On the night of January 19, 1976, a man stood on the stage of the London Palladium and performed for 2 and 1/2 hours without stopping. He sang. He danced. He did impressions of a dozen different people, each one so precise that the audience laughed not just at the imitation, but at the accuracy of the observation underneath it. He played trumpet. [music] He played the vibraphone. He told stories. He worked the room the way a skilled surgeon works. With total economy, nothing wasted, every gesture placed. When he
walked off the stage at the end, the crowd did not sit down for 4 minutes. He was 50 years old. He had one eye. He had been performing professionally for 47 of those 50 years, which means he had been doing this longer than most people in the audience had been alive. His name was Sammy Davis Jr. And the biography that accompanied that name was so improbable, >> [music] >> so densely layered with contradiction and achievement and self-destruction and reinvention, that even people who thought they knew it well were usually
only holding a small piece of it. They knew the Rat Pack. They knew the sequined jumpsuits and the Candy Man and the Las Vegas residencies. They knew, if they were old enough, the photograph, the one taken in 1972 at a Nixon campaign rally, in which Davis embraced the president with both arms and grinned for the cameras, while the entire civil rights movement watched in something between disbelief and rage. What most people did not know, or did not hold together in a single coherent picture, was the full architecture of
the life. The child who was on stage at 3 years old because his family had no other way to eat. The 20-year-old soldier who was beaten by white enlisted men in an army latrine in 1945 and responded by spending 3 months reading every book he could find, teaching himself to be the most educated person in whatever room he walked into because education was the one weapon no one could physically remove from him. The man who lost his left eye in a car crash in 1954 [music] and was back on stage 6 weeks later
performing with an eye patch because the alternative, stopping, was not something his psychology had a mechanism for considering. The man who converted to Judaism in 1961 and was mocked for it by nearly everyone, including many in the Jewish community he was joining, and who maintained that conversion with genuine religious seriousness >> [music] >> for the rest of his life. The man who married a white Swedish actress named May Britt in 1960 when interracial marriage was still illegal in 31 American states and
received death threats. And watch the Kennedy campaign ask him to delay the wedding until after the election so as not to cost them southern votes and comply. And was then not invited to the inauguration he had performed at. That last detail, let it sit for a moment. He performed at John F. [music] Kennedy’s inaugural gala. He was then disinvited from the inauguration itself because the presence of a black man who had publicly married a white woman was considered, by the incoming administration’s [music]
political operatives, too great a liability in the states they needed. Bobby Kennedy made the call. Sammy Davis Jr. took it, swallowed it, and showed up for the Kennedys again the next time they needed him. He did this repeatedly across five decades for an industry and a country that took from him in direct proportion [music] to what he gave. He was the most talented performer of his generation by almost any technical measure. The breadth of his skills, the precision [music] of his craft, the sheer quantity of things he could do at
a professional level that most performers cannot do at any level. And he was also the most exploited, the most instrumentalized, the most thoroughly used by people who understood his hunger for belonging and were not above feeding it in exchange for his talent, [music] his audience, and his particular and very useful ability to make white America comfortable with the idea of a black man in the room. He wanted to belong. This is not a complicated observation, but it is the central one and everything that followed
from it. The Rat Pack years, the Nixon embrace, the mob connections, the financial catastrophe, the addiction, the self-erasure that passed in sequence [music] and spotlight for self-expression. Everything flows from that one desire, which was itself produced by a childhood so systematically [music] denied the ordinary comforts of belonging that the hunger it created could never, finally, be satisfied. He was black in an industry [music] that did not want him. He was Jewish in a country that was not
sure what to do with Jews. He was short and slight and had one eye and had grown up without money or education in a world that rewarded all of those things. He had taken these facts and built from them the most glittering career in American entertainment. He had done it through work, through a quality of obsessive, relentless, consuming work [music] that people who witnessed it described in terms usually reserved for natural forces. Rain works like that. Gravity works like that. Sammy Davis Jr.
worked like that. And it was not enough. Not to fill the specific hole in the center of his life. >> [music] >> Not to purchase the belonging he was buying with every performance. Not to make the people he loved most, Sinatra, [music] the Rat Pack, the Kennedys, Nixon, the Hollywood establishment, love him back in the unconditional way that the child who had been performing since age 3 was still at 50, still at 60, still on the night he died looking for. >> [music] >> This is the story of that search. It
does not have a comfortable ending. The most talented [music] performer of the 20th century died in 1990 with $60 million in debt to the IRS, estranged from many of the people he had spent his life trying to impress, [music] his body eaten by the throat cancer that was the final consequence of the cigarettes and alcohol and cocaine that had been, >> [music] >> for decades, the chemical infrastructure of a career that would have destroyed a less constitutionally ferocious person in half the time. He performed almost to
the end. The last tour was canceled not because he stopped wanting to perform, but because his body stopped being able to. He was 64 years old. He had been on stage for 61 of those years. This is how he got there and what it cost him. Samuel George Davis Jr. was born on December 8, 1925 in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan to parents who were themselves performers. His father, Sammy Davis Sr., was a dancer in a vaudeville troop led by a man named Will Mastin. His mother, Elvera Sanchez, was a chorus
dancer of Cuban descent. They were young. They were talented in the limited way that the entertainment industry of the 1920 permitted black performers [music] to be talented, which is to say they were permitted to work under very specific conditions, in very specific venues, [music] for white audiences who wanted to see black performance as entertainment without wanting to see black people as equals. [music] And their marriage was not a stable one. It fell apart before Sammy was 3 years old. His father took him.
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This was not, in the conventional sense, a custody arrangement. Elvera did not disappear. She remained a presence at the edges of Sammy’s life, a figure he wrote about with careful distance in his autobiography. A woman he loved with the specific, complicated love reserved for parents who were present but not there. What his father’s choice meant practically was that Sammy Davis Jr. grew up on the road in a vaudeville troupe, surrounded by performers and stagehands, and the perpetual motion of
a life organized entirely around the next show. Will Mastin was the gravitational center of this world. >> [music] >> He was a small man, precise and authoritative, who had been in show business since the turn of the century, and who understood its machinery with the thoroughness of someone who had been shaped by it since childhood. His troupe, which performed under various names before settling on the Will Mastin Trio, played the black vaudeville circuit known as the TOBA, which stood
officially for Theater Owners Booking Association, and unofficially, among the performers who worked it, for tough on black asses. The name reflected the reality. The circuit offered work, but the work was structured to extract maximum performance for minimum pay under conditions that made clear, at every venue and in every contract, exactly where black entertainers stood in the American entertainment hierarchy. Sammy was on stage by the time he was three. He appeared initially as a novelty, a tiny child who could mimic the movements
of adult dancers with unnerving precision. Mastin and Sammy Sr. presented him as Silent Sam, [music] the dancing A billing that managed to be simultaneously exploitative and strangely [music] protective, since a child performer who appeared to be a small adult attracted less scrutiny from child welfare authorities. [music] By the time Sammy was seven or eight, the novelty had evolved into something more substantial. He was not merely cute. He was genuinely, measurably, extraordinarily talented.
>> [music] >> The specifics of that talent were visible even then. He had perfect pitch. He had an ear for rhythm that manifested as something almost physical. A quality of responsiveness to music that people who watched him describe as if the music were moving him rather than the reverse. His mimicry was not surface imitation, but structural. He understood what made a person’s walk, or voice, or gesture specific to them. Which meant his impressions were accurate from the inside rather than the outside. Built
from comprehension rather than observation alone. He had no formal training in any of this. He had no school of any kind until he was briefly, chaotically enrolled in a Los Angeles elementary school in the early 1930. An experience that lasted only a few months before the troop moved on. His education was the road. His classroom was backstage, [music] watching adult performers prepare and perform and fail and recover, absorbing by observation and repetition. The technical knowledge that most performers
spend years and significant money acquiring. By the time he was 10, he was watching every performer he could reach. When the troop [music] played bills alongside other acts, which the vaudeville format required, multiple performers sharing a single evening. Sammy would position himself in the wings and study. He watched tap dancers with the focus of a student taking an exam, cataloging their footwork, identifying the combinations, filing them in a memory that appeared to have unlimited storage.
