Sometimes Billie was moody and she’d say, ‘I don’t feel good.’ She would stay in her mother’s house and not open the door for anybody. But when she did feel good she was ready for anything; singing through the night and drinking through much of the day. She used to collect Claire from her place on 142nd Street, ringing three times on the doorbell and waiting for her to come down. Claire lived on the fourth floor and Billie said, ‘I ain’t making no steps. Now, you bitch, when I ring three times, you come on down. Be cool.’
Claire said Billie always spoke like that, using a lot of profanity – ‘Hey, bitch, I ain’t see you! Where the fuck you hang out at?’ – but because of the way she said things, it all sounded like words of endearment. She used to call Lester Young ‘the greatest motherfucker I ever met’ and that told you how much she loved him. When they saw each other they wouldn’t kiss, but their faces would just light up. ‘Goddamn son-of-a-bitch, how you doin’, Daddy?’ she’d say.
After Billie had finished singing at around seven in the morning she and Carmen and Claire would go out drinking together. They went from block to block, to the Silver Dollar, the Brown Bomber, the Poucepateck. Their favourite place was Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, where whisky was served in a teacup.
They’d also go to the beach at Rockaway, meeting up with other friends and going by train or taking a car. Billie never entered the water; she didn’t even own a bathing suit. She’d just come and sit and watch the others. Claire said she wasn’t marked with needle scars, so that wasn’t the reason; maybe she was just afraid of water.
Billie met Jimmy Monroe at Rockaway and that’s where he started going with her. Claire said before that Billie had been with Bobby Henderson and the guitar player Freddie Green, and Sonny White the pianist, who gave her an engagement ring, and everybody hoped she would stay with him because ‘He was a nice boy and didn’t like her for what she had, like most of them did.’ But it was Jimmy Monroe who got her. Claire said he was a ‘suave sort of cat’ who used to go round with the gangster Dutch Schultz. Jimmy was also an ‘out-and-out hustler’ with an opium habit he’d brought back from his time in Paris.
In those days ‘everyone’ went to Irene Kitchings’‡ house. They went there when she was still married to the pianist Teddy Wilson, and they went there when she and Teddy had separated and she was living on her own. Claire remembered how Billie and her friends would turn up in the morning and Irene would cook a whole lot of New Orleans food, and her dog Gypsy would run around and people would be talking and laughing and drinking.
And then, if Billie felt like singing, she’d sing. She’d only do it if she wanted to and there was no point in asking her for a certain song because that never worked. But she’d start humming and Irene would go right up there to the piano and start playing. Claire said it was different from when Billie was performing in clubs. She’d just be sitting there with a drink and a cigarette, and the singing was like talking to herself. ‘It was as if she was having a love affair with herself.’ She wasn’t bothered if the lights were on and the dog was making trouble, for she was in her own world. She’d do torchy songs mostly. Claire loved to hear her sing ‘Yesterdays’.§
Irene Kitchings also spoke about those visits to her house in an interview she gave to Linda Kuehl on 27 November 1971. Her second husband Eldon was sitting beside her, but he mostly remained silent, although he did say that Billie ‘respected people who were strong … She got along so well with my wife because my wife has such a strong will and she respected her for that. Billie thought that if a person was permissive with her, they didn’t care about her.’
Irene was still married to Teddy Wilson when she met Billie at the Hot Cha in around 1934. She remembered her as being ‘robust and carefree and just like a big kid’. And then Billie and Teddy started rehearsing for the Columbia recordings, and one time she came up to the house on her own, ‘And we became friends right there. She told me, “Renie, I’ve met a lot of wives, Duke’s wife and other wives, but you’re the first wife I’ve met that seems real. You’re just a top chick. I can dig you because you’re a real person.” ’
Irene used to go to listen in on those early recording sessions, and once Billie asked her how to pronounce a word in one of the songs. As Irene said, ‘She had to feel close and comfortable with me, to ask something like that.’
