CHAPTER 8
Everything in the entertainment world ends up connecting—but sometimes the connection is a bad one. Motown was so important to me that I didn’t want to meet Berry Gordy, the record label’s president and founder, because I was afraid he wouldn’t like me. When I was at Motown headquarters I was always nervous. One time Gordy and I were on the same elevator. I stared at the floor, trying to be obscure. I didn’t want him to know I was his public-relations man. If he didn’t like me, I might get fired. If he did like me, I might have to spend more time in Detroit. I didn’t want either to happen.
Years later, after Motown moved to Hollywood, a good-looking guy named Bob Silverstein asked me for a job. He didn’t care what he did—he just needed work. I wanted to help him, but I looked around and saw all my publicists with names like Rosenfield, Steinberg, Goldberg and Friedman. Jay Bernstein Public Relations was beginning to look like a refuge for Israeli transplants.
“What’s your middle name?” I asked Silverstein.
“Ellis,” he said.
I hired him as my chauffeur under the condition that henceforth he would be Bob Ellis.
Bob looked more like a movie star than a chauffeur, and girls were always flirting with him. One day he struck up a conversation with Diana Ross when our cars were at a stoplight. Conversation evolved into romance and romance evolved into marriage.
I represented Diana as well as Motown. I was never around Diana much because she was always with Gordy. I wanted to protect both accounts, so I worked as a ghost. Even when I represented Lady Sings the Blues, I assigned a unit publicist to the picture. I didn’t want to meet anybody.
When Berry Gordy found out Diana had married a chauffeur, he came unglued. He thought Diana was lowering herself socially. When he found out the chauffeur was in the employ of his public-relations man, he fired me. After giving me a quarter of a million dollars a year, Berry thought I should have been smart enough to put the quietus on the marriage. He didn’t think Ellis would be accorded the dignity he deserved when people discovered what his job was. So much for Motown’s liberal standards.
I was dancing as fast as I could, but I couldn’t keep up with everyone. I assigned more and more of my clients to account executives. I kept the big stars for myself, primarily because I wanted to be seen in public with them, it sated my appetite for fame and it was the best advertising I could get.
For my money, Sammy was the greatest entertainer of his time, maybe ever. He was a phenomenon. No one had more drive and energy, and when he was onstage he radiated electricity. It wasn’t a bolt, it was a constant surge. He was always moving—singing, dancing, mesmerizing—and when the curtain fell after two hours of nonstop performing, he would often collapse in his dressing room. For a minute—and then it was party time.
I never understood Sammy, but I understood his drive for excellence. He had no formal education, but somehow found time in his schedule to absorb books and magazines. Every time I went to New York, he would ask me to bring certain tomes to put in his suitcase library. It was an eclectic reading list—novels, philosophy, social sciences. I often wondered why he didn’t go to a Manhattan bookstore to satisfy his curiosity, but I never asked him why. I secretly enjoyed the privilege of being his mobile library administrator.
What Sammy really wanted, I think, was to outdo Sinatra, his benefactor. In my judgment he did it, and against great odds, too, because he was black.
Sammy was also my most demanding client. He was responsible for my initial success, all the songsters. I couldn’t relegate him to a junior member of my team (although I eventually did). I was always there for Sammy—many times when I didn’t want to be. Often I served as his security blanket. We were characters in Peanuts.
“I’m flying to L.A. tonight,” he said on the phone, “and you’re flying out with me tomorrow.”
“To where?”
“Tougaloo, Mississippi. Call Marlon Brando; he’s got all the dope,” said Sammy. “Then put out a press release. This is gonna be big but scary.”
I didn’t have to call Brando. A couple of weeks earlier, James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, began a solo civil rights march that was to span 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. The purpose was to show the world that Negroes were not afraid of southern whites. He was shot soon after he started, the moment he set foot on Mississippi soil, and was put in the hospital. Meanwhile, thousands of other protesters took up the cause to complete his march for him.
A few miles north of Tougaloo was Camden. That very day the march had reached an ignominious peak. A confrontation had occurred between blacks and whites; fisticuffs ensued, tear gas was used, but fortunately there were no fatal injuries. Thousands of people were now converging on Tougaloo for a last-minute rally before the final push to Jackson. Sammy wanted to perform for the troops; in this case, the invaders of Mississippi. Next to Vietnam, the heart of the old South was the last place on earth I wanted to visit.
I called my parents. My mother, who was not in sync with anything aside from her own self-inflated ego said, “Mississippi? How nice. Be sure and call the Levins!”
“This is not a social trip, Mother.”
“Well, I don’t want them to think you’re rude. They’re good, liberal Democrats.”
“Yeah, and those liberal Democrats are the ones who are going to be shooting at us.”
We flew to Jackson in a Lear jet, eight of us, including Marlon Brando and Tony Franciosa. Brando told jokes most of the flight, but few of us laughed. Sammy was quiet. Harry Belafonte had bamboozled him again. During Golden Boy, Harry had asked Sammy to go to Selma, Alabama. Sammy told his producer to tell Belafonte it would cost too much to close the show. “How much is too much?” Belafonte asked. “I’ll pay for it.”
The South frightened Sammy. His enemies shot and always missed in L.A., but in the old South—well, Sammy was afraid a Rebel sharpshooter would take a bead on him and shoot for the heart. His heart was a big target, bigger than his bank account.
