It was as a member of the trio that Sammy found himself in Detroit in the dog days of 1941, a substitute opening act for the Tommy Dorsey band. As he wandered backstage marveling at the size of Dorsey’s operation, Sammy was offered a handshake by a skinny white guy in his twenties: “Hiya. My name’s Frank. I sing with Dorsey”
“That might sound like nothing much,” Sammy recalled later, “but the average top vocalist in those days wouldn’t give the time of day to a Negro supporting act.” And Frank did more: For the next few nights, until the regular opening act returned, he would sit with Sammy in his dressing room shooting the breeze, talking about the show life. The kid couldn’t believe his luck.
But if meeting Sinatra was a glimpse of a raceless Eden, the next few years were a crushing racist hell. Sammy was drafted into an army that was a cesspool of bigotry. He felt it the moment he arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for basic training.
“Excuse me, buddy,” he asked a white private he came across while trying to find his way around. “Can you tell me where 202 is?”
“Two buildings down. And I’m not your buddy, you black bastard!”
It was a slap in the face, but it was only the beginning. For two years, Sammy was denigrated, demeaned, and, truly, tortured. He was segregated by a corporal who created a no-man’s-land between his bed and those of white soldiers. His expensive chronograph watch (a going-away gift from Mastin and Big Sam) was ground into useless pieces under a bigot’s boot. He was nearly tricked into drinking a bottle of urine offered to him as a conciliatory beer; his tormentors reacted to his refusal to imbibe it by pouring it on him. He was lured to an out-of-the-way building and held against his will while “Coon” and “I’m a Nigger” were inscribed on his face and chest with white paint.
And there were the beatings. “I had been drafted into the army to fight,” he remembered, “and I did.” He was goaded frequently into using his fists as a means of settling the score with the pigs who abused him, breaking his nose twice, scoring his knuckles with cuts.
Only when he was asked by an officer to take part in a show for the troops could he lift his spirit above the dreadful situation. At first, he didn’t want to expose himself on a stage and entertain the very people who’d been mistreating him, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to perform. George M. Cohan Jr. was also stationed in Cheyenne and convinced Sammy to help him create a touring production that would visit a number of military installations. Sammy threw himself into the work with a kind of violence, seeking release, vindication, and even revenge by being the best song-and-dance man anyone had ever seen.
“My talent was the weapon,” he recalled, “the power, the way for me to fight.” For the last eight months of his service time, the show was continually on the road, far from his most virulent antagonists. It kept him sane, maybe even alive.
But when he got out, his eyes having been opened to his situation as a black man with grand aspirations in America, he found himself increasingly crushed by the gap between his ambitions and his opportunities. He was befriended by Mickey Rooney, who, though still one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, was unable to get him movie work. He winced at the ebonic clichés employed by performers on the Chitlin Circuit. In reaction, he adopted a stage manner so patently artificial that he sounded, in his own words, like “a colored Laurence Olivier.” Even the tone-deaf Jerry Lewis was to encourage him to forgo his “with your kind permission we would now like to indulge” routine, but Sammy only did so after, typically, listening for several self-lacerating hours to tape recordings of his own inflated persiflage. And he reacted with despair and self-loathing whenever he was confronted with the insidious—and frequently overt—limits placed upon him in the Jim Crow era.
Nowhere were these barriers more painfully imposed than in Las Vegas, where the Will Mastin Trio debuted in 1944. Vegas was still a cowboy town, “the Mississippi of the West,” as blacks unfortunate enough to live there called it. The black population, whose members swelled the ranks of janitors, porters, and maids at the emerging hotel-casinos on the Los Angeles Highway (which had yet to be christened the Strip), was restricted to living, eating, shopping, and gambling in a downtrodden district known as Westside—a Tobacco Road of unpaved streets bereft of even wooden sidewalks, lined by shacks that lacked fire service, telephones, and, in many cases, electricity and indoor plumbing.
Sammy ought to have been used to segregation. The trio arrived in Vegas not long after a stint in Spokane, where they were forced, for lack of a black rooming house, to sleep in their dressing room. But Vegas galled him more than anything he’d experienced before, in part because of the appalling contrast between the glamour of the Last Frontier hotel and the shack in which he was forced to spend all of his offstage time, and in part because the gaiety and glitz of the casino—which he wasn’t allowed to walk through or even see—had an almost visceral allure for him.
As in the past, the only time he ever felt lifted out of himself and his miserable situation was onstage—“for 20 minutes, twice a night, our skin had no color.” As in the past, he fought off his frustrations and the indignities of racism with ferocious performances—“I was vibrating with energy and I couldn’t wait to get on the stage. I worked with the strength of 10 men.” But never, as he dreamed might happen, did a casino manager or owner grow so enamored of his performance that he broke the color line by offering him a drink and a chance to try his luck at the tables.
And so it went. He forced himself higher and higher in the ranks of showbiz, garnering accolades, cutting records, standing out a bit more from Big Sam and Mastin with each performance, getting paid a little better with each gig. At the same time, he was hustled by cops to the backs of movie theaters, snubbed at the doors of the Copacabana and Lindy’s, barred even from men’s rooms in some of the theaters he packed with paying customers. If he grew to hate himself in some twisted fashion, he could hardly be blamed.
But repeatedly he found in his corner that skinny guy he’d met in Detroit. When Sammy was in the army, Frank had become a monster star, and when he was discharged and caught up with Mastin and Big Sam in Los Angeles, he made his way over to NBC studios in Hollywood, resplendent in his dress uniform, to watch Sinatra perform his weekly stint on Your Hit Parade. After the show, he waited out back with the bobby-soxers and autograph hounds and sheepishly offered Sinatra a piece of paper to sign.
“Didn’t you work with your old man and another guy?” Frank asked, and he invited him to the next few shows, letting Sammy drink in rehearsals and backstage ambiance until another gig dragged the Mastin Trio back onto the road.
Two years later, Frank insisted that Sidney Piermont, manager of New York’s Capitol Theater, book the Mastins as his opening act at $1,250 a week—a sum that staggered Mastin and Big Sam. Sinatra never told Sammy that he was behind the act’s being hired—Piermont had wanted the Nicholas Brothers and then gagged at the price Sinatra wanted to pay Mastin—but in every other respect he treated Sammy like a peer throughout the engagement. They parted bosom pals: “Remember,” Frank told Sammy as he left for his next booking—and this was his most profound gesture of friendship—“if anybody hits you, let me know.”
But in the early fifties, no one, it seemed, wanted to hit Sammy. He was the quickest-rising star in nightclubs and theaters, particularly among the New York and L.A. cognoscenti. In 1951, the Will Mastin Trio opened at Ciro’s, the hot Sunset Strip nightclub. The room was packed with Hollywood royalty, and Sammy and Company couldn’t do enough. Dancing, singing, little comic bits, everything was a hit, nothing more so than Sammy’s impersonations of such white stars as Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant, and Humphrey Bogart. The same good fortune followed at an engagement at the Copacabana, the dream club of Sammy’s youth, some months later. He was on the map to stay.
There was nevertheless a feeling of vertigo to it all. Although all the right people came to his shows, although he was welcome in the homes of Hollywood’s crown royalty, he sensed a distance between himself and the fellow to whom all