With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Jimmy explained to Billie that his superiors were ‘tickled to death’ by all the big publicity they were getting because of the arrest, but still he did what Billie asked of him and he managed to get Sarah Vaughan let off. In the interview he was very proud of his ability to get his own way in such matters. He said it was because he always knew exactly how to make a report to the office.

  The next time Jimmy saw Billie was at a party. She was so drunk she could hardly stand and she was on the arm of a wealthy white Ford plant executive whom she called ‘My Daddy’ and who was as drunk as her. And then Jimmy came across her by chance in a bar, and he sat with her and Chiquita (her Chihuahua) and they talked together for hours.f

  And then there was another meeting. This was when Jimmy went with the entire office of fifteen or sixteen men for a birthday celebration at Club Ebony. He said the other agents were keen to hear Billie singing because they were all ‘nuts about her sexually’. The picture girl at the club took photos of some of them hugging her.g Half the group went home early, but the rest stayed on drinking until the small hours, and Jimmy said that Billie ‘was dancing with each and every one. And I had so many close conversations with her about so many things …’

  After all this, it was just what Jimmy Fletcher called ‘my bad luck’ that he should be the one brought in for the next raid on Billie. A group of agents headed by a man known as Max G. had tried to catch her in Philadelphia.h They said they had found four ounces of heroin in her empty car and they attempted to arrest her when she arrived at the scene accompanied by three men. She claimed they could prove nothing about the heroin, and in the confusion that followed a fight broke out. Billie and her friends managed to bundle themselves into their car, but as they drove off, Max G. took out his .45 and ‘shot a whole lot of bullet holes into it’. The car swerved and the fender was buckled, but the vehicle got away.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon of that same day Jimmy was about to leave his office in New York. He had his overnight bag with him and he was planning to catch a train home to Washington, DC. He was already standing in the hall and waiting for the elevator when his superior, Colonel Williams, called out, ‘Reeny, John, Philip? Who’s back there? Are any agents back in the room there?’

  ‘I hollered, “Yes, what is it, Mr Williams?”

  ‘ “Where are you on your way to?” he said.

  ‘ “Well,” I mumbled, “I’m on my way to Washington.”

  ‘ “Like hell you are! You find some agents! Call their homes! And you get to Newark, under that viaduct! Pick up on Billie Holiday and her group and stick with her till Monday morning!”

  ‘I was reluctant,’ said Jimmy Fletcher, talking about it so many years later. ‘After all, when you form some sort of friendship with anybody, it’s not pleasant to get involved with criminal activities against that person.’

  But there was nothing he could do – orders were orders. He tried to find an agent to help him, but no one was available. He went to the Newark viaduct, but Billie and her friends had gone into New York by a different route. Jimmy had information that they might be heading for the Grampion Hotel, so he went there.

  He found a green Cadillac parked outside the hotel. He had no torch with him, but with the help of some matches and a lighter he was able to tell it was Billie’s getaway car because the fender had been damaged and then straightened out, and he could see the bullet holes made by Max G.’s .45.

  Jimmy sat in his rented car and watched the hotel. He saw Billie leaving in a yellow cab and followed her to Kelly’s Stables, where she was singing that week. He sat outside the club until five or six in the morning, when he saw her leaving in another cab. She went to Suzy West’s place. He waited for her to emerge from there and then he followed her back to the Grampion.i

  Jimmy knew that the Bureau was getting the warrants ready for Billie’s arrest and that was why they wanted him to keep an eye on her. And so he watched her until Monday morning, then phoned through to the office and explained where she was to be found. As soon as a couple of relief agentsj turned up, he drove his car back to the office, grabbed his overnight bag and headed straight for Washington, DC and his lost weekend.

  Billie and Joe Guy were searched and arrested when the police found a syringe containing heroin outside the door. As Jimmy said, ‘They had nothing against her, no possession … They got her as a circumstantial witness, in being involved in the shoot-out and being present. The charge against her was as a fugitive from justice. That was the exact charge. She threw herself on the mercy of the court … She didn’t have to throw herself. They didn’t have enough of a case against her.’k

  All the time that Jimmy was talking I kept trying to find clues to what he thought of Billie’s character. At one point he said, ‘She was the type that would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type’; by that he seemed to mean that she gave her love to people, as she had to him when they danced and talked, and that there was something in her manner that made her desirable to everyone who came into contact with her. He also said that she ‘couldn’t rate’ as a prostitute because ‘she was such a crazy girl. She didn’t want to just go out with a man. She wanted to be with a man all the time.’

  Just as the interview was coming to an end, Jimmy said that after the arrest Billie never called upon him for help of any kind, even though she must have known that he would have done what he could for her and might have been able to get her off the hook.

  He said Billie did make contact several years later. This was in 1957 and she sent him a telegram from California, telling him that Bill Dufty had written the story of her life and she thought he would like to know. Jimmy found it nice that she wanted to tell him.

  * Ward and Burns, p. 215.

