With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  He kindly allowed me access to the archive. I was shown bundles of files filled with loose sheets of paper. Everything had been jumbled haphazardly together, either by Linda Kuehl herself or by someone else. Fragments of unfinished chapters, almost obliterated by handwritten revision notes, lay alongside the transcripts of Billie’s court appearances and her medical reports. Formal letters from publishers and record companies rubbed shoulders with very informal letters from friends and lovers. There were lists of addresses and several lists of the important dates and events in Billie’s life, but each list was uncertain and incomplete and covered with question marks.

  If I had been a different sort of person I suppose I might have tried to establish order in this chaos, but order has never been one of my strong points and I wouldn’t have known where to begin here. And so I simply raced through the papers as they presented themselves to me and made copies of anything that seemed particularly interesting or relevant, trusting that I would never know what I had missed out. Before I left New York, I also collected a cardboard box filled with typewritten transcripts of the interviews Linda Kuehl had recorded. Even these were in a strange muddle, with pages missing or repeating themselves, and sometimes a whole interview had disappeared completely.

  For about a year I did my best to construct the bones of a biography out of this material. Just like Linda Kuehl before me, I made lists of what seemed to be the main events in Billie’s life and I started chapters with titles like ‘A Baltimore Childhood’ and ‘Harlem in the 1930s’. I then arranged the interviews into little groups and tried to force all those voices into the cages I had constructed for them. But in doing so I lost the wildness and the vitality that made them so interesting, and all I achieved in return was a rather bland uniformity in which one voice merged seamlessly with the next. That was when I decided this book must be a documentary in which people are free to tell their own stories about Billie and it doesn’t matter if the stories don’t fit together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a completely different woman.

  So this is Billie Holiday’s life, seen through the eyes of some of the people who knew her. I begin with the friends she ran around with when she was a young girl in Baltimore: Freddie Green, Mary ‘Pony’ Kane, Skinny ‘Rim’ Davenport, Wee Wee Hill, ‘Sleepy’ Dean and a woman called Christine Scott, who was an inmate at the reform school where Billie was sent when she was accused of being a ‘minor without proper care and guardianship’. I end in the late 1950s, with the lawyer Earle Zaidins, who lived in the same cheap hotel where Billie was staying for a while and who got to know her when they were both out in the street late at night, walking their dogs. And Alice Vrbsky; she of the shopping lists. In between there are all the others.

  I lift out a sheaf of papers stapled together at the top left-hand corner and there is an orange stain where the little strip of rusting metal bites into the pages. The interview date, the number of the tape cassette and the name of the person who is speaking are written at the top of the page and there are occasional corrections and notes added in Linda Kuehl’s rather bulbous handwriting.

  Sometimes an interview includes a brief account of the circumstances of a meeting, ‘in a brown Cadillac Eldorado’; or of what the speaker was wearing, ‘a shiny red suit and a white cowboy hat’; or of how they looked, ‘shaking and sweating profusely from the effects of a cocaine high’. But such descriptions are unusual; mostly the voices are not given faces to recognise or clothes to wear, and so unless the person happens to be a well-known figure in the jazz world, their words float in a haphazard space without any anchors of recognition to hold them steady.

  I have listened to a number of the original tapes. The quality of the recordings tends to be very poor and it can be difficult to disentangle what is being said. You might hear the human roar of a late-night bar, juxtaposed with the closer, intimate sound of the clink of glasses on a table top, the cellophane rustle of a cigarette packet, someone coughing directly into the microphone. Or the interview is being held in a car with the activity of the street echoing on all sides, or in a private house where doors bang, dogs bark and children burst in and are shouted to silence. Several of the speakers are quite old and obviously frail and forgetful; others are drunk, or high on something.

  It is always strange the way the mind works. We often do not know what we think until we have transformed the amorphous creature of our thoughts into words. We do not know what memories we hold until we have opened the door of recollection. Looking back on a far-away time, the mind often gets stuck on a point of its own forgetfulness and then, like a scratched record, keeps repeating the search for the name it has lost or the event that it cannot quite recapture.

