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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. The following podcast contains explicit language. Sammy Davis Jr. was one of the world's greatest entertainers. He was Sammy the way Cher was Cher or Elvis was Elvis.
Five foot five, barely. Skinny as a pencil. Oversized sunglasses. Jewelry hanging off him like Christmas ornaments. He lived off nicotine and vermouth. Never wore the same suit twice. Made a fortune. Died broke. That kind of life. Then he would likely touch down.
A singer, a dancer, a master impressionist with a famous exaggerated laugh that unfolded in three acts. The eyes closed in delight. The full body convulsion. The three-step stagger. In 1972, at the height of his fame, Sammy went to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. Flew there on a private jet owned by an oil company. Took a suite at the Playboy Hotel.
On the opening night of the convention, he sat in the private box of the Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon. On the second night of the convention, Davis played a concert for the Republican youth in a shirt open to his navel and skin-tight pants. He was halfway through his set when suddenly people started chanting, "Four more years." The cheers were for Nixon, fresh from accepting the Republican nomination. He was crashing the party.
Davis held up his hand to quiet the crowd. Ladies and gentlemen, the president and the future president of the United States of America, pandemonium. I am opposed to busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance in our schools. I have spoken out against busing scores of times over many years.
Richard Nixon was, in 1972, the leading practitioner of what was known as the Southern Strategy, the attempt to use racist appeals to win over Southern white voters to the Republican Party. He nominated two Southerners to the Supreme Court, men who were such committed segregationists and so deeply unqualified that the Senate wouldn't confirm them. In the privacy of the Oval Office, Nixon referred to black people as niggers and jigaboos.
He did his best to delay the integration of American public schools. He once complained to one of his aides that the anti-poverty programs established by his predecessors were a waste of money because African Americans were genetically inferior. It was just four years since Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis, and the president seemed bent on reversing everything the civil rights movement had fought for. Black people in 1972 did not like Richard Nixon.
That is, except for one of the most famous black men in the country, Sammy Davis Jr., who sat in the Nixon family box, performed at the Nixon coronation, and who crossed the stage and wrapped one of the most famously chilly and awkward of all presidents in a joyful, excited, loving hug. Let me read to you Will Haygood's description of that moment in his biography of Sammy Davis Jr.,
The public had rarely seen Nixon in such an embrace, even with his own wife. And Nixon, letting loose with a slow, widening grin, towering over Davis, wrapping his arms across his own chest so awkwardly and yet tenderly like some flushed teenage kid. And all those white delegates and all those Nixon placards and Davis leaning on the president's shoulder as if Nixon were kin. Nixon and Sammy in full embrace.
When people remember Sammy Davis Jr., that's what they think of. The photograph of that moment. Sammy never got over it. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things forgotten and misunderstood. This episode is about Sammy Davis Jr. and what happened on that stage in Miami Beach. Because that moment raises questions about obligation and loyalty that still haven't been resolved.
or maybe have been resolved in the wrong way. To understand this, you have to go back to what young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro back during slavery. In 1963 in Detroit, Malcolm X gave one of his most famous speeches. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negro, they lived in the house with master. They dressed pretty good. They ate good because they ate his food.
They would give their life to save their master's house quicker than the master would. The house negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said, "We," he said, "We." That's how you can tell a house negro. Malcolm X was trying to win his audience over to the cause of black nationalism. He was a separatist. He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself.
And if you came to the house Negro and said, let's run away, let's escape, let's separate, that house Negro would look at you and say, man, you crazy. What do you mean separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this? That was that house Negro. Malcolm X was talking about African-Americans who he felt had betrayed their community.
who had achieved success by turning their backs on where they'd come from. He was talking about people like Sammy Davis Jr. Davis was an epic talent. He was Michael Jackson before Michael Jackson.
He was the first black person in history who could sell out performances around the world. A charter member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack, a staple in the tabloids for 40 years. There's a sequence I love from a gala in Sammy's honor in 1989, marking his 60th anniversary in show business. Gregory Hines, a legendary tap dancer, does a number for Sammy, who's sitting in the front row.
