Stuff You Should Know - Sammy Davis Jr: National Treasure

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

Today Josh and Chuck sit down and detail the complicated life of the late, great Sammy Davis Jr. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, everyone in Podcast Land. If you have ever wanted to see us on stage telling jokes and slaying facts, and you live out West, you can come see us in Portland, Oregon, or Vancouver, Canada.

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["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Dylan sitting in again, like a great guy. Like a cool cat, baby. Oh, I thought you were doing evil German doctor

for a second, and then I figured it out. 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. I love how Sammy Davis Jr. always said cat and baby. It was just, he was such a cool dude.

And, okay, do Sammy Davis Jr. saying we have ways of making you talk? What sounds German about any of that? I just do it, please. Please. We have ways of making you talk, man. That was pretty great. Pretty great.

And that's a little soft shoe. Yeah, it's great stuff, Chuck. So, you know, Billy Crystal used to do Sammy Davis Jr. way back in the 80s when Blackface was super cool to do. And not controversial. Did he do Blackface Sammy Davis Jr.? Yes, dude. He did Blackface Sammy Davis Jr. eight years ago

at the Oscars. What? Yes, you don't remember that? No. It's the last time he hosted the Oscars, eight in 2012. 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, and then, you know, this was in, you know, 2012. So there was Twitter and there was Facebook and this social media and people were like, that wasn't cool in the 80s and I can't believe he's doing that now. For real?

Sammy Davis Jr.'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 pretty heavily for it, rightfully so. And he hasn't been around a lot, but he wasn't around a lot before then, you know.

Do you think like that did it? Like that was the demise? How did he get helped? I was, yeah, I haven't seen him in a while either. Man, how did somebody not step back and be like, okay, wait, we're about to do Blackface. I know, like how did no one on the production crew of the Oscars say?

Not a good idea. I don't know. Well, he did it. So I came across something that I thought was pretty interesting. I saw a 1985 interview with David Letterman. Yeah, I saw that too, so good. And Sammy Davis Jr. says in this interview,

he did Blackface when he was a little kid. 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. Yes. And to do that, they...

Their words. Right, yes, thank you. They gave him a candy cigar and put him in Blackface and told anyone who would listen that he was a little person. That's right. Although, again, they didn't say little person. No, they didn't.

Boy, this is a really controversial episode right out of the gate. 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 by racist and also shunned sometimes within his own Black community. Yeah, like a little pinball getting bounced around. 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 and had his little tiny fingers and a lot of pies from singing and dancing and performing live and in movies and on TV and just really, really fascinating guy. Yeah, when you look back at the rat pack,

he was the one that brought the actual talent to the rat pack. Like Sinatra could say D. Martin could sing. Everyone in the rat pack was talented. Right, right, but he was multi-talented, like dancing, doing impressions. He had like a little gunslinger routine for a while. Dude, did you see any of that?

Yeah, I did. He's amazing. 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 Jr. was more talented than all of them put together. All right. Okay. So he made, did you see any of that documentary of the USO tour?

There were a few clips in there, yeah. Yeah, so if you wanna see a different side, if you think Sammy Davis Jr. is just the candy man or Mr. Bojangles, babe. Man, watching him do Mr. Bojangles and knowing how he felt about that song, it's very heartbreaking. It is.

But if you see this documentary in 1972, he did a USO tour of Vietnam where he performed at drug rehab camps and some other forward bases. If you look at this, man, this is like as swinging 70s kind of rock and roll as it gets, really, really cool stuff. He was a bad, a performer.

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 had nothing but a microphone and he's just like, all right, give me the mic. And I will basically kind of do my own beat boxy rhythm section and sing and dance.