He watched comedians for timing. He watched singers for breath control and phrasing. He was, at 10 years old, conducting a self-directed conservatory education in a series of dressing rooms and backstage corridors across the Eastern and Midwestern United States. The vaudeville world he was educated in was not the romantic world of nostalgia. It was a grinding commercial operation that treated performers as interchangeable units of entertainment, paid them as little as possible, housed them in segregated boarding houses when
[music] they could find accommodations at all, and demanded that they remain grateful for the access. For black performers, >> [music] >> the conditions were a specific and additional category of indignity. The TOBA circuit played black theaters for black audiences in the South and Midwest, which provided work but limited earnings. When the Mastin Trio played white theaters, which happened increasingly as Sammy’s talent attracted attention beyond the segregated circuit, the arrangements were paradoxical in
ways that required a particular kind of psychological compartmentalization to survive. They could perform for white audiences. They could not eat in the restaurants [music] near the theaters where they performed. They could not stay in the hotels where their white co-performers stayed. They entered through service entrances, changed in storage [music] rooms, performed for audiences who applauded them, and then navigated to whatever segregated accommodations were available in the surrounding neighborhood.
Sammy absorbed this with the practiced equanimity of someone who had never known anything else. He did not, as a child, experience it as injustice in the sense of something that might be different. He experienced it as weather, as the conditions within which life occurred, not as a deviation from conditions that should be otherwise. This is one of the most important things to understand about the psychological formation that produced the adult Sammy Davis Jr. The accommodation of racism was not a
concession he made. It was the baseline from which he operated. The question for [music] him was never whether he would have to navigate a white world that did not fully want him. The question was how skillfully he could navigate it, how much he could extract from it, how thoroughly he could make it need him. The answer, which he would spend the next half century demonstrating, [music] was more than anyone before him had managed. The transition from vaudeville to the broader entertainment industry
began in the early 1940s. Vaudeville itself was dying, had been dying since the rise of talking pictures in the late 1920. The accelerating process by which Americans shifted their entertainment spending from live performance to film. The theaters that had supported a nationwide circuit of live variety performance [music] were converting to movie houses, and the performers who had built careers on those stages [music] were facing an industry that was actively contracting around them. The Mastin Trio adapted. They moved
toward the nightclub circuit, playing supper clubs and hotel showrooms that catered to adult audiences seeking the kind of intimate live performance that movies could not replicate. They got better bookings as Sammy’s abilities became more widely recognized. They played the Copa in New York. They played clubs in Chicago and Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which was in the early 1940, just beginning the transformation that would eventually make it the entertainment capital of America. Sammy Sr. and Will Mastin made a decision
sometime around this period that would define the rest of Sammy Jr.’s [music] as professional life. They kept the trio structure, billing themselves always as the Will Mastin Trio with Sammy Jr. featured rather than making Sammy the sole act. This was partly generosity and partly pragmatism. [music] Mastin and SR understood that Sammy’s talent was the engine, [music] but they believed in the protection of the group structure. A solo black performer in 1942 faced a different and more exposed set
of obstacles than a trio with an established name and a history of professional relationships. The trio structure provided cover, context, continuity. >> [music] >> What it cost Sammy eventually was something more subtle. He spent his entire career technically within a structure created by and partially for other people. First Mastin’s trio, then Sinatra’s Rat Pack, then the television variety format, then the nostalgia circuit. He was always the most talented [music] person in any of those
structures and always in some organizational sense not quite at center. The hunger to be the center, to be loved not as a feature [music] of something else, but as himself, for himself, would drive every significant decision he made for the rest of his [music] life. In 1943, Sammy Davis Jr. was drafted into the United States Army. He was 17 years old. [music] He had spent 14 of those years on stage. He was about to spend two years in an institution that had a very specific and clearly articulated set of
ideas about where [music] black men belong. And none of those ideas had anything to do with the spotlight. The United States Army in 1943 was a segregated institution. This was not ambiguous or informal or subject to local interpretation. It was policy, formalized, [music] enforced, structured into the basic organization of units and facilities [music] and the daily administration of military life. Black soldiers served in black units. They trained separately. They ate separately. They slept separately. They
were commanded at the senior level almost exclusively by white officers >> [music] >> because the army’s leadership had determined with the serene confidence of an institution [music] that had never been seriously challenged on the question that black men were not capable of leading other men in combat. Sammy Davis Jr. >> [music] >> arrived at Fort Francis E. Warren in Wyoming in the spring of 1943 with the specific disadvantage of having no experience of white people as peers.
He had performed for white audiences. He had navigated white-toned entertainment infrastructure. But the structured daily proximity of a military installation, the shared barracks, the shared training grounds, the inescapable social contact was something entirely different from the managed distance of a performance relationship. And some of the white soldiers he encountered at Warren were not interested in managed distance. He was beaten within days of arriving. The details, which Davis described in his
1965 autobiography, Yes, I Can, with a specificity that suggests the memory was not something that had softened with time, were straightforward in their brutality. A group of white enlisted men waited for him in a latrine. They beat him, wrote racist slurs on his forehead and chest in white paint, and left him on the floor. This was not an isolated incident. It was part of a sustained campaign of harassment and violence that characterized his first months at the base conducted by men who regarded his
presence, >> [music] >> a black man from New York, confident and articulate and openly proud of his performing career, as a provocation requiring correction. What Sammy Davis Jr. did in response to this campaign is one of the most revealing things in his biography and one of the least discussed. He went to the library, not immediately and not as a single decision, but over the weeks and months that followed the initial violence, Davis began an intensive program of self-education that was
simultaneously a survival strategy and a fundamental reimagining of who he was. He read history. He read political philosophy. He read books about race in America, W. E. B. Du Bois, whose arguments about double consciousness and the particular burden of black identity in white America gave Davis a framework for understanding his own experience that had not previously been available to him. He read literature. He read whatever was on the shelves. He had, until this point, the approximate formal education of a fifth-grader,
having spent most of his school-age years on the road. What he had in place of schooling was the performer’s practical intelligence, social acuity, memory, the ability to read a room, plus the technical mastery of his craft. What he lacked was the intellectual architecture that formal education provides, the vocabulary of ideas, the historical context, the ability to place personal experience within larger frameworks of meaning. The library at Fort Warren gave him some of this, not systematically. He was not
following a curriculum but following his own curiosity, which moved laterally and associatively rather than in straight lines. But what emerged over several months of reading and thinking and arguing in the barracks with men who had not expected a black performer from New York to be capable of sustained intellectual engagement was something that would define the rest of his life. The conviction that he could inhabit any world if he prepared rigorously enough for entry into it. That knowledge was
the great leveler. That if he knew more about any subject than the people around him, the surface facts of his identity, his race, [music] his size, his background became temporarily, partially, reversibly less important. >> [music] >> This conviction was not correct, exactly. It was a coping mechanism sophisticated enough to resemble a philosophy, but it produced, as coping mechanisms sometimes do, genuinely useful outcomes. Davis left the army in 1945, a different person than the one who had
