What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?

This article originally appeared in the October 1959 issue of Esquire. It contains outdated and potentially triggering attitudes about race, class, and religion. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.

In a typical ten-day period recently, Sammy Davis, Jr., had this schedule: the final week of an eighteen-day engagement at the Copacabana (sixteen performances interspersed with general frolicking, a record date, television and radio interviews, and two visits with Cye Martin, his tailor); a one-night stand in Kansas City to receive an Americanism award from the American Legion; one night at home in Hollywood; and the opening night of a two-week date in Las Vegas at the Sands Hotel, the management of which has a contract with him for the next four years, eight weeks a year, at $25,000 per week. The schedule could have been extended. The day after closing in Vegas, Davis was due for three weeks in Hollywood at the Moulin Rouge, another night club with which he has a five-year million-dollar deal, followed by two weeks in Australia, followed by an Eastern tour. Photographer Burt Glinn and I, however, arbitrarily pursued Davis through that ten-day period. Since this short, skinny, one-eyed, broken-nosed, umber-colored singer-dancer-musician-actor-mimic may be, as Milton Berle has said, “the greatest entertainer in the world,” and may even be, as Groucho Marx has decided, “better than Al Jolson, who could only sing,” we wanted to find out what we could, naturally, about what makes Sammy Jr. run.

Like most men, Davis lives a life of quiet desperation. The only differences are that he has little privacy to live it in and that on the average of twice a night, thirty weeks a year, he must stand in a spotlight and be Sammy Davis, Jr.—comic, sentimental, bursting with energy, and immensely talented—no matter how he feels inside. If he were an average performer, the challenge might not be so great.

“But you see,” says Davis, “what I do is different. Most Negro performers work in a cubicle. They walk on, entertain, and sing twelve songs before they say good evening. They never make any personal contact with the audience. Long time ago, I knew I could only make it if I broke through this wall. I was convinced that a Negro boy could do comedy—you know the kind I mean. Not the yassuh, nossuh thing. I decided I could make it as a person, like Jolson or Danny Kaye made it. Well, to do that, you have to be honest with an audience. You got to have antennae and feel what they want. And you have to try to keep your personal feelings from interfering with your communication.”

The Davis act has a basic structure—songs, impersonations, dancing, laced together with comic patter or sentimental chitchat. The structure never changes, yet every performance is different.

Sammy Davis Jr. rehearing a scene from Anna Lucasta, 1958.

“The patter between songs,” says Davis, “is something that can’t be planned. You can’t write it if you’re going to be honest. I can vary the act at any minute with a signal to Morty Stevens, my conductor. I snap my fingers a certain way and he knows we are going to go into ‘Let’s Face the Music.’ I tap my foot just so, and it’s going to be ‘Old Black Magic.’ If you’re honest, you can feel the right way to get to them every time. Otherwise, Dullsville, Ohio. I don’t mean all good shows are alike, either. You’ve got three kinds of shows—a routine show, a fun show, and a performance show. The fun show is lots of tumult and laughs. The performance show is the one, like opening night, where you belt it all the way. What I do works because I am trying to be honest.

“You take most of the material in my act: aside from the songs, I don’t do any bits that I didn’t contribute to. I have a choreographer—Hal Loman—but we work out the dances together. Nothing fancy about my dancing. I like to make clear sounds with the taps. Bojangles—that’s Bill Robinson, who taught me a lot—he used to say, ‘Make it so the people can understand it.’ That’s what I try to do.

“Sometimes the impersonations get in the way. They blur your image with the people and you die as a performer without a distinction of your own. I used to do a song called ‘Why Can’t I Be Me?’ That’s the story of most of my life. Every guy wants to sound like himself. But I keep the impersonations in the act because the audience wants them. They’re like a frame. The audience says, gee, that’s his best stuff, what’s he going to give us next?

“The big thing is understanding the songs and projecting them honestly. When I sing ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,’ I think about a guy who is happy with his life. Doesn’t make any difference how I feel. I think how he feels. When you have that, daddy, you don’t need any tricks. All I want is they should like me—say this is a nice guy. Just let them give me one thing—applause—and I’m happy.”

