Selects: Sammy Davis Jr: National Treasure

In this classic episode Josh and Chuck sit down and detail the complicated life of the late, great Sammy Davis Jr.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's me Josham for this week's s YSK Select.
I've chosen our February twenty twenty episode on Sammy Davis Junior.
If I'm not mistaken, this is where I, you, and
the rest of the world finds out that Chuck does
a killer Sammy Davis Junior impression, thus booing the podcast
for years to come. I don't think anything else is

(00:21):
needed to be said about this one. Just enjoy.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Dylan
sitting in again like a great.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Guy, like a cooled cat baby. I thought you were
doing evil German doctor for a second and then I
figured it out.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
No man, wait, I haven't said it yet. And this
is Stuff you should Know. Okay, that was a good
one that no Man was wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
I love how Sammy Davis Junior always said cat and baby.
It was just he was such a cool dude.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
And okay, do Sammy Davis Junior saying we have ways
of making you talk.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
What sounds German about any of that.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
I just do it. Please please, we have ways of
making you talk.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Man.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
That was pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
And that's a little soft shoe.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
It's great stuff, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
So you know, Billy Crystal used to do Sammy Davis
Junior way back in the eighties when blackface was super
cool to do and not controversial.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
Did he do blackface Sammy Davis Junior?

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yes, dude, he did blackface Sammy Davis Junior eight years
ago at the Oscars. What. Yes, you don't remember that. No,
it's the last time he hosted the Oscars. Age In
twenty twelve, he they did, you know, a remote intro
thing where he was doing different things and the last
bit was him and blackface again and people were like,

(02:08):
and then you know, this was in you know, twenty twelve,
so that was Twitter and that was Facebook and this
social media and people were like, that wasn't cool in
the eighties and I can't believe he's doing that now
for real. Sammy Davis Junior's daughter came out and said,
you know what, if there's one thing I know is
that my dad is looking down and laughing and smiling
at Billy Crystal doing this. He was he was roasted

(02:31):
pretty heavily for it, rightfully so, and he is he
hasn't been around a lot, but he wasn't a real
up before then.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
He you know, do you think like that? Did it?
Like that was the demise kid?

Speaker 2 (02:42):
I guess get helped.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
I was, Yeah, I haven't seen him in a while either. Man.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
How did somebody not step back and be like, okay, wait,
we're about to do blackface?

Speaker 2 (02:52):
I know, Like, how did no one on the production
crew of the Oscars say not a good idea?

Speaker 3 (02:57):
I don't know, Well he did.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
So I came across something that I thought was pretty interesting.
I saw a nineteen eighty five interview with David Letterman
and Sammy Davis Junior says in this interview he did blackface.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
He was a little kid.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Apparently his skin was lighter when he was a kid,
and they wanted him because he used to tour with
his uncle and his dad, as we'll see, and to
get around labor laws, they would pass him off as
a midget.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yes, and to do that there was right, Yes, thank you.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
They gave him a candy cigar and put him in
blackface and told anyone who would listened that he was
a little person. Although again, they didn't say a little person.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
No, they didn't.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Boy, this is a really controversial episode right out of
the gate.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Well, there's a lot of sort of I mean, he
was a complicated guy who was you know, his father
was black, his mother was Puerto Rican. He eventually would
endorse two presidents, both Kennedy and Nixon. He served in
the army. He was a rat packer. He was shunned

(04:12):
by racist and also shunned sometimes within his own black community.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, like a little pinball getting bounced around.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
And little is right. He was also a little guy
who always, I think had a complex about his height,
about his looks. He had this weird sort of underbite
jaw that would jut out to one side when he talked.
Just a really fascinating guy that was super super talented

(04:41):
and had his little tiny fingers and a lot of
pies from you know, singing and dancing and performing live
and in movies on TV, and just really really fascinating guy.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, when you look back at the rat Pack, he
was the one that brought the actual talent to the
rat Pack.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Like Sinatra could say, Martin.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
Could sing everyone and the rat Pack was talented, right, right,
But he was multi talented, like dancing, doing impressions.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
He had like a little gunslinger routine too.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Did you see any of that?

Speaker 3 (05:14):
I did?

Speaker 2 (05:15):
He's amazing.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
I watched a PBS documentary for their series American Masters
on him, and it was like an hour almost two
hours long, and it was really in depth and really good.
But they had some amazing footage of him just doing
all sorts of different stuff. So I guess, let me
revise that. Yes, the rat pack was talented. Sammy Davis

(05:37):
Junior was more talented than all of them put together.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
All right, Okay, so he made Did you see any
of that documentary of the USO.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
Tour There were a few clips in there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, So if you want to see a different So
if you think Sammy Davis Junior as just the candy
man or mister bo Jangles babe.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
Man, watching him do mister bo Jangles, that's growing how
he felt about that song. It's very heartbreaking, it is.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
But if you see this documentary. In nineteen seventy two,
he did a USO tour of Vietnam where he performed
at drug rehab camps and some other you know, forward bases.
If you look at this man, this is like is
swinging seventies kind of rock and roll as it gets
really really cool stuff. He was a bad a performer.

