With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Greer Johnson remembered how, in the early 1940s, Billie had asked him to take her to a dance performance by Katherine Dunham at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway. ‘I want to know what the Negroes are doing, Baby. Will you take me?’ she said. And so he bought two tickets for the opening night.

  He remembered that she dressed very demurely for the occasion, wearing a sweater and skirt with a turbaned hat and glinting, hooped brass earrings. They were surrounded by an all-white audience, and throughout the first part of the show people kept turning their heads to stare at her. During the intermission he went to get her a drink and, when he gave it to her, her hands were trembling.

  ‘Everybody’s looking at us,’ she said.

  He tried to reassure her. ‘No, Billie, everybody is looking at you! And for good reason, because you’re so wonderful to look at!’

  ‘It’s because everyone is saying, Who is that woman, with that white boy!’

  ‘No, they’re not! That’s not it!’

  After the show was over, Billie took her friend to a very black club in the upper reaches of Harlem, where his was the only white face. Everyone greeted Billie and stared at him. They sat there until Greer Johnson was so tired he could scarcely keep his eyes open. Suddenly Billie said to him, ‘OK, Baby!’ and she took his hand and led him out onto the street where she hailed a cab. She gave the cab driver some money and told him, ‘You take this man back to his hotel and don’t stop till you get there!’

  Greer Johnson sometimes used to visit Billie in the apartment she shared with her mother above the Braddock Hotel on 99th Street. He never stayed overnight, because ‘they didn’t ask me and I’d have been afraid at that time’, but he did feel that once he was inside the door, he was ‘family’. He met Sadie there about three times and she was always busy cooking or ‘running around the apartment’. He considered her to be a ‘relatively stupid, sad little woman who had been caught in a relationship and it produced a Phoenix and she didn’t know what to do with a Phoenix’. And he said, ‘At no time did I have any feeling from Sadie that she had any inkling whatsoever of the greatness of her daughter. I didn’t think Sadie had any feelings for Billie at all.’

  Billie’s attitude towards her mother was very ambivalent and ‘a disturbing thing to watch really’, because she would be tender and caring one moment and abrupt and aggressive the next. To illustrate this ambivalence, Greer Johnson described meeting Billie at her mother’s funeral. He had gone there with a ‘charming and lovely boy’ called Frank Harriott, who wrote articles for PM.a Billie arrived in a limousine and, when the Mass was over, they all went to the burial plot. ‘I stood with them while they threw flowers into the grave, or whatever it is they do during the thing. After that we all went to a bar in Queens. She showed very little emotion except, “Let’s have a drink!” ’b With hindsight, Greer Johnson said he could understand such apparent coldness because ‘I don’t think whatever Billie felt, she would have shown.’ He said he had the same sort of emotional confusion in relation to his own mother, who was currently in hospital and gravely ill. He thought he was fond of her, but if someone contacted him on the phone and told him she was about to die, he might do nothing more than pour himself another drink.

  He remembered the time when he and Elizabeth Hardwick were invited to a sit-down dinner at Billie’s, somewhere else in Harlem. They arrived at six-thirty or seven, to find the house partially boarded up with sheets of corrugated iron. A sign fixed next to the front door explained that the property had been raided for drugs and no one was to enter. A white policeman was standing on guard by the door.

  ‘We’re going in here. We have a dinner date with Miss Holiday.’

  ‘This is raided property! The best thing for you is to turn round and go back downtown!’

  ‘We are not here to buy drugs, or get drugs, or sell drugs. So, if you don’t mind, we have a dinner date with Miss Holiday!’

  Reluctantly the policeman agreed to let them in.c Dinner was not yet ready because their hostess was busy curling her hair with hot tongs, and anyway she always enjoyed the prerogative of lateness. One of her own songs was playing on a gramophone and her boyfriend, the trumpeter Joe Guy, and his brother were there among the cigarette smoke and the shaded lamps and the bottles of liquor. Eventually they were served braised meat with onions and rice, and Greer Johnson said they had the ‘most fabulous dinner you could imagine’.d

  In return Billie said, ‘Baby, you never have me to dinner!’ and asked to be invited to the Hotel Schuyler. A date was made and Greer Johnson and Elizabeth Hardwick had to wait outside on the street for her, ‘just to make sure she was not in any way embarrassed or insulted’.

