In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior by Wil Haygood Read Free Book Online

two very polished speakers,” says Boyar. “One was Walker Percy. These people really knew how totalk. They’re book people. Sammy is called to speak. Sammy said, ‘I feel so diminutive.’ He was using words I never heard him use. He did fifteen minutes. They were spellbound. He talked off the cuff for fifteen minutes to these two thousand people and pulled it off magnificently.”
    “Everybody screamed, yelled, and carried on,” remembers Peggy Miller. May sat there and smiled her movie-star smile. That’s why she loved him—the gift he had, the way he gave himself to the moment, how he rose. How other women looked at him so admiringly. She didn’t understand America, but she understood admiration, and stardom.
    In the limousine, heading home—the license plate had a mere five letters, SAMMY —Sammy tossed the neck brace aside.
    The reviews kept rolling in. The
New Yorker
claimed
Yes I Can
was “an adroitly balanced mixture of show-biz humility (no truly humble man ever writes a book about himself) and cosmic egotism (Mr. Davis speaks of his talents, which are certainly multitudinous, as an ‘awesome gift’).” The magazine allowed, however, that “one is never sure, from page to page, which Sammy Davis will be on deck.”
    Burt Boyar began to feel momentum building around the book. The initial print run was twenty-five thousand copies, and already they were headed back to press for another twenty-five thousand.
    Sammy gave a copy of
Yes I Can
to Sinatra. Sammy highlighted, in yellow marker—the way a college student highlights a textbook—all the passages about Frank. It was a smart move; Frank was busy. He might read the damn thing, he might not. The highlighted scenes were memories of when Sammy met Frank, raw and naked fawning:
    After the show I hurried around the corner to the stage door. There must have been five hundred kids ahead of me, waiting for a look at him. When he appeared, the crowd surged forward like one massive body ready to go right through the side of the building if necessary. Girls were screaming, fainting, pushing, waving pencils and papers in the air. A girl next to me shouted, “I’d faint if I had room to fall down.” She got her laugh and the crowd kept moving. I stood on tiptoe trying to see him. God, he looked like a star. He wasn’t much older than a lot of us but he was calm, like we were all silly kids and he was a man, sure of himself, completely in control.
    Frank didn’t read the fan magazines, and he didn’t read books about himself. Nobody knew why. Nobody knew Frank’s mind but Frank.
    The
Los Angeles Times
and the
Philadelphia Bulletin
and a host of other daily newspapers praised
Yes I Can
. While reading the particularly good reviews, Burt Boyar was known to start sobbing, tears streaking his face. Seeing him like that, so emotional, only unleashed Jane’s own tears of joy. And there they sat, holding hands, dropping salty tears all because of and for their Sammy. The
Christian Science Monitor
offered praise as well. But there were unsettling observations in the
Monitor
review: “So it does not matter that the writing of
Yes I Can
is sometimes pedestrian, that it reads in places like a grade-B novel, that it’s melodramatic, and that its incidents seem now and then far-fetched. It contains some basic truths that override such flaws.”
    They wanted to do a book tour. Jane and Burt and Sammy. But Sammy couldn’t because of his
Golden Boy
demands. Then Boyar realized something: “Sammy was a living book tour.” Which meant, if cornered in a hotel lobby, dressing room, nightclub, or street corner, and the subject of his book arose, he’d sell a dozen books, then a dozen more, and a dozen more after that with his enthusiasm and exuberance. Roger Straus wanted to have a book party at the Lotus Club, but they still fretted about lost ads during the newspaper strike, and instead decided to spend the book-party money on new ads. There was one semiprivate