After the show, he heads backstage to pay his respects, and asks Sammy to come see him perform.Ībout a week passes. He goes to Harlem to see the Will Maston Trio and is blown away by Sammy’s talent. Some time in the late 1940s, Frank appeared in a theater in New York during the lull of his career. It was almost like, if you show them Paris, how do you get them to go back to the farm?”įrom the beginning, Sinatra stood up for Sammy. And so to go back to the chitlin circuit, the mostly black clubs in run down parts of town, that didn’t really drive him. “I think Sammy had seen, through Frank Sinatra’s eyes, white nightclub living, and how exuberant it was, how stylish it was, how sophisticated it was,” said Wil Haygood, an author who penned what’s considered the preeminent biography on Sammy, called “In Black and White.” “He had seen that when he was 18, 19 years old. Sinatra was, as longtime friend Arthur Silber Jr. Sammy would clip out articles about his idol and put them in a scrapbook to show his grandmother. It was the stage, where he performed for the same people who broke his nose and painted “N*****” in white paint on his chest, that provided solace.Īs he barnstormed the country, Sammy became infatuated with the biggest stars of the day. Next up was a stint in the Army, where he was harassed and savagely beaten by the white members of his patrol. Sometimes that was a bus depot, and sometimes it was a makeshift hotel room like the one above the Chi-Chi. He spent his early life on the road without a real relationship with his mother, performing shows in small clubs above the Mason Dixon line and sleeping wherever they were allowed.
This was Sammy’s reality - he was a black entertainer in a whitewashed world, a man who owed much of his career to the white Frank Sinatra despite being a more versatile performer, and someone who became one of the most popular mainstream entertainers in the world after starting his performing career in blackface. It also wasn’t atypical that when Sammy performed at the Chi Chi with his uncle and father as a teenager in the early 1940s - one of the first members of the Rat Pack to perform in Palm Springs - he had to stay in a little room above the stage constructed specifically for black Americans. After all, the Chi Chi was a club that wouldn’t serve Native Americans drinks in glasses, as managers were instructed to serve them away from the main drag of the bar in old coffee cups. There were plenty of doctors in the audience, because his audience was entirely white. He kept the dance and impersonation going all the way off the stage.
Discreetly, he whispered to a nearby friend, “Go get a doctor, go get a doctor,” without ever stopping the routine.
THE RAT PACK KING OF THE ROAD SKIN
A five-inch circle of skin on his back calf began to burn. But, by accident, the pistol was already cocked, so when he went to pull it, the powder from the blank shot out the end of the holster and onto his mohair tuxedo pants.
Like the end to a lot of shows, Sammy’d planned on ending his Chi Chi set with a quick-draw and firing of the gun. The quick pull was a big part of his act. Sammy was one of the fastest draws in Hollywood. 45 bullet is big enough that if it was shot into someone’s shoulder, it wouldn’t just go through - it would take the whole shoulder with it. One night in the mid-1960s, with Sammy nearing the end of another sold-out show at the Chi-Chi, he finished a song and started a Jerry Lewis impersonation while dancing off the stage.
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