  Billie arrived with the bass player John Simmons. He had been a junkie for years and some people said he was the one who first introduced her to heroin. Greer Johnson didn’t like John Simmons at all, because he kept making harsh jokes about Billie’s desire to be in the company of white people in a white neighbourhood. He mocked her for straightening her hair and putting on pale make-up to lighten the tone of her skin, as if she wanted people to think she was white. Billie ignored his taunts. Among the things she wanted to listen to that night was her own recording of a Gershwin song called ‘Things Are Looking Up’. She said she thought it was the best thing she had ever done.e

  In Greer Johnson’s opinion, Billie was ‘extremely bright, bright and sharp. She was as sharp and intelligent a woman as I have ever known, and I have known some very intelligent men and women. Nothing escaped her ever, except at those times when she was so knocked out, which she often was, that she wasn’t interested. Then she was asleep, but that’s true of anybody, right?’f

  For his part, Greer Johnson was determined to give Billie status and dignity. He wanted her to be treated like Marlene Dietrich or Lotte Lenya, singers who were increasingly able to reveal their humanity and their frailty in their songs. He felt her voice was the perfect vehicle for singing arrangements of the Schubert and Schumann song cycles. On one occasion he arranged for her to meet the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick,g who took her to listen to Bach’s Partitas being played by Wanda Landowska. Greer Johnson said that when he heard about this, ‘I must say I did a double-take; the picture of Billie together with little, funny, almost bent-over Wanda … I asked Billie, “What did you think of her?” And she said, “Well, all I know is those little hands sure ran up and down the keyboard like a bitch.” ’

  In 1946, Greer Johnson told Billie he thought ‘It was time for a jazz artist to do a recital the way anybody in classical music does a recital.’ She liked the idea and so he organised Lady’s Town Hall Concert. Together with a friend called Robert Snyder, he ‘put up every cent of the front money’, planned the programme, sent out 3,500 flyers and invited every music critic he could think of to attend. The concert was scheduled for five-thirty and he had to get Billie ready a full hour and a half before, which wasn’t easy. On the way to the Town Hall, she suddenly decided she needed another dress, so they stopped off at a ‘not particularly elegant dress shop’ called W. R. Burnett and he waited while she chose what she wanted. He said he was hysterical with worry when they finally arrived at the Town Hall, but still she was just on time.

  The performance was a success; they had to turn a thousand people away and could have done the concert three times over. Greer Johnson said the audience was extremely polyglot and very attentive. ‘I don’t think any jazz artist ever had such a reception.’ Billie obviously enjoyed the formality of the occasion and liked the idea of ‘something orderly and meaningful and being billed as America’s Jazz Artist’. ‘She sang with more apparent pleasure and ease than on 52nd Street,’ said one reviewer. ‘Her dignified bearing and her wonderful poise helped to keep the large, quiet, intelligent audience enthralled,’ said another.h

  Greer Johnson was also determined to get Billie photographed by the society photographer Robin Carsons, who was in his opinion ‘the best man in the business’, someone who would be able to capture her ser
ious qualities as an artist. Robin Carsons said there was nothing he would ‘rather do than take pictures of her’ and she agreed to pay for the cost of a session. And so, on a cold autumn afternoon they arrived at Carson’s apartment.i A very prim New England secretary called Miss Spencer was there to let them in. A fire was burning in the grate and liquor began to flow. Billie had brought several suitcases filled with dresses and make-up, and a ‘pretty little singer’ called Ann Cornell had come along to help her change from one outfit to the next.

  The secretary became increasingly nervous because they began to run so far over time that the next client had to be turned away. But still the hours went by, and everyone was laughing and joking and Billie was relaxed and beautiful. Robin Carsons was keen to do her justice and, although he had taken numerous pictures, he still felt he hadn’t got the image he was seeking. He said, ‘Now look, I’ve got some good shots, but they tend to be conventional and they tend to be pretty, but this is not all I want from this woman. There must be some way to get what I feel about her.’

