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. And thats where Sammy is buried today.

It was just how deep this affair went. I dont care anymore about me.. Whenever the Will Mastin Trio appeared onstage, Davis was always in the middle, between Sam senior and Mastin. Cohen, barely five feet five, was a hotheaded thug with a taste for beautifully tailored suits. She went public with her salary disputes with the studio. It didnt matter to Cohn that lavender was a color that Novak loathed. They did close to an hour. We used to stage fightswe were really good at it, especially fast draw and gunplay. It started in 1957 at Chicagos most famous nightclub, Chez Paree. You can relax., Burt Boyar never felt that Daviss life had really been in danger. On a tour of Australia, Davis collapsed from sheer exhaustion. He just understood everything about show business. 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. Shirley Rhodes remembers that Novak came to the hospital when Sammy was dying. Sammy liked his lookshe knew his face was ugly, but he worked on his body.

The Boyars would eventually collaborate with Davis on his two best-selling autobiographical books, Yes I Can in 1965 and, 24 years later, Why Me? He never personalized autographs to anyone, because he couldnt spell peoples names and he was embarrassed., Davis encountered serious racism in the army. When Davis came back from the dance floor, he was incredulous. Davis and Novak went to great lengths to evade both the press and Cohns spies, usually having quiet, intimate dinners together. An aide leaned over and whispered in his ear what hed heard about Novak and Davis, and Cohn started to fume. By the mid-1930s, Cohn had nurtured Columbia from a low-rent, B-movie studio on Hollywoods Poverty Row, a block off Sunset, into a major Hollywood film studio. But there was a more intractable problem in the making: she had to compete with his need to perform, and that need ultimately won out. What began as a boldface item in Dorothy Kilgallens gossip column in the New York Journal-American threatened to become a national scandal on the eve of Americas long struggle for civil rights. Back at Daviss suite, they got a call from Dr. Altovise Davis, naturally, feels different about the relationship. It always hurt him. Marsh took him to a specialist, who found that his constant smoking and singing had caused inflamed nodes on his vocal cords. She was a singer, an attractive young woman originally from Houston, a member of the black bourgeoisie. .

