Sammy Davis, Jr. was all over television when I was growing up; even my garage-bound father enjoyed his frequent variety show appearances. And thanks to the Literary Guild, Yes I Can, his thick 1965 autobiography, brightened our bookshelves with its spine blaring the affirmative title in bright yellow and red. But I didn't pay much attention to Davis because my eyes and ears were mostly tuned in to the Swinging 60s not the Rat Pack in Vegas.
I do, however, remember a famous 1972 episode of "All in the Family" when Davis, playing himself, drops by bigoted Archie Bunker's house in Queens to retrieve a briefcase he has left behind in a cab. Archie asks the "world's greatest living entertainer" (as he was then known in a pre-EGOT world) to take a picture together. Just as the shutter clicks, Davis plants a kiss on Archie's cheek. The stunned reaction of America's most lovable bigot supposedly produced the longest laugh ever from a studio audience just as it also exposed Davis's willingness to do anything he could to make himself as appealing as possible to a white, liberal audience. He was more Martin Luther King than Malcolm X or Huey P. Newton.
As the decades passed, I didn't think much about Davis until sometime during the Obama administration when I learned that Las Vegas aggressively enforced Jim Crow laws in the 1950s. The owners of The New Frontier Hotel and Casino, where Davis was headlining, had emptied and refilled a pool after he took a dip so that their patrons wouldn't have to swim in tainted water.
Davis doesn't mention the story in the book but it's typical of the unrelenting racism that Davis describes with grim specificity until the age of 40, when Yes, I Can concludes. He has weathered the controversy that erupted after his marriage to a Swedish actress, and returned to New York City's premier nightclub, the Copacabana, where he had broken the color barrier a decade earlier in a trio with his father and uncle. After learning that the stage size has been reduced to accommodate the demand for tickets, he takes a moment to reflect.
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’s 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 anymore, trying to please everyone, and my missing rapport with the audience had returned with all the intensity it had ever had, perhaps more.
Yes, I Can, written with friends Jane and Burt Boyar, is definitely an artifact of another, more brutal era. Look no further for proof than a 1951 review of the Will Mastin Trio's debut as headliners featuring "Little Sammy" (then 25) in their hometown paper, after breaking out at Ciro's in Los Angeles several weeks earlier on Academy Awards night. They were supposed to open for Janis Paige but Hollywood's enthusiasm for the act subsequently forced the manager to give them top billing. Davis' impressions of celebrities like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart--supposedly verboten in a still mostly segregated entertainment world--were as appealing as his dancing and singing. Raved the New York Daily News critic:
As the old saying goes, God made Sammy as ugly-looking as He could, and then hit him in the face with a shovel. But the young Samuel doesn’t need any beauty because he sure has got everything else . . .
Davis, born in 1925, grew up in Harlem and on the road as vaudeville gigs were fewer and farther between. By the age of seven he had appeared as a child running for president (!) in a short film starring Ethel Waters targeted at Black audiences. The discrimination he faced as the youngest member of the Will Mastin Trio hadn't permeated his consciousness as much as poverty had. It took enlistment in the U.S. Army to expose him to the taunts and physical abuse that he would suffer in pre-Civil Rights America, and which strengthened his determination to succeed.
My talent was the weapon, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man’s thinking.
There are two constants in Yes, I Can: Davis's all-consuming desire to keep the nightclub applause and standing ovations coming while also conquering Hollywood and Broadway, and the humiliating racism he faces in trying to achieve these goals. They combine to produce a career as electrifying as it is problematic in terms of legacy, particularly from a modern perspective.
In becoming the "world's greatest living entertainer" he had to rely on white audiences and gatekeepers. The show biz crowd embraced him early, allowing him to supplement his prodigious natural talent and early family example with the encouragement and guidance of contemporaries like Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney, Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis. At the same time, he was determined to live like a "star," but he soon learned that was easier said than done when he often wasn't allowed to eat or sleep in the same places they were. To compensate, he began spending lavishly on clothes, jewelry and cars as well as giving extraordinarily generous tips, gifts and parties. Davis eventually converted to Judaism, which really threw America for a loop.