And the soldiers are just loving it, man. They're eating it up. Yeah, and this is 1972, I believe. And I mean, like he was a world famous star by then, but also he was an older dude. Like he'd really had his heyday in the late 50s and throughout the 60s, and this is 72. And he's out there in Vietnam,

belting out Motown hits and drumming on the mic stand. So yeah, I didn't see all of it, but yeah, you can tell it was a- It's pretty cool. Yeah, he's even more of a talented performer than people realize because, you know, you do think of him 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. So the Grabster helped us out with this one. And he said that there were a few defining sort of things about Sammy Davis Jr.'s life that informed who he was. Right. One was that he came from poverty. He performed with his, like you said, his uncle,

which was not his real uncle, but his dad and his uncle, Will Mastin, as the, was it the Mastin Trio? The Will Mastin Trio, right. And they came from nothing, and he did not have any money. And he talked later in life about the thrill of leaving a waitress $100 tip and walking around with $1,000 in your pocket.

He said- Yeah, later on in life. Yeah, he's like, that was a year of salary. And he was like, no one understands that unless you've been at the bottom. Right. He was definitely at the bottom. 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 show business and the earliest years constantly on the road with his uncle and his dad.

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 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. He just didn't have formal schooling, but he was very self-conscious of this and about representing the black community. So like, have you ever mispronounced something

because he didn't know it would 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 he went into the army and it was a big shock to him. Right. He, 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 kind of informed how he viewed race and racial discrimination and the dynamic between the races in the United States in the middle of the last century because he hadn't really seen it firsthand or experienced it firsthand. He hadn't been in 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 18. And so by the time he was 18, he was like, this isn't right. Who do you think you are? And so when he got to the army

and was confronted with it full on, he approached it differently. Whereas some of his contemporaries in the army who were black just kind of kept their head down and tried to go along and get along. He would fight back. 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 guy in one. He beat up some white guy who had done something racist to him. I'm 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 got to Sammy Davis Jr. in such a way that it just transformed his approach that he realized like he could fight white boys his whole life and probably win some of the fights, probably get beat up a lot of the fights. He had his nose broken at least twice, but that it wasn't gonna get him anywhere.

And so he decided then and there that what he could do is fight prejudice through his performing. That he would be such a good performer. He would transcend race at least while he was performing. And he managed to do that or as much as anybody ever has in the history in modern history, at least in the United States. Yeah, so he's discharged in the army in 1945,

goes right back to the Mastin Trio and touring with him. 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. Yeah, little Sammy. Little Sammy, like little Stevie Wonder. Yeah, he actually, Chuck, he won his first contest at age three at like an amateur hour or amateur night. And he's saying, I'll be glad when you're dead,

you rascal, you. That's what he knocked the house down at age three. And that was the formal start to his show business. Yeah, he won 10 bucks. Yeah, about 150 bucks today. Yeah, which for him, I mean, that's a lot of dough. Sure. For a very, very poor kid.

Right. So he gets out of the army, goes back to the Mastin 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 we should point out to you 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. I mean, you'd have to be a vaudeville superstar to make a lot of money. And this was also during the Depression largely too, so people didn't make money in general. Right, but doing three, four or five shows a day

on that circuit. Yeah. 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 them a call or gave their people calls and said, hey, I want this guy opening up

for me in Vegas, this trio opening up. Took him under his wing. That was a big deal. 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 20 minutes, twice a night, our skin had no color. But the second they got finished, he said, other acts would go out and gamble and socialize, have a drink. He said, we had to go through the kitchen with a garbage. And that's when it would all sort of hit home once again. They had to stay in like an entirely different part of Vegas

that from the looks of it almost didn't have electricity. It was all 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, he had used the pool at the Sands and guests in the 50s complained enough

that the Sands agreed to drain the pool and refill it because Sammy Davis Jr. 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. All right, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk more about the Candyman right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Sammy Davis Jr. 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 I've only seen it once and it was a couple of years ago. Oh, okay, so one of his, I think his first one was called Yes, I Can. Sure. And there's a great scene in Spinal Tap when Bruno Kirby as a limo driver is talking about it and 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 guys. That's right. I remember that too. That's very funny, Joe. Like he just keeps going off about that, doesn't he? Yeah.

Yeah. That's good stuff. I mean, the title in Bruno Kirby had a very famous falling out and legend has it, Billy Crystal sort of had him blackballed. What is up with Billy Crystal? My impression of him is changing dramatically. He really sells it when the cameras are on, huh?

