by John Szwed
• • • • •
Billie Holiday’s death on July 17, 1959, and her hospitalization leading up to it were eerie reenactments of much of her life. When she collapsed on May 31, she was taken to Knickerbocker Hospital, where she was signed in as Eleanora McKay. No one in the hospital knew who she was, and, with needle marks on her body, she was left in the hall for hours, since the institution was not allowed to treat drug addicts. A Viennese doctor who was an admirer intervened to have her moved to Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, where she was treated for heart and liver problems. So began the second-longest engagement of her career—forty-seven days in the hospital.
When heroin was found in her room, she was arrested, fingerprinted, and photographed lying in her bed, her flowers and possessions taken away, as police officers and doctors now vied to be her guards. Meanwhile, it was business as usual: One lawyer got her to sign with another agent, even though Joe Glaser, her current agent, was paying her bills; she signed contracts to be in a new film and to produce a magazine article, and plans were made for another book, to be titled Bless My Bones. Her watchdogs and nurses asked for her autograph and played her impounded MGM recording on her record player at the nurses’ station.
On the day she died, the New York Post ran a full front-page headline and her picture, along with the first of a long string of articles on Holiday by William Dufty. It was that cover that inspired Frank O’Hara’s postmodern elegiac poem “The Day Lady Died.” The Post outsold all other New York papers that day.
• • • • •
I set out to write a book that cast new light on the extraordinary artist who was Billie Holiday. My intention was not to deny or gainsay the tribulations and tragedy of her life, but to shift the focus to her art. The consistency and taste she brought to nearly every performance, even those when her body was failing her, display a discipline, an artist’s complete devotion to her work, and a refusal to surrender to the demands of an insatiable world.
She was anything but a self-promoter. She had no lawyer for most of her career except when court appearances demanded it. She had no real publicists, and seldom gave interviews. The pieces about herself that she wrote or collaborated on were few and written to achieve specific ends. Most of her guidance for dealing with the public came from Joe Glaser, a man who himself was a cipher, and whose own dealings with the public often served him poorly.
Making sense of a musician’s life can be a precarious undertaking. Music is its own language, and difficult to translate into words. The value in music can seldom be convincingly connected back to individual performers or composers. Yet fans, musicologists, and biographers alike find this an exercise that is hard to resist. No wonder so many of us look to the words of a song to find clues to a singer’s life.
Holiday’s life is still difficult to fathom; some secrets still linger and contradictions continue. Whatever the source of her failures and vulnerabilities, she fought hard to keep her music out front, and aspired to ever wider audiences. Singers who bravely cross the lines of race, class, nationalism, and gender do not merely take on the mannerisms and language of others. They create a way to adapt the musical architecture of songs and their key ideas, and reach into a deep structure to make these songs trigger social and emotional responses in everyone who hears them.
In the other biographies I’ve written, I’ve tried to stay out of the way, avoiding excessive explication of what someone meant when he was quoted, or guessing at his thoughts or feelings, and I have been loath to offer explanations based on knowledge that I didn’t have. But with Billie Holiday, I became caught up in the details of her life as she and others had represented it. I found enough new information that I felt I had to share it. But I also found myself wanting to defend her, hoping to give her a new hearing in the court of biographical opinion.
Let her have the last word: “I’m Billie Holiday. Singing’s the only thing I know how to do, and they won’t let me do it. Do they expect me to go back to scrubbing steps—the way I started?”
Acknowledgments
Writers of biographies build up considerable debts, and authors hope to be able to remember them all to repay them. I live in fear of having missed someone, and I’m sure that I have. If so, I’ll owe you even more.
To begin with there is Billie Holiday and William Dufty’s Lady Sings the Blues, the foundation of all work on Lady Day. Next there are the biographies on Billie Holiday that have shaped her story. I could not have done without them. John Chilton’s Billie’s Blues, Robert O’Meally’s Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin’s If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, Stuart Nicholson’s Billie Holiday, Chris Ingham’s Divas: Billie Holiday, and Donald Clarke’s Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon are essential reading, as are several others in French and Italian. The late Linda Kuehl’s research and her drafts for a never completed book on Holiday have been the basis of several of the more recent books and will be necessary resources for any future work, since some of her material has become available in published books, especially Julia Blackburn’s With Billie. I owe a special debt to Frances McCullough, Linda Kuehl’s editor, who deposited the Kuehl manuscript and notes into the Institute of Jazz Studies library, and also helped me to better understand the circumstances surrounding Ms. Kuehl’s work. I’ve also benefited greatly from Ken Vail’s Lady Day’s Diary, and Phil Schaap, Ben Young, and Matt Herman’s WKCR Billie Holiday Festival Handbook, an invaluable discography. Two labors of love for which I’m thankful.
I received very special help from H. Dennis Fairchild, William Dufty’s partner of many years, who graciously shared with me some of the rarer of Dufty’s publications and gave me insight into his work. Also I want to thank Dave Hanna, who recorded in audio Bill Dufty’s life history and gave me access to it.
