Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to “30 years in Biloxi,” stripping
\nhim of “his Jewish star” and “his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor.” Now we have two new
\nbiographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and
\nrestore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame
\nhis devout wish — indeed his lifelong effort — to be white.<\/P>
\n
“The joke was that Sammy didn’t start walking until he was two, and the first person he But it wasn’t just his many affairs with white women (including Gallagher; his deepest love It was something else, something that Davis himself recognized. “I think Sammy was smart The irony, of course, is that Davis had been steeped from childhood in the traditional heritage Haygood traces all of this from beginning to end — the long struggle to escape vaudeville and That’s no small feat, especially compared to the alternative — Gary Fishgall’s Fishgall’s diligence would have been better served by more stylish writing and less reliance on Both biographies tell how Davis met Sinatra (for the first time in 1941). They recount the Also setting the two biographies apart is Haygood’s comprehension of “the color divide” “It was a shame upon his death,” Haygood writes of Mastin, dead in 1979 at the age of 100, The ghost was the soft bed in the good hotel. The ghost was all the edgy headlines of the day <\/P> Haygood riffs about that ghost for pages. He writes like a demon, with perspective, This review is reprinted from the Chicago Sun-Times.<\/I><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to “30 years in Biloxi,” stripping him of “his Jewish star” and “his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor.” Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-391","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nwalked toward was a white woman,” Davis’s mother, who abandoned him before he could<\/I>
\nwalk, tells Wil Haygood in
\nBlack and White”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95). And for much of his life
\nDavis scarcely changed direction. “He did so want to be white,” his first love, Helen Gallagher,
\ntells Haygood. Everyone who knew him said the same.<\/P>
\n
\nKim Novak; and — most famously — his second wife May Britt) that brought out the bigots and
\nthe death threats. It wasn’t just his worship of white celebrity and power (his adulation of Frank
\nSinatra, his embrace of President Richard Nixon) that saddened friends and sent detractors around
\nthe bend. It wasn’t just his physical cowardice that would have kept him from marching in the
\nSouth with Martin Luther King Jr., until Harry Belafonte, for one, refused to let him not<\/I>
\nmarch.<\/P>
\n
\nenough to know he had no common link to blacks,” an old friend of his tells Haygood. The
\nreverse was also true. “Blacks didn’t support Sammy,” a longtime associate says. “White America
\nmade him.” Late in his career, Davis even attempted the feeble joke of “introducing himself to
\naudiences as the only black actor who didn’t appear in ‘Roots,'” Haygood writes. “Ha ha ha. But
\nthe more he repeated it, the more a kind of sadness crept into his voice.”<\/P>
\n
\nof black entertainment. Born in Harlem in 1925, he was raised on the chitlin circuit by his father
\nand Will Mastin, tap-dance performers in black vaudeville. Davis never went to school a day in his
\nlife. His only education was standing in the wings and joining them onstage, for the first time at
\nthe age of four. Self-trained, he was shaped by a cultural inheritance handed down from the
\nminstrel tradition of the 19th century. More than any other black performer of his generation, he
\nhad mastered its art and was himself the last great link to consummate black vaudevillians like Bill
\n“Bojangles” Robinson. If anybody had earned the right to be in “Roots,” it was Davis.<\/P>
\n
\nthe rise to the heights of showbiz — with a rich sense of context. You get the feeling of
\nwell-rounded history. Even when details are necessarily offered only in glimpses, he evokes them
\nwith deft strokes based on remarkable, first-hand reporting and thorough research. Above all,
\nHaygood writes with a strong point of view. He’s big-hearted yet skeptical, sympathetic but no
\npushover: “There was white culture and there was Negro culture. There was also the culture of
\nsuccess. That was the best culture of all to Sammy.” Haygood’s tone is also poetic and personal,
\nmaking “In Black and White” wonderfully readable.<\/P>
\n
\nThings”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> (A Lisa Drew Book \/ Scribner, $26) — which gives a much
\nsketchier version of things, despite massive amounts of trivia. Scribner’s promotional claim that
\nFishgall’s is “the first definitive biography” of Davis is obviously not true. But even if it were, it’s
\ndefinitive the way a local train schedule is: No stop is too minor to list. So we get page after
\nwooden page detailing every television appearance Davis ever made.<\/P>
\n
\nsecondary sources (“Assuming Davis and Novak slept together, it is probable that the relationship
\nrepresented more than merely physical attraction.”). He also goes in for oversimplifications and
\nmakes some preposterous claims. Fishgall writes that under the tutelage of an Army sergeant with
\na large book collection, Davis, who could barely read when he was drafted at 19, “worked his
\nway through ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,’ Carl Sandurg’s multivolume
\nbiography of Abraham Lincoln, a history of the United States, tales by Poe, Dumas, Dickens, and
\nTwain. … ” What, no Chaucer?<\/P>
\n
\nmutual admiration and recriminations through the Rat Pack years. They tell how Davis lost his left
\neye in a car crash in 1954, converted to Judaism later that year and was whipsawed by the racial
\nidentity politics of the 1960s and ’70s. They also count the millions he earned and lost, highlight
\nhis obsessive work habits, and let us in on his hedonism, his porn collection (Linda Lovelace
\nbecame his live-in house guest, tending him with her “deep-throat” skills; he then promoted her as
\n“a talent”) and his dabbling in Satanism. Davis made it to all the stations of the cross. Before he
\ndied in debt in 1990 at 64 of throat cancer, the world’s most famous black entertainer was
\npossibly its loneliest.<\/P>
\n
\nwithin the black world; his reporting on Davis’s maternal grandmother, Luisa Sanchez, a
\nlight-skinned, Manhattan-born beauty whose Cuban-rooted “miedro al negro<\/I> (fear of the
\nblack)” turned her into a racist who “felt smothered by black Harlem” and who encouraged her
\ngrandson’s abandonment; and an appreciation of the man who was more father to Davis than his
\nreal father: Will Mastin. “In Black and White” pays him the tribute of a full portrait. <\/P>
\n
\n“that there was no one around to take measure of his life. He had outlived his obituary writers
\nwho might have offered proper tributes.” Davis had enormous talent, yes, along with “a checkered
\nfamily history in Wilmington, North Carolina” on his father’s side and the “brutal Cuban heritage”
\non his mother’s side, Haygood notes. But most important, Davis had “a vision of old Will Mastin
\nswinging a cane.” And like “Uncle Will” — who was abstemious, careful with money, not to be
\ntrifled with, every inch his opposite — Davis was possessed by the old man’s ghost:<\/P>
\nThe ghost was the business itself — the shoeshine box you kept and the rack
\nof suits you owned and the names of theaters you had committed to memory and the money you
\nhad saved and the celebrity you had earned and the way your ear pressed against the velvety
\ncurtains backstage. … The ghost was the smooth road out of every town that had treated you
\nright and with respect. The ghost was the Negro side of town, the folks who point to you as if
\nyou were some kind of hero. …
\n
\n— Negroes on the march, Negroes jailed — which sailed right over you because you did not bleed
\nfrom those wounds. … You had a matinee in Pittsburgh, another gig in Vegas. … The ghost had
\nkept you away from your deep southern roots, where blood had roiled and men had been treated
\nas less than men. … The ghost was the diamond ring on your pinkie. It was the way you tipped
\nyour hat to the lovely lady walking toward you. …<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\nunderstanding and compassion to burn. It’s a pleasure not to be missed.<\/P>
\n