(06:34):
He was at places like some of them were kind
of full on productions where they were capable of pulling
that off. Other times, there's this great footage of him
where they could had nothing but a microphone and he's
just like, all right, give me the mic and I
will like basically kind of do my own beat box
seed rhythm section and sing and dance. And the soldiers

(06:54):
are just loving it, man, they're eating it up.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
And this is nineteen seventy two, believe, and like, I
mean like his like he was a world famous star
by them, but also he was an older dude, you know,
like he'd really had his heyday in the late fifties
and throughout the sixties, and this is seventy two and
he's out there in Vietnam belting out motown hits and
drumming on the mic stand.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
So yeah, I didn't see all.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
Of it, but yeah, you can tell, like it was
pretty cool. Yeah, he's even more of a talented performer
than people realize, because you know, you do think he
as doing like standards and show tunes and stuff like that,
and he did mostly do those things, but he was
talented in all sorts of different ways.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
So the Grabster helped us out with this one. And
he said that there were a few defining sort of
things about Sammy Davis Junior's life that inform who he was.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
One was that he came from poverty. He performed with
his like he said, his uncle which was not his
real uncle, but his dad, and his uncle Will Meston
as the was it the Maston.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
Trio, Will Maston trio, right, And they.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Came from nothing, and he did not have any money.
And he talked later in life about the thrill of
leaving a waitress one hundred dollars tip and walking around
with one thousand dollars in your pocket. He said the
later on in life. Yeah, he's like, that was a
year's salary. And he was like, no one understands that
unless you've been at the bottom, right.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
And he was definitely at the bottom.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
And they, he and his father and his uncle Will
worked their way up, you know, all through they started
all throughout the Depression on the Chitlin circuit doing vaudeville.
And he didn't go to school, once, because this is
really important to understand. He spent his entire life in

(08:48):
show business and the earliest years constantly on the road
with his uncle.

Speaker 3 (08:54):
And his dad.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
Yeah, so that's the second point. Never went to school
at all, did not learn to read and write until
he was in the army, and always apparently had trouble writing,
and he always looked at it as he was always,
you know, sort of ashamed of it. He was proud
of who he became, but always was ashamed of his
lack of formal schooling. And he called his what he

(09:18):
had was the facade of intelligence, which Ed rightfully points
out as just bunk, because there are many kinds of intelligence.
He was a very intelligent guy, right, He just didn't
have formal schooling. But he was very self conscious of
this and about representing the black community. So like, if
you ever mispronounced something because he didn't know, it would

(09:38):
make him feel really bad because he thought that that
represented black people as a whole. So that's number two.
And the third thing is that early on his family,
his dad and his uncle really kind of shielded him
from racial prejudice. He certainly encountered it on the Chitlin
circuit but he didn't really get the full deal until

(09:59):
he into the army, and it was a big shock.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
To him, right he.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
I think this kind of explains that he approached racism
differently than some of his contemporaries, especially when he got
to the army and was confronted with the full brunt
of it, and that that kind of informed how he
viewed race and racial discrimination in the the dynamic between

(10:26):
the races in the United States in the middle of
last century, because he hadn't really seen it firsthand or
experienced at firsthand.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
He hadn't been in.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
School and so other little white kids hadn't bullied him,
or he hadn't been around town and just lived in
a set space where most kids were introduced to racism firsthand.
He didn't get that until he was eighteen, and so
by the time he was eighteen, he was like, this
isn't right.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
What do you what do you? Who do you think
you are?

Speaker 1 (10:54):
And so when he got to the army and was
confronted with it full on, he he approached it differently,
whereas other some of his contemporaries in the army who
were black, just kind of kept their head down and
you know, tried to go along and get along.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
He would he would fight back, he would not he
would not back down, he would not step down. And
he spent a lot of time in the army physically
fighting white racists who were trying to make things hard
for him. And apparently at some point he fought one.
He fought one guy in one he beat up some
white guy who had done something racist to him. I'm

(11:31):
not sure what it was. And then after the fight,
the guy beaten said, you know, you may have beaten me,
but you're still black. And apparently this guy does Sammy
Davis Junior in such a way that it just transformed
his approach that he realized, like he could fight white
boys his whole life, yeah, and probably win some of

(11:51):
the fights, probably get beat up a lot of the fights.
He had his nose broken at least twice, but that
it wasn't going to get him anywhere. And so he
decided that in there that what he could do is
fight prejudice through his performing. He would be such a
good performer, he would transcend race at least while he
was performing. Yeah, And he managed to do that, or

(12:14):
as much as anybody ever has in the history in
modern history, at least in the United States.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah. So he's discharged in the army in nineteen forty five,
goes right back to the Maston Trio and touring with them,
and he was sort of even though he was just
the little kid growing up in that trio, he was
sort of the star still.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
Yeah, little Sammy.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Little Sammy, like little Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, he actually chuck. He won his first contest at
age three, Yeah, at like an amateur hour or amateur night,
and he's saying, I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
You that's what.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
He knocked the house down at age three, and that
was the formal start to his show business.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
He won ten bucks, Yeah, about one hundred and fifty
bucks today.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yeah, which for him, I mean, that's a lot of dope, sure,
for a very very poor kid. So he gets out
of the army, goes back to the Maston Trio. And
this sort of corresponded with the same timeline as when
Vegas started to become a big deal and a big
entertainment center, and they played Vegas a little bit. And

(13:25):
you know, we should point out too, on the Chitlin circuit,
they were never making much money. No, it's a grueling thing.
And they did get paid, but it's not like they
were getting rich out there.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
I mean, you'd have to be a vaudeville superstar to
make a lot of money. And this is also during
the depression largely too, so people didn't make money in general.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Right, But doing three, four or five shows a day
on that circuit, yah, but goes to Vegas, starts performing
in Vegas, starts doing impressions, which he did throughout his career,
was very good at them, and audiences ate it up.
And then Frank Sinatra, the chairman of the board as
they say, gave him a call or gave their people

(14:03):
called and said, hey, I want this guy opening up
for me in Vegas. This trio opening up. Took him
under his wing.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
That was a big deal.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
It was a very big deal. Said, you know, you
do these great impressions, you do me, it's hysterical. You're
so talented. Open for me in Vegas. And that was
where he said, you know, in Vegas for twenty minutes,
twice a night, our skin had no color. But the
second they got finished, he said, other acts to go
out and gamble and socialize, have a drink, he said,

