The Heartbreak and Heroism of Sammy Davis Jr.
by Timothy Sandefur
Author’s Note: This article is adapted from a talk given at LevelUp 2025 in Orlando.
In June 1973, the forty-eight-year-old singer and dancer Sammy Davis Jr. sat alone on an empty soundstage and lit a cigarette. He was about to perform the final number of a television special celebrating his career in show business—a career that had started more than four decades earlier, when he was three years old. Since then, he had become an international celebrity—called by many “the world’s greatest entertainer”—skilled at everything from tap dancing to singing, from the drums to stand-up comedy. He had performed for John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Queen Elizabeth. An intimate of Martin Luther King, he was the first black entertainer to headline a show on the Las Vegas Strip and the first black man to spend the night at the White House. Now, sitting by himself before a TV camera, he held a cigarette in fingers covered with giant rings as the first notes sounded of a song he had specially commissioned from his friend Paul Anka. Then he began singing the first line:
I’m not anyone.
It was a remarkably candid moment—more so, in some ways, than Davis himself probably realized. The lyrics were actually ironic: after that opening line, the song turns out to be a noble statement of individualism. But the truth was that the “greatest entertainer in the world” was a strange blend of genius and bravery on one hand and crippling self-doubt on the other—a self-doubt about which he was surprisingly candid. Gifted as he was, and brave as he was, Davis had climbed up from the streets of Harlem, defying Jim Crow in the most splendid ways, and even surmounted the catastrophic injuries of a nearly fatal car accident, to change the entertainment world forever. In another song, recorded in 1965, he had sung the lyrics,
Got the feeling I can do anything.
Yes, I can.
Something that sings in my blood
Is telling me:
Yes, I can.
And he had used that fitting phrase as the title of his autobiography—one of the greatest in American literature.[1] Yet at the same time, Davis was voraciously desperate for the approval of other people, sometimes embarrassing himself before audiences to get their applause and spending himself into bankruptcy in the vain hope of buying friends. “I was spending money I didn’t have on people I didn’t care about,” he admitted in his memoir. “I was hooked on them, like a junky, loathing them and the need for them, yet needing more and more of them all the time.”[2]
The racism he encountered repeatedly in his life—including from fellow black Americans—wounded him profoundly, yet he strove to conceal it with a nonchalance borrowed from his literary idol, Cyrano de Bergerac. Like Cyrano, Davis’s self-doubt was entirely undeserved. But like that character, Davis’s concealed fears tragically undermined the joy that ought to have been his, even wrecking the one true love of his life. In some ways, Davis really did think he wasn’t anyone—even while he proved time and again that he was really someone. As we commemorate his hundredth birthday this year, I want to examine the breathtaking achievements of this brave and brilliant entertainer—and the lessons that his tragic flaw can teach us about our own lives.
‘Make It Look Easy’
Davis was born in Harlem on December 8, 1925, to a pair of vaudeville dancers. Unable to care for him, they left him in the custody of his grandmother, Rosa, whom he called Mama. Sammy rarely saw his mother after that. His father, Sammy Sr., was a dancer in an act called the Will Mastin Trio, and its leader, Will Mastin—whom Sammy called Massey—treated the boy like a nephew.
The Trio’s act was known as “flash dancing.” It combined varieties of traditional black American dancing, especially tap dance, and incorporated gymnastic and even ballet moves. It also included comedy styles handed down from generations of black entertainers who—strange as it seems now—performed in blackface. When Sammy Sr. decided to take his three-year-old son on the road with him, the boy was quick to catch on and started imitating the comedian Al Jolson. One day, Uncle Massey told a performer to carry the infant, wearing blackface, onstage. The audience was delighted; and Massey, a clever businessman, soon found other ways to work Sammy Jr. into the show.
For Sammy Jr. to travel with the trio was against the mandatory school laws—not to mention the child-labor laws—but Mama Rosa had little respect for truancy officers. When they came to the apartment asking about Sammy, she would say, “Yes, sir, I’ll bring him over tomorrow,” but in reality, she didn’t want him to go to school because, she said, he would “meet all classes of children.”[3] Seeing a truant officer walking down the street one day, she told Sammy, “We’re gonna play a game called ‘Fool the School.’ There’ll be a knock on this door, but just sit in your chair and don’t make a sound.”[4] His father hired tutors to teach him to read and write, but Sammy Davis Jr. never spent a day in a classroom and never read a book until he was in his twenties. When theater managers were hesitant to hire the trio, Massey told them Sammy was a dwarf.
It was a hard life in many ways, especially because segregation often made it impossible for the trio to find places to stay the night. Sometimes, Massey and Sammy Sr. would take the boy to a train station, where he could sleep on a bench wrapped in a coat while they took turns pretending to make phone calls so that they wouldn’t get arrested for vagrancy. Yet the men did their best to shield Sammy from the reality of Jim Crow. They never told him that black customers were barred from businesses due to their race, instead indulging in a fiction that “showbusiness” people were only allowed to stay at certain hotels. That set Sammy up for a rude awakening later on.
As work became harder to find during the Depression, the boy’s charm proved invaluable. He found that he could beguile audiences into throwing coins onto the stage, which was often the only way they paid the bills. Money became even tighter when his father drank too much and gambled away his earnings, which he did frequently. Sometimes Sammy would simply dance on a street corner with an upturned hat for nickels. But as hard as times got, Massey had a tough business sense and a precise idea of how entertainers should behave. He was particularly keen on his appearance: he was always smartly dressed, with a cane and a fashionable hat. It was a practice Sammy was to imitate all his life.
He quickly picked up dancing and singing, and he had a peculiar skill for mimicry. He did such a masterful imitation of Louis Armstrong that Massey had him perform it in front of audiences. At about the age of five, he had a chance to meet the legendary dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Robinson and Massey had been friends for years after Massey had come to Robinson’s aid in a bar fight. Since then, Robinson had become one of America’s most famous dancers. Robinson enjoyed the boy’s admiration and asked to see him dance. When Davis showed him his moves, Robinson started giving him tips. Most of all, he said, the important point was to “make it look easy.”[5] “It was shocking to see how different his dancing was from ours,” Davis recalled. “We’d exhaust ourselves trying, arms and legs flying . . . but Mr. Robinson had his hands in his pockets and he was going up and down a flight of stairs and around the stage like he was taking a stroll set to music.”[6]
Historians now credit Robinson with major innovations in the art of tap-dancing; indeed, the U.S. Congress later declared his birthday (May 25) “National Tap Dance Day.” All his life, Sammy cherished his connection to Robinson, and beginning in the late 1960s, he made the song “Mr. Bojangles” a staple of his stage show. Although the song is not actually about Robinson,[7] Davis used the lyrics, which he combined with a striking dance routine into a kind of commentary on the defiance of grief.
I met him in a cell
In New Orleans. I was,
Well, I was down and out. . . .
Lord, he talked of life,
Laughed, slapped his leg in step;
He said the name was “Bojangles”
And then he danced a lick
Right across the cell . . .
Jumped up high
That’s when he clicked his heels.
Then he let go a laugh,
Lord, he let go a laugh,
Shook back his clothes all around.
That was Mr. Bojangles. . . .
