Sammy Davis Jr.

• 1. Introduction

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  Sammy Davis Jr. once answered a simple golf question with a line that became his signature. Playing a round with Jack Benny, he was asked what his handicap was. Davis replied, "Handicap?" and then went on: "Talk about handicap. I'm a one-eyed Negro who's Jewish." The joke folded three heavy burdens into a single breath, and he delivered it with a performer's timing.

  Davis worked as a singer, actor, comedian, dancer and musician, often in rooms that welcomed his talent but not his presence. How did a child from a family of vaudeville dancers become a headliner? Who protected him, and who threatened him? What did fame ask of him, and what did it cost? And what became of his fortune after he died?

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• 2. Shielded, Then Drafted

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  Sammy Davis Jr. was born on the 8th of December 1925 in Harlem, New York City. His father, Sammy Davis Sr., was an African-American stage entertainer. His mother, Elvera Sanchez, was a Cuban-American tap dancer. During his lifetime Davis said that his mother was Puerto Rican and born in San Juan. Author Wil Haygood challenged that claim in his 2003 biography In Black and White. Haygood wrote that she was born in New York City to Afro-Cuban parents. He added that Davis claimed Puerto Rican roots because he feared anti-Cuban backlash would hurt his record sales.

  As an infant, Davis was reared by his paternal grandmother. When he was three, his parents separated. His father, unwilling to lose custody, took the boy on tour. By the age of four, Davis had begun performing in vaudeville. He learned to dance from his father and from his godfather, Will Mastin, and the act became the Will Mastin Trio. Davis kept the trio in his billing throughout his career. Mastin and Sammy Sr. shielded him from racism, for example by dismissing racial snubs as jealousy.

  In 1933, at the age of seven, Davis played the title role in the film Rufus Jones for President. He sang and danced alongside Ethel Waters. For several years he lived in Boston's South End, and he later reminisced about "hoofing and singing" at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille.

  That protection ended in 1944, when the United States Army drafted Davis at the age of 18. White soldiers from the South frequently abused him. He later recounted, "I must have had a knockdown, drag-out fight every two days." His nose was broken many times and stayed permanently flattened. At one point a soldier offered him a beer laced with urine. Years later he described the shock: "Overnight the world looked different. It wasn't one color any more." He went on, "I could see the protection I'd gotten all my life from my father and Will." He also said, "I appreciated their loving hope that I'd never need to know about prejudice and hate, but they were wrong." Then came the image that summed it up: "It was as if I'd walked through a swinging door for 18 years," he said, "a door which they had always secretly held open."

  The Army reassigned Davis to Special Services, the branch that staged performances for troops. At one show he found himself performing for soldiers who had previously abused him. He later said, "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." In September 1944, while in Paris, he was guided around the city by Madeleine Riffaud, a French resistance fighter and left-wing journalist. Davis earned the American Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal, and he was discharged in 1945 with the rank of private. Afterward he rejoined the family act, which was playing clubs around Portland, Oregon.

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• 3. Ciro's and Broadway

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  In 1949, Davis recorded blues songs for Capitol Records under the pseudonyms Shorty Muggins and Charlie Green. The real turn came in March 1951, when the Will Mastin Trio opened at Ciro's in West Hollywood for headliner Janis Paige. They were booked for only 20 minutes. The celebrity-filled crowd responded so warmly, especially to Davis's impressions, that the trio played for nearly an hour. Paige insisted that the order of the show be flipped. Critics singled Davis out for praise, and he began releasing albums and building a career on his own.

  In 1953, ABC offered Davis a television show built around the trio, called Three for the Road. The network spent $20,000 filming the pilot. It showed African Americans as struggling musicians, not as slapstick comedy or the stereotypical mammy roles of the time. The cast included Frances Davis, the first black ballerina to perform for the Paris Opera. It also included actresses Ruth Attaway and Jane White, and Frederick O'Neal, who founded the American Negro Theater. The network could not find a sponsor, so the show was dropped.

