Hollywood loved Sammy Davis Jr. until he dated a white movie star

In 1957, Sammy Davis Jr. was a star on the rise. He had just completed an acclaimed performance on Broadway in Mr. Fantastic and performed with his father and uncle in a popular nightclub show called The Will Mastin Trio. It was a powerful riposte to a car accident three years ago in which a tube went through Davis' eye, leaving him permanently blind. He will wear a glass eye for the rest of his life.

The unexpected, however, did not diminish Davis' charm and sexiness at all. Hollywood star Kim Novak certainly noticed.

She was about to shoot Hitchcock's Vertigo when she saw Davis performing at a Chicago nightclub. Even though they didn't speak much at the time, Davis wanted to get to know the actress. His friends Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh had to invite the two of them to a party at their house. Soon after, a piece of braille appeared in a gossip column: "Which top female movie star (K.N.) is seriously dating which big-name artist (S.D.)?

This kind of boring gossip is far from innocent. The affair between Novak and Davis threatened to destroy both their careers. In 1957, a majority of Americans opposed it. On top of that, the U.S. Supreme Court has only recently ordered the desegregation of public schools, and Little Rock, Arkansas, will face a national showdown over the merger of its inner-city high schools. The atmosphere was fraught with racial tension.

As a black man, Davis had been prohibited from dating white women before, but this time Novak was a movie star. She's the hottest woman at the box office thanks to films like The Man with the Golden Arm and Friends, and she's being groomed by Columbia Pictures to replace Rita Hayworth. , the studio head Harry Cohn disliked, and Novak, Hollywood's newest sex goddess, could be worth millions.

When he saw the gossip show, Davis called Novak to apologize for her awkward situation in the studio, to which Novak responded: "The studio doesn't own it," according to his autobiography Sammy. I! Invite him over for spaghetti and meatballs. Soon after, they started dating.

Their affair lasted for most of 1957. Davis and Novak are aware of the risks they're taking, but it seems to make their relationship all the more exciting. "She never missed me as much as I thought she would before she was banned," Davis wrote in her autobiography. "Then we became conspirators, drawn together by one thing on Monday: resistance."

Arthur Silber, Davis' close friend and Panion, often The couple was driven to their rented beach house in Malibu. "Davis would sometimes lie on the floor of the car under a blanket to avoid being seen with Nowak," Silber said in an interview. "I would drop him off at her house in Beverly Hills and we would arrange a time or a day to pick him up." Davis also installed a private phone line at the Las Vegas Sands hotel where he works , so he could talk to Nowak without the hotel switchboard listening.

In December, Novak went home to Chicago for vacation, while Davis stayed in Las Vegas. He missed Nowak so much that he found a stand-in and flew overnight to visit Nowak and meet her parents. Irv Kupcinet of the Chicago Sun-Times heard about Novak's visit and mentioned it in his column. Gossip heats up. Rumor has it that Davis and Novak have obtained a marriage license. According to the "London Daily Mirror": "Kim Novak is about to get engaged to Sammy Davis Jr., and Hollywood is stunned." Cohen was furious when he discovered that the star he invested in was dating a black man. The next morning, on the way to Los Angeles, he got the first of several hearts. Cohen was a ruthless studio executive who idolized Benito Mussolini and had ties to the Chicago mob. He even wore a ruby ??"friendship ring" that matched gangster Johnny Rosselli. There are various accounts of what happened next, but what is clear is that Cohen took out a gang of thugs who attacked Davis. Gangster Mickey Cohen found Davis' father and passed on the threat. Silber was there when Davis got the call. "They said if he didn't marry a black woman right away, they were going to break his legs, take out his other eye and bury him in a hole," Silber said. "He was just as horrified as I was."

Novak has always claimed that her relationship with Davis was anything but a friendship, and said the studio ordered her not to see him again. In 2004, she told Larry King: "I thought, this is ridiculous, and I don't want to live like this."

"I can't see anything wrong, you know? What's so scary?

Davis went to his friend, gangster Sam Giancana, for protection. Giancana told him, He could protect Davis in Las Vegas and Chicago, but the threat loomed over him in Hollywood. Sammy Davis Jr., 32, center glasses. The bride, Lori White, 23, cuts the cake and serves it to close friends and celebrities after their wedding in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 11, 1958. Guests, from left to right, are: Joe. E. Lewis, best man Harry Belafonte, Davis, White and Donald O'Connor (AP Photo)

Silber is seated shortly after January 1958. On the bed at the Sands Hotel, polishing his cowboy boots, he noticed Davis sitting on the other bed, flipping through the address book.