Now stop time. Stop time. Then Hines invites Sammy up to join him. Sammy's just had his hip replaced. He'll be dead from cancer within the year. He puts on his tap shoes, hobbles on stage, and the two of them do a dance-off. I swear to God, if you don't believe me, look it up for yourself. Sammy blows him away. At the end, Hines gets down on his knees and kisses Sammy's shoes. ♪
Davis was born in Harlem. He started playing the vaudeville circuit as a three-year-old with his uncle, Will Mastin, and his dad, Sammy Davis Sr. He never had any formal schooling or any childhood to speak of. The three of them traveled Jim Crow America, performing for white audiences in one hotel, then sleeping on the other side of the tracks in a colored hotel. ♪
During the Second World War, when he was drafted into the army, his nose was broken so many times in fights that it's flat for the rest of his life. Sammy was taunted, harassed. At one point, a couple of white soldiers pinned Sammy down, write "coon" in white paint across his forehead. There's an almost unbearable moment in Sammy's autobiography, "Why Me?" He describes standing under the shower in the latrine for hours, trying to get the white paint off his body.
I stood under the hot water, rubbing until rashes of blood trickled to the surface, brushing until I'd scraped the last speck of white out of my skin. I got into bed. Nobody, nobody in this world is ever going to do this to me again. I'll die first. But Sammy's answer to never letting anyone do this to him again wasn't to fight, like Malcolm X wanted black people to do. Sammy's solution was to join.
He moved very publicly into the master's house. He dated white women, blondes. He married the stunning Swedish actress Mae Britt at a time when interracial marriages were almost unheard of. When he moved to Los Angeles, he didn't move to Baldwin Hills, where middle-class blacks lived. He moved into a lily-white section of the Hollywood Hills. This modern house negro loves his master. He wants to live near him.
He'll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master and then brag about I'm the only Negro out here. I'm the only one on my job. I'm the only one in this school. You're nothing but a house Negro.
If I play a Dave Chappelle routine for you without telling you that it's him, or a Richard Pryor bit from the 1980s, you'd know right away that Chappelle and Pryor are black. They code black. But listen to this. Sammy Davis on The Dick Cavett Show talking about what he learned from the old Borscht Belt comedians who used to hang out at Hanson's Drugstore just off Broadway in the 1940s. All of the impressionists would hang out on the corner and...
I'd say, "Hey, I got one. I think I got one. I think I finally got Jimmy Stewart." And, you know, and Will or Larry Storch would say, "No, you haven't got it, man. That ain't it. It's gotta be up here. You got it too low. And when you do it, you gotta have a sort of a draw behind it so that it disappears in here."
Cavett then asks Sammy if he also does Laurence Olivier, which you think is just Cavett being mischievous, because Olivier was the greatest Shakespearean stage actor of his day, the son of a high church Anglican clergyman, about as far from Sammy as you can get.
In theory. Of course I do Olivier. You do Olivier? Yes. Really? What would you like to hear me do from Olivier? Oh, a couple acts from King Lear would be nice. Well, he only did Lear once. How about Richard III? I'll settle for Dick III. Okay. Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer in this son of York. Since I cannot by rightful claim...
My way to the throne, I shall hack and hew my way instead. Oh, that's great. If I didn't tell you that Sammy was black, would you know? He could as easily be white. He could be Jewish. In fact, he was Jewish. He converted. The lone black person at Temple Israel in Hollywood. Sammy's mind worked like this. Whatever it takes to survive, I have to do it.
That's Will Haygood, Sammy's biographer. Many of my friends are Jewish, and they love me, and they support me. So that's interesting. I think I'm going to go to Israel. I think I'm going to become Jewish. And then I'm going to make some jokes about it. And I know people will laugh, but right now, in this moment, this is where my heart is. Sammy meets Nixon in 1954.
Nixon was the vice president at that point, and Sammy was playing the copa when the copa was the hottest ticket in Manhattan. So he got Nixon and his wife seats up front, and they never forgot it. Shortly thereafter, Sammy gets invited to the White House to visit Vice President Nixon. Now just think of that. A kid...
Born poor, who had been scuffling out on the road, who had been playing nasty-looking nightclubs, who never had a teacher, who never had classmates, all of a sudden sliding around the White House. They stay in touch. When Nixon becomes president in 1968, he asks Sammy to join a White House advisory council.
When the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson died, Nixon asked Sammy to represent him at the funeral and sent a government jet. Nixon asked Sammy to go to Vietnam and entertain the troops. Sammy puts together a massive traveling entourage and plays his heart out. It's alright, it's alright. Baby, it's alright. Baby, it's alright.
