Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: The following podcast contains explicit language.
Speaker 3: I knew him, man O Jang goes in, He danced
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 4: And worn not shoes.
Speaker 2: Sammy Davis Junior was one of the world's greatest entertainers.
Speaker 2: He was Sammy the way Cher was Cher or Elvis
Speaker 2: was Elvis, five foot five, barely skinny as a pencil,
Speaker 2: oversized sunglasses, jewelry hanging off him like Christmas ornaments. He
Speaker 2: lived off nicotine and Vermuth, never wore the same suit twice,
Speaker 2: made a fortune, died, broke that kind of life.
Speaker 5: Then he would likely judge now.
Speaker 2: A singer, a dancer, a master impressionist, with a famous
Speaker 2: exaggerated laugh that unfolded in three acts, the eyes closed
Speaker 2: in delight, the full body convulsion, the three step stagger.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy two, at the height of his fame,
Speaker 2: Sammy went to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach.
Speaker 2: Flew there on a private jet owned by an oil company,
Speaker 2: took a suite at the Playboy Hotel. On the opening
Speaker 2: night of the convention, he sat in the private box
Speaker 2: of the Republican presidential nominee, Richard Nixon. On a second
Speaker 2: night of the Convention, Davis pled a concert for the
Speaker 2: Republican Youth in a shirt opened to his navel and
Speaker 2: skin tight pants. He was halfway through his set when
Speaker 2: suddenly people started chanting four more years. The cheers were
Speaker 2: for Nixon, fresh from accepting the Republican nomination. He was
Speaker 2: crashing the party. Davis held up his hand acquiet the crowd,
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen. The President and the future President of
Speaker 2: the United States of America p pneumonia.
Speaker 6: I am opposed to bussing for the purpose of achieving
Speaker 6: racial balance in our schools. I have spoken out against
Speaker 6: bussing scores of times over many years.
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon was, in nineteen seventy two, the leading practitioner
Speaker 2: of what was known as the Southern Strategy, the attempt
Speaker 2: to use racist appeals to win over Southern white voters
Speaker 2: to the Republican Party. He nominated two Southerners to the
Speaker 2: Supreme Court, men who were such committed segregationists and so
Speaker 2: deeply unqualified that the Senate wouldn't confirm them. In the
Speaker 2: privacy of the Oval office, Nixon referred to black people
Speaker 2: as niggers and jigaboos. He did his best to delay
Speaker 2: the integration of American public schools. He once complained to
Speaker 2: one of his aides that the anti poverty programs established
Speaker 2: by his predecessors were a waste of money because African
Speaker 2: Americans were genetically inferior. It was just four years since
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King Junior was shot in Memphis, and the
Speaker 2: president seemed bent on reversing everything the civil rights movement
Speaker 2: had fought for black people in nineteen seventy two. Did
Speaker 2: not like Richard Nixon, that is, except for one of
Speaker 2: the most famous black men in the country, Sammy Davis Junior,
Speaker 2: who sat in the Nixon family box, performed at the
Speaker 2: Nixon coronation, and who crossed the stage and rapped one
Speaker 2: of the most famously chilly and awkward of all presidents
Speaker 2: in a joyful, excited, loving hug. Let me read to
Speaker 2: you Will Haygood's description of that moment in his biography
Speaker 2: of Sammy Davis Junior. The public had rarely seen Nixon
Speaker 2: in such an embrace, even with his own wife and
Speaker 2: Nixon letting loose with a slow, widening grin towering over Davis,
Speaker 2: wrapping his arms across his own chest, so awkwardly and
Speaker 2: yet tenderly like some flushed teenage kid and all those
Speaker 2: white delegates and all those Nixon placards, and Davis leaning
Speaker 2: on the president's shoulder as if Nixon were kid. Nixon
Speaker 2: and Sammy in full embrace. When people remember Sammy Davis Junior,
Speaker 2: that's what they think of the photograph of that moment.
