With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  John Levy was wearing white silk pyjamas and did all the talking. He was known to be an opium user and he was also known to be a police informer. He now mentioned the names of some of the officers he’d ‘worked for’ and suggested that he could ‘turn the tricks’ on some very important people in the narcotics business if he was released and allowed to go back to New York, although he was very vague about the names of the people he could bring in. Colonel White found John Levy smooth and persuasive, even if he was not particularly charming. ‘He was a smart man who’d do anything to extricate himself from trouble. He gave the impression of being more of a shrewd businessman than a pimp – as pimps go, on a scale of ten, I’d have given him a seven … If he had given information, we might have settled the whole thing and let them both go, there and then. If he had just called up somebody in New York or Chicago to get them on an airplane and bring some stuff out, everything would have been fine.’

  Instead, Billie and John Levy were freed on bail, in time for her to do her usual three shows at Café Society Uptown that evening. They appeared together for a preliminary hearing on 3 February. Their lawyer, Jake Ehrlich, was a good friend of Colonel White’s. He also happened to be a good friend of Joe Tenner’s, and Tenner had agreed to pay the legal fees out of Billie’s forthcoming earnings at his club.

  As Colonel White saw it, ‘Most criminal trials are not after justice at all, they’re not after the truth. Lawyers speak a different language than ordinary people and their concerns are: “Can I prevent the jury from knowing what really happened? Can I obscure and confuse and misdirect the issue?” The whole thing is a show.’ White thought that perhaps Jake Ehrlich ‘got together’ with the District Attorney and the two of them agreed to drop the case against John Levy, who immediately packed his bags and got out of the State of California as fast as he could. And when White asked the District Attorney why this man had been allowed to go free, the answer was very simple: ‘We could have indicted Levy if we had wanted to, but Billie Holiday is the name and we want to get some publicity. Levy to us is a nothing guy!’

  Since Jake Ehrlich was employed by the club owner Joe Tenner, his first consideration was to ensure that Billie could complete her lucrative engagement at Café Society Uptown. There were also several later bookings that she needed to fulfil, otherwise she was in danger of being sued for breach of contract.

  The contracted engagement at Café Society Uptown was completed on 22 February.§ Billie then went on a tour of one-nighters that took her through northern California to Los Angeles and Chicago, ending up with a three-week engagement at the Club Bali in Washington.‖ The Club Bali had three record-breaking weeks, ending with a grand finale celebration on 7 April, Billie’s birthday. The following day she was in Baltimore and then Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and back to San Francisco, where she was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as looking ‘large and luscious in a dazzling white-beaded gown’. When she appeared on stage with a black eye, after having been beaten up by John Levy, that same newspaper observed, ‘Billie Holiday, the torchanteuse, is singing these nights with more than lumps in her throat; she had lumps elsewhere, too, after being beaten pretty brutally one night last week. She knows some lovely people!’

  By now Billie’s trial had been set for 1 June. Five days before that date Colonel White and Jake Ehrlich arranged for her to be sent to a psychiatric hospital called Twin Pines, where she was put under the care of Dr James Hamilton. The idea was to make sure that she had no drugs in her system when she was tested at the trial, although as far as one can tell there is no evidence that she was using any drugs at the time.

  So here comes the third member of this curiously crooked team. When Linda Kuehl interviewed Dr Hamilton, what he said was remarkably contradictory. He said that when Billie was brought to him she showed no signs of being addicted to heroin or to any other narcotics.a All he needed to do to keep her calm was to give her ‘enormous amounts of booze’, which, if he remembered rightly, was about nine fluid ounces a day of crème de menthe and brandy. He said, ‘She took command of the hospital. She set the hours she wanted to eat and she had her drinks when she wanted them … I mean a psychiatric hospital cook doesn’t usually act as a bartender. I arranged this for her because that’s the natural thing to do. And I can do as I damn well please!’

  On being asked what he thought about Billie’s state of mind and character when she arrived, Dr Hamilton said, ‘Billie came to me to be cured of nothing. She was a beautiful, strong, dynamic kind of person in a jam, and my natural instinct was to try to help her … She was royalty … I couldn’t find a diagnosis category. This was a superior woman, who interested me very much … an unusual person, almost an operatic tragedy figure who had this aura.’