  But Linda Kuehl was obviously a very good interviewer and she never seemed to be in a hurry, or to be trying to steer people’s thoughts in a particular direction. And so, if sometimes awkwardly at first, the memories soon begin to flood in, the past accumulating on all sides and becoming vivid. And once the talk is flowing easily, then all sorts of unexpected recollections and emotions emerge out of nowhere and float to the surface like strange balloons.

  As well as being patient and friendly and not easily shocked, Linda Kuehl was also pretty and flirtatious and people obviously enjoyed talking to her. A lot of the men were very challenging – when asked if he rehearsed before a music session with Billie, the trumpet player Roy Eldridge said, ‘Why should I rehearse? Would I need to rehearse before making love to you?’ – and several of them, including Billie’s pianist and fellow heroin user Carl Drinkard, the bass player (and junkie) John Simmons and the music writer Arthur Herzog, obviously fell in love with her in one way or another.‡ But over and over again, Linda Kuehl was ready with the relevant questions and a knowledge of dates and circumstances, and people were happy to talk. When I met Billie’s pianist Bobby Tucker in 2003, he remembered Linda with great affection. He said she came to see him on three occasions and she took the time to listen.

  However, although many of the interviews are rich with information and anecdotes, they are often very complicated and difficult to follow and the stories that are being told emerge in broken fragments. In order to make a coherent sequence out of what is being said, I have had to do a lot of untangling, to separate out the various threads of a narrative before piecing it back together. But although I have reshuffled people’s words, I have never put words into their mouths or added any detail that wasn’t actually there. I also make it clear when I am quoting directly and when I am paraphrasing.

  Take the black narcotics agent, Jimmy Fletcher. He was involved in arresting Billie Holiday on a drugs charge in 1947 and as I read his interview I realised that he had maybe never told this story before and it involved a lot of emotional effort for him to do it. He had met Billie several times, he had talked with her, danced with her, enjoyed her company and had even been in love with her in a way. He knew she had been singled out for a big public arrest and he wished he had not been the one chosen to bring this about. He wished he could have stopped the whole unpleasant business before it unfolded. And as you follow the halting and complicated progression of what he is saying, you slowly begin to realise that he is ashamed of having betrayed her and is struggling to put his shame into words.

  On a different note, Carl Drinkard, who worked with Billie in the late 1950s, tells stories that cover more than a hundred typewritten pages, but his stories keep spinning into junkie paranoia and boastfulness and it is hard to tell the real from the imagined. And then there is the pianist Jimmy Rowles, who says he got drunk in anticipation of talking about Billie, and he drinks as he talks and gets more and more excited as the image of Lady Day becomes increasingly vivid and she swims into the room and is there standing in front of him.

  In an interview she gave at the Storyville Club in Boston in April 1959, just over two months before her death, Billie said, ‘I’ve got no understudy. Every time I do a show I’m up against everything that’s ever been written about me. I have
to fight the whole scene to get people to listen to their own ears and believe in me again.’

  A huge amount of myth and gossip and savage misrepresentation had already gathered like a thick fog around her during her lifetime and it has gone on growing and proliferating ever since. Of course it is not possible to disentangle an absolute truth about who Billie was or how she lived, but at least we can listen with our own ears to the voices of the people who knew her, and then we can make our own decisions about what to believe and what not to believe.

  * When she was interviewed by Norman Saks, on 18 February 1985, Alice Vrbsky said rather wistfully that, among many other things, she’d had a letter that Billie sent her from Italy in November 1958, ‘which I gave to that woman who was working on the book and I never got it back’.

  † The story of Linda Kuehl’s last day was given to me by J. R. Taylor, who knew her in connection with the Jazz Oral History Project, which he supervised while it was based at the Smithsonian Institute in the 1970s. He met her once in 1978 and saw her again briefly on the night of her death. He learnt of her suicide from the drummer Jo Jones, who had been a friend ever since she interviewed him for her Billie Holiday book in 1971. Apart from the problems with getting the book finished, I do not know what other factors were involved in Linda’s decision to take her own life.

