What Made Gershom Run?

[pynchonoid]

December 28, 2003

What Made Sammy Run?
By GARY GIDDINS

IN BLACK AND WHITE
The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. 
By Wil Haygood. 
Illustrated. 516 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
$26.95.

GONNA DO GREAT THINGS 
The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. 
By Gary Fishgall.
Illustrated. 430 pp. New York: A Lisa Drew
Book/Scribner. $26. 

[...] Unlike Frank Sinatra, whose music will
ultimately obliterate the man's boorish qualities,
Davis has virtually disappeared from the cultural
landscape while his immense, long-lived celebrity
clouds the minds of those who endured it. To many of
us born in the 1940's and 1950's, he has become a
joke: a bejeweled, Nehru jacket-wearing,
women-and-stimulants-pursuing, faux-hipster caricature
who cackled at racially stupid jokes that were
designed to show how progressively good-natured the
tellers and their victim-buddy were.

[...] Jack Benny once got a big laugh on radio when he
asked Bing Crosby, who had complained that a country
club didn't admit actors, ''How would you like to be
an actor and a Jew?'' Davis got many laughs by
describing himself as an actor who was a Jew and a
Negro and one-eyed. He might have added two more
equally damning handicaps: an exploited childhood and
a brief interlude with Richard Nixon. The stolen
childhood evidently contributed to his unslakable
thirst for love and its material proofs. The Nixon hug
unleashed another kind of bigotry -- a feeling of
betrayal on the part of blacks to whom he had long
been suspect as a performer for infiltrating white
citadels (from the Friars to the bedroom), and of rash
superiority on the part of white liberals. Of course,
race was always the decisive factor; other impediments
were second bananas, good for a nightclub joke.
Davis's besetting sin was not extravagance,
philandering, imbibing or reckless optimism concerning
a president. It was trying to live life as though
color did not matter. He was a naif savant.


[...] Having spent his childhood on the road and in
the backwaters of the Negro theatrical circuit, he
loved old-time comedians like Pigmeat Markham, whose
career he recharged, and Tim Moore, whose indelible
characterization of the Kingfish was endlessly
imitated. Bad enough that Davis's film career
disappeared with the waning of the movie musical, but
when tap-dancing fell afoul of cultural arbiters who
recoiled at the memory of all those
leaping-and-mugging teams on Ed Sullivan, Davis had to
rethink his greatest gift -- a dance tradition to
which he had added his own spontaneous panache,
blending the hat-and-cane elegance of John Bubbles
with the jazzy virtuosity of Baby Laurence.

[...] As vaudeville withered, Mastin stubbornly held
to the road, though he did land Davis in two 1933
movie shorts, the comedy ''Seasoned Greetings'' and
the Ethel Waters vehicle ''Rufus Jones for
President,'' the only production in which she came up
short in scene-stealing. Although the film is racked
with racist caricature, the 8-year-old Sammy, as
Rufus, is vibrant, confident, irrepressible -- what a
partner he would have made for the 5-year-old Shirley
Temple, soon to be high-stepping with Sammy's idol,
Bill Robinson.

[...]  Soon Davis was a recording star (''Hey
There''), a Broadway star (''Mr. Wonderful''), a movie
star (a dapper, slithering Sportin' Life in ''Porgy
and Bess'') and a Rat Pack insider with Frank and
Dean, enduring a relentless stream of race jokes in
case anyone didn't notice his complexion, and
containing his impulses so as not to upstage the
alternately munificent and petulant Sinatra. To top it
all, he became a best-selling memoirist with the
fanciful but still affecting ''Yes I Can.'' All this
while engaging the nation in his personal drama:
America shuddered when he lost an eye in a car
accident, marveled when he adopted Judaism and either
grimaced, applauded or sent bomb threats when he
married the Swedish actress May Britt.

[...] Like Jerry Lewis, whose haircut he copied, he
was too much on television, pontificating or falling
down laughing. Sometimes he affected a broad English
accent, as if that weighted his insights. He also
kissed Archie Bunker in 1972, which, the biographers
agree, represented a big step for race relations.

And he embraced Nixon, a story with a personal
dimension worth exploring. As vice-president, Nixon
had attended the trio's show at the Copa in 1954,
introducing himself afterward and impressing Davis. In
1960, along with the Sinatra gang, Davis worked
diligently to elect Kennedy, who treated him
abominably. Fishgall says that he was disinvited from
the inauguration so as not to upset the Dixiecrats;
Haygood recycles Richard Reeves's account of Kennedy
demanding May Britt be hidden at an unpublicized
meeting of Negro leaders before photographers saw her.
When, nearly a decade later, Nixon asked for his
support, Davis felt honored.

The reaction among blacks especially was devastating,
and Davis was horrified and confused by it. In
Haygood's account, Jesse Jackson requested a $25,000
contribution ''for my charity'' in return for
repatriating Davis at a convention of Jackson's
organization, Operation PUSH. It didn't work;
insistent as he was, Jackson could not still the
relentless booing as Davis stood silently. Fishgall,
who says nothing about this financial transaction,
quotes Davis's response: ''Nothing in my life ever
hurt me that much'' -- not even, he said, the accident
that cost him an eye. He never completely recovered.
He divorced, remarried, neglected his children,
discovered pornography and drugs, and worked
unremittingly, scoring a couple of hit records but
never rekindling the magic of his early career.

[...]

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company 


...read it all:
<http://nytimes.com/2003/12/28/books/review/28GIDDINT.html?pagewanted=all&position=>



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