If you look at the back cover of Sammy's autobiography, Why Me?, there's a blurb from Alex Haley, who wrote Roots. Another from Aaron Spelling, the creator of 90210, among a million other things. Another from Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli. It's maybe the greatest blurb lineup in the history of publishing. And then there's Richard Nixon, who writes...
Sammy is one of the great living Americans. It wouldn't matter what color he was. With his intelligence, he could make it at anything, anywhere. It wouldn't matter what color he was? That sounds like something you would say about someone who comes from privilege, to flatter them into thinking they would have succeeded even without their privilege. It wouldn't matter if Mark Zuckerberg were an orphan from a remote village in the Himalayas. He's so smart he would still be a billionaire.
It's totally nuts to say it wouldn't matter if he hadn't had those privileges about a black man born in Harlem in 1925 who never had any privileges. Sammy comes to Nixon pretending he isn't black, and Nixon comes to Sammy forgetting he's black. Their relationship is a kind of delusional post-racial fantasy.
So Nixon says, come to Miami for the convention. We'll put you up at the Playboy Hotel. Why not play for the kids at the youth rally? Of course Sammy says yes. And Nixon stands in front of the crowd on national TV and starts talking about how Sammy's critics accuse him of selling out by being a Nixon supporter. Then Nixon says, You're going to buy Sammy Davis Jr. by inviting him to the White House. You're going to buy him by doing something for America.
Nixon waits for the applause to die down. He's looking the other way. Sammy sneaks up from behind, wraps his arms around him. The hate mail Sammy gets over the next few months is so vicious that he hands over some of the letters to the FBI. Eartha Kitt comes up to him and hisses, did you have to kiss him?
Sammy is blindsided. He's desperate to salvage his reputation. He calls up Jesse Jackson, who every year has a big conference in Chicago for his civil rights group, Operation Push. I am somebody. I am somebody. In 1972, Jackson had lined up virtually every Motown and gospel star. The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, the OJs, Curtis Mayfield, Roberta Flack. Sammy says, I want to perform.
Jackson says yes, brings him out on stage. I am here because I have come home as a black man. Disagree, if you will, with my politics, but I will not allow anyone to take away the fact that
But who is he kidding? It's September 28, 1972, a little over a month since he was hugging the enemy in Miami.
For the rest of his life, Sammy would be haunted by his reception. You said maybe one of the worst things that happened to you, I read, was being booed by people. I think it was in Chicago. This is Sammy, in an interview years later with Tom Cottle on the Boston ABC affiliate. It was the first time that I'd ever been rejected by my own people because it was predominantly a black audience. Because of your embracing of Nixon? Yeah, the embracing of Nixon and all of that. And
Jesse was there as he always had been before prior to and as he's been since. To be supportive as a friend. And I was about ready to run, literally run off the stage and he said no. And he made me stay and he talked to the audience and made me perform. And what did Sammy sing? Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong.
You can't make this up. Whether I find a place in this world or never belong, I gotta be me. Gotta be me. What else can I be? But the hurt of being booed, I know I want to experience that kind of hurt again. I want to live, not merely survive. Afterwards,
Sammy went home and got drunk. So now you have a 20th century type of Negro today. A 20th century Uncle Tom. He's just as much an Uncle Tom today as Uncle Tom was 100 and 200 years ago. Only he's a modern Uncle Tom. Then Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom wore the top hat. Sammy sold his own people out.
In the middle of a life and death struggle, he put on a top hat and tap danced for the master. And there's nothing so unforgivable as that, is there? Except, I'm not so sure.
I had been given the opportunity through a company that I was consulting to, to interview the first women entering their sales force. That's Rosabeth Cantor. She's a professor at the Harvard Business School, talking about a research project she did back in the 1970s. It was for a big industrial firm headquartered at the time in New York City.
They had a sales force of 300 people, all men, and they just hired 20 women. And so here was a batch of people who all had advanced degrees and were very technically talented, and yet they were walking into technical sales in a place that had never seen people like them before. The women were struggling. That's why the company brought in Cantor to diagnose the problem. She showed up with her notebook and began talking with the new hires.
And after many interviews, Cantor tells the company, "The reason the women you hired aren't doing well is that you haven't hired enough of them. This isn't about the women and their abilities. This is about numbers."
