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

‘Eat your food, Janie.’ ” (He couldn’t help it: Janie. He could be so condescending—so Sinatra.)
    Yes I Can
is a book about a child entertainer who grows to manhood on the stage. Written by a former child actor, by a newspaperman working for a horse-racing newspaper, it has a horse-racing motif: dust, gallops around the corner, setbacks, comebacks, the firing of guns, fans up out of the seats! It is an apolitical book, quite unlike another autobiography, Dick Gregory’s
Nigger
, published less than a year earlier. The tone of
Yes I Can
is one of uplift, optimism. Where there is hurt, it is Sammy’s own hurt. It is certainly not a book inwhich an individual makes an attempt to probe his own psyche. Sammy makes countless allusions to his life and important moments in his life by matching them with maudlin scenes from Hollywood movies. There is a tearjerker scene of his attempt at suicide, foot to the pedal, and an aborted drive off a cliff. A heartbreaking scene: only it never happened. His friends and colleagues recall no suicide attempts, ever. (Even in his darkest moments, Sammy still hungered for life.)
    Sammy liked mystery, and he seemed to know just what to give the public. He had propelled Jane and Burt Boyar to write the book he wanted them to write. Sans introspection. He was so seductive that way. He had goaded his father and Will Mastin to change the dance act, to turn it to his strengths, and they did. He knew how to play to the audience. And the audience liked—no, loved—a tearjerker. So he gave them a tearjerker. And he gave them all the headlines—May, Frank, the Negro press—but little underneath. He gave them a book that skirted, only fleetingly, along the fault lines of race in America. It was on the best-seller lists. Folks were making money. Why complain? As a performance,
Yes I Can
was amazing. It wasn’t literature, but it was being promoted by a literary house. It wasn’t introspective, but it was hard to put down. It wasn’t all the truth, but why bring a man to his knees over a few little lies? Or a few big lies?
    Sharp-tongued comic Lenny Bruce had a routine that had him playing a judge and that ended with his passing a harsh sentence on Sammy for his distance from the civil rights movement: “Strip him of his Jewish star, his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor—thirty years in Biloxi!”
    Biloxi? Let Lenny Bruce go to Biloxi! Mississippi frightened Sammy, and not without reason: in June 1964, the Klan had murdered two whites and a Negro—one of the whites a Jew—down in Mississippi. When the three—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—disappeared, a lot of locals, whites, said they were probably just engaged in some prank to attract media attention. Turned out they’d been released from a Neshoba County jail and murdered on the evening of June 20. “Are you that nigger lover?” one of the Klansmen had asked Michael Schwerner. “Sir, I know just how you feel,” Schwerner is reported to have said before the bullet tore into his skull.
    The hell with Mississippi. Mississippi was otherwordly. Once, in Mississippi, Dick Gregory held up his memoir and said to a gathered audience, “Take a ‘nigger’ to bed with you tonight.” There was laughter aplenty, but a lot of it was of the nervous kind.
    Sammy’s whole America—the America that he loved—was one big nightclub. He had to keep them in their seats. They’d hate him, they’d take away their love, they’d never come back through the nightclub doors. “Sammy couldread an audience in two seconds flat,” says his longtime friend Jess Rand. “It was amazing. He would know right away what kind of house it was.” So why wouldn’t he know what kind of reading public lay beyond the nightclub doors?
    And why drag them through his family torments, or the obsession with white women?
    Fifty thousand copies in print, and another twenty-five thousand on the way!
    One reviewer castigated the book for