  So far so good. But then a little later Dr Hamilton continued with his diagnosis, saying, ‘What drives Billie? I don’t like to use this word, but she’s really a psychopath; an impulse-driven, strong, talented, but not dependable woman.’ He looked at the notes he had made when Billie was in his care and added, ‘She’d had a lot of tough breaks in her life, and the tough breaks were part of the racial problem.’ Summing up his whole encounter with her, he concluded, ‘It was kind of fun. It was real fun to see this unusual person!’

  The trial opened as arranged on 1 June. Billie still had the black eye, but no trace of drugs was found in her system.b Her lawyer put forward the case that her manager John Levy had conspired with the narcotics agent Colonel White to have her arrested. A photograph was produced as evidence; it showed Colonel White and John Levy sitting companionably together at a table in Café Society Uptown.c Billie had been told to ‘act dumb’ when she was questioned, and she simply said that John Levy was her man and she loved him so. On 3 June she was acquitted.

  According to Jake Ehrlich, the whole fiasco could be blamed on John Levy. ‘He was turning Billie over to White. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s his business … Levy wanted to get rid of her. He had cleaned her out of money. She was at the end of the road. Oh, sure she was!’

  Jake Ehrlich claimed that he had really wanted to save Billie. It was not just because she was his client, but because ‘Here was a woman who was so great, she had so much heart. She was like a child with nobody to guide her … I wanted to acquit her more than I wanted to acquit anyone. Levy and those others were making a living off her body and to me the lowest scum on God’s green footstool is a pimp.’

  Such protestations were fine and dandy, but soon after the trial was over Levy invited Ehrlich and his wife to come to meet him in New York, so that the three of them could celebrate the victorious outcome. And only a year later Ehrlich was busy taking ‘this great woman’ to court, for failure to pay his legal fees. He knew that in the end all the money she had earnt had been appropriated by John Levy, who had agreed to pay her legal costs with it. But as he said, ‘This was a legal manoeuvre. Billie was the principal. She was my client. Services were given to her!’

  This story has an epilogue. In 1974 the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco decided to dedicate rooms number 203 and 204 as the Billie Holiday Suite. Apparently the rooms are ‘tastefully decorated with relics of the era’, and this includes framed newspaper reports of Billie’s arrest, her trial and subsequent acquittal.

  * According to Jimmy Fletcher, White was ‘a rotten supervisor, I can tell you. He was a drunkard. Worked coast to coast and everyone from Port Authority down to Seattle knew him as a drunkard. And mean, mean to defendants.’

  † Colonel White explained that Joe Tenner was on his list as a drugs dealer with Italian hoodlum connections. While Billie was performing, heroin was on sale in the club as well as from Joe Tenner’s house, which was just around the corner. Colonel White said that later the place went ‘down, down, down and went to the dogs and got very shabby … Then one day the agents shot the lock off the door.’

  ‡ According to the lawyer Jake Ehrlich, his ‘good and honourable friend’ Colonel White arrested Billie ‘because of some deal
ing he had with John Levy’.

  § On 10 February three zealous policemen turned up at Café Society Uptown and arrested Billie for a second time during the intermission of her show. They took her down to the county jail for more questioning and rebooked her on the old charge of opium possession.

  ‖ It was while she was in Washington that Billie was offered a substantial sum for a three-week appearance at the Royal Roost, provided she could get her Cabaret Card back, but her appeal was turned down by the Supreme Court.

  a According to Dr Hamilton, ‘If she had been addicted to heroin, she would have gotten diarrhoea and withdrawal symptoms, but she didn’t, so after five days it was perfectly apparent to me that she was not addicted.’

