by John Szwed
John Hammond’s adventures in jazz were coming home to haunt him. When he learned that it was his cousin Louise who was involved with Billie, he went directly to the Crane family to warn them that their daughter’s relationship with the singer might lead to the family being “hurt by unsavory gossip, or even blackmailed by the gangsters and dope pushers Billie knew.” Louise’s mother subsequently ordered her never to have “any more colored folk in her house, I didn’t care who it was,” and she and Billie ceased to see each other. Hammond said that Holiday never forgave him for it, and Billie angrily describes the affair in her book, offering her theory of what was driving Louise’s attentions and how they affected black people such as herself:
But some girls like Brenda can’t love or let themselves go with anybody—man or woman. They can’t even be lesbians and work at it. They’re incapable of loving anybody—just the opposite of my trouble. And they try to make up for it by buying things for people like me.
It’s a cinch to see how it all begins. These poor bitches grow up hating their mothers and having the hots for their fathers. And since being in love with our father is taboo, they grow up unable to get any kicks out of anything unless it’s taboo love. And some Negroes in America walk around with big “Do Not Touch” signs on them, that’s where we come in. And I’m telling you it can be a drag.
There were others who could have appeared in the book. Elizabeth Hardwick moved to New York from Louisville in 1943 hoping to become a writer and an intellectual. She shared an apartment with Greer Johnson, a friend from Louisville who had also just come to town, and who later became a producer who created important opportunities for Holiday when work for her was scarce. Hardwick includes a chapter on Billie in her book Sleepless Nights that is part essay, part nonfiction, based on Hardwick’s and Johnson’s idolatry. She wrote of Billie as “the bizarre deity,” the phrase that the poet Baudelaire used for his brown-skinned mistress, and as one of those for whom the word “changeling” was invented, an offspring of a legendary being who has been switched at birth for a mere mortal.
Her whole life had taken place in the dark. The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café, the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night-working, smiling, in make-up, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all is just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness threaten the theatrical eyelids.
Simone de Beauvoir visited New York City in 1947 and went to Carnegie Hall with Richard Wright to see Louis Armstrong and then to the Downbeat Club, where Billie was appearing with Art Tatum. Attendance at the club had been sparse, and both performers’ pay had just been cut for lack of business. Although Billie didn’t perform that night, she was there at the club, and De Beauvoir described her in her diary:
She is very beautiful in a long white dress, her black hair straightened by a clever permanent and falling straight and shiny around her clear brown face. Her bangs look like they’ve been sculpted in dark metal. She smiles, she is beautiful, but she doesn’t sing. They say she’s on drugs and sings only rarely now.
The last chapter in the original draft version of Lady Sings the Blues was moved back to become part of chapter twenty-two, and a new final chapter was added to the published book titled “God Bless the Child.” In it Billie describes being once again arrested in Philadelphia for drug possession, along with her husband, Louis McKay, only this time, she says, with no evidence of any wrongdoing. After a night in jail, she went to the Showboat Club, sang her last evening’s set, and left by bus for New York. In her concluding paragraphs she says the doctors had told her that she had successfully kicked her addiction—a fact she already knew, she explained, because she now hated television, a true sign of her rehabilitation.
• • • • •
Billie often found herself the subject of attention of the police, who wanted to prove to the public that they were dealing with the drug plague, no matter where it was found, and of the press, which was eager to reveal her true character when she was away from the lights and the glamour. She had become the archetypal black jazz junkie, and there was no way she could deny it. Most of the passages cut from the book concerned her involvement with the white elite, which perhaps would have helped make her case for her rehabilitation and widened her social circle beyond African Americans and junkies of both races. But when they were edited out for fear of litigation, Lady Sings the Blues became what we know it to be today: a confession in which she blames no one but herself, and doesn’t ask for sympathy.
• • • • •
After Billie’s death Bill Dufty wrote several articles in which he cited a number of topics that hadn’t been discussed in the book, either because Billie didn’t want them there or because she hadn’t remembered them. Some of what she had recalled had been triggered by minor incidents. One day Dufty and Billie were having lunch in a tiny Chinese restaurant—roast duck and 7 Up and gin, favorites of hers—when the waiter brought some mustard to the table.
Ask him to take away that damn mustard . . .
I hate the smell of mustard. I sat in a tub of mustard for eighteen hours one time, killed my baby so I wouldn’t be a bad girl. Having a baby without being married. My mother worried about that. It happened to her. And all she prayed for was it wouldn’t happen to me. I didn’t want to hurt her so I sat in a damn tub of hot water and mustard. God will punish her, the kids used to say. He damned well did, too. The only thing I ever wanted is that baby.