The company had its sales force spread across the country. A typical office was eight people, which meant seven men and only one woman. And Cantor's point was that it's really, really hard to be the lone woman in an office of eight people. And I thought, that's really the issue. Are you alone or are there many of you like you?
Canto wrote up her findings in a classic essay called Some Effects of Proportion on Group Life. Being the only one of your kind, she said, being a token creates a special set of problems for both sides, for the majority and for the token.
The women told Cantor that the minute they showed up in a room, the men on the sales team would become almost exaggerated versions of themselves, telling dirty jokes, war stories, being aggressive, as if the presence of an outsider reinforced what they all had in common. At the same time, the women felt their behavior changing. They felt scrutinized, not as individuals, but as members of their category, which left them self-conscious, uneasy,
In one brilliant section of her paper, Cantor talks about the four roles that token women get pushed into. The mother, the pet, the seductress, and the iron maiden.
They couldn't be themselves, not until the proportions of the group turned more in their favor. So you put that same lone woman in a group that has more women in it, and she can relax. She's not on the spot. She can be friends with some. She doesn't have to be friends with all of them. She can find things in common with the men. To fit in, the token has to pass a loyalty test.
Kenta writes, "If tokens collude, they make themselves psychological hostages of the majority group. For token women, the price of being one of the boys is a willingness to turn occasionally against the girls." The token woman, in other words, is required to sell out her own kind. Required. That was the cost of admission to the master's house. Being one of the boys was not who they were.
It was what they were forced to be. So why is Sammy Davis Jr.'s position any different? In his mind, he was pushing aside white, black for green, green being money. Will Haygood, Sammy's biographer. He started his career with really, literally, having to put food on the table to keep his daddy surviving and to keep Will Mastin alive.
surviving. He did not want to let them go. And so who would Sammy talk to every day? Who signed his checks? White businessmen. And who was in the audience in those Las Vegas nightclubs? Rich white people. Sammy does Laurence Olivier impressions because that's what white audiences wanted to hear.
He becomes friends with Richard Nixon. And who is Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon is the political embodiment of those people in his Las Vegas audience. He didn't know the kind of judges who Nixon was appointing to the federal courts or to the Supreme Court. He didn't know Nixon's southern strategy to divide and conquer. All Sammy knew was Nixon welcomed me wherever I was at.
By the way, Sammy campaigned for John Kennedy 10 years before he campaigned for Nixon. But did Kennedy ever invite him to stay at the White House like Nixon did? No. Kennedy disinvited him from his inauguration because he worried about what it would look like if Sammy brought his white wife to the White House. Sammy had to make strategic decisions out of necessity. These are the steps the token takes to survive, but they aren't who he is.
Sammy marched on Washington. He marched at Selma. He shut down a Broadway show to make the trip. Will Haygood says that when he interviewed Harry Belafonte, Belafonte made a point of stressing how generous Sammy was to the civil rights movement. Whenever King was in trouble or was jailed or whenever King needed bail money, Martin...
would turn to me and he would say, "Get Sammy." And the next day, Sammy Davis Jr. would wire them $10,000 or $7,000 or however much money King needed. And that was a lot of money back in the '60s. When Sammy Davis comes on stage at the Push Expo, what does Jesse Jackson say in an attempt to quiet the crowd?
Brothers, if it wasn't for people like Sammy Davis, you wouldn't be here. We wouldn't have Push today. Now, I expected some foolish people were going to react like this because this man hugged the President of the United States. So what? Look at what this gigantic little man has committed himself to over all these years. Sammy sang, I Gotta Be Me.
But the minute you listen to any of his interviews from that tortured stretch of his career, you realize that he couldn't be me. That was the price he paid. Was there a period, though, Sammy, where you felt, I must prove something to a certain group of people? They've got to know something about me. I guess the first 45 years of my life. You were doing just that? That's all I was doing.
Ladies and gentlemen, from the celebrity room of the Grand Hotel, Dean Martin honors our man of the hour, Sammy Davis Jr., with tonight's guests, Freddie Prinze. First came the hug, then came the booing at Operation Push, then came the roast. And tonight's very special man of the hour, Sammy Davis Jr.!
The singer and comedian Dean Martin did a regular series of celebrity roasts from Las Vegas during the 1970s. They were broadcast on NBC on Thursday nights, national television. The featured guests were a who's who of that era. Muhammad Ali, Ralph Nader, Frank Sinatra, Truman Capote. It was a ritual of comic humiliation. The guests took their medicine. The country watched in mock horror. In April of 1975...
