The Full Biography
Sammy Davis Jr. Singer. Dancer. The Harlem child who lost an eye, kept the beat, and made a whole evening out of one man.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a tuxedo in Las Vegas, a cigarette, a grin traded with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, or a 1972 television clip of “The Candy Man.” What the still cannot show is Samuel George Davis Jr. of Harlem, a vaudeville child who had been working since he could stand, a soldier who learned what a segregated army did with talent, and a one-eyed dancer who treated a glass eye as a prop the audience was not owed an apology for.
He was born on December 8, 1925, in Harlem, to Sammy Davis Sr., a dancer, and Elvera Sanchez, a tap dancer of Puerto Rican descent. The marriage did not hold the household. The boy went on the road with his father and his adopted uncle, Will Mastin, as the Will Mastin Trio. The first pressure was a train schedule. He was three when the act needed him. He was a teenager when the act was already a living. School was a rumor between stands. The stage was the classroom: impressions, taps, a song stolen from whoever had just left the bill. By the time the Army took him in the Second World War, he was already a professional who had never been allowed to be a child.
The Army was the first room that tried to break the professional. He was a Black entertainer in a segregated service. He boxed. He performed. He learned, in a way no nightclub could teach, what a uniform did not protect. He came home to the Trio and to a country that still had separate doors for the man who had just entertained the troops. The door that opened him to the rest of America was not a movie test. It was a car wreck.
On November 19, 1954, driving back from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, he crashed near San Bernardino. The accident took his left eye. The public, which had known him as a gifted opening act, discovered him as a man who went back to work. He wore a patch. Then he wore a glass eye. He converted to Judaism in the months that followed, a choice he explained as kinship with a people who had learned how to stand up after a blow. Within weeks he was onstage again. The courage was real. So was the calculation. Show business loves a comeback it can see.
Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.Sammy Davis Jr.
Broadway built a show around him. Mr. Wonderful opened in 1956 and ran because the star could do in two hours what most bills needed a whole night to attempt. He recorded. He played the clubs that had not wanted him in the front door and then put his name on the marquee. Frank Sinatra, who collected gifted men the way other people collect first editions, pulled him into the informal company the columns called the Rat Pack. Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop. Las Vegas. The Sands. Ocean’s 11 (1960). Sergeants 3. Robin and the 7 Hoods. The joke of the Pack was ease. Davis’s job inside the joke was to be twice as good and half as free, and to smile as if the arithmetic were a compliment.
He married the dancer Loray White in 1958; the marriage was brief. In 1960 he married the Swedish actress May Britt. An interracial marriage in the year of a presidential campaign was not a lifestyle page. It was a civic argument. John F. Kennedy’s inaugural festivities, which had room for Sinatra’s friends, did not have room for Davis and Britt. He had campaigned. He was disinvited. He did not make a career of the slight, and he did not forget it. They had a daughter, Tracey, and adopted sons Mark and Jeff. The marriage ended in 1968. In 1970 he married the dancer Altovise Gore, who stayed until the end.
The work in those years is easy to reduce to the Pack and a candy commercial. The file is thicker. He played Sportin’ Life in Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess (1959). He took Golden Boy to Broadway in 1964, a musical about a boxer, and earned a Tony nomination for a part that asked him to be more than a nightclub. He made television specials that treated variety as a serious American form. He recorded “I’ve Gotta Be Me” (1968), which is as close as he came to a public theology, and “Mr. Bojangles,” which he sang as if the old dancer in the song were a relative. He was, for a stretch, the most complete all-around entertainer the country had: singer, dancer, actor, impressionist, a man who could hold a stage after the orchestra sat down.
He also walked into rooms that wanted him for the talent and not for the dinner. He integrated hotels by being too famous to send around back, which is a poor method for a movement and a real method for a life. He raised money. He showed up. He also, in the years that followed, photographed himself with Richard Nixon and then with Ronald Reagan, choices that cost him in neighborhoods that had claimed him as theirs. He did not recant the friendships. He did not pretend they were free.
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as Rat Pack folklore. The turn is the 1954 wreck and the decision, made in a hospital and kept for thirty-six years, that a missing eye would be part of the act and not the end of it. The glass eye is not trivia. It is the occupation. He danced on a depth cue the rest of the Pack never had to think about. He told the joke first so nobody else could.
He recorded for Decca, then for Reprise, Sinatra’s label, which is a fact about loyalty and about a Black star who still needed a powerful friend’s door. “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “The Birth of the Blues” are the club set. “I’ve Gotta Be Me” is the manifesto. He played Sportin’ Life as if the character were a cousin. He hosted television — The Sammy Davis Jr. Show in 1966 — and discovered that a network week is a different kind of grind from a Vegas midnight. He made A Man Called Adam (1966), a jazz picture that asked him to be sour on purpose, and Sweet Charity (1969) as Big Daddy, a cameo that is also a reminder the movies never quite knew what to do with a man who could already do everything. He marched, he raised money, he stood with the movement when the movement would have him, and he stood with presidents when the movement would not. Both choices are in the file. Neither cancels the dancing.