entered it. Not transformed, the hunger was the same. [music] The talent was the same. The fundamental shape of his desire was the same, but equipped. He had a mind that had been deliberately expanded, and he knew it, and he trusted it in a way he had not before. The army had also given him something else, less intellectual and more structural. >> [music] >> It had given him, through the absolute worst of what it had done to him, a clarity about what he was willing to accept and what he was not. The men who
had beaten him and painted slurs on his body had intended to diminish him. What they had produced instead was a man who had tested the worst available version of white America’s hatred, and discovered that it had not destroyed him. This is not the same as healing. It is not the same as resolution, but it is a certain kind of knowledge about one’s own durability, and Davis carried it forward. The army also put him, unexpectedly, in a position to perform. The military establishment of World War
II ran an enormous entertainment infrastructure. Shows for troops, morale performances, organized variety entertainment at bases across the country, and eventually overseas. Davis ended up performing in army shows, first informally, and then as an assigned duty, for audiences that were sometimes integrated in a way that civilian audiences in 1944 America were not. He performed for white soldiers who applauded him. He experienced, for perhaps the first time, the specific sensation of being received purely as a
performer by white audiences who had no other context for him, who knew nothing about him except what they saw on the stage. It was intoxicating, not because white approval was intrinsically more valuable than black approval. >> [music] >> Davis never believed that, and the charge frequently made against him in later years, that his pursuit of white acceptance reflected a pathological self-hatred, misreads the situation. [music] What the army performances revealed was something more specific, that the stage
could, under the right conditions, temporarily dissolve the categories that organized the rest of his [music] life. That in the act of performing, the hierarchy that set a black man from Harlem was worth less than a white man from Georgia could be, for the duration of a show, suspended. >> [music] >> He would spend the rest of his career chasing that suspension. When he was discharged in 1945, >> [music] >> he returned to the Will Mastin Trio with new urgency. The road, which had been his home for
his entire life, now felt simultaneously like comfort [music] and constraint. He knew what he was capable of. He had tested himself against something harder than any audience. >> [music] >> He was 20 years old, and he had already lived several lives, and he was about to begin the one that the world would remember. The post-war entertainment industry was in a state of rapid reorganization. The old vaudeville and nightclub circuits were being reshaped by television, which was about to transform the economics of
American entertainment in ways that no one fully understood yet, And by the explosion of Las Vegas as a legitimate major entertainment destination, the big casino showrooms, the Copa Room at the Sands, the showrooms at the Desert Inn and the Flamingo were competing for the best acts in the country, and they were paying by the standards of the entertainment industry extraordinary money. The Masten Trio worked toward those rooms with the methodical persistence of men who understood that access was not
given but accumulated. They built their booking relationships. They refined the act. They played smaller clubs, then larger ones, then the kind of rooms where the people who booked Las Vegas showrooms came to eat dinner and evaluate talent. By the early 1950s, the Masten Trio was working the Las Vegas circuit, and Sammy Davis Jr. was becoming, in the specific way that word travels within an industry before it travels outside it, a known quantity. Known to other performers, known to the men who ran the rooms, known to one
performer in particular, a man named Frank Sinatra, who saw Davis perform in the late 1940s and [music] reportedly said to the people he was with that the kid was the greatest entertainer he had ever seen. Sinatra meant it. >> [music] >> This was not an idle compliment from a man who gave idle compliments. And what happened as a result of that assessment, the relationship it initiated, the world it opened, and the very particular price it eventually extracted is a story that would take another decade to fully
unfold. Before it did, there was a highway in California and a car and a morning that Sammy Davis Jr. did not die when he should have, November 19, 1954. Highway 66 between Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California in the early morning hours. Sammy Davis Jr. was 28 years old, coming off a recording session, driving a pale yellow Cadillac convertible that he had bought [music] because he could finally afford a pale yellow Cadillac convertible. And because buying it had felt the way many things felt to him, like an announcement. He
was driving fast. He was tired. The highway was straight and relatively empty in the gray pre-dawn light. And then the car in front of him, a vehicle stopped partially in the roadway, was suddenly there. He hit it head-on. The impact drove the Cadillac steering column back into the driver’s compartment with the force of a mechanical punch. The specific object that did the damage was the horn button. A protruding chrome knob at the center of the steering wheel that, >> [music] >> at the moment of collision, traveled the
short distance between itself and Davis’s [music] left eye with results that the emergency room surgeons at San Bernardino Community Hospital were, several hours later, unable to reverse. He lost the eye. The surgery to remove what remained of it took [music] several hours. Davis was conscious for parts of it, under inadequate anesthesia in the overwhelmed trauma environment of a 1954 county hospital. And the descriptions he gave later of those hours, the sounds, the sensations, [music] the specific quality of the darkness
that followed, were among the most unflinching passages in a memoir that was notable for its willingness to go to places most celebrity autobiographies carefully avoid. He spent 3 weeks in the hospital. He was visited by Frank Sinatra, [music] who chartered a plane and arrived with flowers and the specific quality of presence that Sinatra deployed for the people he actually cared about. Not the performative attention of a famous man doing his obligations, but genuine, focused concern. He was visited by other
performers, [music] by industry friends, by people he barely knew who came because the news had traveled, and the industry wanted collectively to process the possibility that its most extraordinary [music] talent might be permanently diminished. The visitors had a question underneath their sympathy, and the question [music] was whether Sammy Davis Jr. could still perform. The answer, which Davis was working out in the hospital bed with the same relentless internal processing that characterized everything he did, was
yes. Not yes easily, or yes without consequences. The loss of one eye is not merely an aesthetic change. It eliminates binocular vision, which is the mechanism by which the brain calculates depth and [music] distance. For a dancer who must judge the precise position of feet and floor and other bodies in space, this is not a trivial loss. For a performer whose relationship to physical space, the stage, [music] the microphone, the audience was as finely calibrated as Davis’s, it was potentially catastrophic.
>> [music] >> He relearned it, all of it. Six weeks after the surgery, Sammy Davis [music] Jr. was back on stage at Ciro’s in Los Angeles, wearing a black eye patch, performing a show that by the accounts of everyone present was not diminished. Not merely adequate or courageous or moving given the circumstances. [music] Actually, technically genuinely good, the precision intact, the timing intact, the physical command of the space intact. >> [music] >> Rebuilt in six weeks through a process
of adaptation so rigorous that the people who had been worried about him were replaced by people who were, if anything, more astonished by him than they had been before. How he did this, the mechanics of the adaptation, is worth understanding because it illuminates something essential about the quality of his talent. Most performers work largely from habit and instinct. >> [music] >> They train until the training becomes reflex, and then they perform from reflex. This is efficient and produces
reliable results, and it is why most performers, faced with a fundamental change in their physical capabilities, require years of adjustment if they can adjust at all. Davis worked differently. He had always been aware, at a level of conscious attention that was unusual, of exactly what he was doing physically when he performed. The technique was not buried in reflex, but held close to the surface, available for examination and modification. When he lost the eye, he could access [music] that technical awareness and use
it to deliberately recalibrate, to re-examine every assumption about spatial judgment, >> [music] >> and rebuild the framework from new data. He later described this process in practical terms. He had to learn to read space through peripheral vision and timing, rather than through the direct depth perception that binocular vision provides. He used sound. He used the feel of the floor. He used the position of the lights and the shadows they cast. He rebuilt, in 6 weeks, a spatial map of stage