Sammy learned to blend Robinson’s style with his father’s, and he began to enter children’s dance competitions at the age of three. When he was seven, Massey got him a role in a movie called Rufus Jones for President in which he tap-danced and did his Louis Armstrong impression.
Soon, Massey had new posters printed for the act: “Will Mastin’s Gang, Featuring Little Sammy.” Although the trio did better during the Depression than many entertainers, they had many hard nights. Sammy recalled one sad evening in Manhattan, standing with his father across the street from the Copacabana, the city’s fanciest night club, watching rich couples covered in jewels get out of their limousines and strut inside. “Why shouldn’t they laugh? [I thought]. . . . They had everything. . . . I clenched my fists. ‘Someday I’ll play that place, so help me God,’” he told his father.[8]
‘You’ve Got to Fight with Your Brain’
Sammy had good reason to think he could. By the time the 1930s came to a close, Sammy was a teenager and had honed his skills on the road to the degree that he was becoming the highlight member of the Will Mastin Trio. Then two things happened that changed his life forever.
The first was Frank Sinatra. In 1940, Sinatra’s breakthrough came when he joined with bandleader Tommy Dorsey to produce songs such as “Stardust” and “I’ll Never Smile Again.” Sammy was smitten immediately. He kept scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings about the singer and listened to his records over and over until he could copy Sinatra’s mannerisms with almost spooky precision. In fact, his skill at mimicry grew to such a degree that he could do spot-on imitations of actors such as Jimmy Cagney, Boris Karloff, and Edward G. Robinson—decades before “celebrity impersonations” became a staple of Vegas entertainment.
By this time, Davis was already self-conscious about his appearance. His dramatic underbite, his high forehead, and his short stature—he never grew above five foot five—made him feel physically awkward. Even late in life he could recall the time a little girl in his neighborhood drew a hideous caricature of him and wrote the word “ugly” beneath it. He was only seven years old at the time, but the incident remained a vivid memory for his entire life.
The second transformative experience was World War II. Although he had managed to escape service for most of the war, his draft notice arrived in the summer of 1944. Massey and his father somehow managed to find $150 to spend on a gold wristwatch as a going-away present. “We always had the name of the best-dressed colored act in show business,” Massey told him. “Can’t let ’em think different about us in the Army.”[9]
But the military was a horrid awakening for Davis. Although segregation and the Depression had presented enormous challenges, life in showbiz had been a safe haven to some extent. But when Davis arrived at Fort Warren in Wyoming, he had his first encounter with genuine segregationists. The enlisted men were brutally frank in their hatred. They refused to sleep next to him, ordered him to polish their boots, and on one particularly cruel night, smashed his gold watch. At last, the reality dawned on him. “Had I just been too stupid to see it?” he asked himself one night. “Didn’t we just go to [segregated hotels] because they knew us and were the cheapest . . . ?”[10] No, he realized—it was because he was black. “I lay awake trying to understand. How many white people felt like this about me?”[11]
When his sergeant, a man named Williams, learned he was a showman, he assigned Davis to join the band at the base, entertaining the men. Although his performances were popular, the racial hatred did not go away. One night after a show, Davis and a friend went to get a Coke. “Maybe we should go over to the colored service club [instead],” his friend said. Davis said no. There was nothing to worry about. “I just entertained them for an hour,” he answered. “They cheered me. . . . I’m thirsty, and I’m goin’ in for a Coke.”[12] But inside was Private Jennings, the soldier who had smashed his watch. Jennings waved him over. “Man, where’d you learn t’dance like that?” he asked, facetiously. “Have a beer.” But when Davis lifted the bottle to his mouth, he discovered that it was filled with urine.
“Drink it yourself, you dirty louse,” Davis replied. But the crowd simply laughed at the word “louse,” and Jennings picked up the bottle and poured its contents on Davis’s shirt. “Silly niggers can’t even control themselves,” he said. “This little fella got so excited sittin’ with white men—look what he did to himself.”[13]
Enraged, Davis leaped at the man and began to choke him. The two were soon punching and kicking each other. Jennings was far bigger than the short, skinny Davis. Jennings soon knocked Davis unconscious—although Davis at least had the satisfaction when he awoke of learning that he had broken Jennings’s nose. He also had the satisfaction of discovering that the men in his barracks sided with him. “Jennings had beaten me unconscious and hurt me more than I’d hurt him, but I had won,” he recalled. “All he’d proven is that he was physically stronger than me, but that’s not what we were fighting over.”[14]
Unfortunately, that did not cure the problem. Davis soon found himself in constant combat with racists on the base. “I must have had a knockdown, drag-out fight every two days,” he wrote. “I had scabs on my knuckles for the first three months in the army.”[15] His nose was broken so frequently that for the rest of his life it had a strikingly flat, downturned look—which, of course, only made him more self-conscious about his appearance.
The worst came when Davis decided to enter a competition between the different entertainment groups on the base. The contest was organized by a white woman, and Davis worked to charm her in hopes of ensuring his act a good spot on the billing. But the white soldiers did not like that. A group of privates shoved him into an empty barracks, tied him down, and painted his face and arms with white paint. “Come on, Sambo, give us a little dance!” one of them shouted. When he fell to his knees, another one painted the word “Coon” on his forehead and again insisted that he dance. When he still refused, they began beating him until at last he began dancing. When he collapsed, exhausted, the men grabbed a bottle of turpentine. “No matter what you do or think,” one said, “what you are is black and you better get it outta your head to mess around with white women.” They began rubbing his skin with the turpentine. “There, y’see?” said the leader. “Just as black ’n ugly as ever.”[16]
Sergeant Williams finally took mercy on him. Calling him into his office, he sat Davis down and pointed out that the fights were accomplishing nothing. “You can’t hope to change a man’s ideas except with another, better idea,” he said. “You’ve got to fight with your brain, Sammy, not your fists.”[17] But when he urged Sammy to pursue an education, he encountered an obstacle: Sammy had had no schooling; he had never even read a book. Williams began lending him his own books, and Davis was soon devouring Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Carl Sandburg, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. Then he read Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.
“[I was] entranced by the flair of the man,” he recalled,
I read [the speeches] aloud in a whisper, playing the role, dueling in dance steps around the latrine; imagining myself as that homely, sensitive man . . .. I feasted on the glory of the moment when, making good his threat, he drove the actor from the stage and, as the audience shouted for their money back, tossed them his last bag of gold and admitted to Le Bret, ‘Foolish? Of course. But such a magnificent gesture.’ And it was. Glorious!
One night, Davis acted out the scene to himself in a field behind the barracks. Grabbing a pocket full of change from his pocket he threw the coins in the air. They rattled against the wall of the barracks, and the lights suddenly flashed on. “A voice yelled, ‘Corporal of the guard!’”[18] Fortunately, he got away before anyone realized it was him.