Yeah, well, that's what you do, you know? That's crazy though, to be that, wow, wow. I mean, we know the game. People think you and I like each other. All right, we got everybody fooled. It's amazing. Like what were their names, the Mythbusters? Yeah, like the day the cameras stopped rolling,

they released press statements saying, we never liked each other. I know, why would anybody do that? Even if you didn't like each other, why would you just let it go, you know? I don't know. But it's Jamie and... Adam.

Adam, that's right. Adam Savage, Adam's a great guy. I know him a little bit. So... Are you implying Jamie's not? I don't know him any. Oh, okay. I'm not siding.

This took a really weird turn, didn't it? It did. So back to Sammy Davis Jr. He also started, his star started rising. Well, his star had already risen, but in the 70s, when the Variety Show came about, which was a big deal in the 70s and even into the 80s, Sammy Davis Jr. was perfect for that medium.

Well, this was, I think even earlier than that, when TV really started to dominate, the earliest shows that they had were vaudeville shows and that led to Variety Show. He had his own Variety Show later in the 70s 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, is a real deal gunslinger, a Variety Show is pretty great. It really was. So he's getting onto TV. Their Vegas gigs have really put the Will Mastin Trio on the map and they were doing really well. They had reliable work, that kind of stuff. People knew who Sammy Davis Jr. was.

He was already a protege of Frank Sinatra by this time, but it wasn't until 1951 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.

Sammy Davis Jr. was a star from that moment on. That's right. And that was at Janice Page and a show at Sero's, which is now the comedy store. Right. Oh really? I didn't know that. Yeah, it became the comedy store after Sero's,

but was sort of a legendary place in its own right. Oh yeah. But everyone, 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 there. Including Bogey and his rat pack. Sure. The original rat pack, which wasn't called the rat pack.

No, it was actually. It was? Yeah. Well, why did, oh never mind. I'm not going down that rabbit hole. What? That's all right. Okay.

So he kills it there. He's doing impressions of people that are in the audience. Everyone loves him. They signed with the William Morris Agency and an overnight sensation, you know, 20, 30 years into making starts happening. Yeah. And we should say, so Sammy Davis Jr.

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 Jr. started doing impressions of white people, if you were 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 Jr. started doing white people and the white people loved it. And at that show at zeroes, he was doing impressions of some of the people in the crowd. Like he did a killer, Kerry Grant. And Kerry 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 Janice Page said, I was the headliner tonight. I think these guys should be the headliner from now on. Which was pretty cool of her to do that, you know? It's amazing.

So he gets a record deal after that. He's putting out like show tunes, old standards. He does a pilot in the mid 50s with his father and uncle about a trio of black entertainers that are kind of struggling called We Three. Yeah, I would love to see that. Well, there's another pilot we'll talk about later that you definitely need to see.

I haven't checked it out yet, but I know the one. It's pretty legendary. So a big thing happened that same year in 1954 is Sammy Davis Jr. had a wreck in 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 eyeball hit that thing and he lost it and wore an eye patch for a while and then a glass eye. Yeah, apparently he remembers coming out of the car with holding his eye in his hand. And then that's the last thing he remembers. 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, his eye was gone. He was really, really scared that his career was over. This is 1954. He'd just gotten 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 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 Jr. was he had him basically come convalesce at Sinatra's place and really guided him in saying like you need to relearn how to move. You're going to be fine, but you're going to 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 now rather than, you know, spend a year feeling sad. And that was a huge help for him. 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 put a pin in this, but this was the first exposure to Judaism in the hospital. You got to visit from a rabbi and just put a pin in that because that will come back again later. Okay. Is there a pin in it?

Well, look, all right. It's very nice. I don't even know where this pin came from, do you? I don't. Well, you do have that pin cushion right there, but. Yeah, this little tomato one with the strawberries dangling off of it. You remember those?

Oh man. Do I? Was there a 70s mom that didn't have one of those? Yeah, with the macrame owl hanging on the wall behind. Yeah, yeah. So here's where it gets really kind of great as far as knowing what a standup guy Sammy Davis Jr. was. His success is booming.

