Product Description

He was, for decades, one of the most recognizable figures in the cultural landscape, his image epitomizing a golden age of American show business. His career spanned a lifetime, but for years he has remained hidden behind the persona he so vigorously generated, and so fiercely protected. Now, in this surprising, illuminating, and compulsively readable biography, we are taken beyond the icon, into the extraordinary, singular life of Sammy Davis, Jr.

In scrupulous detail and with stunning powers of evocation, Wil Haygood takes us back to the era of vaudeville, where it all began for four-year-old Sammy who ran out onstage one night and stole the show. From then on it was a motherless childhood on the road, singing and dancing his way across a segregated America with his father and the formidable showman Will Mastin, struggling together to survive the Depression and the demise of vaudeville itself.

With an ambition honed by poverty and an obsessive need for applause, Sammy drove his way into the nightclub circuit of the 1940s and 1950s, when, his father and Mastin aging and out of style, he slowly began to make a name for himself, hustling his way to top billing and eventually to recording contracts. From there, he was to stake his claim on Broadway, in Hollywood, and, of course, in Las Vegas.

Haygood brings Sammy’s showbiz life into full relief against the backdrop of an America in the throes of racial change. Sammy grew up trapped between the worlds of blacks and whites, with so much invested in both. He made his living entertaining white people but was often denied service in the very venues he played. Drafted into a newly integrated U.S. Army in the 1940s, he saw up close the fierce tensions that seethed below the surface. Dragged into the civil rights movement, he witnessed a hatred that often erupted into violence. In his broad and varied friendships and alliances (with Frank Sinatra; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Richard Nixon; Sidney Poitier; Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few), not to mention his romances (his relationship with Kim Novak and his marriage to the blond beauty May Britt drew death threats), he forged uncharted paths across racial lines. Admired and reviled by both blacks and whites, he was tormented all his life by raging insecurities, and never quite came to terms with his own skin. Ultimately, his only true sense of his identity was as a performer.

Based on painstaking research and more than 250 interviews, Wil Haygood brings us a sweeping and vivid cultural history of the twentieth century, chronicling black entertainment from its beginnings and the birth of popular culture as we know it. In Black and White transcends simple biography to become an important record, both celebratory and elegiacal, of a vanished America and its greatest entertainer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1206387 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this moving, exhaustive life of one of America's greatest entertainers, Haygood (King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.) casts Sammy Davis Jr. as a man shifting between identities, between the worlds of black people and white people. Born into vaudeville and raised by his grandmother and vaudevillian father, Davis (1925-1990) never knew the world off the stage, never experienced a loving mother and never experienced racism-until his stint in the army during WWII. Sammy spent most of his life before the army above the Mason-Dixon line in the protective bosom of the Will Mastin Trio (of which he and his father were two-thirds) and experienced his first love with a white woman in Montreal. From here, Haygood makes clear, Sammy wanted to be white-he had mostly white friends and courted ivory-skinned, blond women. As his career-and his determination to be accepted by white America-grew, so did problems with the media, including death threats from angry Southerners and Hollywood moguls not wanting the reputation of their white starlets (e.g., Kim Novak) to be tainted by Davis. Haygood shows how Davis desperately needed love and attention, so much so that he switched allegiances, first backing Kennedy and marching with Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, then, years later, being seen on national TV giving a hug to Archie Bunker (while doing a cameo) and Richard Nixon (while campaigning for him). Haygood's reporting and powerful prose reveal Davis's career against the backdrop of the swinging '60s and the Rat Pack (with Sinatra as a mighty presence in Davis's life) and Davis as a tragically complex man.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Sammy Davis Jr. never went to school. His show business career began at age 5, with the Will Mastin Trio, and lasted until his death at 64. Davis' life story is all about the American Dream (he called his autobiography Yes, I Can!), but as Haygood tells it in this remarkably rich biography, it is dream mixed with nightmare, illusion with reality, the story of a black man "with his face pressed against the white world." Did Davis want to be white? Haygood tackles this politically charged question straight on, delivering answers as complex as the history of race relations. Davis, Haygood argues, knew no world beyond the footlights; he created himself in the image of Hollywood stardom, and yes, that image was unquestionably white: Bogart, Cagney, Cooper (all of whom Davis would later impersonate on stage), and of course, Sinatra, Sammy's idol. (The women were white, too, and usually blonde, a fact not lost on the young Davis, who wooed Kim Novak and married Scandinavian Maei Britt.) While Haygood's psychosexual analysis of Davis' life is unfailingly perceptive, it doesn't overwhelm the book. He vividly re-creates the world of vaudeville, where Davis got his start, and he tracks the performer's career as tap dancer, impressionist, singer, and actor, emphasizing the remarkable talent of this child prodigy turned Vegas headliner. As he follows Davis from one unbridled enthusiasm to another (from black power to Richard Nixon, from Judaism to devil worship), Haygood never loses sight of Sammy the entertainer, indefatigable on stage and insatiable in his craving for adoration. A fascinating American life story, brilliantly told. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Back Cover
"In this moving, exhaustive life of one of America’s greatest entertainers, Haygood (King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.) casts Sammy Davis Jr. as a man shifting between identities, between the worlds of black people and white people."
--Publishers Weekly (starred)

"An American life considered with art and understanding in a major work of biography."
--Kirkus (Starred)

"A fascinating American life story, brilliantly told."
--Booklist (Starred and Boxed)

"In Black and White… presents a full picture of one of the most recognizable entertainers of the last century?--a picture with all the shades of gray. In reading In Black and White, it becomes clear why author Wil Haygood not only has won honors for his journalism, but also high praise for his work in biography."
--Ebony
“Reading this book is a very moving experience: because of the power of Wil Haygood’s prose; because of the compassion with which he writes about his complex and tortured subject; and because of the penetrating historical insight — indeed brilliance–with which he weaves Sammy Davis Jr.’s life and the poignant and fascinating story of black entertainment in America into the whole tragedy of race relations in our country. Mr. Haygood writes with great power and great compassion, and he has created a book that I couldn’t put down and that I will never forget.”
--Robert A. Caro

"... [Haygood] does a vivid job of conjuring the many worlds [Sammy Davis, Jr.] traversed, and shows how the issue of race, in his own mind and in the minds of his fans and detractors, shaped his career and life."
–Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"[Haygood] writes like a demon, with perspective, understanding and compassion to burn. It's a pleasure not to be missed."
–Jan Herman, Chicago Sun-Times