CHAPTER 5
When I was in the ninth grade I carried a briefcase to Casady Prep School. I was part of the A group, but my briefcase kept me organized and set me apart from my friends. Of us all, I was the only one who made exceptional grades.
Jealousy is a powerful emotion, and my good grades prompted certain students to steal my briefcase. Had I not had a bad temper, the thefts would have been a passing fad, but losing my temper was the whole point of the ploy. The incident almost always ended in a fistfight, with me being pushed into combat against a decidedly superior foe, usually an athlete. I’d get in a good punch or two, but the end result was always the same: defeat and its consequent bruises and abrasions.
After a dozen or so fights, I got fed up. It was ridiculous getting my brains beat out by bigger boys. I knew, however, the theft of my briefcase would not stop—absent a different tactic on my part. Thus, the next time it happened, I was prepared.
We were in class and someone began to edge my briefcase, which was under my chair, to the back of the room. It was a relay with several students involved, but the case always ended up in the hands of a bigger boy I would have to fight to get it back. This time I had a weapon, the leg from a broken chair, and when the last bully to receive the briefcase taunted me, I bypassed the preliminary tough-talk altercation and hit him in the head as hard as I could. He went down with a groan and a bloody gash. After that, nobody stole my briefcase.
The incident was a learning experience. When people have no idea how you will react to a given circumstance, their mind-set changes. Suddenly there are no rules. Stronger, bigger people become intimidated, since no one wants his head cracked open or a bullet in his heart. Physical size becomes irrelevant. A weapon is an equalizer, and that’s why I often have a holstered handgun in the breast of my jacket. I want bullies to be afraid of me, and they are.
Before I arrived in Hollywood, Sammy Davis Jr.’s affair with Kim Novak was a cause célèbre. Never again was he out of the public eye. His marriage to Swedish actress Mai Britt was deemed in some quarters a defiance of American values. In thirty-seven states, interracial marriage was felonious. Sammy’s hate mail was incredible. In public he was on constant alert for would-be assassins. He seldom ventured outside his home without a phalanx of bodyguards. One in particular, Joe Grant, was his closest companion. Sinatra had an entourage for the purpose of reminding him of how great he was; Sammy’s was to save his life.
When Mai became pregnant, Sammy was bombarded with the same crude question: “What color do you think your child is going to be?”
“I don’t care if it’s polka-dot,” answered Sammy honestly.
In November 1961, Mai gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Tracey. Hate mail doubled overnight. Sammy provided more hospital security for mother and child than Jackie O had when John-John was born. The day Mai and Tracey were scheduled to go home, Sammy asked me to be on hand at the hospital to handle the press if any reporters showed up.
In those days journalism was still a profession rather than an industry. I foresaw no problems. Two legmen for gossip columnists were hanging out in the lobby when I arrived. I knew both of them. I answered their questions, and then went upstairs, where Sammy was waiting. Mai was in a wheelchair holding the baby. Joe Grant was standing by.
“Any reporters waiting for us?” asked Sammy.
“Just a couple of legmen.”
“Good, let’s go.”
We trundled the wheelchair to an elevator and began our descent. The Davises were in good spirits; Mai was looking forward to being home with her new baby and Sammy was looking ahead to his opening at Ciro’s nightclub on the Strip.
The door opened. A horde of photographers and reporters blocked our exit. Camera bulbs flashed. Questions flew like missiles. It was pandemonium. Mai turned away to protect her baby. Sammy was speechless. I tried to wave a path open. “Come on, guys!” I yelled. “Let us out!”
They didn’t. Flash! Flash! I bodily pushed them. They began to back up, except for one lone photographer determined to get a shot of Tracey. I popped him in the nose with one hand and gave him a roundhouse with the other. He went reeling back with a moan, blood squirting from his nose like water from a toy pistol.
We surged forward, a nurse and Sammy pushing Mai and Tracey while Joe Grant and I led interference. The horde fell back silently, perhaps collectively realizing how intrusive they were. We went straight to Sammy’s limousine, which was waiting at the curb outside the lobby. Nobody followed us, and then we were gone.
To me, the experience signaled the beginning of professional journalism’s transition to a moneymaking industry interested solely in the bottom line. Most photographers and reporters were still thoughtful, giving quarter to human needs and emotions, but they were on the brink of change, and we saw an inkling of it that day. In a dozen years, with the collapse of the Nixon presidency, journalism as a profession would sigh its last breath. From that point forward, the ambition of Hollywood journalists would be personal celebrity, not honest reportage.