And you would think, Sammy Davis Jr., you can leave that Will Mastin Trio behind. Yeah. Because it's really all about you. He said, no, man, shine us all up, babe, three-way split. Yep. And he did. He insured contractually that they would get

a three-way split that endured 10 years after he left as a solo performer. He was still giving them 33% each. Yeah, for 15 years total, 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 Mastin Trio featuring Sammy Davis Jr.

But then over time, you know, remember his uncle and his dad were a good 20 years older than him. By this time, he's in his 30s. 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. He's just stepping back.

But even still, he made sure they were taken care of for another 15 years, a third, a third. And this is a third during Sammy Davis Jr.'s peak earning years. So he got one third of what he would have gotten had he just basically said, dad, uncle Will, thank you for teaching me everything I know. 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 15 years, Chuck. That's really amazing. It's pretty great. So that pin, it actually wasn't in there that long.

We can go ahead and take the pin 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. He said, this is my new religion. And he very humorously started referring to himself as a one-eyed black Jew. Sometimes a one-eyed black Puerto Rican Jew. Black Puerto Rican Jew, which was very sort of in keeping with his self-deprecating style. For sure.

He's like Tim Watley. He converted for the jokes. Man, I remember that one. I've been plowing through Seinfeld again. Yeah. I love, one of my favorite things that always gets me is when Jerry calls George Biff. Yeah, yeah.

It never fails to make me laugh. Biff. Yeah. So good. Should we, oh no, let's not take another break. Let's plow on here, right? Yeah, sure. So, dating-wise, he is dating black women and white women.

When he dates white women, he gets racist threats from white people and he gets condemnation from the black community for betraying the black community by dating a white woman. Right. He can't win. No, he really couldn't win. Apparently from what I saw in that American Masters

documentary, he really, really, really was in love with Kim Novak. Yeah. From what I saw, she may have been the love of his life. 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 50s, there was a contract put out on his life by the studio head

and I think Columbia, where Kim Novak was an actress. Yeah, Harry Cohn was the studio head and this was back when Vegas and Hollywood were, there was some mob and mafia dealings going on for sure. And Sammy had some mob friends too, just because he was friends with Frank and that was just sort of the thing. These guys would come to these Vegas clubs

and he would meet them. He sought protection from 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. 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 was even kidnapped for a few hours to scare him, but who knows if that's really true?

Well, apparently one of his friends who was there said, no, it wasn't true. He was never kidnapped, but the contract basically said, there was a contract that said you have 48 hours to marry a black woman or you die. And whatever it was, whether there was an actual contract, whether it were just got to him that there was,

it didn't matter to Sammy Davis Jr. at that minute because he broke it off with Kim Novak much to his own heart's break. And proposed to a woman named Loree White who, she was a black singer and I think they had dated years before. And I guess he never copped to the idea that it was an arranged marriage,

that it was basically a business proposal, but that is definitely how it's portrayed by the people who were there at the time, who were his close friends, that he even paid her $10,000 to do this. And I'm sure it was very kind and congenial to it, but they described that day, his wedding day to Loree White

as probably the worst day of his life, tied for first with the day that he lost his left eye. 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. Yeah. Not making any excuses for the guy,

but it was certainly not right to do that. Right. So their marriage didn't last terribly long. I didn't see how long it lasted, did you? Yeah, a little over a year. 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 Cohn, 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 is at a time when there were laws

that prevented black men and white women or vice versa to marry. Yeah, it wasn't legal yet. 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 Jr.

Whatever the reason was, Sammy Davis Jr. really bristled under that. And so in 1960, this was a few years after he had to break it off with Kim Novak. He got married to a woman, a Swedish actress named Mai Britt. 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 Mai was in part a, I'll just put it as PG as possible, 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 gonna marry this beautiful six-foot white woman. Yeah, who looks like Margot Robbie, sort of.

