The multitalented Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr. was born in Harlem in 1925. Dubbed “the world’s greatest entertainer,” Davis made his film debut at age seven in the Ethel Waters film Rufus Jones for President. A singer, dancer, impressionist, drummer and actor, Davis was irrepressible, and did not allow racism or even the loss of an eye to stop him.

Behind his frenetic movement was a brilliant, studious man who soaked up knowledge from his chosen teachers—including Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, and Jack Benny. In his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr., Davis candidly recounted everything from the racist violence he faced in the army to his conversion to Judaism, which began with the gift of a mezuzah from the comedian Eddie Cantor.

But the performer also had a destructive side, further recounted in his second autobiography, Why Me?—which led Davis to suffer a heart attack onstage, drunkenly propose to his first wife, and spend thousands of dollars on bespoke suits and fine jewelry. Driving it all was a lifelong battle for acceptance and love. “I’ve got to be a star!” he wrote. “I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.”

The Natural

The son of a showgirl and a dancer, Davis traveled the country with his father, Sam Davis Sr. and “Uncle” Will Mastin. His schooling was the hundreds of hours he spent backstage studying his mentors’ every move. Davis was just a toddler when Mastin first put the expressive child onstage, sitting him in the lap of a female performer and coaching the boy from the wings. As Davis later recalled:

The prima donna hit a high note and Will held his nose. I held my nose, too. But Will's faces weren't half as funny as the prima donna’s so I began copying hers instead: when her lips trembled, my lips trembled, and I followed her all the way from a heaving bosom to a quivering jaw. The people out front were watching me, laughing. When we got off, Will knelt to my height. “Listen to that applause, Sammy”…My father was crouched beside me, too, smiling…“You’re a born mugger, son, a born mugger.”

Davis was officially made part of the act, eventually renamed the Will Mastin Trio. He performed in 50 cities by the time he was four, coddled by his fellow vaudevillians as the trio traveled from one rooming house to another. “I never felt I was without a home,” he writes. “We carried our roots with us: our same boxes of make-up in front of the mirrors, our same clothes hanging on iron pipe racks with our same shoes under them.”

Two of a Kind

In the late 1940s, the Will Mastin Trio got a huge break: They were booked as part of a Mickey Rooney traveling review. Davis soaked up Rooney’s every move onstage, marveling at his ability to “touch” the audience. “When Mickey was on stage, he might have pulled levers labeled ‘cry’ and ‘laugh.’ He could work the audience like clay,” Davis recalled. Rooney was equally impressed with Davis’s talent, and soon added Davis’s impressions to the act, giving him billing on posters announcing the show. When Davis thanked him, Rooney brushed it off: “Let’s not get sickening about this,” he said.

The two—a pair of slightly built, precocious pros who never had childhoods—also became great pals. “Between shows we played gin and there was always a record player going,” Davis wrote. “He had a wire recorder and we ad-libbed all kinds of bits into it, and wrote songs, including an entire score for a musical.” One night at a party, a protective Rooney slugged a man who had launched a racist tirade against Davis; it took four men to drag the actor away. At the end of the tour, the friends said their farewells: a wistful Rooney on the descent, Davis on the ascent. “So long, buddy,” Rooney said. “What the hell, maybe one day we’ll get our innings.”

The Accident

In November 1954, Davis and the Will Mastin Trio’s decades-long dreams were finally coming true. They were headlining for $7,500 a week at the New Frontier Casino, and had even been offered suites in the hotel—instead of facing the usual indignity of staying in the “colored” part of town. To celebrate, Sam Sr. and Will presented Davis with a brand-new Cadillac, complete with his initials painted on the passenger side door. After a night performing and gambling, Davis drove to L.A for a recording session. He later recalled:

It was one of those magnificent mornings when you can only remember the good things…My fingers fit perfectly into the ridges around the steering wheel, and the clear desert air streaming in through the window was wrapping itself around my face like some gorgeous, swinging chick giving me a facial. I turned on the radio, it filled the car with music, and I heard my own voice singing “Hey, There.”

This magic ride was shattered when the Cadillac rammed into a woman making an ill-advised U-turn. Davis’s face slammed into a protruding horn button in the center of the driver’s wheel. (That model would soon be redesigned because of his accident.) He staggered out of the car, focused on his assistant, Charley, whose jaw was horrifically hanging slack, blood pouring out of it.

“He pointed to my face, closed his eyes and moaned,” Davis writes. “I reached up. As I ran my hand over my cheek, I felt my eye hanging there by a string. Frantically I tried to stuff it back in, like if I could do that it would stay there and nobody would know, it would be as though nothing had happened. The ground went out from under me and I was on my knees. ‘Don’t let me go blind. Please, God, don’t take it all away.’”

