February 2001

From the Inside Out
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By Chris M. Slawecki

Good autobiography explains the life of its subject. Great autobiography explains the life of its subject and more – not just what that life was, but also why and how that life came to be that way.

Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990) recounts one hell of a life in Sammy: An Autobiography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His first memoir, Yes I Can (1965), a true American rags to riches story, was both popularly and critically acclaimed; for an encore he delivered Why Me? (1980), which brooded more troublesome issues such as his personal relationships with the Kennedy family, his wives, and others. Davis wrote both books with the husband and wife team of Burt and Jane Boyar, his friends for decades. Burt combined both texts with previously unpublished interviews, and wrote a new prologue and epilogue, for this new Autobiography. Davis succumbed to throat cancer in 1990 at age 64. Jane Boyer died in 1997.

Davis was a rare breed of entertainer. He could sing, dance, and do comedy and drama with soul and style, sort of the prototype Michael Jackson. Much has been made, including much of this book review, of the fact that Davis was “burdened” as a performer by being both Jewish and Black (though he wryly notes he started out as a “negro”) during a period where large expanses of America were less than enlightened on racial and religious tolerance. In the year 2000, ten years after Davis’ passing, a Jewish senator ran for the second highest office in the United States, and a Black man is serving as Secretary of State. Sammy: An Autobiography reminds us that things were not always so. It is not merely the autobiography of a talented Jewish, Black performer, even though that might be interesting enough. It is simply, triumphantly, an American autobiography.

Davis saw himself as born to the stage. He was not someone who entertained – he was an entertainer. The road and the stage were his home: “Although I had traveled ten states and played over fifty cities by the time I was four, I never felt I was without a home. We carried our roots with us: our same boxes of makeup in front of the mirrors, our same clothes hanging on iron pipe racks with our same shoes under them. Only the details changed, like the face on the man sitting inside the stage door, or which floor our dressing room was on.”

As Davis searched for stardom, for the first several years with his father and family friend in The Will Mastin Trio, he was running from and running to many things. As a child, he appeared in a Warner Brothers film starring Ethel Waters, Rufus Jones for President. Davis played Rufus, a little boy who fell asleep on his mother’s lap and dreamt he was President. Davis recalls, “When Rufus Jones attended a cabinet meeting, there were signs saying ‘Check Yo’ Razors at the Door.’ He appointed a ‘Secretary in Charge of Crap Shooting’ and a Secretary of Agriculture to ‘make sure the watermelons come in good and the chickens is ready fo’ fryin’.’” Davis’ depiction of several instances of racial intimidation and abuse are absolutely horrific; he endured some unspeakable horrors while serving in the Army during WWII, including being beaten and painted with the words “coon” and “I’m a nigger” in white paint by his own troops.

After he left the army, Davis and Elvis Presley were the original pair in consideration for Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, which eventually starred Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. But Elvis’ manager, Col. Parker, turned the deal down. Presley had to explain it to Davis: “The real reason is because he says that all those people out there who buy my albums, among them are lots who won’t want to see me chained to a colored guy and end up liking him.”

That same drive that drove Sammy Davis Jr. to stardom in many ways nearly drove him to death. “There had been no harm in the dream of a boy – ‘I’ve got to be a star’ – until it hardened and fastened itself onto a man as a necessity, blinding, obstructing maturity, preventing reevaluation,” he learned. “No white man could ever have been the enemy to me that I had been to myself; he was often guilty of unkindness and stupidity, but I had wasted my life and my talent to win a victory over that stupidity. I was the man who’d opened the door and let Hatred come in, and presented my case to a madman. I was the man who’d paid tribute to Hatred with every breath of my life.”

“All I really had was my talent,” he finally decided. “Without that I wouldn’t be welcome at the White House, I wouldn’t be able to help anybody, not even myself. If God ever took away my talent I would be a nigger again.”

Davis comes clean with other flaws too. He struggled with the club performers’ equivalent of writers’ block, where he lost respect for himself because he knew he could do better, and lost respect for his audience because they did not. “Phoniness, the lack of respect, had become a habit, a reflex,” he wrote. “And there had been a transition within me, a shift of balance so slight that I hadn’t seen it happening and the ‘con man’ began creeping onstage until gradually but inevitably he overpowered the honest performer and I was no longer able to take off the coat. I had stopped playing the role and become the character.” And Davis seems to relish that he absolutely hated the idea of singing “The Candy Man” with The Mike Curb Congregation for M.G.M. Records, which became a Number One single. His immediate reaction: “I’ve heard the song. It’s horrible. It’s a timmy-two-shoes, it’s white bread, cute-ums, there’s no romance. Blechhh!”

Later, he charmingly reflects, “Unfortunately, I wasn’t born sixty years old. I had to work hard, fuck up a lot and consequently learned a lot.”

Davis explains his mid-life conversion to Judaism, which was introduced to him by Eddie Cantor, with profound insight on the similarities between Jewish and Black American cultures. While reading “A History of the Jews,” Davis remembers that “I got hung up on one paragraph: ‘The Jews would not die. Three centuries of prophetic teaching had given them an unwavering spirit of resignation and had created in them a will to live which no disaster could crush.’”