  Billie had meanwhile changed into a black sequined dress and had a bunch of artificial gardenias pinned to the side of her head, and she was ‘feeling absolutely marvellous’. Greer Johnson suggested that she go over by the fireplace and sing ‘Strange Fruit’. At first she said she couldn’t possibly – just like that, with no musical accompaniment – but then she agreed to do it. She sang a cappella and Robin Carson’s camera never stopped. Later she chose four prints, and Greer Johnson was able to have one for himself.

  He remembered how once, towards the end of her life, he came into Billie’s dressing room and she was very drunk and depressed, and she tripped and fell on the floor and burst into tears. ‘Baby, fuck it! I’ve had enough!’ she said. ‘Honest to Christ, I’m never going to sing again no more!’

  ‘What the hell do you think you can do if you don’t sing?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck!’

  ‘Fine! And then what will you do, Billie?’ And she got up off her knees, dusted off her dress, smiled a blurred alcoholic’s smile and muttered, ‘I’ll sing again!’ And Greer Johnson said, ‘You’re damn right you will!’

  * The account of the sudden end of Greer Johnson’s ‘neat, clerkly life’ appears in Elizabeth Hardwick’s book Sleepless Nights (1979), Part Three, pp. 24–39. The two were childhood friends who lived together for a while in New York. She wrote about her ‘mariage blanc’ relationship with this ‘red-cheeked homosexual … whose holy habits ruined his sex life’. She also described the various meetings the two of them had with Billie Holiday. She provided a very different interpretation of Billie’s personality and circumstances from the one offered by Greer Johnson when he was interviewed by Linda Kuehl in August 1971.

  † Elizabeth Hardwick said he had ‘a passion for jazz or maybe for blackness, even though he was hesitant with black men’.

  ‡ Elizabeth Hardwick went on to say: ‘She seemed for this moment that never again returned to be almost a matron, someone real and sensible who carried money to the bank, signed papers, had curtains made to match, dresses hung and shoes in pairs, gold and silver, black and white, ready. What a strange, betraying apparition that was, madness, because never was any woman less a wife or mother, less attached; not even a daughter could she easily appear to be. Little called to mind the pitiful sweetness of a young girl. No, she was glittering, sombre and solitary, although of course never alone, never. Stately, sinister and absolutely determined.’

  § He said that on this first occasion the police warned him against being involved with Billie, and later he was often warned and threatened when he was in her company. He did his best to fight for her and, when she was subjected to racial abuse at the Plantation Club in St Louis, he wrote an article for the Walter Winchell column, in which he complained about how ‘in the city which gave jazz to the world, an outstanding figure of the jazz world should be ridiculed for the colour of her skin’. A few days before this incident, a member of Benny Carter’s band was severely injured in the same club, from a blow to his head with a pistol.

  ‖ He said, ‘She was completely open with me about what she was taking. I saw her roll up a dollar bill and sniff cocaine, shooting heroin, chain-smoking marijuana. She never hid it from me.’

  a Frank Harriott wanted to write a novel about Billie. Greer Johnson arranged an interview at the Braddock Hotel, which became an article called ‘The Hard Life of Billie Holiday’. He said the article was ‘full of naïveté, which was Harriott’s, not mine. It caused a great deal of comment at the time and he got a contract for a novel out of it. He wrote two chapters and then died.’

  b Elizabeth Hardwick was also at Sadie’s funeral. She wrote, ‘At last [Billie] arrived, ferociously appropriate in a black turban … Sadie and Billie Holiday were a violation, a rift in the statistics of life. The great singer was one of those for whom the word changeling was invented.’

  c Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, ‘Our frozen alarm and fascination carried us into the void of the dead tenement. The house was under a police ban and when we entered, whispering her name, the policeman stared at us with furious incredulity.’

  d Elizabeth Hardwick described the evening: ‘[Billie] filled even a black hotel room with stinging, demonic weight … She was living with a trumpet player … He was as thin as a stick and his lovely, round light face, with frightened, shiny, round eyes, looked like a sacrifice impaled upon the stalk of his neck.’

