With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  By the spring of 1943, more than half a million blacks were in the army. But only 79,000 were overseas, and repeating the traumatic experience of their fathers in the First World War. Walter White, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke of ‘the gratuitous insults and beatings and humiliations suffered by men who had fought in the Pacific and had been returned home to train other fighters … the countless stories of lynchings and mistreatments of Negro soldiers’.

  The tensions in Harlem were building up during the spring of 1943 and they were exacerbated when the authorities decided to close down the Savoy Ballroom on 21 April 1943. The police charged that the ballroom was a ‘base for vice’ and a major cause of the spread of venereal disease among white soldiers. It was alleged that 164 servicemen had contracted venereal disease in the past nine months as a result of meeting women there. To prove their point the police picked up three prostitutes and a pimp outside the Ballroom.

  Ninety employees lost their jobs, and the people of Harlem were indignant. Walter White argued that prostitution was a fact of life at other public places, including the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but everyone knew that it was really the mixed dancing the police were angry about. As Roy Wilkins observed, ‘Chiefs of police, commissioners, captains, lieutenants and plain rookie cops get purple in the face at the very thought of Negroes and whites enjoying themselves socially together.’†

  James Baldwin remembered that before the summer of 1943, he had never been aware of so many policemen on the streets of Harlem, ‘on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two’. And then on 1 August a riot finally broke out, triggered by a scene at the Braddock Hotel in which a black soldier in uniform tried to intervene in a quarrel between a white policeman and a woman called Margie Polite. There was a scuffle and a shot was fired. The crowd that gathered in front of the hotel was convinced the soldier had been fatally wounded.

  The rage and despair burst its banks and soon thousands of men and women were sweeping through Harlem, looting and burning and breaking street-lamps so that whole areas were plunged into darkness. The writer Claude Brown was six years old at the time and remembered how ‘the crashing sound of falling plate-glass windows kept me awake for hours. While I listened to the noise I imagined bombs falling and people running through the streets screaming.’‡

  Five thousand police were rushed to Harlem from throughout the city, but they were under a restraint order, which meant that the fatalities were not as high as they might otherwise have been. Nevertheless six people were killed, nearly 700 were seriously wounded and there were 600 arrests.

  The following morning the main streets looked as if they had been swept by a hurricane or an invading army, and Walter White, who had lived in Harlem for twenty-five years, said he had never seen ‘such concentrated despair’ as he witnessed that morning. Arthur Garfield Hayes, writing in the New York Times five days after the riot, blamed it on ‘conditions in Harlem: the wretched housing, unduly high rents, lack of recreation grounds, discrimination in industry against coloured people, are largely responsible for an emotional situation which might at any time cause a flare-up. But in addition to this is a lack of proper treatment of the people by the police.’§

  Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Harlem had not been an all-black community. The transformation had a lot to do with relations between the black and white soldiers. These relations were so strained and volatile that, however equal the soldiers might be deemed to be, it was thought best to keep them separate when off base. Harlem was effectively off-limits for white soldiers. Nevertheless white soldiers did come there in search of amusement of one sort or another, and all through the winter and spring of 1943 scenes of racial provocation turned into clashes on the city streets.

  Billie was singing at the Onyx Club and staying in an apartment above the Braddock Hotel at the time of the riot. Even if she missed the worst of it, she must have seen the chaos the following morning and of course she knew all about the heightened racial tensions that the war had released.

  By now she was the acclaimed Queen of 52nd Street‖ and night after night she played to standing-room-only crowds.a Her songs of love and longing exactly reflected the feelings of the entire nation, as soldiers said goodbye to their sweethearts and set out to face their destiny in unknown lands. But throughout the war years there was a deepening gulf between her popular success and the realities of her life in Harlem. This was the mood in the air when she smashed the top off a beer bottle and brandished her weapon at a naval officer who had come up to her in a bar and called her a ‘nigger’. And it was the mood in the air when she single-handedly attacked three white soldiers who were burning her mink coat with the lighted ends of their cigarettes.

