With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  † Anslinger said that treatment centres would ‘elevate a most despicable trade to the status of an honorable business … and drug addicts would multiply unrestrained to the irrevocable impairment of the moral fibre and physical welfare of the American people’ (Anslinger, p. 186).

  ‡ This includes Roy Harte, who went with her on holiday to Cuba in 1943; Leonard Feather, who travelled with her to England; Memry Midgett, who was on tour with her in 1955; and her lawyer and friend Earle Zaidins, who was close to her towards the end of her life. When I spoke to Ditti Smit van Damme, a doctor specializing in drug addiction in Holland, she said that some very strong personalities can keep their heroin intake under control and can also move from ‘snorting’ to injecting at will.

  § A study of jazz musicians made by the psychologist Charles Winick in 1957 showed that ‘heroin use was concentrated in the 25–39 age group, after which it tapered off to very little. As one forty-three-year-old jazzman said, ‘There were just longer and longer periods between the times when I took a shot. I guess you could say I diminuendoed out of it.’

  ‖ Quoted in Lesley Gourse, A Billie Holiday Companion, 1997, p. 41.

  a As jazz trumpeter Red Rodney said, heroin became ‘the thing that made us different from the rest of the world … It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club.’ The long list of musicians who used heroin during this period includes Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz and Bill Evans.

  b The saxophone player Stan Getz was arrested in the 1940s, but after a brief stay in prison his career was not affected. As Billie said, ‘Don’t forget, I’m black and he’s white.’ Stan Getz worked with Billie at the Storyville Club in Boston in 1951 and said, ‘I marvelled how strong she was for a person who had taken so many knocks from life, and at her honesty as an artist’ (Chilton, p. 142).

  c Nicholson, p. 175. The Cabaret Card scheme came into force in 1939 as a means of controlling people, and especially potential Communists who were ‘not of good character’ and who might pose a threat to the security of the US. It became unlawful for a club to hire someone who was without a card. An appeal could be made every two years. Stan Getz did not lose his Cabaret Card because of drug offences, but Bud Powell and Sonny Stitt both did, although they got them back after a lawyer took on their cases. Thelonious Monk was without his for six years. Miles Davis was told his would be withdrawn if he made a complaint about police brutality after he was hit over the head outside the Birdland Club in 1959.

  d Vail, p. 128.

  e Margolick, p. 94. This sounds more as if Billie was drunk. Heroin users have a sleepy way of talking, but blurred ‘dribbling’ speech is more symptomatic of alcohol.

  f William Dufty ghostwrote a total of forty books during his lifetime. Apart from Lady Sings the Blues, he was most famous for Sugar Blues, which was about healthy eating habits and was inspired by his meeting with, and subsequent marriage to, Gloria Swanson, the star of the silent screen. Sugar Blues was dedicated to ‘Billie Holiday whose death changed my life and Gloria Swanson whose life changed my death’.

  g Norman Granz to William Dufty, letters dated 2 August and 19 August 1955.

  h With a typical journalistic turn of phrase, Dufty used to refer to Billie as ‘my late ex-wife-to-be’, while she spoke of him more simply as ‘that faggot’.

  i Letter to A. D. Weinberger, 21 October 1956.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Jimmy Fletcher

  ‘She was the loving type.’

  Listening to Jimmy Fletcher’s voice, you don’t get the sense that he is drunk or high; but he does sound very nervous and it obviously costs him a lot of emotional effort to tell the story he wishes to tell. The transcript of the interview runs to thirty-seven pages. I read it through four times as I tried to disentangle what was being said, and only then could I begin to fit the various sequences of events together. I suddenly realised that Jimmy Fletcher was struggling to tell the truth about the past, even though the truth was painful to him and he was still burdened by the way he felt he had betrayed his friendship with Billie Holiday.

  Jimmy Fletcher had been trained as a federal narcotics agent and he was quick to condemn anyone who was caught up in ‘that business’ of narcotics. But he was also aware that in Billie’s case it was her fame, her colour and her peculiar mixture of defiance and vulnerability that got her into such deep trouble. After all there were many others in the entertainment business who were not pursued so remorselessly, or punished so harshly once they had been caught.