She does. Yeah, she does a little bit. I hadn't put my finger on it. And their children were incredibly beautiful, thanks largely to their mom too. But they had three kids together and they were married for eight years. And I think it's very sad

because Mai Britt immediately lost her career. So she gave up her career to be with Sammy Davis Jr. I don't know, she must have fallen in love with them because she had three kids with them too, but she gave up a lot and he gave up nothing. And I think that it was very unfair on his part to ask for what he asked for from her and give so little in return.

Yeah, and what was also not fair and sort of a black eye on John F. Kennedy was that Sammy Davis Jr. had been scheduled to perform at the 1960 inauguration and he disinvited him because of his marriage to a white woman. Kennedy personally had him disinvited. This wasn't like Kennedy's advisors or anything like that. Nope, it was him.

And he said, apparently people said he was a political move because he didn't wanna alienate Southern Democrats, but either way, that was a big fracturing of the relationship between JFK and Sammy Davis Jr. He never got over that. No, he never did. And it was also a moment where Sinatra, who had stood up for Sammy Davis Jr.

multiple countless times against racists, against studio heads, against record company executives, against all sorts of people, didn't. He did not stand up 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 Jr. as much as JFK betraying him and probably even more

because he expected more from Frank than he did from Kennedy. And the other thing about Kennedy rescinding that invitation, Harry Belafonte's invitation wasn't rescinded and Harry Belafonte was married to a white woman and was there with his white wife at this inauguration party. So Sammy Davis Jr. couldn't help but take it personally and he really did.

Yeah. It was a big deal, a big moment in his life and 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 70s. That's right. You wanna take a break?

Yeah, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about his work in the civil rights movement right after this. Singing stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This cat is interesting, man. Right? I don't know if everybody's picking up on it. Did you know this before? Because this is your pick, 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 70s. So in the 60s 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 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 gonna 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, I'm gonna support Nixon now

because you disinvited me. Exactly, 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 Jr., that a lot of people are like, the Nixon administration was just using Sammy Davis Jr.

They were 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 Jr. and admired him. And under Nixon's administration, it tastes like bitter acid saying this, Sammy Davis Jr. became the first Black person

to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. And apparently Sammy Davis Jr. was an avid Lincoln fan and sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom with some of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln's personal effects in this room just blew him away. Oh, I'm sure. And that was actually how he ended up in Vietnam doing this USO tour in 1972.

He said, what can I do to help? And Nixon said 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 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. It's not like today where it's like, we really, really hate these endless wars. We really disagree with 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 it was during the Vietnam era. So Sammy Davis Jr. going over there to support the troops after embracing the Nixon administration really furthered this rift between him and the Black community, which,

and I don't know if we've really said this enough, was unfair and unjust, because he was a fervent supporter of the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s. I mean, fervent, like he marched in Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. 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 legit for sure, but he also was friends with Richard Nixon. So one kind of tarnishes the other, for sure. So in the 60s, 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 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 Lawford, Dean Martin, and of course, the chairman. Right. And started their first movie together, which was Ocean's Eleven, not a great movie. Oh, disagree. I think the original's not very good. Oh, I liked it.

I thought the remake was great, but did not care for the original. I like the original. Yeah. Have you seen Robin and the Seven Hoods? Yeah, also not great. I don't think the Rat Pack ever made a great movie. Okay.

That's just my opinion. What about Time Bandits? Fantastic. Okay. 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 an empty hotel at this point that they just used for movie shoots. And it was an overnight thing, and at like two in the morning, I was working in the art department, and they said, here, you need to go assemble all these flags that we're gonna hang. And they said, just go 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 the dusty old shadows of what was once the great Coconut Grove. And for like an hour and a half by myself, like sitting in a booth at the Rat Pack might've sat in. Wow, that's amazing. Really pretty neat.

And later that night got to go see where Bob Kennedy was shot. Oh, that's where he was shot? Yeah. In the Ambassador Hotel, that's right. 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 wanna go down in the kitchen? So we were happy and then we went, oh yeah. Wow, that's amazing. And it was super cool and creepy. Wow. So anyway. That's a great story, Charles.

