What Makes Sammy Jr. Run?:Classic Celebrity Journalism Volume 1 (1960s and 1970s) (2024)

FOREWORD

BY JOYCE WADLER

Every now and then somebody chases me down to talk to their journalism class about writing profiles and since this gives me the opportunity to get to a young reporter before some editor does, draining every ounce of creative juice and originality and delight out of their bodies and leaving them an empty, beaten, health insurance dependent shell, much like myself, I usually say yes.

Kiddies, I say, essential to getting a subject to spill their guts is establishing trust. One does this in many ways: showing interest in what interests the subject, feigning sincerity, mastering a range of words and sounds along the lines of Wow! No! You don’t say! That is so interesting! Oooh! Aaaah! It may seem daunting, I say, but if you have ever been on a blind date with a person who appears mostly dead but you want to sleep with anyway, faking sincerity is a skill you already possess. You’ve feigned org*sm? You are ready for a career in journalism.

True, I was not always aware of all this as I traipsed gaily out into my journalism career. Nobody told me to save questions involving murder raps or marital tensions for last, which is why you once could have seen me sprinting down the halls of the Plaza as the son of a New York politician screamed, "I PISS on The Washington Post" or being frozen out by the crew on a sailing ship in New Zealand where they were doing a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, because the star had a screaming fit about that bitch from New York. Actually, he was alleged to have used a much uglier word than bitch. No, no, don’t ask who it was. I couldn’t possibly tell you. Oh, all right, Mel Gibson. On the plus side, he wasn’t anti-Semitic.

Eventually, however, I got the knack of the interview. If I was talking to the guy who got shot out of the cannon at the circus, I slipped into the cannon to get the feel. (Dumb, dumb, dumb. Had the thing fired it could have cut me in two.) If the subject was an animal trainer, I rode the elephant. (Bonus reportorial tip: Always be extra nice to the elephants. A human hates you; the worst you will suffer is a screaming phone call from the publicist. The elephant hates you; you will be a headline in the Daily News.)

So, when I had an assignment some years back to go up to Woodstock, NY, to interview Levon Helm, the guitarist and vocalist of The Band who died in 2012, I was confident I was ready. I had grown up not far from Woodstock in the mid-1960s where The Band’s members had hung out, I knew their music, I knew which Band member had killed himself and which had died of an overdose.

My interest was Helm’s financial problems. Both Helm and the Band’s organist, Garth Hudson, had almost lost their homes because of tax troubles. I had interviewed Hudson a week before I went to talk to Helm and the fact that I still remained in the business was proof of just how desperate I was for health insurance. Hudson didn’t answer questions for several minutes or at all and, when he did, he replied in what I shall generously describe as parables. I am paraphrasing here, but it went something like this.

Me: Garth, you almost lost your house, but at the last minute someone bailed you out. You must be feeling pretty good about this.

A long pause during which life is discovered on Mars; an ice age threatens Woodstock, getting as far as West Shokan, then withdraws; I die and, having learned nothing from my previous life, am reborn as a feature writer.

Hudson: Well, I’ll tell ya. I play a lot better with my left hand now than I did seven years ago.

Interviewing him was one miserable slog. Happily, I was accompanied by a photographer, Chris Maynard, a man of few words, though not so few as Hudson, and when Hudson left us for a spell, he made one of those corkscrew motions at the side of his head you learn in second grade, then spoke the three little words a reporter cannot hear often enough when an interview has gone south.

It’s not you, he said.

A week later I drove back up to the country to interview Levon, who was married and living in a barn-like house in Woodstock. He’d had a bout of throat cancer a year or two earlier but he was as chatty as Hudson was withdrawn. He talked about losing his money to drugs; about the record companies he felt had cheated him; about his former bandmate Robbie Robertson, the one decent businessman in the group as far as I could see, who was living in Los Angeles, scoring movies, who Levon felt had ripped him off too.