Speaker 2: Sammy never got over it. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Forgotten
Speaker 2: and Misunderstood. This episode is about Sammy David and what
Speaker 2: happened on that stage in Miami Beach, because that moment
Speaker 2: raises questions about obligation and loyalty that still haven't been resolved,
Speaker 2: or maybe have been resolved in the wrong way.
Speaker 7: To understand this, you have to go back to what
Speaker 7: young brother here referred to as the House Negro and
Speaker 7: the Field Negro. Back during slavery.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty three in Detroit, Malcolm X gave one
Speaker 2: of his most famous speeches.
Speaker 7: There was two kind of slaves. There was the House
Speaker 7: Negro in the field Negro. The house Negro. They lived
Speaker 7: in the house with Master. They dressed pretty good. They
Speaker 7: ate good because they eat his food. They would give
Speaker 7: their life to save them Master's house quicker than the
Speaker 7: master would the house Negro. If the master said we
Speaker 7: got a good house here, the house negroes say, yeah.
Speaker 6: We got a good house here.
Speaker 7: Whenever the master said we, he said we. That's how
Speaker 7: you can tell a house Negro.
Speaker 2: Malcolm X was trying to win his audience over to
Speaker 2: the cause of black nationalism. He was a separatist.
Speaker 7: He identified himself with his master more than his master
Speaker 7: identified with himself. And if you came to the house
Speaker 7: Negro and said let's run away, let's escape, let's separate
Speaker 7: that house, Negro would look at you and say, man,
Speaker 7: you christ, what you mean separate? Where is there a
Speaker 7: better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes
Speaker 7: than this? Where can I eat better food than this?
Speaker 7: That was that house Negro.
Speaker 2: Malcolm X was talking about African Americans who he felt
Speaker 2: had betrayed their community, who had ACHIEVEDSS by turning their
Speaker 2: backs on where they'd come from. He was talking about
Speaker 2: people like Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 4: I gotta be me, gotta be me.
Speaker 2: Davis was an epic talent. He was Michael Jackson. Before
Speaker 2: Michael Jackson. He was the first black person in history
Speaker 2: who could sell out performances around the world. A charter
Speaker 2: member of Frank Sinatra's rat Pack, a staple in the
Speaker 2: tabloids for forty years.
Speaker 3: The Dream of Life flat fears.
Speaker 2: There's a sequence I Love from a gala in Sammy's
Speaker 2: honor in nineteen eighty nine, marking his sixtieth anniversary in
Speaker 2: show business, Gregory Hines, a legendary tap dancer, does a
Speaker 2: number for Sammy, who's sitting in the front row.
Speaker 8: Last Stop Time, Stop Time.
Speaker 2: Then Heines invites Sammy up to join him. Sammy's just
Speaker 2: had his hip replaced. He'll be dead from cancer within
Speaker 2: the year. He puts on his tap shoes, hobbles on stage,
Speaker 2: and the two of them do a dance off. I
Speaker 2: swear to God, if you don't believe me, look it
Speaker 2: up for yourself. Sammy blows him away. At the end,
Speaker 2: Hines gets down on his knees and kisses Sammy's shoes.
Speaker 2: Davis was born in Harlem. He started playing the vaudeville
Speaker 2: circuit as a three year old with his uncle Will
Speaker 2: Maston and his dad, Sammy Davis Senior. He never had
Speaker 2: any formal schooling or any childhood to speak of the
Speaker 2: three of them travel Jim Crow America, performing for white
Speaker 2: audiences in one hotel, then sleeping on the other side
Speaker 2: of the tracks in a colored hotel. During the Second
Speaker 2: World War, when he was drafted into the army, his
Speaker 2: nose was broken so many times in fights that it's
Speaker 2: flat for the rest of his life. Sammy was taunted, harassed.