Night-club audiences do curious things when Davis is on stage. For one, they are prone to give him standing ovations. For another, they tend to gasp out telling comments—telling about themselves as well as the performer. Early in his act, Davis comes on wearing a grey porkpie hat, black suit, black shirt, white tie, with a trench coat flung over his shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey-colored water in the other. He blows smoke into the microphone, sips the drink, and says, “My name is Frank Sinatra, I sing songs, and we got a few we’d like to lay on ya.” Davis puts the drink on the piano, throws the trench coat on the floor, and begins ‘The Lady is a Tramp.’ The audience always applauds wildly and somebody is certain to cry out: “My God, he even looks like Sinatra,” or words to that effect. A broken-nosed Negro does not look much like Sinatra, even though the latter is no work of art himself, but the illusion of Davis’s voice and visage and movements, plus the complete rapport which has been established between entertainer and entertainees, produces a kind of Sinatrian hallucination.

For the full sixty minutes of his act, Davis sustains this kind of communication. It could be defined as an atmosphere of colorlessness in which he not only makes the audience forget that he is a Negro, but also makes it forget that it is white. This is why one of his closing bits has a special irony that is all Davis. He is sitting on a stool in a circle of light. He has, it seems, almost sung himself out in an effort to entertain. His coat and tie are off. He takes a few deep breaths and suddenly he brightens. “What do you say?” he asks. “Let’s all get in a cab and go up to my place!” For one goofy moment, nobody laughs. Here is the source of his power and also the reason for his private desperation. In the spotlight, he and they are colorless. In the real world, he is a colored man who has made it and yet can never make it all the way. When the applause finally comes, it is deafening. The performance drives to a rocking, exploding, belting finish, and Davis is gone. As someone once said, “The only thing that could follow that act is World War Three.”

Thus driving and thus driven, Sammy Davis made $1,200,000 last year—over half from night clubs and the rest from records, TV, and movies. When you say it slowly, it sounds like a lot of money, but his net is considerably less. Besides taxes (he’s in the ninety per cent bracket), he has eleven people on his payroll: valet, secretary, conductor-arranger, drummer, guitarist, office manager, typists (for answering fan mail), and various assistants; his overhead is $3,500 a week. His agent takes ten per cent. And even though his father retired from the act in 1959, because of a heart attack, and his uncle, Will Mastin, moved over from dance manager to manager in 1958, he still splits what is left equally with them, and presents the act to the public as the Will Mastin Trio featuring Sammy Davis, Jr.

The three-way split of the profits is unique in show business. Davis believes he must spend on the “millionaire” level, yet the contract with father and uncle provides him with a mere 33 per cent, of which still another ten per cent goes to a group of Chicago investors.

Davis has not saved much money nor has he put his earnings to work for him with any conspicuous success. He owns a piece of an unspectacular restaurant in Hollywood and has an interest in a line of sports shirts (“Creations by Sammy Davis, Jr.”) and a hand grip for cameras. He put money into some TV and movie properties. But mostly the money goes for living well, if not too wisely. It would be surprising if it went any other way.

Davis was born in Harlem, December 8, 1925. His mother, father, and uncle were all in show business. He went on stage before he was three in a theatre in Columbus, Ohio. He did a talking act with Uncle Will when he was three and a half. He appeared in a movie, Rufus Jones for President, made at Warner Brothers’ Long Island studios, at age four. The next year, in the midst of singing ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You’ at the Republic Theatre in Manhattan, he was pulled off the stage by a member of the Gerry Society, which enforced child-labor laws in those days. Until he was eleven, he trouped with his uncle’s fifteen-person vaudeville act. When the authorities became suspicious, his father put cork on his face, stuck a cigar in his mouth, and passed him off as a dancing midget. In 1936, the vaudeville act was disbanded and the Will Mastin Trio, a straight dancing act, was born. They danced in beer gardens and theatres all over the east, making as little as $30 a week (for the trio) and spending part of the time on relief. Davis’s education consisted of less than two years in school and a few lessons from a now-and-then tutor.

