You know, he told her, Im making 25 grand a week, and Im sitting here with a bowl of soup I dont want. I Was Dumbstruck, Women first interviewed by the directors behind, Epstein Had a Precise Plan: How the Only Known Photo of Prince Andrew and the Pedophile Happened. On a freezing weekend in December 2010, a team of tabloid investigators tailed the queens favorite son through New York Cityand traced him to the mansion of a convicted sex criminal. After a sleepless night he boarded a flight to Los Angeles, but the plane was almost diverted to Denver when the aging mogul suffered a mild heart attack, the first of several that would finally finish him off. Im going to be dead. Earlier that year when he had watched Novak rehearse her dance number with Rita Hayworth on the set of Pal Joeyafter Novak, no dancer, had practiced the routine until her feet bledCohn turned to Sidney and said, There they aremy first star and my last. Even then he knew. Davis wasnt as lucky, though he would finally be lucky in love. Davis Sr. gracefully stepped aside, but Mastin just couldnt give it up. Silber sat on his bed polishing his shoes in the suite they shared at the Sands Hotel. At stake was not only Novaks career as a screen starby this time she was the No. In 1956 she had had a small part in Cecil B. DeMilles overwrought epic The Ten Commandments, and she had danced on Broadway. . At the heart of their star-crossed affair was one of Hollywoods sacred monsters: the notorious Harry Cohn. Twenty-two years after their doomed affair, they would meet again in 1979 and dance together one last time. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. James Bacon caught the opening night: Everybody was at Ciros. Ill give him 24 hours. Her version of the affair is It was a very dangerous relationship thena white woman and a black man, no matter his statusit simply didnt mix publicly.

Men seemed to consider Davis ugly, because he was short and slight, his features flattened. At some point in the transformation of Marilyn Novak, her studio-assigned publicist, Muriel Roberts, dreamed up an all-lavender scheme and insisted that they rinse her hair with a pale lavender tint. He got so mad at me and at the story and at her. The newly elected president feared that his presence would alienate southern congressmen. Davis liked to inhale cigarette smoke in the middle of a song and exhale with the note and the smoke pouring out. The majority of his black audience couldnt afford to go see him. His nose was broken countless times and permanently flattened; he was given beer to drink by his buddies that was laced with urine. Shirley Rhodes remembers that Novak came to the hospital when Sammy was dying. Her first husband was a 40-year-old car salesman named Edward C. Judson; she then married director Orson Welles, Aly Khan, heir apparent to the Ismaili Muslim throne, and singer Dick Haymes. Luna first met Davis in Chicago, where she was appearing in The Pajama Game. I must have had a knockdown, drag-out fight every two days, he told the Boyars during the writing of Yes I Can. Dont go back home unless you straighten things out with Harry Cohn., It was really touch and go, Silber recalls. If I let you change me, will that do it? she asks Scottie.

dancing down the barriers between us., Arthur Silber Jr. met Davis in 1946, when Silbers father became the agent for the Will Mastin Trio. Paperback edition art has a different look, but the content is the same! He read constantly during his conversion to Judaism, after the November 1954 car accident that cost him his left eye. They did close to an hour. She was a black woman. I had to make [the audience] acknowledge me, he told the Boyars. Novak was installed at the Studio Club, a curfewed dormitory for young starlets where Cohn could have his expensive new possession watched around the clockeven tailed by studio detectives to make sure she didnt follow the wayward path of Rita Hayworth. I got the call this morning. The reporter James Bacon, fresh out of Chicago, was assigned to cover Hollywood for the Associated Press back in 1948. I went from covering Al Capone to covering Harry Cohn, Bacon recalls.

Mastin was very determined to keep the name Will Mastin out in front. Mastin and Sam Davis Sr. had grown up in show business as part of a colored revue known as Holiday in Dixieland; they had learned what they were allowed to do and what could get them run out of town: no speaking directly to the audience, no impressions of white people. Have You Heard the Latest About SAMMY DAVIS JR.?

