Samela's Shammash.(The Talk of the Town)(Sammy Davis, Jr.)

If there is a Heaven, and Sammy Davis, Jr., is looking down from it, he's probably distressed about the state of his earthly possessions. "He was meticulous," Burt Boyar, Davis's friend and a co-writer of Davis's autobiography, "Yes I Can," said recently. "He shined his own shoes. When he was trying on a suit, he would take it off and put it in the laundry just for having tried it on." But when Davis died, in 1990, his finances, it turned out, weren't as well ordered as his closets (he owed more than five million dollars to the I.R.S.), and his things were auctioned off: a white satin jumpsuit with matching boots ($825); a "Mod Squad" script ($412.50); sixteen wooden canes ($3,575); a Snoopy calendar ($880); a Mr. Bojangles costume ($2,750); a "Planet of the Apes" sculpture ($2,750); a signed letter from Richard Nixon ($1,430).

One object from the sale is about to be put on the block again. It is Davis's sterling-silver menorah, 12.3 inches tall, with an inscription on its base. On one side it says, "WOMEN'S DIVISION FEDERATION JEWISH PHILANTHROPIES TUESDAY NOVEMBER 23, 1965 HOTEL ASTOR." And, on the other, "TO SAMMY DAVIS JR WHOSE ACHIEVEMENTS WON BY COURAGE AND INTEGRITY SAY TO EVERY MAN YES, WE CAN." Boyar said that Davis had a lot of similar memorabilia, since he did many events for Jewish philanthropies. (Ernest Michel, who has worked at the United Jewish Appeal Federation for more than fifty years, missed the presentation, but said that Davis had performed for the group in Las Vegas, and "everybody loved that guy.") Davis converted to Judaism after he lost his left eye in a car accident, in 1954; the comedian Eddie Cantor had got him interested in the religion. Davis was serious about his faith, and "Yes I Can" is full of instances in which he uses jokes to defuse people's skepticism. (His favorite was a response to the question "What's your golf handicap?" "I'm a colored, one-eyed Jew--do I need anything else?") In one scene in the book, the radio host Barry Gray talks to Davis:

"Is it true that you've become a Jew?", A hush fell over the restaurant. The people were leaning in, listening. "Yes, Barry, I am a Jew." , He extended his hand. "Welcome aboard, lantzman. . . . I've heard it said that you wanted to be a Jew because all your friends are Jewish.", "Barry, Frank Sinatra is my closest friend and I never yet saw him wear a yamalka. I'll admit he eats a bagel every now and then."

Boyar said, "I called him on Yom Kippur once, and he wouldn't take my call. He called me the next day and said, 'I'm sorry, I thought you were going to talk about business.' " He always lit the candles during Hanukkah.

The menorah will be sold next month at an auction held by the dealer Jonathan Greenstein, at the Radisson ...