Read In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior for Free Online Page A

that now, it appeared, would not hit the streets. Reviews were not everything, but good reviews surely sold books. Calamity had struck.
    Sammy cried upon hearing of the strike. It was showtime, and now it was as if an earthquake had hit the stage he was prepared to go on. To assuage his pain, he bolted town—off to Honolulu—for ten days. (His understudy in
Golden Boy
, Lamont Washington, suddenly became Joe.) Roger Straus broke out in a rash.
    Burt Boyar, former child actor, former performer, was cool and steady. He called in chips. He called Milton Berle, who was a longtime Sammy admirer, whom Boyar, as a
TV Guide
columnist, had written about enthusiastically over the years. “Count on me, babe,” Berle told Boyar. “Mr. TV” vowed he’d go on television and trumpet the book. And he did. Clay Felker, working at the
Herald Tribune
, had been Boyar’s onetime roommate. Felker talked fast, seemed plugged in everywhere in Manhattan media circles, and was relentless when he wanted to promote something. No one had seen the
Herald Tribune
review of
Yes I Can
, but Felker made sure they
heard
about it. And he promised Boyar to do a feature on him and Jane and Sammy at strike’s end. Corbett Monica, a comedian and Berle acquaintance, went on
The Tonight Show
and lauded the book. “I’ve just read the most wonderful book on entertainment,” he said, going on and on about
Yes I Can
. The publicity machine kept cranking up, and the publisher took out print ads in Philadelphia, the closest big city to New York. “Meanwhile,” adds Boyar, “on CBS radio, Garry Moore had a daily radio program. He had heard what happened. He was sympathetic. He plugged the book every day.”
    By the seventh day of the strike, there was a feeling that, perhaps this time, the unions had overstepped their boundaries. Both the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
had suffered huge circulation losses from the 1962 strike. Mercifully, on the eleventh day, the strike ended, and the presses began to hum again.
    Yes I Can
—like other books scheduled for review during the strike—had been dealt a harsh hand. The reviews had been printed, true enough, but theyhadn’t been distributed. Walking along Manhattan streets after the strike’s end, Boyar would notice bundles of newspapers. Wrapped around some of the bundles was the
Herald Tribune
book review section of September 19—the one with the glowing
Yes I Can
review—now being used merely as wrapper paper. The sight crushed him.
    The year had already seen a rather eclectic book-publishing season. Norman Mailer, who hadn’t published a book in a decade, was back in bookstores with
An American Dream
. (Boyar, for a fleeting moment, had something in common with the tough-talking Mailer: Scott Meredith was Mailer’s literary agent.) Mailer’s new novel was about a congressman—idealistic, charming, good-looking—and a murderer. “I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946,” began Mailer’s novel. Kennedy continued to haunt deeply, like some big square-jawed ghost upon the land who had exposed, in his own assassination, its derangement. Theodore Sorensen (
Kennedy
) and Arthur Schlesinger (
A Thousand Days
) both had books out about the man and the mysteries inside him. The Sorensen and Schlesinger books were selling very briskly. Truman Capote’s novel
In Cold Blood
was also garnering wide attention. Capote’s book was a documentary account of a 1959 murder that took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a family of four killed by two drifters. The book, brilliantly reported, was dark and mesmerizing. A small, fey man, Capote was a genuinely gifted writer. He was also a product of the American South, and he possessed wild insecurities. “Something very nice happened to him while he was writing
In Cold Blood
, which was that he was getting more masculine—which was terribly important to him,” Norman Mailer later commented. “It was much more important to him than any other homosexual I’ve known. He really