(14:33):
we had to go through the kitchen with the garbage,
and that's when it would all sort of hit home
once again.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
They had to stay in like an entirely different part
of Vegas that, from the looks of it, almost didn't
have electricity, Dusty roads. Yeah, that's where they had to stay.
They were beloved performers, but that's where they had to
go stay after the show. And I saw that even
after he was a member of the rat Pack a superstar,

(15:00):
he had used the pool at the Sands and guests
in the fifties complained enough that the Sands agreed to
drain the pool and refill it because Sammy Davis Junior
had been using the pool and this is after he
was a star already. That's how vile the segregation was,
even in a place like Vegas.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
All right, let's take a break and we'll come back
and talk more about the candy Man. Right after this,
Softly Jaws.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Stoff.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
So Sammy Davis Junior wrote a bunch of memoirs and
autobiographies over the years, and one of them is a
very great spinal tap joke. So I know you still
haven't seen it, right, I saw it, but you've.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Only seen it once and it was a couple of
years ago.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Okay, so one of his I think his first one
was called yes I Can. Sure. There's a great scene
in spinal tapp when Bruno Kirby as a limo driver
is talking about it and he said he said something
about yes I can, he said, although the real title
should have been yes I can. If Frank says, it's
okay because Frank called the shots for all those.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
Guys, right, I remember that too. It's very funny, Joe like,
he just keeps going off about that, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, Yeah, it's good stuff. You know, Billy Crystal and
Bruno Kirby had a very famous falling out and no
legend has it. Billy Crystal sort of had him blackballed.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
What is up with Billy Crystal? My impression of him
is changing dramatically. He really sells it when the cameras
are on.

Speaker 3 (16:49):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, well that's what you do.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
You know. That's crazy though, to be that Wow, Wow.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
I mean we know the game. People think you and
I like each.

Speaker 1 (16:57):
Other, right, we got everybody fool It's amazing. Like what
were their names of the MythBusters?

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, they like. The day the camera stopped rolling, they
release press statement saying we never liked each other.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
I know, why would why would anybody do that? Even
if you didn't like each other, Why would you just
let it go?

Speaker 3 (17:16):
You know?

Speaker 2 (17:17):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:18):
But it's a Jamie and Adam Adam, that's.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
Right, Aim Savage. Adam's a great guy. I know him
a little bit.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
So are you implying Jamie's not?

Speaker 1 (17:26):
I don't know him any Oh, Okay, I'm not siding
this took a really weird turn, didn't it.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
It did. So back to Sammy Davis Junior, he also
started his stars started rising. Well, his star had already risen,
but in the seventies when the variety show came about,
which was a big deal in the seventies and even
into the eighties, Sammy Davis Junior was perfect for that medium.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Well, this was this was I think even earlier than that,
when TV really started to dominate. The earliest shows that
they had were vaudeville shows that led to variety show.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
He had his own variety show later in the seventies
because he was so and it wasn't a huge hit.
But for someone who can dance and sing and do
impressions and do comedy and for God's sakes, as a
real deal gun slinger, a variety show is pretty great.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
It really was.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
So he's you know, he's getting onto TV. Their Vegas
gigs have really put the will Maston trio on the map,
and they were doing really well. They had reliable work,
that kind of stuff. People knew who Sammy Davis Junior was.
He was already, you know, a protege of Frank Sinatra
by this time. But it wasn't until nineteen fifty one

(18:40):
that the big break came through. And it really came
through in like a really kind of Hollywood story kind
of way, where like this they were given this one
shot and this one particular spot at just the right time,
in front of just the right people, and they killed
it and that was it. They Sami dave Or was
a star from that moment on.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
That's right. And that was at Janis Page and a
show at Ciro's which is now the Comedy.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Store, right, And oh really I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, yeah, it became the Comedy Store after Ciro's, but
was sort of a legendary place, you know, of its
own in its own right, Oh, yeah, but everyone, you know,
apparently it's debatable whether or not it was an Oscar
party after party or not, but regardless, there were a
lot of Hollywood people.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
There, including Bogie and his rat Pack.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Sure, the original rat Pack, which wasn't called the rat.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Pack, no, it was actually it was yep.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Well why did well, never mind, I'm not going down
that rabbit hole. What that's all right?

Speaker 3 (19:45):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (19:46):
So he he kills it there. He's doing impressions of
people that are in the audience. Everyone loves them. They
signed with the William Morris Agency, and an overnight sensation,
you know, twenty thirty years in the making, starts happening.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, and we should say so. Sammy Davis Junior became
known for his impressions. He was groundbreaking in the sense
that he would do impressions of white people. And up
to the time Sammy Davis Junior started doing impressions of
white people, if you're a black performer, you could do
impressions of other black people, and that was it. It
was just not okay for you to do white people.
Sammy Davis Junior just started doing white people and the

(20:22):
white people loved it. And at that show at Zero's.
He was doing impressions of some of the people in
the crowd, like he did a killer Carrie Grant and
Carry Grant was a member of Humphrey Bogart's rat Pack
and he was probably there that night. So there were
a lot of people who were getting impressions done of them.
They just loved it killed And I think Janis Page

(20:43):
said I was the headliner tonight. I think these guys
should be the headliner from now on. Yeah, which is
pretty cool of her to do that, you know.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
It's amazing.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
So he gets a record deal after that, he's putting
out like showtuns old standards.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
He does a pilot in the mid fifties with his
father and uncle about a trio of black entertainers that
are kind of struggling called We Three.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Yeah, I would love to see that.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Well, there's another part we'll talk about later that you
definitely need to see.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
I haven't checked it out yet, but I know I
know the one.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's pretty legendary. Yeah. So a big thing happened that
same year in nineteen fifty four is Sammy Davis Junior
had a wreck and his Cadillac, and the Cadillac and
This is just horrific to think about, because I've seen these,
you know, in the middle of the steering wheel, they
had these little decorative cones that stuck out. His left

(21:36):
eyeball hit that thing and he lost it and wore
an eyepatch for a while and then a glass eye.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, apparently he remembers coming out of the car with
holding his eye in his hand, and then that's the
last thing you remember. The next thing he remembers after
that was waking up in a hospital bed and when
he woke up and realized that he'd lost his eye
for life. As eye was gone, he was really really
scared that his career was over. This is nineteen fifty four.

