Sometimes that was a bus depot, and sometimes it was a makeshift hotel room like the one above the Chi-Chi. He spent his early life on the road without a real relationship with his mother, performing shows in small clubs above the Mason Dixon line and sleeping wherever they were allowed. This was Sammy’s reality - he was a black entertainer in a whitewashed world, a man who owed much of his career to the white Frank Sinatra despite being a more versatile performer, and someone who became one of the most popular mainstream entertainers in the world after starting his performing career in blackface. It also wasn’t atypical that when Sammy performed at the Chi Chi with his uncle and father as a teenager in the early 1940s - one of the first members of the Rat Pack to perform in Palm Springs - he had to stay in a little room above the stage constructed specifically for black Americans. After all, the Chi Chi was a club that wouldn’t serve Native Americans drinks in glasses, as managers were instructed to serve them away from the main drag of the bar in old coffee cups. There were plenty of doctors in the audience, because his audience was entirely white. He kept the dance and impersonation going all the way off the stage. Discreetly, he whispered to a nearby friend, “Go get a doctor, go get a doctor,” without ever stopping the routine.
#THE RAT PACK SAMMY DAVIS JR SKIN#
A five-inch circle of skin on his back calf began to burn. But, by accident, the pistol was already cocked, so when he went to pull it, the powder from the blank shot out the end of the holster and onto his mohair tuxedo pants. Like the end to a lot of shows, Sammy’d planned on ending his Chi Chi set with a quick-draw and firing of the gun. The quick pull was a big part of his act. Sammy was one of the fastest draws in Hollywood. 45 bullet is big enough that if it was shot into someone’s shoulder, it wouldn’t just go through - it would take the whole shoulder with it. One night in the mid-1960s, with Sammy nearing the end of another sold-out show at the Chi-Chi, he finished a song and started a Jerry Lewis impersonation while dancing off the stage.