  b The legal problem for Ehrlich was that Billie had been charged with possession of the drugs that were thrust into her hands as the agents burst into the hotel room. Dr Hamilton said he was ‘primed’ by Ehrlich to state that Billie was not addicted to any drugs, the moment he was put on the stand. The prosecution objected, and Dr Hamilton was severely reprimanded ‘as if I had been the worst guy in the world … to expose the fact that this woman was not an addict’, but in spite of that he got the jury on his side and this led to Billie’s acquittal. At one stage in the proceedings Ehrlich told the jury, ‘We’re trying a human being here! We are not trying her for the colour of her skin!’

  c When William Dufty was going through the manuscript of Lady Sings the Blues, checking it for possible libels, he contacted Ehrlich and asked if he still had a copy of that photograph, because, ‘in a fit of pre-publication nerves, Doubleday has questioned the use of the episode because … it was referred to in the testimony, but never admitted in the record … They seem to feel that the implication of a frame … would in some way inflame Colonel White into suing Doubleday. Since this goes to the heart of the trial and your strategy, it seems worth fighting about.’ Dufty never got a reply and the scene was omitted from the book. I can’t work out if Colonel White agreed with Jake Ehrlich to get Billie let off the hook, or if he was genuinely surprised when the photograph was produced as evidence.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Carl Drinkard

  ‘We were like a family.’

  The interview with Carl Drinkard must have gone on for many hours over several days because the typewritten transcript of the tapes covers more than 130 pages. Linda Kuehl doesn’t say when she first met him, but among her other papers there is a letter that suggests they became very good friends. This letter has no address or date, and it is written from a prison somewhere. Carl sends Linda his love and calls her his honey and his baby. He asks her to contact a friend of his who might write an affidavit for his forthcoming trial. He says he has just heard that Billie’s last husband, Louis McKay, has shot somebody, and he wants to know if this is true and ‘Did he kill the guy?’*

  Carl Drinkard was Billie’s piano player on and off between 1949 and 1956. Their relationship began in Washington, DC in the summer of 1949, when he was twenty years old and close to finishing his studies at Howard University. He was living with his mother and earning between eight and fifteen dollars a night, playing at a small upstairs club called Little Harlem.

  Then one evening he was telephoned by Al Suder, the manager of Club Bali, the most lavish place in Washington, where all the big-name singers appeared. Billie Holiday was in town and she had said she wanted Carl to accompany her. A man called Coolridge Davis had been booked for the job, but ‘he played big fat piano in the Fats Waller bag’ and she didn’t want that; she wanted Carl.

  Carl told the Club Bali manager that he was flattered. He said he considered Lady to be the greatest jazz singer in the world and, like everyone else in the business, he was in awe of her. But he couldn’t do it.

  Just at that moment there was a noisy commotion on the stairs leading up to the Little Harlem club and ‘here comes Lady Day up the steps’. She marched over to the piano and said, ‘You! You’re coming with me!’

  She was wearing the blue mink coat that was reputed to be worth $17,000, and when Carl looked at her he said to himself, ‘Truly, if I didn’t know who this woman was, I’d know she must be somebody!’ He said she had a way of carrying herself very erect so that she seemed tall, even though she wasn’t that tall. And she always stared straight ahead, looking neither to the left nor the right, and that made her seem independent and full of confidence, even though as soon as you got to know her you knew how insecure she really was.

  Carl could not resist her authority and so he agreed to go with her. Billie began by taking him to a bar called the Crystal Cabin. She ordered herself a double brandy with a crème-de-menthe floater and she got him a double gin, which was what he asked for, even though it was more than he could manage because he was hardly a drinker at that time.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about my music,’ Billie said. ‘If you can play “The Man I Love”, you can play for me. I’m the easiest thing in the world to play for.’

  They then went in her car to the Club Bali, which was packed with people all waiting expectantly for her to reappear after the intermission. In the dressing room she tore off the first five numbers from her music book and gave them to Carl. ‘Let’s go on!’ she said, and there wasn’t even time to look at the tunes.

  He remembered how he had to walk through the hushed crowd to reach the stage. And there he saw Art Tatum, the idol of every jazz pianist in those days, sitting at the horseshoe bar. In spite of his blindness, Art Tatum felt Carl passing close by and reassured him, saying, ‘You just do your best! Nobody can expect more than that!’