It was a humid August day and at one point Levon suggested I kick off my shoes and take a walk to his lake. Naturally—take an interest in their interests—I did. It was a nice enough lake, but very buggy, so after a little Oooh, aaah, great lake, sweet property, gee whiz, trees and everything? I cut it short. It wasn’t until two hours after I had left Levon’s that I realized that I was scratching my legs not because of bugs, but because of poison ivy. Within 48 hours they were covered with great oozing sores. It took a course of oral antibiotics to clear them up, but I was so grateful that Levon had been a great talker I didn’t hold it against him, even when I learned someone else had gotten a wicked case of poison ivy on his land so he had to have known it was there.

About a week later, I was heading up to Woodstock again and since I had a few more questions for Levon, I made an appointment to drop in and see him again. He came out to meet me, wearing only a pair of faded, navy blue underpants. The name on the band was Calvin Klein. You notice things like that when a guy is wearing only his underwear. Also that even in rock ‘n’ roll, time takes a toll.

Levon said nothing about why he was dressed only in underpants and not wishing to be uncool with a guy who had played with Bob Dylan I did not bring it up. It certainly wasn’t a seduction move, there was none of that vibe about it, his wife was in the house, and the ‘60s were over. We sat in his screened-in porch, stacked with crates of empty Coca-Cola bottles, and discussed heroin and getting ripped off and I thought about the gorilla in the middle of the room and what a wuss I was being and finally, as casually as I could, I asked Levon what I still feel was one of the most penetrating questions of my career. I wish 60 Minutes had been there to capture it.

INTRODUCTION

BY ALEX BELTH

There is, far as I can see, no reason to do a story on me. Most of what I have to say you couldn’t print anyway. Most movie stars are not interesting, so to sell papers and magazines in the fading publications field, a writer has to end up writing his ass off to make somebody look more interesting than he really is, right? What it all boils down to is publicity because somebody’s got some movie to sell, right? What do I need with publicity? You want to see me driving up and down the Sunset Strip in my car picking up girls, right? Well, you don’t think I’d be stupid enough to let you see that side of me, do you?—Warren Beatty, Esquire 1967

Hi diddle-de-dee. An actor’s life for me.—Robert Mitchum, Penthouse 1974

For more than a hundred years, we’ve made celebrity worship a national pastime without ever calling it as much. With their beauty, ability, and fame, celebrities charm us, and we yearn to know if that charm extends to their daily lives. We want to know everything about them.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it’s hard to imagine a major star divulging their private lives to … a writer. If a celebrity wants to document their life, they’ll produce a documentary or docuseries or fictional movie or podcast. They won’t leave it to a magazine, because why would they? But during the 1960s and ’70s, the balance of power tilted in the other direction. Magazines, even low budget start-ups, had the freedom to publish nuanced, intimate, and occasionally revealing stories. Writers weren’t invincible but they had freedom to write what they wanted, and a magazine could publish a critical piece without fear of damaging relationships with actors and agents and PR teams. It was a time of provocation where the results could be damning or exposing.

The happy result for us readers is a trove of lively, interesting reportage that is both entertaining and historically intriguing. The writers in this anthology, in a range of styles, all put us right there in the room with the entertainers and artists who are grappling, in some way or another, with their fame. What it means to have it, sustain it, and lose it.

There were notable magazine articles on celebrities before, of course; The New Yorker started doing their Profiles in the 1920s and occasionally wrote about a celebrity such as silent movie star Rudolf Valentino. However, during the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, from the 1920s through the ’40s—which coincided with a golden age of magazines—movie stars were protected, which meant magazine articles weren’t especially in-depth or candid. In the old days the Hollywood press had real power, Joan Crawford said in a 1973 interview, yet they could be so—well, discreet is a nice word … I mean, they had to know something about what went on between me and Clark [Gable], and me and a few other men, but they kept quiet …. There was such a thing as a gentleman of the press.

Lillian Ross’s 1950 New Yorker magazine portrait of Ernest Hemingway, and then her masterful examination of film director John Huston in Picture, detailing the making of Huston’s 1951 film, The Red Badge of Courage, set the tone for smart, sharp, observational reporting. Truman Capote’s 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, The Duke in His Domain, was the smartest and sharpest of all. Warned against being left alone with Capote, Brando ignored the advice and suffered the consequence: The piece had the inevitable, casual cruelty of a cat torturing a mouse. Most actors are such children, Capote later told his friend, the novelist John Knowles. Brando could have sued me over that interview and collected.

