Life of Sammy Davis Jr. (Book Review)

[Kooperman]

Life of Sammy Davis Jr. Book Review

By Gregory McNamee

Bottom line: In the hands of biographer Wil Haygood, Sammy Davis Jr. emerges as a flawed hero, capable of greatness but content to settle for much less.

By Wil Haygood (Alfred A. Knopf, 532 pages, $26.95)

Singer, dancer, actor, raconteur, life of the party. Master of stage, screen, radio and television. Beloved of the mainstream at a time when only a handful of black performers found anything approaching mass acceptance. Infamously, a friend of and sometime apologist for shadowy figures -- Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, Richard Nixon.

Sammy Davis Jr. was a whirlwind -- constantly on the go, unhappy when at rest. As biographer Wil Haygood, a writer for the Washington Post, puts it: "He suffers from insomnia -- not in the sense of a medical malady; he simply abhors sleeping, for there is so much on his mind, so many things he wants to do. He considers idleness a curse."

"In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr." is a fitting whirlwind of a biography, a wide-ranging life that often speaks of its late subject in the present tense, a big book that takes on big themes and big issues: the history of vaudeville, the internal politics of the civil rights movement, the pervasive, often casual racism that allowed even supposed friends like Sinatra and his Rat Pack buddies to refer to Davis as "Smokey." (If we are to trust Haygood's account, only Dean Martin was free of the taint.)

Whereas Gary Fishgall's recent, and also noteworthy, "Gonna Do Great Things" (Scribner, $26) focuses closely on Davis' inner life -- exploring just why it was that, as the old comedy saw had it, Davis was so addicted to the spotlight that he'd do a 20-minute routine whenever he opened his refrigerator -- Haygood's narrative does much to place Davis in the larger context of some strange and troubled times.

Its subject sometimes eludes the effort. Davis preferred to chart his own course and apparently refused to believe that anyone could think ill of him. Whenever Davis was confronted with overt racism, he either laughed it off or tried to win over those who hated him for his color by putting on a pleasing show. Thus, as Haygood writes, when Davis was beaten and threatened by white soldiers in his mixed-race outfit on the World War II home front, he subdued them by joining the base band and staging crowd-pleasing revues.

"He believed that the quickness of his feet and the mimicry in his voice could defeat the hard glare of the redneck," Haygood writes. He had good reason to think so, for Davis' prodigious talents saved him from many a scrape. Still, he was often assailed by criticism on all sides, sometimes for dating blondes, sometimes for holding himself at a distance from the civil rights movement even as he donated mountains of money to the cause, sometimes for selling out with such infra dig products as "Candy Man," sometimes simply for indulging in too many bad habits at once.

Haygood delivers many surprises as this sensitive portrayal unfolds, uncovering why Davis was so reluctant to discuss his early life and revealing some brave moments of defiance, especially as Davis shook off Sinatra's influence, which, Haygood suggests, had done more harm than good to Davis' career over the years.

In the end, Sammy Davis Jr. emerges as a flawed hero, capable of greatness but content to settle for much less. He was a complex, touchingly lonely man, driven by strange demons and difficult passions, often disappointed. But he was a phenomenon for all that -- and he was never idle.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/revie...tent_id=2059398