Speaker 2: At one point, a couple of white soldiers pinned Sammy
Speaker 2: down right coon in white paint across his forehead. There's
Speaker 2: an almost unbearable moment in Sammy's autobiography Why Me. He
Speaker 2: described standing under the shower in the latrine for hours
Speaker 2: trying to get the white paint off his body. I
Speaker 2: stood under the hot water, rubbing until rashes of blood
Speaker 2: trickled to the surface, brushing until I'd scraped the last
Speaker 2: speck of white out of my skin. I got into bed. Nobody,
Speaker 2: nobody in this world is ever going to do this
Speaker 2: to me again. I'll die first. But Sammy's answer to
Speaker 2: never letting anyone do this to him again wasn't to
Speaker 2: fight like Malcolm X wanted black people to do. Sammy's
Speaker 2: solution was to join. He moved very publicly into the
Speaker 2: Master's house. He dated white women blondes. He married the
Speaker 2: stunning Swedish actress May Britt at a time when interracial
Speaker 2: marriages were almost unheard of. When he moved to Los Angeles,
Speaker 2: he didn't move to Baldwin Hills, where middle class blacks lived.
Speaker 2: He moved into a lily white section of the Hollywood Hills.
Speaker 7: This modern house. Negro loves his master. He wants to
Speaker 7: live near him. He'll pay three times as much as
Speaker 7: the house is worth just to live Negro's master, and
Speaker 7: then brag about I'm the only Negro out here.
Speaker 6: I'm the only one on my job.
Speaker 7: I'm the only one in this school.
Speaker 9: You nothing but a house Negro.
Speaker 2: If I play a Dave Chappelle routine for you without
Speaker 2: telling you that it's him or Richard pryor bit from
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties, you'd know right away the Chappelle and
Speaker 2: Prior are black. They code black. But listen to this
Speaker 2: Sammy Davis on The Dick Cabot Show, talking about what
Speaker 2: he learned from the old Bush Belt comedians who used
Speaker 2: to hang out at Hanson's drug Store just up Broadway
Speaker 2: in the nineteen forties.
Speaker 10: All the impressionist will hang out on the corner and
Speaker 10: I'd say, hey, I get one. I think I got one.
Speaker 3: I think I finally got Jimmy Stewart man, you know,
Speaker 3: and will Or Larry Storch would say, no, you haven't
Speaker 3: got it man, That is, I.
Speaker 4: Gotta be up here.
Speaker 10: You got a tool, law, I want your door.
Speaker 6: You gotta have a sort of a draw behind that.
Speaker 10: Disappear.
Speaker 2: Cavitt then asked me if he also does Laurence Olivier,
Speaker 2: which you think is just Cavot being mischievous, because Olivier
Speaker 2: was the greatest Shakespearean stage actor of his day, the
Speaker 2: son of a high Church Anglican clergyman, about as far
Speaker 2: from Sammy as you can get in theory.
Speaker 11: Of course you do Olivier.
Speaker 5: Yes, really, what would you like to hear me do
Speaker 5: from a.
Speaker 2: Couple acts from King Lear would be nice?
Speaker 10: Well, he only did Leir once? How about Richard the Third?
Speaker 9: I'll settle for Dick the Third?
Speaker 1: Okay, now is the winter of our discontent made Gloria
Speaker 1: summer in this sun of York. Since I cannot buy
Speaker 1: the rightful claim my way to the throne, I shall
Speaker 1: lack and heal my way instead.
Speaker 9: Oh that's great.
Speaker 2: If I didn't tell you that Sammy was black. Would
Speaker 2: you know he could as easily be white, he could
Speaker 2: be Jewish. In fact, he was. He's Jewish. He converted
Speaker 2: the lone black person at Temple Israel in Hollywood.
Speaker 9: Sammy's mind worked like this, whatever it takes to survive,
Speaker 9: I have to do it.
Speaker 2: That's Will Haygood, Sammy's biographer.
Speaker 9: Now, many of my friends are Jewish and they love
Speaker 9: me and they support me. Huh, So that's interesting. I
Speaker 9: think I'm going to go to Israel. I think I'm
Speaker 9: going to become Jewish, and then I'm going to make
Speaker 9: some jokes about it, and I know people will laugh.
Speaker 9: But right now, in this moment, this is where my
Speaker 9: heart is.
Speaker 2: Sammy meets Nixon in nineteen fifty four. Nixon was the
Speaker 2: vice president at that point, and Sammy was playing the
Speaker 2: Kopa when the copa was the hottest ticket Manhattan.
