With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Jimmy goes back to when he first met Billie, in Hollywood in May 1942. He was a young white boy, fresh from college and ‘still green, but starting in on getting a little darker’. He was playing piano in the Lee and Lester Young Band† when he heard that Billie was coming to work with them at Billy Berg’s Trouville club. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t wait for her to arrive.

  And suddenly there she was. Jimmy says, ‘I was in awe of her. When I first met that girl, she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was big, but she didn’t seem big. She was just strong, you know. Her skin was like satin, like the tune “Satin Doll”. Her skin was flawless. And she was graceful. Watching her was like watching a dream walk through the room. Even if she was jumping around with slacks on.’

  The band used to rehearse together every morning and she came to every rehearsal and he got to know her style. ‘She liked pure harmony; she didn’t want to hear anything that would distract. She would stray ahead with her intonation and if you played something atonal like a chord, and threw it at her all of a sudden, she’d say, “Don’t do that! Don’t play that fucking chord! I can’t hear my note!” ’

  But it was Billie’s sexuality that most impressed Jimmy Rowles, and it was her sexuality that he keeps referring to all through the interview. He says, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about her sex life. Whatever she wanted to do was all right with me … But sex had a lot to do with it, because she was a sexy singer. She sang from her crotch. You bet she had the greatest crotch in life. Now that I look back, I’m sorry I missed it.’‡

  Billie never had female dressers or make-up girls to help her get ready for a show; she just liked to be there together with the band, joking, drinking, smoking, putting on her make-up, while all those men were milling around her. ‘Lady Day was like one of the cats,’ says Jimmy Rowles. ‘She had no complexes, no personality problems. She was open from the beginning. She was always the same.’

  Very often she’d be naked, and at that time she had her hair dyed red and her pubic hair dyed red as well.§ ‘And she’d just stand there with just a pair of shoes on, and it got so that I loved her all the more because she was so gorgeous, beautiful … and every night I saw her body, every inch of her body.’ When she was in the dressing room she’d often call Jimmy Rowles over and say something like, ‘I want the chords to this tune, I want to sing this tune’, and he’d scribble down the chords and ‘whatever she wanted to sing, we had to make sure we knew it.’

  When Jimmy met her, Billie still hadn’t started on heroin, so she was just smoking reefers and drinking gin. Jimmy thought she was probably more happy than she had ever been, or ever would be again, because things were going so well and on top of that she was working with Lester Young. Jimmy knew that when Lester played for her ‘She felt as if she was in her mother’s arms; she was always happy when Lester was playing for her because of what he did for her, because he was there with her. The two of them were perfectly matched. They belonged together.’

  At first Jimmy presumed that Billie had come to Hollywood ‘to fuck Lester’,‖ but a couple of days after Billie arrived, she moved in with the other tenor player, ‘Bumps’ Mayer. He was ‘very even-minded, relaxed, nice, never any trouble unless things got real mean and then … he might kill somebody. He could take care of himself, that’s for sure. He was just a big strong bull, a docile bull. He had the deepest voice you ever heard, a down-in-here voice, and it was beautiful to hear him talk. He never got mad and they got along well together. He handled her very nicely.’

  Jimmy Rowles remembers the first time he spoke to Billie on her own. It was about a week after she’d arrived in Hollywood and they had just finished rehearsing. He was sitting at the end of the bar and he saw her come in. He called to her, ‘Lady, can I buy you a taste?’

  ‘So she sits down beside me. I bought her gin and Coke. Can you imagine drinking that shit? I didn’t know what to talk to her about, but I remembered a tenor player called Dick Wilson, and for some funny reason I asked her about Dick Wilson.’

  ‘She put her drink down. She asked me, did I ever know Dick Wilson? And she said, “I’m going to tell you something. I was going with Freddie Green and I was true to that motherfucker. But every time I saw Dick Wilson, I just had to take him out and fuck him!” ’

  Jimmy Rowles was bowled over. ‘She just about wiped me out. I couldn’t believe that chick! The first time I had heard anything come out from a chick like that! Crazy chick! She had me then. What can you do after that? You have to love her!’