In 1943, Davis was drafted into the Army. He passed the Air Corps cadet tests, but Negroes with less than two years of college training were not being accepted. He was transferred to the Infantry, in which he took basic training in one of the earliest integrated units. Three times he was rejected for overseas duty because of an athletic heart. Toward the end of the war, he was transferred again, to Special Services. In camp shows, he developed as a singer and mimic. “What was more important,” says Davis, “I met a sergeant by the name of Bill Williams who gave me about fifty books to read. He’s really the guy who educated me.”

What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? promo, Esquire magazine, September 1959.

After the war, with Davis’s songs and impersonations added to the act, the trio’s luck improved. They traveled six months with Mickey Rooney, who encouraged Davis to develop all of his talents instead of concentrating on just one. Frank Sinatra, whom Davis had first met in 1940, got them three weeks on his bill at the Capitol on Broadway in 1947. In spite of favorable reviews, nothing happened. They toured the West Coast with Jack Benny, through whose help they were booked into Ciro’s, Hollywood, in 1951. Herman Hover, the owner of Ciro’s, offered them $300 a week to open a show starring Janis Paige. The trio held out for $350. Finally, Arthur Silber, their agent, put up $50 of his own for the first week, and the contract was signed. The act caught fire. By the second week, the Will Mastin Trio was co-starred with the headliner. They moved on to a date at the Chez Paree in Chicago at $1,250 a week and were not headed again.

After twenty-three years, Davis had become an overnight sensation. In the eight years that followed, the trio went round and round on the night-club circuit—New York, Miami, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Hollywood. Davis made eleven record albums for Decca Records. He took intermittent turns as a guest performer on TV—notably the Comedy Hour and the Steve Allen show. He appeared in Mr. Wonderful on Broadway—a mediocre show that ran for a year because it was cheaper for Davis’s growing audience to see him in a theatre than in a night club. In Hollywood, he made Anna Lucasta and the spectacular Porgy and Bess. The money simply poured in.

“After that night in Ciro’s,” Davis recalls, “every day for three years I had a new chick—wine, women, and song. After the war, I’d been hungry and mad, baby. You couldn’t work certain hotels because of the Negro bit. Certain headliners refused to go on with us because we stole the show. I was so hungry. I was trying to do everything. We used to do an hour-and-forty-minute show. I could do fifty impersonations. Play the drums. Play the trumpet. Play the bass fiddle. Play the piano. Dance. Sing. Tell jokes.

“Well, then we made it. It’s the old story of the guy who doesn’t have it and then gets it. He fluffs friends. He does a hundred things wrong. He knows he’s doing wrong, see, but he can’t stop.

“I bought twelve suits at a time—$175 a whack. I bought tailor-made shirts, cars—fast ones. Once I bought twenty-one pairs of shoes from Lefcourt in New York. All my life, I wanted to buy something in a store and not ask how much. I lost all sense of value. I had credit everywhere and just signed my name. Between 1951 and 1954, I must have blown $150,000. My head got so big. I wanted to pick up every check and pay every tip. The first time I was booked into the Copa in New York, I bought a pack of cigarettes and left the girl change from a twenty-dollar bill. I wanted to do that because once I went in there as a nobody and they put me on the side. I bought a Cadillac El Dorado. I bought gold cigarette cases for everybody. I remembered when, for Christmas presents, my dad and uncle and I used to exchange a carton of cigarettes. Every day was like Christmas. I got snotty. Everybody I saw, it was, ‘Hello, chickee. Love ya, baby. See you later.’

“It takes a terribly long time to learn how to be a success in show business. People flatter you all the time. You are onall the time. And if you’re a Negro, you find yourself using your fame to make it socially. Let’s face it. The biggest deals with the big moguls are made in a social way, around the pool, that sort of thing. If you’re not there, well, you’re not there. So I used to think the greatest thing in the world was to be invited to a movie star’s house.