One of the early celebrity profilers, Helen Lawrenson became famous in 1936 when she wrote Latins Are Lousy Lovers. Published in Esquire under an anonymous byline, the essay—meant to be a comic debunking of Latin machismo—instead created a scandal. Cuban officials confiscated copies of the issue of Esquire and jailed eight newsdealers. Much to Lawrenson’s horror, the phrase Latins are lousy lovers became part of the American lexicon—most people were familiar with the line without knowing where it came from.

In 1958, she recalled, I don’t suppose that I have gone to a party in thirty years without having someone come up to me, sooner or later, in the course of the festivities, and announce with a bright gleam in his eye, ‘Say, I understand you’re the girl who wrote that piece!’ There is never any doubt what piece he means because the next thing is, inevitably, ‘Tell me, how did you ever come to do it?’ If the man is a Latin, he is eager to leap into the arena and avenge his national honor. If he is a non-Latin, he regards me skittishly and is afraid to spend much time with me, lest he wake up some fine morning to find that he, too, has been immortalized in print.

By the ’50s, primarily in the pages of Esquire, Lawrenson became known as a go-to profiler of celebrities, from Marlene Dietrich to Errol Flynn, writing not so much with innovation but bookworm smarts, sexual frankness, keen observation, and self-deprecating appeal. Elsewhere, at Time magazine, Brad Darrach delivered stylish, often confidential portraits of A-list stars—Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor among them. Darrach succeeded the great James Agee as Time’s movie critic, and also wrote about books for years, while finding his groove writing profiles in the style of Time stories, all of them masterpieces of compression.

Thomas B. Morgan, a young magazine editor, quit a cushy job at Look magazine in 1957 to write fiction and spent the next couple of years working on a pair of novels that went unpublished. Hoping to make some money, he turned to magazines as a freelancer. His first assignment, on the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr, came from Clay Felker, a rising young editor at Esquire later known as one of journalism’s power brokers during his run at New York magazine. Morgan assimilated what he’d learned as a novelist. His profile of Davis Jr., he later recalled, came out virtually as a short story, using dialogue, atmosphere, and character development … I plan more novels, but I no longer tell myself that journalism is a preliminary before the main event.

Meanwhile, successful fiction writers such as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote dove into journalism with zeal and facility. Capote went so far as to straight-facedly invent a new category—the nonfiction novel—with his true crime saga, In Cold Blood.

While it’s tempting to picture the ’60s as a golden age of magazine journalism—think of all those incredible Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire covers—the reality was less rosy. Sure, a few legacy brands, Esquire, Harper’s, and Cosmopolitan, enjoyed revitalizations, but by the early ’70s, many long-standing titles—Collier’s, Life, The Saturday Evening Post—pillars of magazine’s golden age, folded. Still, even if the industry was forever in flux, and TV continued its ascent as the dominant form of media, magazines were at the center of cultural conversation. Scrappy start-ups like Ramparts, Rolling Stone, and New York found their audience; and at publications from Harper’s to The Village Voice to Playboy, a new, less rigid brand of writing, best known as New Journalism, flourished.

The term New Journalism is most associated with Tom Wolfe—who came to regret it, as did many of the people labeled New Journalists. At its worst, most cartoonish, New Journalism came to connote style over substance, and taking great liberties with the facts. But fabrication did not define the movement, which was all right there in Gay Talese’s 1962 Esquire profile of retired heavyweight champion Joe Louis. It’s this piece that Wolfe credited as a model, using the elements of a novelist’s toolbox that Morgan discussed. Crucially, magazines offered more space and more freedom to writers than newspapers could—at times, a single article would take up an entire magazine issue. And, as was the case with Mailer, columnist Jimmy Breslin, or journalist Hunter S. Thompson—the authors themselves became a character in their own stories. Others, like Talese, Joan Didion, or O’Connell Driscoll, took a more third-person, voyeuristic approach, with the writer receding into the background, the eye of a documentarian’s camera.