Speaker 9: So he got Nixon in his wife seats up front
Speaker 9: and they never forgot it. Shortly thereafter, Sammy gets invited
Speaker 9: to the White House to visit Vice President Nixon. Now
Speaker 9: just think of that, a kid born poor, who had
Speaker 9: been scuffling out on the road, who had been playing
Speaker 9: nasty looking nightclubs, who never had a teacher, who never
Speaker 9: had classmates, all of a sudden, sliding around the White.
Speaker 2: House, they stay in touch. When Nixon becomes president in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight, he asks Sammy to join a White
Speaker 2: House advisory Council. When the gospel singer Mahelia Jackson died,
Speaker 2: Nixon asks Sammy to represent him at the funeral and
Speaker 2: sent a government jet. Nixon asked Smmy to go to
Speaker 2: Vietnam and entertain the troops. Sammy puts together a massive
Speaker 2: traveling entourage and plays his heart out. If you look
Speaker 2: at the back cover of Sammy's autobiography, Why Me, there's
Speaker 2: a blurb from Alex Haley, who wrote Roots, another from
Speaker 2: Aaron Spelling, the creator of nine O two one zero
Speaker 2: among a million other things. Another from Frank Sinatra and
Speaker 2: Michael Jackson and Liza Minelli. It's maybe the greatest blurb
Speaker 2: lineup in the history of publishing. And then there's Richard Nixon,
Speaker 2: who writes, Sammy is one of the great living Americans.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't matter what color he was. With his intelligence,
Speaker 2: he could make it at anything anywhere. It wouldn't matter
Speaker 2: what color he was. That sounds like something you would
Speaker 2: say about someone who comes from privilege to flatter them
Speaker 2: into thinking they would have succeeded even without their privilege.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't matter if Mark Zuckerberg were an orphan from
Speaker 2: a remote village in the Himalayas. He's so smart he
Speaker 2: would still be a billionaire. It's totally nuts to say
Speaker 2: it wouldn't matter if he hadn't had those privileges about
Speaker 2: a black man born in Harlem in nineteen twenty five
Speaker 2: who never had any privileges. Sammy comes to Nixon pretending
Speaker 2: he isn't black, and Nixon comes to Sammy forgetting he's black.
Speaker 2: Their relationship is a kind of delusional post racial fantasy.
Speaker 2: So Nixon says, come to Miami for the convention. We'll
Speaker 2: put you up at the Playboy Hotel. Why not play
Speaker 2: for the kids at the youth rally. Of course, Sammy
Speaker 2: says yes, and Nixon stands in front of the crowd
Speaker 2: on National TV and starts talking about how Sammy's critics
Speaker 2: accuse him of selling out by being a Nixon supporter.
Speaker 2: That Nixon says, you're.
Speaker 12: Gonna you're gonna buyd by enjoying something.
Speaker 2: Nixon waits for the applause to die down, he's looking
Speaker 2: the other way. Sammy sneaks up from behind, wraps his
Speaker 2: arms around him. The hate mail Sammy gets over the
Speaker 2: next few months is so vicious that he hands over
Speaker 2: some of the letters to the FBI. Eartha Kit comes
Speaker 2: up to him and hisses, did you have to kiss him?
Speaker 2: Sammy is blindsided. He's desperate to salvage his reputation. He
Speaker 2: calls up Jesse Jackson, who every year has a big
Speaker 2: conference in Chicago for his civil rights group, Operation.
Speaker 6: Push Um Somebody, Alm Somebody.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy two, Jackson had lined up virtually every
Speaker 2: motown and gospel star, The Temptations, Marvin Gay, the Ojys,
Speaker 2: Curtis Mayfield, ROBERTA. Flack. Sammy says, I want to perform.
Speaker 2: Jackson says yes, brings him out on stage.
Speaker 3: I am here because I have come home as a
Speaker 3: black man. Disagree if you will, with my politics, but
Speaker 3: I will not allow anyone to take away the fact
Speaker 3: that I am black. Now, That's all I can say,
Speaker 3: except that I would like to sing.