When time came for the competition, Davis was ready. “My talent was the weapon, the way for me to fight,” he thought. “It was the one way I might hope to affect a man’s thinking.”[19] It would be nice to think that bigots like Jennings changed their minds from seeing Davis on stage, but that did not happen, at least not right away. Yet Davis thought he saw some of the men’s prejudices fading gradually. “I dug down deeper,” he wrote. “I lived 24 hours a day for that hour or two at night when I could give it away free, when I could stand on that stage, facing the audience, knowing I was dancing down the barriers between us.”[20]
As soon as the war ended, Davis returned to the road with the Will Mastin Trio. He had learned to play the trumpet and trombone in the army, and now he picked up the drums and the vibraphone, too, by begging Lionel Hampton to teach him between shows. Hampton was amazed at how quickly Davis learned instruments. Eventually, Sammy put together a number in which he would switch from one instrument to another in the same song.
Night after night, the Trio traveled and performed, especially on the West Coast, where they met Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, and Billie Holiday. In 1946, Metronome magazine named Sammy “Most Outstanding New Personality,” and that brought him to the attention of radio star Steve Allen, who loved his celebrity impressions. Eventually, the trio was invited to open for Sammy’s idol, Frank Sinatra.
Davis was determined to impress, and he danced and sang with special passion. Cool as always, Sinatra simply told him, “Good job.” But he nicknamed Davis “The Kid” and “Charley,” and he let Davis hang around his rehearsals. He encouraged Davis to sing and do impressions—something his father and Massey were starting to discourage, fearing that it was overshadowing their part of the act. But with Sinatra’s support, the trio was now entering the top levels of entertainment. Davis befriended actor Mickey Rooney, singer Mel Torme, and drummer Buddy Rich.
Around this time, Davis started to do something new—something that is easy to overlook nowadays but was radical for the time. Up to this point, the Will Mastin Trio, like the minstrel shows of a previous generation, never spoke directly to the audience. They spoke to each other on stage but not to the white people watching. But in the early 1950s, Davis began to address the audience. This innovation, writes historian Gary Fishgall, “was probably the most important . . . of [Davis’s] entire career.”[21] And when Davis spoke to the audience, he did so not in the subservient style of minstrel performers but in textbook-correct English, totally ignoring the racial stereotypes of the past.
That had a downside, however: Davis often spoke in an exaggeratedly correct style—overly gracious in his mannerisms in a way that came off as excessively eager to please. “You talk too good!” his close friend Jerry Lewis told him. “American you are, but the Duke of Windsor you ain’t!”[22] Davis admitted it was good advice. “I sounded like a colored Laurence Olivier,” he wrote. “In trying to elevate myself I had gone from one extreme to the other. . . . My personality could become buried.”[23] Yet he never managed to shake the habit, and eventually his tendency to flatter audiences with oozing affectations—“Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, with your very kind permission we have some impersonations to offer. We do hope you’ll enjoy them”—would become a target of satire.[24] They were even held against him by other black Americans who viewed them as “Uncle Tom” affectations. They emerged in part from Davis’s insatiable craving for audience approval, which as the years went by increasingly warred against his authentic personality.
Davis’s star truly began to rise in the 1950s. The Will Mastin Trio appeared on Ed Sullivan, Eddie Cantor, and Milton Berle. In 1953, they performed at the Copacabana, the very club that twenty years earlier Sammy had sworn he’d play. Then came Las Vegas. The Trio began performing at the Last Frontier casino. Sammy was twenty-eight years old. His name was in lights, and the pay was so good that he bought a house in Los Angeles for his grandmother and Cadillacs for his uncle, his father, and himself. Everybody was calling him “sir.” One day, when he was sunbathing by the pool, a manager came to speak to him. Expecting to be told that the pool was for whites only, he was surprised when the manager instead asked him if he would please go inside and play blackjack, because everyone wanted to be near him. When he gambled, the house made more money.
“The First Word I Saw Was ‘Justice’”
In the early hours of November 19, 1953, Davis left Vegas in his new Cadillac to drive to LA to record a song for a movie. Sometime around sunrise, as he was driving near San Bernardino, California, the car in front of him suddenly stopped, and Davis’s car smashed into it. His next memory was waking up in a hospital bed with bandages over his eyes. Somehow, he had survived the wreck without breaking bones, but he had hit his head on the steering wheel, and it destroyed his left eye. Doctors replaced it with a prosthetic, but he would have to wear an eyepatch for six months, and worse, he would have to relearn how to do even simple tasks without the depth perception that comes from having two eyes. Davis was devastated. How could he ever dance again? “Objects will appear flatter than they did before,” the doctor warned. “Doc,” Davis replied, “I don’t care if Marilyn Monroe looks flat just as long as I can move around a stage.”[25]
His urgency to get back on stage grew even greater when his father brought a telegram to his hospital room. The Sands in Las Vegas was offering the trio $25,000 per week to perform. They would become the first black act to headline on the Vegas strip. Davis was horrified. “Face it, Dad,” he said. “I’m a curiosity. But have you and Massey wondered how I’m gonna do impressions and get laughs with only one eye?”[26]
Sinatra came to his friend’s aid. He took Davis into his Palm Springs home and for weeks helped him relearn simple tasks such as how to pour water into a glass and how to hit a ball with a golf club. He also cheered Davis up with his wry sense of humor. One day, he gave Davis a present: a pair of binoculars, which he had sawed in half.[27]
Davis did manage to relearn many of his moves, and he soon appeared on stage wearing his eye patch, which he had studded with rhinestones. But after six months passed and doctors said he could remove it, he chose not to. He flaunted it, made jokes about it on stage, and treated it like it was something glamorous and unusual. It was “swashbuckling,” he said. But his friend Humphrey Bogart was not amused. “Y’wanta keep reminding people about the accident?” he asked. “Y’trying to trade on it . . .?”[28] Davis was shocked to realize that Bogart was right: he had been using the patch as a crutch because he was embarrassed about his physical appearance. He had accomplished the seemingly impossible: climbing over racial barriers to become a national celebrity, relearning to dance after suffering an injury that would have ruined most careers—yet he was terrified to simply show his face to the audience.
Around the same time, Davis told some close friends that he had decided to convert to Judaism. He had been curious about Judaism for some time, and as he tells the story in his memoir, he had been holding a Star of David pendant in his hand when the accident occurred; it left a permanent star-shaped scar on his hand. But it was that Christmas, when he was home in Los Angeles, that he began reading about Jewish history. He had bought his grandmother a Cadillac as a present, but when he took her out to the driveway to present it to her, he found that during the night someone had painted across the garage door the words, “Merry Christmas, Nigger!”[29] He managed to close the door before she saw it, and ordered it painted over—but as he wandered the house that evening, he happened to pick up a copy of Abram Leon Sachar’s book A History of the Jews and opened it.
“The first word I saw was ‘Justice,’” he said. “That’s a laugh.”[30] But as he read it, he became fascinated by the parallels between anti-Semitism and Jim Crow. “I went through page after page, reading of [Jewish] oppressions, their centuries of enslavement,” he wrote in his memoir. “Searching for a home, for equality and dignity. . . . They hung on to their beliefs, enduring the scorn, the intolerance, the abuses against them because they were ‘different,’ time and again losing everything, but never their belief in themselves and their right to have rights, asking nothing but for people to leave them alone, to get off their backs.”[31] One line in the book particularly charmed him. “The Jews,” it said, had “a will to live which no disaster could crush.”[32]
He arranged to meet with a rabbi. “I love the idea that we can all reach for the brass ring and we can keep stretching until we’re tall enough to reach it,” he told him. “I love your thinking about not waiting around for a Messiah to come and straighten everything out.”[33] The rabbi was skeptical at first, but Sammy proved his sincerity by studying the traditions, history, and culture of Judaism. In 1960, he officially converted.