  It was at some point towards the end of 1943 that Billie became involved with the bass player John Simmons. Simmons had been a junkie for years. Perhaps it was under his influence that she started injecting heroin, protecting herself from the knowledge that nothing really changed, no matter how successful she became.

  In an interview with Linda Kuehl, Simmons described the way Billie was eager to please her public. ‘She would go over and have drinks with them, sit down and laugh and talk … and people would ask her about her life and when she started singing, and what does she think about when she was singing, and things like that; and that would wear her down and she would run upstairs to her dressing room to fix, and get this nervous condition away from her, because it’s like they’d inflicted real pain on her just from holding a conversation.’

  John Simmons also described how, in this new world of fame, total strangers would say, ‘Hello, Billie!’ and she’d say, ‘Kiss my ass! I don’t know you!’ Then she would turn to Simmons in a panic and ask if he thought she was crazy. And talking about it later he said, ‘No, she wasn’t crazy, but she wanted to be … She got to the point where she thought everyone was trying to use her and so she said “Fuck the world!” ’

  Now that she had money, Billie gave it away as fast as she earnt it. The singer Babs Gonzales remembered, ‘She fed everybody in New York for about four years with no sweat. Any musician could go there and eat and get money for the subway or to go to the movies. Every day they could do that. And if she was out of town she would leave money with her mother.’ The trombonist Trummy Young said, ‘She couldn’t do enough for the men she loved, or even her friends. She spent a large portion of the money she earnt on heroin, but she also spent a lot on down-and-out friends … Billie was, with all her weaknesses, an honest person.’b

  Billie often referred to herself as a ‘race woman’. The blues folk singer Josh White, who became friends with her during the early 1940s, was one of the few people to assert that ‘She had more thought for humanity and was more race-conscious than people thought.’c In October 1943 she appeared at the Golden Gate Ballroom in Harlem for an All Star Victory Show in tribute to Lieutenant Benjamin O. Davis Jr, who, along with his father, made up the only two black officers serving in the army.d In May 1944 she appeared at the Golden Gate Auditorium in New York at a Celebration and Rally to end Jim Crow (segregation) laws in New York City, attended by the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell and Benjamin O. Davis Jr, as well as Count Basie, Teddy Wilson and others. In June she took part in the Negro Salute to the Fighting Jews of Europe at Town Hall in New York.

  She was not a political activist or speaker, but she fought back physically whenever she was insulted because of her race. And she went on singing ‘Strange Fruit’, even when club owners tried to stop her and the song jeopardised her career. According to John Hammond, she was ‘pretty well gone by 1940 … She was still marvellously musical, but she had gotten self-conscious. I felt that the beginning of the end was “Strange Fruit” when she became the darling of the left-wing intellectuals. I think she began taking herself very seriously and thinking of herself as very important.’e

  Others, especially the new breed of tabloid journalists and various police departments
, had a different opinion of what was happening. They said that Billie was going downhill because she was leading a selfish and dissolute life and she deserved to be punished for her sins.

  * Walter White, quoted in Brandt, p. 189.

  † Quoted in Brandt, p. 171.

  ‡ Ibid., p. 187.

  § Ibid., p. 208.

  ‖ When Esquire magazine conducted a poll among jazz critics at the end of 1943, Billie was the clear winner of the vocal section. In October 1943 a photograph of Billie at a studio jam session dominated the centre spread of Life magazine.

  a As Stuart Nicholson said, ‘The Street provided her with an ideal forum; it allowed her talent to blossom.’ Frank Sinatra, among many others, went to see her. ‘I used to watch Billie in New York night after night, as much as I could,’ he said. ‘She was a great contributor to my career in the sense of articulating a song.’

  b Chilton, p. 97.