performance that served him for the remaining 36 years of his performing career. The comeback at Ciro’s [clears throat] made him, if possible, more famous than he had been before. The story of the accident, the loss, the recovery, the return, it was exactly the kind of narrative that the American entertainment press, and through it the American public, found [music] irresistible. The man who had everything taken away and came back better. The performer whose talent could not be destroyed by
the worst that physical reality could do to it. This narrative was not false. It was real, and it was genuinely inspiring, and it deserved the attention it received. But it also had an effect on Davis’s public identity that compounded a pattern already in place. It made his suffering legible as spectacle. The accident became part of the act, not in a cynical or deliberate way, but structurally, inevitably. His story was now a story of triumph over adversity, which meant that the adversity was not
merely his to carry privately, but was public property to be retold and referenced and used as the emotional background against which his performances acquired additional resonance. [music] He had always been performing his own survival. Now, it was visible. The period immediately following the comeback was also when his relationship with Frank Sinatra solidified from admiration into something that functioned [music] for both of them as friendship. Though, friendship may be too simple a word for
the specific and asymmetrical dynamic that defined their connection for the next 35 years. Sinatra had genuine affection for Davis. This is important to establish because the relationship has been analyzed so thoroughly through the lens of its power differential. Sinatra as patron, Davis as dependent, that the real emotional content tends to get lost. Sinatra admired Davis’s talent without reservation. He was loyal to him in ways that cost him something. When Las Vegas hotels that booked Sinatra tried in the
mid-1950s to apply the standard segregation policies to Davis separate accommodations, restrictions on where he could go in the casino, the full apparatus of the color line, Sinatra made clear that the entire package was negotiable. Either Davis was treated as an equal or Sinatra went elsewhere. Several hotels tested whether he meant it. He meant it. >> [music] >> This was not nothing. In 1955 Las Vegas, a white star with enough commercial leverage to move the segregation needle was not a common figure. And Sinatra’s
interventions on Davis’s behalf were both genuine and effective. Davis knew this. He was grateful for it in the specific [music] complex way that you are grateful for someone who does something for you that you should not have needed done. The gratitude was real. So was the cost of carrying it. The Rat Pack was forming in these years, loosely and organically, around a nucleus of friendship and proximity, and shared investment in a certain kind of professional cool. Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Davis
began appearing together in Las Vegas in the late 1950, performing, gambling, socializing in the specific way that Las Vegas in 1959 permitted a group of famous men to socialize, >> [music] >> which is to say with a degree of public visibility and private excess that would have been impossible in any other American city. Sammy Davis Jr. was the best performer in that group. Everyone in it knew this. >> [music] >> Sinatra knew it. Dean Martin, who was himself an immensely skilled
entertainer, knew it. The audiences knew it. And the particular pleasure of the Rat Pack’s [music] collective stage performances, which were improvisational, loose, deliberately chaotic, structured around interruption and riffing, and the specific energy of people who knew each other too well to pretend otherwise, was partly the pleasure of watching Davis respond to chaos with a facility that made chaos look like something he had planned. He had found his world. He had found his people. The belonging he
had been performing toward since he was 3 years old was, in these years, something approximating real. The cost of that belonging was approaching. It always was. The Rat Pack, as it existed in its peak form between 1959 and 1963, was the most glamorous social formation in the history of American entertainment. And it was also, for Sammy Davis Jr., the most systematically complicated. To be inside it was to be at [music] the center of the world he had always wanted. To be inside it honestly required ignoring or not
looking too carefully at a series of conditions that a man who had been beaten by white soldiers in an army latrine might, under other circumstances, have been unwilling to accept. The geography of the Rat Pack was Las Vegas, and Las Vegas in 1959 was still, structurally, a segregated city. The Sands Hotel, where Sinatra held court, where the group performed together, where they gambled and ate and maintained the specific theatrical version of their friendship that the press photographed and the public
consumed, enforced a color line that exempted Davis because of his relationship with Sinatra and for no other reason. He was permitted in the casino. He was permitted to eat in the restaurant. [music] He was permitted to stay in the hotel. The black performers who did not have Sinatra’s patronage were not. Davis navigated this with the compartmentalization that had been his primary psychological tool since childhood. He was inside the line because of who he knew. He understood this. He did not pretend otherwise to
himself, which is to his credit, though the accommodation itself, the willingness to occupy a privileged position within a system that was wrong rather than refuse the position until the system changed, was something that civil rights activists of the period noted and criticized, and not without justification. The Rat Pack performances at the Copa Room were genuinely extraordinary. The format was deceptively [music] simple. The five men on stage together with musical backing, performing their individual material and each others,
interrupting [music] each other, gambling at a small table set up at the side of the stage, bringing audience members up, improvising responses to [music] whatever was happening in the room. The structure required each performer to be present and responsive at every moment, not just during his own material. And the level of professional attention that demanded was visible to anyone who understood what they were watching. Davis was the one who could do everything. When Sinatra sang and Martin sang,
>> [music] >> Davis sang better. When Martin performed the amiable half-drunk persona that was his stage character, Davis matched it with something more technically precise underneath the apparent looseness. When the group broke into dance, Davis was the one the others stepped back to watch. He did impressions of every other member of the group. And then impressions of the people the group admired. And then impressions of the people [music] the group found ridiculous. And all of it landed because
the impressions were real and the timing was real and the audience was watching a man for whom performance was not an activity but a condition of existence. The film they made together, Ocean’s 11, released in 1960, captured something of this energy and considerably less of the actual talent. The camera could not do what a live audience at the Copa Room [music] could do, which was feel the specific electricity of that much concentrated performance in one room. But it made the [music] Rat Pack a national phenomenon
rather than a Las Vegas one. And it transformed Davis’s [music] fame from the specific fame of an extraordinary performer, known to people who followed entertainment closely, into the broader fame of a cultural figure, [music] recognizable to people who had never been to a nightclub. What the fame provided was access, and what Davis did with access was pursue belonging with an intensity that began in these years to acquire the specific character of compulsion. He spent money. The spending was not casual or
circumstantial. It was structural, systematic, an ongoing project of self-presentation that required constant financial [music] input. The clothes were custom. The jewelry was significant. >> [music] >> The entourage grew. The parties he threw at his house in the Hollywood Hills were famous for their extravagance [music] and for their guest lists, which were curated with the care of a man who understood that who was in your house was a public statement [music] about who you were. He collected art. He bought
cars. He gave [music] gifts to friends, to acquaintances, to people he barely knew with a generosity that his closest associates recognized as something other than pure altruism. The giving was a form of connection. [music] It created obligation and affection and the specific social warmth that Davis [music] experienced as belonging. He was also, by the early 1960, drinking heavily and using drugs in the casual, normalized way >> [music] >> that the entertainment industry of that period treated substance use
as an occupational accessory, a mechanism for managing the biochemistry of performing four [music] shows a night while also maintaining the social obligations of being Sammy Davis Jr. In Las Vegas in 1960, [music] the specific substances changed over the years, but the underlying pattern, the use of chemical support to sustain performance schedules and social energy that would otherwise be unsustainable was established early and would persist with escalating consequences for the rest of his life.