Libraries have been very important to my efforts, especially The Gabe M. Wiener Music and Arts Library of Columbia University, the special Holiday collections at Emory University and the University of Maryland, and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. I’m so pleased to be able to record my debt to two scholar-librarians who were of immense help to me: James Tad Hershorn at Rutgers University–Newark and Wolfram Knauer of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, both of them my personal heroes. The many Web sites and discographies devoted to Holiday were also of great value, and I salute those who painstakingly built and maintain them.
Among my colleagues I thank Robert O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, both brilliant and generous people. Tad Shull, Susan Stewart, Loren Schoenberg, Gary Giddins, Lewis Porter, J. R. Taylor, Will Friedwald, and Rachel Vetter Huang and Hao Huang were my tutors for various phases of this project, and I feel blessed to have had them share their wisdom with me and I take pleasure in listing their names together. Chris Albertson, George Avakian, and Nat Hentoff, all of whom knew Billie Holiday, were kind enough to let me interview them about their relationships to her.
I want to acknowledge the help given to me by Sara Villa, a woman of boundless abilities who generously helped me with translations, and more than that gave me the benefit of her shrewd readings of the Holiday literature in languages other than English.
Thanks, too, to the many people who have helped keep Holiday’s writing and music available to the public, especially Michel Fontanes of France, who has kept the Masters of Jazz CD series of Billie Holiday recordings alive and expanding.
Then there are friends whom I could not do without in writing this book or for anything else: Roger Abrahams, Grey Gundaker, Dan Rose, Nick Spitzer, and Robert Farris Thompson. Each of them in their own idiosyncratic and cool way encouraged and helped me despite my incessant complaining about the difficulties of writing.
This book would not exist without the hard work, care, and truly great knowledge of my agent, Sarah Lazin, and my editor, Rick Kot. Rick is the king of editors and Sarah the queen of agents, long live them both. Diego Nuñez wo
rked hard and carefully as a copyreader, a job deserving the highest praise from everyone but seldom receiving it. Carolyn Coleburn, Ellen Abrams, and Holly Watson are my treasured publicists. Can’t live without them.
I dedicate the book to Heather, Matt, and Miles Szwed. I count on them and they never fail. But as always, it’s Marilyn (Sue) Szwed who has to suffer most from my anxieties and obsessions, but at the same time manages to help and encourage me without fretting. And for that there is no gratitude great enough.
Notes
Introduction
Barack Obama heard in her music: Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 138; The Starr Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1998), p. 707.
a columnist in the Los Angeles Mirror suggested: Florabel Muir in 1950, quoted in David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 53; see also pp. 51–53.
There is a powerful urge: Happy songs do exist, but, as David Bowie once said, if you want to lose an audience, sing them a song about what a happy boy you are.
Our Lady of Sorrows: Francis Davis, “Our Lady of Sorrows,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2000, pp. 104–8.
As Stanley Crouch put it: Stanley Crouch, “The Invincible Sound of Swing: An Appreciation,” in José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo, Billie Holiday (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1993), p. 52.
CHAPTER ONE: The Book I: Lady Sings the Blues
a persona of tragedy and sorrow: Robert Belleret, Piaf: Un mythe français (Paris: Fayard, 2013).
She had certainly read Lady Sings the Blues: Ken Vail, Lady Day’s Diary: The Life of Billie Holiday, 1937–1959 (Surrey, UK: Castle Communications, 1996), p. 176.
Billie was staying with the Duftys: Rhonda B. Sewell, “Biographer Remembers Billie Holiday’s Greatness,” Toledo Blade, April 1, 2001, pp. B1–B3.
She was especially put off: William Dufty, “The Legend of Lady Day, Part 1,” East West Journal, January 15–30, 1973, p. 8.
It was agreed that “no agent or broker”: August 1, 1955, from the Lester Cowan and Ann Ronell “Trial of Billie Holiday” Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
“She wouldn’t be in the mood and would get angry”: Sewell, “Biographer Remembers Billie Holiday’s Greatness,” pp. B1–B3.
Dufty discovered that the material in it was rich: Harriott himself later started a novel based on Holiday’s life but died before it was finished.
“Mom was 13”: Frank Harriott, “The Hard Life of Billie Holiday,” PM, September 2, 1945. During the research these numbers were changed but were still not accurate.
“Miss Holiday’s explosiveness”: Quoted in “The True Story of Billie Holiday, Part 6,” New York Post, July, 26, 1959. Twenty-five years later the same paragraph would appear in a “Who Said That?” teaser quiz in a Simon and Schuster ad for The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People.
“We have been working for a week now”: Letter from William Dufty to Norman Granz, June 28, 1955, H. Dennis Fairchild archive.
the weaknesses of the autobiographies: Christopher Harlos, “Jazz Autobiography: Theory, Practice, Politics,” in Krin Gabbard, ed., Representing Jazz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 160.
she had been reading from the book: Letter from Dufty to Granz, H. Dennis Fairchild archive.
“Dear Mr. Barker, Since my meeting”: Ibid.
Even more ominously, McKay insisted: Al Dunmore, “Billie Holiday Book Pulls Some Punches,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 29, 1956, p. A14.