(22:03):
He'd just got in his big break three years before
and was on his way up, and now all of
a sudden he loses his eye. And the thing about
losing your eye, in addition to say, you know, having
to sit for publicity photos and try to be a
leading man in movies or on Broadway or that kind
of thing, you have to relearn spatial awareness. You're going

(22:27):
from binocular vision to monocular vision, and that has all
sorts of weird tricky effects on you. So if you're
a dancer or a gunslinger or doing some old soft
shoe or whatever you're doing, you have to relearn how
to move. And apparently one of the things that Sinatra
did that was really stand up for Sammy Davis Junior

(22:48):
was he had him basically come convalesced at Sinatra's place
and really guided him in saying, like, you need to
relearn how to move. You're gonna be fine, but you're
gonna have to You're gonna have to start really attacking
this and you can't really sit around and feel bad
for yourself. You need to get you know, relearn movement

(23:11):
now rather than you know, spend a year feeling sad.
And that was a huge help for him.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
It was, and he also was kind of I don't think,
I mean, maybe his life did kind of pass before him,
because he definitely had an awakening of what have I
done here with my life so far? What greater purpose
have I served? And what can I do from this
point forward? He and put a pin in this. But

(23:37):
this was the first exposure to Judaism in the hospital,
he got a visit from a rabbi. Yeah, and just
put a pin in that because that will come back again. Later, Okay,
there a pin in it. Well, look all right, I
don't even know where this pin came from. You, I don't.
Well you do have that pin coashion right there.

Speaker 3 (23:53):
But yeah, this little tomato one with the strawberries dangling
off of it? Remember those?

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Oh, man, do I was there a seventies mom that
didn't have one of those?

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, with a Macromay owl hanging on the wall behind him.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
Yah.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
So here's where it gets really kind of great as
far as knowing what a stand up guy Sammy Davis
Junior was. His success is booming, and you would think,
Sammy Davis Junior, you can leave that Will Maston Trio behind. Yeah,
because it's really all about you. He said, no, man,

(24:29):
shine us all up, babe. Three way split, yep, And
that's what they did. He ensured contractually that they would
get a three way split that endured ten years after
he left as a solo performer. He was still giving
them thirty three percent each. Yeah, for fifteen years total.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
They got a third of the profits each of them.
And yeah they were you know, originally they were still
doing their Vegas show as the Will Maston Trio featuring
Sammy Davis Junior. But then over time, you know, I
remember his uncle and his dad were a good twenty
years older than him. By this time, he's in his thirties,

(25:06):
so you know, they're starting to get they're losing their
step a little bit, so they start to not be
in the show quite as much, just stepping back. But
even still, he made sure they were taken care of
for another fifteen years. Third a third and this is
a third during Sammy Davis Junior's peak earning years, So
he got one third of what he would have gotten

(25:27):
had he just basically said, dad, uncle will thank you
for teaching me everything.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
I know.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
I'm going to move on now, best of luck, let
me know if you need a loan. Instead, he just
took a third of what he could have gotten and
gave the other two thirds to those two, which is
for fifteen years. Chuck, Yeah, that's really amazing.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
It's pretty great. So that pen it actually wasn't in
there that long. We can go ahead and take the
pen out. Because he after that first meeting with a rabbi,
he reads more and more about Judaism. He draws a
correlation between the plight of the Jewish people and the
plight of black people, and it really spoke to him
and he converted. And some people said, oh, this big
publicity stunt. He's like, no, this is not a publicity stunt.

(26:08):
He said, this is my new religion. And he very
humorously started referring to himself as a one eyed Black.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Jew, sometimes a one eyed black Puerto Rican.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Puerto Rican Jew, which was very sort of in keeping
with his self deprecating style.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
For sure, he's like Tim Wattley. He converted for the jokes.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Oh man, I remember that one. I've been plowing through
Seinfeld again.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Yeah, I love.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
One of my favorite things that always gets me is
when Jerry calls George Biff.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
It never fails to make me laugh. Biff. Yeah, so
good should we? Well, no, let's not take another break.
Let's plow on here, right yeah, sure, all right. So,
dating wise, he is dating black women and white women.
When he dates white women, he gets racist threats from

(27:01):
white people, and he gets condemnation from the black community
for betraying the black community by dating a white woman.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Right, he can't win. No, he really couldn't win. And apparently,
from what I saw in that American Masters documentary.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
He really, really, really was in love with kim Novak. Yeah,
from what I saw, she may have been the love
of his life.

Speaker 1 (27:26):
At the very least. He never got to explore whether
she was or not. But when he said that he
intended to marry her. I guess it was in the fifties.
There was a contract put on in his life by
the studio head and I think Columbia where kim Novak
was an actress.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah, Harry Cohne was the studio head. And this was
back when Vegas and Hollywood were you know, there was
some mob in mafia dealings going on for sure, and
Sammy had some mob friends too, just because he was
friends with Frank and you know, that was just sort
of the thing. These guys would come to these Vegas
clubs and he would meet them. He sought protection from

(28:06):
a Chicago gangster that he was in with. The Chicago
gangster was like, I can't help you in California. He's like,
I'm no good there. I can protect you in Chicago,
I can protect you in Vegas. Can't do anything about
California and it's not my territory. And supposedly, and this
is where it gets a little hazy, because some people
say it happened. Some people say it didn't. Supposedly he