In the meantime, Humphrey Bogart’s words had persuaded him that it was time to get rid of his safety blanket. At a star-studded performance in Las Vegas on January 11, 1954—all his Hollywood friends had come to cheer him on, and Sinatra did the introduction—Davis came out tap-dancing with his eyepatch on. The opening ovation lasted for five minutes. He sang song after song, performed impression after impression, and performed his heart out for nearly two hours until the moment came. Perfectly timed, as always, Davis finished singing “Black Magic” and then ripped off the patch and tossed it into the audience.
‘Let Me Get Mine’
Sammy was still performing as part of the Will Mastin Trio, but he obviously dominated the show, and audiences were finding it increasingly strange to see the act billed as a trio even though the elderly Massey and Sammy Sr. had been mostly sidelined. Yet even when other performers nudged him to break out on his own, Sammy held back. “They’re dead weight,” Ed Sullivan told him. “When Babe Ruth was playing ball, you didn’t see his father and his uncle on the field.”[34] Yet Sammy was reticent. He felt he owed too much to his father and uncle to leave them. And Massey, with his dominating personality, insisted that he was in charge, no matter what. Skeptical of movies and television, and afraid to lose control of the business, he resisted anytime Sammy got an offer from Hollywood. Worse, after a lifetime of dealing with Jim Crow, he was intensely skeptical that the promises white producers were offering Sammy would be fulfilled. Whenever Massey resisted, Sammy would cave in, despite the fact that touring as a trio was making him look increasingly ridiculous in the eyes both of the public and of his celebrity colleagues.
In 1956, when Sammy was offered the chance to do a Broadway musical, Massey exploded. “It’ll break up the act,” he said. But rather than stand up for himself, Sammy offered a compromise—he would get the writer to add a role for Massey into the script. The author refused, but Sammy replied, “I can’t walk out on my father and uncle.”[35] Nevertheless, Massey continued to hassle the producers over money and credit until the project was nearly canceled. At last, Sammy was forced to take a stand. “Now I’m going to tell you what I want from life,” he told Massey. “I don’t want ‘nigger’ written on my door.” Pulling out his membership in the prestigious Friar’s Club, Davis said, “You said I’d never get this. Read it. Tell me again that they’ll never let a Negro into the Friar’s Club. . . . This is what I want out of life, Massey. . . . You got yours. Let me get mine. Please. Don’t stand in my way.”[36] Massey relented, and Davis’s Broadway show, Mr. Wonderful, was a sensation. A year later, he was cast as Sportin’ Life, the flamboyant ne’er-do-well in the film version of Gershwin’s classic Porgy and Bess—a role perfectly suited to his talents and personality. A year after that, he played the lead in an episode of General Electric Theater, becoming only the second black man (after Sidney Poitier) to star in a television drama.
Although Davis was now a genuinely famous man, he found himself confronted with a new challenge. He could now get into nightclubs that had once refused to serve him, but anytime the papers published a photo of him sitting with a white woman, it became a scandal. When a magazine ran a picture him at a table with Sinatra’s wife Ava Gardner, his father was terrified that he would be lynched. Things got worse when Sammy began secretly dating movie star Kim Novak—a fact that he denied publicly because it was likely to ruin Novak’s career.
“I wondered about the men who wrote these things,” Davis said later. “Didn’t it occur to them how it might feel to hear ‘A woman’s career can be ruined just by association with you’?”[37] He rented a private house in Malibu so that he and Novak could meet in secret, and he would crawl down in the backseat when his chauffeur took him there so reporters wouldn’t see him. He was glad to see her but felt ashamed about hiding it. “I wasn’t making my own rules,” he wrote. “I was sneaking around theirs. . . . They were saying ‘You’re not good enough to be seen with a white woman.’ And I was hiding on the floor of a car, confirming their right to say it.”[38]
‘As We Walk Together in the Sun’
It was in 1959, however, that Davis met the woman who would prove to be the true love of his life. May Britt (her name pronounced to rhyme with “sigh”) was a beautiful Swedish actress who had just performed in a small role in a film called The Young Lions. They met at a movie studio; she was twenty-six, and Sammy was thirty-four. After begging friends to introduce him, he found himself making stupid jokes with her because he was so nervous. He was too shy to kiss her on their first date. She was “something apart from all moments through all the years of my life,” he wrote.[39]
Having grown up in Europe, May had little familiarity with the color line in the United States. She was charming, intelligent, and—perhaps most important—sincere. He had been with many women already, but when he was with May, he found that he enjoyed simply talking with her. “I’d never really talked to a girl before,” he wrote later. “It was always laughs, jokes, and pow! into bed or not.”[40] But with May, it was different. “I’d asked her [over] like, ‘Here’s a crazy-looking chick and I dig having her around.’ But it hadn’t been that superficial. . . . It was impossible to imagine the day I’d ever stop seeing her.”[41]
But Sammy had to find ways to conceal their relationship. He had just been signed to star in an unscripted stage show in Las Vegas along with Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop—a group that would be nicknamed the “Rat Pack” and would become one of the most successful shows in Las Vegas history—and could afford some elaborate tricks. For a while, he asked Sinatra to pretend she was visiting him so that reporters wouldn’t find out. Other times, the couple would vacation together in Europe where they could keep away from photographers. They talked on the phone every night, and once, when May was in New York filming a movie, Sammy impulsively proposed marriage and May impulsively said yes.
Interracial marriage was illegal in twenty-three states at the time. Only four years before, Emmet Till had been lynched in Mississippi merely for—allegedly—whistling at a white woman. “Baby,” Sammy told May, “I can’t go walking into [a luxury hotel] like ‘Hello America: Sammy Davis and May Britt are an item.’”[42] When he told his friends of their engagement, they were delighted, but he felt like he could not even hug her in public without risking scandal and violence.
In 1960, Davis was asked to perform before the Queen of England, and May flew out to be with him. There was much less of a color line in Europe, and Davis felt relaxed enough to finally announce to the press that he and May intended to get married. In fact, maybe he would stay in Europe for the rest of his life. Other black Americans had chosen the expatriate life—James Baldwin, for example, or Richard Wright. But after a few weeks, Davis realized that this was itself just another kind of evasion. He had to go back to the United States, and he had to marry May at home. He explained his reasons in his memoir, published shortly after their wedding:
“It had felt good . . . to rebel,” he wrote.