It was Sammy Davis Jr.'s turn. At the microphone is the host, Dean Martin of Rat Pack fame. Big, tall, handsome guy. His shtick was that he always pretended he was drunk, even when he was. And in recognition of one of the great black men of our time, even the NBC peacock is wearing an afro. Why does Sammy agree to this? For the same reason he hugged Richard Nixon.
Because the world represented by the roast was the world Sammy has been trying his whole life to join. It's the club. And what is a celebrity roast? It's a ritual of initiation. The target of the roast agrees to be roasted because being roasted is proof that you belong. Only what does this roast prove? That Sammy isn't one of them. The first booking he got was in Atlanta.
As Sammy stepped off the plane, he was met by the governor and a rope. Even the Ku Klux Klan took notice of Sammy. They voted him most likely to be next. He proved that a black man could eat in white restaurants, check into white hotels, date white women, and be carried away in a white ambulance.
Then Dean Martin pretends to read telegrams from well-wishers. Here's one I think you're going to be very proud of. Dear Sammy Davis, we'd like you to pose for a nude centerfold in our magazine signed "The National Geographic." It goes like this on national TV for an hour.
Sammy had done everything he could to join the club. And yet, what are the jokes about that day at the MGM Grand? That he doesn't belong. That he's black and he'll always be black.
Sammy's sold out, but you can only sell out if someone's buying. You took your glass, you getting tired, Sammy? Want to take a watermelon break? That's Milton Berle, supposedly one of Sammy's oldest friends. The reason I say that is because Sammy hasn't been feeling well lately. Last month, he had an operation on his throat, and they had a problem. They had a roll of flour to find his mouth. LAUGHTER
Next up, Foster Brooks. A man with a brief moment of celebrity based entirely on his ability, born of experience, to impersonate a drunk.
Sammy Davis had more talent in his pinky finger than Foster Brooks. But Sammy isn't a member of the club, and Brooks is. Mrs. Dick, Mrs. Dick, Mr. Davis. You are a great performer. The excitement you create in an audience is incredible. There they sit, spellbound, wondering if someone in your entourage is ransacking their room. LAUGHTER
Cut to Sammy cracking up on the dais, then giving Brooks a big Sammy-style hug, arms wrapped around him. Dancing for pennies to that magnificent moment when Frank Sinatra thought down to the lobby and said, send the colored kid up to dance while I shave. LAUGHTER
Remember what Rosabeth Cantor wrote? For token women, the price of being one of the boys is a willingness to turn occasionally against the girls. And then she writes a line that I couldn't stop thinking about as I watched that roast. Tokens thus find themselves colluding with dominance through shared laughter. At the end of the evening, Sammy gets up, and there's a moment when you think he's going to lash out.
to stand up to the humiliations of the previous hour. But we only think that because it's now. The doors are now open to black entertainers. So that's what would happen today. Can you imagine how Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle or Wanda Sykes or Tiffany Haddish would respond to an evening like that? I mean, a bloodbath.
But Rock has Chappelle, and Chappelle has Sykes, and Sykes has Haddish, and a hundred others. And when you have numbers, you have power. But Sammy? Sammy was the first. He didn't have numbers. It's the second generation that gets to defend itself, not the first. Thank you. I would first of all like to thank a man that I love very, very much for giving me this honor.
Mr. Dean Martin. He turns to Dean Martin, who's sitting next to him. Dean Martin reaches up and places his hand on top of Sammy's. One of the great joys of being 45 years in this business is to have people who love you make fun of you. That is one of the great joys, because the day they don't make fun of you,
That means they don't give a damn about you. The token succeeds at the cost of his own dignity. I thank you. That's it. Thank you very much. Mr. Samuel! Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer is Mia Lobel, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Barber. On stage we can see a manager who seems to be waiting for the president and waiting to get signals when Mr. Nixon will arrive here. He keeps looking at Sammy Davis Jr. with a very prolonged look, shaking his hand, saying, no, he's not here yet.
So we continue to stand by. The young people here have not run out of enthusiasm. And certainly once again we are seeing that young people of this country may differ on politics. They may be Democrats or Republicans, but when you put a fast, hard beat to music, that is the universal song of politics for the young people of this country.
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