It was well known that Billie loved children, talked about having them, and openly fantasized about what it would be like to be a mother and have a family that lived in a house with a white picket fence—an image she had carried from her childhood. She enjoyed the company of children so much that she often asked her friends to bring theirs to see her or offered herself as their babysitter. When she lived in Queens, young Miles Davis and his family were her neighbors at a time when both of them were experiencing brief moments of domestic bliss. On Saturday afternoons Miles would borrow a bicycle and pedal over to Billie’s house to talk and drink gin. He said she reminded him of his mother, with her light brown skin, long hair, and regal carriage. Billie always asked him to bring his two-year-old son Gregory along with him, occasions on which she happily played with him and never wanted him to leave. She often found excuses to spend time with her friends’ children, babysitting for Maya Angelou’s son Guy, or Jack Crystal’s son Billy, and she was quick to ask to be godmother to the children of the Duftys, as well as to Leonard Feather and Rosemary Clooney. (“It takes a bad woman to be a good godmother,” she said to Rosemary.) Bevan Dufty recalled Billie doting on him as a child and trying to breastfeed him from her milkless breasts. At one point, she attempted to adopt a child in Boston, and was devastated when she learned that she had been turned down because of her drug conviction.
• • • • •
After the book was published, Dufty read somewhere that Billie had once been a guest at the White House while Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, but she had never mentioned it to him or anyone he knew. When he asked her about it, she shouted, “Jesus Christ, don’t remind me of that damn thing. I don’t even want to think about it.” Her explosive response was puzzling, since Billie had always spoken of FDR as one of the few men she admired. But it was not the president who was the issue. In 1944 Hazel Scott, the pianist and singer who worked with her at Café Society, had talked Billie into going to one of the president’s infantile paralysis benefit balls held annually on his birthday, January 30. Billie was concerned about how the staff of the White House, the “dicty Negroes”—what she called the snobbish black elite of D.C.—would respond to her being there. She imagined that every one of them would be watching her, looking for signs of drugs or their traces on her arms. Though she had not yet been arrested for drug use, she knew the rumors of her addiction were widespread in the black community.
Finally she agreed to
go, and when she arrived in full finery, she had a long wait ahead of her, with Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford, Maria Montez, Lucille Ball, Jinx Falkenburg, John Garfield, and Red Skelton roaming in and out of the dressing rooms and bathrooms. After she had finished her song, she couldn’t leave until the president had made his appearance. By now she was spending every minute looking for an empty bathroom, and in desperation she stepped into an elevator and hit the button. When it stopped, she walked out and began making her way down a long hall when she heard a voice she recognized from the radio saying, “Well, little lady, you look as though you’re lost.” There was the president of the United States in a wheelchair pushed by a naval officer. She, like most of America, had never seen the president in a wheelchair, as he was carefully guarded from the public’s learning of the degree of his illness. She was shocked to see him looking older, weakened, an invalid. When their eyes met she saw something else:
These goddamn American doctors don’t know nothing about drugs. Here’s a man who was President of the United States. He should have the best doctors around. He’s got a war to run and all that bullshit and aggravation and you know what they had him on? They had him on morphine. Yeah, morphine. They should have been giving him goddamn heroin.
My God, I couldn’t sleep for days thinking about it. I wished I’d never gone near that place. Who the hell could I talk to about it?
• • • • •
To take advantage of Lady Sings the Blues’ publication, Clef Records produced an album with the same title made up of songs Billie had been working on in the studio over the previous two years, all of them rerecordings of songs she had previously issued, and most of them with titles that were chapter titles in the book. Only one song was new, “Lady Sings the Blues,” with music by Herbie Nichols, a little-known pianist who was much admired by musicians for his challenging compositions. They had been brought together by Dufty, and Billie added the words to an instrumental piece by Nichols that he had titled “Serenade.”
But the big event to promote the book and provide some work for Billie in New York City was two performances at Carnegie Hall. The concerts were set for November 10 at eight thirty and midnight, and both were sold out, with seats added onstage for the overflow. Don Friedman, the show’s producer, asked Gilbert Millstein to narrate parts of the book between her songs to create an autobiographical structure for the event, presumably because Millstein had given the book a positive review in the New York Times and was well known as a journalist and a critic in the city. Millstein would read selections over piano accompaniment, and the spotlight would then swing over to Billie for her to segue into a song. When Holiday arrived that afternoon for rehearsal, it was obvious to everyone that she was not well. Her voice was thin, her suit ill-fitting, her legs and ankles swollen, and she had no interest in singing. She picked the songs for the performances and the order in which they would be sung and then left. Millstein feared that she would never make it through the night.
When the lights went down for the first performance and the musicians began to play, Millstein later wrote, “Miss Holiday stepped from between the curtains into the white spotlight awaiting her, wearing a white evening gown and white gardenias in her black hair. She was erect and beautiful; poised and smiling. And when the first section of the narration was ended, she sang—with strength undiminished, with all the art that was hers.” Despite the incongruity of a middle-aged white man’s reading her words while she stood only a few feet away, the audience seemed to accept it in stride, much as readers had when William Dufty wrote in Holiday’s voice. In fact they seemed moved and even startled, gasping at words they had never heard spoken at a public gathering.