  ‡ Carl Drinkard wrote to Linda Kuehl when he was in jail, asking for help with a legal problem and saying he missed her. John Simmons wrote letters on the First Church of the New World headed paper, calling her ‘dearest Tripper’. He said he was ‘highly optimistic, waiting for your return when you’re ready to resign yourself to the fact as to how I feel towards you. I know we will be good to and for one another.’ The songwriter Arthur Herzog had a long correspondence between 1971 and 1976, and when they finally met in 1976, he said he ‘had had no ideas of being amorous’ and enclosed a limerick about ‘a lovely lady named Linda’ for whom ‘Lowly impulse succeeds when she’s highish’.

  THREE

  The Facts of Childhood

  7 April 1915: Born in Philadelphia General Hospital. Her mother, Sarah Julia Harris, known as Sadie, is nineteen and her presumed father, the banjo player Clarence Holiday, is sixteen. Sadie gives her occupation as ‘housework’. The baby is given the name of Eleanor and is registered as the child of Frank DeViese, a twenty-year-old waiter who then disappears without trace.

  The baby is collected from the hospital by Robert Miller, the husband of Sadie’s half-sister, Eva Miller. Robert Miller takes the baby to Baltimore and hands her over to his mother, Martha Miller, ‘who was always taking in neighbourhood kids who had fallen on hard times or had been abandoned’.*

  1918: Sadie returns to Baltimore. For a while she stays with Martha Miller, who is still looking after the child. Clarence Holiday visits occasionally, but in October 1918 he goes as a soldier to France. He is back in Baltimore nine months later.

  1919: Sadie starts a relationship with Philip Gough, a twenty-five-year-old driver who lives on Spring Street.

  1920: Sadie moves in with Robert and Eva Miller, to a house in Colvin Street, and brings the child with her. Eva Miller looks after the child and Sadie works in a shirt factory. Sadie starts using the surname of Fagan, after her father, Charles Fagan.

  October 1922: Sadie marries Philip Gough and moves with him to East Street. The child goes on living with Eva Miller, who has moved to Bond Street in the Fell’s Point district, the home of Miss Viola Green and her son Freddie Green. When the child starts school, Eva Miller is registered as her mother.

  1923: Sadie separates from Philip Gough and the child returns to Martha Miller in North Barnes Street for a while. ‘The child was left with my grandmother … Her mother would be off working or with other men. She left her all the time and that was the problem. The child had an attitude, I guess from being neglected.’†

  According to Freddie Green, the child moves back to the house of Miss Viola Green on Bond Street and lives with them for ‘about a year and a half’. Freddie says that Sadie is mostly absent. ‘Miss Sadie used to make trips to New York over the weekend and be back for Monday mornings because she was “working out” as a maid somewhere else in Baltimore.’

  1924: Sadie gets a house of her own on Dallas and Caroline Street, near to the docks in the Point district. She moves there with her nine-year-old daughter.

  January 1925: The child is brought before the Juvenile Court, for playing truant and being ‘without proper care and guardianship’. She is sent to spend a year at the House of Good Shepherd, a reform school in a converted warehouse on Franklin Street and Calverton Road.

  3 October 1925: The child is released on parole. She moves to a place on the East Side with Sadie.

  26 October 1925: The child stops attending school. She moves with Sadie to Durham Street, the home of Miss Lou Hill. Sadie starts an affair with Miss Lou’s son, Wee Wee Hill.

  24 December 1926: The eleven-year-old child is raped by a neighbour. She is returned to the reform school as a State Witness.

  2 February 1927: The child is released from the reform school after the intervention of a lawyer who uses the grounds of habeas corpus. She goes to stay in Miss Lou Hill’s house. Sadie and her lover Wee Wee move to the house next door.