I tell you what, theres one chance, Cohen told him. Davis would travel with a steamer trunk full of porno films, and one particularly tough member of his security team would steal some of the tapes out of Daviss room and charge the bellboys to watch them.. The studio contoured her figure by encouraging her to purge 15 pounds. But women knew better. Its a terrible comparison, but its like betting on the Kentucky Derby. The two appeared with a man they called the boys uncle, Will Mastin, in a flash dance act (an entracte performed between movie showings) that became the Will Mastin Trio. Even without Novak complicating things, it wasnt going to be easy. Wonderful, Mastin and Sam Davis Sr. were still part of the act, but everybody knew that they had stayed on too long. just doesnt understand show business. Altovise Davis was left with Daviss $7.5 million tax debt. What you never wanted to do was to owe them., One night in the fall of 1957 Tony Curtis went backstage at Ciros with the rugged actor Jeff Chandler. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. In that era, Cohn thought, Whos going to go see a movie star whos married to a black man? The F.B.I, was still keeping track of lynchings. They were together for about 45 minutes and they came back in. The four then went to the awards, Novak in a stunning backless dress, and to the Academy ball, where she and Davis danced. Then Ill do it. Silber recalls, He sat her downhe was sitting in a chair and I was sitting on the bedand he made her a proposition, to marry him for a certain sum of money. Then they changed her hair, dyeing it three shades of blond at once. I had been drafted into the army to fight, and I did . He literally got down on his kneestears were coming out of his eyes. Finally Silber acquiesced. I knew we were in trouble thenthat was the beginning. We broke up a restaurant once in Hawaii with our fake fights.. with Southerners and Southwesterners who got their kicks out of needling me. Davis had just come out of the army, and Arthur was still in high school. She would have all the rights that Mrs. Sammy Davis Jr. would have, but at the end of the year they would dissolve the marriage. With the Boyars, Davis ventured into New York establishments that had previously been closed to him. The studio had wanted a gimmick to distinguish its blonde from the many other new platinum blondes on the block: Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Diana Dors, Joi Lansingall outsize girls signed to compete with Marilyn Monroe and built like the decades big Chevys and Buicks. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., in September 1960 to play the Lotus Club, he was picketed by neo-Nazis bearing signs with scurrilous slogans such as GO BACK TO THE CONGO, YOU KOSHER COON. She never regretted that loss, however. He had become obsessed with Miles, an icy, imperious beauty along the lines of Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren, but when Miles became pregnant and turned down the role, Hitchcock settled for Novak. He kept himself in fantastic shape and he was so immaculate. He was out of sync with the new music. Cliff Robertson, who made his film debut in Picnic, recalls, Kim was in a quiet hurry to leave Chicago before her beauty clock ran out. . Vertigo has been called Hitchcocks most personal film, but in a fundamental way it is Novaks as well. I go to Medlavine, whos getting not a lot, say $500 a week, but he likes that money coming in. Only when he was assigned to Special Services, for which he performed in camp shows around the country, did the acts of violence diminish. . I was ready to stay onstage for hours . Rolexes, Cartiers, what have you. As one of Daviss oldest friends observed, The I.R.S. Sammy liked his lookshe knew his face was ugly, but he worked on his body. Donjo Medlavine. Medlavine was stocky, built like a pit bull, and he had a heart as big as the world, Silber says.

Could it be that Sinatra was sore over Daviss dalliances with his former wife Ava Gardner? He never personalized autographs to anyone, because he couldnt spell peoples names and he was embarrassed., Davis encountered serious racism in the army. Thats how much things have changed, says Haley. Her later films veered from forgettable to lousy, with a few exceptions: Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and Strangers When We Meet (1960) were made with Richard Quine, the volatile film director with whom she became involved in 1959. I loved Sammy and I had the chance to marry the man I loved, she says. There were bomb threats in Reno, Chicago, and San Franciscowherever Davis played. Cohn also found out about Novaks arrival and sent a delegation from Columbia headed by Muriel Roberts, who often traveled with Kim, and Norma Kasell. How do you like that?, Arthur Silbers father booked Davis into Ciros. You can relax., Burt Boyar never felt that Daviss life had really been in danger. )? And if those initials werent enough of a tip-off, she followed the item up two days later with Studio bosses now know about K.N.s affair with S.D. In her desperation to win the love of Scottie, the expolice detective played by James Stewart, she consents to being made over by him to look more like his ide fixe. Sammy went into his imitation of white stars, like Jimmy Stewart and Jerry Lewis, and these people were in the audience. One day in early January 1958, at Hollywood Park, Cohen buttonholed Davis Sr. and said, Listen. and have turned lavender over their platinum blonde., Daviss sexual charisma had already been noticed by Confidential, the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world, in Tom Wolfes phrase. Cohn took all the credit for creating Rita Hayworthhe was also obsessed with her.

