With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Clara used to have two apartments at 135 West 142nd Street. She kept one for business purposes while the other was for living. She was nostalgic about the old days when ‘people used to come into my house, from the best to the worst; even Tallulah [Bankhead] used to come to my house. They were beautiful times. You could walk up and down Lenox Avenue and go in and go out and there was no sticking up. Everything was peaceful, and people could have beautiful evenings and mornings and look beautiful and not be afraid, and they were all nationalities … And there was a shop on 8th Avenue had the most beautiful flowers you ever heard of, honey, and even the President didn’t have no more beautiful flowers.’

  It was Clarence who arranged for Billie and Sadie to rent a room from Clara for a while. Clara said she wanted to make it clear that she wasn’t ‘cloaking’ Clarence at the time, and she only met him once or twice when he came to the apartment to visit his daughter. She said you could tell straight away that the two of them were related because Billie ‘looked just like her daddy, only she was taller and he was a little shorter. But they had the same freaky-looking eyes, sort of slanty eyes … In fact, Clarence looked something like a foreigner.’ She remembered how Billie ‘always did what she wanted’ and how Sadie would run after her, calling, ‘Billee, Billee, Billee.’ ‘She just loved her, just like a little baby, and used to worry herself to death about her.’

  After a few months Sadie got a place on 142nd Street, near 7th Avenue. Clara said Sadie had a little business there, where she used to serve food. ‘There were no real tables, but people could sit around and drink and go with girls and everything. White fellas and girls would go on up.’ The trumpet player Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison confirmed that Sadie was a ‘groovy person … who ran a little whorehouse, and a lot of musicians used to go up there and buy some pussy’. Clara said she didn’t know about Billie ‘doing any prostitution’ at the time, but in her view it was always ‘better to sell it than give it away!’

  Clara said that Billie was ‘beautiful people’, having a good time and living her life. She had lots of friends and ‘she did everything everybody else did … There’s nothing bad I can say about her … She was a spodie-odie good time. She’d come into some place and she’d say “OK, come on! Rack ’em up and run ’em around!” ’ At one point during the interview Clara announced that Billie ‘could have been real famous, with that voice’.

  Clara remembered Clarence’s funeral. She said the Reverend Monroe was the preacher and he had ‘some Baptist church’ down on 115th and St Nicholas Avenue and ‘he’d preach for anybody’. Clara used to call him Motha because he was ‘a gay baby and he loved those nice-looking boys’.

  Fanny also spoke about the Reverend Monroe. She said he was often called in for the funerals of musicians who didn’t have church connections. She described him as a light-brown-skinned man with a deep ‘religious voice’. He could really preach a funeral; he could preach anyone into heaven with fire and brimstone and his hands waving. Clarence’s body was brought to Duncan’s Funeral Parlour and the Reverend Monroe did his preaching there because ‘he had no church’. Then Clarence was taken to Forest Hills cemetery in Queens, and Billie accompanied Fanny and Atlanta Shepherd in the limousine. There was no question of Sadie coming with them, so she went on her own in a separate car and somehow got lost on the way and arrived too late to see the coffin lowered into the ground.

  * Clarence had already married an eighteen-year-old Baltimore woman called Helen Boudin, on 16 October 1922 when he was twenty-three, but they only stayed together for a few months. He never obtained a divorce.

  † This is according to his friend, the musician Walter Johnson. Ken Burns in Jazz gives a very different impression of Clarence, whose ‘flashy example helped lure her into the music business [and] whose hustling ways were mirrored in many of the predatory men she would later call “Daddy” ’ (p. 206).

  ‡ ‘Catting’ comes from the word ‘tomcat’ and means ‘to seek women for sexual reasons’. It can also mean to gossip or to loaf about (Dictionary of American Slang).

  § She was so light-skinned she could pass as white. She turned up towards the end of Billie’s life and for a while tried to contest the will. In March 1987, the Attorney at Law, L. Mifflin Hayes, who was representing the estate of Billie’s last husband Louis McKay, wrote a very stern letter regarding a Grammy award that had been claimed on Billie’s behalf by a woman called Nicole Holiday, who said she was Billie’s half-sister: ‘It should be noted that the name Billie Holiday was a stage name, not her real name. Secondly … to the best of my knowledge, she had no sisters or other close blood relatives.’