The Rat Pack dynamic had its own particular chemistry of mutual exploitation that is easy to sentimentalize and important not to. Sinatra was the axis around which the group turned. And Sinatra’s relationship to Davis was warm and genuine. And also occasionally permitted things that a man who genuinely saw Davis as an equal would not have permitted. The racial dynamics within the group’s public performances [music] were complicated in ways the audiences of the time mostly did not analyze. Some
of the on-stage humor involving Davis’s race was by the standards of the period progressive. It acknowledged the reality of racism and used comedy to expose its absurdity. Some of it was something else. Jokes in which Davis was the punchline in a way that required the audience to hold at least temporarily a condescending view of black men to find funny. Davis performed this material without visible discomfort. Partly because the alternative was not performing it and losing his place in the group. And
partly because he had spent his entire life performing his own survival and had developed as a consequence a very high threshold for what he was willing to register publicly as painful. Dean Martin used to pick Davis up and say, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this award.” A joke that required the audience to be amused by the spectacle of a black man being physically handled by a white one. Davis laughed. The audience laughed. The joke ran for years. Whether Davis found it funny, whether he found it necessary,
or whether he found it the price of a ticket he was not willing to give back. That question lies in the space between his public face and the private one that his autobiography occasionally allowed to surface. Peter Lawford’s connection to the Kennedy family was the Rat Pack’s political aperture, and it opened a set of relationships that would define the most controversial chapter of Davis’s public life. John Kennedy was charming, attractive, and gifted with the specific political skill of making the people
around him feel that his attention was a form of validation. Davis was susceptible to this in the way that anyone who has spent their life performing for approval is susceptible to the approval of someone powerful and glamorous. He campaigned for Kennedy in 1960. [music] He performed at fundraisers. He used his name and his platform to bring black voters and entertainment industry support >> [music] >> to a candidate whose actual civil rights commitments were, at that point, considerably more cautious than his
rhetoric suggested. [music] And when the Kennedy campaign decided, in the weeks before the inauguration, that Davis’s presence, [music] specifically the presence of a black man who had just married a white woman, was too politically costly to accommodate at the ceremony, it was Bobby Kennedy who made the call. Davis was disinvited. He found out through an intermediary. He had performed at the gala. He had campaigned across the country. He was not wanted at the moment of arrival. He took the call. He did not make a public
statement. He did not withdraw his support. He swallowed it with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been swallowing things since he was 3 years old, and he moved on to the next thing. The next thing was a marriage that would test, more directly than anything that had come before, exactly how much the country’s tolerance of Sammy Davis Jr. was contingent on what he did with his personal life versus what he did on a stage. May Britt was a Swedish actress, 25 years old in 1960, blonde, composed, and possessed of the
specific quality of Scandinavian self-containment [music] that reads, to people who don’t know it well, as either serenity or coldness. She and Sammy Davis Jr. met in Hollywood in 1959 at a party in the kind of house where people who worked in the film industry went to see each other and be seen. And what happened between them was, by all the accounts that survived from people who observed them together, the real thing. This is worth establishing clearly because the marriage was subjected, from
the moment it became public, to a level of external interpretation that made the actual relationship difficult to see. To white racists, it was an outrage, a violation of the color line that organized American sexual and social life, a sight so offensive that death threats arrived at Davis’s home and at the homes of people associated with him within days of the engagement announcement. To some voices in the black community, it was a betrayal, a successful black man choosing a white woman rather than a
black one, which was read as a statement about what kind of woman was worth having. To the Kennedy political apparatus, it was a liability. To the press, it was a story. To May Britt and Sammy [music] Davis Jr., it was a marriage. The reduction of their relationship to its political and symbolic dimensions was a thing that happened to them rather than a thing they chose, >> [music] >> and the cost it extracted from Britt in particular, who was not a famous person in America and had no framework for the
scale of hostility she was about to encounter, [music] was significant and lasting. They announced their engagement in the fall of 1960. The response was immediate and severe. The death threats were specific and credible enough that Davis hired security. The FBI opened a file. The Ku Klux Klan made statements. Southern newspapers published editorials. More quietly, the entertainment industry’s infrastructure, the television networks, the film studios, the variety show producers whose decisions determined who
was visible and who was not, began making calculations about what associating with Davis now cost versus what it had cost the week before. The Kennedy calculation was the most stinging because it was the most personal. Davis had invested in that relationship. He had campaigned. He had used his platform. He had understood the Kennedy political project as something he was part of. And the instruction to delay the wedding, to make himself less conspicuous, to manage his private life around the need of a political operation
that was, at the same time, asking black Americans to believe it represented their interests, exposed the conditional nature of the belonging he had been offered. He delayed the wedding. It took place on November 13, 1960, a week after the election, in a small ceremony in Las Vegas. The guests were limited. The public visibility was managed. Davis had done what was asked of him, and for this he received in return this invitation from the inauguration. The marriage itself, stripped of its political context, was functional and
warm for several years. Britt converted to Judaism, >> [music] >> as Davis had converted before her. A shared religious identity that provided, for both of them, a framework of community that their other circumstances made unusually necessary. They had children. They had a domestic life. Davis was often absent. The performance schedule of a working entertainer in the early 1960s was essentially continuous, but the absence was occupational rather than emotional. When he was home, by the
accounts [music] of people who were around the family in those years, he was present in the way that people are present when they have found something real in a life otherwise organized around performance. The industry’s response to the marriage was not a single dramatic event, but a slow rearrangement of opportunities. Television bookings declined. Certain film roles that had been discussed were no longer discussed. The specific mechanism by which the entertainment industry communicates its preferences
without committing them to paper operated efficiently, and what it communicated was that [music] Sammy Davis Jr. had, by marrying May Britt, become a more complicated commercial proposition than he had [music] been the week before. Davis responded by working harder. This was his answer to every external pressure, [music] and it was both his greatest strength and a significant component of his ultimate financial destruction. He could not cut back. He could not consolidate. Every problem was met with more performance, more
spending, more attempting to overwhelm the difficulty through sheer output. The machine required constant fuel, money to maintain the lifestyle, performances to maintain the money, the lifestyle to maintain the identity that the performances were selling. The physical toll of this approach began to accumulate in the early 1960s. He was smoking heavily, a habit that would eventually [music] kill him. He was drinking at a pace that required, for its management, careful attention to when and how much, a calibration that
became increasingly difficult to maintain as the schedule intensified. The drug use that had been recreational was becoming functional, a way of getting through the hours rather than a way of enjoying them. None of this was visible from the stage. [music] The discipline that had been built into him since age 3, the professional control over what the audience saw and what it did not help. He was still the best performer in any room he worked. The reviews were still extraordinary. [music] The audiences still stood. May Britt
watched the life she had married into reveal itself over several years, and made the only rational decision available to a person who wanted [music] to survive it. She asked for a divorce in 1968. By that point, the marriage had lasted eight years, which is longer than most marriages survived the conditions [music] they had faced, and the dissolution was conducted with a dignity that reflected well on both of them. They remained, by various accounts, on civil terms. Davis maintained his relationship with
their children. The legal event of the divorce [music] was considerably less dramatic than the public event of the marriage had been. What Britt took away from the marriage is something she has discussed occasionally in interviews over the subsequent decades, with the carefully maintained privacy of someone who has earned the right to keep the meaningful parts of her experience to herself. What Davis took away is visible in what he did next. In the pattern of decisions [music] he made through the late 1960
and 1970 that amounted to a systematic [music] dismantling of whatever political credibility he had built in exchange for a version of belonging that was offered by people with very specific reasons for offering it. The first and most damaging of those decisions was made in the summer of 1972 >> [music] >> at a Republican campaign rally in Miami, where Sammy Davis Jr. walked onto a stage and embraced the President of the United States. The President was Richard Nixon. To understand what Sammy Davis
Jr. did in 1972, it helps to understand [music] what the years preceding it had done to him. By the early 1970, the Rat Pack was effectively over. The cultural moment it had occupied had been superseded by the countercultural upheaval of the late 1960, >> [music] >> which had no patience for the particular brand of cool that Sinatra and Davis and Martin had embodied. The assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, which ended the political cycle Davis had oriented himself around, removed the
connection to Democratic [music] Party power that had been, despite its costs, a genuine anchor. The civil rights movement, which Davis had supported in various ways and various degrees of commitment throughout the 1960, had moved into a phase, black power, black nationalism, the explicit rejection of the integrationist model, that was in direct tension with the life Davis had built, which was the life of a black man who had spent 40 years learning to move through white institutions with maximum skill [music]