  He was also fascinated by Billie’s relationship with Lester Young and tried to understand whatever it was that bound the two of them together.a ‘The way he and Lady Day got along was really strange. They’d go together like that praying mantis that devours the old man when they’re through making it. That’s my own image for them. He was a weird guy anyway. If there ever was a unique individual, this man was it! And his language! You couldn’t understand him unless you worked with him for three months.b … Lady was never all over him, like always sitting together. She went her way, he went his. But she’d say, “Well, Pres! I can smell him! I know he’s here and so it’s good!” ’

  Jimmy Rowles would watch Billie come out of her dressing room after a show was over, ‘And she’s rough, and I mean rough!’ And then Lester would appear from behind a pillar, pigeon-toed, with his mincing walk and his high whispery voice. Jimmy Rowles says they had the funniest way of meeting: she’d be hugging him and then she’d move back. ‘They were like goldfish or something. And they went through their little trip. They had the funniest way of looking at each other. It was like brother and sister, but another thing. He was so strange, he was like a visitor. And she was, too. And you put the two of them together and it’s pretty wild. But they’d just touch and get their guns off and it was cool, until the next time they’d bump into each other around the club.’

  Lester would say, ‘How are you, Miss Lady Day? Lady Day?’ Puffing out his pale cheeks and bobbing up and down in a long dark coat, a milk glass full of old Schenley bond proof whiskey clasped in his hand, and the flat black porkpie hat fixed to his head as if it grew there.

  And Billie would say, ‘Hey, Buppa Baby,c you motherfucker!’ and they’d be smiling and weaving and touching and parting, until the next encounter took place later in the night. Jimmy Rowles says it was ‘like accidental joy. And Billie was happy all the time.’

  The stories continue. One time Billie had a birthday party. ‘Bumps’ Mayer was on his way out by then and Billie’s first husband, Jimmy Monroe, was just out of jail and had come back to claim her.d Jimmy Rowles had nothing to say against Jimmy Monroe and didn’t want to put him down, but all the same he was ‘a little disappointed’ when he first met the man, because Jimmy Monroe was only ‘a teeny fella, a pimpy cat, high collar, a real conk, all that shit, a greasy little motherfucker’.

  But at least Monroe was better than most of Billie’s other men. According to Jimmy Rowles, ‘The trouble was, Billie was a fool for cats. She’d go from one to another. She went through the whole zoo and finally she got to the leopard cage.’ By this he seems to be referring to Billie’s manager, John Levy, whom he calls ‘that hoodlum Mafia cat’.e

  Anyway, here is Billie at her own birthday party, dancing around in a tiny room. Her records are playing on the gramophone and three or four white girls are there as well. Suddenly the door opens and in comes a man called Leo Watson, whom Jimmy Rowles describes as a ‘powerful little cat, strong like a gorilla and with a reputation for wildness’. Billie goes on dancing and, after a few drinks, Leo Watson gets louder and louder, and after a couple more he starts swearing.

  Billie turns to Jimmy Monroe and she says, ‘You get that son-of-a-bitch out of here!’

  So Monroe tries to talk to Leo Watson, which Jimmy Rowles says is ‘like trying to have a conversation with Gargantua, and he didn’t get nowhere’.

  Meanwhile Billie is dancing and getting high and watching what is happe
ning, and Leo Watson is getting louder and louder. Suddenly Billie picks up a batch of her own records, and she smashes them down on Leo’s head, almost knocking him through the floor. ‘Then she grabbed him, and the blood is coming out of his head and his hair is sticking up and he’s screaming and he’s bleeding, and she picked him up and said, “Open the door.” And they threw open the door for her, and she threw Leo Watson clear across the hall and he hit the wall, boom! And she slammed the door and came back and put another record on, and started dancing and snapping her fingers.’

  Jimmy Rowles also tells the story of the New Year’s Eve celebrations at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood.f ‘It was about a minute to twelve, place was really packed and another band was playing, and there’s a curtain there closing off the kitchen and Lady Day spent a lot of time there with a one-legged chef. And all of a sudden there is this terrifying noise, this screaming, and she’s cursing and she’s throwing plates and tearing the kitchen apart, and it’s a big rumpus.