“Things got bad. One night in Vegas, I lost $39,000 playing blackjack. That’s how bad it was. There’s nobody who’s got that much money to lose.

“I feel I’ve been changing. If a man doesn’t change, he isn’t one to swing with. But his friends stick by him while he’s changing.

“November 19, 1954, I’m driving along with a buddy at eight in the morning near San Bernardino on the way to Hollywood. It was a beautiful, typical, happy California morning. A car pulled out of a blind drive and I hit it going fifty-five or sixty. The steering wheel hit me in the face. I got the car stopped and ran over to see if the lady in the other car was all right. She was, until she looked at me. She turned green. Then I felt my left eye. They took me to the hospital and Dr. Owen O’Connor and Dr. Frederick Hull removed the eye. If they hadn’t done that, I might have gone blind in a month. I spent three, four days in total darkness. I began thinking about my faults. I was sure God had saved my life. That’s when I began to change.

“I met a rabbi at a Jewish benefit in Las Vegas and got interested in Judaism. I found the faith gave me something I’d been missing—peace of mind—so I converted. When I am home, in Hollywood, I try to attend services whenever I can. For a long time, I was reluctant to go into a synagogue. I was afraid people would think I was trying to pull something. While we were working on Porgy and Bess, Sam Goldwyn thought I was kidding when I said I wanted to be excused for the high holy days. Then he had to believe me when I said I would take off anyway.

“I admit the Jewish thing has been a bit of a problem. It couldn’t have been more of a problem if I’d have had my eyes fixed and become Japanese. But I think everyone has to find God his own way. Sometimes it takes something like the loss of an eye to get you thinking about it. Life is very confused and you need something. I accept the Jewish idea of God. As I see it, the difference is that the Christian religion preaches love thy neighbor and the Jewish religion preaches justice. I think justice is the big thing we need.”

Davis and his most famous friend, Frank Sinatra, at the Friars Club in New York, 1955.

Davis has not been without a sense of humor about his religious conversion. During his night-club act he is likely to say, “I could have starred in The Defiant Ones, but I lost the part when they found out I was Jewish,” or “The Irish kept me out of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade for two reasons.” On the Porgy and Bess set he looked accusingly at German-speaking director Otto Preminger and said: “You made lamp shades out of my people.” But the justice he seeks, of course, is the most elusive of human ideals. Instead, there is irony, which Sammy Davis runs from and into almost every day of his life.

During his stay in New York last spring, Davis’s dressing room was a small, seedy, two-room suite on the third floor of the Hotel Fourteen, which adjoins the Copacabana. One night after his late show, the average crowd of thirty people was milling in the twelve-by-fifteen-foot living room. Among them were Sidney Poitier, the actor, and Archie Moore, the fighter; Fran Warren, the singer, and Althea Gibson, the tennis star; three plain-clothes cops (“just friends”), and a Mrs. Goldman and her daughter (“We’re fans!”) from Queens, Long Island, and twenty-or-so other people who were helping themselves to the liquor, watching TV, and fooling around with the expensive portable stereo rig on the mantel—yakking and puffing as though none of the satires on show biz had ever been written.

Davis was in the bedroom, wearing a white terry-cloth robe with a torn pocket and drinking bourbon-and-Coke from a sterling-silver goblet, which a friend had given him. With him were his valet, Murphy Bennett; his secretary, Dave Landfield, who looks a little like Rip Torn and is an aspiring actor; and a man from Hollywood, one Abby Greshler, who seemed proudest of the fact that he originally brought Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis together as a team. Greshler was there to organize a movie vehicle for Davis based on Joey Adam’s novel, The Curtain Never Falls, about a Broadway-Hollywood star and heel. As usual, Davis was conducting his business in a fish bowl. He has no secrets from his valet, his secretary, or from almost anyone else. In exchange, his employees are deeply attached to him. A guest once said to his valet: “Tell you what, Murphy, I’ll kill Sammy, and you come work for me.” Bennett replied: “If Sammy dies, I’ll just have to go with him.”