They're hanging out with the Rat Pack. And this is where it gets a little dodgy, because the Rat Pack, they were all best buds. They genuinely loved each other. But when you look at their old shtick, there is a lot of sort of racial joking about Sammy. 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 NAACP award. So stuff like that. So in that documentary, and I'm not justifying that at all, but in that documentary, Whoopi Goldberg is like,

you know, you can take any segment of their show and be like, this was really offensive for Italians, or alcoholics, or women, or black people, or Jews. And she said, they went hard on everybody. But from 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. Yeah, I mean, it was certainly a different time. I mean, there was no doubting about it

that back then you could make jokes about all kinds of things that you can't joke about now. Yeah, and it's not like I used to hang out with Sammy Davis Jr. 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 impression that I have from the research that I've done.

Let me tell you, Josh. 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 1966 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 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 telegrams coming in and all this outpouring of support, he considered himself alone and that he was a loner and that's really bizarre when you step back

and look at that because Sammy Davis Jr. always had friends. He was always 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 anyway. You're like, Sammy, I don't feel like I know the real you. Come on, Sammy, let it out. And he said, that's by design, babe. I feel like I'm tripping or something right now. So his career is booming in the 60s and into the 70s and the result of that, of course,

well, through the 60s, 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 1968, he got divorced. In 1970, he married a woman named Altevis Gore,

who was 18 years his junior. Great name. Backup dancer. His children did not like the fact that she was so much younger, but they stayed married for the rest of his life. Yeah, he was like, oh, if you got a problem with her, you should probably not know about everything else I'm doing.

Yeah, so here's where it gets really interesting. Very interesting. Sammy Davis Jr. had a convergence of two interests in the 70s. He became a member of the Church of Satan. He was an honorary warlock. 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 an orgies. He participated in satanic orgies. Right. Yeah, that was actually, I don't know if it was his first orgy or not, but that's how he became a part of, involved in the Church of Satan.

You know, like the original Church of Satan with Anton Levese there and everything. Like the real good, like classic golden years of Church of Satan. Exactly. He went and participated in a satanic orgy. Sammy Davis Jr. Which I think is like a regular orgy,

but with just more like red candles. 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. I read that too, yeah. He was apparently at the first one. And this would have been in the late 60s.

And somebody in a hood is trying to get his attention. And it turns out he lifts the hood and it's his barber. His barber, JC Bring, would later be killed with Sharon Tate by the Manson family. But he was basically like, hey, Sammy, it's me, Jay. How are you doing? Isn't this awesome? And then they went back to the...

They're coming. He pulls the mask back down. Yeah, but he, yeah. He was hugely into pornography, he was into orgies, into swinging. He was, he loved cocaine and loved drinking. I saw a Arsenio interview with him. Must have been very shortly before his death,

where he's like, you know, I had to give everything up. And I don't miss all the other stuff, but I miss booze. I miss whiskey. I miss vodka. I love that stuff. 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, anything like that. And then somebody went backstage and there's Sammy Davis, Jr. smoking a cigarette, drinking a brand. And he goes, Sammy, what are you doing? I just told Larry King that you gave all this up. He's like, I'm, I plan to. 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, which is how we ended up becoming involved in the church of Satan, which went on for years. Yeah, no judgment here. If that's his bag, it's not hurting anybody. Right. Did you see the one quote about the ritual

with the lady who was tied to the bed? Where he decided like it was okay. Yeah, he was talking about it. And he was like, that chick was loving it, man. You're right. And it, well, I won't say the rest of the quote, but do you remember? Yeah, I remember.

I remember. So all of this led to what we were talking about earlier, this, this TV pilot that is legendary in Hollywood is one of the weirdest, worst things that Hollywood has ever produced. And it was a pilot for a TV show in 1973 called Poor Devil, which was about a man who was a load down on the totem pole,

or I guess high on the totem pole. Sure. Cole Shoveler in hell, who is 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 earth. Right, Jack Klugman, Quincy M.D. Yeah, and it is on YouTube.

And dude, it is amazing. I have not had a chance to see it yet. 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 his, his most bitter revenge impulses and stuff like that. But at one point, apparently Jack Klugman wants to get in touch with Sammy Davis Jr., 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. And they made him in honorary war law. He used to flash like the devil horns at them from stage when they, when he would do a show in Tampa, just go, yeah.