Hed keep tabs on all the writers. Within two years Davis developed throat cancer. He was making $25,000 a week at the Sands in Las Vegas, and he was about to break into television as one of the mediums first black actors to appear in a dramatic role, in Auf Wiedersehen, on General Electric Theater. .

Nobody even took one picture! Twenty years earlier he and Novak would have been mobbed. Every hooker was there, as was Bob Harrison, who published Confidential and was really just a pornographer. She wasnt ready. Part of the problem, as Sy Marsh observes, was that Sammy Davis lived in a white world. It was damned scary. And thats where Sammy is buried today. I got some terrible news for you. When his doctor told him he needed surgery to live, he knew it would mean hed never sing again. Ill have that son of a bitch back in Argentina, Cohn exploded. Not one picture, he said. Davis would see Novak on two more occasions before his death. But I have to print what I think is news., Fuck you, he said, and hung up., Sam Davis Sr. loved going to the Hollywood Park racetrack in Inglewood, as did Mickey Cohen, the West Coast gangster who had tried to take over Ben Bugsy Siegels gambling interests after the dapper Siegel had his eye shot out. He would make a point of it, he would say, Isnt that adorable? Boyar feels that he would have preferred to look like Cary Grant, but he was pretty satisfied with what he had.

Davis began having problems with his throat around 1988. He chose greatness. The late 1960s and the 1970s were unkind to Davis in other ways. He was singing to Kim Novak, sitting at a stageside table; she had just finished work on Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo, the most challenging film of her career. The name he picked was Loray White, who happened to be performing at the Silver Slipper. He had a wonderful V-shaped body, and he loved his little behind. Shirley Rhodes attended the wedding, which was held on January 10, 1958, in the Emerald Room, one of the convention rooms at the Sands Hotel. I got to the point where I wanted to get the whitest, the most famous chick in the world and just show em. Her only problem was, in the beginning, she wasnt a very good actress, and I think she knew that.. Endangered animals and their value to our world. Nat King Cole had warned him, Dont do that. Her re-emergence, however, was not entirely pleasant.

So I say, We just cant do that anymore. Sammy, what are you doing? Silber asked. Sitting in his penthouse apartment in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, one of Philippe Halsmans striking photographs of Sammy Davis dominating the room, Boyar reminisces about their long friendship. Cohn was by far the meanest. Cohn had found his blonde. What is it Sammys got that the girls go for?. They call you the Carpenter, she told him, cause you nail every girl you meet. But she always believed that Davis loved her unconditionally. When she married Davis in 1960, Twentieth Century Fox declined to renew her option, and her studio career ended. The most sublime moment in the film is when Madeleine, in an immaculate white coat, stares at the cross section of a giant sequoia tree on the California coast. Soon after the frightening events of 195758, he met the Swedish actress May Britt at the Mocambo Club on Sunset Boulevard. Judys reluctant transformation into the ghost of Madeleine is an eerie echo of her metamorphosis into a movie goddess. . .

I dont think thats the way I want to go out. Davis made the decision not to have the operation. What went wrong, only one of them could say. Kim Novak seemed to have disappeared during the Sturm und Drang of Daviss sham wedding.

. Sammy Davis Jr. was born in Harlem in 1925. I said, Harry, weve been friends for a long time. I got his uncle and his father down to a minimum. She was in makeup. Cohn blew his top. The squat, flat-roofed building on the Sunset Strip, which now houses the Comedy Store, was the hottest and most glamorous nightclub in Los Angeles. It was still the Will Mastin Trio with Sammy Davis Jr. at the time, even though Davis had started to push ahead of his father and uncle. Silber described them as just a glorified dance act at the time. But ongoing tax problems brought in the I.R.S. She agreed to that, and thats what took the heat off., Shirley Rhodes, the wife of George Rhodes, Daviss trusted and beloved music director, was one of Daviss closest friends. He was too valuable.