and minimum friction. He was 50 years old, and the world he had mastered had changed around him. The nightclub circuit that had made him was dying. Television variety, which had been his primary medium through the 1960, >> [music] >> was being replaced by forms that did not have a natural place for him. The specific type of performance he had built his career on, the complete entertainer, the man who could do everything, was becoming a period piece in an industry that was moving toward
artists who did one thing with particular intensity. He was also in serious financial difficulty, though the full extent of the difficulty would not become visible to the public until much later. The spending that had characterized his entire adult life, the custom clothes, the jewelry, the entourage, the parties, the gifts, had never been fully supported by his income, which was itself substantial. He had operated for years on a combination of earnings and borrowing. The borrowing covered by the
expectation of future earnings. The future earnings always slightly below what was needed to retire the borrowing. The IRS was watching. The structure was not stable. Into this context, arrived the Nixon administration’s cultivation of Sammy Davis Jr. The recruitment was not accidental or spontaneous. Nixon’s political operation, under the direction of H. R. Haldeman and his political director Harry Dent, >> [music] >> had a specific and documented strategy for peeling black voters and
entertainment figures away from the Democratic coalition. Davis was identified as a target, a figure who was famous enough to generate significant attention, who had visible Democratic connections that would make his defection meaningful, and who had a known hunger for the kind of presidential access and recognition that the Democratic Party had provided inconsistently [music] and conditionally. They played to that hunger with considerable skill. Davis was invited to the White House. He was received not as a visitor or a
performer, but as a respected figure. Welcome, attended to, treated with the unconditional courtesy that presidents deploy when they are trying to create obligation. Nixon himself met with Davis and was, in the way that Nixon could be in private settings before the specific poison of his character overwhelmed the social performance, attentive and apparently interested. He asked about Davis’s career. He expressed admiration. He suggested that his administration represented something new in terms of
its relationship to black Americans, >> [music] >> which was either a breathtaking lie or a genuinely delusional self-assessment. And Davis, who wanted to believe it, chose to believe it. He accepted an invitation to speak at the 1972 Republican National Convention. He appeared at a Nixon campaign rally in Miami in August 1972, was invited onto the stage, and embraced the president. Threw both arms around him and held on, grinning, while the cameras recorded and the country watched. The reaction from the black
community was immediate, wide, and devastating. The NAACP [music] issued a statement. Prominent civil rights leaders made public comments. Black newspapers, which had been the record of black America’s relationship with its cultural figures for decades, were scathing. The image of Davis embracing Nixon Nixon, whose administration had worked [music] systematically to undermine fair housing enforcement, had escalated the drug war in ways that targeted [music] black communities with deliberate
disproportionality, had shown contempt for civil rights legislation at every opportunity available, was understood as something more than a political mistake. It was understood as a betrayal. Davis heard this and was shaken by it. He had not, apparently, fully modeled the reaction, had not run the calculation of what it would mean to the community that had produced [music] him when one of its most famous members publicly aligned himself with the Nixon administration. Whether this reflects political naivety,
willful blindness, or the specific distortion produced by spending too much time in rooms where the people around you tell you what you want to hear, is something his later account suggest he himself was not entirely certain about. What is documented is that he attempted, fairly quickly [music] after the convention, to walk the endorsement back. He gave interviews in which he expressed concern about Nixon’s civil rights record. He noted the specific policies that troubled him. He tried to retreat
to a position of critical distance [music] that acknowledged the Republican engagement without constituting a full endorsement of the administration’s record. It was not enough. The photograph existed. The embrace had happened. And in the specific economy of symbolic politics, where a single image can define a person’s public identity for decades, the Miami photograph had done its [music] work. It followed Davis for the rest of his life, appearing in profiles and retrospectives, [music]
and the casual shorthand of cultural reference as a symbol of a particular kind of political miscalculation. The famous black entertainer who hugged Nixon, the subsequent revelation in the Watergate tapes that Nixon and his staff had [music] discussed Davis in terms that made clear their contempt, had referred to him in racially derogatory language in conversations they believed were private, >> [music] >> completed the picture with an almost unbearable irony. Davis had sought belonging from people
who in private [music] categorized him with a racial epithet. The belonging had never been on offer. The cultivation had been entirely transactional. He had paid a significant political and social price for access to people who did not, in the most basic sense, respect him. He knew this eventually. He said so in various ways in various interviews over the subsequent years. The Nixon thing was a mistake. He had wanted something and had not examined clearly enough what he was trading for it. He was sorry. The
community that had been hurt by it received the apology with varying degrees of acceptance. >> [music] >> Some did, some did not. The image remained. What is important to understand about the Nixon episode as about every other significant decision Davis made in the second half of his life is the consistency [music] of the underlying mechanism. The hunger for belonging. The willingness to pay a very high price for access to a version of it. The pattern of trading dignity for entry into rooms where the doors open and then
quietly, efficiently, firmly closed again. He had been doing this since he was 3 years old, performing for audiences who applauded him and then denied him the ordinary conditions of human dignity in the intermission. The pattern was not a moral failing. It was a wound. And wounds, when they are deep enough and early enough and have never been properly treated, organize a life around themselves in ways that the person living that life can see partially and understand partially, but cannot finally, fully escape. He could not
escape it. He kept performing toward the approval of people who would never give him what he was actually looking for. [music] He kept paying. The payments accumulated. The financial architecture of Sammy Davis Jr.’s life was, by the 1970, a structure of such elaborate instability that it required constant active management simply to prevent its immediate collapse. [music] The management was mostly not happening. The people around him, the managers, the [music] accountants, the advisers whose
professional obligation was to tell him the truth about his situation, were, for various reasons of self-interest and fear of his reaction, mostly not telling him. The numbers, when they were eventually fully assembled, [music] were remarkable. Davis earned, over the course of his career, sums that in absolute terms were substantial, tens of millions of dollars across five decades of continuous professional activity. He spent, [music] across the same period, more. The gap between the two was covered by debt, to banks, to the
IRS, to Las Vegas casinos, to the entertainment industry infrastructure of advances and loans and payment arrangements that accumulated interest. >> [music] >> While Davis continued to spend as if the income were keeping pace. The spending was not reckless in the [music] sense of being thoughtless. Davis thought about it constantly. He was not confused about money in the way that people are confused when they don’t understand it. He understood the basic mathematics of his situation with some
clarity. What he could not do was stop. The spending was not discretionary. It was identity. Every dollar spent on [music] a custom suit or a piece of jewelry or a party for 200 people was a dollar deployed in the ongoing project of being the person he needed to be, which was the person who could buy custom suits and jewelry and give parties for 200 people. The entourage was a particular financial drain of a particular psychological necessity. By the early 1970, Davis [music] was traveling with a group
of 30 or more people, assistants, security, musicians, friends, hangers-on. People whose relationship to him was defined entirely by his willingness to pay for their proximity. He understood in his more clear-eyed moments that many of these relationships were transactional. [music] He maintained them anyway. The entourage was warmth. It was company in hotel rooms at 2:00 in the morning after a show. It was the ongoing evidence that he was someone worth surrounding. >> [music] >> The IRS became a presence in his life in
the mid-1970s and became an increasingly aggressive one as the decade [music] progressed. Back taxes, underpayment, the specific intersection of high income, high spending, and inadequate record keeping [music] that produces, in tax law, very large and very difficult to negotiate obligations. >> [music] >> Davis’s accounting records were, by the accounts of the professionals who eventually tried to reconstruct them, a disaster. Years of commingled personal and professional expenses, [music]
missing documentation, deductions taken without support. The whole accumulating mass of a financial life run with enormous energy and minimal organization. Alongside the financial structure, the substance use had evolved from its earlier forms into something more consuming. Cocaine arrived in Davis’s life sometime in the mid-1970, which made it, chronologically, almost exactly contemporary with its arrival in the life of most of the entertainment industry, the financial industry, the legal profession, and large portions of the
American upper middle class. In those years, it was not understood as the specific kind of devastating substance it would later be recognized as it was understood as an enhancer, a social lubricant, a way of maintaining energy and presence through the kind of schedule that Davis ran, which was essentially continuous. He used it continuously. The combination of cocaine, alcohol, and a performance schedule that would have been extraordinary for a man in perfect health was producing, by the late 1970,
visible physical consequences. His voice, which had always been extraordinary, a flexible, expressive instrument that could move between tender ballad delivery and explosive gospel force in the space of a single phrase, was beginning to show the wear. Not diminished, not yet, [music] but different. Harder at the top of its range, less immediate in its response. The mob connections that had been a structural fact of his Las Vegas career since the 1950, were a separate dimension of the same accumulating weight.