There was nothing new about any of this. But hey, in the ’60s, hype carried the day. In fact, New Journalism proved the exception not the rule; I don’t think anyone would mistake Lawrenson or Helen Dudar or Anne Taylor Fleming for a New Journalist. No matter the label, the best journalism is rooted in great reporting. Talese called it the art of hanging out.

I’m one of those who believe that reporting is an art form, he once said, or should be pursued as an art form. You can do anything with it. Even write a story about a subject that won’t grant you an audience, which is what happened when Talese tried, unsuccessfully, to interview Frank Sinatra in late 1965; the result, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, a brilliant depiction of the atmosphere and people around Sinatra, is one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever written. Its perceived failure—not getting Sinatra to talk—turned out to be a blessing. The piece is also a reminder of the limitations of a writer’s clout, particularly when it came to access, which even in the ’60s did not come easily. Gay Talese came out here and got hot under the collar because it took him three weeks to see Frank Sinatra, Guy McElwaine, Beatty’s press agent told Rex Reed. Hell, Mia Farrow [Sinatra’s then wife] doesn’t even see Sinatra until the lights go out.

Other reporters had better luck, like Doon Arbus, a young reporter from New York who was able to convince James Brown and his entourage to let her to go along on a music tour of the South, at a time when a young White woman traveling with a group of Black people could be scandalous. Sara Davidson got plenty of cooperation from Jacqueline Susann when the author was at the height of her success as a publishing phenomenon. Then there’s Jerry Lewis, Birthday Boy, a massive 1974 Playboy profile by Driscoll. The complete opposite of Talese’s Sinatra tale, Lewis allowed the 21-year-old USC student to hang out with him up close in Los Angeles, Miami, and Germany. Lewis had previously had a circ*mspect, almost cagey attitude toward the American press. How did he let his guard down enough to let this kid reporter see so much? When Driscoll handed the story in, his editor at Playboy said, I hope you have notes because we’re going to get sued. But a lawsuit never came. The piece both made Driscoll’s career and marked him as someone who saw too much and thus couldn’t be trusted. Never again would he enjoy that kind of access.

A few pieces in this anthology created a stir when first published, like Barbara Goldstein’s 1967 New York article on Viva, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars. A lot of horrible things have happened to me, Viva later said, but I would consider that the worst. Robert Ward’s juicy 1977 Sport profile of Reggie Jackson reignited a tabloid storm for Jackson with the New York Yankees for which the baseball player never forgave Ward. Darrach’s Penthouse profile left Robert Mitchum’s family mortified. A year later, in a 1973 Rolling Stone article, Mitchum’s twenty-year-old daughter conceded that Darrach’s piece was a fairly accurate story—though hardly a fair one. The thing is, she said, "it was all so private."

This isn’t a compendium of the most controversial celebrity profiles ever written. If it were, we would have included Reed’s 1967 dismantling of Beatty in Esquire (Will the Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up?) instead of selecting Lawrenson’s sympathetic, and perhaps more accurate, portrait.

You’ll find plenty of writerly voice in these pieces—witness the tour de force that is Brock Brower’s lead in to his profile of writer and critic Mary McCarthy, devoted to her smile (one of the characteristics of this era of journalism is an emphasis on physical descriptions, the kind of details considered offensive today). And you’ll also see plenty of humor, such as Mark Jacobson’s visit with movie star Pam Grier, which ends hilariously, albeit painfully for the author; or the lighthearted, almost meta-hijinks of Sally Quinn’s lunch interview with Rudolf Nureyev. Quinn writes with sly humor about Nureyev’s appeal as a sex object; he beams with pride as he successfully evades her questions. And then there’s Albert Goldman’s coffee shop comedy riffing with Philip Roth on the occasion of the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, the book that made Roth both a celebrity and a wealthy man.