  In 1954, Universal Pictures hired Davis to sing the title song for the film Six Bridges to Cross. In 1956 he starred on Broadway in the musical Mr. Wonderful, opposite Chita Rivera. Critics panned it, yet it was a commercial success and closed after 383 performances.

  In 1964, Davis was starring in the musical Golden Boy at night while shooting a New York-based afternoon talk show by day. Golden Boy adapted a play of the same name by Clifford Odets. Davis earned a Tony Award nomination for it, and the show included the first interracial kiss on Broadway. On days off he recorded in the studio, performed at charity events in Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas, or appeared on variety specials in Los Angeles. He felt he was cheating his family of his company, but he said he was incapable of standing still. In 1966 he finally had his own television variety show, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show.

  On the 11th of December 1967, NBC broadcast Movin' with Nancy, a musical-variety special starring Nancy Sinatra. Nancy Sinatra and Davis greeted each other with a kiss, one of the first black-white kisses on American television.

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• 4. The Lost Eye

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  On the 19th of November 1954, Davis was driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles when he nearly died in a car accident near San Bernardino, California. A year earlier, comedian Eddie Cantor had given him a mezuzah, a small object Jewish tradition places by the door as a blessing. Davis wore it around his neck for luck instead. The only night he forgot to wear it was the night of the crash.

  The accident happened at a fork in U.S. Route 66, at Cajon Boulevard and Kendall Drive. A driver who had missed her turn at the fork reversed into Davis's lane, and his car struck hers. The bullet-shaped horn button, a standard feature on 1954 and 1955 Cadillacs, damaged his left eye, and he lost it. His friend, the actor Jeff Chandler, said he would give one of his own eyes to keep Davis from total blindness.

  Davis wore an eye patch for at least six months after the accident. He appeared with the patch on the cover of his debut album and on the television quiz show What's My Line? Later he was fitted with a glass eye, which he wore for the rest of his life. The accident marked a turning point, lifting him from well-known entertainer to national celebrity.

  In the hospital, Cantor described to Davis the similarities between Jewish and Black cultures. Davis had a Catholic mother and a Baptist father and was raised Catholic. As an adult he began studying Jewish history, and he converted to Judaism in 1960. He found commonalities between the oppression of African Americans and that of Jewish Americans. One book he read, A History of the Jews by Abram L. Sachar, held a passage on the endurance of the Jewish people that interested him in particular. It credited three millennia of prophetic teaching with giving them a will to live that no disaster could crush. The passage opened with five blunt words: "The Jews would not die."

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• 5. Rat Pack and Jim Crow

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  In 1959, Davis became a member of the Rat Pack, a circle of performers led by his friend Frank Sinatra. The others were Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford, a brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy. Sinatra first called the gathering "the Clan." Davis objected because the name reminded people of the Ku Klux Klan. Sinatra renamed the group "the Summit."

  Actress Angie Dickinson supplied the name that lasted. After a long night of poker that ran into the early morning, the men looked drunken and disheveled. As Dickinson approached, she said, "You all look like a pack of rats." The nickname caught on. It had already belonged to an earlier group led by Humphrey Bogart and his wife, Lauren Bacall, who originally made the remark about the pack of rats they kept company with.

  The group made Ocean's 11 in 1960, Sergeants 3 in 1962 and Robin and the 7 Hoods in 1964. They also performed together on stage in Las Vegas. In 1964, Davis became the first African American to sing at the Copacabana night club in New York.

  At the Frontier Casino in Las Vegas, Davis was a headliner. Jim Crow practices still required him, like every black performer in the 1950s, to lodge in a rooming house on the west side of the city. His white colleagues stayed in the hotels. Black performers got no dressing rooms and had to wait outside by the swimming pool between acts. They could entertain, but they could not stay at the hotels, gamble in the casinos, or dine or drink in the restaurants and bars. Davis later refused to work at places that practiced segregation.

  In 1959, Canada offered a way around the American color barrier, when the CBC aired Sammy's Parade, his own television special. In the United States of the 1950s, corporate sponsors largely controlled the screen. Jason King of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music described the situation this way: "Black people were not portrayed very well on television, if at all."