  † Throughout this chapter it is John Levy the pimp who is being referred to. Jimmy Fletcher said Levy cured himself of his heroin addiction when ‘he went to a little place in Illinois … He was a heroin addict, but he was not a real junkie. He had never gone long enough to get hooked and he went back to smoking hop [opium].’

  ‡ Jimmy Fletcher described one occasion when Billie and John Levy had been smoking hop together in a hotel room, and Levy crept out while she was sleeping and informed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that she was there. But Billie suspected something and, when the agents arrived, the room was empty.

  § Jimmy Fletcher said Billie ‘was smart because she never sold anything, never handled it, and she didn’t inform me and she wasn’t an informer’.

  ‖ The FBI started their files on Billie in around 1940 after she sang ‘Strange Fruit’ at Café Society.

  a Jimmy Fletcher could have used this information as what was called ‘a dated buy’, but he would have needed two more such examples to make a case, and he wanted something bigger and clearer.

  b She was buying two ounces a week from Sam, but all the peddlers were keen to ‘take advantage of her. They’d catch her in a crack time. She’s sick. She has to go on and what she really wants is a couple of fixes, but they wouldn’t think of letting her have it that small and they’d sell her half an ounce for about a hundred and fifty dollars and many asked her five hundred dollars.’

  c Billie’s boxer dog Mister was said to be very skilled as a carrier, wearing a collar that was designed to carry an ounce of heroin. Joe Guy would buy his ounce, put it in the collar and tell the dog to go ahead. The elevator operator was in on the conspiracy and would carry the dog up in the elevator to the top floor.

  d The Braddock was a ‘notorious hangout for prostitutes and pimps’ and the army had asked for it to be declared ‘raided premises’. There was a ban on racially mixed couples, and police even entered rooms to eject white persons. A policeman was always on duty in the lobby. See Brandt, p. 184.

  e Harry Anslinger. Obviously at this point Billie was not going to lose her job, since they still hadn’t got enough against her. I suppose what Jimmy Fletcher means is that she was bound to lose her job eventually, if the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics went on hunting her.

  f He asked her how she had managed to bring a Chihuahua out of Texas, because it was against the law to import them. She opened the front of her dress and ‘she had nothing on but that gown and said, “Here’s how I brought him”, putting the little dog between her tits with just his head sticking out – everybody was looking.’

  g Jimmy Fletcher got these photos back later and ‘melted them down’ when he realised they could be used as incriminating evidence once Billie was under arrest. He told his chief ‘a little white lie’ about where he and the others had been that night.

  h Jimmy Fletcher’s story of Billie’s arrest on 19 May 1947 and the events leading up to it is different in many respects from the other versions, but perhaps that doesn’t make it less accurate.

  i Billie claimed that the Grampion stole all her belongings when she was arrested. This information was going to be included in Lady Sings the Blues, but it was removed, for fear that the hotel might sue.

  j According to Stuart Nicholson’s researches, the hotel was raided at 5 a.m., by six officers.

  k This is the same case that Bobby Tucker was referring to and that led to Billie being sentenced to a year’s imprisonment at Alderson, West Virginia. It was because of this prison sentence that she was denied her Cabaret Card in New York. Apart from getting her into trouble in the first place, Joe Glaser was the only person who could have got her out of trouble, when she was released from prison, by getting her Cabaret Card restored to her. As Dolores Herzog said, ‘Joe Glaser could cut corners when he wanted to. He could swing things, bring power to bear. He knew where the skeletons were buried, and if he wanted something done, he had it done!’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Colonel White and Friends

  ‘A straight business thing.’

  In the company of the narcotics agent Colonel George White and his two friends – one a lawyer and the other a doctor – you enter a world where it is almost impossible to disentangle the truth from the blatant lies, or the honest person from the bunch of crooks.

  While telling their own versions of the arrest and subsequent trial of Billie Holiday on a narcotics charge in 1949, it seems that these three men were so at ease with the idea of corruption and double standards in their respective law-enforcement, legal and medical professions that they felt there was no need to explain the contradictions and unanswered questions that emerged as the case unfolded.

  Each man had his own reasons for behaving as he did, whether he was motivated by financial greed, obedience to someone with higher authority or the simple desire to spit in the face of the idea of justice. As Colonel White said about his friend, the lawyer Jake Ehrlich, ‘If I told him he was a conniving shyster-lawyer, he’d laugh and think it was a great compliment.’

  Colonel White was proud to be one of the most successful narcotics agents in the business. He was also proud of his reputation for heavy-handedness.* He said he believed in being firm, and when he was arresting someone he had always found it better to punch them in the stomach straight away, rather than hesitating and maybe having to shoot them dead a few moments later.

  When Colonel White was being interviewed in 1971, he was full of nostalgia for the good old days of the 1940s and ’50s, when the job had been so much more fun and crooks would buy three or four kilos of pure heroin at a time because, as he put it, ‘they understood the meaning of a good investment’. They might then cook the heroin with milk, but they didn’t fool around with it, didn’t kill anybody with it, didn’t mix it with anything really dangerous like rat poison or horse tranquillisers.