Davis was passionately convinced that The Curtain Never Falls with himself in the lead would be an important step forward for all Negro actors and entertainers.

“So the hero in the book is Jewish,” he said. “We make him a Negro. It works, motivation and everything. Look, I want to make it as a movie actor. I always wanted to act, but what chance was there? I remember when the reviews came out for Mr. Wonderful—everyone was crying about the beating we took and I was walking on air because Brooks Atkinson said I was a believable actor. Atkinson said that. Or you take Porgy and Bess. Now I simply had to play Sportin’ Life. I mean, he was me. I worked to get that part. My friends—Frank and all the rest—worked to get it for me. So one night after Sam Goldwyn saw me perform, he called me into his office and pointed his finger. ‘You,’ he said, ‘you are Sportin’ Life.’ Let me tell you, I mean, playing that part was the gasser of my life.”

“Well, this’ll be great, too,” said Greshler.

“The way I see it, Abby, the movie positively can’t preach. It’s got to show it. Here’s this hero. He knows there are only three ways a colored cat can make it: as a fighter, ballplayer, or entertainer. He’s got to make it, see? I remember one time a guy asked me, ‘How far you going to make it, Sammy?’ and I said, ‘I’ve got an agent, some material, and talent.’ So the guy says, ‘Yes, but you’re colored.’ And I said, ‘I can beat all this.’ Now this is what the hero in the movie wants. Only he’s ready to renounce everything he is to make it. He’s a character who’s ashamed of his father, see? That’s the way we’ll do it. People have to believe it’s honest.”

“They will, Sammy, they will,” said Greshler.

Davis and Greshler shook hands, re-sealing their contract, which would never be more formal than that until the money-talk began in Hollywood. Davis turned and walked into the living room to join his guests. In the crowd, he looked smaller than he seems on stage. He is about five foot six and weighs only a hundred and twenty-five pounds. His hair, combed flat, is neither brown nor black, but somewhere in between. It is next to impossible to determine which eye is the blind one. He has a U-shaped scar across the bridge of his nose, which was broken in the 1954 accident. His face is thin, the jaw slightly underslung. As Bob Sylvester once said, he looks as though he had been hit in the face with a shovel.

Davis spied Sidney Poitier, who is husky and tall and reminds you of an unspoiled Belafonte who can also act.

“Sidney!” cried Davis. “I’m glad to see you, baby!”

Sidney Poitier embraced him, lifting him off his feet. The room, which had been shaking with noise, became quiet, except for some shooting on the TV and Tony Bennett, lisping on the stereo.

“Everybody’s got to see it, baby,” said Davis, turning to a clot of people on his blind side. “I mean, you have to see Sidney in Raisin. Only the end—a definite gas!”

Now Davis embraced Poitier, then backed away, bending over, shoulders hunched, hands dangling in a precise imitation of Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, crying: “I’m thirty-five and what am I—I’m nothing!”

A girl laughed, “Oh, you’re something, Sam, and you’re only thirty-three,” and everyone laughed with her.

“She’s got to die,” said Davis, pinching her cheek. “If she makes one more remark, death!”

The crowd began to thin out after a while. Poitier and Moore and many of the people that no one knew departed. Davis paused to say good-by as each one left. At the door, he did a short bit with a girl who asked him how he was getting along with the head doctor. Davis has had some psychoanalysis, but he is rarely in Hollywood long enough to accomplish much.

Davis with co-star Dorothy Dandridge on location for Porgy and Bess, 1959.

“Well, I’ve had a little, baby,” said Davis. “I’m still sick, but I understand it now, see what I mean? I told the doc I didn’t want to understand myself, I just wanted to be better. So he says, what you got, a cold or something—what better?”

Then Davis kissed her cheek and sent her on her way. A hard core of a dozen cordial-to-very-close friends remained. Dave Landfield, the secretary, strapped on one of the two-gun belts which had been hanging in the closet and practiced his fast draw.

“Not that way, Dave! Dave—God, I could draw faster with a pencil and paper,” Davis said. “Get the thumb on the hammer, man, and do it all in one motion.”

