In ''Gonna Do Great Things,'' Gary Fishgall notes that ''the relatively few African-Americans who had become national celebrities'' at the mid-20th century ''spoke carefully and acted with rectitude, as if they were walking on eggshells,'' while Davis ''went about his business as if he didn't care about breaking eggs or setting a good example for anyone. That was his choice.'' That last sentence is a good example of writing on eggshells, but the point is an interesting one. Davis is not remembered for being outspoken in the 50's about race or anything else. Like Louis Armstrong, Davis was later scorned as an Uncle Tom, though both men had overturned many color bars. One has to conclude that they were assailed not for what they did or did not say, but for who they were, for images that did not comport with changing attitudes in America's ceaseless struggle to be cool.
This was a constant problem for Davis, whose entire show business orientation flirted with traditions that had grown passe and were now considered offensive. 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. [...]
[...] 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.
It was a measure of his stature that the marriage did not choke his career. He triumphed again on Broadway (''Golden Boy''), but his gift for doing everything found few outlets beyond road shows. 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.
Yet he lived long enough to see the world turned on its ear. In 1979, he danced with Kim Novak at a party and none of the photographers thought it worth shooting. In the mid-50's the mob and Columbia Pictures promised to shoot him for good if he was ever seen with her. If the tap-dance revival, jewelry-decked hip-hop moguls, interracial marriage, integrated nightclub acts and black Republicans are now too commonplace to merit comment, more than a little credit must go to Sammy Davis Jr.'s childlike refusal to mind his place. They also serve who only play.
| Part of the beginning and the end of "What Made Sammy Run?," Gary Giddings' New York Times book review of Gary Fishgall's "Gonna Do Great Things" and Wil Haygood's "In Black and White"
posted in reviews on December 26, 2003 11:03 PM | t (0)
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