  In those happier days, Colonel White had been on friendly terms with many of the Italian hoodlums and Mafia men; people like Joe Adonis. He used to meet up with them regularly and they would talk and play chess together. Of course they understood that sometimes he had to arrest one or two of them and maybe punch them in the nose in the process, or even testify against them in court, but still it was what he called ‘a straight business thing’. And when they were arrested, White was sure to have ‘something substantial’ against them. This meant that either they would agree to turn informer and bring in some good connections for him, or they would be brought before a judge and jury and found guilty, no matter what sort of a lawyer they had employed to fight their case.

  Colonel White explained that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics used to have a book in which it listed the names of all the national and international drugs traffickers who were considered to be major public enemies. The task for people like him was continuously to widen the net of contacts and informers and every so often arrest those who were chosen as targets for prosecution.

  Of course there was a file on Billie Holiday, but Colonel White said she was not considered an important target, since she had never been a dealer or an informer. She was simply a ‘sometime addict’ who was known to have used marijuana, heroin, cocaine and opium and who was hurting nobody but herself in the process. Colonel White realised that it was not usual to put such a person in jail, unless there was some other reason for it.

  But that was exactly the problem. Although Billie was not a ‘public enemy’, she was what Colonel White called a ‘very attractive customer’ and it was obvious that she could provide the Bureau with some very good publicity. And after all, if she did get into trouble, he felt she had ‘brought it upon her own house’ because she was so ostentatious. ‘She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewellery and her gowns – she was the big lady wherever she went and a good deal of resentment was generated.’ On top of that, Billie was not a very stable personality, and as a ‘prominent person’ she was under an obligation to be extra-circumspect in the way she lived her life.

  Ever since her release from Alderson women’s prison, in March 1948, Billie had been in the public eye, but from the way the popular press described ‘the unforgettable lamenter of Strange Fruit in the million bucks worth of silver blu’ mink’, it seemed that her conviction in a drugs case and her ‘episodes of violence’ were much more interesting than her talent as a singer.

  Once Billie could no longer work on the New York club circuit because of the loss of her Cabaret Card, she was forced to take on a hectic schedule of performances, which had her zigzagging across the country, sometimes performing as many as five times a day, seven days a week. Three Carnegie Hall concerts in March and April were followed by a Broadway show, four weeks at the Ebony Club, one week in Philadelphia, three in Chicago and then six at the Strand Theater on Broadway. This sort of pressure had been continuing unabated when Billie opened at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood on 15 December 1948. On New Year’s Eve there was the drunken brawl in which John Levy stabbed a man in the shoulder and Billie screamed and threw dinner plates.

  On 3 January 1949 she was charged on three counts of assault and released on bail. Ten days later the charges against her were dropped, although the woman who said she had been wounded by a dinner plate took out a private lawsuit later. On 13 January Billie started a four-week engagement at Joe Tenner’s Café Society Uptown† in San Francisco. The publicity surrounding her latest arrest had proved very good for business and the crowds were so keen to come and see the ‘notorious blues singer’ that there was standing room only.

  Colonel White explained that during the first week Billie was at Joe Tenner’s, he and two of his officers picked up ‘four or five little coloured prostitutes’ on a minor drugs charge. And they all complained to him, ‘Why do you pick on little people like us, and let Billie run around and use drugs? And everybody knows she uses stuff and yet you pick on poor little things like us! Why don’t you bring her in?… Show us that you move against the rich as well as against the poor!’

  Apparently this was when the first seed of an idea was planted. A few days later, when Colonel White and his men were ‘at a loose end’ in the office, they had the sudden inspiration to ‘polish it off … to kick her over … to make the arrest’. Colonel White s
aid he realised that an outsider, or indeed Billie herself, might think it was a pre-arranged plan that had finally grown ripe and ready for execution, but he insisted this wasn’t the case. As far as he and his men were concerned, arresting Billie was done on a whim and was a way of passing time.‡

  In those days a search warrant wasn’t needed for an arrest, just so long as the case was brought before the State Court and not the Federal Court. And so this little group of determined law-enforcers set off to the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco’s red-light district, where they knew Billie and John Levy were staying. They checked with the hotel receptionist that their two suspects were indeed at home, and then they went on up and knocked on the door of room number 203.

  Colonel White couldn’t remember if he and his men went through the familiar ritual of pretending they had a telegram to deliver, or if they simply kicked the door open. As they entered, John Levy picked up a glass bottle that had been turned into an opium pipe and a small quantity of opium wrapped in paper, and he handed them to Billie. She fled obediently into the bathroom, threw the bottle and the packet into the toilet bowl and tried to flush them away. In her haste she managed to topple headlong into the bathtub, but was not hurt. Colonel White fished out the incriminating evidence and announced that he was arresting John Levy and Billie and taking them to the county jail.

  In the interview White said there was no indication that the opium had been used, and when he and his men searched the room they found no other drugs and not even any alcohol. He said Billie was wearing heavy silk pyjamas and she was sober and clear-headed. She didn’t swear or complain; she just sat there, very quiet and passive. Colonel White said he examined her arms and found old needle scars, but no new ones.