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

wanted to be a most fearsome little man.”
    James Michener’s book
The Source
, a sweeping account of the history of Judaism, was atop the
New York Times
best-seller list in the fiction category.
    And then there was
Yes I Can
.
    Harper’s Magazine
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
both ran excerpts of Sammy’s book. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
piece was about Sammy and May Britt, owing to the fact that feverish and voyeuristic curiosity about interracial marriages existed across the country.
Ebony
magazine, a favorite of Negro readers, bought an excerpt. The negotiations with
Ebony
got testy: Boyar demanded a cover of Sammy; the magazine refused. There were tense words, verbal exchanges, but in the end Boyar relented. Sammy’s relations with the Negro press were already beyond prickly. In the upper-right-hand corner of the December 1965 issue of
Ebony
(the cover article was “Black Power: New Laws for the Old South”) went the headline heralding the excerpt: “Military Ordeal of Sammy Davis Jr.” His service, of course, was hardly the stuff of a Tuskegeeairman, that crack all-Negro military unit that flew in World War II dropping bombs from the blue skies. In fact, not a gun was shot in Sammy’s stateside military ordeal, save in training exercises.
    Maurice Dolbier, dean of the
Herald Tribune
critics, invited Sammy to the
Herald Tribune
author/book lunch. It was a nice coup for Sammy and the Boyars. Only Sammy did not jump up and down. What made Sammy run? The Dolbier book invite did. “For him to stand up and talk to this literary group, well, it started getting him nervous,” Boyar remembers. Sammy was forever insecure about his lack of formal education.
    A couple of weeks before the scheduled luncheon, Sammy had been slightly injured in one of his
Golden Boy
fight scenes. And just days before the author/book lunch, he began reminding Boyar that he had been hurt. Something about his neck, his arms, his shoulders. He wanted Boyar and anyone else around to know that he hurt. And if they didn’t believe him, it was too bad. He checked himself into Mt. Sinai Hospital. Boyar sensed something awry. The
Herald Tribune
had been running full-page ads about the upcoming lunch featuring Sammy. Boyar fretted Sammy might try to pull out of the event, feigning illness. “He used hospitals as excuses to not do anything he didn’t want to do,” says Boyar.
    On the very day of the event, Sammy phoned Boyar and told him he wasn’t going to attend. Boyar couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He raced to Davis’s apartment, the taxi zooming along, Boyar’s blood rushing. “I’m not going to let you embarrass yourself,” he told Sammy. But Sammy told Boyar he doubted he could talk well enough to address the audience. At such times, his childlike voice would return, tiny and heated. “You’re talking to me,” Boyar snapped. “You can talk to them just fine.” May, in the apartment, allowed her lovely Swedish face to turn cold at Boyar’s words. She did not want her husband doing something he did not want to do. She consoled him while Boyar bore on. “I’ve never been so forceful with Sammy,” says Boyar. “I was in too much awe of him.” Finally, rising like a wounded prizefighter, Sammy got dressed.
    In the gleaming Cadillac limousine taking them over to the Waldorf, Sammy sat stiffly in his neck brace. May, who didn’t understand the demands on her husband’s time, fumed. “You’re sucking my husband’s blood!” she screamed at Boyar. She had always been so unemotional—and now this.
    Sammy stiffly got out of the limousine. Boyar coaxed him along, comforted him with words as best he could. Roger Straus was in the audience. His assistant, Peggy Miller, was also there. Miller saw Davis and the brace around his neck. “We all said, ‘What the hell is that about?’ ” she says.
    Always, whenever he entered a room, there were stares. Always, finger pointing, elbows nudging sides, whispers. “He followed