In 1957, Sammy Davis Jr. met a young Hollywood actress named Kim Novak, who was about to star in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Vertigo. Davis took a liking to Novak and arranged to see her again with the help of his friends Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Before long, a blind item appeared in a gossip column hinting at the two of them being in a relationship. The fact that Davis was black and Novak was white meant that both of their careers were now at risk.

For context, interracial marriage was illegal in half of the states in the U.S. at the time. And as if that wasn’t enough, a Gallup poll from 1958 reveals that just 4% of Americans approved of such marriages. Despite that, the pair defiantly continued dating, but made a significant effort to cover it up. Apparently, Davis would even hide under a blanket while riding in the car with Novak to avoid being seen.

Sammy Davis Jr.’s Relationship With Kim Novak Allegedly Led to a Mob Threat on His Life

When word of their possible engagement got to Harry Cohn, who was the head of Columbia Pictures, he was reportedly enraged that Novak was seeing a black man and took out a mob hit on Davis. Davis’s close friend, Arthur Silber, remembered being there when Davis got a call from his father telling him that mobster Mickey Cohen was threatening to “break both of his legs, put out his other eye, and bury him in a hole if he didn’t marry a black woman right away.” But according to some sources, the threats went a little further than a phone call.

Ovid Demaris and Ed Reid’s The Green Felt Jungle, originally published in 1963, claims that Davis was actually kidnapped by a couple of “Chicago thugs,” and that the person who arranged for the kidnapping died shortly thereafter (Cohn suffered a fatal heart attack in February 1958). The story made its way to the press as a result, and a newspaper clipping about it ended up in Davis’s FBI file. However, because the alleged incident wasn’t reported to authorities, an internal memo suggested that Davis might’ve planted the story for publicity. 

Whatever the case may be, Davis married a black woman by the name of Loray White in January 1958. They divorced the following year.