  e Elizabeth Hardwick also described this same evening: ‘Once she came to see us in the Hotel Schuyler, accompanied by someone. We sat there in the neat squalor and there was nothing to do and nothing to say and she did not wish to eat. In the anxious gap, I felt the deepest melancholy in her black eyes, an abyss into which every question had fallen without an answer. She died in misery from the erosions and poisons of her fervent, felonious narcotism.’ Greer Johnson had a photograph of Elizabeth and himself in a nightclub looking ‘obviously high’, with Billie and Joe Guy and ‘other strange Mafia-type people’.

  f This assessment is dismissed out of hand by Donald Clarke, who says in his biography Wishing on the Moon that Johnson was ‘obviously prejudiced, he was clearly crazy about her’. And yet Clarke accepts the judgement of John Simmons, who was very damning of Billie in the interview he gave. This is in spite of Linda Kuehl’s description of meeting John Simmons in Los Angeles, ‘living with his mother … teeth missing, greyed, sleeping away much of the day, although still quite electric in his understated way and attractive. Undoubtedly John, like most men, had more trouble with Billie than suited his image and had to prove himself as a male and as a musician when he was with her, and we must read between the lines. She was the instant artistic legend and she was a provocateur with men and stronger than most of them.’

  g Greer Johnson describes Kirkpatrick as ‘a classical music critic, and in my opinion the greatest living harpsichordist’. In a separate interview Kirkpatrick said Billie came to his apartment in 1943, and ‘While she put away the better part of a bottle of rum, I played Bach for her. Her face registered everything; no manifestation of the music seemed to escape her. I am not sure if she knew who Bach was, but I could have used her as an infinitely sensitive precision instrument to monitor my performance of the G-minor English Suite, using the subtle variations of expression on her face to show me with uncanny infallibility what was coming off and what was not.’

  h John Hammond and Leonard Feather. Quoted in Clarke, p. 242.

  i Elizabeth Hardwick said she came along to the session, but Greer Johnson doesn’t mention her as being present.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jimmy Rowles

  ‘Oh, I loved her! Oh, how I loved her!’

  Jimmy Rowles had to get himself ready for this interview. He had to get himself a couple of drinks, because if he is going to talk about Lady Day, he is going to need to feel good.

  A few years ago he was disgusted with a lot of things. He was taking drugs and drinking heavily
; he needed a pint of gin or vodka in the morning, just to find the energy to get out of bed and get started. He used to sit on the floor in the middle of the living-room and he’d put on the record Lady in Satin, which Billie made towards the end of her life.

  He’d put on the record and sit there, and the full orchestra with all those strings would be playing, and her familiar voice would soak into him and he’d pray with all his heart that she’d come back and sing – just for one day.

  ‘One day, one day, it would be nice!’ he says. She could come to sing at the Forum Theater in Hollywood and he would make sure he got a good ticket for the show and he would be right there, close to the stage, watching her every movement, luxuriating in her sound, being happy again. ‘I knew it wouldn’t come through, but I used to pray anyway. And sit and curse and carry on. Funny thing, man!’

  As Jimmy Rowles speaks about Billie, it’s as if she has stepped silently into the room where he and Linda Kuehl are sitting, the tape recorder catching his words.* It’s as if Billie is standing there right in front of him and watching him, a milk glass full of gin in her hand and the same wistful smile on her face, which has hardly changed since the first photograph of her was taken when she was four or five years old.

  And as Jimmy Rowles speaks, you begin to understand that he really did love to be close to this woman, to be part of her world, under her spell. He says, ‘I remember her turning around and looking and laughing, and maybe you’d play some tune and she’d hug you and say something like “I love you!” And if she said “I love you!”, boy, you heard it! She used to growl it out!… And she liked to have you tell her you loved her. Of course I told her! I told her all the time! Everybody used to tell her. You couldn’t help it! She’d do something and you’d have to say, “Oh Jesus Christ, how I love your ass!” She’d say something, do something, sing something, and all over the place people would be saying, “How I love her!” It just came out of people.’