Illness Caused Davis To Give Up His Drinking

By the mid-1980s, Sammy Davis Jr. was suffering from - and denying that he had - severe health problems. Even his old friend Bill Cosby couldn't persuade Davis to start taking better care of himself. Then a minor accident mushroomed into a life-threatening crisis. Part 3 of a three-part excerpt from ``Why Me?: The Sammy Davis Jr. Story,'' by Sammy Davis Jr. and Jane and Burt Boyar.

I was at the Friars' Club and I passed that room where they have the portraits of me and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Joey Bishop. A young member came up to me, and, glancing at the pictures, then back to me, said, ``You're the only one who still looks like yourself.''

Didn't he see my stomach? My hair? The face getting hollow? ``Thanks, babe. Never more than three packs a day and one bottle of vodka,'' and I kept walking.

At home I studied myself in the mirror in profile. It wasn't me. It wasn't Sammy Davis Jr. It was an impersonator who looked five months pregnant. My shirts, always slim and form-fitting, were about to split. I looked terrible. Yet I was down to one small meal a day.

That evening Elizabeth Taylor and Tony Gary and Richard Burton and his wife, Susie, had a quiet dinner with me and (my wife) Altovise and we wound up sitting around our bar with the champagne flowing and Richard going on magnificently, an endless repertoire, hilariously told, with little asides to Elizabeth like ``Darling, you remember when we . . .'' and Susie sitting there being very gracious. It was an evening you wanted never to end but I started getting tired. It was only midnight, but I said, ``Will you please go home? I'm starting to nod and I don't want to miss anything. Will you please come back another night?''

Elizabeth knew me from the old days when I outlasted everybody. ``I don't believe, Samson, that you really said that. You saying good night to us?''

The next night Alto and I went to a party in Malibu. At dinner I whispered to her, ``You sit here but I've got to go inside and take a lie-down.'' When I woke up, Linda Evans was on one side of me and another gorgeous girl on the other. I looked at these two incredible women: Did I do something rude? No, they've got their clothes on. Then the girls ``woke up'' and I understood that they'd come in to do bits with me, that the joke had been: ``He'll wake up and not remember what happened.''

It was funny. But ominous. What was wrong with me that for two nights in a row I couldn't stay awake with people I enjoyed?

I hated having to warn the audiences that they were going to see ``my little potbelly'' as I took off my coat to do a number. I'd begun doing lines like ``I'm a little chunky now . . .'' and ``Isn't he adorable this way? A little chubs?'' I tried to comfort myself by thinking about movie stars, major performers, who had paunches. It still wasn't me.

And less and less did I feel like me. I was always dragging. In 1972 I'd had a PGA tournament named after me, the Sammy Davis Jr. Open, and I'd always played in it. This year they were making bets that I wouldn't get through four holes. They were wrong. I was planning to wait in the bar.

Bill Cosby and I had been friends going back to before ``I Spy,'' when he was working in the coffeehouses. We did a benefit somewhere, around 1980, we just bounced some lines off each other and the chemistry was right. We played some Harrah's dates and the rapport was positive between us, no upmanship, no ``How many laughs is he getting?''

We opened at Caesars. Although sometimes it hurt me in the stomach to hit the big notes I absorbed the pain. I couldn't dance at all, and had stopped trying. I could do postures, like with Bojangles, but I was sluggish, stiff, leaden. So I talked a lot, and I got laughs, and I sang as best I could.

I began to feel Bill observing me, watching me. After an early show during our first week he came into my dressing room and looked pointedly at my stomach. ``What the f--- is wrong with you?''

I sipped my vodka and Coke and patted my paunch. ``Age, babe. I'm not fighting it. Grow old gracefully, they say.''

``You're drinking all the time now.'' It was an accusation. That wonderful, caring face that looked like it had been run over by every kind of trouble and sadness in the world, but still remembered how to smile, was frowning. He said, ``Whatever you're doing . . . don't end like this.''

We had some people over the night before I was leaving for Reno, but I said good night early and went into my bedroom and lay down on the bed. I fell asleep still dressed. When I awoke, a little groggy, and tried to pull my pants off over my boots, sort of jumping out of the trouser leg, I tripped and fell, banging my ribs against the night table with a ghastly cracking sound.

When I awoke in the middle of the night it felt as if I had a flame against my ribs and I gasped.

``What's wrong?'' Altovise jumped awake. I told her and she said, ``I'll call Gerry Blankfort.''

Gerald told me, ``We'll have to lance your stomach. It has a liquid lining. That's not a middle-age pot you've got there, it's a reservoir, and we have to get that fluid out of there.''

``An operation?''

``Not really. It will be done here in the room. We lance and drain it.

``Then I'm OK?''

``You could be worse,'' Gerald said. ``You can keep your liver in remission by not drinking, but once diseased, they most often go down, down, down. Further, you're not chemically dependent on alcohol. You haven't had a drink in 12 days, yet you've had no DT's, no shakes. All you have is a lifetime habit. But you can beat that. You're also lucky that you have longevity in your genes.

The Desert Inn wanted me to play eight weeks, four weeks at a crack, at $100,000 per week.

I had a good feeling about the Desert Inn, that I could create some excitement there.

Without drinking, suddenly I got healthy and the energy level came back so strong that I could fly over buildings. ``I wouldn't have dared try to a few years ago. But I never felt better than I feel now. Let's go for it. I'll do a one-man show.''

Then, once having committed, I wondered: Can I do it? And why? Why put that extra pressure on myself? The answer rushed after the question: Because I'm supposed to be the premier nightclub performer, the variety artist, the last of a breed. So I can't keep giving them yesterday. I have to keep growing, giving them something fresh, different.

The marquee at the Desert Inn said, ``Sammy, That's All.''

In the middle of a dinner show I saw my tap shoes in the piano where they had always been. Impulsively I reached in and took them out, as though to fondle some favored memorabilia. The audience began applauding. I held the shoes in my hands. ``It's been a long time since I felt I could use these. Maybe I'm not as old as I've been feeling.''

They continued urging me on. Apprehensive, I needed a moment before I was prepared to commit myself to dancing. Audiences always enjoyed the sight of my yard-long shoehorn, which is a saber given to me by the Queen's Guards in London, made for me with a shoehorn at the tip by the Wilkinson Sword people. I held it up. ``There's nothing in my contract that says I gotta bend down.'' As they laughed I lowered the shoehorn and slipped into my shoes. I flicked the taps a few beats to feel my legs. Okayyyy. The audience was applauding again, standing on their feet. I danced for them. I wished I could reach out and hug the whole room. I kept dancing, hugging them the only way I knew how.

The shows were fun again.

Frank came to Vegas to play the Nugget for the weekend, and he called me and did mock angry: ``What is this? Why don't you retire? This is no time to start doing one-man shows, for crying out loud. What am I supposed to do? Get rid of all the comics that go on with me? And all those musicians! You trying to support the union?'' Then, jokes done, he leveled: ``I hear the show's marvelous, just marvelous, and that your voice is in great condition. When am I going to see you?''

Saturday after the second show I met him in his dressing room.

Frank said, ``The word is out on you,'' and he began nodding his head with pleasure. ``You're having a renaissance,'' he said, adding that he couldn't be happier. ``All the reports are magnificient.''

(From the book ``Why Me?: The Sammy Davis Jr. Story,'' by Sammy Davis Jr. and Jane and Burt Boyar. Copyright, 1989, by Sammy Davis Jr. and Boyar Investments Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.)