Name: Sammy Davis, Jr. Collection on Letterman, 1985-89
Uploaded: 2020-03-23T05:31:44.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sammy Davis, Jr. Collection on Letterman, 1985-89' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-03-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sammy Davis, Jr. Collection on Letterman, 1985-89' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-03-23. Transcript available.

Sammy Davis, Jr. Collection on Letterman, 1985-89

Thank you, Paul. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the show. We
have a wonderful
telecast for you tonight. Dr. Richard Brandt is here, and a man who is a whistler,
Francisco
Hernandez, will be joining us, and also my first guest tonight, who is, I'll
tell you
in a second. Did you have a good vacation, Paul?
Very, very nice vacation.
Yeah. Anything exciting?
We met up, of course, on the West Coast.
Yeah, we spent a little of it together. It was nice to see you out there.
A little beaching.
Yeah, a lot of fun.
You insisted on going nude on the beach, which I, I don't know why. You don't
like
tan lines, I guess.
No, no.
That's the whole thing. I know.
Hal, did you have a nice vacation?
Yes, I did.
Thank you very much. Our director, ladies and gentlemen, Hal Gertney. Barbara?
Yeah.
Did you have a good vacation?
Yeah.
Okay.
We're back, and we're ready to go, and this gentleman, it's very exciting for
us to have
him here. He has been in show business for 55 years. This is the first time he's
been in
time he has been on our program. It's truly a pleasure to have him here. Please
welcome Sammy Davis Jr.
How does that make you feel? You must get this wherever you go, this kind of
response, don't you?
It makes me feel very, very good. It really does. I can't lie about it.
Can you go anywhere, like shopping, to any place without being mobbed? Can you
go to, say you want to go to the zoo with your kids, or you want to go any
place, or you want to, are you just?
Well, nobody mobs me, David. It's like people just say, hey, Sam, how are you?
And the brothers go, hey, bro, what's happening?
And there's always somebody that will say invariably, hey, how's Frankie? But
there's never the other kind of thing with tearing and all of that. No, I never
have had that.
People are very, very nice. Very nice, and it's like I'm family, so I like that.
Fifty-five years in show business. I hate to correct you, but it's 57 years.
Oh, gosh.
Now, what was your first job, and how old were you? You must have been what?
You were like three years old?
I was three. I won my first, I won an amateur contest at the Stanley Theater in
Philadelphia when I was three and a half years old singing, I'll be glad when
you're dead, you rascal, you.
Now, how did, you're obviously your folks entered you in the contest, right?
Yes, my dad and Will Maston, my uncle, I affectionately called him my uncle, he
was my godfather, really.
They were on the bill, and they had an amateur contest, and they brought me on.
And in those days in vaudeville, David, they used to have an afterpiece.
After the act, they'd do a little encore.
And if there was a younger member of the family, they would bring the younger
member in,
and he would do some sort of obnoxious number or something, you know.
And there was only a few of us, and Mickey did it, Mickey Rooney did it, Donald
O'Connor did it, and I did it, you know.
And we were still around, thank you, good luck.
Now, were there other three-year-olds competing in this talent show?
No, no, I was the only three.
You were the only one.
I don't believe this.
No, there were, no, no, there weren't.
It wasn't Meglin's kiddies.
It was a regular adult amateur show, and I walked out and sang, I'll be glad
when you did your answer.
And stole the show.
Stole the show and won $10.
Yeah.
You know, people are always talking about vaudeville.
What does the word itself mean?
We know what it meant generically.
It was a circuit of theaters for live performances, and they would do five or
six shows a day, and so on and so forth.
No, you did three shows a day.
It went from two shows to three shows, and it wasn't until the presentation
with big bands
that they started doing four and five shows a day, like at the Strand Theater
here, or the Lowest State in New York,
or the Roxy, or the Paramount.
We did four and five shows a day.
I had the good fortune of working all of those theaters as an opening act with
my dad and my uncle before it started to happen for me.
But do you know what the term meant?
Vaudeville meant variety, a variety show, where there would be the juggler, the
comedian, the two-man act, the hand-balancing team.
The next-to-closing was the top spot.
And if you were a next-to-closing act, you were the top of the bill.
Now, what would that do to the poor person, a man or woman or a juggler or
whatever, who had to close the show?
That would have been a tough spot.
Well, usually the closing spot was left for a big, big variety, a review type
of thing, 12 people.
And they'd come up and sing and dance, and nobody cared, you know.
And that was the end of that.
Boom, boom, boom, you know.
Yeah.
Now, where were we?
Oh, but then you started working regularly after your debut in The Amateur Hour,
right?
Yes.
And your parents, your family, is this true that they said you were a midget so
you could get by labor laws?
I'm going to say a line now that's going to probably cause a great deal of
laughter and some consternation.
I appeared in blackface.
And that means burnt cork, right, with the thing.
And I had a little chocolate cigar, and they would dress me in their long pants,
and I was about the same size I am now.