What binds these stories is that they all touch on the nature of fame and the inner workings of the fame machine. They are presented in chronological order; the fact that there are consecutive pieces about the publishing industry is coincidental. The overall result is not meant to be definitive so much as representative. This isn’t a collection of stories about celebrities whose fame transcends time, it’s a collection of stories about what it meant to be a celebrity in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ve left out standards like Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Talese and Radical Chic by Tom Wolfe, the Sweet Home Alabama and Stairway to Heaven of celebrity profiles—because, like Capote’s Brando piece, they are heavily anthologized and easy to find. Instead, the aim here is for you to enjoy some names that you may not be familiar with. Or those you might know but not in this idiom—such as the inimitable Nora Ephron, who, decades before she became a famous filmmaker, was a kick-ass magazine writer. Rex Reed later joked that the celebrity interview was the lowest form of journalism, but the truth is, he was terrific at it, and his profiles from that era sparkle.

The bylines you find here are a gratifying mix of seasoned veterans such as Helen Dudar and Jacqueline Trescott, and short-timers like Anne Taylor Fleming and John Eskow. Lawrenson was in her seventies when she wrote about Beatty, and Darrach in his late fifties when he profiled Mitchum. But one remarkable aspect of this collection is the poise and restraint shown by the younger writers: Sara Davidson was twenty-seven when she wrote about Jacqueline Susann; Driscoll twenty-one when he got to Jerry Lewis, and Doon Arbus just twenty when she profiled James Brown. Each of their stories have a measured, even tone you don’t immediately associate with a young writer.

Bear in mind the reporting standards of the era. Many of these reporters took notes, but not in front of their subjects, scribbling them on co*cktail napkins in the bathroom instead. Tape recorders were cumbersome and not yet industry standard. Lillian Ross and Talese didn’t use them at all. When Anne Taylor Fleming showed up at La Côte Basque for her first interview with Truman Capote, she placed her shoddy-looking tape recorder on the table. Put that away, said Capote. If you’re going to be a good reporter all you have to do is listen. Taylor knew it was part of a game, a challenge. He was putting me on notice, she remembers, so, I learned to listen with all the fiber I had.

Just as Capote had put his finger on Brando twenty years before, Fleming’s portrait of Capote, which ran in two-parts, in consecutive issues of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, presented the writer as a victim of his own lust for fame. By the ’70s, Capote had squandered his immense talent, reduced to a caricature of himself, gossiping on TV talk shows. He underestimated Fleming, and while her piece lacks the acidic glee of The Duke in His Domain, it stings all the same. Like Jerry Lewis, Capote was a star of yesteryear trying to make a dramatic comeback only to face his own dramatic failings.

Lauren Bacall, on the other hand, had a more grounded perspective. Captured with brisk, effortless precision by Helen Dudar—who, as a longtime reporter, struck many as a real-life version of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday—Bacall hadn’t acted much in the ’70s but was on the verge of publishing a memoir when Dudar interviewed her. The book, which Bacall wrote without a ghostwriter (though in collaboration with legendary book editor, Robert Gottlieb), not only became a bestseller but is regarded as one of the finest Hollywood autobiographies ever written. In their conversation, brief, courteous, and professional, Bacall is levelheaded about her life and celebrity. I’m not desperate about it at all, said Bacall, a star at nineteen, whose fame would never burn as bright as it had when she’d been married to Humphry Bogart, who died in 1957. I just don’t want to waste my time, Bacall continued. I don’t want to give myself away. I don’t want to go to co*cktail parties anymore.

Bacall knew the steep price of fame, but, as the saying goes, the show must go on. There were, after all, today and tomorrow to be faced, writes Dudar. Besides, she knows very well it’s not supposed to be easy.