Goldberg, Giancanas code name whenever he was in Las Vegas dating the singer Phyllis McGuire. I must have had a knockdown, drag-out fight every two days, he told the Boyars during the writing of Yes I Can. He was in the dark and suddenly the spotlight picked him uphe was electric, he was hot, it was almost a sexual thing. He even remembered what car she was in. The next morning, the reporter was at Union Station to meet her. I knew we were in trouble thenthat was the beginning. Rhodes remembers, She went crazy with the money. Davis was so grateful to her that he gave her a blond mink stole and a stunning ring of rose-cut diamonds and emerald baguettes. He kept a framed photograph of his hero, Benito Mussolini, on his massive desk and had his office decorated to look like Il Duces. To show everybody, yeah, guess what Im doing with her! 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. Paperback edition art has a different look, but the content is the same! . All of them. I could see right from the beginning that they were getting along in an intense way, and that was the beginning of the relationship., Novak had also asked to meet Davisand she wasnt alone in being attracted by his intense magnetism. Jack Haley Jr., who was producing the Academy Awards broadcast that year, had arranged to take Novak to the gala event. People used to say, Im going to beat Harry, Sidney recalls. He chose greatness. I tell you what, theres one chance, Cohen told him. Judys reluctant transformation into the ghost of Madeleine is an eerie echo of her metamorphosis into a movie goddess. I go to Medlavine, whos getting not a lot, say $500 a week, but he likes that money coming in. She visited him the day after Davis announced the engagement from the stage at the Sands. What went wrong, only one of them could say. All rights reserved. Another big-time gossip columnist who got into the act was Irv Kupcinet, who wrote Kups Column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Novak, however, found ways to dig in her heels and refuse to be completely made over by Cohn. I was sitting at a table with Clark Gable and William Holden and the Humphrey Bogarts, and the Will Mastin Trio came out with Sammy Davis. He was still smarting from having let Marilyn Monroe slip away: unimpressed by her beauty, he had neglected in 1948 to renew her initial six-month contract. . With a black-gloved hand, Madeleine touches a ring on the ancient tree and whispers, Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died. New Years/ Sinter Klaas (Dutch Christmas), The ripple effect of kindness and small deeds/ Endings and new beginnings. Thats when Silber noticed a private telephone being installed in Daviss suite. I got some terrible news for you. He watched as Davis, looking seignorial in his white terry-cloth robe, riffled through his address book. Davis left Altovise a $2.1 million life-insurance settlement and the beautiful house on Summit Drive, which he had worked his whole life to own. They sold all the stuff he hadGary Coopers hat, Gene Kellys shoes. It was damned scary. I realize the position youre in with the studio. But Novak insisted that the studio didnt own her, and she invited Davis over to her house in Beverly Hills for a spaghetti dinner. He couldnt win. Daviss first break in a Las Vegas hotel came in 1946 at the El Rancho. She balked at being renamed Kit Marlowe, and, incredibly, she won that battle. Sammy had arranged that Will Mastin would be buried here, on the left, his father was buried on the right, and the plot in the center was left open. at the end. His appearance in 1958 on General Electric Theater was almost canceled because the sponsors threatened to pull out for fear of alienating audiences south of the Mason-Dixon line. Kim Novak was Harry Cohns revenge on Rita Hayworth. Since there was already a Marilyn, the first thing that had to go was her name. Some of my friends wouldnt even return my telephone calls. Novaks biographer, Peter Harry Brown, always felt that it was Cohn who was the villain of the piece. Sy Marsh, a top William Morris agent who left the agency to become Daviss business partner, says that till the day he died he could sign his name, but he couldnt write. Have You Heard the Latest About SAMMY DAVIS JR.? First he got rid of some of the paid entourage; then he went around to the various casino owners to whom Sammy owed money. A decade later, those present still want to know what each man wanted from the other. And Sammy was a watch freakhe had maybe a couple of hundred watches. It was stunning, Boyar remembers. Youre burning your vocal cords with all that heatyoure making it worse. But nothing could stop himhe did it for the theatrical effect. Ill give him 24 hours. You had to see him: the gorgeous shirt, the cuff links, the way everything billowed. A former dancer, she became involved with Davis during the London run of Golden Boy in 1968, when she played his sister in the musical.

The mysterious Madeleinea creation dreamed up to mask a murder and therefore never real to begin withis uncommunicative, withdrawn, passive. The F.B.I, was still keeping track of lynchings. Novak virtually left Hollywood in 1962 and, in some sense, returned to being Marilyn Novak. 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. 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. Davis gave her a call, and she went over to his suite.