  Jimmy Fletcher was born in Princeton, New Jersey, at around the same time that Billie was born. He attended Howard University in Washington and became an employee of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics not long after he had completed his studies. He seems to have been chosen for the job because he was a black man who knew how to move easily between the black and the white worlds. On top of that, he was good at mixing with criminals and was quick to establish friendships with a number of notorious gangsters.

  Jimmy Fletcher was working in Chicago in the late 1930s when he got to know Joe Glaser, the man who later became Billie’s agent. He said that at the time Joe Glaser was ‘messing around with Al Capone’s set … and he had quite an underworld record’. He was a manager of prize fighters and used to fix their fights. He had a string of whorehouses and a fondness for under-age girls, which landed him in court on two occasions. He also proudly proclaimed that ‘nobody liked a bit of nigger pussy’ better than he. He must have included Billie in that category because Jimmy Fletcher remembered seeing the two of them together ‘way back in the thirties’ at the Grand Hotel nightclub in Chicago. For years afterwards Joe Glaser often referred to himself as one of Billie’s boyfriends.

  When Joe Glaser became an agent for several important entertainers, he brought his gangster skills to this new profession. He was said to have a ‘wonderful ability to lie with total impunity’, and one New York club owner described him as ‘the most obscene, the most outrageous and the toughest agent I’ve ever bought an act from’.* But people felt that he was at least openly corrupt. There were others who were much more devious in their business arrangements.

  Jimmy Fletcher also happened to be a friend of John Levy, whom he first met when he arrested him in 1934 or ’35, on a pimping charge in Kansas City. When their paths next crossed, John Levy was a ‘down-at-heels junkie’ in Chicago and Jimmy Fletcher found him leaning against a lamp-post lost in a narcotic daze. Apparently Levy managed to break his addiction to heroin;† after that he just smoked opium and ‘secured any morphine that came through’.

  John Levy became one of Jimmy Fletcher’s informers and the two men saw quite a bit of each other when they both moved to New York in the early 1940s. Jimmy had no problem with John Levy’s explanation that he was with Billie ‘because I do everything I can to get rich’, or that he ‘sometimes felt like killing her’. He also accepted that once John Levy wanted to get rid of Billie, he ‘set her up’ a couple of times, trying to get her arrested while in possession of drugs.‡

  As a black narcotics agent, Jimmy Fletcher’s main job was as a so-called ‘archive man’, mixing in the underworld to find out who was selling drugs and who was buying them, and who was ripe for prosecution. As he explained it, ‘Being an undercover man you’d better not come in talking like a preacher. When you get in the underworld your language is just as rotten and filthy as the language of the whole lot sitting near you. And after you spend ten to fifteen hours a day in the underworld spots, then you know what’s happening there, just as a sewer man would know what’s going on in the sewers.’

  As part of his work, Jimmy Fletcher often went to Clark Monroe’s Uptown House on 52nd Street, and he and Clark used to ‘run around all night together’. Billie was by then married to Clark’s brother Jimmy Monroe, and so Jimmy Fletcher got to know her as well. In those days she was already drinking ‘enough liquor for ten men and taking any drugs that came along … She would buy cocaine all
the time. She was what was called “a snorting horse”.’ He remembered talking to her about heroin. She said she used it occasionally, but she was not injecting. Anyway, she said, ‘I never let it get me. I never let it happen. I can master it.’

  Like a teacher in charge of a class of unruly children, Jimmy was always busy with his network of informers.§ As he explained it, every drug user is a potential informer, and so what might be called the creative side of his work began each time he made a simple arrest of a person caught with drugs in their possession. ‘You catch him and you ease his pain and tell him that if he cooperates, you’ll tell the judge and that might get him a light sentence, or it might let him off with nothing on him at all … You tell him he needs to bring in five or ten cases – not friends or anybody he knows in the junk world, because the first thing he thinks is “How can I do this without getting killed?” – he needs strangers who won’t suspect him. You suggest he gets someone to take him down to some district where he is not known … So then he comes back and he’s got one for you and then another. And then you’re getting somewhere!’