(28:27):
was even kidnapped for a few hours to scare him,
but who knows if that's really true.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
Well, apparently one of his friends who was there said no,
it wasn't true.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
He was never kidnapped.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
But the contract basically said there was a contract that said,
you have forty eight hours to marry a black woman, yeah,
or you die yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
And whatever it was.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
Whatever, whether there was an actual contract, whether it wor
just got to him that there was, it didn't matter
to Sammy Davis Junior at that minute, because he broke
it off with Kim Novak.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
To his own heart's break and.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Married a woman.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yeah, proposed to a woman named laure White who she
was a black singer, and I think they had dated
years before. And I guess he never copped to the
to the idea that it was an arranged marriage that
was basically a business proposal, But that is definitely how
it's portrayed by the people who were there at the

(29:26):
time were his close friends that he even paid her
ten thousand dollars to do this, and I'm sure it
was very you know, kind and congenial to it. But
they described that day. His wedding day to Laura White
is probably the worst day of his life, tied for
first with the day that he lost his left eye.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, and he you know, we can't look over some
of the ugly parts of that day. He got drunk
and physically assaulted her in the car just after the
wedding reception. Not making any excuses for the guy, but
it was certainly not right to do that.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Right, So their marriage didn't last terribly long. I didn't
see how long it lasted, did you.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, a little every year.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Okay, so about a year, and I guess he considered
that the heat had gone down or whatever by that time.
But I get the impression that the fact that Kim
Novak had been taken from him strictly out of racism.
Like Harry Cohne, I'm sure was a racist, but he
was also a businessman, and the reason that he was
doing this was because he knew America was racist. This

(30:32):
is at a time when there were laws that prevented
black men and white women or vice versa.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
To marry.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, it wasn't legal yet.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
No, So the idea of one of his biggest stars,
Kim Novak, marrying a black man. He decided that he
just couldn't take that risk business wise, and so he
threatened Sammy Davis Junior. Whatever the reason was, Sammy Davis
Junior really bristled under that. And so in nineteen sixty,
this was a few years after the he had to

(31:02):
break it off with kim Novak, he got married to
a woman, a Swedish actress named my brit and he
had children with her and was married to her, but
he also ran around on her almost constantly. From what
I understand, and you get the impression that my was
in part A, I'll just put it as PG as possible,

(31:25):
thumbing his nose at all of the racists out there
who took kim Novak from him. He was saying, I think,
as somebody put it, I'm big enough now that you
can't tell me who to marry. And I'm going to
marry this beautiful six foot white woman.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah, who looks like Margo Robie sort of she does, Yeah,
she does.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
A little bit.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
I hadn't put my finger on it. And their children
were incredibly beautiful, thanks largely to their mom too, but
they were They had three kids together, and they were
married for eight years and I think it's very sad
because my Britt immediately lost her career. Yeah, so she
gave up her career to be with Sammy Davis Junior.
I don't know. I she must have fallen in love

(32:06):
with them, and because she had three kids with him too.
But she gave up a lot and he gave up nothing.
And I think that was very unfair on his part
to ask for what he asked for from her and
give so little in return.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah. And what was also not fair and sort of
a black eye on John F. Kennedy was that Sammy
Davis Junior had been scheduled to perform at the nineteen
sixty inauguration and he disinvited him because of his marriage
to a white woman.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Kennedy personally had him disinvited. This wasn't Kennedy's advisors or
anything like that.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
No, it was him, and he said, you know, apparently
people said he you know, it was a political move
because he didn't want to alienate Southern Democrats. But either way,
that was a big fracturing of the relationship between JFK
and Sammy Davis Junior. He never got over that.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
No, he never did.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
And it was also a moment where Sinatra, who had
stood up for Sammy Davis Junior multiple countless times against racists,
against studio heads, against the record company executives, against all
sorts of people, didn't.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
He did not stand up.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
And argue and try to persuade JFK to change his mind.
He just quietly went along with it. And I think
that broke Sammy Davis Junior's part as much as JFK
betraying him, and probably even more because he expected more
from from Frank than he did from Kennedy. And the
other thing about Kennedy rescinding that invitation, Harry Belifani's invitation

(33:45):
wasn't rescinded, and Harry Belifani was married to a white
woman and was there with his white wife at this
inauguration party. So Sammy Davis Junior couldn't help but take
it personally, and he really did.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah, it was a big It.

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Was a big deal, a big moment in his life,
in a very sad moment, and a lot of people
think that it led to him later on embracing, probably
ill advisedly, the Nixon campaign in the early seventies.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
That's right, you want to take a break.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yeah, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little
bit about his work in the civil rights movement right
up to.

Speaker 3 (34:18):
This softly jawsh.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Sof this cat is interesting, man, right, I don't know

(34:45):
if everybody's picking up on it.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Did you know this before? Because this is your pick.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I've always been pretty fascinated with him
because we haven't even gotten to the super weird and
interesting stuff, yeah, right, which happens in the seventies. So
in the sixties is when, and possibly because of the
JFK treatment, is when he really starts to get more
socially aware, starts donating money to the cause, and marches

(35:11):
at SELMA for the civil rights efforts. He when he
supported Nixon, it was not just a thumbing of the
nose at Kennedy, but he bought into Nixon and thought
that it was going to be a good choice for
black America. He regretted that later on, of course, but
it wasn't just a poopy pants move like, hey, well,

(35:34):
I'm going to support Nixon now because you disinvited.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
Me, exactly.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
And so one of the other reasons that he embraced
Nixon was that Nixon embraced him as a human being
and really stood in stark contrast to the treatment he
received from Kennedy, and in that Nixon actually seemed to
really like Sammy Davis Junior, that a lot of people
are like. The Nixon administration was just using Sammy Davis

(35:59):
Junior at the same time, using what's called the Southern strategy,
which is they were stoking racism among Southern whites to
get them to turn on the Democrats. But he also
apparently really did like Sammy Davis Junior and admired him,
and under Nixon's administration, it tastes like bitter acid saying this.

