know how to sing.” Davis had grown up hearing what he couldn’t do. His response to that would be reflected in the title of his first book, Yes I Can.
By the time Davis was appearing in Mr. Wonderful, Mastin and Sam Davis Sr. were still part of the act, but everybody knew that they had stayed on too long. Davis Sr. gracefully stepped aside, but Mastin just couldn’t give it up. “It was tragic,” Boyar remembers. “Even when he was out of the act, it was still called ‘the Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis Jr.’” Mastin would travel with Davis and would insist on having his own dressing room, bringing out his costumes and makeup but never going onstage.
Davis’s first break in a Las Vegas hotel came in 1946 at the El Rancho. He was being paid $500 a week, but in racially segregated Las Vegas he couldn’t stay at the hotel—he couldn’t even walk through the lobby. “Sammy was like a man without a country,” the actress Barbara Luna recalls. Luna first met Davis in Chicago, where she was appearing in The Pajama Game. She would make her film debut in 1961 with Frank Sinatra and Spencer Tracy in The Devil at 4 O’Clock. “It was a very Jim Crow time. In Florida, black people weren’t allowed to live in the hotels where they performed. I think Vegas was the same way.” With Sinatra’s help, Davis was finally given a suite at the Sands Hotel. Ironically, the black press didn’t always celebrate Davis’s breaking of the color line. Part of the problem, as Sy Marsh observes, was that “Sammy Davis lived in a white world. The majority of his black audience couldn’t afford to go see him. He was a black symbol performing for white audiences.”
“Things would happen,” Boyar remembers. “He would come out of the stage door having had six standing ovations and somebody would yell ‘Nigger.’ There would always be something that would just cut through it all, that would just knock him down.” Davis told Boyar, “You know, I reached a point with the indignities, the injustices, the nastiness, the racial abuses . . . I got to the point where I wanted to get the whitest, the most famous chick in the world and just show ’em. To show everybody, yeah, guess what I’m doing with her! How do you like that?”
Arthur Silber’s father booked Davis into Ciro’s. The squat, flat-roofed building on the Sunset Strip, which now houses the Comedy Store, was the hottest and most glamorous nightclub in Los Angeles. James Bacon caught the opening night: “Everybody was at Ciro’s. I was sitting at a table with Clark Gable and William Holden and the Humphrey Bogarts, and the Will Mastin Trio came out with Sammy Davis. Sammy went into his imitation of white stars, like Jimmy Stewart and Jerry Lewis, and these people were in the audience. They were only supposed to do 20 minutes, but every time they’d go off, the audience would start to yell. They did close to an hour. It was such a big night for Sammy that Janis Paige [the main act] told George Schlatter [then a show producer at Ciro’s], ‘You’d better put them on as headliners.’ Sammy Davis was made after that.”
But it wasn’t all roses for Davis. When Marsh signed on as his business partner, he discovered that Davis was deep in debt. “He’d never been out of debt in his life,” Marsh realized. “Every club wanted him, so they would say, ‘Here, Sammy, take $5,000.’ So he would—and then he owed them [an engagement]. That was the problem. He was playing clubs to pay off his indebtedness.”
It fell to Marsh to put Davis’s house in order. First he got rid of some of the paid entourage; then he went around to the various casino owners to whom Sammy owed money. “So I came into the office and saw that he owed the Sands Hotel,” says Marsh. “He owed Donjo Medlavine, [one of the three owners] of Chez Paree. So now I come in and I see I’m paying Donjo Medlavine in Chicago. . . . I go to Medlavine, who’s getting not a lot, say $500 a week, but he likes that money coming in. So I say, We just can’t do that anymore. I got his uncle and his father down to a minimum. It just went on and on.”
Part of the problem was that, as Arthur Silber observes, “you could not perform in these United States without being with gangsters, because the gangsters owned the nightclubs. All of them. You can mention them now: Sam Giancana. Donjo Medlavine.” Medlavine was stocky, built like a pit bull, and “he had a heart as big as the world,” Silber says. “But he was a guy you wouldn’t want to meet in the street if he was after you. They controlled the silverware. They controlled the linens. They controlled all the liquor. And the way you handled that relationship was very important: either you hung out with the Mob and became very buddy-buddy, or you tried to keep a respectful distance. What you never wanted to do was to owe them.”
One night in the fall of 1957 Tony Curtis went backstage at Ciro’s with the rugged actor Jeff Chandler. Davis told Curtis that he wanted to meet Kim Novak. He had invited her to sit ringside at Chez Paree, but he’d never had a chance really to talk to her. “He didn’t want to create problems,” Curtis remembers, “so I said, ‘I’m going to have a party at my house. Come on by, and I’ll invite Kim.’ They both came over and they spent the evening together—deep in thought, deep in talk. I could see right from the beginning that they were getting along in an intense way, and that was the beginning of the relationship.”
Novak had also asked to meet Davis—and she wasn’t alone in being attracted by his intense magnetism. Men seemed to consider Davis ugly, because he was short and slight, his features flattened. But women knew better. His personal charisma was so great, his stage presence so sexually charged, that women were outrageously drawn to him. When the New York Daily News columnist Bob Sylvester wrote cruelly, “God . . . hit him in the face with a shovel,” Davis was devastated. “That hurt,” Boyar recalls. “It always hurt him. But after a while he got used to it, and he’d say, ‘It’s getting me where I’m going.’”
Boyar also feels that Davis knew how attractive he was to women. “Sammy liked his looks—he knew his face was ugly, but he worked on his body. He kept himself in fantastic shape and he was so immaculate. He had a wonderful V-shaped body, and he loved his little behind. He would make a point of it, he would say, ‘Isn’t that adorable?’” Boyar feels that “he would have preferred to look like Cary Grant, but he was pretty satisfied with what he had. He recognized it worked for him.”
It didn’t take long for the gossip industry to go into high gear about the attraction between Davis and Novak. Someone at Tony Curtis’s party must have put in a call to Dorothy Kilgallen, the columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain, who slyly asked in her gossip column, “Which top female movie star (K.N.) is seriously dating which big-name entertainer (S.D.)?” And if those initials weren’t enough of a tip-off, she followed the item up two days later with “Studio bosses now know about K.N.’s affair with S.D. and have turned lavender over their platinum blonde.”