  c Chilton, p. 104. In her book If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, Farah Jasmine Griffin says, ‘At times she was militantly pro-black, often referring to herself as a “race woman” … but eventually the stories of her arrests and drug addiction joined with her stage persona of the torch singer to create a new image, that of the tragic, ever-suffering black woman singer who simply stands centre-stage and naturally sings of her woes … [a woman who] feels but does not think’ (p. 31).

  d The army continued to insist that only whites could command black outfits. Moreover, no black could be ranked higher than the lowest-ranking white. As a result, few black lieutenants were ever promoted and, apart from Benjamin O. Davis Sr, none achieved the rank of general or, in the navy, flag rank.

  e For her part, Billie resented John Hammond’s condescension, saying, ‘John’s a square, John’s just rich, John wants to run my life, tries to tell me and everybody else what to do.’ Quoted in Margolick, p. 59.

  NINETEEN

  Lester Young

  Billie first met him in 1936, when he had just arrived in New York. He moved in with her and her mother after a rat jumped out at him from the cupboard in the hotel room where he was staying. Talking about that time years later, he said, ‘She was teaching me about the city, you know, which way to go … because I didn’t know my way around. She taught me a lot of things, you know, and got me little record dates, you know, playing behind her, little solos and things like that.’*

  Lester Young had green eyes with dark rings of permanent tiredness around them. He had red-tinged hair and it fell in soft curls when he let it grow long at the back. He thought of tying it up with ribbons, until his friends stopped him. He had pale skin that looked grey in the daylight, but he avoided the daylight as much as possible. He was a night person – always had been.

  He was very shy and often silent and preoccupied. He tended to look for signs to tell him how things were going; if a butterfly landed on his hand, that was a sign that somebody loved him. When he did speak he used his own coded language so that only the people who knew him well were able to understand what he was saying. For those who did understand, he was a gentle philosopher who spoke in riddles. He had a high, whispery voice.

  ‘How’s it going, Lester?’

  ‘Ding dong, I feel a draught. Bob Crosby and another grey just walked in.’

  ‘How’s it going, Lester?’

  ‘No eyes, no eyes. Things are bad. All the popes are dying.’

  ‘How’s it going, Lester?’

  ‘Seeing is believing, and hearing is a bitch … It’s fight for your life, that’s all.’†

  Lester gave nicknames to the musicians he worked with: ‘Sweets’ for the trumpeter Harry Edison, ‘socks’ for the pianist Bobby Scott; ‘Lady Tate’ for his fellow saxophone player Buddy Tate, because ‘You’re so refined and you’re so nice, I got to give you a Lady name, because I don’t see you mad at anybody or anything.’‡ And Lady Day for Billie Holiday because he found her so nice, and she found him nice too and called him ‘Pres’, short for President.

  Billie and Lester made numerous recordings in which you can hear their closeness in the way that the voice and the saxophone work together with such an easy intimacy. They were never lovers, but were more like a brother and sister who shared many character traits. They had the same sort of fears and lack of confidence, and the need to keep the world at bay with drink and drugs; they also had the same easy generosity and hopeless business sense. But beyond that there was their shared ability to give power and poignancy to the most sentimental lyrics.§ They both favoured torch songs about lost or unrequited love, and Lester used to know all the words to all the verses of a song, thinking along with them as he played.

  Towards the end of his life, Lester explained his ‘philosophy of the spiritual’ to his friend Willie Jones. He said, ‘A musician is a philosopher and a scientist and he uses the science of music to project the particular philosophy he subscribes to.’‖ He believed that jazz expressed the principles of democracy and equality and said, ‘We have made a major contribution to this country and we are Americans … Our music must be melodious and melodic and the songs universal and that’s about equality.’ Towards the end of his life, Lester was flying across the United States with the pianist Bobby Scott, the one he called Socks. He looked down at the vastness of his homeland stretched out beneath him and said, ‘Sure as hell is enough room for everybody, ain’t there, Socks!’a