—Alex Belth

THOMAS B. MORGAN

Before New Journalism emerged in the 1960s, Thomas B. Morgan (1926–2014), a magazine editor and frustrated novelist, applied the literary techniques of fiction to magazine profiles with dazzling results. During most of the ‘50s, Morgan worked as an editor at Look magazine where he polished his craft while contributing pieces to Esquire, Holiday, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and TV Guide. He quit Look in 1957 to be a writer of serious fiction, penned two novels, neither published, and with a young family to consider, quickly returned to magazine work. The day after he finished his first novel, Morgan commiserated at lunch with Clay Felker, a rising young editor at Esquire. Felker mentioned that he’d seen the brilliant Sammy Davis Jr. on TV the night before and talked about how Davis had never been properly profiled. Morgan got the assignment and hung out with Davis nonstop for a week. I earned Sammy’s trust enough for him to open up to me about his life in a way that he hadn’t to any reporter, Morgan recalled. He spent the weekend fishing with me and my wife at our summer house in Long Island, and I earned his trust that way. I had the feeling that he had never had a friend who was a journalist before.

Morgan said the piece came out virtually as a short story, using dialogue, atmosphere, and character development to explore Sammy’s personality. It proved a winning formula in a string of profiles Morgan delivered to Esquire in the early ’60s on figures as diverse as Roy Cohn, Teddy Kennedy, John Wayne, and Blaze Starr. Morgan did eventually publish a novel, Snyder’s Walk, in 1987, though novelist would be a minor accomplishment in what proved a fascinating career: Morgan served as Adlai Stevenson’s press aide in 1960, and later was press secretary for New York Mayor John Lindsay; he held executive positions at New York magazine, WNYC public radio, and the United Nations Association of the U.S.A. And quietly, Morgan helped pioneer, and master, the show business profile.—Alex Belth

WHAT MAKES SAMMY JR. RUN

Esquire, 1959

In a typical ten-day period recently, Sammy Davis Jr. had this schedule: the final week of an eighteen-day engagement at the Copacabana (sixteen performances interspersed with general frolicking, a record date, television and radio interviews, and two visits with Cye Martin, his tailor); a one-night stand in Kansas City to receive an Americanism award from the American Legion; one night at home in Hollywood; and the opening night of a two-week date in Las Vegas at the Sands Hotel, the management of which has a contract with him for the next four years, eight weeks a year, at $25,000 per week. The schedule could have been extended. The day after closing in Vegas, Davis was due for three weeks in Hollywood at the Moulin Rouge, another nightclub with which he has a five-year, million-dollar deal, followed by two weeks in Australia, followed by an eastern tour. Photographer Burt Glinn and I, however, arbitrarily pursued Davis through that ten-day period. Since this short, skinny, one-eyed, broken-nosed, umber-colored singer-dancer-musician-actor-mimic may be, as Milton Berle has said, the greatest entertainer in the world, and may even be, as Groucho Marx has decided, better than Al Jolson, who could only sing, we wanted to find out what we could, naturally, about what makes Sammy Jr. run.

Like most men, Davis lives a life of quiet desperation. The only differences are that he has little privacy to live it in and that on the average of twice a night, thirty weeks a year, he must stand in a spotlight and be Sammy Davis Jr.—comic, sentimental, bursting with energy, and immensely talented—no matter how he feels inside. If he were an average performer, the challenge might not be so great.

But you see, says Davis, what I do is different. Most Negro performers work in a cubicle. They walk on, entertain, and sing twelve songs before they say good evening. They never make any personal contact with the audience. Long time ago, I knew I could only make it if I broke through this wall. I was convinced that a Negro boy could do comedy—you know the kind I mean. Not the yassuh, nossuh thing. I decided I could make it as a person, like Jolson or Danny Kaye made it. Well, to do that, you have to be honest with an audience. You got to have antennae and feel what they want. And you have to try to keep your personal feelings from interfering with your communication.

The Davis act has a basic structure—songs, impersonations, dancing, laced together with comic patter or sentimental chitchat. The structure never changes, yet every performance is different.

The patter between songs, says Davis, "is something that can’t be planned. You can’t write it if you’re going to be honest. I can vary the act at any minute with a signal to Morty Stevens, my conductor. I snap my fingers a certain way and he knows we are going to go into ‘Let’s Face the Music.’ I tap my foot just so, and it’s going to be ‘Old Black Magic.’ If you’re honest, you can feel the right way to get to them every time. Otherwise, Dullsville, Ohio. I don’t mean all good shows are alike, either. You’ve got three kinds of shows—a routine show, a fun show, and a performance show. The fun show is lots of tumult and laughs. The performance show is the one, like opening night, where you belt it all the way. What I do works because I am trying to be honest.