(36:20):
Sammy Davis Junior became the first black person to sleep
in the Lincoln bedroom, and apparently Sammy Davis Junior was
an avid Lincoln fan, and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom
with some of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln's personal
effects in.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
This room just blew him away.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Oh, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
And that was actually how he ended up in Vietnam
doing this USO tour in nineteen seventy two. He said,
what can I do to help? And Nixon said that
would probably that would probably help a lot, But that
just contributed even further to his alienation from not just
black people, but young black people too, because it was
a really tone deaf move as I saw it described

(37:02):
at the time, that was not the kind of thing
you did. Vietnam was so unpopular that even the troops
weren't particularly supported at home. You know, it's not like
today where it's like, you know, we really really hate this,
you know, these endless wars.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
This is we really disagree.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
With the you know, the hawks and the military industrial
complex that supports us. But we're still going to be
supportive of the troops who have to go there, who
are over there, whether by their own choice or well,
I guess it's all volunteer army, they still deserve support
these individuals over there overseas. That was not necessarily how

(37:41):
it was during the Vietnam era. So Sammy Davis Junior
going over there to support the troops after embracing the
Nixon administration really.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Furthered.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
This rift between him and the black community, which and
I don't know if we've really said this enough, was
fair and unjust because he was a fervent supporter of
the civil rights movement during the fifties and sixties. Yeah,
I mean fervent, like he marched in Selma with Martin

(38:12):
Luther King Junior, Scared to death apparently, but he still
went and he still did it. He contributed a ton
of money to the civil rights movement. He was he
was legit, for sure. But he also was, you know,
friends with Richard Nixon. So one kind of one kind
of tarnishes the other, you know.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
For sure. So in the sixties he is blown up.
He's everywhere. He's on stage, he's recording records, he's on TV,
he's doing celebrity roast, he's on Broadway, he's writing books,
he's doing the Gunslinger thing. He's making a lot of
money at this point and starts spending a lot of

(38:53):
money because he came from nothing. Like we said, this
is when the rat pack thing really heats up. And
he's hanging out with Joey Bishop, Peter Lawfer, Dean Martin
and of course the Chairman and started their first movie together,
which was Ocean's Eleven. Not a great movie. Oh disagree,

(39:15):
I don't. I think the original's not very good.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
Oh I liked it.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
I thought the remake was great, but did not care
for the original.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
The original. Yeah, hanging seen Robin in the seven Hoods.

Speaker 2 (39:27):
Yeah, also not great. I don't think the Ratpeck ever
made a great movie. Okay, that's just my opinion.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
What about Time Bandits fantastic? Okay.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
They were hanging out at the Coconut Grove in the
Ambassador Hotel, which is a place that I have a
neat little quick story did a commercial shoot there before
they tore it down. And it was, you know, an
empty hotel at this point that they just used for
movie shoots. And it was an overnight thing, and like
two in the morning, I was working in the art department.
They said, here, you need to go assemble all these

(39:59):
flag that we're going to hang. And they said, just
go in the in the Coconut Grove and do it
because there's plenty of room in there. And I went
in there all by myself, sitting in cocaine in the
the dusty old shadows of what was once the Great
Coconut Grove, and uh, for like an hour and a
half by myself, like sitting in a booth that the
rat Pack might have sat in.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
Wow, that's amazing, really pretty neat.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
And later that night got to go see where Bob
Kennedy was shot.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Oh, that's where he was shot Yeah in the Ambassador Hotel.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah, in the kitchen, and one of the got the
overnight security guy. It was just sort of one of
those slow shoots. He was like to me and my friend,
He's like, you want to go down in the kitchen.
It's where it happened. And we went, oh yeah, wow,
that's amazing. It was super cool and creepy.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
Wow. So anyway, great story.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Charge they're hanging out with the rat Pack, and this
is where it gets a little like dodgy because the
rat Pack they were all best buds. They genuinely loved
each other. But when you look at their old stick,
there is a lot of sort of racial joking about Sammy.

(41:05):
It's all in good fun, but there were often jokes
made about him being black, being the only black member.
Dean Martin one of his famous jokes was he would
pick little Sammy up on stage because Dean was a
big guy and Sammy was small and thank the audience
for the n double ACP Award. So stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
So in that documentary, and I'm not like justifying that
at all, but in that documentary, what p be Goldberg
is like, you know, you can you could take any
segment of their show and be like this was really offensive.
Sure Italians or alcoholics, or women, or black people or Jews,
and she said they went hard on everybody. But from

(41:47):
what I understand, at least as far as Sammy was concerned,
he wasn't secretly didn't secretly have a chip on his
shoulder and he had to just put up with this
to be a member of the rat pack. He seemed
to really not like he didn't take it as if
they were being hostile or cruel, that it was just
part of the act and that's how he took it.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Yeah, I mean it was certainly a different time. I
mean there was for sure no doubting about it that
back then you could make jokes about all kinds of
things that you can't joke about now.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
Yeah, And it's like, it's not like I used to
hang out with Sammy Davis Junior and had like quiet
talks with him or whatever. So it is possible that
he did, you know, harbor resentment from it, but that's
not the impresson that I have from the research.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
That I've done.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Let me tell you, Josh.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
Right, But apparently no one did, because this is a
really bizarre thing about him when he was talking about
converting to Judaism. I think in like a nineteen sixty
six Playboy interview he was talking about losing his eye
and then you know, converting to Judaism, and that it
happened during a period of soul searching, and that he
did all this and went through all this even though

(42:51):
he was convalescing at Frank Sinatra's house, even though apparently
Jerry Lewis spent seven days at his bedside when he
was in the hospital, had all these tele Graham's coming in,
all this outpouring of support. He considered himself alone and
that he was a loaner, and that that was that's
really bizarre when you step back and look at that,
because Sammy Davis Junior always had friends. He was always

(43:14):
the life of the party. He was always a good guy.
Everybody wanted to be around him. He was always having fun.
But he considered himself a loner. And apparently he didn't
let people in. So even if I had been hanging
around with him, he probably wouldn't have had that conversation
with me.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Anyway, Like, Sammy, I don't feel like I know they're real.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
You come on, Sammy, let.