Las Vegas entertainment in the 1950s and 1960 was not separable from organized crime. The hotels where Davis performed, the Sands, the Frontier, the MGM Grand, were at various points in their history, owned or influenced by people whose money came from sources >> [music] >> that did not bear examination. The casino infrastructure itself was the product of the same syndicate investment that had built the Flamingo. Davis performed in these rooms, was paid by these operations, socialized with the
men who ran them. The relationships were not, in the main, collaborative. Davis was not controlled by mob figures in the way that a person under direct criminal pressure is controlled, but the relationships created mutual obligation and mutual exposure. And as law enforcement’s attention to Las Vegas entertainment infrastructure >> [music] >> intensified through the 1970s and 1980, the question of who had been in what room with whom became one with potential legal implications. There were also more specific
Davis had performed at events with mob-connected organizers. He had accepted bookings from promoters with documented organized crime associations. Whether these were knowing associations or products of an entertainment industry >> [music] >> so thoroughly intermixed with criminal money that clean separation was essentially impossible, is a question that, in Davis’s case as in that of many Las Vegas performers of his generation, has no clean answer. What can be said is that his connections
gave him access and gave others leverage, and the direction that leverage ran was not always in his favor. The period also included Davis’s brief, strange, and ultimately damaging involvement with the Church of Satan. He had been introduced to Anton LaVey, the church’s founder, through the Hollywood social circuit in the late 1960s and had attended some events and expressed some public interest in the organization’s aesthetic philosophy. He later characterized his involvement as superficial, as a phase of spiritual
exploration that did not represent genuine commitment, and that he had moved away from fairly quickly. The public record of it, however, was sufficient to generate significant controversy, particularly in the black church community that had been cultural anchor for black Americans across the civil rights years and beyond. The combination of the Nixon embrace and the satanic association created, in the public [music] image of Davis, a portrait of a man making systematically terrible decisions about his
affiliations, trading his identity and his community for access to white institutions [music] that neither deserved nor reciprocated his investment. The portrait was not entirely false, >> [music] >> but it was incomplete. What it missed was the through line, the consistency of the underlying need that each of these decisions was attempting and failing to satisfy. [music] Davis was not making random bad choices. He was making the same choice repeatedly in different registers. [music] Choose
belonging over integrity. Choose access over dignity. Choose the embrace even when the embrace was from someone whose arms you should not be in. He was $60 million in debt to the IRS when he died. He had earned in his lifetime a sum that would have made this impossible if it had been managed with ordinary professional competence. The money had gone into the performance of a life that was itself a performance, into the continuous maintenance of the image of Sammy Davis Jr. as a man of abundance and generosity and
belonging, sustained past its financial capacity by pure narrative momentum and the unwillingness of the people around him to stop it. He could not stop it himself. It had been running for 60 years. It had started before he was old enough to choose it. In 1972, the same year as the Nixon embrace, Sammy Davis Jr. recorded a song called The Candy Man. He had not wanted to record it. He found it cloying and simplistic, a children’s television piece of material that bore no relationship to what he understood
himself to be as a performer. He recorded it because his record label wanted him to and because the calculation of who was paying for the session and what it would cost to refuse was, as it usually was, one that came out in favor of compliance. The Candy Man reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1972 and remained there for 3 weeks. It became the best-selling single of Davis’s career. It is, in many respects, >> [music] >> the record by which he is most widely remembered by people who were not alive
during the Rat Pack years. The irony is almost too neat to use. [music] The man who had spent 50 years constructing the most technically complete performance career in American entertainment history, >> [music] >> who had survived poverty and racism and military violence and a car crash that took his eye and a Nixon photograph that cost him his community, the most enduring commercial record of all of that was a song about a candy store that he had not wanted to make. He was not bitter about it publicly. He
performed the song with the same commitment he brought to everything, smiling, sequined, holding the microphone with the practiced ease of a man who had been holding microphones [music] since before the equipment was called that. The audiences loved it. They always loved whatever he gave them because he gave it with his whole body and all of his attention and the 50-year accumulation of craft that made everything he did seem inevitable. What the Candy Man era represented, [music] beyond its specific chart success, was
the broader repositioning of Davis’s career toward a kind of entertainment that was explicitly nostalgic. The Las Vegas residency circuit, the television variety appearances, the performing his own legend mode that very successful entertainers often shift into when the moment that made them most contemporary has passed. This is not a diminishment. It is a different category of work requiring different skills, and Davis performed it with distinction. But it was a narrowing. >> [music] >> The 1970s
Las Vegas residency circuit was its own world, a world of enormous financial reward, intense [music] professional routine, and a specific social ecosystem built around late nights and casino culture, >> [music] >> and the particular quality of isolation that comes from living in a hotel for months at a time in a city organized entirely around keeping you there. Davis’s residencies at the MGM Grand and later at other strip properties were commercial successes. The audiences came. The shows were good. The life
between shows was consuming him. The cocaine use that had begun as a social and professional tool had become by the late 1970s a daily requirement. He was using large quantities which cost large amounts of money and created large amounts of physical and psychological dependency that organized his days around acquisition and use in ways that the performance schedule could only partially structure. The drinking had not diminished, it had deepened [music] the way habits deepen when they are joined by other habits. Each one
normalizing the presence of the others. His health was showing it. >> [music] >> The weight fluctuated. The energy that had always seemed inexhaustible was revealing itself on closer examination to be chemically maintained rather than naturally [music] generated. The hip that had been giving him trouble since the early 1970s, a consequence of years of performing through physical punishment, of a dancing career that had demanded explosive movement from a body that never got sufficient recovery time, was
worsening. He had surgery and returned to performing before the recovery was complete because stopping was not [music] something the financial structure of his life could accommodate. Altovise Gore, who had been Davis’s backup dancer and whom he married in 1970, occupied a [music] complicated position in the life of the 1970s. She was present and she was loyal and she was also, by [music] the accounts of people who were close to the household, not equipped and perhaps not permitted to exert the kind of stabilizing
influence on his life that might have slowed the accumulation of damage. Davis was not in his domestic [music] life a man who took guidance from the people around him. He had been the center of his world since he was 3 years old. The habits of centeredness [music] are not ones that admit easy renegotiation. He remained throughout all of this a performer of extraordinary quality. This is the thing that the story of [music] his decline risks obscuring, that the decline and the talent coexisted, and that the talent
continued to function at a level that most performers never approach in their prime, let alone while managing the specific interior chaos that Davis was managing. The shows were good. The craft was intact. When he walked onto a stage in 1978, he was still [music] the best person in any room he was. The entertainment industry’s relationship to Davis in the late 1970 and into the 1980s was, >> [music] >> in its way, a recapitulation of the relationship it had always had with him. >> [music]
>> It used what he could do. It paid for the performance and the celebrity without much concern for the person. When he was commercially useful, he [music] was wanted. When the specific commercial moment he occupied was no longer the moment the industry was selling, the calls became less frequent, the terms less generous, the energy directed elsewhere. He adapted, as he always had. He took the nostalgia circuit and worked it with full commitment. [music] He did television appearances. He did
the Rat Pack reunion tours that Sinatra organized in the 1980, which were commercial events of the first order, and also, for Davis, something genuinely more than that. A return to the group [music] that had been the closest thing he had found to the unconditional belonging he was looking for, >> [music] >> the group that had accepted him on its own terms and within its own limitations as one of them. Frank Sinatra was aging into something slightly softer than the figure he had cut in the 1960.