But I knew I was far from ready to put my country down to adopt another. As much as I loved being in England it is not Utopia, and the colored cat who goes there thinking he’s walking into heaven is going to be disappointed. Despite all the problems, America is still the best country in the world. Even with all the tensions, the equality which is still only a technical thing—despite these things I became a star. With everything going against me I was able to make it in America. It could never have happened for me in England. I don’t know of any Negro who started with nothing and made it there. Social equality is all they have for the Negro there. In America, although we have far less social equality, we have constantly expanding opportunity, and that has to be the best. Social acceptance is delightful, but it’s only ice cream and cake—opportunity is the meat and vegetables.[43]
Getting married in England, he thought, would be the equivalent of running away, of hiding, just as he had been hiding when he dated Kim Novak. And if he did that, “it would be one compromise after another.”[44] He broke the subject to May at a restaurant. “I want to stand up in my own country and be married like anybody else,” he told her. “That’s what I always wanted until you said it would be easier to do it over here quietly and come back as Mr. and Mrs. Davis,” she replied. “Hey—I like the sound of that.”[45] Delighted, they headed back to their hotel. But as they pulled up to the building, they found a truck parked outside covered with banners reading “Go Home, Nigger” and “Sammy, Back to the Trees.”[46] The truck carried loudspeakers, blaring racist slogans. It was the work of Oswald Mosley, the infamous British fascist.
Back in the room, May lit a cigarette and picked up a magazine. “Don’t you care about what happened out there?” Sammy asked her. “The only thing that bothers me is that maybe it bothers you,” she said. “Did it?” But Sammy could see her holding back tears. “She had all the guts in the world,” he wrote later. “She was playing a beautifully corny scene, trying to give me support.”[47]
Davis was later asked about the incident and other experiences of racism in an interview on the BBC. “Nowadays, when you’re accepted by the same people that would have turned you away once from their door, don’t you feel some contempt for them as you perform, and see those same faces applauding you now?”
“No,” Sammy answered,
I think that because I had so much contempt thrown at me, so much hatred thrown at me. . . . I’ve really got no time to hate that vehemently back. I can’t, you know? I’ll get upset, I’ll think it’s ironic, but I can’t sit and stew, because it’s not important, really. And you waste your time and your energy—I’ve come to realize that if the people who hate, see, the bigots—gee, if they could concentrate a half of that time on discovering a cure for cancer, we would have had it discovered, you know, twenty years ago. . . . I don’t want to add to that. That’s one group I do not want to belong to.
The interviewer then asked, “Once after an unfortunate demonstration by some of Oswald Moseley’s supporters, you turned the incident into a piece of comedy in your show. Is this a way to purge yourself of hurt?”
“Well, actually no,” replied Davis. “What you do is, you get it out, you get it out of your system, but the hurt is still there. Every time someone’s called a ‘nigger’ it hurts. And you can’t deny it hurts. But you cannot lay on it.”[48]
Sammy’s love for May is palpable in his memoir Yes I Can. Most of all, he could not wait to live an ordinary home life with his new family, and he was excited at the prospect of children. The same year the book appeared, Sammy released what is probably his best album, Sammy Davis Jr. Sings and Laurindo Almeida Plays, a collection of introspective and romantic ballads far more intimate than his usual big-band music. The words of “Two Different Worlds” struck a particular resonance with the racial tensions surrounding his relationship with May.
So far apart;
They say we’re so far apart;
And that we haven’t the right to change our destiny.
Well, when will they learn
That a heart doesn’t draw a line?
Nothing matters if I am yours
And you are mine.
Two different worlds;
We live in two different worlds;
But we will show them as we walk together in the sun
That our two different worlds are one.
By this point, Davis had already befriended Martin Luther King and often performed benefit concerts to raise money for King’s protests. His friends in the Rat Pack were also supporters of the growing civil rights movement, particularly Sinatra, who was a close friend to the Kennedy family. As the 1960 presidential election approached, the Rat Pack openly supported Kennedy, primarily because they hoped a Democratic administration would support the civil rights cause. Davis endorsed Kennedy and sang for Democratic Party fund-raisers. But when word of his engagement reached the American press, the Kennedy campaign was horrified. Southern Democrats were segregation’s primary supporters, and for Kennedy to be seen publicly endorsing a black entertainer who was about to marry a white woman could turn off southern voters. The tension was obvious when Sammy appeared at the Democratic Party convention alongside other entertainers to sing the national anthem. Many in the audience booed.
The Kennedys asked Sinatra to speak to Sammy about it. Would he please postpone the wedding until after the election? Sinatra himself would not attend if Sammy refused. Davis tried to seem unflustered and made it seem like his idea. “We’re so up to our ears getting the house ready that we’re going to have to put the wedding off a couple of weeks,” he told Sinatra. “You’re a better man than I am, Charley,” Sinatra replied. “I don’t know if I could do this.”[49] But the humiliation would only get worse.
Davis and May Britt were married at a Hollywood temple on November 13, 1960, five days after the presidential election. It had been a close one, with Kennedy inching past Richard Nixon by a narrow margin. Davis had been invited to the inauguration if Kennedy won. But as soon as the election was over, the Kennedy family had another request. Given the narrowness of the election, they feared alienating southern congressional support if Davis attended. Would he please not come? Once again, Davis graciously complied.
In the days surrounding the wedding, Sammy and May were bombarded with death threats. On October 25, Davis was scheduled to perform at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Los Angeles. Napping in the green room before he went on stage, he was awakened by a stage manager. “I’ve been getting phone calls,” he said. “The first one was this morning. He said, ‘We’ve got guns and hand grenades and we’re coming to blow up the place.’ . . . I just got another call and this one said ‘We’ll fix him and we’ll get his so-and-so [fiancée] too.’” Davis called May and asked her not to come. But she insisted—“Nobody is going to frighten me away from you,” she said—so Davis reserved thirteen additional tickets, to surround May with armed bodyguards.
Only minutes later, another death threat arrived—a drawing of a bullet with the words “I’m going to shoot you dead during your show.”[50] That gave Sammy an idea. He sent a friend to his house to retrieve a pair of .45 caliber revolvers that he kept to practice another of his remarkable skills: Davis was well known as one of the quickest draws in Hollywood, appearing in Westerns such as The Rifleman to show off his skills. When the friend returned with the guns, Sammy loaded them with real bullets and began to strap them on. “You’re not going to go on stage like that?” asked his manager. No, Davis agreed, he could not do that. “I’m going to move into [demonstrating] the gun tricks . . . and then I’ll just not bother to take the holsters off.”[51]
As showtime approached, picketers appeared on the sidewalk, marching with signs protesting Davis’s appearance. Then May appeared in his dressing room. “Why don’t you put the [show] off for a few days so the police will have time to be sure?” she asked. “Darling,” he replied, “I can’t let myself be chased off the stage by anyone who makes a threat or I’m going to spend the rest of my life running from shadows.”[52] When the curtain rose, Sammy strode on stage, the theater filled with armed guards, his manager standing only yards away holding the .45s.