  ‖ Fanny was in the same apartment when she was interviewed by Linda Kuehl in December 1971.

  THIRTEEN

  Pop Foster

  ‘It was only show people.’

  Clarence ‘Pop’ Foster was a vaudeville comic who performed with various partners on the black theatre circuit in America and in theatres throughout Europe. Linda Kuehl first interviewed him in January 1972 while he was doing the Wednesday Night Amateur competitions at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She said that when he came on stage, ‘He stood before the curtain with a frayed tweed overcoat over his shoulders as though it were a luxurious cape. His voice was thick with alcohol, but elegant and almost-British just the same.’ She interviewed him a second time in the nearby Paradise Bar in May 1972. Here he is talking:

  I met Billie when she was sixteen years old, but she was big. She was a big fat slob and she’d wear the same dress every night; a common dress, not an evening gown. She used to put on anything and I’d call her a big fat slob.

  In those days she did a little prostitution up here in Harlem. Along 136th Street was kind of the main drag and 132nd Street by the Lafayette Theater. I used to see her every night and every day. I knew she was doing it because I was in that life myself. You dig? So I knew everything that was going on. But you wouldn’t say she was one of those common prostitutes that you see hanging out on the streets; she was a girl that was a very lovable person and she had her own way about things. She was an all-around girl.

  She was young and she didn’t know what was going on until she won this amateur contest and that’s when she went on to stardom. That’s when she found out she could sing. Then she began to know where she was really at.

  She was singing in nightclubs and getting whatever they would pay her, and some nights she didn’t get nothing. She just wanted to sing, you dig, she wanted to sing but she needed money and at that time she wasn’t making money. We were working to be working. We’d work for whatever they threw on the floor. When she was working for me we got paid off at Jerry’s Log Cabin in chicken and waffles. We’d get money and we’d split up maybe ten or twenty dollars between us.

  About 1928 or 1927 she was singing at the Hot Cha and this was really when people began to notice her, and from then on it was Billie Holiday! From then on. All the show people were nuts for her! We used to jam in every night at the Hot Cha, just to hear her sing. And then some actor gave her the name of Lady Day and then we started to call her Lady Day. Billie had a lot of white friends and a lot of ofay* men used to go for her, because she could sing.

  We used to smoke pot a lot together. In the hotels there in Harlem, in the Braddock, in the Theresa. Or we’d bump into each other at parties. She wasn’t a loud girl; she was kind of a shy girl, quiet in a way, unless somebody flustered her, and then she was a bitch and she’d raise hell. She had a very good sense of humour and a big smile. When we got high, everyone would be telling stories because it was really good in those days and everybody used to laugh, and she had just a belly laugh when she really laughed. There was a big black boy with great big white teeth and a great big broad smile. We called him High Jivin’ Smiley and he used to make everyone laugh because he was so unfunny, and Billie used to pass out when he started, she used to die laughing.

  In the tea pads they’d say, ‘Lady Day’s in the house!’ and they would play all her records an
d she used to sing along. This is where they sold marijuana. There’d be fifteen or twenty of us, passing the pot around with the door wide open, and the cops didn’t bother us. There were four or five tea pads uptown. One was called Kaiser’s, and then there was Reefer Mae’s on the corner of 143rd Street and 7th Avenue. Mostly show people were there and they’d say ‘We’re crazy and we’re happy’ and we used to have a ball.

  You could get anything at that time: booze, cocaine, and some used to drink ‘top and bottom’, gin and wine mixed together, but no one would really get drunk because we had marijuana. We got it from Texas and Mexico. We found out we was getting happy on this marijuana. Oh yeah, we were getting happy! Oh my God! You could see the black gum of the marijuana coming out of the end of the cigarette.