  But now here is Lester Young stepping out onto the stage. The audience roars a welcome and the spotlight follows him and holds him at its centre, but he seems to be hardly aware of his surroundings. The pianist and composer Gil Evans said he moved like a parakeet on its perch, while Bobby Scott described his walk as ‘more of a shuffle than an honest walk. It had something Asiatic about it, a reticence to barge in. He sidled. It was in keeping with the side-door quality of his nature.’b

  He stands there in a pool of isolation, clutching the saxophone, one leg placed in front of the other to give him better balance, and his heavy-lidded eyes almost closed. If the music goes well he might suddenly break into a private tiptoeing dance – he was a wonderful dancer, with such a quality of looseness in his movements that he seemed to float just above the surface of the floor. But if things are not going well, then he might turn his back to the audience to hide his tears.c

  Lester was always meticulously dressed. He had a long black coat with a high fur collar, which he liked to keep on even when he was indoors. He wore sunglasses when the sun was not shining and crêpe-soled shoes that made a soft scrinch-scrunch sound as he walked. He was fond of well-tailored suits with padded shoulders, wide lapels and highwaisted trousers that were full in the leg and narrow at the ankle. Sometime in the early 1930s his attention was caught by a picture of a group of Victorian ladies in their riding habits wearing broad-brimmed, flat-topped black hats. He had the design copied and the resulting porkpie/matador-style hat became his trademark.d

  Lester was almost six feet tall and during the last years of his life he became painfully thin. He ate very little and could rarely be persuaded to touch any food at all before three o’clock in the morning; then he might start with a tin of sardines and follow that with some ice cream. Drink provided him with his nourishment. He drank port wine or sherry mixed with gin, whisky or Courvoisier mixed with beer, along with all those other mezzo-mezzo, up-and-down, top-and-bottom combinations that Billie also favoured. As a young man Lester said he never wanted to lose that ‘nice feeling’ he had at the beginning when he moved from orange sodas to the harder stuff, but towards the end of his life, as he explained to Bobby Scott, ‘I have to drink. When I drink, the pain goes.’e The drinking had begun in earnest in the 1920s while he was with Count Basie and doing a lot of one-nighters: playing for eight hours, followed by a jam session for five or six hours more, and then bundling into a rackety bus for the long ride to the next booking in the next town.

  By the time Lester was in his mid-thirties, he was drinking almost two pints a day of 100 proof spirits; sometimes he bought six bo
ttles of spirits at once, just to be safe. It was important for him to feel safe whenever possible. In the days when it was still legal, he used to carry a little leather suitcase filled with marijuana. When Prohibition had ended and marijuana took its turn to be the illegal substance, he would carry a bottle of spirits in a little red plaid bag, which he kept on his lap. His tenor saxophone was always somewhere close by, even in later years when he was not so often in the mood to play. ‘Hold it carefully,’ he said to the photographer who wanted to move the saxophone in order to get the composition of a picture just right. ‘Hold it carefully, you dig. That’s my life!’

  Along with many of the other musicians he worked with, Lester took Benzedrine tablets to keep him going and barbiturates to help him sleep, and he smoked marijuana every day. People said there was never a moment when he was not high on what he called his New Orleans cigarettes, except for the period between 1944 and 1945 when he was in the army.

  So there was the drink and the dope and the pills, but never anything else; no cocaine and no ‘needle dancing’ as he called it. If someone was using heroin, Lester would ask them to leave the room when they needed to give themselves a shot. He didn’t like what heroin did to people, but he also had a terrible fear of needles and injections, as well as a fear of hospitals and medical men and women in white coats. That was why he refused to go to the dentist even when his teeth were falling out and why he avoided doctors, no matter how ill he felt.f

  He was a man of many fears. He was afraid of the dark and needed to have a light on while he slept. He was afraid of silence, and when he was alone he had the radio babbling to itself and keeping him company, or he put a record onto repeat and let it play through his wakefulness and into his dreams. He liked to listen to Billie singing the old songs they had recorded together and he admired Frank Sinatra, someone who also knew how to turn a simple lyric into something meaningful.