The two women went out together in search of good music. They went to an Irish bar where Billie sang Irish songs. They went to a place where they’d heard a good trio was playing, but ‘It was nothing but a whorehouse. I had never seen anything like it.’ Billie, who knew all about whorehouses, told Irene, ‘Now, if you have to go to the rest-room, you just let me know, because you can’t go in there by yourself because those chicks are too rough, uh! uh!’
When Irene’s marriage to Teddy Wilson fell apart, she went to live with Billie and her mother for a while. By this time Billie was going with Jimmy Monroe, and Irene remembered her coming home in the morning and putting something in her coffee that Jimmy had given her, while Sadie fussed over her and accused her of ‘acting strange’.
I told Lady, ‘What you put in that coffee?’
And she said, ‘Aw, Renie, this is just something. Don’t pay Mom no mind!’
So I said, ‘No, what is it?’
She said, ‘Aw, it’s not going to hurt me.’
Next thing I know, Lady’s in the bathroom, as sick as a dog. Next thing I know Monroe had her smoking hop.‖ And next thing I knew, he had her using coke.
But it was still the music that mattered. Billie had a collection of records, including Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess, and she’d sing along with them. Irene said, ‘She had a remarkable ear and didn’t know one note of music, not one note. She had opera and stuff like that on her machine. Afternoon of a Faun.a She loved Afternoon of a Faun.’
Irene saw Billie over the years, but she never judged her harshly as some others did. She said, ‘Once she got big, it didn’t matter to her. All she wanted was to have some decent music to accompany her, and the people to be quiet and listen to her sing … Singing was all she knew how to do. That’s all that made her real happy.’
* According to Claire, Billie bought everything from the pharmacy: deep-red Cutex nail varnish, Maybelline eye pencils, Stein’s brown powder, cold cream. But even when she was appearing on stage, ‘She wasn’t vain, didn’t have too much shit on the table. She took a little pain in putting her lipstick on, she’d put it on her top lip, then bite down on her lower lip and put a circle on the lower lip again. She took her time with everything … but she wouldn’t take too much pain with her appearance, she could be looking at herself but just staring, not seeing herself.’
† Carmen McRae was born in New York in 1920. She sang and played the piano and was later an actress. When she was eighteen she wrote ‘Dream of Life’, which was recorded by Billie. She died in 1994.
‡ Pianist and composer. After she and Teddy Wilson parted she wrote ‘Some Other Spring’, one of Billie’s favourite songs.
§ Callye Arter remembered a surprise birthday party for Teddy Wilson in 1934, arranged by Earl Hines’ wife. People were singing and Billie was ‘sitting there and nobody was saying one word to her. She was nothing but a kid. And then she gets up and says, “Teddy, will you play ‘These Foolish Things’ for me?” And Teddy played it and Billie broke the party up and people started talking about her then.’
‖ Opium.
a Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
SIXTEEN
Ruby Helena
‘She didn’t have the right, being who she was.’
Ruby Helena was a dancer and entertainer. She got to know Billie and her mother Sadie when she stayed with them in an apartment on 99th Street in Harlem. According to John Hammond, it was ‘a beat-up flat, an awful, after-hours place’. Ruby Helena thought that must have been in 1939, or it could have been 1940; it was difficult to be sure because it was such a long time ago. Anyway she was with them f
or about six months and Billie used to refer to her as ‘my half-sister’, while Sadie spoke of her as ‘my other daughter’.
Ruby Helena had been told that when Billie first arrived in Harlem she lived with her mother at Florence Williams’ whorehouse at 151 West 140th Street. Neither Billie nor Sadie ever mentioned that they had been arrested while they were there, although Ruby Helena did know that Billie had spent almost a year in prison while she was still a young teenager. She thought it was because Billie had refused to have sex with a man called Big Blue Ranier and he’d got his own back by telling the police that she had tried to rob him.