Speaker 2 (43:32):
It, and he said, that's by design, babe.

Speaker 3 (43:36):
I feel like I'm tripping or something right now.

Speaker 2 (43:40):
So his career is booming in the sixties and into
the seventies, and the result of that, of course, well
through the sixties I guess, is that he's not around much.
He had a lot of regrets about not being around
as a father, as a husband. He was flandering, he
was drinking a lot, he was using drugs. So in

(44:01):
nineteen sixty eight he got divorced. In nineteen seventy, he
married a woman named Altaviz Gore who was eighteen years
his junior. Great name, backup dancer. His children did not
like the fact that she was so much younger, but
they were stayed married, you know, for the rest of
his life.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
He was like, oh, if you got a problem with her,
you should probably not know about everything else I'm doing.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yeah, So here's where it gets really interesting, very interesting.
Sammy Davis Junior had a convergence of two interests. In
the seventies. He became a member of the Church of Satan.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
He was an honorary warlock.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
And he got really really into porn and porn you know,
there's no better way to say it than he was
a swinger. He was in orgies. He participated in Satanic orgies.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
Right, yeah, that was actually I don't know if it
was his first orgy or not, but that that's how
he became a part of involved in the Church of Satan,
you know, like the original Church of Satan with Anton
Levey there and everything.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Like the real good, like right back with Golden Ears
of Church of Satan exactly.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
He went and participated in a Satanic orgy.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Sammy Davis Junior, which I think is like.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
A regular orgy, but with just more like red candles.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
Yeah, and pentagrams and black robes and stuff like that.
But then the black robes come off, but I think
the pentagrams stay on. But he I read this really
interesting Vice article about it, and he was apparently at
the first one, and this would have been in the
late sixties, and somebody in a hood is trying to
get his attention, and it turns out he lifts the

(45:47):
hood and it's his barber is Barbara J. S.

Speaker 3 (45:50):
Bring.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
He would later be killed with Sharon Tate by the
Manson family. But he was basically like, hey, Sam, it's
me Jay, how are you doing.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
In this awesome, and then they went back to They're
coming Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Yeah, but he yeah, he was hugely in the in
the pornography he was and the Orgies into swinging.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
He was. He loved cocaine and loved drinking.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
I saw our Sineo interview with him, must have been
very shortly before his death, where he's like, you know,
I had to give everything up, uh, and I don't
miss all the other stuff, but I miss booze, I
miss whiskey, I miss wodka.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
I love that stuff.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
But then I also saw another interview where he basically
said the same thing to Larry King, like I've given
everything up, I don't smoke anymore, or anything like that.
And then somebody went backstage and there's Sammy Davis Junior
smoking a cigarette, drinking a brand and he goes, Sammy,
what are you doing. You just told Larry King that
he gave all this up. He's like, I'm I plan to.

(46:49):
So who knows what he actually gave up or didn't do,
but his whole jam was I want to experience every
possible human experience I can, and I approach all this
stuff without judgment. Yeah, which is how he ended up
becoming involved in the Church of Satan, which went.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
On, yeah, no judgment here. If that's his bag, it's
not hurting anybody. Did you see the one quote about
the the ritual with the lady who was tied to
the bed.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
Where he decided like it was okay.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, he was talking about it and he was like
that chick was loving it. Man, Right, Well, I won't
say the rest of the quote, but do you.

Speaker 3 (47:26):
Remember, Yeah, I remember, I remember.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
So all of this led to what we were talking
about earlier. This this TV pilot that is legendary in
Hollywood as one of the weirdest, worst things that Hollywood
has ever produced. And it was a pilot for a
TV show in nineteen seventy three called Poor Devil, which
was about a man who was a load load down

(47:53):
on the totem pole or I guess high on.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
The totem pole.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Sure, Cole shoveler in Hell, who has offered the chance
to work his way up the ranks in Hell if
he can get the soul of Jack Klugman, a living
white man on.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
Earth, right, Jack Klugman, Quincy, MD.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yeah, And it is on YouTube, and dude, it is amazing.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
I have not had a chance to see it. I
can't wait to see it, but it sounds amazing. I
saw it described as like he's a reverse Clearance from
It's a Wonderful Life, which you wouldn't possibly understand that. Yeah, sure,
but just imagine that somebody's not trying to get you
to be good so that they can or understand how
great life is. He's trying to get him to follow

(48:38):
his most bitter revenge impulses and stuff like that. But
at one point, apparently Jack Klugman wants to get in
touch with Sammy Davis Junior the Devil, and is like, oh,
I know, I'll call the Church of Satan downtown. They'll
know how to get in touch with them. And the
Church of Satan went because apparently the pilot was aired
and they were all about Sammy d At this point,

(49:00):
they made him an honorary war law.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
He used to flash like the devil horns at them
from stage when he would love San.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Francisco, honey. Yeah. Christopher Lee, by the way, played the Devil,
which is pretty on the noes but perfect. Yeah, so
that doesn't succeed, obviously, it's terrible. The seventies and the
eighties his star starts to fade a little bit. He's
still around. Of course, he was on All in the
Family in a very famous episode where he kissed Archie
Bunker on the lips. He was we have to talk

(49:34):
about the great great Cannonball Run.

Speaker 3 (49:37):
Oh yeah, he was in that, wasn't he.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Man? He and Dean were for partners. They played I
forgot about. They dressed up as priests, that's right, heavily drinking,
smoking priests. They played themselves basically as priests who wanted
to drive fast.