Over his bathrobe, Davis buckled on a gun belt holstering a single-action Colt .45 six-shooter. He tied the holster things above his knee. He drew the gun, twirled it three times over his trigger finger, and brought it down smartly into the holster. He drew again, very fast, cocking and dry-firing in a split second. Then he twirled the gun vertically, horizontally, over and back into the holster. (In Hollywood, Davis has a collection of thirty Western guns and, next to Mel Tormé, he is the fastest nonprofessional draw in town. Once I saw him hold a bottle at waist level, throw the bottle to the floor, and draw, cock, and shoot before it hit the carpet. “I love things Western,” he says. “Morty, Dave, Arthur Silber, and I go to Phoenix and dress up in the tailor-made jeans and the tailor-made shirts, the cowboy hats, .45’s on our hips and Winchesters in the saddle holsters. We ride out like cowboys and talk about the south forty, tip the hat back with the thumb, and chew on filter cigarettes.”) Davis demonstrated the fast draw a few more times.

“You dig, baby?” asked Davis.

Landfield nodded and Davis retired to the bedroom to dress. As he hung up his gun belt, he said to me: “I’m crazy to make a Western. Can you imagine a colored Western—they’ll never do it! But if they do, it’ll be the first time they let the Indians win!”

From the Hotel Fourteen, Davis and the hard core of friends rode three cabs to the Hotel New Yorker. Davis was living there in the penthouse. (Going up in the elevator, I remembered a story I had once heard about Bert Williams, a great Negro song-and-dance-man of twenty-five years ago. When Williams played New York, he also rented a penthouse at a midtown hotel. The only difference was that his lease required him to enter and leave the hotel by the service elevator. One night, Eddie Cantor was riding up with Williams and asked him if it bothered him using the service elevator. “Mr. Cantor,” Williams said, “the only thing that bothers me is applause.” A great deal of progress has been made since then, I thought, but there was still a strong trace of Williams in Sammy Davis, Jr.) Parties of varying intensity were held every night at the penthouse during Davis’s eighteen-day engagement at the Copacabana and this night was no exception. When Davis arrived, three Copa girls, a former owner of the Chez Paree in Chicago, Davis’s lawyer, another one of Davis’s assistants named John Hopkins, and the comedian, Jack Carter, and his date were waiting. Hopkins and Murphy Bennett tended bar. Landfield sent out for hamburgers and Davis turned up the stereo. The hamburgers arrived and talking stopped as the guests leaped to the feast. In a twinkling, the hamburgers were gone. Everyone got one, even the pretty girl reclining on the floor underneath an oak bench—everyone, that is, except Davis.

“It’s a definite steal,” he said, cheerfully, but for an instant he looked as though he would have liked a hamburger.

The party broke well after dawn. Only a few bitter-enders remained when Davis’s father and stepmother came in from their room down the hall. They had flown to New York from Hollywood, where they live with Sammy Jr., for a vacation and to see him at the Copacabana.

“How’s my baby?” asked Sam, Sr., and kissed Sam, Jr.

“I’m fine, Dad.”

Davis stepped back to examine his father. The older man is taller and heavier and the family resemblance is faint. He wore a new suit.

“You’re getting fat, Dad,” said Davis.

“I’m going to get fat as I want to.”

“Well, then, get into your old clothes. Nothing looks worse than a fat man in a Continental suit.”

“See what kind of a boy I have,” said Sam, Sr., and the two men embraced, laughing.

To me, Sam, Sr. said : “We have a fine house out there. We all live in it together—the wife and me, Sam’s two sisters, grandmother, and Sammy. A fine house, yes! Believe me, it’s a kick for a man who was born on West 39th Street.”