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• 6. Love Under Threat

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  In 1957, Davis became involved with actress Kim Novak, who was under contract to Columbia Pictures. Because Novak was white, studio president Harry Cohn feared public backlash that could hurt the studio. Accounts differ on what happened next, but they agree that organized crime figures close to Cohn threatened Davis. In one version, Cohn called racketeer John Roselli, who had Davis kidnapped for a few hours to frighten him. In another, mobster Mickey Cohen passed the threat to Davis's father. Davis would lose his other eye or suffer a broken leg unless he married a black woman within two days. He turned to Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, who said he could protect Davis in Chicago and Las Vegas but not in California.

  In 1958, Davis briefly married Loray White, a black dancer, to protect himself from mob violence. She was 23, twice divorced, and had a six-year-old child. He paid her a lump sum, reported as either $10,000 or $25,000, on condition that the marriage end before the year did. At the wedding Davis became drunk and tried to strangle White on the way to their wedding suite. His personal assistant, Arthur Silber Jr., later found him with a gun to his head. Davis said despairingly, "Why won't they let me live my life?" The couple never lived together. They began divorce proceedings in September 1958, and the divorce was granted in April 1959.

  Also in 1959, Davis had "a short, stormy, exciting relationship" with Nichelle Nichols. In 1960 he married May Britt, a white actress born in Sweden, in a ceremony led by Rabbi William M. Kramer at Temple Israel of Hollywood. Interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, but anti-miscegenation laws still stood in 23 states. A 1958 Gallup poll found that only 4% of Americans supported marriage between black and white spouses. From 1964 to 1966, Davis received racist hate mail while starring in Golden Boy, whose character is in a relationship with a white woman. In 1967, after the musical had finished, the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in every state under the 14th Amendment.

  In a 2014 book, Davis and Britt's daughter Tracey Davis alleged that her father was not permitted to perform at John F. Kennedy's inauguration because of his marriage to a white woman. Director Sam Pollard confirmed the snub in a 2017 American Masters documentary. He revealed that Davis's invitation was abruptly canceled on the night of Kennedy's inaugural party.

  Davis and Britt adopted two sons, but he performed almost continuously and spent little time with his wife. They divorced in 1968, after Davis admitted to an affair with singer Lola Falana. That same year he began dating Altovise Gore, a dancer in Golden Boy. Jesse Jackson married the couple on the 11th of May 1970, and in 1989 they adopted a son named Manny. They stayed married until his death. Toward the end of the marriage, Altovise was sharing her mansion with Davis's girlfriend.

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• 7. Nixon and the Candy Man

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  By the late 1960s, Davis's recording career was fading, even though he remained popular in Las Vegas. In 1969 his song "I've Gotta Be Me" reached No. 11 and topped the Easy Listening singles chart. He signed with Motown to update his sound and appeal to young people.

  Then came June 1972, when "The Candy Man," released on MGM Records, reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Davis did not particularly care for the song and was chagrined to become known for it. Still, he made the most of the opportunity, and it revitalized his career. He never had another Top 40 hit. His 1976 performance of the theme from the television series Baretta, "Baretta's Theme (Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow)," did earn popularity as a single on 20th Century Records. As a Las Vegas star he earned the nickname "Mister Show Business."

  Davis was a registered Democrat who supported John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign and Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 campaign. Yet he became a close friend of Republican President Richard Nixon and endorsed him at the 1972 Republican National Convention. In February 1972 he went to Vietnam as a representative of Nixon's Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention. His task was to observe military drug rehabilitation programs and to entertain the troops. He performed shows for up to 15,000 troops. After one two-hour performance he reportedly said, "I've never been so tired and felt so good in my life." The U.S. Army made a documentary about the trip.