  Then the compère was announcing, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen! The Club Bali takes pleasure in bringing you the one and only Lady Day … Miss Billie Holiday!’ And with that, a great roar of pleasure rippled through the room as the audience watched her going up the little flight of steps that led onto the stage. The pink spotlight followed her. She carried her head high, so that you could feel what Carl called ‘the magic of her proudness’. She turned to her new pianist and he gave her the opening of the first song.

  And then she began to sing, standing very stiff and not looking at the audience, but staring beyond them, her arms bent at the elbows, her hands clenched into tight fists and ready to punch the air. Carl Drinkard remembered that she was wearing a long, heavy gown of the type that her manager John Levy always bought for her, and it was sequined from top to toe ‘like the suits that warriors wore to the Crusades’. He said she always knew how to carry herself in a gown like that, with just enough movement to be seductive, without ever being gaudy or vulgar.

  The first set went smoothly and when it was over Billie said, ‘From now on, Carl, you belong to me. You’re going to be my piano player!’ And it was true. He did belong to her for several years. He was with her on her first European tour in 1954; he played for her at the Carnegie Hall in 1955; and he made recordings with her in 1956. Then they drifted apart, although in the interview he never explained why.

  Carl was used to snorting heroin in those days, but he was not what he called ‘a needle junkie’ when he first began working for Billie. He knew all about her habit and what he called her ‘checkerboard career with heroin, going back and forth on the needle’.† He’d sometimes ‘pick up a package for her’, but she did her best to protect him and warn him off the drug. ‘She did not endorse the use of heroin, except for herself … She used to preach to me day in and day out. She’d say, “Carl, don’t you ever use this shit! It’s no good for you! Stay away from it! You don’t want to end up like me!” ’ In the interview he wanted to make it clear that when he did become a junkie, it was not Billie’s fault. This happened in 1952 in Chicago. For a short while he was playing in a band along with Miles Davis and ‘a little drummer’ called Jimmy Green. Every night after the show the three of them would go to Jimmy Green’s house and they’d get high together. Carl said, ‘The two of them were shooting and I was snorting’, and they began to tease him, saying, ‘If Carl doesn’t stop was
ting this stuff, we’re going to take it from him!’ That was when he decided to join the club and ‘Miles Davis put that needle in my arm and helped me wreck my life.’‡

  So Carl became a needle junkie and he must still have been a junkie when he was interviewed by Linda Kuehl, because that would explain his rambling stories and his endless fascination with the details of getting a fix, or failing to get a fix.§the chaotic scenes of violence and despair he was talking about. On one occasion he described a quarrel between Billie and John Levy, which culminated in her smashing a portable TV set over Levy’s head. At this point in his narrative Carl remarked absent-mindedly, ‘It was the first portable TV I’d ever seen.’ It would also explain his curious detachment from

  When asked to explain the nature of his relationship with Billie, Carl said that Billie had a magnetism that could make anyone love her, if she wanted them to. But he insisted that his love for her was never sexual, even though they often shared the same living quarters and even the same bed. He was so young when he first started to work for her, and so relatively inexperienced, that he felt he was like the son she never had. He never called her Billie, always Lady, and he felt she appreciated the dignity of the name. ‘God knows, to me she was the great Lady Day!’

  Like a child with a wayward parent, Carl tried to watch over Billie as well as he could. When I look at a photograph of the two of them arriving at London Airport in 1954, it does seem as though they might be related, although that might be just because they both have the same tired and puffy faces and the same distracted stare that makes them appear like creatures from another planet.

  For Carl, Billie always appeared exquisitely beautiful when she was fully dressed, but terrifying in her nakedness. He said her legs were too short, her breasts were too baggy, her arms were too long, her hips were ‘insane’, and she was either too fat or too thin, depending on her intake of drugs and drink. Perhaps this is why he hated her lack of modesty and her way of welcoming complete strangers into her dressing room when she was wearing nothing more than a pair of high-heeled shoes. But it could also have been because her skin was ‘tattooed like a map’ with needle scars and he saw the signs of his own condition mirrored there.