Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [154]
Misprint aside, the billing was deceptive: Sammy Davis Jr. was the one whose name should have been first, in big capital letters. He had been the star of the act since age three, in 1928, when his father, Sammy Davis Sr., and vaudeville partner Will Mastin first put the little boy on the stage. From childhood, Sammy had been a miraculous performer, a show-business prodigy who could instantly pick up complicated dance routines, sing like a natural, and learn to play any instrument that was put into his hands. About to turn twenty-two, having reached his adult height of just five feet three, he was a tiny whirlwind of singing and dancing genius: he not only had a beautifully rich baritone but could do tap routines of blinding speed and precision. He could play piano, saxophone, and drums. He did eerily accurate impersonations of Cary Grant, Boris Karloff, Edward G. Robinson—and of his idol Frank Sinatra.
He was also a desperately lonely young man. His parents had split when his father took him on the road; performing had been his whole life. Little Sammy spent his childhood running from truant officers, missing his mother, living for the charmed moments each day when he could win the love of an audience. The hours between those moments were long and empty. In his spare time he imagined the fame that would bring him true love at last. Fame, he knew, was everything.
Davis had been obsessed with Sinatra from the moment he first heard about him. That voice made his hair stand on end—as did the idolatry. As Sammy toured the unapologetically racist country, scrounging a living in flea-bitten vaudeville theaters, carrying the act named after the bitter and domineering old man who also loved him like an uncle, he thought constantly of Frank—bought his records and fan magazines, kept a scrapbook of articles about him, imitated his dress and mannerisms. And—since he was not just an entertainer but also a stargazing fan who haunted stage doors wherever he played, trying to get a glimpse of, and maybe an autograph from, stars like Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, Bob Hope—Sammy dreamed of the day he would meet his idol in person.
It came, unexpectedly, at Detroit’s Michigan Theater in 1941, when the Mastin Trio filled in for Tommy Dorsey’s warm-up act Tip, Tap, & Toe. There was a friendly backstage handshake between Sinatra and the awestruck sixteen-year-old, and then the road took them their separate ways. Over the next couple of years, as Frank’s star rose and the Mastin Trio kept scrounging, Sammy dreamed of the reunion that would validate his existence. His chance came in the fall of 1945, in Los Angeles. Though he’d been discharged from the Army in June, he got out his uniform, had it pressed, and put it on so he could get a serviceman’s ticket to Sinatra’s radio show at CBS. Afterward, he recalled in his autobiography.
I hurried around the corner to the stage door. There must have been five hundred kids ahead of me, waiting for a look at him. When he appeared, the crowd surged forward like one massive body ready to go right through the side of the building if necessary. Girls were screaming, fainting, pushing, waving pencils and papers in the air. A girl next to me shouted, “I’d faint if I had room to fall down.” She got her laugh and the crowd kept moving. I stood on tiptoe trying to see him. God, he looked like a star. He wasn’t much older than a lot of us but he was so calm, like we were all silly kids and he was a man, sure of himself, completely in control. He acted as if he didn’t know there were hundreds of papers being waved at him. He concentrated on one at a time, signing it, smiling, and going to the next. He got to me and took my paper. He used a solid gold pen to sign his name. I thanked him and he looked at me. “Don’t I know you?”
The story rings true, solid-gold pen and all. Sinatra did have an amazing memory for names and faces, and Sammy Davis didn’t look like anybody else. Frank invited him to come to his dressing room after the next week’s show.