  In 1973, Nixon invited Davis and his wife Altovise to sleep in the White House, the first time African Americans had been invited to do so. They spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Davis later said he regretted supporting Nixon and accused him of breaking his promises on civil rights. At the 1972 Black Exposition in Chicago, organized by Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH, he acknowledged his new unpopularity. "Disagree, if you will, with my politics, but I will not allow anyone to take away the fact that I am black," he said. Then he performed "I've Gotta Be Me." In 1984 he supported Jackson's campaign for president.

  In the late 1960s, Las Vegas also gave Davis a friendship with Elvis Presley, as both were top-draw acts there at the same time. Davis was nearly as reclusive as Presley during hotel gigs, holding parties in his penthouse suite that Presley occasionally attended. He sang a version of Presley's "In the Ghetto" and made a cameo in the 1970 concert film Elvis: That's the Way It Is. A cameo in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever followed a year later, but the scene was cut.

  On the 27th and the 28th of May 1973, Davis and Monty Hall hosted the first annual 20-hour Highway Safety Foundation telethon. The guests included Muhammad Ali, Ray Charles, Lawrence Welk and dozens more. It was a financial disaster. Pledges totaled $1.2 million, but the money actually received came to only $525,000.

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• 8. Last Years and Legacy

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  Davis was a devoted fan of daytime television, especially the soap operas produced by ABC. He made a cameo on General Hospital and had a recurring role as Chip Warren on One Life to Live, which earned him a 1980 Daytime Emmy nomination. In 1986 he visited the Network 10 studios in Melbourne to watch the Australian soap opera Prisoner: Cell Block H being filmed. He said he could not tell who was more starstruck, him for meeting the cast or the cast for meeting him.

  After his 1968 divorce from May Britt, Davis turned to alcohol, cocaine and amyl nitrite. A bout of cirrhosis led him in 1985 to sponsor the Sammy Davis Jr. National Liver Institute in Newark, New Jersey. He was also a heavy smoker, at times getting through four packs of cigarettes a day.

  In 1988, Davis was billed to tour with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, but the two had a falling out. Liza Minnelli replaced Martin on the tour, which was called The Ultimate Event. In August 1989, Davis developed a tickle in his throat and lost the ability to taste food. Doctors found a malignant tumor. Surgery to remove his larynx offered the best chance of survival, but Davis replied that he would rather keep his voice. He was treated with radiation instead. When the cancer returned, his larynx was removed. He left the hospital on the 13th of March 1990.

  Davis died of complications from throat cancer on the 16th of May 1990, at his home in Beverly Hills, at the age of 64. Little Richard and Stevie Wonder were among those at his funeral, and he was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. On the 18th of May, the neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip were darkened for ten minutes in tribute. Media outlets reported his death alongside that of Muppets creator Jim Henson, who died the same day.

  Davis left most of his estate, estimated at $4,000,000, to his widow Altovise. But he owed the IRS $5,200,000, and interest and penalties pushed the debt above $7,000,000. Because Altovise had co-signed their joint tax returns, she became liable for it. She was forced to auction his personal possessions and real estate. Friends including Quincy Jones, Joey Bishop, Ed Asner, Jayne Meadows and Steve Allen took part in a fundraising concert at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Altovise reached a settlement with the IRS in 1997. After she died in 2009, their son Manny was named executor of the estate.

  Shortly before his death, ABC aired the special Sammy Davis, Jr. 60th Anniversary Celebration, produced by George Schlatter. Sinatra, Martin, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Eddie Murphy, Diahann Carroll, Clint Eastwood and Ella Fitzgerald paid tribute. The show earned six Primetime Emmy nominations and won for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy.

  The NAACP awarded Davis its Spingarn Medal in 1968, and he received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1987. In 2001 he was posthumously given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2017 he was inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. His popularity helped break the race barrier of the segregated entertainment industry.

  Don Cheadle won a Golden Globe for playing Davis in the 1998 HBO film The Rat Pack. Billy Crystal portrayed him on Saturday Night Live and at the 2012 Oscars. In September 2009, the musical Sammy: Once in a Lifetime premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, with Obba Babatundé in the title role. In January 2017, Davis's estate joined a team led by Lionel Richie, Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mike Menchel to make a movie about his life and show-business career.

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