Sammy Davis Jr. began performing at two, billed as an adult to dodge the law
To get around child labour laws, Sammy Davis Jr.'s father and godfather passed the tiny tap dancer off as a 44-year-old man of short stature. He had joined their vaudeville act at age two. By 1954 he was topping the bill in Las Vegas, the first Black performer to do so, in a city whose hotels once refused him a room.
Davis was born in Harlem in 1925 to two vaudeville dancers who split up when he was two. His father, afraid of losing custody, took the boy on the road with Will Mastin's troupe, where he learned tap from his father, Mastin and another dancer. At seven he landed the title role in the short film Rufus Jones for President opposite Ethel Waters. For years his father and Mastin shielded him from racism, brushing off snubs as mere jealousy.
That protection ended when the Army drafted him in December 1944. White soldiers bullied him constantly; he recalled fighting every couple of days, and his nose was broken so often it stayed flat. Moved into the Special Services entertainment unit, he found himself performing for some of the men who had abused him, and concluded that talent was his weapon for changing minds.
After the war the family act, soon the Will Mastin Trio, played Las Vegas from 1946 but could not stay in the hotels where they performed. Frank Sinatra, whom Davis had met at 15, became a lifelong ally and once forced the Copacabana to admit him after the club turned him away. The breakthrough came on 23 March 1951 at Ciro's in Los Angeles: booked to open for Janis Paige for twenty minutes, the trio held the celebrity crowd for nearly an hour, and Paige insisted on swapping the running order.
A car crash cost him his left eye in 1954, and in 1960 he converted to Judaism, seeing parallels between Black and Jewish experiences of oppression. Asked his golf handicap by Jack Benny, he replied that being a one-eyed Black Jew was handicap enough. He joined Sinatra and Dean Martin in the Rat Pack, earned a Tony nomination for Golden Boy, and scored his only Billboard number one with The Candy Man. He died of lung cancer in 1990, still owing money to the tax authorities.
Source: Sammy Davis Jr.