A heavily edited recording was made from the two concerts that evening and released as The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert Recorded Live, leaving out some of the rougher parts of her book—descriptions of her addiction and her attempts at drug withdrawal, sentencing and parole, her days with the Count Basie band, the racial tension surrounding her performance of “Strange Fruit,” and her hope of having her cabaret card restored (which was strongly applauded). Two reels of tape exist that reveal that, in addition to the excised readings, there were fuller versions of some of the songs on the album, seven songs that weren’t included, and, at the end, a presentation to her of a leather-bound and gold-engraved edition of Lady Sings the Blues, along with a plug for the Coronet condensation of the book then on newsstands.
Overall it was something of a triumph for Holiday, but one that came at a huge cost. Gerald Early summed it up: “Holiday’s concerts were the final public acceptance of jazz as an art form and of the black performer as artist. The life and the art had become interchangeable. And the life and the art had become a kind of voyeuristic tragedy for the audience and a self-conscious tragedy for the artist.” As Billie said, “They come to see me fall on my ass.”
• • • • •
After her death in 1959, Dufty wrote a series of eight articles in the New York Post on the final years of Billie’s life that served as a de facto finale to the autobiography, and readers responded to them as such. Among the letters to the editor, the novelist Dawn Powell said the story of the end of her life was “perfect—making the end a triumph and not a defeat,” and playwright Lorraine Hansberry praised “the bold and unvarnished, yet sweet humanity in the writing.” Dufty wanted his pieces added to the book’s subsequent editions to complete her life story, but no publisher has yet chosen to do so.
• • • • •
Holiday’s problems were accumulating just at the moment when inexpensive forms of photographic and recording technology were becoming available. The first gossip magazines appeared, and increased police and psychiatric surveillance was introduced along with more extensive means of governmental gathering and exchange of information on individuals and their behavior. The story of her life was made public as part of the first war against drugs. She was being followed nightly by the police, and her apartment building sometimes had an officer at the door warning visitors away. Yet she quickly realized that it was possible for her to use some of the same media and methods to defend and redefine herself.
Beginning in 1947 Holiday began giving more interviews to music magazines (such as “I’ll Never Sing with a Dance Band Again—Holiday,” Down Beat, 1939; “Don’t Blame Show Biz!—Billie,” Down Beat, 1947; “Billie Holiday, Now Remarried, Finds Happiness, a New Sense of Security,” Down Beat, January 11, 1952), and in the last ten years of her life several articles were written under her name for African American magazines (“I’m Cured for Good,” Ebony, July 1949; “Can a Dope Addict Come Back?” Tan, February 1953; “How I Blew a Million Dollars,” Our World, March 1953; “Billie’s Tragic Life,” Ebony, September 1956). The articles written for African American audiences deal openly with her failures—drug use, poor business dealings, even poorer choices of husbands, time spent in prison, and her problems finding work in New York City without a police permit. The articles in Ebony were particularly important to her, not only because it was the premier African American magazine, but because it was where in 1951 Cab Calloway had published “Is Dope Killing Our Musicians?,” warning readers that the sweep of drugs through the black community had left a generation of jazz musicians addicts, who were doomed unless they sought help. Though no names were mentioned in the article, the magazine included a rogue’s gallery of drug users’ pictures that included Billie along with Miles Davis, Gene Krupa, Dexter Gordon, and others. In all of these publications, as in Lady Sings the Blues, she argued for changes in drug laws and rehabilitation, spelled out how her civil rights had been violated by the police and the FBI, and pleaded for her cabaret card to be restored so that she could make a living.
She also spoke openly about life as a woman of color in America, something that was very rare, and even dangerous at that time, and declared herself “a race woman”—one who was committed to the rights of her people:
&nb
sp; When you’re writing, straighten them out about my people . . . I’m a Negro. I’ve got two strikes against me . . . I’m proud of those two strikes. I’m as good as a lot of people of all kinds—I’m proud I’m a Negro.
A lot of the real dicty people with talent used to come and hear me [in nightclubs]. They were wonderful, but as usual it only took one cracker in the audience to wreck things.
I hate these East Side clubs that hire colored entertainers and refuse to cater to colored customers. . . . When I go there they put me in a corner together with the rest of the colored customers . . . they have a marvelous way of getting us all together where we can’t be seen by the whites. Then when they learn that I’m Billie Holiday they immediately become apologetic and switch me to the ringside where I have a perfectly horrible time. I find I can’t enjoy the show any longer because of what’s happened and I pick up and walk out.
It was slow, this attempt to climb clear of the barrel. But as I grew older, I found those trying to keep me in it were not always the corner hoodlum, the streetwalker, the laborer, the numbers runner, the rooming-house landladies and landlords . . . They, I found, were the ones who wanted me to “go,” to get somewhere. It was their applause and help that kept me inspired . . . long before the mink-coated lorgnette crowd of Fifth Avenue and Greenwich Village ever heard of me.
I never felt inferior to anybody and I couldn’t learn to act as if I did. That was my trouble. I never got past the fifth grade in school. If I had, I might have been brainwashed like a lot of brown skinned kids. When I was thirteen I just plain decided one day I wasn’t going to do anything or say anything unless I meant it. Not “Please, Sir.” Not “Thank you, Ma’am.” Nothing. Unless I meant it. You have to be poor and black to know how many times you get kicked in the head just for trying to do something as simple as that. But I never gave up trying.