Ruby Helena said that when Billie was released from jail, Sadie had found her a room in a reefer pad just off 7th Avenue. She was only there for a short time before ‘something came up’ and she had to leave in a hurry. She moved to another place, but the man who owned it kicked her out because she ‘thought she was cute’ and refused to do the things that all the other girls were doing. And then she was in the house next door and Ruby Helena suddenly wondered if this was where she was raped by Big Blue. She explained to Linda Kuehl that she hadn’t known Billie or Sadie at that stage in their lives and was simply trying to piece together the fragmented stories they had told her later.
Ruby Helena was asked to describe a reefer pad. She said ‘some of the cats’ took her to one in the 1920s when she was still a very young girl. No one bothered her, but it was the first time she saw the things that happened there. She said a reefer pad was just a room lined with couches and with ‘dull lights – red; sometimes a blue light or a green one. You could hardly see the person sitting next to you.’ There were low tables and music playing on a gramophone, or perhaps someone was busy on the keys of an old piano. Bootleg whisky was sold by the tumbler and cost between two and five dollars, depending on how wealthy the client appeared to be.* Ready-made reefers were sold by the stick at two dollars or more.
There were always girls there, ready to dance and entertain. They usually danced in short costumes, but some of them were a ‘little bashful’ and preferred long dresses with a slit up the front. The ‘rich white people’ who had come here ‘to see some spice’ were ‘millionaire businessmen, newspaper men, celebrities – all the people who were getting all the money’. They would be sitting at the tables, listening to the music, smoking, drinking, watching what was going on. And then a man, or it might be his female companion, would place some money on the table and the trick was for one of the girls to pick it up with her vagina. ‘They would put a fifty-dollar bill on the table and these girls would take their vaginas and pick up the money. They would even pick up silver money. They picked up quarters the same way and the more the girls would pick up, the more they made … They were so skilled, how they could pick up that money!… Some of the girls left out of there very wealthy. One fella put down a hundred-dollar bill.’
Listening to Ruby Helena’s voice, it is easy to imagine a scene from an old movie full of gangsters and romance. You can see the whisky in shining glasses and the smoke from the reefers illuminated in ghostly spirals by the shaded lights. You can see the pale faces of wealthy smiling men in wellcut suits; the glint of a woman’s jewellery. And you can see the faces of the people who lived in Harlem, and their smiles and clothes and jewellery.
But then there is the sound of laughter. All the people who have money to spare are laughing uproariously as they place a tightly folded banknote or a little metal coin on the corner of a low table. And the intensity of their laughter gathers momentum as they watch a dancing woman dipping down onto the prize like some strange creature gathering food. And if she cannot get enough of a grip, then the coin is dropped, or the piece of linen paper, certified by the United States Treasury and carrying the proud face of one president or another, flutters listlessly to the floor. So then the whole process must be made to begin again. People laughing to see how even the smallest amount of currency is worth such an effort.
People said that Billie was called ‘too cute’ because she refused to do dancing work in the reefer pad where she was staying. And Ruby Helena said that when she wouldn’t go to such places to sing, people complained about her being high and mighty because ‘She thought she was better than anyone, but she didn’t have the right, being who she was, because they knew where she was living. She didn’t have the right to that “air”.’ According to Ruby Helena’s version of things, this was why Billie was given the name of Lady Day and why the name stuck, because she was determined to ‘make it’ in the entertainment world and she already felt herself to be such a grand lady. But then, thinking it over, Ruby Helena added that it might have been more than just putting on airs. ‘She was a person with a lot of pride … It could have been something inside of her – some decency.’
Ruby Helena remembered meeting Billie for the first time at Ginnie Lee’s restaurant, behind the Apollo Theater on 125th Street. It was around two o’clock in the morning and Billie was there with a group of friends. She suddenly turned to this new stranger and announced, ‘I don’t want them to take me home, I want you to take me home.’ And so that was decided and they turned up together at the apartment Billie was sharing with her mother.†
So there they were and Billie was making coffee when Sadie called out, ‘Billie, is that you?’