"You take most of the material in my act: aside from the songs, I don’t do any bits that I didn’t contribute to. I have a choreographer—Hal Loman—but we work out the dances together. Nothing fancy about my dancing. I like to make clear sounds with the taps. Bojangles—that’s Bill Robinson, who taught me a lot—he used to say, ‘Make it so the people can understand it.’ That’s what I try to do.

"Sometimes the impersonations get in the way. They blur your image with the people and you die as a performer without a distinction of your own. I used to do a song called ‘Why Can’t I Be Me?’ That’s the story of most of my life. Every guy wants to sound like himself. But I keep the impersonations in the act because the audience wants them. They’re like a frame. The audience says, gee, that’s his best stuff, what’s he going to give us next?

"The big thing is understanding the songs and projecting them honestly. When I sing ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,’ I think about a guy who is happy with his life. Doesn’t make any difference how I feel. I think how he feels. When you have that, daddy, you don’t need any tricks. All I want is they should like me—say this is a nice guy. Just let them give me one thing—applause—and I’m happy."

Nightclub audiences do curious things when Davis is on stage. For one, they are prone to give him standing ovations. For another, they tend to gasp out telling comments—telling about themselves as well as the performer. Early in his act, Davis comes on wearing a grey porkpie hat, black suit, black shirt, white tie, with a trench coat flung over his shoulder, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey-colored water in the other. He blows smoke into the microphone, sips the drink, and says, My name is Frank Sinatra, I sing songs, and we got a few we’d like to lay on ya. Davis puts the drink on the piano, throws the trench coat on the floor, and begins The Lady Is a Tramp. The audience always applauds wildly and somebody is certain to cry out: My God, he even looks like Sinatra, or words to that effect. A broken-nosed Negro does not look much like Sinatra, even though the latter is no work of art himself, but the illusion of Davis’s voice and visage and movements, plus the complete rapport which has been established between entertainer and entertainee, produces a kind of Sinatrian hallucination.

For the full sixty minutes of his act, Davis sustains this kind of communication. It could be defined as an atmosphere of colorlessness in which he not only makes the audience forget that he is a Negro, but also makes it forget that it is White. This is why one of his closing bits has a special irony that is all Davis. He is sitting on a stool in a circle of light. He has, it seems, almost sung himself out in an effort to entertain. His coat and tie are off. He takes a few deep breaths and suddenly he brightens. What do you say? he asks. Let’s all get in a cab and go up to my place! For one goofy moment, nobody laughs. Here is the source of his power and also the reason for his private desperation. In the spotlight, he and they are colorless. In the real world, he is a colored man who has made it and yet can never make it all the way. When the applause finally comes, it is deafening. The performance drives to a rocking, exploding, belting finish, and Davis is gone. As someone once said, The only thing that could follow that act is World War III.

Thus driving and thus driven, Sammy Davis made $1.2 million last year—over half from nightclubs and the rest from records, TV, and movies. When you say it slowly, it sounds like a lot of money, but his net is considerably less. Besides taxes (he’s in the ninety percent bracket), he has eleven people on his payroll: valet, secretary, conductor-arranger, drummer, guitarist, office manager, typists (for answering fan mail), and various assistants; his overhead is $3,500 a week. His agent takes ten percent. And even though his father retired from the act in 1959, because of a heart attack, and his uncle, Will Mastin, moved over from dance manager to manager in 1958, he still splits what is left equally with them, and presents the act to the public as the Will Mastin Trio featuring Sammy Davis Jr.

The three-way split of the profits is unique in show business. Davis believes he must spend on the millionaire level, yet the contract with father and uncle provides him with a mere thirty-three percent, of which still another ten percent goes to a group of Chicago investors.

Davis has not saved much money nor has he put his earnings to work for him with any conspicuous success.