Davis would end up losing his left eye. He had to painstakingly relearn his balance, practicing his moves in Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs pool as he recuperated. At his first nightclub engagement at Ciro’s weeks after the accident, everyone from Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, June Allyson and, of course, Frank Sinatra were there to cheer him on. “Never had I felt so much a part of show business,” he writes. “All that it had given me materially was nothing compared to kinship I felt for all these people.”

Missed Connections

Davis would forever be haunted by the way he treated movie icon James Dean, who shyly frequented his raucous Hollywood house parties. Davis would tease Dean about his lack of interest in fun and chicks; Dean would reply by explaining, “Man, the only thing I want to be is an actor.”

The two bonded when Dean asked Davis, an avid firearms enthusiast, how to draw a gun. Davis complied, but mocked him along the way. According to Davis, the last time the two met was on Mulholland Drive. As Davis drove the winding road a Porsche passed by, its horn honking:

It was Jimmy Dean. He had Ursula Andress with him. We skidded to a halt in the middle of the road and he jumped out of the car…a cowboy hat and a rope in his hand. “Hey, Sam, I gotta show you something I learned in Texas.” In two seconds he had the rope spinning…“And I’m getting a little faster with the guns.”

When Davis heard of Dean’s death in 1955, he was brokenhearted, recognizing he had never given Dean a chance. “I did to him what I wouldn’t want anybody to do to me. I tolerated him. I treated him like a kook,” Davis writes. “He was a sensitive man…And I made jokes about him. How could I have judged a man before I knew what he was all about? Me, who’s suffered from prejudgment. I wish I’d said to him, ‘I know you were my friend and I wish I’d been your friend, too.’”

The Politics of Love

According to Davis, his legendary 1957 romance with movie star Kim Novak was equal parts civil disobedience and love affair. “Through me, she was rebelling against the people who made rules for her,” he writes. “And wasn’t I doing the same thing?” Davis would hide, crouching under the car seat on his way to meet Novak, disgusted with the prejudice which forced him to behave in such a way.

But there was no hiding in 1960, when Davis and the equally blonde Swedish actress May Britt fell deeply in love. They got engaged at the height of Rat Pack mania, and Frank Sinatra was slated to be Davis’s best man at their wedding in October.

But the couple’s romance spelled trouble for the Kennedy campaign, in which Sinatra was heavily involved. That July, at the Democratic National Convention, Davis stood onstage with his friends Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Peter Lawford, and Sinatra. “My name was called and I stepped forward. The applause rang out clear and loud across the hall. Then there was a loud “Boooooooooo.”…My head snapped upward involuntarily and almost every head in the hall turned with mine, searching,” Davis remembered. “It was the Mississippi block.”

The Kennedy campaign soon began to get hate mail directed at Davis, and Sinatra was pressured to not attend his friend’s wedding. Finally, Davis (who was receiving daily death threats) called Sinatra. “Look, what the hell,” he said. “It’s best that we postpone it ’til after the election.” Sinatra began to cry, touched by Davis’s gesture. The wedding was rescheduled for November 13, 1960—five days after election day. Kennedy won, and Sinatra was best man.

That’s Entertainment!

In 1960, Davis, an enthusiastic Anglophile (Jerry Lewis and Milton Berle would both counsel him to cool it with his “Duke of Windsor” accent), was thrilled to be invited to perform for Queen Elizabeth II at a Command Performance in London. As he nervously waited backstage, he was shocked to hear Nat King Cole give a subpar performance, his silky voice cracking. “He came back upstairs, dripping wet, shaking his head miserably, ‘I don’t never want to do that no more! Not ever!’” Cole exclaimed, before giving Sammy some advice:

“Do you remember what that cat told us before about don’t look at the Queen? Forget it! Damn protocol. You give her a sneaky little peek out of your good eye, otherwise you’ll be looking for her when you should be worrying about your song…I didn’t do none of that. That’s how I know you should do it.”

Davis did as he was advised—and gave the performance of a lifetime. The queen even put down her fan to applaud. Backstage, Cole lifted Davis off the floor, laughing. “You did it, you dog, I knew you’d do it.” An ebullient Davis began to dress for the finale, only to find his costume and top hat much too big. Always a pro, he stuffed Kleenex in the hat so that it would fit and made his way onstage. As the cast began to sing “God Save the Queen,” Davis took off his hat…only for the Kleenex to sail out over the orchestra pit into the audience and hit a man square in the face.

After the show, a mortified Davis watched nervously as Queen Elizabeth greeted the performers, hoping against hope that despite his snafu he would be one of the few whose hand she shook. “The Queen of England was standing in front of me, smiling warmly, offering me her hand, and I was shaking hands with her, addressing her as ‘Your Majesty’—a phrase, the grandeur of which one can never fully understand until one is saying it to a person who is actually entitled to it.”

That’s show business for you.

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