  Lester Young used to come into the tea pads and he carried a brown leather zipper bag, this big, full of marijuana. But Billie and Louis Armstrong made marijuana popular. They were the idols of the marijuana people. You could say they were King and Queen. But once they got really big they kind of waned away from public smoking, because they could get all the dope they wanted and only once in a while they came uptown.

  When Billie wanted to blaze it, to get drunk and have a ball, she would check into a hotel with Dexter Gordon. After Dexter Gordon she fell in love with Lester Young. She used to change boyfriends like you change your pants, but Lester Young was the boy she really loved, and after he died I don’t think she lived more than five months.†

  There was a place called the Daisy Chain‡ on 141st Street, between Lenox and 7th Avenue, and we all used to go there. It was just a cat house, owned by a very, very pretty girl called Hazel Valentine, an ex-chorus girl who died five or six years ago. You’d go up to this big railroad flat house and you had to pay five dollars a piece and everybody would get buck-naked. I used to go up there quite often. I was quite young. Everyone was doing everything, but you don’t care, you just have a ball. Billie used to frequent it, just to look and see what was happening.

  There were these rooms over here and rooms over there and a long hall, and you’d be going from room to room and you’d see people on the floor getting their thing. Fantastic! Women going with women. Men going with men. They had a girl called Sewing Machine Bertha and she went down on all the girls. All the lesbians used to go up there, but I couldn’t quote names because some of them was real big-time stars, so it was husha-husha. Entertainers went up there and it was half-coloured and half-white. Hell, yeah! Real integrated! Nobody paid it any mind. The public didn’t know anything about it. It was only show people. Everybody was gay and having a lot of fun, twenty-four hours a day.

  * ‘A white person … common Negro use since c. 1925’ (Dictionary of American Slang).

  † ‘When she died they wanted to have her funeral at St Patrick, but Cardinal Spellman wouldn’t allow it. This is the truth. I know it. So I never did like Cardinal Spellman after that. Billie was a real Catholic and she gave the Catholic Church a lot of money, and Cardinal Spellman knew her.’

  ‡ ‘The act or an instance of several persons having sexual intercourse with each other at the same time’ (Dictionary of American Slang).

  FOURTEEN

  Bobby Henderson

  ‘The way she handled a fork.’

  Mae Barnes first got to know Billie in 1928, when they were both ‘doing the tables’ at a club called the Nest.* Billie stood out from the other girls because she refused to sing dirty songs and only took tips with her hands. ‘She felt if she couldn’t make a dollar standing on her own two feet, she didn’t want it. And if a guy offered her ten dollars to go with him to a house, she’d say, “Shit! I can make that standing up!” Even for a hundred bucks, she’d refuse.’

  Mae Barnes met Bobby Henderson around 1930 when he and Billie were sweethearts for a couple of years. She saw how different he was from the other men Billie went with later, the ‘hustlers, pimps and all kinds of smooth-talking cats, rough-talking cats, who could protect her’. She said that Bobby Henderson was the only man Billie ever loved. He was someone who ‘showed her a lot of affection and he was a good man and a beautiful pianist … He had his own style.’

  People spoke of Bobby Henderson as the warmest, kindest, gentlest person they knew.† He was quiet in the company of strangers and he could be aloof in his way, but when he was working in a club he was very lively and would ‘juice a lot’ along with the best of them. He always got on well with everyone: with the girls who were singing or dancing, with the club owner and with the guests; he was even on friendly terms with difficult men such as the gangster Dutch Schultz and the pimp Dickie Wells.‡

  Away from the night-life of work, Bobby Henderson lived quietly with his mother on 109th Street, just across from Mayor La Guardia. He spent a lot of time alone, walking the streets of New York with a bottle of wine in his pocket to keep him company. He said that was the only way he could think about what he called the ‘process’ of his life and could listen to the stream of music playing inside his head. ‘I had a habit of walking … I know every path in Central Park; I know every path in every park in New York City. I’m one of the few people that walked from the Battery to the Bronx, from the Hudson River to the East River – you hear what I say? Through Chinatown. I don’t think there’s a street in New York I haven’t walked on. It’s a big city, but since I was a kid I knew it. And thank God I could always hear some music when I was walking, whether a jukebox was playing or not, I was hearing sounds. And when I came to the piano at night, the girls used to say, “Where you been today? What you been doin’? You sound mighty fresh on those keys!” ’