Back when I was at Rogers & Cowan, I came up with a publicity idea to celebrate Sammy’s thirty-third anniversary in show business. He was performing at Mocambo, a popular Sunset Strip nightclub. My plan called for thirty-three different charities to join in giving him an award for his service to mankind. I gave Warren Cowan my pitch. He approved it with a smile and a complimentary pat on my back.
Finding thirty-three charities was easy, since Sammy was one of the most magnanimous entertainers in the world. I could have secured a hundred had I wanted to—that was not my problem. But I needed a dynamite emcee to handle the awards, someone who was contemporary and hot on television.
We represented the popular television series Ben Casey, as well as most of its stars. Vince Edwards, who played the title role of Doctor Casey, seemed a natural choice to make the presentations. I talked to Vince; he was delighted to perform the honors.
The thrust of the idea, of course, was to publicize the hell out of the event before it happened. For a solid month I barraged the media with press releases devoted to Sammy and the charities, the latter one by one, which sustained the campaign. Naturally, on the night the award was going to be presented, the club was packed like a can of sardines. That’s when I ran into Milton Berle again, although this time it wasn’t physical, like it had been on the stage of Jackpot Bowling.
“Why did you get Vince Edwards to give the award?” he asked with an intimidating tone.
“Because he’s a television star in one of the most successful shows on the air,” I told him, which Milton could have taken as a personal slur, since Jackpot Bowling had celebrated a lonely funeral at the end of its first year.
“Damn,” said Milton. “I should be presenting this award. A year from now Vince Edwards’ name won’t mean shit!”
Vince gave the award, and Milton sat glumly with the rest of the stars. Later, he told Warren Cowan I was a rank amateur, with a few choice expletives thrown in for effect. After my second run-in with Milton, I really thought he was an asshole, although I kept my feelings to myself.
The truth is, I was an amateur. What I didn’t understand at that stage of my career was the enormity of the ego that dwelled in the psyche of most entertainers. I took Milton’s aggressiveness personally, which was a mistake. It would be a couple of years more before I learned that the bully ego of stars, past, present and future, had nothing to do with anyone except themselves and their audacious ambitions.
A few nights after Sammy’s event, I was at Chasen’s restaurant with a date. Milton came over to my table. “I got respect for you, kid,” he said. “You’re tougher than I thought.”
I grew ten feet tall. Milton Berle had come to me . . . and with a compliment.
Sammy called me at my office. He wanted to come by “right now,” which was unusual. Seldom did you meet with a star of Sammy’s magnitude in your office. It was usually for lunch, if you were lucky, or dinner, if you were unlucky, because after hours an entourage of hangers-on was always close by and little business got done. I told Sammy I’d wait for him.
Within ten minutes he arrived, all excited, full of energy. He said he had been offered the honor of being the first Negro (the terms black and Afro-American had not come into vogue yet) to have the dramatic lead in a television show. “It’s The Dick Powell Show,” he told me, and he wanted it publicized to all known planets.
I read the script. Sammy would be playing an ex-prizefighter turned shoeshine boy. When I came across a scene in which three thugs physically beat him in an alley, my mind started clicking. Within minutes I had in idea. I called Sammy. “Are you using a double in your fight scene?”
“Hell no, man! I’m doing my own stunt!”
I called the studio and got the crew list; then I called Bob Conrad to see if he knew any of the stuntmen working the picture. Half of Bob’s friends were stuntmen. I read him the list.
“I know them all,” he said.
I explained to him the scene. “Can you set up a meeting for me with the stuntman who gives Sammy’s character the coup de grace in the alley?”
He did, and I met with the stuntman. We talked about the scene. Then I popped my question: “How much would it cost me for you to accidentally hit Sammy in his bad eye at the climax of the scene?”
He thought I was kidding; I assured him I wasn’t. He shrugged. “Three hundred bucks.”
I only had three hundred to my name. “How about two-fifty?”
We settled on it; the deal was done.
My press connections were excellent, but I owed UPI a favor. I called the bureau chief. “Sammy Davis, Jr., is doing a dramatic episode for The Dick Powell Show.” The service had been running the news releases I was filing, so he was aware of the episode and Sammy’s role in it. “If you can send someone over to photograph the actual shooting of the fight scene, I’ll give you an exclusive.”
Another deal was done; this one for free.
Ernie Schworck was the UPI photographer. I made sure he got some shots of Sammy while the scene was being set up. Then I held him at ringside to make sure he didn’t leave. Right before the take, the stuntman gave me a subtle thumbs-up signal. The actors were on their marks, the crew was ready, and the director yelled, “Action!”
Fight scenes are choreographed and well-rehearsed. This one went accordingly, until my stuntman gave Sammy a right punch that sent him to the floor.
