I got a Polaroid so I can take pictures of chicks’ boobs.’ ” “I said, ‘ Stock? What stock?’ He said, ‘I bought it for two dollars a share.’ ‘Two dollars? For a piece of paper?. He said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a Polaroid, the new Polaroid. He was in the army, doing a show, and he came to the dressing room, and then we went to my hotel and hung out. “We were in Florida and I was at the Beachcomber. When Sammy started taking pictures, as a teenage performer in the 40s, he used a Brownie and whatever inexpensive camera came his way. Let’s think of something he doesn’t have. This may sound a little paranoid, but I am positive that somewhere in Germany, in Japan, there are men awake in the middle of the night, thinking, Now, Sammy Davis Jr. In terms of addiction I think there is nothing more powerful than men’s toys. “Of course, once I had a little education,” Sammy said, “I needed a new Nikon this and a Canon that, both with 18 lenses and 62 filters.
It was waist-high and had two shelves filled with Minoxes and Rolleis and stereoscopic cameras-the best and newest of every high-end model. In time, Sammy would have a cabinet running the length of a 25-foot wall in his Beverly Hills home.
He got me involved with serious photography and using available light.” “During the early 50s,” Sammy once told me, “Jerry gave me my first important camera, my first 35-mm. It was the start of a friendship and collaboration that would result in two autobiographies, which we co-wrote, Yes I Can and Why Me? We had extraordinary chemistry from the first minute and, as luck would have it, we had dinner seven nights a week the entire year he was in town. That first evening, as our meal ended, he apologized for having to leave for the theater, but he said, “What about having dinner together”-he thought for a moment before continuing-“five nights a week?” He suggested dinner at Danny’s Hideaway, a steak house popular with comedians and other show-business types. I was writing a daily syndicated newspaper column, and I phoned him up, as I did many stars who came to town, hoping to get a few items. Wonderful, a show that Jule Styne had co-produced to showcase Sammy’s myriad talents. It was during his Broadway days that my late wife, Jane, and I met him. And he did it all with a worldly bearing, hipster banter, a cigarette in his hand, and a lot of flash and body English. ,” and he’d name two songs-different ones each night-and then he’d ad-lib for the next hour or more. He would tell his musical director, George Rhodes, “I’ll open with. Sammy was one of those rare entertainers who do not have a set act. He did impressions, played musical instruments, even threw in a few gun tricks.
Photos of the rat pack how to#
Having started in vaudeville at age three (where he would routinely do six shows a day), he had learned how to gauge an audience by instinct and respond, minute by minute, to what he sensed the crowd was craving. Until now.ĭuring the 50s and 60s, watching Sammy perform in a nightclub or concert hall was the most exhilarating experience in American popular culture.
Photos of the rat pack archive#
As revealed in a new book, Photo by Sammy Davis, Jr.- and in the previously unpublished images displayed on these pages-only a fraction of his archive has ever been seen, let alone appeared in print. On faded transparencies, Red Buttons clowns by the pool, Tony Curtis sits before an easel, painting, and Mel Tormé and his family sprawl on the shag rug on Christmas morning.Īnd from the time I met him, in 1956, he was never without a camera. On his contact sheets, Marilyn Monroe tucks a friend’s son into bed, Milton Berle does card tricks for Kirk Douglas, and Nat “King” Cole prowls the town.
He was, it turned out, a sort of house photographer for the storied Rat Pack-shooting Dean Martin backstage, Peter Lawford in his bathrobe, Frank Sinatra in pajamas. Then, beginning in the 1950s, with intimate, unparalleled access to the offstage lives and late-night high jinks of the celebrities he met, he went on to record the glamour of Hollywood, the rise of Las Vegas, the allure of Miami Beach’s resorts and Broadway’s nightclub and theater scenes-from inside the stars’ private domains. He chronicled life inside African-American clubs, homes, and hotels.
He traveled the country shooting rural landscapes and urban street scenes in the style of Walker Evans. My friend had begun taking pictures as a hobby in the late 1940s. Once inside that musty storage room, I opened box after box with two cohorts of mine (film producers Robert Bloomingdale and Howard Burkons), and we discovered one of the greatest untapped photo archives in the history of entertainment. But it was only recently that his widow-his third wife, Altovise-granted me access to his belongings, kept for years in a nondescript Bekins warehouse in Carson, California. One of my best friends died of throat cancer, at 64, in 1990.