  Jimmy explained that an agent is only as good as his sources of information: ‘a cheap source brings you in flea cases, but an informer with a bit of personality can be trained and turned into a professional!’ Apparently the standard fee for informers was five dollars a day and the pay was added to the agent’s expense account.

  Jimmy was always able to supply his informers with large quantities of drugs, so that anyone who didn’t know his line of business would have presumed he was just a rather successful street peddler. He boasted that one time in Texas he was carrying a hundred ounces of heroin himself. As he explained it, he had to teach a new recruit to ‘climb the echelons of peddlers’, giving him quarter-ounces and then half-ounces to sell, ‘until you’re willing to get him on up to buying five, ten ounces’. At that stage in the proceedings it was necessary for Jimmy to consult his immediate superior and get permission from the Bureau’s main office in Washington.

  Jimmy was sure, or at least he said he was sure, about the moral justification for the kind of work he was doing. He was very insistent that the people he caught had only themselves to blame, because ‘you victimise yourself by becoming a junkie’. Nevertheless he was still painfully aware that what he called ‘the law in general’ was riddled with corruption and it was the little people who tended to get caught, while the fat cats could always avoid prosecution.

  He described a New York ‘shooting gallery’ run by a ‘very noted junkie prostitute madam’ called Suzy West. This was a small first-floor apartment next to the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. The rooms were used by junkie-prostitutes who brought their clients there, and junkies could ‘go shooting there all night, twenty-four hours of the day’. But Suzy West had ‘such good connections and she sold so much stuff for the Italian bunch’ that no one wanted to cause her any trouble. Jimmy said the police raided her establishment once a week, ‘as regular as clockwork’, but these raids were just symbolic, and every Saturday the police collected $500 from Suzy’s, as a token of her appreciation. It was important, for the sake of the official records, that a certain amount of heroin was occasionally found on these raids, but then Suzy only needed to make one telephone call and a new supply was delivered at once.

  By 1947 Billie had become a regular visitor to Suzy’s and that was when the enforcers of the law were very keen to have her arrested; it was just a question of getting the timing and the circumstances right. According to Jimmy Fletcher, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the FBI and the local police departments had been keeping files on her ‘from the beginning’‖ and she was being constantly pursued by various agents who were keen to make a ‘lovely big case’ against her and were ‘covering her ground, keeping her under observation, night and day’. But it was not just the forces of law that were involved, for Jimmy said there were also ‘plenty of small-timers who never reached her stardom and, oh my God, there is so much animosity between them, all the way up the ladder … Entertainers have all got enemies, jealous, envious enemies, and there were people who’d say, “Why don’t you catch Billie Holiday? She’s so high she can’t sing!” ’

  The chance to fix Billie’s arrest, and to be sure that she was sent to jail, came in 1947, when Joe Glaser decided that his client needed to be ‘taught a lesson’. It is impossible to know what Glaser’s real motives were; as he himself said, he knew hundreds of junkies; about one-third of the entertainers on his books were using either heroin or cocaine, and part of his job as an agent was to make sure they were protected. It is possible that he was in a situation where he was forced into making some sort of a deal with Harry Anslinger; or it might have been that he was busy with a personal vendetta against Billie and simply wanted to hurt her, especially since he knew she was terrified of ever being incarcerated again. Be that as it may, it is certain that Joe Glaser helped to engineer Billie’s arrest, and he severely prejudiced her case by making sure that she had no legal representation when she was brought before the judge.

  And so it happened that one day in the spring of 1947, Jimmy was summoned to his office for a ‘confidential conversation’ with one of his superiors. A message had come through from Anslinger saying that ‘Joe Glaser wants a coloured agent to work on getting a case against Billie Holiday.’ Jimmy was told that Glaser was very upset because Billie’s mother was ‘starving to death, in New England, I think it was, or New Jersey, while Billie was making $750 a week and spending it all on narcotics’. And that was presented as the moral justification for hunting her down, although numerous other reasons were produced later and they all contradicted each other.