  Bobby’s mother was unmarried and already middle-aged when he was born in Harlem in 1910. He was her only child. She worked as a janitress and brought him up on her own, but she was visited regularly by a much younger man who ‘acted like a little chippy girl’ and ran a musicians’ club on 134th Street and 7th Avenue. Bobby had always known this man as Uncle Fred, but when he was seventeen a friend told him that Uncle Fred was his father. He kept this knowledge to himself for another ten years. He remembered the one occasion when Uncle Fred ‘showed me that he loved me’. He clapped Bobby on the shoulders and said enigmatically, ‘This is my boy.’§

  Bobby said his mother was full of love and never judged him, but she was also very strict and very religious. She was keen for her son to go to college to study bookkeeping so that he might have a better life than the one she had known. But then, when he was twenty-two years old, he was sitting one day in the classroom with the music of Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ going round in his head and suddenly he asked himself, ‘Who is going to keep whose books in this administration?’

  His teacher was calling to him, ‘Mr Henderson! Mr Henderson! Where are you, Mr Henderson?’

  And right then he knew what he had to do and he said, ‘I can’t tell you, Mr Marquet, but give my books to the Principal with my best regards, because I’m leaving school right now!’ And all the class turned round and laughed at him, but he walked out and never returned, even though he later admitted that it took ‘a lot of guts’ to do it.

  He remembered how he hopped on the back of one of those open streetcars and rode right up to Harlem. He told his mother what he had done and ‘The tears came down and I grabbed her and hugged her and explained to her, “Mama, I’m playing music now!” ’ He had already been earning seven dollars a night by playing at parties and he was sure he could earn even more.

  Not long afterwards a man called Jack Sneed‖ took him one morning to Pod and Jerry’s. It was an integrated club where the ‘sporting element’, Negroes with plenty of money, mixed with white people from downtown who also had plenty of money. Bobby Henderson said that in those days the area was ‘completely integrated and people could walk on the side-streets anywhere and nobody was knocked on the head’. And in spite of Prohibition, at Pod and Jerry’s there was always a jug of corn liquor in the corner, made by people from the South who knew how to make real corn liquor.
It gave you ‘an appetite like a horse’. The musicians would come and ‘hit the jug’ and send out for another milk bottle full, which cost a quarter for a quart.

  So there was Bobby Henderson at Pod and Jerry’s and the boss, Jerry, came over and said, ‘Hello, son, can you play the piano? That’s Willie “The Lion” Smitha you see there. He’s one of the greatest piano players playing. Well, Willie’s made plenty of money, and Willie’s going to move downtown to another spot … So, play a tune, kid.’

  Bobby Henderson was very scared, but he said to himself, ‘Play what you can play and that’s all you can do.’ He started with ‘I Got Rhythm’ and after a while he relaxed and went on for about twenty choruses.

  Somebody said, ‘Who is this kid?’

  Somebody else said, ‘You’re all right, kid!’

  And the boss said, ‘Don’t stop there, kid. Play a little blues. I like you. What you drinking? You want the job?’

  So Bobby turned up again at eleven o’clock that night. There was a mirror fixed over the piano so that he could watch the girls dancing and picking up the money between their legs. ‘I’m looking around and my eyes are poppin.’ But the girls who were singing loved him at once for the way he could transpose to any key they wanted, even to the difficult F sharp. ‘Nobody played for us like you play for us,’ they said.

  There was a waiter who had the job of gathering up all the money and putting it into an ‘entertainers’ fund’ that could be shared out at the end of the night. This waiter had to make sure that the girls didn’t secretly stuff dollar bills down their fronts, or hide them ‘you know where’, and as the night moved on the waiter was putting more and more money into Bobby’s pockets. By the time the club was closing in the early morning he had earned himself $150.