Speaker 2: But who is he kidding? It's September twenty eighth, nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, a little over a month since he was
Speaker 2: hugging the enemy in Miami. For the rest of his life,
Speaker 2: Sammy would be haunted by his reception.
Speaker 11: He said, maybe one of the worst things that happened
Speaker 11: to you, I read was being booed by people, and
Speaker 11: she was. I think it was in Chicago.
Speaker 2: This is Sammy in an inch of few years later
Speaker 2: with Tom Caddle on the Boston ABC affiliate.
Speaker 10: Hey, but the first time that I had ever been
Speaker 10: rejected by my own by my own people, because it
Speaker 10: was predominantly.
Speaker 11: A black audience, because of your embracing her.
Speaker 10: Yeah, they embracing her. Nixon and Jesse was there as
Speaker 10: he always had been before prior tone as he's been since,
Speaker 10: to be supportive as a friend. And I was about
Speaker 10: ready to run or literally run off the stage, and
Speaker 10: he said no, and he made me stay, and he
Speaker 10: talked to the audience and made me perform.
Speaker 2: And what did Sammy sing?
Speaker 10: Whether I'm right.
Speaker 2: Or whether I wrong, You can't make this up.
Speaker 3: Whether I find a place in this world or never belong.
Speaker 3: I gotta be me, got me?
Speaker 6: What else skin?
Speaker 10: But the hurt I'm being booeded. So I know I
Speaker 10: want to experience that kind of hurt again.
Speaker 4: I want to live not merely survived.
Speaker 2: Afterwards, Sammy went home and got drunk.
Speaker 13: Well, now you had a twentieth century tight coin.
Speaker 7: He grow today a twentieth century Uncle Tom.
Speaker 6: He's dead as much an Uncle.
Speaker 7: Town today said, Uncle Tom was one.
Speaker 10: Hundred and two hundred years ago.
Speaker 9: Oh, he's a modern Uncle Tom.
Speaker 6: Then Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head.
Speaker 10: This Uncle Tom were a tap had.
Speaker 2: Sammy sold his own people out in the middle of
Speaker 2: a life and death struggle. He put on a top
Speaker 2: hat and tap danced for the master. And there's nothing
Speaker 2: so unforgivable as that, is there, Except I'm not so sure.
Speaker 12: I had been given at the opportunity through a company
Speaker 12: that I was consulting to to interview the first women
Speaker 12: entering their sales force.
Speaker 2: That's Rosabeth Canter. She's a professor at the Harvard Business School,
Speaker 2: talking about a research project she did back in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies. It was for a big industrial firm headquartered
Speaker 2: at the time in New York City. They had a
Speaker 2: sales force of three hundred people, all men, and they
Speaker 2: just hired twenty women.
Speaker 12: And so here was a batch of people who all
Speaker 12: had advanced degrees and were very technically talented, and yet
Speaker 12: they were walking into technical sales in a place that
Speaker 12: had never seen people like them before.
Speaker 2: The women were struggling. That's why the company brought in
Speaker 2: Cantor to diagnose the problem. She showed up with her
Speaker 2: notebook and began talking with the new hires, and after
Speaker 2: many interviews, Canter tells the company, the reason the women
Speaker 2: you hired aren't doing well is that you haven't hired
Speaker 2: enough of them. This isn't about the women and their abilities,
Speaker 2: this is about numbers. The company had its salesforce spread
Speaker 2: across the country. A typical office was eight people, which
Speaker 2: meant seven men and only one woman. And Canter's point
Speaker 2: was that it's really really hard to be the lone
Speaker 2: woman in an office of eight people.
Speaker 12: And I thought, that's really the issue. Are you alone
Speaker 12: or are there many of you like you?
Speaker 2: Kant wrote up her findings in a classic essay called
Speaker 2: Some Effects of Proportion on Group Life. Being the only
Speaker 2: one of your kind, she said, being a token creates
Speaker 2: a special set of problems for both sides, for the
Speaker 2: majority and for the token. The women told Canter that
Speaker 2: the minute they showed up in a room, the men
Speaker 2: on the sales team would become almost exaggerated versions of themselves,
Speaker 2: telling dirty jokes, war stories, being aggressive, as if the
Speaker 2: presence of an outsider reinforced what they all had in common.
