The Night Sammy Davis Jr. Overshadowed Ol’ Blue Eyes

Sammy Davis Jr. was one of those famous folks whose celebrity overshadowed his talents, especially during the last half of his life when his cigarette-puffing, head-swaggering manner had become its own parody.

I have to confess to being among those who always figured Davis would go down in entertainment history--if he went down at all--as a crony of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, rather than for anything he had accomplished on his own as a song and dance man.

It wasn’t until I saw him at the Pacific Amphitheatre in 1987, when he was sharing a bill with his Rat Pack pal Frankie, that I caught a real glimpse of why Davis had earned and not just befriended his way onto the showbiz Mt. Olympus.

Before that night, I, probably like most of my post-World War II peers, had my opinion of Davis shaped through his talk show and telethon gigs, not to mention those always penetrating interviews with Army Archerd on Oscar nights.

As a singer, he was known to us in the rock generation chiefly through his only No. 1 single, the diabetic-seizure inducing “Candy Man.”

So I had come to the Pacific prepared to endure Davis as part of the price of getting to hear Sinatra again, knowing full well that Frank still could be, on a good night, the best pop singer in the world.

That tepid August evening, however, turned out to be a bad one for the Chairman of the Board as he rambled somewhat disjointedly between songs and never took his eyes away from a TelePrompTer that scrolled all his lyrics.

But it was a great night for Sammy. Instead of giving us one of those exaggerated Vegas lounge-act performances that had seemed to typify him, Davis came across as a sharp, canny vocalist whose innate rhythmic sense made it perfectly clear why he had jumped to the stages of vaudeville virtually as soon as he could walk.

Naturally, he did give us his overblown signature tune, “I Gotta Be Me,” but he infused a surprising amount of freshness and character into it, and into such familiar material as “Begin the Beguine,” “Satin Doll” and even “The Girl From Ipanema.” In selections from “Porgy & Bess,” he reminded us why he had been such an appropriate choice to play Sportin’ Life in the film nearly three decades before.

Afterward, I felt a little sheepish realizing that I’d expected nothing more from the first half of the concert than a stroll down memory lane with Sammy, Friend of the Superstars. I left that night with the happy realization that as a musician, Sammy Davis didn’t have to be anybody’s junior.