So, actually, I got away with it, and they said I was a 44-year-old midget.
So, when I tell people now, some of the people from the old days, I say, they
say, how old are you going to be, Sam?
I go, in December, I'll be 60.
And they go, come on, you know, because they don't believe it, because they
remember a midget.
Yeah.
That's an unbelievable life, isn't it?
It is an unbelievable life, and it's the best it's ever been right now, David.
Well, congratulations to you.
Thank you.
Now, in the early days, did you go to school and stuff?
No, I never went.
I never had any formal education at all.
None.
I'm not proud of that statement, but I survived.
But you must have had an education of some kind.
I mean, people give you books and help you read and introduce you to different
subjects and so on and so forth.
None of that.
There was a guy that played piano with the act.
He had wanted to be a teacher, and he taught me a little bit.
I didn't learn how to write until I went into the army at the age of 18.
And I was a spotty reader, but I forced myself.
Something happens to you when you don't take it for granted, and it's not just
laid on you, man.
I learned everything I had to learn so that I wanted to just fill my head with
knowledge about...
So that subsequently, thank God, I can go down and have dinner with someone,
and I don't have to talk, just show business.
But that's the way it was.
I never missed it.
But, you know, it's because you didn't have an education that you weren't able
to make anything out of yourself.
We'll do a commercial, and then we'll be back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
We'll be right back with Sammy Davis Jr.
What do you think of the boys?
Are they all right?
I can't get over that.
I really can't.
It's just wonderful.
We have a few seconds of a motion picture
that you were in as a child.
I don't know how old you were in this,
and I'm not sure of the kind of film it was.
Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?
I think it's Rufus Jones for President,
and I was five and a half.
Five and a half.
All right.
Is there anything?
Well, you don't know what we're going to look at.
I don't know either.
Well, let's see what the film we have
from the motion picture of Rufus Jones for President.
Wait, where's that new president?
You're here?
Oh, come here, Pratt.
You've got to say something to your constituents, sir.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
I'll be glad when you're there, Rufus.
Boy, you were something.
Mr. Big Shot there.
Oh, my goodness.
I've seen that before, but it's been some time since I've seen it.
When you look at it from time to time, or the first time you looked at it, do
you understand
who that person was there?
No, I have no idea.
Yeah.
No, I really don't.
I relate to it only in the fact that I remember somewhere along the line that I
danced.
I remember somewhere along the line that I sang.
I can't see.
I never took lessons for anything, and I was one of those people, and thanks to
the business
at that time, that you just suddenly have people.
You say to someone, I remember saying to Buddy Rich, playing with Tommy Dorsey's
orchestra,
right?
And this was in 1940.
I said, how do you do that?
And he went, what do you mean?
I said, you do a thing that goes, and he went, well, let's, well, I'll show you.
You go like this, and I said, he said, try it, and I went, he said, give me
back the
sticks.
But I was working.
So everything was on the job training.
Yes.
You had experts all around you to help you out.
Yes.
Now, are you surprised when you look at that at how good you were, what a slick
little performer
you were at five years old?
I mean, at five years old, you know, most kids are sitting in mud, you know?
Yeah.
Really?
No, but it's true, you know?
I mean, they're...
You are, you are a delight.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, I know.
No, no.
No, I mean that.
But when you look at the little kid there, doesn't that just take your breath
away?
No, it doesn't.
What it looks, what it reminds me of, to be absolutely honest with you, David,
it reminds
me that I must have been hell on wheels.
I must have been terribly obnoxious, you know, to have ever gone that far, to
be that precocious,
to get up there at that age and go, look, I'm going to show you how good I am,
you know?
And nowadays, you get up on the stage and you perform, but I think it's, I
think it's
nice.
Yeah.
And it's nice for me, because as a grandfather now, my oldest boy, Mark, just,
and his wife
just presented, we have a, we have a little grandbaby, and four weeks old, and
it's nice
to look back, and one day he'll be able to look at that and say, that's my
grandpa, when
he was my age, or even younger, you know?
Yeah.
It's, I tell you, not having seen that before, it's stunning to see what a cute
little kid
you were, and...
And what happened to me afterwards?
Yeah.
No.
Uh...
What happened to you?
Uh, what are you doing for fun these days?
You mentioned you just finished working and you're going home, what do you do
for fun?
You go home now, you're off for four weeks, you said?
Yeah, I'm off for four weeks.
I play a little golf, relax with my family, enjoy my grandson, and my wife, and
see the house.
It's a good, uh, it's a good time for me.
And thanks to, uh, to audiences around the world, it's a good, I'm not fighting
those
devils anymore, you know?
I don't fight the, uh, gee, I wonder if I just go out and do my show, and it's
a good
time.
And you're talking about devils, you just mean the anxieties you can generate
on your
own behalf?
Yeah, personal devils, I wonder how good I can be, and who's that, and you get
envious
of that person, and who's that.
I look at all the young performers today, and I go like this, yeah, ma