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

together, it was holy writ” to the Boyars, says Peggy Miller. “They were a strange pair,” Roger Straus would have to admit, albeit with affection.
    Every time the Boyars received the book back from an editor, they reread it. And after another reading, they realized they had more stuff to add! More words, more Sammy scenes, more Sammy! The manuscript ballooned from a thousand to twelve hundred pages. Finally, an exasperated Roger Straus told the Boyars that he’d edit it himself.
    So the book had an editor. But the 1964 publishing season had already come and gone. Straus announced that the book would be published the following year.
    With the head of the publishing house hovering with them, the Boyars finally relaxed, and they accepted Straus’s editing. All, at long last, went muchsmoother in trimming a manuscript that at times reached nearly two feet high. Straus did not toy with the stylistic tone of the book. He made cuts, but they were not radical in any sense. “We went through about five editors and couldn’t work with any of them,” Boyar would recall years later, with not a trace of apology in his voice. He and Jane found Roger Straus much more to their liking: “We answered every question of Roger’s, and it went great.” Peggy Miller figured she knew why the Boyars were amenable to Straus: “He was the head of the company. They had no place else to go.”
    The book was still in search of a title. Among those thought of and discarded were
Troubled Man, Excuse Me for Living
, and, in honor of Sammy’s favorite drink,
Bourbon and Coke
—the latter the silliest and offered by May Britt, Sammy’s gorgeous, Swedish-born wife.
    One finds, however, in the
Golden Boy
script—the play Sammy was appearing in during the behind-the-scenes selling of his book—a genesis for the eventual title. In the script, Sammy, as Joe, asks the stage chorus a litany of questions.
    J OE :
    Can I get what I want to get?
    G ROUP :
    Yes, you can!
    J OE :
    Can I have a car
    With a built-in bar?
    G ROUP :
    Yes, you can!
    J OE :
    And a color TV
    And a Playboy key!
    G ROUP :
    Yes, you can!
    Sammy liked that theme of fighting for his dreams to come true—in both the script and his own life. He had been told he couldn’t be a mimic, couldn’t mime white people, couldn’t hop from the stage into the band and play all those different instruments, couldn’t do Broadway. And he had been told that because of his height and his skin color, he couldn’t enjoy the full benefits of being an American entertainment star. He had been told he couldn’t be a Negro cowboy, couldn’t date white women, couldn’t date actress Kim Novak, couldn’t marry May Britt. He had been told he couldn’t spend money like Sinatra spent money.
    “Yes, you can!”
    For literary purposes, the title became
Yes I Can
. And it had muscle. It stood up. It had affirmation.
    By the summer of 1965—Sammy was now in full flight as the star of
Golden Boy
—his book was listed as a fall arrival from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Among other titles on the distinguished publisher’s list were
The Old Glory
, by Robert Lowell,
The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1930–1963
, by Edmund Wilson,
To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings
, by T. S. Eliot,
The Myth and the Powerhouse
, by Philip Rahv, and
Aura
, by Carlos Fuentes. The unpublished Boyars were suddenly swimming in very deep and warm waters.
    It had been nearly six years since the book idea had been born. The Boyars were so excited that they made a special trip to the Greenwich Village bindery where the books were being printed, and they saw the first copies rolling off the press. “We were there the night they put dust jackets on them,” Boyar recalls. They grabbed up as many books as they could carry and rushed for a taxi to get them uptown to the Majestic, where Sammy would be. Inside the theater, inside the dressing room, they gave copies of the book to Sammy, who shrieked with delight.