“Shit! Cut!”
Sammy groaned; his face was bleeding from a small cut under his blind eye.
“Jesus, Sammy,” said the stuntman. “I’m sorry!”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” muttered Sammy heroically.
As a crowd gathered, I whispered innocently to Ernie Schworck, “That was dramatic. Did you get anything?” Ernie was already leaving; he had something.
The story went out within an hour, with a photograph taken almost at the instant Sammy was hit. If it didn’t go through the solar system, it went around the world more than once. It was a PR man’s dream. It was on every wire, churning around the globe like whipped cream in the making: “Davis in Fight Accident!”
I drove through Laurel Canyon whistling under my breath. When I got to the office I had a message directing me to report to Warren Cowan immediately. I dashed to his office expecting high praise. Warren sat glumly behind his desk. “I just had a call from Aaron Spelling,” he said. “They know what you did with Sammy Davis, Jr.”
Spelling was Dick Powell’s top man, just on the verge of entering the Hollywood jungle as an independent producer.
“What I did?” I asked, feigning naïveté.
“Yes, and I know, too,” said Warren.
I stood like a statue wondering exactly what he knew. Had the stuntman confessed? I doubted it; he would have lost his union card. But something had gone awry. The question was: What?
“Rogers & Cowan is barred from Four Star as long as you are employed here,” continued Warren.
Four Star Productions was the parent company of Dick Powell’s mini-empire. It was big-time, so I understood the implication of Warren’s words. “That’s it?” I said. “I’m getting fired over an accident that happened on the set?”
“I think you know it’s more than that, Jay,” said Warren.
I had just pulled off the biggest publicity stunt of my young career, and I was getting canned for it. Something was wrong. What did Warren know that I didn’t?
In those days the motion-picture television industry was far removed from what it is today. It was as segregated as the races, which is part of the irony of the story, since Sammy’s role was an incipient effort at leveling the playing field for black actors. But in the early sixties television and movies were separate—as well as unfriendly—entities. Movie people thought television people were trying to destroy their industry, and television people resented the backseat role in which movie people tried to place them.
When I left Warren’s office, however, I thought somehow word had leaked out about my role with the stuntman. That wasn’t it at all. One of the wire stories sent around the world said Sammy had been hit during a stunt while making a movie. The key word was movie, as on the silver screen. Because I was Sammy’s publicist, I was accused of defaming the television industry. Dick Powell, Aaron Spelling and other television bigwigs thought I was purposely putting their fledgling industry down. That’s what Warren meant when he said it was more than Sammy being accidentally punched in the face: “I think you know it’s more than that, Jay.” It was a television industry ego trip, and I hadn’t even written the goddamned copy!
When the story came out the next day in the newspapers and trades, it had a different take, as it would later in the weeklies. The stories varied, but they had the same essential information: “Sammy Davis, Jr., failed to duck a stuntman’s blow during a fight scene while filming an upcoming episode for television’s The Dick Powell Show.”
Television’s The Dick Powell Show.
Warren called me. “Come back to work, Jay. The dailies have saved you.”
I stayed in my office all day waiting for the call, namely the gracious thank-you from Sammy for my wonderful services rendered. He’d asked me to get him some worldwide publicity, and I had performed. The call came at five o’clock. I felt like lighting a victory cigar, but instead I propped my feet on my desk and picked up the phone. A feeling of pride in accomplishment swept my body; my voice literally sang, “Helloooo, Sammy!”
“We’ve got to get that son of a bitch!” he cried.
My heart sank. Did he know the stuntman had punched him on purpose? “What son of a bitch?” I asked.
“The one that wrote that fucking caption!”
“What caption?”
“The one that said ‘Sammy Davis, Jr., failed to duck a blow.’ Do you know how that makes me look? Do you know how fucking embarrassing that is? Like I can’t handle myself in a fight! I want you to get that mother!” And he hung up.
When I was assigned Eddie Fisher’s account, his career had been derailed by a series of romantic contretemps that had sent his popularity plunging. Eddie had dumped Debbie Reynolds, his wife, and married Elizabeth Taylor, whose third husband, Mike Todd, had been killed in a plane crash. Eddie had become Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, which was bad enough; but then Elizabeth had fallen in love with Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra in Rome and sent Eddie scampering back to the States as the soon-to-be ex–Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, which was worse.
As in all cases of romantic intrigue and failure, the truth about the Debbie-Eddie-Elizabeth-Richard story was hidden somewhere between the lines of the gossip columnists and the words of the pundits. Eddie was devastated, but he was not defeated. He still had a huge following and, being a realist, he wanted to bring his fans back into the fold as quickly as possible.