Dean Martin had withdrawn into [music] a private grief after the death of his son in 1987 that closed him off from the public world in ways [music] that did not fully reverse. Davis was the one still performing with full energy, still at the center of the stage, still giving everything he had to rooms of people who had grown up with him and wanted, [music] in their middle age, the specific comfort of watching a man they had always loved do the thing he had always done. He gave it to them. He was giving
it to them in 1989 on a tour that ran through spring and summer when the thing he had been carrying in his throat finally announced itself. The diagnosis arrived in August 1989. Throat cancer, >> [music] >> stage four. The tumor was in the larynx, in the specific part of the instrument that it produced for 60 years, the voice that audiences in 40 countries had paid to hear. The doctors told him what they tell people with stage four throat cancer, that it was serious, that the options were limited, that what happened
next would depend on factors both medical and personal, and that the prognosis was not good. Davis had been smoking since his teenage years. He had smoked through the army, through the Rat Pack years, through the Nixon rally, through the MGM residencies, [music] through the cocaine period and beyond it. He had smoked the specific brand of cigarette, strong, unfiltered, that the entertainment culture of his generation had associated with a certain kind of masculine creative seriousness. He had smoked, by any reasonable calculation,
something between half a million and a million cigarettes over the course of his adult life. The cancer was not a surprise in the retrospective logic of a body that had been subjected [music] to that kind of consistent assault. It was not a surprise in the way that consequences are rarely surprising when you have had enough time to accumulate them. He told almost no one initially. The tight group of people who were informed, out-of-towners, a few close friends, his immediate medical team, were asked to
maintain the information privately while Davis considered his options and finished the tour he was in the middle of. This was characteristic. [music] The show was running. The show was the structure within which everything else, health, finance, relationships, fear, [music] was organized. You did not stop the show because something had gone wrong. You found a way to keep going. He finished the tour in October 1989. A show in Reno, Nevada on October 11th was his last public performance. He did not know it was the last one. He was
still planning to come back, still discussing future dates with his management, still, in the way that performers never entirely stop, calculating the next booking and the one after. The treatments began. Radiation, which was brutal in the specific and un-metaphorical way that radiation for throat cancer is brutal. Burning the tissues of the throat from the outside. Creating pain and inflammation, and the specific indignity of a body that refuses to process food normally. That loses weight it cannot
spare. That requires [music] constant medical management of functions most people do not think about. Davis lost 40 lb in the first months of treatment. The face that had been photographed a thousand times, that had been the face of the most recognizable entertainer of his generation, became the face of a man fighting something that was winning. He remained, in the accounts of the people who visited him during the treatment period, fully present. Not cheerful in the performed way that sick people sometimes perform cheerfulness
for the benefit of their visitors, but genuinely engaged, asking about other people’s lives, making plans, talking about music and performance and the specific technical questions of entertainment that had occupied him for 60 years. The mind was intact. The interest was intact. The curiosity that had driven him to the library at Fort Warren in 1944 [music] was still operative. Frank Sinatra came. Dean Martin came. Before his own grief had consumed him entirely. Sammy’s daughters came. Members of the
entertainment industry that had shaped and used and sustained him came. In the way that people come at the end. Drawn by some combination of genuine feeling and the specific social obligation that attaches to the last phase of a famous life. He gave one final interview to 60 Minutes, broadcast in February 1990. He appeared thin and diminished in the way that cancer diminishes. But his eyes were the same, alert, specific. The eyes of someone who had always been paying close attention to whatever was in front
of him. He talked about his career with affection and with some degree of honest assessment. He talked about the things he would have done differently and did not pretend there were none. He was asked about money and he acknowledged the debt. He was asked about Nixon and he acknowledged the mistake. He was [music] asked about his life and he said it had been in its way exactly what he wanted. More than what the boy from Harlem had any right to expect and less than what he needed. That last part. The precision of it.
More than what he had any right to expect, less than what he needed. He was describing in nine words the fundamental structure of a life organized around a need that could not be filled. The need for a belonging that the world he had been born into and the world he had built his way into had never been able to provide unconditionally. He had gotten close. He had gotten closer than most people. But close is not the same as there. and he had known the difference his entire life. The cancer [music] progressed through the spring of
1990. The radiation had not eliminated the tumor. Surgery was discussed and then not pursued. At the stage the cancer [music] had reached, the surgical options were limited in their likely benefit and extensive in their certain damage. Davis continued to decline. The body following the logic of the disease while the mind, as far as the people around him could tell, remained as active as it had always been. He called Frank Sinatra on the phone two days before he died. The conversation was private. Its contents were not
shared by the people who knew it happened, if they knew the contents at all. What the two men who had known each other for 40 years said in those minutes is not something the record has preserved. Davis asked in his final weeks that no extraordinary measures be taken to extend his life beyond the point at which he could be conscious and present. This was not a resignation. It was the same practical calculation that had characterized his entire professional life. Understand what is actually available and work within it rather than
against it. He had always known what he had to work with. He had always made more from it than anyone expected. On May 16, 1990, Sammy Davis Jr. died at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 64 years old. The throat cancer had taken the voice that had launched a million shows, and the body that had danced since before memory, [music] and the face that had smiled for audiences on four continents across six decades of [music] the most densely lived performing career in the history of American entertainment.
>> [music] >> The tributes came quickly and in overwhelming quantity. The entertainment industry that had complicated and exploited and sometimes failed him showed up to mourn him with an unanimity It had not always shown when he was alive and needed something [music] from it. Presidents spoke. Performers spoke. Civil rights leaders spoke. >> [music] >> Some of them with the specific generosity of people who are willing, in the face of death, to put complicated history to one side.
His funeral was held at Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills. Frank Sinatra was a pallbearer. The man who had been the most powerful figure in Sammy Davis Jr.’s professional life, who had opened doors and also complicated the terms of entry, who had loved him with the genuine and limited love of someone whose capacity for equality was real but never quite complete, Frank Sinatra carried his coffin. The estate that was probated had $60 million in federal tax debt attached to it. The assets did not cover it.
Altovise Davis spent years after her husband’s death in legal and financial struggle, attempting to settle obligations that the life had generated and the death had not resolved. What Sammy Davis [music] Jr. left behind is both more and less than the legend that has formed around him in the decades since his death. The less is fairly easily described. The Nixon photograph has not gone away. The debt has been noted. The years of accommodation, the acceptance of conditions that a man of his talent and stature should not
perhaps have accepted, are visible in retrospect with a clarity that was harder to achieve while he was alive and the performance was still running. He wanted things that compromised him. He paid prices that, assessed from the outside, looked too high. He gave to people who did not give back in kind, [music] and he gave again, and he kept giving. The more is harder to describe because it lives in the specifics rather than the outline. Watch a recording of Sammy Davis [music] Jr. performing at his peak and what you
are watching is not nostalgia. It is craft of a quality that does not have a current equivalent. A performer with mastery of vocal technique, physical performance, comedic timing, musical instrument playing, and audience management, all operating simultaneously, all at a professional level that most performers do not reach in a single one of those disciplines across an entire career. He could do everything. [music] He could do everything well. He could do everything well at the same time in the
same show with the ease that only comes from a lifetime of preparation so total that the preparation itself is invisible. He was the most technically complete entertainer of the 20th century. This is not a sentimental claim. It is a measurable one if you know what you are measuring. What his career demonstrated about the cost of that kind of talent in the specific conditions of the American entertainment industry [music] in the mid-20th century is something the legacy has been slower to absorb.
The industry took from him with consistency and generosity >> [music] >> and without much concern for what the taking cost. It took the performances and the celebrity and the political cover of his presence. [music] The implicit argument that a black man this prominent in Hollywood entertainment was evidence that the [music] industry was something other than what it was. It gave back money some of the time [music] and access most of the time and the specific warm light of proximity to
power, which was the currency he valued most and which was never quite what it appeared to be. He knew this eventually. He said so in the 60 Minutes interview and in other late career interviews where the management of public image had been replaced [music] by something closer to honest accounting. He had wanted things. He had paid too much for them. >> [music] >> The world had been less than he had hoped and more than he had been given any reason to expect. And in the space between those two measurements, he had
performed continuously, brilliantly, without stopping for 61 years. The boy who had gone on stage at 3 years old because [music] his family needed the money never stopped performing. He performed through everything that happened to him. He performed through the army and the car crash and the marriages [music] and the political mistakes and the debt and the cancer and the final weeks when the body was failing. But the mind was still tracking, still noting, [music] still in the specific quality of
attention that had been his since childhood, paying close attention to what was in front of him. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills in a section called the Court of Freedom. The marker carries his name and his dates and nothing else. Down the slope from where he lies, the city of Los Angeles extends to the horizon. The city he had worked for 40 years, the city that had applauded him and complicated him and used him and mourned him with the same practiced thoroughness it brought to
everything. The Sands Hotel, where the Rat Pack performed, was demolished in 1996. The Flamingo, which Bugsy Siegel built with mob money while Sammy Davis was still doing army shows in Wyoming, is still open. Las Vegas continues. On some stages in some cities, there are performers tonight who are working through material that traces its lineage in ways they may or may not be aware of to the techniques that Sammy Davis Jr. developed and deployed and never stopped refining. The vocabulary of American
popular performance has his fingerprints on it in places that have lost the attribution but not the influence. The most connected performer in Hollywood history, connected to everyone, belonging [music] fully to no one. That in the end was the story. It was his and it was America’s and it did not have the ending he spent a lifetime performing toward. But the performance was extraordinary.
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