Davis, Sammy

By: Carolyn L. Quin

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Davis, Sammy

Sex:  Male

Born:  Harlem, New York, New York, United States
8 December 1925

Died:  Beverly Hills, California, United States
16 May 1990

Activity/Profession:  Stage / Screen Actor, Vaudeville Performer, Dancer, Popular Singer

Sammy Davis, Jr., 1956. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-114446).

variety performer and entertainer, was born in Harlem, New York, the son of Sammy Davis, Sr., an African-American dancer, and Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, a Puerto Rican chorus girl, both in Will Mastin’s Holiday in Dixieland, a vaudeville troupe. He lived with his paternal grandmother, Rosa B. Davis, whom he called “Mamma.” After his sister was born in 1927, his parents separated.

Davis went on the road at age three with his father, performing with a Will Mastin vaudeville show, known then as an all-colored revue. The group came on between the main acts and served as just another anonymous comedy group to liven up the audience. Davis affectionately referred to Mastin as his uncle. The first show Mastin developed that included Davis was Struttin’ Hannah from Savannah. When he was seven, he got the billing “Silent Sam, the Dancing Midget.” He made his film debut as Rufus, a seven-year-old singer and dancer, in a 1933 film with Ethel Waters, Rufus Jones for President. Davis performed for about thirty years with his father and the man he called his uncle as the Will Mastin Trio. The act was originally conceived as a conventional flash dance act, with three men doing extremely intricate tap dancing at flying speed. They would run on, do their dancing, and then run off without connecting with the audience. Davis developed the idea that they should add more variety to the act and add a human dimension, which became his famous impressions of other stars. Because of his career as a child star, he never received any formal education except occasional tutoring.

While performing in Detroit in 1941, Davis shared the billing with Frank Sinatra, then an up-and-coming young singer. They instantly became friends. Davis once said, “He is my friend, and he is to me one of the nicest human beings I have ever known in my life.”

In 1942 Davis was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to basic training for infantry at Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to be in one of the first integrated units in U.S. military history. There he encountered racism at its worst when a group of white enlisted men painted him white after they saw him talking to a white female officer. That conversation had been about his joining the Special Services branch. He finally got the appointment and fulfilled his duty entertaining other soldiers.

When Davis got out of the army, the Mastin trio played Las Vegas, Nevada, at a time when hotels there barred them as guests because of their skin color. Davis met strong racial prejudice wherever he entertained in the United States, despite his obvious talent. When he went to see Frank Sinatra at the Copa Cabana Club in New York City, he was turned away. The next night Davis got in, and Sinatra took an interest in his career and in helping him break social barriers from then on.

Early in 1952, when Davis was the opening act at Ciro’s in Hollywood, California, he dazzled the audience with his tap dance routine, jokes, impressions, dramatic songs, and ability to play every instrument in the orchestra. He was an overnight sensation, and his reputation quickly spread. Two years later Davis was recording songs for Decca, including “Hey There,” “The Birth of the Blues,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “My Funny Valentine.” Decca released Starring Sammy Davis, Jr. (1954), an album featuring his impressions of Dean Martin, Jimmy Durante, Johnny Ray, and Bing Crosby. In November 1954 Davis lost his left eye as a result of a traffic accident. For a while he wore an eye patch, but it was later replaced by an artificial eye. His first performance after the accident was in January 1955 at Ciro’s in Los Angeles with the trio. Later that year, after studying with Max Nussbaum, the rabbi at Temple Israel Hollywood, he converted to Judaism.

In 1956 Davis played Fletcher Henderson in the film The Benny Goodman Story, which starred Steve Allen. That same year he played a character based on himself in the Broadway stage production of Mr. Wonderful, which also featured his father and Mastin. After it closed in February 1957, his father retired. The “Ed Sullivan Show” on CBS provided Davis with his first solo appearance on TV. That was followed by roles on “General Electric Theater,” the “Steve Allen Show,” and the “Dick Powell Show.” He also recorded the album Sammy Davis, Jr., Live at Town Hall (1958), which provides a hint of the fast-paced shows for which he became so well known.

To direct attention away from his interracial affair with actress Kim Novak, Davis was married in Las Vegas in 1958 to Loray White, an African-American dancer. Harry Belafonte was his best man. The ill-fated marriage lasted three months.

In the 1950s and 1960s Davis moved in the fast lane with fellow celebrities Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop in a group known as the Rat Pack. They partied as hard as they entertained and became notorious for their wild escapades. The pinnacle of the Rat Pack’s existence was the infamous “Summit at the Sands” in 1960 when they went to Las Vegas to shoot scenes for the caper film Ocean’s 11, while simultaneously playing the Sands Hotel and Casino.

While traveling in Europe in 1960, Davis met Swedish actress May Britt. When they decided to marry that October, there was much controversy over the interracial wedding, so it was postponed until after the election of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States, a campaign in which the Rat Pack had been very active. Sinatra was best man at the wedding. During their eight-year marriage, which was burdened by hate mail, death threats, and bias against miscegenation, they had a daughter and adopted two sons. Kennedy waited until 1963 to invite Davis to the White House. When the president learned that May Britt would accompany her husband, he barred media photographers. Although the occasion was not widely publicized, it caused emotional pain to Davis and his family.

Davis’s major film breakthrough came in 1959 when he played Sportin’ Life in the screen adaptation of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. His next role was as the sailor Danny Johnson, with Eartha Kitt in Anna Lucasta (1959). Davis’s second role in an opera film was the Street Singer in Die Dreigroschenoper (1963), a production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in the original German.