  ‘And from behind the curtain comes a cat I’ve never seen before, an ofay, and he’s got a white shirt on, no tie; and in one hand he’s got a basket of biscuits and he’s got a twelve-inch butcher’s knife buried in his left shoulder, about a quarter inch above his heart. And the blood is gushing out and his eyes are glazed, and he’s coming at me and he’s in shock, and he’s two feet from me and he’s going gagagaga! And I say, “Holy Christ!”, and I went right under the piano backwards clear across the stage!’

  Jimmy tells another story about Billie getting badly beaten by John Levy, who was ‘jumping up and down on her stomach, beating the shit out of her … So she aches and burns and her crotch hurts, which is great because that’s where she sings from. So she starts to think what she’s going to sing, and she thinks she’s going to sing “My Man”! And she’s not even made up yet and Billy Berg is saying, “Jesus Christ, you’d better go down there and get that motherfucker off her so she can get up here to sing a tune.” ’

  But neither Jimmy, nor Billie’s other pianist Bobby Tucker, is brave enough to go, and so they sit and wait until she emerges, just a few minutes before she is set to sing. And Jimmy is sure that ‘By the time she gets to the bandstand she hates the world. She’s madder than a bitch, and she turns to Bobby Tucker and says, “Strange Fruit”, but that’s the end of her show, the last tune she sings.’ Bobby Tucker tries to argue with her, and she turns her anger on him and slams the lid of the piano down and he just gets his hands away in time, as it goes bam! And she says, ‘Strange Fruit’, and he says, ‘OK!’

  And then the year is 1954, and Billie has changed and her voice has taken on a drawly edge and she has slowed up, although as far as Jimmy Rowles is concerned, ‘She is still Lady Day and whatever she wants to do is all right by me. I don’t give a shit. If she wants to go to Tokyo, let’s go! That’s the way I feel!’

  They are making a record in Hollywood for the producer Norman Granz and they are working in the Radio Records Annex, just off Santa Monica Boulevard. Jimmy Rowles has the task of going to the hotel to get Billie ready for the next session. ‘I first had to go get her up,’ he says, ‘and that was a job because she’d stayed up all night. And then I’d give her a bit of juice to get her heart started. So she’s had three or four drinks – and I mean drinks! She whacks out a pint of booze, it was either vodka or gin, but probably gin, and she says, “Now I’m going to eat breakfast!”

  ‘So now she’s trying to get her shoes on and her feet are swollen and she can’t get them on. And she goes into the next room and tries to get dressed. Now I’ve seen this woman buck-naked so many times it means nothing, but she’s still coy. And she’s got this corset she’s trying to get on, and she calls me in to tie her up while she’s holding herself together. And she says, “Don’t peek!” And she’s loaded, and I’m laughing and I say, “Oh, you’re too much!” ’

  By the time she got to the studio, Billie was ready to go and it was ‘cool and fun and a lot of laughs’. Her old friends Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and Ben Websterg were doing the recording with her, but Jimmy Rowles felt the sessions didn’t go as well as they could have done, because Norman Granz was not a musician. ‘He was rather irritating in a way. He was like a stranger off the streets that came in and hung around … And he couldn’t understand it took us some time to get the chords together … He wanted to go, “One, two, three … Why don’t you play ‘How High the Moon’? All right! Set the keys and let’s go!” ’

  And Billie used to get ‘a little salty’, because she wanted it to be right. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ she said to Norman Granz. ‘Give us a couple of minutes to figure out the fucking chords on this tune!’

  * * *

  Jimmy Rowles remembers meeting Billie in the late 1950s when they hadn’t seen each other for a while. He was playing at the Roxy Theater in New York with Evelyn Knight, and after the show he was going to a Chinese restaurant across the street, when he saw Billie with her Chihuahua Pepe on a lead. He says that Pepe ‘just wanted to get down and chew all the garbage, and she’s cursing at Pepe and everybody’s stopping and saying, “Look at that terrible coloured girl!”h

  ‘And I’m standing behind her and she says, “What are you doing here?”

  ‘ “I’m at the Roxy, playing for Evelyn Knight.”