Wonderful, Mastin and Sam Davis Sr. were still part of the act, but everybody knew that they had stayed on too long. Every place Sammy played, the Copacabana, the Chez Paree, the Latin Quarter, the Latin Casino in Philadelphia, all these places were owned by the guys, and they couldnt afford to let Sammy get hurt. But Sy Marsh insists to this day that Sammy was inches away from getting killed.. The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. 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. But women knew better. The director George Sidney, who made The Eddy Duchin Story, Jeanne Eagels, and Pal Joey, all with Novak at Columbia Pictures, became one of Cohns most trusted intimates. Sammy has to get marriedto a colored girl., Silber was with Davis at the Sands Hotel when the phone call came. Haley recalls taking her to Daviss house so they could all go to the Academy Awards together. Frank knew this was big trouble. Novaks career went into decline after Cohns death. Sammy, too, because we didnt know who was in the next suite.. When Marsh signed on as his business partner, he discovered that Davis was deep in debt. In 1957, Sammy Davis Jr. was at the height of his powers and his popularity. Though the director never publicly acknowledged her valuable contribution, Novak gave the richest performance of her career in Vertigoshe is almost unbearably affecting as the lonely Judy, who, like Madge in Picnic, wants to be cherished not for how she looks but for herself. But there was always an undercurrent of indebtedness in their relationship. Could it be that Sinatra was sore over Daviss dalliances with his former wife Ava Gardner? . Just two years earlier, all but three southern U.S. senators had signed a document known as the Southern Manifesto, which equated school integration with subversion of the Constitution. (The maverick senators were Lyndon B. Johnson and the two senators from Tennessee, Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver.) Cohn blew his top. Rolexes, Cartiers, what have you. As one of Daviss oldest friends observed, The I.R.S. When he first invited Altovise up to his suite, she was wary of his reputation. In that era, Cohn thought, Whos going to go see a movie star whos married to a black man? He was pulling her across the bridge in her beautiful dress, and she was fighting him, protesting, Im not ready, Im not ready! With the Boyars, Davis ventured into New York establishments that had previously been closed to him. Heres a man dying of throat cancer, and his voice was glorious, like a nightingale. Instead, Cohn decided to get back at Hayworth. 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. 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. So now I come in and I see Im paying Donjo Medlavine in Chicago. Sammy Davis Jr. was born in Harlem in 1925. . He had a liver that just defied the doctorsnobody knows how he stayed alive, Silber says. Every club wanted him, so they would say, Here, Sammy, take $5,000. So he wouldand then he owed them [an engagement]. The studio contoured her figure by encouraging her to purge 15 pounds. Then Ill do it. Thats the reason he married Altovise Gore, in Marshs opinion. When Cohn found out about Kim and Sammy, he put a contract outnot to kill him, really, but to break both his legs and to put out his other eye., We had to help ourselves, we had to do some straightening out, Silber says. But he was a guy you wouldnt want to meet in the street if he was after you.

Hed never been out of debt in his life, Marsh realized. 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 two of them went out in the backyard and Altovise and I went in the other room, and we let them talk. Ironically, the black press didnt always celebrate Daviss breaking of the color line. . Theyre buried that way, out in Forest Lawn, notes Boyar. That night would be the first and virtually the last time that Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. would be seen in public together. 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. 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. . James Bacon, one of the first West Coast reporters to get wind of Novaks affair, called Novaks family in Chicago and was told by her father, Joe, that the star was returning to Los Angeles on the Union Pacific train. The good news was that she had become Mrs. Sammy Davis Jr. He just pulled her across the bridge and said, Get in that goddamned boat.. He knew that Sinatra wouldnt have let him out of his engagement at the Sands, even for one night. Run time is about 13 minutes. But ongoing tax problems brought in the I.R.S. And in the following year, S-H-H! She had Harry Cohnwe all knew that, we werent blind. 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.

Then they changed her hair, dyeing it three shades of blond at once. So I say, We just cant do that anymore. Endangered animals and their value to our world. Six months later he paid her $25,000 to divorce him, but it would take him three years to extricate himself from the marriage. His personal charisma was so great, his stage presence so sexually charged, that women were outrageously drawn to him. After Hayworth returned to Hollywood in 1951. Kim Novak seemed to have disappeared during the Sturm und Drang of Daviss sham wedding. She had always acknowledged his instinct for finding the right properties and felt that once he was gone nobody knew what to do with her at the studio. You can mention them now: Sam Giancana. He was out of sync with the new music. hit him in the face with a shovel, Davis was devastated. 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. When they saw Bacon talking to Novak, they practically chased him out of the station. I think Vegas was the same way. With Sinatras help, Davis was finally given a suite at the Sands Hotel. When Kilgallens item appeared, Davis called Novak and apologized, reassuring her that hed had nothing to do with it. But Sammy Davis Jr. threw him completely. Men seemed to consider Davis ugly, because he was short and slight, his features flattened. She was nervous and intimidated because she was working with experienced Broadway stage actors, but she had something going for her besides her beauty. Cohn had found his blonde. It was all kisses and hugs and it didnt mean rat shit, remembers Tony Curtis. Davis liked to inhale cigarette smoke in the middle of a song and exhale with the note and the smoke pouring out. I said, Harry, weve been friends for a long time. 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. Sam asked me, begged me, to go for him, Silber recalls, but I didnt want to go. Josh Logan kept saying, Where the hell is she? He finally got on the megaphone and yelled, Kim, get your ass over here! He charged across the bridge with all the other actors holding their breath.



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