The after-life of Sammy Davis Jr

The after-life of Sammy Davis Jr
David Usborne examines an enduring legend
Independent UK
Published: 23 June 2007

He died in 1990 but America is more fascinated than ever by the poignant life story of the Rat Pack's smallest and most irrepressible member.
I am guessing that over the 17 years since he died, Sammy Davis Jr has been wearing himself thin from beyond the grave, showing off his dance moves, grabbing his trumpet, crooning like he used to in the Rat Pack days, in short doing whatever he can to win back our attention. Like one of those skeleton sailors in Pirates of the Caribbean, his bones are all a-jangle in a non-stop frenzy of posthumous performance.

It was Marlon Brando who once labelled Davis an "audience junkie". The little man from Harlem - he was 5ft 4in with an under-bite jaw as long as a runway and weighed 110lb - was virtually born on the stage and, famously insecure about his place in the world, could never leave it. He lost his bearings without his fans (usually to porn, drugs and booze). No wonder then if today he's yelling: "Hey, boys. I've been dead a while, but Goddamn mine was a cool life. Give me some LOVE already!"

Well, Smokey - Sinatra, the racist bum, used to call you that - it's coming. People have written books about you, most recently Will Haygood with In Black and White: The Life Sammy Davis Jr. And those pictures you used to take with the camera Jerry Lewis gave you? They just published a load of them in a coffee table book. But get ready now, because Hollywood beckons. And why not? Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, the semi-fictional singers in Dreamgirls - they have all had movies made about them. And there's all the Rat Pack nostalgia. Remember that bank-heist film you did with the boys, Ocean's Eleven, back in the day? We dig that stuff so badly we are up to Ocean's Thirteen today. I'm not kidding.

Sammy, however, should be wary of what he wishes for. The good news is that there are no fewer than four films examining his life currently under development in Hollywood. His best-selling autobiography, Yes, I Can, is the basis of both a feature film and a documentary. Another of the projects will explore arguably the most explosive period of his life, the months he risked professional suicide - and even death by Mafia execution - by romancing the actress Kim Novak. Most tantalising, however, is a planned adaptation of Haygood's book with Denzel Washington acting and directing.

Three major biopics of Davis headed for our screens may be two too many. But expect one to be a monster hit. Davis deserves this kind of treatment if only because he was one of the greatest American entertainers of the past century. And his is surely an inspiring story of poor boy made rich.

Born in Harlem in 1925 to a tap-dancing father and foot-stomping mother from Puerto Rico (with Cuban heritage), he never went to school. His mother ran off when he was a tot, so he accompanied his father and his father's partner, Will Mastin, touring the land with their vaudeville act. By the time he was eight, Sammy had equal billing, a prodigy, in what became the Mastin Trio. Three decades later, Davis, with help from Sinatra, was one of the highest paid entertainers in the land.

But Hollywood is so fascinated for another reason. The Charles and Cash films did well because their subjects were not simple, but flawed. Davis surely fits that category. It is not just the down years of the 1970s when he went off the rails, filling his Rolls Royce with sex kittens, including Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame, stuffing his snoz with cocaine and freighting his flimsy frame with quantities of gold and jewellery. Nor is it the fact that his eye popped clean out in a 1954 desert car accident that almost killed him. No, Davis is really interesting because the biggest struggle in his life was the same as America's. His is a story above all about race, about his being black in a white world - and wishing he wasn't. Better still, from Hollywood's point of view, is how his many hang-ups about race intersected with his hunger for sex.

In his later years, Davis admitted that his father and Mastin protected him so successfully against prejudice as a kid that the shock of it was so much worse when he was finally exposed to it after enlisting in the army. Davis was billeted in one of the army's first integrated barracks and suffered terribly for it. White soldiers busted his nose not once but twice in the beatings they gave him. They wrote "Coon" and "I'm a nigger" across his forehead. "Overnight the world looked different," Davis was later to write. "It wasn't one colour any more. I could see the protection I'd gotten all my life."