Speaker 2: At the same time, the women felt their behavior changing.
Speaker 2: They felt scrutinized not as individuals, but as members of
Speaker 2: their category, which left them self conscious uneasy. In one
Speaker 2: brilliant section of her paper, Canter talks about the four
Speaker 2: roles that token women get pushed into, the mother, the pet,
Speaker 2: the seductress, and the iron maiden. They couldn't be themselves,
Speaker 2: not until the proportions of the group turned more of
Speaker 2: their favor.
Speaker 12: So you put that same lone woman in a group
Speaker 12: that has more women in it, and she can relax.
Speaker 12: She's not on the spot. She can be friends with some.
Speaker 12: She doesn't have to be friends with all of them.
Speaker 12: She can find things in common with the men.
Speaker 2: To fit in. The token has to pass a loyalty test,
Speaker 2: Kenta writes. If tokens collude, they make themselves psychological hostages
Speaker 2: of the majority group. For token women, the price of
Speaker 2: being one of the boys is a willingness to turn
Speaker 2: occasionally against the girls. The token woman, in other words,
Speaker 2: is required to sell out her own kind required. That
Speaker 2: was the cost of admission to the Master's house. Being
Speaker 2: one of the boys was not who they were, it
Speaker 2: was what they were forced to be. So why is
Speaker 2: Sammy Davis Junior's position any different?
Speaker 9: In his mind, he was pushing aside white black for
Speaker 9: green green bean money.
Speaker 2: Will Haygood, Sammy's biographer.
Speaker 9: He started his career with really literally having to put
Speaker 9: food on the table to keep his daddy surviving and
Speaker 9: to keep will Maston surviving. He did not want to
Speaker 9: let them go. And so who would Sammy talk to
Speaker 9: every day? Who signed his checks? White businessman?
Speaker 2: And who was in the audience in those Las Vegas nightclubs,
Speaker 2: rich white people. Sammy does Laurence Olivia impressions because that's
Speaker 2: what white audiences wanted to hear. He becomes friends with
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon, and who is Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon is
Speaker 2: the political embodiment of those people in his Las Vegas audience.
Speaker 9: He didn't know the kind of judges who Nixon was
Speaker 9: appointing to the federal courts or to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 9: He didn't know Nixon's Southern strategy to divide and conquer
Speaker 9: all Sammy knew was Nixon welcomed me wherever I was at.
Speaker 2: By the way, Sammy campaigned for John Kennedy ten years
Speaker 2: before he campaigned for Nixon. But did Kennedy ever invite
Speaker 2: him to stay at the White House like Nixon did. No,
Speaker 2: Kennedy disinvited him from his inauguration because he worried about
Speaker 2: what it would look like if Sammy brought his white
Speaker 2: wife to the White House. Sammy had to make strategic
Speaker 2: decisions out of necessity. These are the steps the token
Speaker 2: takes to survive, but they aren't who he is. Sammy
Speaker 2: marched on Washington, he marched at Selma. He shut down
Speaker 2: a Broadway show to make the trip. Will Haygood says
Speaker 2: that when he interviewed Harry Belafonte, Bellefonte made up point
Speaker 2: of stressing how generous Sammy was to the civil rights movement.
Speaker 9: Whenever Keen was in trouble or was jailed, or whenever
Speaker 9: Keen needed bail money, Martin would turn to me and
Speaker 9: he would say, get Sammy, and the next day Sammy
Speaker 9: Davis Junior would wire them ten thousand dollars or seven
Speaker 9: thousand dollars or however much money Keen needed. You know,
Speaker 9: and that was a lot of money. Back in the sixties.
