San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Television
Here’s a first-person recollection of Sammy Davis Jr., subject of a new PBS documentary.
In 1968, Sammy Davis Jr. ventured to Chicago to star in the musical “Golden Boy.” All black entertainers who were in town paid their respects with a visit to Johnson Publishing Co., whose magazines Ebony and Jet loyally chronicled their careers.
I often attended the magazines’ celebrity lunches. James Brown arrived swathed in a full-length mink coat. James Earl Jones’ sonorous voice made everything he said sound earth-shattering. But Davis was the most memorable.
If you watch “Sammy Davis Jr.: American Masters” on KQED on Tuesday, Feb. 19, you’ll get a sense of him as a jokester. His part in the legendary Rat Pack — composed of Frank Sinatra and his close buddies Davis, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop — seemed to be to regularly crack up the Pack. The starstudded five defined the 1960s like few other performers, and in their treatment of Davis it was obvious political correctness was not in their lexicon. Bishop, who wrote much of their Las Vegas material, concocted a skit where Martin would pick up the diminutive Davis like a doll and declare, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this wonderful trophy.” Often the brunt of Sinatra and Martin’s jokes, Davis knew how to give back, his put-downs as sharp as theirs.
The documentary, originally titled “Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me,” shows him largely living in a white world in which he never seems quite comfortable. It was a sharp contrast to the Davis at that magazine lunch in ‘68, who appeared completely at ease discussing politics and the world with a bunch of editors and writers. Davis talked about spending his time when he wasn’t performing campaigning for Robert F. Kennedy for president in the Democratic primaries. He was closer to RFK than he had been to President Kennedy, who was Sinatra’s carousing partner.
Davis also talked about giving away tickets to his Chicago show to the black community and inviting them onstage at the conclusion to talk about what they had seen. The production, which was rewritten for Davis from the play and movie of the 1930s in which the boxer was white, now depicted a poor Harlem resident who disobeys his family by going into prizefighting as a route to fame and fortune. Things don’t work out the way he had hoped.
Four years later, in 1972, I was working at The Chronicle and interviewed Davis in the Fairmont’s private billiards room (the inner sanctum of the hotel’s owner, the politically influential Ben Swig). State of Israel Bonds was to give him its Israel Commendation Award for his work raising money for Israel and entertaining Israeli troops.
At the awards dinner, Davis joked about being black and converting to Judaism, which he did 17 years earlier after a car crash cost him his sight in one eye. “When I wake up in the morning, I don’t know if I should be lazy and shiftless or smart and stingy,” he told the crowd.
In our interview, he said there were few things he took more seriously than being black and Jewish. Davis attended services during the High Holidays but didn’t believe that’s what being a Jew is all about. “It means being a good human being and being aware of your brother’s plight,” he said softly. The troops — both men and