Speaker 3 (49:50):
That's pretty great.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
But you know, even though we revere that film, I
don't think it was looked at generally as one of
the big highlights of his career.

Speaker 3 (49:59):
Oh I'm sure not. By this time. He's kitchy Sammy.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
From what I understand, like he was fine with that
as long as he was working.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
He was okay.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
Because I said earlier that like he had a certain
affiliation with that song Mister Bojangles. Yes where if you
listen to it, it's about an old performer who's washed
up and has been washed up for years, and he's
still drinking and just doing you know, he's been reduced
to doing basically sidewalk performances, and apparently Sammy was scared

(50:28):
to death about that being his future. So even just
doing what he was doing with Dean and Cannonball Run,
I'm sure it was just fine in his in his
mind because he was still working and performing.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Of course, he looks around and there's there's Burt Man,
there's Adrian Barbo.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
Was.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
You're digging the Sammy now, aren't you.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
Yes, Sude, I think Sammy needs to be a recurring
character from now on.

Speaker 3 (50:54):
In episode We'll see, We'll see, okay, the new hippie rob.

Speaker 2 (50:59):
So in the eighties, he gets into some financial trouble,
to say the least, because I love how I had
put it. He'd been struggling with tax payments since the
nineteen sixties. I think it was a Willie Nelson sort
of deal from what I could gather. Oh yeah, yeah,
I mean I think he wasn't really paying his taxes.

Speaker 1 (51:17):
Sure, sure, And apparently he'd also I don't know if
he got bad tax advice or what, but he had
claimed some very extravagant stuff as a write off, and
the IRS came back and said, Nope, that doesn't count.
You also owe on that. And his estate was worth
or his net assets were worth about four million, but
he owed about seven million cheese. And he was a

(51:39):
profligate spender of money. I saw one interview once where
a guy said that he walked six blocks.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
In New York with them.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
He even named the streets, So it seems like he
really did just walk six blocks and dropped fifty thousand
dollars along the way, stopping in different stores.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
I thought, you dropped that out of his pocket on
the street.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
No, no buying stuff, just buy by buy.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
He had to spend it because he had come from
nothing and he knew, you know, that thrill of spending money.
He was terrible with his money, and so he as
he found out he owed seven million dollars, he started
to organize some shows and specials to try to raise
some money to help him pay off this debt. And
after the first one, I think in nineteen eighty nine,

(52:21):
he found that he had a sore throat, so he
went to the doctor and ultimately was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Yeah, after that very first show, that's like such cruel
irony to raise all this money. Because when he passed
away in nineteen ninety in May sixteenth of cancer, he
left that tax bill to his wife like that that
carried over, yeah, Altavius. Yeah, so that really left her

(52:51):
kind of destitute for the rest of her life as well.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
Oh yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
I mean like she then she basically owed three million
dollars and his estate was sold off like basically at
a yard sale auction. All of his stuff was And yeah,
that was the negative part of his legacy, was that
text at leaving that behind.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Yeah, and you know, in one way, it's like kind
of a sad ending with the financial stuff and obviously
dying way too young of cancer.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
But yeah, sixty five man, he did.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
Accomplish everything he set out to accomplish. He showed everybody
who said this diminutive, little mixed race, kind of funny
looking guy is never going to amount to anything. And
he had a lifelong career from the age of three
to sixty five in show business.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
And one of the things Chuck is he did not
really harbor regret. He apparently whenever he talked about his life,
he talked about it with great satisfaction, which is pretty reassuring.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah, that quote on that Letterman show was great. Yeah,
on the eighty five episode, he's talking about the younger generation,
and he said, I look at the young performers today
and I go like this, Yeah, man, go ahead, cook,
I've been there. That's it man, I have no envy.
I did it all. Yeah, pretty great, Go ahead, cook,
that's great.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
Sammy Davis Junior. Everybody, round of applause. You got anything else?

Speaker 2 (54:17):
Got nothing else?

Speaker 1 (54:18):
If you want to know more about Sammy Davis Junior,
just start watching some of his old performances.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
They're pretty amazing. Uh.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
And while you're doing that, we're going to just move
on ahead to listener mail.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Yeah, this is about the nine to one to one
pizza thing. We heard from a lot of uh nine
one one people.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
Yeah, I'm glad that you you picked one of these men.
This is good.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Hey, while we are not specifically trained, just send ems
to calls where people pretend to order a pizza. Most
nine one one dispatchers will in fact ask you, this
is nine one one? Did you dial the wrong number?
And if they respond no, we will then say are
you in a situation where you can't ask for help?
And then they can say yes or no. Obviously, there

(54:59):
are many stories of this working out. Most in domestic
violence are kidnapping situations. So even though it is a
protocol necessarily or set in stone as a way to
ask for help, it could help many people in bad situations.
We will not just hang up on you. Even if
you keep ordering a pizza and do not acknowledge that
you need help. Most will still send out law enforcement

(55:19):
for a welfare check due to the suspicious nature of
the call.

Speaker 3 (55:23):
I'm glad to hear this.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
Yeah, please let this be known because in a last
ditch effort, this may save someone's life.

Speaker 3 (55:27):
And that yeah is.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
From responder Brooke Diane.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Thanks Brooke, and thank you also not for being like Josh.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
Was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Oh I don't remember did you say that's not true?

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Yeah, I said specifically it's an urban legend.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Oh okay, I don't even remember that.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
So I was really glad when people started writing I'm
glad you picked one to say like, no.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
This is this is for real.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Okay, great, thanks again, Brooke. That was fantastic. If you
want to get in touch with this like Brooke did.
Even if you do want to say Josh was wrong
wrong wrong, wrong, wrong, that's all right, we'd love to
hear that kind of thing. You can send us an
email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.