No violence occurred that night, but it set a pattern for the months and years to come as members of the American Nazi Party followed Davis around the country, protesting outside his shows.[53] Sammy would repeatedly ask May not to attend out of fear that he would be gunned down on stage. He ordered that a bucket of paint and brushes be kept ready at his house at all times to cover up any more racist graffiti that might appear during the night. When the couple went to city hall to get their marriage licenses, they were accompanied by armed bodyguards. Throughout it all, May put on a brave face. Pulling out a cigarette, she asked Sammy for a light. “If I’ve got bodyguards,” she said, “I’m much too important to light my own.”[54] To Sammy, all the fear and expense seemed worth it if he could be with May. “‘Alone’ is a word I’ve lived with since I went into the army,” he told her. “For over fifteen years it was an inescapable state of mind, but it has no claim on me anymore.”[55]
‘I’ve Gotta Be Me’
He became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement, attending Martin Luther King’s march on Washington; he also marched with King in Alabama and Mississippi. He increasingly worked racial humor into his stage shows. “I collect racial cliches,” he would tell audiences, “since I have a choice of two.” Being black and Jewish, he said, was very confusing because he didn’t know “whether to be shiftless and lazy or smart and stingy.” Still, “you haven’t lived until you’ve tried kosher watermelon.” He was also part Puerto Rican, he said, “so when I move into a neighborhood, people start running four ways at the same time.”[56]
Jokes like these shocked some people even then, but Davis thought that by mocking racism and acting as if it were already something trivial and obsolete, he might help people to stretch themselves beyond it. “I do racial stories and racial jokes,” he said, “however . . . I tell them on myself. . . . I love to have fun this way. However, I make jokes about it on the stage; after the show, if you wanna march any place, I’ll be with you.”[57] He went door-to-door raising funds for King and other civil rights leaders and performed so many benefit concerts for King that he became one of the movement’s biggest financial contributors. He adored King. “I would give him my good eye,” he said.[58] In 1968, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded him the Spingarn Medal, its highest award.
But that same year, King was assassinated in Memphis, and race riots broke out across the country. As the decade came to a close, many in the younger generation of black Americans were beginning to turn away from King’s message of integration, embracing instead the militant separatist ideology known as Black Power. Championed by Malcolm X and other Black Muslims, this ideology centered around what the French poet and politician Aimé Césaire called “Négritude”—supposedly the authentic culture of “blackness.” Négritude rejected allegedly “Eurocentric” values such as capitalism, legality, and Western artistic traditions and embraced racial “pride,” political violence, and art forms that expressed anger and protest instead of the harmony and nonchalance that had long been the trademark of Davis’s jazz style. Indeed, advocates of Black Power would come to spurn celebrated American artists such as trumpeter Louis Armstrong, poet Robert Hayden, and novelist Ralph Ellison as sellouts to the “oppressions” of white America.
Davis’s first taste of such treatment came when he tried to visit a ghetto in Harlem after the riots and was stopped on the sidewalk. The community’s Black Power leaders would not allow him above a certain block, said his tour guide, because he was part of “The Establishment.” “Don’t feel bad,” the man added. “‘They wouldn’t let Martin Luther King past there. Thought he was too Uncle Tom.’” Davis was flabbergasted:
Martin Luther King an Uncle Tom? Talk about prejudice. And myself? I’d paid my dues with three broken noses and a lifetime of insisting on what I believed were my rights. . . . I didn’t deserve to be an outsider. But I was. I was a member of the black race but not the black community.[59]
Maddening as the situation was, it did not catch Davis entirely by surprise. Two years earlier, he had predicted the danger that if King’s efforts failed, the civil rights movement might turn in such a direction. “We’re citizens of our country, we deserve our rights, and we’ve got to get them,” he told an Australian interviewer;
We want to get them in the best, [most] amiable way. I don’t want the Black Muslims to take over, which will happen if we don’t. . . . It’ll happen within a short period of time. . . . The Muslims will take over and that’ll be it. Then it’ll be chaos, because they have hatred going for them, steeped up in many of my people. . . . And hatred is bad whether it’s black or white. I don’t believe in it.[60]
Davis’s ostracism had begun, in fact, with his marriage to May, which was greeted with hostility, not just by white racists but by black racists, too. “He is one of the kind that is not fighting for civil rights for his race, but fighting for a way to get to a white woman,” wrote one reader of Ebony.[61] “Why doesn’t he stay in his own race?” demanded a reader of the Pittsburgh Courier.[62] “Sammy for the most part ignores his own race,” said singer James Brown.[63] Worse was to come.
In February 1972, Daivs appeared on the television comedy All in the Family. The show, which starred Carroll O’Connor as a racist blowhard named Archie Bunker, was designed to satirize racism by treating Bunker as a buffoon. The show was popular with white audiences, but black audiences had mixed feelings; some believed that bigotry should be treated as utterly anathema, not as a source of amusement. In the episode, Archie is driving a taxicab and happens to carry Davis to the airport, only to have Davis leave his briefcase behind. When Davis comes to retrieve it at Archie’s house, the two fall into a conversation that includes Archie’s absurdly racist views. In the episode’s climax, a friend takes a picture of the two together—and just as the camera goes off, Davis kisses Archie on the cheek. It became one of the most famous moments in television history. Davis thought it was a hilarious way of satirizing racism, but many viewers did not find it amusing. Letters flooded into the studio condemning the episode as somehow legitimizing Bunker’s character by portraying him as lovable. Worse, some viewers saw it as proof of Davis toadying up to white bigots.[64] Even today, some critics regard the episode with disgust.[65] As recently as 2001, Los Angeles Magazine accused Sammy of performing “in white face.”[66]
Things got worse when President Richard Nixon asked Davis to join some of his projects aimed at the black community. The two had been friends since 1954, when they had met backstage, and Nixon was a genuine fan. Davis said yes, believing that the president’s plans would improve race relations. But black leaders were disgusted by what they saw as Davis’s turn toward the political right. Many young black people saw Davis not as a pioneer but as a sellout who “acted too white.”[67] In August 1972, Davis performed at the Republican National Convention in Florida and hugged Richard Nixon on live television. The black press blasted him for it.
Davis was stunned. He thought it was worth trying to cooperate with Republicans. Nixon had received the largest landslide in American history and had chosen to keep federal civil rights programs in place instead of cancelling them. Was it not worthwhile to try to find ways to cooperate? He invited Davis to perform at the White House and even spend the night—something no Kennedy ever did. When Davis went on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, to report on drug abuse in the military, Nixon adopted some of his recommendations. “I believe deeply in what this man is doing for black people,” Daivs said. “What could I be getting out of it that would be worth all the friends I’ve lost?”[68]
Hostility from fellow black Americans stung Davis not only because of the injustice but because Davis thought the special spark of black American culture lay in its spiritual resilience—the kind of defiant grace that he had seen in Cyrano de Bergerac and that he thought was a commonality between black and Jewish culture. His conception of black American history was lovingly expressed in the lyrics of “The Birth of the Blues,” a song that never failed to find a place in Davis’s stage show:
Oh, they say some people long ago
Were searching for a different tune,
One that they could croon
As only they can. . . .And from a jail came the wail
Of a down-hearted frail,
And they played that
As part of the blues. . . .
They took a new notePushed it through a horn
Until it was wornInto a blue note
And then they nursed it
They rehearsed it
And then sent out that news
That the Southland gave birth to the blues.
But the bitterness at the core of the Black Power movement seemed alien to this spirit. It represented a violent nihilism that was miles apart from the constructive, dignified spirit that Davis saw as central to Martin Luther King’s vision.
