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October 25, 2003
TT: What they used to be
I'm reading Wil Haygood's In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., and finding it engrossing. Perhaps you have to be older than 30--if not 40--to expect to find Davis interesting, but Haygood's anecdotage is quite arrestingly good. Here's an amazing story that comes from Keely Smith:Sammy and Sinatra and singer Keely Smith were sitting around one evening. Just three singers, awash in the joy they were all having, talking about singing, songs, life. Sammy told Sinatra he'd have to leave early, couldn't hang around. Sinatra couldn't understand what might be more important than hanging around with him. So he wanted to know why Sammy had to leave, and those blue eyes pressed for an answer. It was Kim Novak; they had a date. A little smirk crawled across the Sinatra face. He told Sammy he could get Kim to break the date. Sammy thought Sinatra was kidding, but he wasn't, the blue eyes steady and hard. Keely Smith sat listening, looking between both men. Sammy against Frank. She knew who would win. "I said, ‘Frank, don't do that.' He went into the room, called Kim [said he wanted to see her], and she broke the date with Sammy to go with Frank. It broke Sammy's heart. And Frank never went to meet her."
That's a story any biographer would have killed to unearth, and Haygood's book is full of similar tales.
I have to add, though, that In Black and White is also full of similar journalistic clichés ("A little smirk crawled across the Sinatra face"), and more than a few passages are so throbbingly florid as to read almost like a parody of Tom Wolfe. O.K., it's a celebrity biography, not the life of Samuel Johnson, but In Black and White is also riddled with errors of fact, chronology, and spelling (Jimmie Lunceford's first name is spelled two different ways on the same page) that will be immediately obvious to anybody who knows a reasonable amount about American pop culture in the 20th century. I'm not talking anything so awful as to call into question the fundamental reliability of the book (as a friend of mine cracked, why would you expect an author who can't spell his own first name to be able to spell anything else?), but I just finished proofreading A Terry Teachout Reader, a job I took very seriously, and it's plain to see, at least to me, that nobody went over this book with anything remotely approaching the same kind of care.
Again, I know times have changed...except that In Black and White was published by Alfred A. Knopf, which still has a reputation as a publisher of books that not only look good but read well. There was a not-so-distant time when any Knopf editor who allowed a book as sloppily edited as In Black and White to go into print would have committed ritual suicide in expiation of his sins.
I know this at first hand, incidentally, because Knopf was H.L. Mencken's house, and in 1995 I published a Mencken anthology, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, that got the full Knopf treatment. It was edited with a kind of care I thought had gone out of style. And so it had at most publishing houses--but not at Knopf, at least not in 1995, and not for at least a few more years after that. But I guess those days are over now, at least when it comes to celebrity biographies.
All of which reminds me of a stanza from my second-favorite song in Chicago (which was inexplicably and inexcusably deleted from the movie, though you'll find it on the DVD):
Whatever happened to old values?
And fine morals?
And good breeding?
Now, no one even says "oops" when they're
Passing their gas
Whatever happened to class?
Posted October 25, 2003 6:21 AM
