Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
Sammy Davis, Jr.: onstage he was as audacious as they come; living that way proved more complex. A new book takes a look at the contradictions that drove this consummate performer—here's a sneak peek - Legend—Behind The Scenes - Excerpt
Interview, Oct, 2003 by Wil Haygood
For close to half a century he earned Americans' applause end crossed the barriers of segregation to do so--singing, dancing, and cracking jokes while headlining on TV, in movies, and in Vegas with the Rat Pack. But in fact the most daring deed of Sammy Davis, Jr.'s life concerned not his career, but his soul. Wil Haygood's In Black and White (Knopf)--one of two major new biographies of the star due out this month--reminds us how startling and even outrageous it seemed in Eisenhowerage America that the African-American Davis would embrace Judaism in the prime of his career. Although Davis's decision provoked dismay and wisecracks even among his friends, it was clearly an essential one for this man whose only identity for much of his life had been that of an entertainer. By declaring his newfound faith, he reminded everyone (maybe even himself) that there was a lot more to Sammy Davis, Jr., than just song and dance.
PATRICK GILES
By year's end, there was something else profound in the life of Sammy Davis, Jr. It was religion. Sammy pronounced himself a Jew.
The announcement--the ricocheting word of mouth--startled his friends. He had never mentioned Judaism before. His own background had been one without religion. His mother was a lapsed Catholic, his father a lapsed Baptist. His adoption of Judaism could not really be called a conversion because he had nothing to convert from. If pressed, he might well have answered "entertainment" as his religion. The decision had been made like many other decisions made in the life of Sammy--spur of the moment, a bout of light introspection, the mind working with a vaudevillian's quickness and agility, no turning back from an arrived-at decision.
Sammy had always been a fervent searcher. And where his mind was not intellectual, his heart was always vulnerable. The conundrum left him forever open to new gadgets, new ideas, new kinds of love. And whatever winds blew those new ideas into the soft recesses of his heart proved, more often than not, to be strong enough to push the ideas even further into his mind, where they fastened, and where he mistakenly thought they had originated with the weight of intelligence. So he came to Judaism quickly and romantically--as if electrical currents were guiding him.
"I never could figure it out," recalls [Sammy's personal assistant] Jess Rand. "It came out of left field."
"He came to me," recalls Jerry Lewis--born Jerry Levitch, and himself Jewish--"and said, 'I'm going to turn Jewish.' I said, 'You don't have enough problems already?'"
If we are to believe Sammy's autobiography, Yes I Can, the act of conversion had whipped itself around in his mind for all of two weeks. It involved the happenstance of coming across a book, A History of the Jews, and having a few conversations with rabbis. (During his hospital stay, Eddie Cantor had slipped him a Star of David, which he was now wearing around his neck.) There was no hunger, however, greater than Sammy's hunger for fame, for Hollywood. He watched movies, trailed the famous, snapped their pictures, hugged them, and hugged them some more. Fame was meat. He was its tiger. If, as the film historian Neal Gabler has proclaimed, the Jews invented Hollywood, then, in 1954, Sammy proclaimed himself--with the acquisition of an almost overnight spirituality--an appendage to that invention. Once seized by a notion, he could be relentless.
He found Max Nussbaum, a rabbi in Los Angeles and a refugee from Europe. In Germany, Rabbi Nussbaum's reputation kept growing. He had a gift. He was told he should be in that place known as Hollywood....
Nussbaum reached Hollywood in 1942, an escapee from the waves of persecution sweeping the continent. He headed Temple Israel. Five of the seven founders of the Hollywood-based temple were power brokers in the movie business. Nussbaum corralled actors and actresses for fund-raising benefits. Following one--where Bill "Bojangles" Robinson had been the featured guest--he squired everyone to the famous Brown Derby restaurant. The group was told that Robinson, a Negro, would not be served. Nussbaum and company turned and left.
Sammy found his way to Nussbaum. He was full of childlike questions. He grilled the rabbi as if he were a director moving huge camera equipment across impossible terrain and he needed Nussbaum to help him navigate it all--this very minute. The rabbi was suspicious and saw fit to warn Sammy: "Let me caution you not to expect to find Judaism in books."
Sammy opened his one eye wider. The comment perplexed him. He would find Judaism, then, in the clutter of his emotional heart.
There were, however, depths and undertows and crosscurrents that Sammy could not imagine that would intercut with his decision to convert.
The Jew and the Negro had a sometimes complex and always emotional history in America. Both groups, indeed, stood upon common ground: that of an oppressed minority. Bondage and suffering had shoved them together. Pain was understood by both. Several years before Sammy's conversion, a young writer and essayist by the name of James Baldwin, writing in Commentary magazine, said, "Though the notion of the suffering is based on the image of the wandering, exiled Jew, the context changes imperceptibly, to become a fairly obvious reminder of the trials of the Negro, while the sins recounted are the sins of the American republic. At this point, the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of Egypt." Baldwin goes on: "It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting."