Davis had the opportunity to speak up for himself only weeks after the Nixon hug when Jesse Jackson invited Sammy to appear on stage at the Black Expo in Chicago. The event was a fund-raiser for Jackson’s new “Operation PUSH,” an organization that combined political activism with philanthropic efforts such as literacy and job-placement programs for inner-city blacks. Jackson had started the program after breaking with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King’s organization, and PUSH’s supporters tended to reject King’s integrationism and instead embrace the black nationalism of figures such as Malcom X. In their eyes, Davis’s efforts to bridge the gaps between the two races was suspicious, if not downright treasonous. Thus, Davis was well aware that he would face a hostile audience. He could easily have declined the invitation—he would be the only performer not performing soul or R&B music, which would have offered a handy excuse—but instead, he chose to face down his critics.
When Davis strode on stage, the audience booed so loudly that Jackson had to intervene to calm them down. When at last Davis could speak, he approached the microphone to defend himself.
I’d just like to say a few things, if I may,” he began, as the audience fell into bone-chilling silence. “I am not here, but as only one way: I am here because I have come home, as a black man. Disagree if you will with my politics—[roaring applause]—good! Good! Good. But don’t—I will not allow anyone to take away the fact I am black. And I can only add that it wasn’t easy to come here but being—trying to be a brother—it would have been very easy to avoid it, but I had to face this, ’cause I knew that here is where it’s happening. . . . If you can understand what I’m saying, and I know the brothers in the audience can—[shouting disapproval]—well, try to. Cause I am—I have gone through some changes—and . . .that’s it. Now that’s all that I can say, except that I would like to sing, if you would like for me to sing. If you don’t want for me to sing, then I won’t—[roaring approval].[69]
Davis then launched into one of his most popular songs, 1968’s “I’ve Gotta Be Me”:
Whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong,
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong,
I gotta be me—I’ve gotta be me.
What else can I be but what I am . . . ?
I’ll go it alone, if that’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else if I’m not right for me.
I gotta be free. I’ve gotta be free,
Daring to try, to do it or die.
I’ve gotta be me!
The audience gave him a standing ovation. Yet Davis couldn’t help but reflect, when he returned to the Sands hotel in Vegas and looked at the black guests and employees in the lobby, that he could recall a time when they weren’t even allowed in the building. “I thought, you wouldn’t be standing where you are if not for me.”[70]
‘Something for Everyone’
Yet for all the courage of his convictions and his brilliant talent, Davis still suffered from his one weakness. Deep down, he still craved the approval of others, and it drove him into self-destructive decisions. He was spending money at a fantastic rate on cars, clothes, and gold chains. Jerry Lewis once confronted him: “Sammy, at the end of this week, you’ll be $20,000 richer. Now, why have you gone out and bought $30,000 worth of jewelry?” Davis’s answer: “Why not?”[71] He was particularly lavish in buying presents for friends. Worse, he began sleeping with the female cast members in his show. That, combined with his work schedule—at one point he was home only two weeks in the entire year—meant that he simply was not around while his wife was trying to raise their children.
In 1968, the day finally came. “What’s the point in this, Sammy?” May asked. “I really don’t like the life of Charlie Show Biz.”
“Then why did you marry me?” Davis asked.
Her reply was heartbreakingly simple. “I fell in love with you.”[72]
They divorced, and from there, Davis’s life spiraled down into drugs, alcohol, and debt. By the time he died in 1990, he legally owed $15 million to the IRS; even today, the financial and legal confusion he created makes it hard for record companies to publicize his work.[73]
Fundamentally, the tragedy of Sammy’s life—the cause of his self-destructive behavior—was rooted in self-esteem. Self-esteem is not just an arbitrary sense of feeling good about yourself; it’s an essential component of a healthy human psyche, as important to flourishing as diet and exercise—more so, in fact, because it motivates other life-improving activities. A distorted sense of self-worth can warp a person’s perspective so he cannot compare, pursue, or appreciate the values in life. It can confuse every feature of one’s relationship to the world and to other people. It can lead to self-rejection, which causes depression and even suicide. Amazingly, even people with every reason in the world to recognize their own value often suffer in this way. As Nathaniel Branden observed, a person “can project an image of assurance and poise that fools almost everyone and yet secretly tremble with a sense of . . . inadequacy. . . . [One can] be adored by millions and yet wake up each morning with a sickening sense of fraudulence and emptiness.”[74]
In fact, high-achieving people such as Davis are more susceptible to this disorder than others because they tend to be highly self-critical and therefore, feel even minor shortcomings with an exaggerated intensity. They see their flaws as humiliating catastrophes instead of obstacles to be surmounted. They find it hard to forgive themselves. Sometimes they even think doing so is wrong. This can have a disastrous feedback effect, because a breakdown in self-esteem cripples our ability to choose. So, a person whose self-esteem suffers an injury, or fails to develop properly, can be led down dangerous paths. Because self-esteem is so crucial to human flourishing, one will grasp anything that feels like a substitute, like a castaway in a lifeboat drinking seawater out of desperation, only worsening his dehydration.
This phase of Davis’s life is perfectly symbolized by his infamously bad 1970 album Something for Everyone.[75] The music is an awful attempt by Sammy the jazz singer to perform Motown and R&B styles—which were not his music. The cover, and even the title, are revealing. The picture shows Sammy, holding a glass of booze, surrounded by fifty anonymous female groupies. The title promises to please everybody except himself. Sammy had once sung “I gotta be me.” Now he wasn’t himself at all.
Finally, his friends called the only person who could help: Frank Sinatra. Over dinner at Caesar’s Palace, Sinatra laid it on the line. “I’m so fuckin’ disappointed in you,” he said. “You’re the fuckin’ greatest talent that ever lived. You going to let this shit destroy you? Give it up . . . You’re a superstar. . . . Isn’t that sweet enough?”[76] Davis began to cry. He promised to quit drugs. And he did. His recovery took three years, but in the end he managed to quit, in part by returning to an old hobby: cooking.
Davis had always enjoyed cooking, but his career had often left him with little time to focus on it. Now, as he tried to distract himself from the gloom, he returned to the kitchen. “Cooking was a refuge from myself and my mistakes as well as from everyone else,” he remarked.[77] But it was more than that. In fact, Davis had hit upon a crucial lesson about self-esteem.
Depression feeds on itself like a mental parasite by sucking out the energy necessary to defeat depression. The victim feels like every action is pointless—but that only worsens the depression, because by sitting around and doing nothing, the victim ends up feeling worse. It’s absolutely vital for a person experiencing depression to do something—no matter how trivial—simply to break depression’s gravitational pull. A hobby, or even just accomplishing a list of household chores, can help the sufferer take the first steps toward regaining a sense of meaning.
My perfect day was to get offstage before two, in bed by four, awake by noon, be on the Desert Inn’s golf course at one and back to my suite at four, cooking and watching television, listening to music, closed off from everybody, taking no calls, easing myself into the ritual before going downstairs at seven to prepare for the eight-thirty show.[78]
‘I’m Not Anyone’
Sammy began to dance again—something that had gradually faded out of his stage shows over the years. By 1980, he had mostly rebuilt his life. Although his finances were never straightened out, he was able to return to the stage drug- and alcohol-free; and in 1989, he appeared in Tap, alongside his protégé, tap dancer Gregory Hines. The movie’s thin plot was mostly an excuse to show off tap-dancing skills, but Davis’s performance as an aging dancer who still has what it takes was remarkably touching. “Davis has never had a juicier role,” wrote critic Roger Ebert.[79] That November, Davis—now sixty-four years old and suffering from terminal cancer—joined Hines on stage to dance at a party in Davis’s honor. For two minutes the elder dancer showed off moves that Hines could only barely keep up with. Finally, with the audience shouting its approval, Hines fell to his knees and kissed Sammy’s shoes.