(Sam, Jr. was proud of the house, too. It had been built by Judy Garland on the side of one of the Hollywood hills, just up the road from where Davis’s friend, James Dean, used to live. Davis had bought the house a few years ago for a reported $75,000. Built on three levels, it provided an apartment for Davis’s grandmother and more-or-less private quarters for the family of Sam, Sr. The upper floor—living room, bedroom, terrace, and guest room—was Davis’s domain, furnished with white rugs, mostly black furniture, and gigantic lamps. The terrace overlooked the inevitable swimming pool. The most unusual piece of furniture was Davis’s bed, which was twice the size of the average double bed; otherwise, the house was ordinary-California-expensive without being lavish.

“It is a fine house,” Davis said. “It means a lot to me. Someday, I’d like to arrange things so I can spend some time there.”

Davis finally went to bed that morning at eight. He was up at noon in high spirits. After lunch at P.J. Clarke’s with Dorothy Kilgallen, the columnist, he walked crosstown. Everywhere he went, people on the street spoke to him, a bus driver pulled over to the curb to shake his hand, and teen-agers chased him for his autograph. A few days earlier he had been taking such a stroll on Seventh Avenue and had obliged a middle-aged lady with his signature. A crowd had formed and had followed him to the door of a haberdashery. From inside, he had seen a hundred noses pressed to the window. The crowd had grown, tying up traffic on the street. At last, an irate police sergeant had forced his way into the shop.

“Mr. Davis,” the policeman had said, “you got a crowd outside.”

“I didn’t bring them,” Davis had said.

“I’ll call some more cops for you.”

“No, I’ll get out all right.”

“How can you stand it?”

“I worked twenty years for this, sergeant. I can wait.”

Now as he walked, Davis enjoyed the waves and glances of passersby again. “This sort of thing started a couple of years ago,” he said to me. “All of a sudden, it was there. People knew me. Then I was sure I’d made it.” His high spirits lasted through a sloppy recording session at Decca studios late in the afternoon. He was not in good voice and, besides, the songs were not right for him. When Dave Landfield, the secretary, asked him, “What’s next?” Davis said: “Well, Dave, baby, it’s a definite leave from here in two-oh minutes, maybe even one-five, followed by a definite cab, which will speed me to Danny’s Hide-a-Way for a little din-din. Then it will be another cab-ola to the Hotel Fourteen, that is, one-four. After that, chickee, it is a definite lay-down with closed eyes and Morpheus dropping little things in them for about forty winks, until I awake again, as myself—like refreshed—ready to go on. I mean, baby, is that clear?”

Davis laughed. When he is very happy, indeed, his talk often becomes a combination of Hip, show biz, jazz, and, of course, English. It is in-group lingo of the kind he shares with his Hollywood friends—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Eddie Fisher, and Tony Curtis—who are members of a determinedly informal organization known as “the clan.”

Davis performing with “The Rat Pack”—from left, Peter Crawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Joey Bishop—in Las Vegas, 1960.

In about one-five, Davis said to me, “Let’s split,” which meant leave, and we rode a definite cab to Danny’s Hide-a-Way, a midtown restaurant in which Davis frequently dined. He ate his one big meal of the day with gusto. At seven, I followed him to the hat-check counter where he retrieved his derby, cape, and umbrella. A teenage girl asked for his autograph. Davis signed a postcard for her. “Thank you, Sammy,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he said, walking toward the door.

A heavy-set blond man, waiting to get to the hat-check room, said: “That’s very nice, but why don’t you do that in the street—”

A car was waiting for Davis. He stood inconclusively on the sidewalk. He looked through the window into Danny’s, trying to spot the man. Then he got into the car. By the time he arrived at the Hotel Fourteen, he was deeply hurt and enraged.

“What a Jackson!” he said.

“What’s a Jackson?” I asked.

“A Jackson is some guy who calls a Negro ‘Jackson’ or ‘Bo,’ ” he explained. “I’d like ten seconds with that rat!”

What can happen to Davis at any time, no matter how high he is flying, had happened.

Davis’s early show was, in many subtle ways, below par. His timing was off. He did not kid with the audience. The beat of his songs was slower. It was not a happy show. Afterward, he returned to the dressing room, changed into the terry-cloth robe, and lay on the couch. Mike Silver, the drummer who travels with him, sat in a chair with his sticks in his hands, watching TV. Murphy Bennett straightened the bedroom. Davis was almost as alone as he ever is.

