As Sammy Davis Jr's Star Imploded

Sammy Davis Jr. was the epitome of the artist as brilliant naif, blazing as he collapses into a cold, dark star, a posthumous object best described (considering Sammy's diminutive stature and gargantuan talent) as a giant dwarf, a fate understood most clearly by those who came later, the lawyers and accountants who first realized Sammy had bounced his last check, busted, so left his descendants nothing but memories and debt.

For years, it turns out, the Candy Man, third from the left in the typical photo of the Rat Pack, had been living beyond his means -- making tons, spending a little more, with debt accruing until it loomed over him like an Everest. As my grandfather used to say, the man who earns $100 and spends $90 has a happy life; the man who makes the same but spends $101 dies in squalor. Sammy is a hero for our times, a personification of the current American Dream, living in a mansion owned by the bank, short the mortgage but certain he can dance his way out. As Sinatra sang, “Riding high in April, shot down in May."

Matt Birkbeck in Deconstructing Sammy has done a tremendous amount of reporting into the life of Sammy, but the book is more than a newspaper story. It's a melancholy dirge: Horatio Alger in his stirring rise, but also in the reckless appetite that hurries his fall. It follows Sammy from his Harlem boyhood to his wrenching deathbed (he died of cancer in 1990) in his Beverly Hills mansion, where various hangers-on, seeing the circling vultures, stripped his corpse even before it was a corpse: “During the months prior to Sammy's death, his employees looted his home of memorabilia, jewelry and artwork."

“Deconstructing Sammy" is two narratives spun together. In the first, you have Sammy Davis Jr., “arguably the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century"; in the second, you have Albert “Sonny" Murray Jr., a young black lawyer who rescued Sammy's estate from its creditors (at his death, Sammy owed the IRS $7 million). Murray was a former federal prosecutor, made famous by the case that brought down E.F. Hutton. Murray's parents owned a resort in the Pocono Mountains that catered to a black clientele. It was while standing in the yard of this resort that Murray first saw the woman who would bring him into Sammy-land. She was standing across the road, “tall, thin and black . . . somewhat disoriented, head bobbing softly back and forth." Her name was Altovise Gore, and she was Sammy's widow. She had washed up in the Poconos like flotsam, alcohol-addicted, broke, the IRS dogging her for the outstanding debt.

Altovise asked Murray to manage the estate. He accepted the job in 1994, determined not only to clear the debt but also to restore the faded star to his proper place in the firmament. By following Sonny in this quest, Birkbeck tells the epic of Sammy Davis Jr: life as a prodigy, dancing with his father and uncle; rise to fame; the car crash that took his eye and made him a Jew; his friendship with Sinatra; his struggles with racial prejudice. Sammy wanted everything Frank had, which meant houses and money, but also women, specifically white women. It was this desire that landed him in trouble, first during his affair with Kim Novak (which got him scratched off the guest list for the Kennedy inaugural), then during his marriage to the Swedish film star May Britt, which made him a Hollywood pariah.