Their act was followed by another protégé, Michael Jackson, performing a song he had written specially for Davis, titled “You Were There.”
You took the hurt, you took the shame.
They built the walls to block your way
You beat them down. You won the day.
It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair.
You taught them all. You made them care. . . .
Yes, I am here—
Because you were there.[80]
Sammy died six months later. But he already had performed his own epitaph. In the 1970s, he asked songwriter Paul Anka to write him a special tune. Anka had written “My Way” for Frank Sinatra, with lyrics that Anka hoped would capture Sinatra’s personality. He did such a good job that the song became Sinatra’s musical signature. Davis wanted something similar for himself—and Anka delivered perfectly.
He knew the Sammy Davis who had once told a rabbi that everyone can reach for the brass ring and keep stretching until we’re tall enough to reach it. He knew the Sammy Davis of Cyrano de Bergerac. And seeing perfectly through Davis’s personal struggles, he began the song’s lyrics with a sly joke. “I’m not anyone,” it begins—only to follow with, “no, not just anyone.” Then it leads into a glorious declaration of individuality and freedom—a song more sincere and more truthful than anything Sammy ever sang in his life.
Life is filled with those who fail:
The weak, the wrong, the meek, the frail,
And those who just refuse to try,
And those who just live to die.
I’m not—I’m not one of those.
I’m full of pride I suppose.
I’ll say it loud: I am proud!
And I’ll not be a space, a no one, a number, a face
No sir, not me. I am free.
No I’ll not be used,
Misled, deceived, or abused,
No sir, not me—not me,
Can you dig it? I’m free!
This article appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.
[1] Sammy Davis, Jr., Jane Boyar, and Burt Boyar, Yes I Can: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965).
[2] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 397.
[3] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 19.
[4] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 19.
[5] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 41.
[6] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 41.
[7] The song, written in 1968 and made famous by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, was inspired by a white New Orleans dancer who called himself “Mr. Bojangles.”
[8] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 47.
[9] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 49.
[10] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 56.
[11] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 55.
[12] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 57.
[13] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 59.
[14] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 61.
[15] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 62.
[16] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 71.
[17] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 63.
[18] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 65.
[19] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 74.
[20] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 75.
[21] Gary Fishgall, Gonna Do Great Things: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. (New York: Scribner, 2011), 47.
[22] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 134.
[23] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 135.
[24] The best known of these was Billy Crystal’s impression of Davis on Saturday Night Live, which Davis took in good spirit. “How Billy Crystal Learned to Imitate Sammy Davis, Jr.,” American Masters, November 1, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/how-billy-crystal-learned-to-imitate-sammy-davis-jr/30362/.
[25] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 209.
[26] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 213.
[27] Nancy Sinatra, Frank Sinatra: My Father (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), xxi.
[28] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 283.
[29] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 285.
[30] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 286.
[31] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 286.
[32] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 286.
[33] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 287.
[34] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 319.
[35] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 300–301.
[36] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 305.
[37] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 434.
[38] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 435.
[39] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 493.
[40] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 501.
[41] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 502, 511.
[42] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 513.
[43] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 549.
[44] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 549.
[45] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 550.
[46] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 550.
[47] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 551.
[48] Talk on the BBC, 1967,
[49] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 570.
[50] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 574.
[51] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 575.
[52] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 575.
[53] The danger was real enough, however. Later that month, newspaper reporter Roby H. Heard of the Los Angeles City News Service was beaten to death with a hammer by members of the American Nazi Party while investigating the identities of those who led the protest at Davis’s performance. “Boy Leads Gang in Nazi-Type Murder,” (Indianapolis) Jewish Post, November 18, 1960, 17. No arrests were ever made.
[54] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 579.
[55] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Yes I Can, 587.
[56] Sammy Davis Jr., “Monologue,” That’s All! (Reprise Records, 1967).
[57] Davis, “Monologue.”
[58] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024), 193.
[59] Sammy Davis, Jr., Jane Boyar, and Burt Boyar, Why Me?: The Sammy Davis Jr. Story (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 214.
[61] Letter to the Editor, Ebony, April 1965, 15.
[62] George E. Pitz, “The Readers Write about Sammy Davis Jr.,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 26, 1960, 23.
[63] Harry McLaughlin, “This Entertainer Puts Americanism at the Forefront,” Patriot-News, April 7, 1968, 19.
[64] Emilie Raymond, Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 230.
[65] Wil Haygood, In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr. (New York: Knopf, 2003), 421.
[66] R. J. Smith, “Pardon the Expression,” Los Angeles Magazine, August 2001, 107.
[67] Davis once vented about such accusations to a friend: “People I never even met sitting around deciding what I oughta do! They’re out of their minds. The white cats are saying ‘He oughta live there’ and the colored cats are saying ‘He oughta live here’ and it always ends up with both of ’em saying ‘Hell, he thinks he’s white’ and ‘Yeah, he’s ashamed he’s colored.’ Bull! If I was ashamed of being colored would I present myself at the best hotel in town and expect them to let me in . . . ? When I’m convicted by my own people, who should know better, what kind of acceptance can I hope for from the rest of the world? I’ll tell you now, I’ll be playing the Copa[cabana] in New York later this year and I’m not going to live in Harlem any more than I’m going to live in New Jersey. I know now they’re gonna fight me on it. The guys in the papers’ll start the whole thing about me trying to be white, and the cats on the street’ll read it and say, ‘Yeah, how come he don’t live up here where he belongs?’ But, Johnny, there ain’t a one among ’em that wouldn’t move down-town and into the Waldorf-Astoria if he had the money and if they’d let him in.” Sammy Davis Jr. and Jane and Burt Boyar, Sammy: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 204–5.
[68] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Why Me?, 259.
[69] The Black Expo concert was filmed and recorded for a documentary called Save the Children. Although the film was released in 1973, it quickly vanished from theaters and was not released on home video until 2024, when it was digitally restored and released on Netflix. Chris Willman, “‘Save the Children,’ Long-Lost ’70s Concert Film with the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Staple Singers and Other Black Superstars, Gets a Netflix Rebirth,” Variety, November 3, 2024. The film edits some of Davis’s remarks. An alternate audio recording is available on YouTube:
[70] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Why Me?, 268.
[71] Haygood, In Black and White, 418.
[72] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Why Me?, 178.
[73] The financial and legal complexities of Davis’s estate are detailed in Matt Birkbeck’s Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, and Madness (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
[74] Nathaniel Branden, A Woman’s Self-Esteem: Struggles and Triumphs in the Search for Identity (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 8.
[75] Something for Everyone was a spectacular failure, and remains the only one of Davis’s albums never to be rereleased.
[76] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Why Me?, 293.
[77] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Why Me?, 297.
[78] Davis, Boyar, and Boyar, Why Me?, 336.
[79] Roger Ebert, “Tap,” February 10, 1989, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tap-1989.
[80] Jackson never performed the song again. His performance can be seen at