“I’ve never, never tried to be anything but what I am,” he said. “I am a Negro. I’m not ashamed. The Negro people can mark a cat lousy for that and they won’t go to see him perform. Well, we have Negroes here every night. If you go hear a Negro and see some Negroes in the audience, then you know how they stand. They’ll ignore a guy who’s marked lousy, see? So, I’ve never been the kind of guy who was ashamed. See, it’s a matter of dignity. That’s what makes something like that Jackson so tough on you. One time I went on in San Francisco and a guy down in the front row says to another guy, ‘I didn’t know he was a nigger,’ and walked out. It’s tough to play against that. In the Army, the first time anybody called me a bad name, I cried—the tears! I had spent all my life with my dad and uncle. I was loved. I was Charlie-protected. But now, this is the thing that is always just around the corner. It’s like you can’t get into El Morocco because you’re colored. See?”

Davis’s second show that night was better than the first, but he still seemed chilled. About four a.m., accompanied by fifteen men and women, he went to a West Side night club. Legally, it was closing time, but the bartender gathered up bottles, mix, ice, and glasses and carried the makings into a large back room. Cecil Young and three-fourths of a Canadian jazz quartet were having a last drink before calling it a night. Like the patrons, the fourth member of the quartet—the bass fiddler—had already gone home. Seeing Davis, Cecil Young began telephoning around to find another fiddle player. When the man arrived, sleepy-eyed, the jam session began. Davis, Young, the Canadians, and the new man played wildly and wonderfully for ninety minutes. Davis sat in on drums, blew the trumpet, and sang scat with Cecil Young. When it was over, the hurt was out of his system.

During a break, Cecil Young had said to me: “Jazz isn’t polite, son. Jazz is, pardon the expression, screw you. If you don’t like it, well, that’s all. But if you do like it, then I like you, dig? With jazz, you thumb your nose when they don’t like you. You get the message out, daddy.”

Davis picked up the check for his friends and the group moved over to his penthouse for the sunrise.

A few days later, Davis landed in Las Vegas after overnight stops in Kansas City and Hollywood. Murphy Bennett had arrived a day ahead of him and had set up the suite at the Sands Hotel which would be Davis’s home for the next two weeks. The stereo was rigged and 250 records (from Davis’s collection of 20,000) were stacked neatly in the bedroom. There was fresh ice in the ice bucket and the silver goblet had been polished. After the rehearsal and a steam bath, Davis settled on a couch in the living room to relax until it was time to dress for the opening.

Jack Entratter, manager of the Sands, telephoned to report that five hundred reservations had been turned down for the dinner show. A friend called to tell Davis that his wife, Loray White Davis, was in Las Vegas divorcing him. Davis had been married in 1958 and had separated from his wife in less than three months. During the separation, a settlement had been made, but this was the first Davis had heard of the Nevada divorce proceedings. He shrugged. It was all over long ago. Another friend called to give him the latest on the romance of his friend Eddie Fisher who, with Elizabeth Taylor, was exciting Las Vegas and the world at that time.

Davis sighed. “Vegas I like,” he said. “I feel like I’ve come home. You know I’ve performed in this town like twenty-nine times. We use to come in here before we were anything and when there were only a couple of hotels. The Sands I like. I was offered $37,500 a week to go into another hotel, but I turned it down. Very low pressure here. Easy. You’re not fighting the knives and forks. It builds, but the pace is slower. You’re running all the time, and then it’s nice to come down to the Vegas pace.”

Davis called to Landfield, the secretary.

“Hey, baby, call up Keely (Smith) and Louis (Prima) and tell them we’ll be over after our show tonight. And find out what the Count (Basie) is doing. We’ll swing with him tonight. And chicks. Chicks, we need. Ah, it’s like a vacation. You can tumult all night, sleep all day, get a little sun—sun, I need—play a little blackjack. Oh, fine!”

And he lay back on the couch, running.