Speaker 2: When Sammy Davis comes on stage at the Push Expo,
Speaker 2: what does Jesse Jackson say, in an attempt to quiet
Speaker 2: the crowd, Brothers, if it wasn't for people like Sammy Davis,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't be here. We wouldn't have Push today. Now,
Speaker 2: I expected some foolish people who are going to react
Speaker 2: like this because this man hugged the President of the
Speaker 2: United States. So what Look at what this gigantic little
Speaker 2: man has committed himself to over all these years, Sammy
Speaker 2: saying I gotta be me. But the minute you listen
Speaker 2: to any of his interviews from that tortured stretch of
Speaker 2: his career, you realize that he couldn't be me. That
Speaker 2: was the price he paid.
Speaker 11: Was there a period, though, Sammy, where you felt I
Speaker 11: must prove something to a certain group of people. They've
Speaker 11: got to know something about me.
Speaker 4: I guess the first forty five years of my life
Speaker 4: you were doing just that.
Speaker 10: That's all I was doing. Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 7: From the Celebrity Room of the Grand.
Speaker 14: Hotel, Dean Martin honors our Man of the Hour, Sammy
Speaker 14: Davis Junior, with to night guest Ready brim.
Speaker 2: First came the hug, then came the booing and Operation Push,
Speaker 2: then came to roast.
Speaker 14: And Tonight's very special Man of the Hour, Sammy Davis.
Speaker 2: Junior, the singer and comedian Dean Martin, did a regular
Speaker 2: series of celebrity roasts from Las Vegas during the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: They were broadcast on NBC on Thursday nights National Television.
Speaker 2: The featured guests were a who's who of that era,
Speaker 2: Muhammad Ali, Ralph Nader, Frank Sinatra, Truman Capoti. It was
Speaker 2: a ritual of comic humiliation. The guests took their medicine
Speaker 2: the country watched in mock horror. In April of nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five, it was Sammy Davis Junior's turn at the microphone.
Speaker 2: Is the host Dean Martin of rat Pack Fame, big tall,
Speaker 2: handsome guy. His stick was that he always pretended he
Speaker 2: was drunk even when he was.
Speaker 6: And then recognition of one of the great black men
Speaker 6: of our time. Even the NBC peacock is wearing an airfro.
Speaker 2: Why does Sammy agree to this for the same reason
Speaker 2: he hugged Richard Nixon. Because the world represented by the
Speaker 2: roast was the world Sammy has been trying his whole
Speaker 2: life to join. It's the club. And what is a
Speaker 2: celebrity roast. It's a ritual of initiation. The target of
Speaker 2: the roast agrees to be roasted because being roasted is
Speaker 2: proof that you belong. Only what does this roast prove
Speaker 2: that Sammy isn't one of them?
Speaker 6: The first booking he got was in Atlanta. As Sami
Speaker 6: stepped off the plane, he was met by the governor
Speaker 6: and a rope. Even the kreuplus Klan took notice of Sammy.
Speaker 6: They voted him most likely to be next. He proves
Speaker 6: that a black man could heat in white restaurants, check
Speaker 6: into white hotels, date white women, and be carried away
Speaker 6: in a white ambulance.
Speaker 2: Then Deeed Martin pretends to read telegrams from well wishers.
Speaker 6: Here's one I think you're going to be very proud of.
Speaker 6: There's Sammy Davis. We'd like you to pose for a
Speaker 6: new centerfold in our magazine, signed the National Geographic.
Speaker 2: It goes like this on National TV for an hour.
Speaker 2: Sammy had done everything he could to join the club,
Speaker 2: and yet what are the jokes about that day at
Speaker 2: the mgm Grand that he doesn't belong, that he's black,
Speaker 2: and he'll always be black. Sammy sold out, But you
Speaker 2: can only sell out if someone's buying.
Speaker 5: You took your glass.
Speaker 8: You're getting tired, Sammy. I want to take a watermelon break.
Speaker 2: That's Milton Burrel, supposedly one of Sammy's oldest friends.
Speaker 8: The reason I say that is because Sammy hasn't been
Speaker 8: feeling well lately. Last month he had an operation on
Speaker 8: his throat and that had a problem that had a
Speaker 8: roll over and flour to find his mouth. Sam the
Speaker 8: last time you had cash in your hand, this is
Speaker 8: when you bought your freedom from Scarlet O'Hara.