Dufty reassured him: Norman Granz to William Dufty, August 2, 1955; Dufty to Granz, August 2, 1955, and August 19, 1955, H. Dennis Fairchild archive.
Billie said, “I can’t help it”: William Pepper, “Banned Billie OK for Park?,” World Telegraph, July 30, 1957.
He opened his review by declaring: Saunders Redding, “Book Review,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 15, 1957, p. A2.
“Well I don’t know if you have been digging it”: William Dufty, “The True Story of Billie Holiday, Part 1,” New York Post, July 20, 1959.
“I never was a child”: Ethel Waters with Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow (New York: Doubleday, 1951), p. 1.
CHAPTER TWO: The Book II: The Rest of the Story
she wrote in the margin: William Dufty in the BBC film Reputations: Billie Holiday—Sensational Lady, BBC TV 2, December 21, 2008.
four hundred dollars that he gave her: Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Citadel Underground, Reissue Edition [1946], 2001). Early draft, Lady Sings the Blues, Robert O’Meally archive.
“He was supposed to be getting ready to marry”: Robert O’Meally archive.
Kane was a great picture: Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (New York: Harlem Moon, 2006), pp. 106–7.
Holiday and Welles made a striking pair: In 2000 Christine Vachon and Pam Koeffler of Killer Films announced they were developing Fine and Mellow, a film to be based on the Welles-Holiday affair; see Movieline, September 2000.
I remember the night Orson Welles came into the Onyx: Early draft, Lady Sings the Blues, Robert O’Meally archive.
Holman performed the song in tan blackface: Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Harper, 2013), pp. 40–44.
Holman was first known to Billie: Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 59–60.
As Billie discreetly put it: Ibid., p. 59.
He later claimed to have had an affair: Christopher Wilson, Dancing with the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000).
she was also deeply wedded to jazz: Tallulah Bankhead, “The World’s Greatest Jazz Musician,” Ebony, December 1952.
two women began sharing their show business miseries: Joel Lowenthal, Tallulah: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady (New York: Harper, 2008), p. 409.
“Well, godammit darling”: Robert O’Meally archive.
An account of the three-way phone call: Ibid.
Tallulah followed up the call with a letter to Hoover: FBI file on Billie Holiday. (For a time this file was for sale on Amazon.com!)
she wrote Bankhead: Robert O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (New York: Arcade, 1991), p. 124.
“I put in a couple of big words”: George Monteiro, Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), p. 24.
Kirkpatrick recalled her: Kai Erikson, ed., Encounters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. ix; Kuehl manuscript, Rutgers University–Newark.
“the most extraordinary gift of phrasing”: Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, eds., Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 104.
Louise Crane is not mentioned: Holiday and Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 97–100.
Crane’s fascination with Holiday: Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, p. 328.
ready to move away from the downtown slummers: Marianne Moore, Selected Letters (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 414.
When he learned that it was his cousin Louise: John Hammond with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record: An Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 1982 [1977]), pp. 208–9.
Hammond said that Holiday never forgave him: Ibid., p. 209.
wrote of Billie as “the bizarre deity”: Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, new edition (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2001), p. 35.
“She is very beautiful in a long white dress”: Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, Carol Cosman, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 44.
“Ask him to take away that damn mustard”: William Dufty, “The Legend of Lady Day, Part 1,” East West Journal 2, no. 20, 1973, p. 9.
Billie loved children: Alice Vrbsky, her m
aid, in the film The Long Night of Lady Day (1984).
Billie always asked him to bring his two-year-old son: John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), p. 64.
she attempted to adopt a child in Boston: Attorney Earle Warren Zaidins, in the film The Long Night of Lady Day (1984).
“These goddamn American doctors”: William Dufty, “The Legend of Lady Day, Part 2,” East West Journal 2, no. 21, 1973, p. 9.
When the lights went down for the first performance: Gilbert Millstein, liner notes to The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert Recorded Live, Verve V-8410.
“erect and beautiful; poised and smiling”: Ibid.
heavily edited recording was made from the two concerts: The Essential Billie Holiday: Carnegie Hall Concert Recorded Live, Verve V-8410.
Two reels of tape exist “Billie Holiday—Carnegie Hall Concert Tape with Unreleased Content,” http://recordmecca.com/products-page/museum-quality-collectibles/billie-holiday-carnegie-hall-concert-tape-with-unreleased-content/. Many thanks to Jeff Gold of Recordmecca.
“the life and the art had become a kind of voyeuristic tragedy”: Gerald Early, “Pulp and Circumstance: The Story of Jazz in High Places,” in Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 393–430.
a series of eight articles in the New York Post: Letters to the Editor, New York Post, July 20, 1959.
articles in Ebony were particularly important: Ebony, February 1951, pp. 22–24, 26–28.
“When you’re writing, straighten them out”: Michael Levin, “Billie Holiday: ‘Don’t Blame Show Biz,’” Down Beat, June 4, 1947, p. 1.
“A lot of the real dicty people with talent”: “Billie Talks About Fish and People,” Los Angeles Mirror-News, February 1957.
“I hate these East Side clubs”: “Billie Holiday Sounds Off Against Segregation in Gotham Nighteries,” Baltimore Afro-American, 1942.
