As Sammy's star imploded

Altovise asked Murray to manage the estate. He accepted the job in 1994, determined not only to clear the debt but also to restore the faded star to his proper place in the firmament. By following Sonny in this quest, Birkbeck tells the epic of Sammy Davis Jr: life as a prodigy, dancing with his father and uncle; rise to fame; the car crash that took his eye and made him a Jew; his friendship with Sinatra; his struggles with racial prejudice. Sammy wanted everything Frank had, which meant houses and money, but also women, specifically white women. It was this desire that landed him in trouble, first during his affair with Kim Novak (which got him scratched off the guest list for the Kennedy inaugural), then during his marriage to the Swedish film star May Britt, which made him a Hollywood pariah.

In the late 1960s, when that marriage dissolved, Davis was pressured, less by members of the white community than by members of the black community, into marrying a black woman, which is how he wound up with Altovise, a dancer in his Broadway show "Golden Boy." The book chronicles that marriage, which devolved into depravity, with Sammy forcing Altovise into all kinds of kinkiness. (These are the passages in which Sammy is "deconstructed": "So Sammy found solace in drugs, particularly cocaine and amyl nitrate, and experimented briefly with Satanism and pornography.") By the end, Altovise was sharing her mansion with Sammy's (white) girlfriend.

In return, Altovise, who reveled in the role of celebrity wife, came away with little more than bad karma and debt. The couple had filed joint tax returns, which meant Altovise was responsible for Sammy's losses. Murray assigned himself the tasks of untangling the estate's finances and curing Altovise of her alcoholism and sadness. He was surprisingly successful, settling with the IRS and checking Altovise into a treatment facility, but every step forward was followed by two steps back. In the end, after years of work, for which he went largely unpaid, Altovise fired Sonny. He did so much and came away with so little (I fixed the Sammy Davis Junior Estate and all I got was this lousy book). It's never clear exactly why Sonny persisted so long, year after year, traveling coast to coast. In Birkbeck's telling, it seems an act of citizenship, even love. He wanted to restore a great entertainer to his rightful position.