In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior Read Online Free PDF Page A

he knows what Sammy Davis is all about,” recalls Boyar.
    There was something else about the manuscript that rubbed Robbins the wrong way. He felt Davis had been far too quiet in the book about civil rights. He wanted anger, heat on the page. He wanted to know where Sammy’s heart lay. “Henry said, ‘Sammy’s got to fight back sooner. Everybody’s going to think Sammy’s a coward. Sammy’s got to hit back sooner.’ ”
    The Boyars sat and listened to Henry Robbins. And they didn’t like what they were hearing. It was their Sammy, and they felt Robbins simply did not know their Sammy. Never mind that they were unpublished, that this was their first book; they still could not abide by Robbins’s suggestions, his blunt orders. Robbins grew irritated. “If you don’t,” Robbins said to the Boyars about positioning Sammy as more of a rebel in the book, “people will see Sammy as a coward.” Burt Boyar felt Henry Robbins was talking about a Sammy Davis, Jr., that simply did not exist. “Don’t try to change the nature of this man,” Boyar finally told Robbins. “He is what he is.”
    Robbins was not finished. He thought he might be able to get the Boyars to understand him if he got them in less formal surroundings, so he invited them to his apartment, where—through a meal and the flowing of wine—they took up their discussion anew. But Robbins could sense something: there was very little movement on the part of the Boyars. Finally, Burt Boyar had had enough. He did not want to discuss it further. He feigned near drunkenness and made his way to the door, Jane in lockstep with him.
    Robbins simply “didn’t understand” Sammy, says Boyar. “He was not editing; he was trying to write. He was trying to write Sammy instead of edit him.”
    Inside the publishing house, there was a sense that the Boyars were becoming oddly obstinate. “They were like two parakeets in a cage,” remembers Roger Straus.
    Peggy Miller, assistant to Straus, sensed Robbins’s irritation. “He threw up his hands and said, ‘I can’t deal with these people,’ ” she says. Miller asserts thatthe Boyars were well liked and quite charming, but they had a flaw that could stymie a publishing house: they were obsessive about every little change—commas, semicolons—that might be made to the manuscript. Why, they had been to the nightclubs! They had whirred along in the limo with Sammy through the streets of Manhattan!
    Despite the problems, Roger Straus announced plans to publish the (still-untitled) book in 1964.
    The manuscript was passed from Henry Robbins to Sigrid Rock. Rock had been a writer at the
New Yorker
before turning to editing. “She was a tough-looking blonde,” Straus later remembered of Rock, whom the publishing house had not worked with that often. She began editing the book by making cuts, up to twenty-five pages by the time the Boyars had received her first version. The cuts astonished them, and they felt they were drastic. Actually, they were merely a few pages here and a few pages there, trimming the fat from a huge manuscript. But the Boyars had become too close to the material. Any cut seemed like an assault on their love for Sammy. The Boyars decided they would have to have a very serious discussion with Sigrid Rock. The discussion never took place. Rock, in the midst of editing the Sammy book, attempted suicide: she had been going through a painful romantic breakup. She survived the suicide attempt, but Farrar, Straus thought it best to take the book away from her. The Boyars hardly complained.
    Straus was indeed charmed by the Boyars. They finished each other’s sentences; they often wore his-and-her matching outfits in the manner of young fraternal twins. They were doubly obsessive about their book. But, in time, enough seemed to be more than enough. “Because they were together all the time,” says Straus, “they always talked about the book, nitpicking.”
    “Having put this manuscript