Novak was so overwhelmed, outclassed, and terrified that at one point, Logan had to drag her from her trailer for a crucial scene as a hundred extras waited for her in the diminishing Kansas daylight and cinematographer James Wong Howe gnashed his teeth. There were rumors that the couple was taking out a marriage license, and supposedly a clerk in Aurora found that an application had been filled out but never filed. He couldnt win.

Kasell was running Chicagos Fair Teens Club for a local department store when she discovered Novak, and helped groom her for a modeling career and a $400 scholarship to the Patricia Stevens Professional Academy. It was stunning, Boyar remembers. He called me and used a few vituperative terms. Harry Belafonte, who was appearing down the street at the Riviera, was Daviss best man. She was Columbias resident sex goddess in the 1940s, but she had a bad habit of getting married. But he was a guy you wouldnt want to meet in the street if he was after you. America was still deeply segregated. Her marriage to Khan, a notorious playboy and womanizer, kept her out of pictures for more than two years, infuriating Cohn and further alienating her fans. It was such a big night for Sammy that Janis Paige [the main act] told George Schlatter [then a show producer at Ciros], Youd better put them on as headliners. Sammy Davis was made after that., But it wasnt all roses for Davis. For the first time in my life I started putting real bullets in. It was said that Harry Cohn put more people in the cemetery than all the other moguls combined. He was playing clubs to pay off his indebtedness., It fell to Marsh to put Daviss house in order. But after a while he got used to it, and hed say, Its getting me where Im going., Boyar also feels that Davis knew how attractive he was to women. Sinatra would give him a part in the 1960 movie Oceans Eleven and pay him $100,000 for a few days work, but to earn his salary Davis had to play a singing garbageman. He used to fire people all the timeusually on Christmas Eve.. The mysterious Madeleinea creation dreamed up to mask a murder and therefore never real to begin withis uncommunicative, withdrawn, passive. When they saw Bacon talking to Novak, they practically chased him out of the station. You took no notice. In that moment, hidden in Madeleine, there is Judys masked yearning to live, to be noticed, to become real. . The marriage ended in 1968. Daviss first break in a Las Vegas hotel came in 1946 at the El Rancho. Amazingly, his voice actually improved in the last years of his life. Sammy was just a kid at heart, Silber told me at his home in North Hollywood, where hes writing a memoir about the years he spent touring with Davis. It would open up more doors to his being accepted.. As early as March 1955, it ran an article whose headline read: What Makes AVA GARDNER Run for SAMMY DAVIS JR.? Novak still wasnt ready. Sammy, too, because we didnt know who was in the next suite.. By the time Davis was appearing in Mr. She balked at being renamed Kit Marlowe, and, incredibly, she won that battle. Every time she got married, her box-office standing eroded. It was just how deep this affair went.

He ran Columbia Pictures as if it were a family business, and in a way it was, because he had wrangled control from his brother Jack, who was back on the East Coast in New York. He told Shirley Rhodes, You know, the world owes me nothing. When he first invited Altovise up to his suite, she was wary of his reputation.

He sang one song and left the stage. He would come out of the stage door having had six standing ovations and somebody would yell Nigger. There would always be something that would just cut through it all, that would just knock him down. Davis told Boyar, You know, I reached a point with the indignities, the injustices, the nastiness, the racial abuses .

Murphy would always stop on the way and buy a white rose and leave it for Sammy from her, Rhodes recalls, because thats what Sammy always gave Kim. And Sammy was a watch freakhe had maybe a couple of hundred watches. Its amazing. The man known as the greatest entertainer in the world was onstage, the smoke from his cigarette trellising the air. Sammy was like a man without a country, the actress Barbara Luna recalls. His response to that would be reflected in the title of his first book, Yes I Can. He might be her co-conspirator in saying no to Harry Cohn, no to Jean Louis, no to Muriel Robertsno to anyone who tried to put his or her stamp on her. So now I come in and I see Im paying Donjo Medlavine in Chicago. But no one could beat Harryhe was too smart, he was too sharp. I dont want to be here., Evelyn Cunningham, doyenne of the black press, who wrote a column for the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, was the first to call and congratulate Davis.

My attraction to Sammy was his talent, Burt Boyar recalls. . Sammy Davis Jr. was Kim Novaks revenge on Harry Cohn. Goldberg (Sam Giancana) in L.A.: You can tell him that Mickey says the pressure is off.

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