  Jimmy went to meet Joe Glaser for lunch at the Palm Tavern on 5th Avenue, and Joe Glaser told him ‘the entire story … He confided about Billie being his girl and he’d like to save her, and the only way to save her is to have her knocked out by the government.’ Joe Glaser went on to explain that he had spoken to Anslinger and had been given a guarantee that if he helped the Bureau to get Billie arrested, in return the Bureau would ‘hook and crook’ on his behalf – by which it was meant that his part in the whole affair would not be included in any of the legal reports.

  The two men met again on several occasions and Joe Glaser was able to use his information as Billie’s agent to say exactly where she was going to be performing and even whom she was planning to meet. He apparently kept repeating his mantra about how he ‘only wanted to save Billie and this was the only way.’

  And so the necessary machinery was set in motion and Jimmy’s team of informers were told to be on the lookout. A man known as Stiffleg Baltimore was puffing with excitement when he turned up to say, ‘Oh man, have I got a case for you! I just sold Billie Holiday thirty-six caps of heroin for eighty dollars!’a And then there was Sam, ‘a storming-down, big-shot peddler pimp … who had done so much time in the penitentiary that he was pathetic’; he was eager to explain how much heroin he had sold to Billie over the last six years. But Jimmy didn’t think that either of these leads was strong enough.b

  At this time Billie was living upstairs at the Braddock Hotel on 8th Avenue with the trumpeter Joe Guy, who was known to be a junkie and bought an ounce of heroin every day from some connection in New York.c All the pimps and the pros hung out at the Braddock and the place was raided quite regularly, especially since it did not have Suzy West’s ring of protection.d

  Jimmy had been involved in some of the Braddock raids and had ‘caught Billie in the net’ a couple of times, but then he had not been after her, so they had simply talked and made jokes like old friends. But now that she was a target, things were different. Jimmy arrived at the hotel with his colleague, a white man called Cohen, and they knocked on Billie’s door, saying they had come to deliver a telegram.

  ‘Stick it under the door!’ she said.

  ‘It’s too big to go under the door! We’ll take it back if you don’t open!’

  And so she let them in. She was on her own. Jimmy said he was
embarrassed and wanted to leave the room as quickly as possible, and so he said to her, ‘Billie, why don’t you make a short case of this and, if you’ve got anything, why don’t you just turn it over to us? Then we won’t be searching all around, pulling out your clothes and everything. So why don’t you do that?’

  But Jimmy’s partner Cohen didn’t like this idea. He wanted a policewoman to be brought up to the apartment, to do a body search.

  When Billie heard this plan she said, ‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip. All I want to say is will you search me and let me go? All that policewoman is going to do is look up my pussy!’

  And so Billie undressed in front of the two narcotics agents, while they stood at the door of the bathroom and watched her. Then she snatched a thin gown from the floor and put it over her shoulders, and she went to the lavatory and urinated, standing over the bowl, while staring at the two men.

  ‘No, no, Billie, you don’t have to do that!’ said Cohen, trying to close the bathroom door to give her some privacy. But she slammed the door open and went on urinating, forcing him to watch her, forcing both of them to see her nakedness and her defiance.

  Jimmy said something happened to him during that encounter. ‘She sealed our friendship. She sealed herself closer to me that morning, when we went to raid her’ he explained in the interview.

  Before he and Cohen left the room, Jimmy took Billie to one side. ‘I promised her that I would talk this over with the US Commissioner.e I told her, “I don’t want you to lose your job!” ’ It is not clear what her response was to this offer, or if he really was able to do anything to help her.

  Jimmy remembered meeting Billie again in Philadelphia. He had been sent to catch her in a hotel room after a tipoff, but when he got there all she was doing was drinking spirits and there were no drugs to be found. The singer Sarah Vaughan had just been arrested on a drugs charge, and Billie started shouting about ‘how the bastards had locked up her friend!’ She grabbed hold of Jimmy and said, ‘I want you to do me a favour. Go there and get Sarah out!’