The Thursday Night Bowling League is a sort of ritual for a number of Broadway actors and actresses. Two of them are Sammy Davis and Tammy Grimes. Tammy says that, as a result of this bowling friendship, Sammy offered to help her whip up a night-club act. In themselves, such Broadway friendships are many and are seldom news. But this friendship did make headlines. Why? Because Tammy Grimes was viciously beaten up by white racists- allegedly because of her friendship with Negro entertainers. Tammy spared no details when she gave her side of the story in an at-home interview. Still a bit dazed from sedation, she said, "It must all go back to those column items." One item was Dorothy Kilgallen's: Sammy Davis has agreed to stage Tammy Grimes' night-club act..." Then there was a feature in the New York Journal-American by John Watson, which mentioned the "night-club act in which she [Tammy] has already started rehearsing under tutelege of Sammy Davis..." Those were just two of the items.
That last story appeared on Sunday, March 7. That very night terror struck at Tammy Grimes. On crowded Broadway and 48th Street. "They did this to me on Sunday night. I don't know who did it, but it must have happened while I was in the drug store buying bubble gum for Amanda." Amanda is Tammy's seven-year-old daughter, born of her four-year marriage to British actor Christopher Plummer which came to an end in 1960.
"There were about six or seven people in the store," Tammy told me. "I'm not Elizabeth Taylor, but three very nice people recognized me and asked for my autograph. I signed for them, exchanged a few pleasantries and walked out. My chauffeur had the car parked just up the street and was waiting for me. When I got there, he looked at me with a frightened expression. And I was completely puzzled. "What's wrong?" I remember asking him. "He was speechless. He could only point. And he pointed at this hand..." Tammy leaned forward on the pumpkin-colored sofa and waved her bandaged left hand for emphasis. "Blood..." Tammy shuddered, seemingly mystified still. "Blood was dripping crazily...profusely. The suddenness of it all left me thoroughly dazed- and in panic for some quick medical attention.
"For a moment I thought of going back to the drug store and buying a bandage. But just then Lester Wilson [Mr. Wilson, a Negro, is the choreographer for the Broadway smash musical "Golden Boy," which stars Sammy Davis]came along and quickly sized up the situation. He said the cut was too severe to treat lightly. He thought it best if I went to the hospital." Wilson took Tammy to Midtown Hospital where, "The doctor took five stitches," Tammy said- and I never felt a thing, just nothing at all."
As I listened to this incredible tale, I gazed around Tammy's elegant, high-ceilinged living-room, the many mirrors and the antique chandeliers and beautiful paintings seeming so incongruous with the image of mysterious assailants. I wondered aloud how a three-inch wound might be inflicted without her being aware of it. Really, how could it happen? "I swear I have no idea. God's truth. I didn't know what happened until I saw the blood. I didn't feel a thing. I would think it had to be something very sharp- like the edge of a razor..."
Her voice, almost quivering now, faded for a moment. With her good right hand she straightened a few of the more unruly srands of her golden tresses which are notorious for their usual uncombed untidiness. "Of course, I wondered about it all the way home from the hospital and into the next day, " Tammy said haltingly. "But I just cast it off as an accident-one of those freak, inexplicable mishaps that defies any explanation. They sometimes happen, you know."
Tammy told the same story to the detectives of the West 47th Street Precinct, who had been summoned to the hospital to investigate the case. Yet by the next night, Tuesday, the one-time-debutante-turned-actress knew it was not "inexplicable"- and so did the police. "Tuesday night I had been out to dinner with a date," Tammy went on, pointedly avoiding mention of his name. "I don't think I should bring him into this because he was not involved. But I will say, because of what did happen- that he was white." At any rate, it was now 11:00 P.M. Her date saw Tammy to her door, said goodnight and left in his own limousine. "I started to take the key out of my bag. Suddenly...four men...they were white men...approached me..." Tammy's voice broke and she swallowed hard trying to hold back her tears. "One of them asked me...." Again Tammy faltered. She couldn't bring herself around to uttering it right off. It was as though she were trying hard not to use it because there was no other way to express it.