Speaker 6: Sammy has always been for civil rights.
Speaker 1: One time in Mississippi, he told the bus driver that
Speaker 1: he wanted to be on the front of the bus,
Speaker 1: so the driver tied him to the bumper.
Speaker 2: Next up Foster Brooks, a man with a brief moment
Speaker 2: of celebrity based entirely on his ability, born of experience,
Speaker 2: to impersonate a drunk Sammy Davis had more talent in
Speaker 2: his pinky finger than Foster Brooks. But sam isn't a
Speaker 2: member of the club, and Brooks is messidius.
Speaker 6: You are a great performer. The excitement you create and
Speaker 6: an audience is increditable. There they sit spell bounds, wondering
Speaker 6: if someone in your entourage is ransacking their room.
Speaker 2: Cut to Sammy cracking up on the dais then giving
Speaker 2: Brooks a big semi style hug, arms wrapped around him.
Speaker 6: I'm dancing for pennies to that magnificent moment when Frank's
Speaker 6: not reformed down to the lobby and said, send the
Speaker 6: colored kid after dance while I shave you.
Speaker 2: Remember what Rooseabeth Kanter wrote for token women. The price
Speaker 2: of being one of the boys is a willingness to
Speaker 2: turn occasionally against the girls. And then she writes a
Speaker 2: line that I couldn't stop thinking about as I watched
Speaker 2: that roast. Tokens thus find themselves colluding with dominance through
Speaker 2: shared laughter. At the end of the evening, Sammy gets
Speaker 2: up and there's a moment when you think he's going
Speaker 2: to lash out, to stand up to the humiliations of
Speaker 2: the previous hour. But we only think that because it's
Speaker 2: now The doors are now open to black entertainers, So
Speaker 2: that's what would happen today. Can you imagine how Chris
Speaker 2: Rock or Dave Chappelle or Wanda Sykes or Tiffany Hattish
Speaker 2: would respond to an evening like that, I mean a bloodbath.
Speaker 2: But Rock has Chappelle, and Chappelle has Sikes, and Sikes
Speaker 2: has Hattish and one hundred others. And when you have numbers,
Speaker 2: you have power. But Sammy, Sammy was the first. He
Speaker 2: didn't have numbers. It's the second generation that gets to
Speaker 2: defend itself, not the first.
Speaker 4: Thank you, I would first of all, I have to
Speaker 4: thank man that I love very very much for giving
Speaker 4: me this honor, mister Dean Martin.
Speaker 2: He turns to Dean Martin, who's sitting next to him.
Speaker 2: Dean Martin reaches up and places his hand on top
Speaker 2: of Sammy's.
Speaker 5: One of the great joys of being forty five years
Speaker 5: in this business is to have people who love you
Speaker 5: make fun of you. That is one of the great joys.
Speaker 5: Because the day they don't make fun of you, that
Speaker 5: means they don't give a damn about you.
Speaker 2: The token succeeds at the cost of his own dignity.
Speaker 4: Hi, thank you, that's it.
Speaker 2: A Revisionist History is a Panoply production. The senior producer
Speaker 2: is Mia Lobel, with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista. Our
Speaker 2: editor is Julia Barton. Flon Williams is our engineer. Fact
Speaker 2: checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Skierra, Special
Speaker 2: thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 14: I'm Malcolm Glavo, and on stage we can see a
Speaker 14: manager who seems to be waiting for the president and
Speaker 14: waiting to get signals when mister Nixon will ride here.
Speaker 14: He keeps looking at Sammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 13: With a very prolonged look, shaking his hand saying no,
Speaker 13: he's not here yet. So we continue to stand by.
Speaker 13: The young people here have not run out of enthusiasm,
Speaker 13: and certainly once again we are seeing that young people
Speaker 13: of this country may differ on politics. They may be
Speaker 13: Democrats or Republicans, but when you put a fast, hardbeat
Speaker 13: to music, that is the universal song of politics for
Speaker 13: the young people of this country.