I liked Eddie. For all of the adverse publicity that portrayed him as a doting wimp, he wasn’t. At thirty-four, he was a seasoned professional in both work and romance, and his cool aplomb had not diminished a fraction. However, he was still obsessed with Elizabeth, who, when Eddie exited Rome, had given him a faint hope of reconciliation by trying to persuade him not to leave in the midst of her indiscretions with Burton. Given a choice between continued humiliation and sudden flight, Eddie chose the latter.
Before he opened at Cocoanut Grove, I was with Eddie almost every night. We were usually joined by Walter Winchell, who had moved to California after his decades-long heyday in New York as the most important—as well as the most merciless—gossip columnist in America. He was the prototype for the Burt Lancaster character J.J. Hunsacker in The Sweet Smell of Success, which gives an indication of how ruthless and brutal Winchell was.
Walter had been a mentor of Eddie’s, and now that Eddie and Elizabeth had broken up, he gave Eddie his shoulder to lean on. I didn’t particularly like Winchell; he was a heavy-duty drinker who became increasingly mean-spirited with each drink. He wanted to “get” people, particularly Burton, for having done injury to his protégé. It was the same every night—a convivial beginning and a hostile ending, with Walter in his cups. I didn’t argue with Winchell’s tactics, which for the most part were all talk anyway. Eddie was my friend, and as the publicist assigned to him, I wanted to help rejuvenate his career.
Warren Cowan came up with an idea. Eddie’s two-week engagement at the Cocoanut Grove should be a “Back in My Own Backyard” sort of thing, where Eddie would sing to packed houses and the audiences could feel their heartstrings being pulled. Opening night, however, was not what we expected. A lot of stars were present, but the press, except for Winchell, was noticeably absent. It was probably for the best, because when Eddie sang “Danny Boy” to the tune of “Hava Nagila,” a drunken Irish sailor got pissed off and began to heckle him. To top it off, the sailor stood on his chair and called Eddie a kike. Mickey Rooney leaped from his seat and punched the sailor before security guards rushed in. It was a bad start.
The next day Cowan cracked the whip. We had to devise something that would get the press interested in going to the Grove. Then he came up with an idea. “How about we bring the same sailor back? We’ll get him a date, and we’ll have a plainclothes cop there to supervise the situation. We’ll show the warm side of Eddie.”
My job was to make sure the press corps was present in toto. I called almost every columnist in town, from Louella Parsons to James Bacon. They all knew about the Rooney-sailor incident, so it wasn’t difficult to get them there for the next performance. Fifteen minutes before curtain call, the showroom was full. I saw all the columnists—Hedda Hopper, Bacon, Parsons, Harrison Carroll and others—at their tables. The only one absent was Winchell. I went backstage to Eddie’s dressing room; he told me Winchell was upstairs in Eddie’s suite.
“I’ll get him,” I said.
“Be careful,” answered Eddie.
Something strange was in the air, accentuated by Eddie’s warning. I could not define it, but I could feel it.
I went up to Eddie’s suite. Winchell had already imbibed a few drinks. I wasn’t surprised because I had been out with him and Eddie almost every night for two weeks, and Winchell was an old-fashioned drinking machine. He had been knocking out coded columns with banner headlines through which Eddie was secretly trying to communicate with Elizabeth, an effort that indicated how much pain Eddie was suffering.
“Eddie’s on in ten minutes,” I told him.
“Okay,” grunted Winchell, “let’s go.”
We got in the elevator and the door closed.
“You got press tonight?” he asked.
“Yeah, but they came because we invited the heckler back.”
Winchell whipped a .45 from inside his suit jacket, cocked the hammer and placed the barrel between my eyes. His own eyes were glassy and his expression was maniacal. It was my moment of truth. It lasted for seconds; it seemed like minutes.
“I should kill you, you bastard! You’re taking advantage of Eddie.”
I stared at him without blinking. My fear factor was nil. I said nothing; I didn’t want to push him over the edge. He pressed the barrel harder against my forehead. “I should kill you,” he repeated. We stared at each other until he lowered the gun. The elevator door opened and I calmly stepped out. He remained inside. The door closed.
It is difficult to explain, but I did not feel frightened, even afterward which I’m told is often when fear surfaces. I had faced death and stared it down, because that crazy drunk bastard had been on the verge of shooting me. For the first time I realized what it was like to be Audie Murphy in combat or Ernest Hemingway facing a charging lion. Grace under pressure. It was a pivotal point in my life. I felt I had become a man.