From Jackson we motored in two cars to Tougaloo, where Sammy, Brando and Tony were scheduled to appear at a rally at the football field of the local college. I felt like Willie Stark’s astutely observant PR man in All the King’s Men, except my boss wasn’t the white governor; he was an outsider who by genetic chance was black as the ace of spades.
As we approached Tougaloo, the crowds lining the road grew larger and increasingly hostile. Some carried shotguns, others clubs; sharecroppers held shovels and hoes. All of them were white. I suddenly realized the truth of Sammy’s words that long-ago night in Kanab, Utah: “Jay, the only time we’re alike is when we look in a mirror at midnight and the electricity is off.”
We drove circuitously to a “black” motel “somewhere across the tracks.” We were in a Negro shanty district, and my literary recollections shifted from Robert Penn Warren to the gothic depths of William Faulkner. Brando thought it was wonderful. He, too, was in a literary mood: “Tennessee would love this fucking town”—a reference to Tennessee Williams, his friend and favorite playwright. “It’s so atmospheric!” he exclaimed.
Across from the motel, a horde of angry whites held banners, signs and weapons. On our side of the street was a mixed mob of freedom fighters, riders and kids crazy with energy they wanted to expend. The two groups were yelling at each other, mostly expletives. Before I got out of the car, I secretly unsnapped the strap that held my .38 in place above my ankle. I had no intention of starting anything, but I had every intention of defending our party, if necessary.
I waited in the lobby while Sammy and his fellow celebrities went to the “war room” to meet with Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil-rights leaders: Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and all the militants who ran the black spectrum of defiance from “civil disobedience” to “Let’s kill whitey.” I wondered what the hell I was doing there. Every network had camera crews on the scene and all the big newspapers had teams of correspondents. Public relations were out; the only news that could come out of this potential fiasco were hospital reports and obits, which were hard to put a good spin on. The heat was stifling. The humidity approached 100 percent. I sweated. An old-fashioned Coke box was in the corner, full of ice and soft drinks. A sign read: Pop, 10 Cents. I took a Coca-Cola from the ice and went to the desk to pay for it. The clerk, a burly black man, said, “That’ll be a quarter.”
“The sign says a dime,” I told him.
“That was yesterday. Today it’s a quarter.”
We were supposed to be on the same side of the conflict that was brewing outside, but greed superseded principle. This was America, after all.
The afternoon waned. I was soaking wet. I’d drunk about two dollars worth of Cokes when Sammy and the others returned from their strategy meeting, which I knew had been a farce, since there was no strategy to strategize. Next on the schedule was the concert at Tougaloo College football stadium. When we went to our cars, some of the black kids on our side of the street yelled at Sammy. “Go back to Hollywood! We don’t need no honky nigras!”
He ignored the taunts, but it wasn’t easy. For years he had taken heat from both sides of the issue. Whites hated him for being successful in “their” world and blacks denigrated him for wanting to be white. The whites were right regarding his success; the blacks were wrong about what he wanted. Sammy was too smart to waste his time wishing he were white; what he wanted was to live like white people because his life’s experience dictated it was a better way to live. I admired him because he put up with the name-calling and catcalling without comment. He was here for the “cause,” as dedicated to civil rights as Martin Luther King was, but he wasn’t going to change his lifestyle for anyone.
Outside the sports arena, which was the size of a high school football stadium, a few thousand whites were assembled, waiting and willing for action. Mississippi State Police cars cordoned off a pathway, but it didn’t take a genius to know which side the police would be on if the crowd got out of hand. Inside the stadium the bleachers and field were packed with activists, both black and white, but mostly black. We parked near a makeshift stage in the center of the field. I kept my gun loose on my ankle.
The concert was an exercise in futility—a mob scene. Thousands of people were on hand for the warm-up session preliminary to the final march on Jackson the next day. It was a parody of entertainment. The sound system didn’t work; there were no musicians. James Brown tried to sing; Sammy scatted a capella. Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, who had flown in earlier, served as cheerleaders. Marlon gave a speech nobody could hear. He had a bumper sticker plastered across his forehead that read: We’re the Greatest! It was loony tunes.
Part of the crowd started singing “We Shall Overcome,” countered by Carmichael’s supporters, who changed the lyrics to “We Shall Overrun.” I watched, thinking how stupid they were. If violence got out of hand, they would be Switzerland against the Soviet Union. Those Mississippi crackers outside the stadium would slaughter them like pigs at an abattoir. James Meredith’s purpose had been to show white America that Negroes weren’t afraid to face white superiority in Mississippi. The truth was, everybody in the stadium was scared shitless, including me.
My group didn’t stick around for the march into Jackson the next day. It was just as well; the end of the march was anticlimactic. King gave another stump speech, and then everybody went home, back to New York and other northern states. As far as I could see, the only beneficiaries of the march were soft-drink salesmen and the makers of over-the-counter blister ointments.
Strangely, flying back to Los Angeles was like having a victory party. I understood Sammy’s exuberance: he was still alive. But what had been accomplished? Brando still wore his bumper sticker like a mustard plaster. I didn’t say anything. No logical reason existed for me to try to rain on their parade, but I saw hard times ahead for black folk. I saw violence, murder and mayhem.
Because of Sammy Davis, Jr., I had an elite list of black entertainers, ranging from Barry White to Leslie Uggams. By the early seventies, 65 percent of my performance clients were black. It had nothing to do with color—it was all about talent. My philosophy was always based on merit.