Davis the showman was soon on stage entertaining his fellow troops, however, and performing became his shield. He once recalled seeing one of his tormentors over the footlights. "At that moment I knew that because of what I could do on a stage, he could never again think, 'But you're still a nigger,'" Davis wrote. "Somehow I'd gotten to him. My talent was ... the way for me to fight." That early epiphany might have been enough to make him comfortable with his skin colour. But it did not.

Davis continued for years to suffer prejudice, implied and institutional. His professional breakthrough probably came on Oscars night in 1950, when the Mastin Trio opened for Janis Paige at Hollywood's red hot nightclub Ciro's. Sammy dazzled the crowd, not least with his impressions of Sinatra, Mel Torme and Jimmy Cagney, and the booking agents suddenly sat up. In 1956, he was starring on Broadway in Mr Wonderful and in 1959 he became a charter member of the Rat Pack in Las Vegas with friends Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. But segregation remained the rule. Even then he wasn't allowed to sleep in the hotels he performed in. Often, he didn't even get a dressing room.

It was, of course, a highly charged time, with Martin Luther King bringing the civil rights struggle to a head. Davis, above all, wanted fame and success, and he was pursuing it in a white world. How he handled himself brought him opprobrium not just from whites but from fellow blacks also. Until his death, he faced charges of being an Uncle Tom, because of a perception, not quite fair as it happens, that his ambition for fame eclipsed any interest in defending black rights. In fact, he was a friend of both Harry Belafonte and Dr King. He joined the Selma march in Alabama, was at Dr King's "I have a dream" speech in Washington and, without advertising it, donated heavily to civil rights organisations.

Only near the time of his death from throat cancer in May 1990 were black performers such as Eddie Murphy and Michael Jackson paying public recognition to the doors he had opened for them in the industry. People came to see that even the racist jokes unleashed by Sinatra and Martin in the Rat Pack days against Davis - to which he was a willing foil - served to puncture the taboos about white-black interaction. "How does it feel to sit at the back of the bus?" Martin once blurted on stage to hoots of laughter.

He also, though clumsily, helped crack superstitions about inter-racial relationships. Landing Novak as his lover in 1957 gave Davis the fleeting feeling that he was the equal of Sinatra and any other white man out there. And in a way it did, even though the relationship was killed on the orders of Harry Kohn, the then head of Columbia Studios to which Novak was contracted. After a Mobster threatened to take out his remaining good eye if he didn't lay off her, Davis consented to a phoney marriage to a small-time black Vegas singer, Loray White, in 1958. It barely lasted a year, however, and in 1960 he defied convention again, marrying a 24-year-old Swedish actress, May Britt, with whom he would have one daughter and two adopted sons. Never mind that when he was invited soon afterwards to a White House reception, President Kennedy asked that the pair be removed from the room before official photographs were taken. Inter-racial marriages were still banned in most states of the union.

The couple divorced in 1968, heralding a long period of hedonistic excess that only stopped in 1983 when he was diagnosed with a dangerously enlarged liver. His dating of Linda Lovelace began even after he married his third wife, Altovise Gore, a dancer, in 1970. However, Altovise remained his adoring wife right until his death.

"He did so want to be white," said his first love, Helen Gallagher, an Irish-American Catholic. "I think he thought he would be accepted more." It was this struggle for acceptance that ruled the trajectory of his life. It explains his rush into the arms of Novak, his circle of white mega-stars from Sinatra to Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins, his stunning conversion to Judaism in 1955 shortly after his near-death in the car accident and even arguably the infamous hugging of Richard Nixon - an act caught live television that especially enraged black activists across the land.

In 1978 when Davis was trying to revive a flagging career on Broadway, a critic for Time wrote that he projected "the image of an overage child parched for affection, aggressively demanding approval". Affection and approval are about to be his on the silver screen, though he should know it will not be unalloyed by critical appraisal. His greatness makes him interesting, but more so perhaps his frailties.