‘Yes, Mom, it’s me … Meet my friend Helen.’‡
Ruby Helena stayed for what was left of the night and the next day she drove Billie to a recording studio and then went home. They didn’t see each other again until they met by chance when Ruby Helena was working at a club somewhere out of town with a troupe of entertainers and Billie happened to turn up and agreed to be ‘the special artist for the night’.
When Ruby Helena got back to New York she discovered she had been thrown out of her rented room and that the suitcase in which she kept all her money had been stolen. She contacted Billie and told her what had happened and Billie said, ‘Well, that’s just wonderful. You can come on down and stay with us.’
Ruby Helena was immediately swept into this family of two women, who behaved towards each other as if they were sisters rather than mother and daughter. She planned to be there with them for a week, but it turned out to be six months.
Ruby Helena said that at this time Billie was just starting to change her appearance, although really she was still nothing more than ‘a great big old bundle – just like her mother, only taller. She was a great big out-of-shape person in tacky dresses.’§ Sadie didn’t know anything about glamour, but there was a woman called Lucille who gave Billie advice on what to wear and how to ‘look the part’; she’d also borrow jewellery from Ruby Helena.
At this time Billie was fiercely protective of her mother, promising that she would never ever leave her and would always be there to look after her. Although she went out a lot, she never failed to tell Sadie exactly who she had been with, at what time she had dinner and all the things that happened next. It was as if she was giving her mother the chance to live her life vicariously, through her daughter’s adventures and romances.
But it seems that Sadie was not at all happy with how things were going and soon turned to her ‘other daughter’ as a confidante with whom she could share her worries. In spite of the fact that she had done so little to care for her daughter and protect her from the dangers of the world, Sadie now felt that Billie was neglecting her and failing in her duties. She asked Ruby Helena to keep an eye on her, to go with her to the clubs where she was singing and to make sure that she got home at night.
For her part, Billie got on well with her new ‘sister’ and talked openly about her troubles and her difficulties with Sadie. Her father Clarence had died only recently and she often spoke of her daddy and how much she had loved him. ‘She swore she’d never get over it, because she thought they let her father die.’‖
Sadie was also very busy with thoughts of Clarence Holiday. She told Ruby Helena that he was the only man she had ever loved. They had been married for a while, but then he had walke
d out on her and had left her on her own with a young child to raise. He was like all men, she said; he only wanted to break a woman’s heart. ‘Look what your father did to me!’ she would say to Billie, weeping piteously, as if it was her daughter’s fault that Clarence had abandoned them both all those years ago.
According to Ruby Helena, Sadie never wanted Billie to be close to a man and did everything she could to stop her daughter from becoming attached to any of the men she spent time with. Billie was forbidden to invite a man to stay the night, although Sadie apparently encouraged her to bring women back to the apartment. As Ruby Helena said, ‘She didn’t mind if she slept with girls, she just didn’t want her to sleep with men.’ And so Billie would often come home with different girls, white girls mostly, ‘society girls’, and in the morning they would all get up and have breakfast together. Some of these women were regular visitors.a
But there were men in Billie’s life as well, lots of them. For a while there was Clark Monroe, who had a club called the Uptown House. Then she set her heart on his brother Jimmy, even though she said she couldn’t stand him when they first met. Ruby Helena described him as a ‘very fair-complexioned, nice-looking, frail type’ who was just back from spending a few years in Paris and was full of the cosmopolitan sophistication of Europe. He was also ‘a person who didn’t talk much. A quiet type of person. You would wonder what he was thinking about, or if he was thinking. He seemed to be in some kind of other world; in a daze.’
When Billie met Jimmy Monroe he was married to an actress called Nina McKinney, but he was also ‘running’ two or three other women as well. He was known to be a pimp, but, as Ruby Helena explained, ‘He wasn’t always busy being a pimp. He was just running a few girls. His mother and his brother Clarence had a reefer pad in Harlem and he would go there and pick up girls from the club, for his own purposes.’
With Billie Page 10