  ‘ “That fucking bitch! She’s doing the Roxy for ten thousand dollars a week and I’m still doing the fucking Apollo for one hundred and fifty! Fuck her! And fuck you!” ’i

  When Jimmy Rowles tries to protest, Billie calls him a ‘motherfucking white ofay’. And all the time the dog is still busy with its nose in the rubbish, and she is screaming and cursing, and people are standing and watching and wondering whether this is the moment to call the police. ‘Oh, I loved her! Oh, how I loved her!’ says Jimmy Rowles.

  The last time he saw her she had changed. ‘She was less humorous, more desperate, so strung out on that shit and drinking so badly … She was fighting, doing anything she could to feel good, because when you fuck with that strong shit, when you mess with that Chinaman, he drains the meat off your bones and you don’t have much energy, you don’t have nothing. You have to drink twice as much, smoke twice as much, sniff twice as much shit, to get to where you all of a sudden remember feeling how you should be …

  ‘She was fighting it out. But, on the other hand, she’d have her good days when she didn’t need to do that. When she’d feel good. But there would be mornings when she’d have to knock off a pint just to get dressed. I’ve done that myself. You keep going because of necessity, and your feet are swollen up with your shoes on. She was just beat. That’s all. I was young. I didn’t realise she was that sick. I knew she was thin, but Louis was taking care of her. He was really taking care of her.j

  ‘She said, “Louis is out of town. You have to take me home.”

  ‘She said, “You gotta feed me. I wanna go to a Chinese place.” ’

  So Jimmy Rowles took Billie to a Chinese restaurant a block away. They sat down to order, when ‘all of a sudden a young coloured cat walks into the kitchen with a tray, and she flipped. She started throwing things and swearing, yelling. “Did you see that?” she said. “There’s not a Chinaman on Earth would let a black motherfucker into his kitchen! Or a white motherfucker! This ain’t a Chinese restaurant! This is a bunch of shit!” ’k

  Eventually the manager calmed her down and the food was brought, and Jimmy Rowles took her back to her room and tucked her up in bed. ‘ “Here’s your shrimp,” I said. “Here’s your foo yong. You’ve got it all here. Now goodnight, you lovely bitch. Eat your food. Drink your gin. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  ‘She’s in bed, her titties are sticking out. And she gets all coy. “Louis is out of town, you know,” she said.’

  Jimmy Rowles did not take up the offer, even though, looking back all those years later, he wishes he had. That’s when he reassures himself. ‘I’ll fuck her after I die,’ he says.l

  * * *

  And then, right at the en
d of a long interview, Jimmy Rowles is back to the beginning again, back to Hollywood in the late spring of 1942 when he had just met Billie and they were working together for the first time. One Sunday afternoon he and his wife Dorothy went to a club where all the bands were playing; Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Duke Ellington – everybody. Billie was there and she came to sit at their table. And Jimmy Rowles remembers how Nat ‘King’ Cole got up to play and ‘He was playing real good, and Buck Clayton was playing and he was playing real good, and Lady was screaming at him, “Go on! Play it! You blue-eyed son-of-a-bitch! You motherfucker! Let ’em have it!” ’

  And over in a corner Jimmy Rowles could see Lester Young sitting by himself and saying, ‘Isn’t that nice! Isn’t that nice!’ with a glass of whiskey in his hand. And then Lester got up and ‘he started blowing and he wiped them all out!’

  ‘It was wild!’ says Jimmy Rowles. ‘It was really wild! Those that were there will remember!’

  * Jimmy Rowles was born in 1918 and died in 1996. An obituary by John Fordham in the Guardian described him as ‘a subtle, laconic and all-but-psychic pianist, who elevated the art of creative jazz accompaniment to the status of a miniaturist wonder of the world’. Linda Kuehl interviewed him on 23 August 1971, at the Montecito Hotel, Hollywood.

  † The band leader was Lester’s brother Lee (short for Leonides). He played drums and, according to Jimmy Rowles, ‘He speeds something terrible. He’ll start out slow and wind up in a horse race. And that was a drag because if he had been any kind of drummer we would have had some hell of a band. Nobody ever said a word about it.’

  ‡ Jimmy Rowles also had his own theory on Billie’s sexuality. ‘She’s a masochist. She digs punishment. She was unfortunate enough to be mentally arranged so she had to have a cat that beat the shit out of her three times a week, to keep her happy.’