I said, eff, Silber said. “He said, I’m looking for someone to get married to. "

The woman he chose was Laurel White, a black singer who worked at the Silver Slipper store across the street. She and Davis had gone out several times in the past. Now Davis offered her a money ($10,000 to $25,000) for her to marry him and be his wife. In photos from the Las Vegas wedding, White and Davis served each other in an oversized martini glass. Drinks were served next to a tiered cake that had the word "Happiness" written on it. But Silber, who drove the couple to their wedding suite, recalled that Davis drank all night and became so upset in the car. He tried to strangle White. Silber stopped Davis and carried him to his room. "He was so hurt," Silber said. As the shirt came off his shoulders, he said to me: 'Why don't they let me live my life?'

Silber remembers Davis being particularly distraught at the hotel that night. "When I walked into the bedroom, he had a gun pointed at his head," Silber said. "I jumped on him ... and I took the gun away from him." Then I kneeled on his shoulders until he passed out.

By September, newspapers reported that White and Davis were divorcing.

One day, a few years later, Sammy and Silber were having lunch at 20th Century Fox when a woman walked in. She was tall and cute, with shiny blond hair and a husky voice. Davis immediately introduced herself:

Her name is May (pronounced "My") Britt, a 26-year-old Swedish actress filming the remake of The Blue Angel. She and Davis began seeing each other. Soon he proposed and she accepted. Britt is an outsider to America's racial politics, and she doesn't understand why race keeps her away from the people she loves. On June 6, 1960, Davis announced her engagement to the press in the UK. "The public went crazy," Burt Boyar, a close friend who co-wrote Davis' autobiography, said in an interview. "When they got engaged, everything got out of control. The studio immediately canceled Britt's contract. They thought she would be useless at the box office by marrying a black man. The next day, British fascists attacked the theater where Davis was performing in London. Picketing, booing, shouting and chanting "Go home" and other racial slurs, Davis told the media it was "the most brutal racial attack I have ever experienced in America." Si and Britt were inundated with hate mail, not just from white people but also from black people, who had long accused Davis of posting a message with the headline "Is Sami Ashamed of Being Black?" "?" Theaters where Davis performed in Reno, San Francisco and Chicago had received bomb threats. At the Lotus Club in Washington, American Nazis were picketing outside, but when Davis walked on stage, the audience stood up and applauded.

Davis received so many death threats that he hired a 24-hour armed force Guard. He fears his wife will be attacked if seen together, so they rarely go out. As they did so, Davis was holding a gun or a cane with a knife concealed at the tip.

"May is almost like a prisoner in a mink cell," Boyar said. "I wonder when they'll be able to walk down the street and have fun like everyone else."

Meanwhile, Davis worked for the civil rights movement. According to Emily Raymond, author of "Freedom Stars: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement," Davis raised approximately $750 for the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr. · Organizations such as King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference provided him with ￡1,000 (about $5.6 million today), and he campaigned for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, performing in 20 cities, often with other rats. But at the Democratic National Convention in Mississippi, he was booed during the national anthem, an incident that nearly brought him to tears.

After he won the election, Kennedy twice snubbed Davis. Davis was invited to attend Kennedy's inauguration and was so proud to go that he had a special suit made. Britt bought a Balenciaga dress. But three days before the inauguration, Kennedy's secretary called to say the president was not interested. The move was political, with the president-elect having narrowly won the election and not wanting to alienate Southern congressmen by his controversial marriage to Davis. Davis was deeply hurt and embarrassed by the snub.

Then in 1963, Davis and Britt were invited to a White House reception for African-American leaders. Raymond said in an email that when Kennedy saw them there, he booed his aides and told them to "get out of here," shoving the couple out of sight of photographers.

Davis is not the first celebrity to have an interracial marriage. Singer Harry Belafonte married a white woman in 1957 and 1912, and boxer Joe Jackson was jailed for dating a white woman. . But no prominent interracial marriage has received as much public attention as Davis and Britt. "I was a little kid when it happened," said Gerald Earle, editor of The Sammy Davis Reader. "Everyone is talking about it. I do think it had an impact. It was part of the opening up of American society in the '60s. He and May Britt were the pioneers in making interracial marriage more accepting of America.

In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional. With the ensuing legal reforms and the emergence of successful movies, which featured interracial romances, the culture quickly changed. Featured in stories like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (Davis himself also played a black slut who falls in love with a white woman and has relationships with people of other races in the 1964 Broadway musical Golden Boy) The relationship began. )

Davis and Britt divorced in 1968. The marriage lasted eight years and resulted in three children, according to Davis biographer Gary Fisher. Gary Fishgall said Davis and Novak met again at a dance after the 1979 Oscars.

Later, Davis was surprised -