"One of them," she began again in a slow deliberate voice, asked me, 'What are you, some kind of nigger-lover?' "I was petrified and furious..." The thirty-one-year old blonde has never been known to be called a bomb-shell, but there is hardly and actor or actress along Broadway who isn't awar of Tammy's temper. She is a girl with guts and plenty of gall. The very insolence and intolerance inherent in the question hurled at her incensed Tammy to the boiling point. "How dare you speak like that to me." Tammy demanded. "Who do you think you are? What kind of language is that? You have no right. It doesn't matter whether I love or hate Negroes, but don't use that word-
Tammy never finished the sentence. A sudden punch struck her right cheek bone. "Everything started to spin then," Tammy told me in a stiff-strangled voice. "Then he hit me again on the left side of my face near the eye." In her terrified confusion, Tammy had the presence of mind to do the one thing that now stands out as a tribute to her good sense in a time of stress and great danger. "I turned the key in the lock, opened the door, and quickly shit it." Tammy got away. So did the attackers. Once inside the safety of her apartment, Tammy saw that already her cheek was puffed with a hideous bruise the size of a silver dollar. Blook began rolling down her cheek. Her eye was beginning to discolor. "I wasn't hurt badly enough to have to go the hospital again," Tammy told me. "I looked something awful, but I was able to take care of the wounds myself, I bathed the bruise with antiseptic and put these bandages on the other cheek. "Those punches hurt, but they didn't hurt nearly as much as the pain I felt inside. Call it disgust. I cried myself to sleep that night..."
There was no doubt in Tammy's mind now that the four men who accosted her at her front door were somehow involved with the mysterious Sunday hand-slashing. It was probably a razor blade wielded unseen by one of those men. "If you saw them again would you recognize those men?" I asked. "The police asked me the same question," Tammy smiled. For some reason, she had not reported it, but detectives read about it in the newspaper. "I todl them I have no recollection of what they looked like. It all happened so swiftly that I had no chance to look at the their faces, much less study them. It was dark on the street and I was wholly absorbed in one ambition at the moment- to get away from them before they killed me."
She did however recall that they were wearing black jackets, black boots and had touseled hair and long sideburns. The following morning Tammy arranged for an armed guard- a private detective with a trusty .38-calibre revolver in a shoulder holster- to stay with her or near her wherever she goes. "I told the detective," she confided, "that I didn't think there was a prayer that the men were after money. Both times I had more than two hundred dollars in cash in my pocketbook, and no one made an effort to grab it. Very definitely this was not robbery- but the work of white racists. "I think they were motivated by what they had read in the columns about Sammy and me..."
Sammy Davis did not know hat had happened to Tammy until the story broke in the newspapers. Then, Tammy said, he called to console her. When he called her was not clear. But Sammy has been quoted as making a few other things clear. First of all, he wanted it known that he did not bowl on the same team as Tammy, that their teams bowled only opposite each other. Secondly, that he was not helping her with her night-club act- his choreographer, Lester Wilson, was helping her. Sammy, an old hand at racist headlines, could feel deeply for Tammy and wish with all his heart she had not been beaten. However, he felt compelled to make statements to the newspapers (and there is the possibiity that he was misquoted) that he did not know Tammy, and that he has never associated socially with her, and that he wished Miss Grimes would keep his name out of her publicity.
That sammy and Tammy were not telling exactly the same story was perfectly evident. And something else was evident too. Broadway had a mix-up to talk about for a good long time. - CHRYS HARANIS

The article is accompanied by a full page black and white photo of Tammy sitting with raised sun glasses, showing the bruises and bandages on her cheeks; a small b&w photo of Tammy holding the hand of a smiling Sammy Davis- Caught in the middle? Sammy wishes Tammy would keep him out of all the publicity.; a very small b&w photo of Tammy's left profile.