His fame quickly became a lightning rod. The tabloid press, eager to stir the national pot, published photos of Davis teasing romances with women like Ava Gardner and Kim Novak even though he denies they were anything other than friends. A sham, short-lived marriage to a Black woman did little to tamp down the frenzied speculation, and his marriage to May Britt suggested that the gossips had been right all along.
Nor did Black America embrace him as on of their own, although Davis--who insisted he was colorblind--went to considerable lengths to change attitudes so long as it didn't slow his ascent or inconvenience him. Prior to 1957, for example, whenever he performed in Miami Beach, he would have to return to the Carver Hotel in Overtown, a mostly Black neighborhood across the bay in Miami, or risk being arrested under a municipal law. But when a gig at the Eden Roc included a luxury suite provided by a progressive hotelier, the owners of the Carver gave him a lot of grief for not staying there as he always had. It's hard to question Davis's decision if you've ever been to both Miami Beach and Overtown.
Still, Yes I Can drops a disproportionate number of white names. There's no mention of Eartha Kitt, Sidney Poitier or Dorothy Dandridge, Davis's costars in Anna Lucasta and Porgy and Bess, but he spends several pages lamenting his initial impression of neighbor James Dean as a weirdo, perhaps because Dean didn't survive a horrible car crash in 1955 as Davis had a year earlier, when he lost his left eye. Davis credits a gruff Bogart for his reluctant decision to replace his eyepatch with a glass prosthetic instead. There's even a command performance for Queen Elizabeth.
Davis idolized Frank Sinatra, with good reason. Ol' Blue Eyes insisted that the Will Mastin Trio open for him at the Capitol Theater in 1947, at the peak of his bobbysoxer appeal, and interceded in other ways to ensure that Davis was treated in the same manner as white performers. He rushed to the hospital after Davis crashed his car and offered him a role in Ocean's 11 which branded the Rat Pack on celluloid. There's absolutely no doubt that Davis's "Black mascot" membership contributed to his reputation as "Mr. Entertainment" even if some of the comic bits (You ain't lived until you've seen colored Jewish pickets!) seem more than a little cringe today.
Towards the end of the book, Davis writes about postponing his 1960 wedding to Britt until after the presidential election so that Sinatra, who has been campaigning hard on behalf of John F. Kennedy, won't have to choose between politics and their friendship. He fears that Sinatra's presence at his interracial nuptials will alienate Democrats in the South, where more than a dozen states still enforce anti-miscegenation laws. Davis also describes his fruitless efforts to raise money for Martin Luther King in Harlem where the businessmen he approaches turn him down on the grounds that things will never change.
They do, of course, at least to a certain extent, as the result of Civil Rights Act, passed the year before the publication of Yes I Can. The timing couldn't have been better (perhaps even connected) because likely book buyers now could take comfort in the fact that the discrimination that Davis faced was now illegal.
From both a political and personal perspective, Yes I Can could not have ended more happily, with Britt giving birth to their healthy daughter. But Davis lived another 35 years and remained tabloid fodder to the very end. He began to drink heavily and snort coke after an affair with dancing partner Lola Falana--known as the Black Venus--ends his marriage to Britt in 1968. Four years later, he endorsed Richard M. Nixon for president, beguiled by the tricky Republican's unrealized plan to increase Black wealth through capitalist enterprise. He brought his girlfriend home to live with his third wife who, after Davis died in 1990, owing $5 million in back federal taxes, had his body exhumed to recover $70,000 worth of jewelry that she then sold to pay off part of his debt.
But the messiness of his later years can't diminish the dynamo's tap dancing, his way with a song, or the fond regard with which his show business peers held him. It says a lot more about the price he had to pay for becoming "the world's greatest living entertainer" in a still segregated society.
