Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. wasn’t too happy about getting married to Loray White and it was so bad that he tried to sadly commit suicide right there at his wedding. Here’s what happened according to his former personal assistant, Arthur Sibling:
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Beloved crooner Sammy Davis Jr attempted suicide on his wedding night because racial jibes drove him mad.
The MR BOJANGLES singer’s former personal assistant ARTHUR SILBER JR has revealed the cabaret star’s personal pain in a new memoir, SAMMY DAVIS JR: Me + MY SHADOW.
Silber claims [Sammy] was distraught at having to end his secret romance with actress Kim Novak after mobsters, who disapproved of the interracial match, threatened to kill him.
Sammy then wed dancer [African American] LORAY WHITE in a marriage of convenience, but drank too much at the ceremony and wailed, “Why can’t I be with the woman I love?”
Silber recalls, “Sammy was putting a gun to his head. I jumped on top of him and pinned his arms as I wrestled the gun out of his hand. It was loaded.
“I twisted his arm and the gun fell to the floor.”
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Source: contactmusic.com
Wow! It was that bad huh? This is how it got to the point of Sammy wanting to kill himself:
You see in 1957, when Davis was involved with…
MMM…not completely true. The part about Sammy and Kim having a relationship is true. So is the reaction of Harry Cohn. However, Cohn couldn’t get the Outfit to do anything to Sammy. They didn’t care, plus Sammy made so much money in Outfit controlled clubs, they would never have ‘killed the golden goose’. That eye injury was from a car accident well before Sammy dated Kim. Think about it: do you really think a mostly Italian run group like the Outfit (all of the Mobs, not just the Mafia and such) cared if a Polish girl wanted to date a Black man? It’s also a fact that people like Sinatra, Martin and such protected Sammy, even making some people do things they wouldn’t…when the owners of the Sands wouldn’t allow Sammy to stay there, Sinatra told them, “Sam gets to stay here. Or I GO.” Sinatra and his buddies were the big draw at the Sands .. they even built Sam a bungalow of his own to stay in.
MMM…not completely true. The part about Sammy and Kim having a relationship is true. So is the reaction of Harry Cohn. However, Cohn couldn’t get the Outfit to do anything to Sammy. They didn’t care, plus Sammy made so much money in Outfit controlled clubs, they would never have ‘killed the golden goose’. That eye injury was from a car accident well before Sammy dated Kim. Think about it: do you really think a mostly Italian run group like the Outfit (all of the Mobs, not just the Mafia and such) cared if a Polish girl wanted to date a Black man? It’s also a fact that people like Sinatra, Martin and such protected Sammy, even making some people do things they wouldn’t…when the owners of the Sands wouldn’t allow Sammy to stay there, Sinatra told them, “Sam gets to stay here. Or I GO.” Sinatra and his buddies were the big draw at the Sands .. they even built Sam a bungalow of his own to stay in.