In 1964, in one of his most important stage roles, Davis played a boxer struggling to become successful in Golden Boy, a musical adaptation of Clifford Odets’s 1930s play, which ran for two years in Britain and on Broadway in the United States. It included one of the first fully integrated casts, and in 1965 Davis was nominated for a Tony Award for best actor in a musical. Also in 1965 he made an excellent jazz recording, Our Shining Hour, with Count Basie and arrangement by Quincy Jones. In 1966 he starred in A Man Called Adam, filmed by his own company, Trace-Mark Productions, in New York City. That same year Davis did some of his finest recording work on an album called Sounds of ’66, with the Buddy Rich Big Band. In 1969 he created the role of Big Daddy in the film version of the musical Sweet Charity, but by then his heavy drinking had begun to get serious. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy affected him deeply and caused his spirits to sink even lower.

In the 1960s and 1970s Davis appeared on many television shows, including “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Mod Squad,” the “Tonight Show” (as substitute host for Johnny Carson), “Here’s Lucy,” “Make Room for Granddaddy,” and “All in the Family.” On “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” he created anew an old vaudeville routine, “Here Comes de Judge,” and made the phrase “Here come da judge” a popular comedic statement. Regardless of his personal pain, he always wanted his audiences to laugh.

In 1970, two years after his divorce from May Britt, Davis married Altovise Gore, an African-American dancer whom he had met while doing a revival of Golden Boy in London. She and Davis adopted a son, and their marriage lasted until his death.

Davis joined the Republican party in 1972 and became a supporter of Richard Nixon. He traveled to Vietnam to entertain the troops fighting the war there and encouraged the idea of the festive party for former prisoners of war that Nixon held on the White House lawn on 24 May 1973, at which Davis, Bob Hope, and others entertained. After Davis entertained at a state dinner, he and his wife spent the night in the White House at the president’s invitation. He later performed at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, and at a rally he hugged Nixon. The photograph of the embrace, which was disseminated across the nation, caused an uproar of criticism from African-American Democrats and from entertainers who felt that Davis had sold out to political forces hostile to the civil rights movement. Davis later explained that he had been so touched by Nixon’s concern for his problems that he had hugged the president spontaneously. His career plummeted.

Among the songs for which Davis was best known—including “I’ve Got to Be Me,” “The Birth of the Blues,” and “Me and My Shadow” (recorded with Frank Sinatra)—none more closely reflected his own sense of vulnerability than “Mr. Bojangles.” Ironically, its success certainly contributed to his being called “Mr. Entertainment.” About an aging, down-on-his-luck dancer named Bojangles (not to be confused with the famous and successful tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson), the song had a powerful effect on Davis: “[It] spooked me. I had seen too many performers who’d slid from headlining to playing joints, then toilets, and finally beer halls. … The song was my own worst nightmare. I was afraid that was how I was going to end.”

Davis’s career was not at an end, however. He was able to return to the musical stage as Little Chap in Stop the World … I Want to Get Off at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center in August 1978. Nor had he lost face in much of the African-American community. In 1979 Ebony magazine gave him a lifetime achievement award. His film credits in the 1980s included the box-office success Cannonball Run (1981) and the less-noticed Heidi’s Song (1982), Cannonball Run II (1984), and Moon over Parador (1988). His last film, Tap (1989), which he felt was his best, featured Davis as a tired, old tap dancer.

Davis was a pioneer for African Americans in the entertainment field. He not only danced and sang, he also played bass, trumpet, vibraphone, piano, and percussion. He broke color barriers on the stage early in his career, and he challenged the restrictions on African Americans to be in the audience in places where he performed. His life told a story of persecution—at times intense—by white Americans who refused to accept him as their equal despite his immense talent and self-taught genius. Yet he never became bitter. He believed throughout his lifetime that if he worked hard enough and proved himself to others through his talent, that he could transcend racial prejudice. To a significant extent he did; his peers in the entertainment world—black and white alike—freely acknowledge his abilities.

To many, Davis was larger than life. He had a powerful, magnetic presence when he performed, with his fedora pulled down over one eye, his “conk” hairstyle, high-heeled black boots, expensive jewelry, and flashy costumes. But he will always be remembered for his exceptional talents. A singer of perfect pitch and rhythm, he was also an exceptional mimic, whose impressions of James Cagney and Charlie Chaplin were famous. His tap dancing made him an idol for many, including the young Gregory Hines, who later became a renowned tap dancer, actor, and entertainer.

Davis gained attention as well for his tireless philanthropic activities, which included the founding of the Sammy Davis Jr. National Liver Institute. A lifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he was an ardent supporter of the civil rights movement, and in 1969 the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal for his outstanding achievements. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan presented him the Kennedy Center Honor for his many humanitarian efforts and his long show-business career.

In a television tribute to Davis in 1989, the immensely popular entertainer Michael Jackson, a much younger star possessing a similar charisma, performed a song of his own that acknowledged his debt to Davis as a path-breaking model for black entertainers. Davis was not scheduled to perform because of ill health, but the emotion of the evening took over. He put on his tap shoes and did a tap improvisation with Gregory Hines, his heir apparent as a dancer. It was his last public appearance.

A heavy smoker who often appeared on TV lighting one cigarette after another, Davis died of throat cancer in Los Angeles, California. Davis may have done more than any other African American of his time to liberate black entertainers from the demeaning stereotypes based on the Stepin Fetchit character of an earlier era. As Quincy Jones wrote, “Sammy Davis Jr. did it all the way no one had done it before” (Rolling Stone, 28 June 1990). Davis the entertainer once said, “For as long as I can remember, Las Vegas has been my spiritual home.” To commemorate his death, there were ten minutes of darkness on the entertainment strip in Las Vegas, a fact that speaks more to his achievement of his goals than anything else ever could.

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