  1928: Sadie moves to New York, leaving the child at Miss Lou Hill’s.

  1929: The child comes to New York to join her mother. Sadie is staying in Harlem, between Lenox Avenue and 7th Avenue in a whorehouse run by Florence Williams.

  2 May 1929: The child, along with her mother and several other women, is arrested during a night raid. She is tried and found guilty of vagrancy. She is sent to Welfare Island, first to the hospital and then to the workhouse.

  October 1929: The child, who is now fourteen years old, is released from Welfare Island. She joins Sadie in Brooklyn. She sings at the Grey Dawn, a small cabaret bar in Queens.

  Spring 1930: She moves with Sadie to a tiny room in Harlem, between 5th and Lenox Avenues. She does waitress work at a club called Mexico’s, which is popular with musicians. She sings at tables ‘like a gypsy fiddler in a Budapest café’.‡ It is around this time that she changes her name to Billie Holiday.

  * Evelyn Miller in an interview with Stuart Nicholson (Billie Holiday, 1995, p. 19). Evelyn was raised by her grandmother Martha Miller and was ten years old when this new child suddenly arrived in the household.

  † Evelyn Miller again. It seems likely that Billie’s later stories about the grandmother who loved her were based to a large degree on her memories of Martha Miller.

  ‡ The composer and bass player Spike Hughes, quoted in Nicholson, p. 35.

  FOUR

  Freddie Green

  ‘I’m in your corner, girl!’

  On the morning of 27 October 1971, Linda Kuehl had arranged to meet Freddie Green* at the Red Rooster club in the Point district in Baltimore. Billie Holiday’s friend Ethel Moore used to have a whorehouse a few blocks from here, down by the docks. Billie always went to see Ethel and other old friends whenever she came back to Baltimore. She’d see Willie Diggs and Hilda and Rosie, the Polish lady who had a bar on Pratt and Bethel Street, and Wee Wee Hill and ‘Pony’ Kane, and she’d see Freddie too.

  In her notes Linda Kuehl said that when she arrived at the club she had to put her face to the peephole and say the word ‘Freddie’ before she was let in. I imagine her leaving the daylight world behind as she steps into a darkened room, full of murmured talk and cigarette smoke. I imagine her walking carefully between the tables, a tape recorder clutched under her arm. In the one photograph I have seen of her she wears pink lipstick, and she has lines of kohl drawn around her eyes. Her pale face is framed by a waterfall of straight dark hair.

  She went to sit next to Freddie at the mirrored bar. She said he was wearing a shiny red suit and a white felt hat with a feather stuck in the brim. She said he was sweating profusely and coming down from what he called ‘a wee morning cocaine high’. He called her ‘honey’ and ordered her a
drink. She turned on the tape recorder. Listening to the interview, you can hear the electric buzz of voices on all sides.

  Freddie was eager to talk. ‘I’m in your corner,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna get it from the horse’s mouth. You’ll get it together, honey, we’ll put that thing together! I can’t tell you more than I know, and it’s easy to repeat something you know is the truth!’

  Freddie said that his mother, Miss Viola Green – known as Miss Vi – rented out three rooms in her house on Bond Street. Billie and her mother had a third-floor bedroom at the front. He remembered that they brought their own bedroom suite with them when they arrived and they had what he called ‘some Christian pieces’: the figures of Mary and Jesus and a ‘little tiny statue of the Saviour on the cross’.

  Freddie insisted that he and Billie were the same age and ‘we was fourteen’, but this must have been in 1922, when Billie was just seven years old. There is a photograph of her from around that time. She wears white socks and a white ruffled dress with long sleeves. Her right elbow rests on the polished surface of a little table and her left hand reaches across to touch the right hand, as if for reassurance. She stands very serious and poised and erect, and a big white ribbon perches like a butterfly on the side of her head, in a curious visual presentiment of the white gardenias that later became her trademark when she appeared on stage.