Sammy Davis Jr.: My Father
Like many children-of-celebrity biographies, this uneventful family memoir doesn't offer the most enlightening perspective on its subject-"Pop" was too busy hanging out with the Rat Pack to spend much time with his kids. Tracey Davis-born in 1961, when Sammy was 35-grew up in her ambitious father's superstar shadow and angrily refers to her pampered childhood self as "Tracey comma daughter of Sammy Davis Jr. comma." She was traumatized when her father missed her fifth birthday party, then gave her a $100 bill as a present, and when he flashily picked her up from school in a limousine. Sammy wasn't exactly a Daddy Dearest, but he clearly was neglectful. Mom, however (the Swedish-born actress May Britt), was a "saint," but after father and daughter patch things up in a Las Vegas hotel suite in the 1980s, Britt, then divorced from Sammy, nearly disappears from the narrative. Davis touches on pertinent topics like mixed-race identity, the stresses of marital strife and the suffering of witnessing her father's bout with terminal cancer, but she spends much time as well lending Sammy's Aramis cologne supernatural significance and trashing her stepmother, who comes across as a messy drunk who spitefully gave the youngsters shopworn Christmas gifts. Ultimately, this book serves as an appendix to the father's own, bestselling memoir, Yes I Can. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.