“The Candy Man,” in 1972, went to No. 1 on the Hot 100. It is not the best thing he ever sang. It is the thing a Saturday-morning generation can still hum. He knew the difference. He took the hit. He kept working the rooms that still wanted the whole evening, not the one song. He played Morris Fenderbaum in The Cannonball Run and did the talk-show circuit that keeps a name in the weather when the Broadway parts thin out. He never learned how to be only one thing. The country, which likes to file people, never quite found the drawer.
Six things most people never knew
- The Will Mastin Trio is the childhood. Father, adopted uncle, a boy on a bill. He was a professional before he was allowed to be a student.
- The left eye left in 1954, on a road near San Bernardino. A crash, a patch, a glass eye, a return measured in weeks. The dancer the Pack hired was already working on one lens.
- The conversion to Judaism is in the same season as the wreck. He framed it as kinship after a blow, not as a publicity stunt. He kept the faith in public and in the house.
- May Britt and the inaugural slight are civic facts. 1960. An interracial marriage. A Kennedy celebration that had room for Sinatra and not for him.
- Golden Boy is a Tony nomination, not a nightclub encore. 1964. A boxer on Broadway. He wanted the town to write him down as an actor.
- “The Candy Man” is 1972, and it is not the whole catalog. A No. 1. A generation’s hook. “I’ve Gotta Be Me” and “Mr. Bojangles” are the theology.
Altovise kept the house in the years the columns preferred the Pack. Tracey and the sons have had to share a father who is a tuxedo, a glass eye, and a civic argument. Friends from the Sands describe a man who was first into rehearsal and last off the floor, a professional who could be wounded in a way the grin was designed to hide. He wrote it down in Yes I Can (1965) and, years on, in Why Me? He did not leave the explanation only to the impressionists.
The later years
The years after the No. 1 were not a fade so much as a long last set. Variety television still wanted him. Las Vegas still wanted him. The Pack, which had always been more a weather than a corporation, reassembled when Sinatra said so. In 1988 and 1989 Davis went out with Sinatra and Liza Minnelli on a tour that was billed as a last look and functioned as a paycheck and a sacrament. He was already ill. He did not treat illness as a reason to cancel the job. Throat cancer had been found. The treatments took the voice in pieces. He smoked through a life that had never been built for quiet. He kept the glass eye, the jewelry, the stories, and the refusal to become only a clip of “The Candy Man” on a variety rerun.
Home was Beverly Hills, a house that had seen the marriages, the IRS weather, and the friends who came when the lights were on. Altovise was there. The children were in and out of a life that had never been private. He had made himself available to presidents and to talk-show hosts and to any room that would let a Black man from vaudeville stand in the center and run the clock. The cost of that availability is in the memoirs: money trouble, drug weather in some seasons, a hunger for approval that the wreck and the inaugural slight had not cured. He did not hide the hunger well. He also did not stop working long enough for the hunger to become the whole man.
He played benefits. He played the old songs for people who had first seen him in a patch. He accepted the Kennedy Center’s kind of civic thank-you and the roast’s kind of joke. In the last television appearances the voice is thinner and the timing is still a weapon. People who had known only the candy hook discovered that the man who sang it could still tap, still do a minute of Cagney, still turn a story about a segregated hotel into a laugh that left a mark. He was, to the end, a vaudevillian. The form had died around him. He had not.
The 1980s were a long closing number he refused to treat as one. He played London. He played the old Vegas rooms under new corporate names. He did Cannonball Run II and whatever television would still build an hour around a man who could fill it without a guest list. In 1989, when the tour with Sinatra and Minnelli crossed the country, reviewers wrote about history and about a voice that was already being spent. He knew. He had been spending the voice since 1933. Throat cancer and the treatments took the top off the horn; the dancer’s clock, the one the Army and the Trio had installed, was still there. He taped appearances sitting down and then stood up anyway. Altovise managed the house and the visitors. The IRS weather of earlier decades had eased into a more ordinary fame tax: the tribute, the clip reel, the young impersonator who could do the candy song and not the tap. He watched some of that. He did not correct all of it. Correction had never been the act. The act was to be better, tonight, than the man they had come to remember.
He died on May 16, 1990, at his home in Beverly Hills. He was sixty-four. Throat cancer. Altovise was there. The funeral was the kind of show-business sacrament Los Angeles still knows how to hold: Sinatra, the old rooms, a crowd that understood it had lost the last man who could do the whole bill alone. Forest Lawn took the body. The clips took the rest.
After he was gone
The Rat Pack industry did what industries do. It sold the tuxedos. It sold the candy song. The better rooms kept Golden Boy, the Copa dates, and the fact of a one-eyed dancer who had integrated a hotel by refusing to use the back door. Tracey Davis has written the daughter’s book. The estate has had the usual fights. “I’ve Gotta Be Me” still walks into a wedding and a retirement dinner and changes the temperature. The glass eye is in every documentary whether the narrator says so or not.
He came out of Harlem, toured as a child, lost an eye on a California road, became a Jew, married across a color line the inaugural committee would not host, danced in a Pack that needed him more than it always admitted, topped the chart with a candy song, and died with the last tour still in the air. If you only remember the tuxedo, you have the still. If you remember the Trio, the wreck, May Britt, and a man dancing on one eye, you have him.
Portrait: Jay Bernstein Public Relations · Public domain (publicity photo, 1972) · via Wikimedia Commons