He, Christopher Lee, by the way, played the devil, which is pretty on the nodes, but perfect. Yeah. So that doesn't succeed, obviously. It's terrible. The 70s and the 80s, 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 about the great, great Cannonball run. Oh yeah, he was in that, wasn't he? Yeah, man, he and Dean were partners. They played. I forgot about that. They dressed up as priests. That's right.

Heavily drinking, smoking priests. They played themselves, basically, as priests who wanted to drive fast. That's pretty great. But even though we review that film, I don't think it was looked at generally as one of the big highlights of his career. Oh, I'm sure not.

By this time, he's kitschy Sammy. Yeah. From what I understand, he was fine with that. As long as he was working, he was okay, because I said earlier that he had a certain affiliation with that song, Mr. Bojangles, 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, he's been reduced to doing basically sidewalk performances. And apparently Sammy was scared to death about that being his future. So even just doing what he was doing with Dean in Cannonball Run, I'm sure was just fine in his mind because he was still working and performing.

Yeah. Of course, he looks around and there's Bertman, there's Adrian Barbeau. You're digging the Sammy now, aren't you? Yes, dude. I think Sammy needs to be a recurring character from now on and stuff you should know episode. We'll see, we'll see.

Okay. He's the new hippie Rob. So in the 80s, he gets into some financial trouble, to say the least, because I love how I'd put it. He'd been struggling with tax payments since the 1960s. 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. 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 4 million, but he owed about 7 million. Geez. And he was a profligate spender of money. I saw one interview once where a guy said that he walked six blocks in New York with them. He even named the streets.

So it seems like he really did just walk six blocks and dropped $50,000 along the way, stopping in different stores. I thought you dropped it out of his pocket on the street. No, no, buying stuff, just buy, buy, buy. He'd just spend it because he'd come from nothing. And he knew that thrill of spending money. He was terrible with his money.

And so as he found out he owed $7 million, 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 1989, he found that he had a sore throat. So he went to the doctor and ultimately was diagnosed with throat cancer. Yeah, after that very first show,

it's like such cruel irony to raise all this money because when he passed away in 1990, in May 16th of cancer, he left that tax bill to his wife, like that carried over. Yeah, Altavis. Yeah, so that really left her kind of destitute for the rest of her life as well. Oh yeah, for sure.

I mean, she basically owed $3 million 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 tax debt, leaving that behind. Yeah, and in one way it's like kind of a sad ending with the financial stuff and obviously dying way too young of cancer.

But yeah, 65 man. He did accomplish everything he set out to accomplish. He showed everybody who said this diminutive, little mixed race, kind of funny looking guy is never gonna amount to anything. And he had a lifelong career from the age of three to 65 in show business. 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. Yeah, that quote on that Letterman show was great on the 85 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. Sammy Davis Jr., everybody, round of applause. You got anything else? Got nothing else.

If you wanna know more about Sammy Davis Jr., just start watching some of his old performances. They're pretty amazing. And while you're doing that, we're gonna just move on ahead to Listener Mail. Yeah, this is about the 911 pizza thing. We heard from a lot of 911 people. Yeah, I'm glad that you picked one of these, man.

This is good. Hey, while we are not specifically trained to send EMS to calls where people pretend to order a pizza, most 911 dispatchers will, in fact, ask you, this is 911, 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 are many stories of this working out, most in domestic violence or kidnapping situations. So even though it isn't 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 for a welfare check due to the suspicious nature of the call. I'm glad to hear this. Yeah, please let this be known because in a last-ditch effort, this may save someone's life. And that is from responder Brooke Diane. Thanks, Brooke.

And thank you also not for being like, Josh was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh, I don't remember. Did you say that's not true? Yeah, I said specifically it's an urban legend. Oh, okay. I don't even remember that. Yeah, so I was really glad when people started writing,

I'm glad you picked one to say like, no, this is for real. Oh, okay. Great. Thanks again, Brooke. That was fantastic. If you want to get in touch with us 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 stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say,

bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.