With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Carl said that of course all of Billie’s men were pimps and for him there was nothing odd in that. ‘A man could give her money and jewellery and she didn’t give a damn. She’d grown up in that pimp-whore environment and she expected this. She felt and believed that if a woman was making money, the man should have it.’ He described how John Levy treated her as a ‘valuable commodity … and she represented everything he had attained at that time’. When he bought her mink coats and fine jewellery, he did so with the knowledge that he could always use these items as ‘collateral’ if he was short of cash. Levy made sure Billie was kept working so hard because ‘that was how the money kept coming in’, and even when she behaved badly he was ‘too smart to walk out on her, but would lay and lay until she had calmed down. Then he would take her home and that would start another chapter in their torrid love affair.’ On one occasion John Levy explained his belief that ‘You gotta keep your foot up them bitches, Carl, otherwise they’ll get lazy on you.’

  In 1950 and 1951 there were about four months when Billie was not on tour from one city to the next, and during that time she lived in a house on Linden Boulevard in St Albans, New York. John Levy had bought the house using her money, but he kept it in his name so that, when he left, the house went with him. Nevertheless, for a while it was a place that seemed more like home than most of the places Billie had ever known.

  The house had three bedrooms, as well as a kitchen and dining area. Billie had the walls decorated by a ‘guy called Jay’ who was apparently the inventor of flock wallpaper, so he covered the walls with swirling patterns in fuzzy brushed nylon. The house was never completely furnished and Billie had no record player, but the radio was kept on at all times, although nobody bothered whether it was playing music or reporting the latest news headlines.

  Billie had Chiquita her Chihuahua and Carl her pianist to keep her company. John Levy used to come and stay occasionally, but as Carl said, ‘he was usually gone’ with his gambling commitments, a club in New York, numerous property deals and at least two other women to keep him busy.

  At home in St Albans, Billie and Carl followed a daily routine. She tended to wake up between ten in the morning and noon. She never bothered to eat breakfast, but would begin the day with a large glass of Gordon’s gin and Seven-Up. As Carl explained, ‘When I say she had gin for breakfast, I don’t mean just having one double. It started in the morning and it went on all day long until she went to bed.’ If she had no need to go out, she didn’t bother to get dressed, but would potter around the house wearing slippers and Japanese silk pyjamas or ‘satinish-type lounging robes’. She liked to wear an apron to give her a feeling of domesticity.

  Carl said that Billie enjoyed doing things around the house herself. She might begin with a bit of cleaning and then she’d take up some knitting or crocheting, ‘which was how she’d spent a lot of time while she was doing that year in West Virginia’. For a while she was busy making a tomato-red woollen sweater for Carl, but then they quarrelled about something and she transformed it into a jacket for the dog instead. The main event of the day was the preparation of ‘a really good dinner’, which Billie cooked in the vague hope that John Levy might turn up to share it with them. She never had much interest in eating and it was ‘only during the very late hours that she would even consider food at all’, but she liked to cook. Her speciality was recipes using ground topside of beef: dishes like meat loaf or Cornish Hens. Carl said, ‘Her seasoning was perfection’, and she could spend hours chopping and kneading and fiddling about in the kitchen.

  Such work was regularly interrupted by more gin, a cigarette, a quick snort of heroin, because ‘she was sniffing at this time, she didn’t use the needle’, or simply the wish to stop everything and talk. Billie could talk for hours, mostly drawing on her own memories and anecdotes about people she had known. She had the habit of inventing stories and, once she had thought them up, they took on a life of their own, until they seemed to have all the validity of real experiences and she herself never doubted that they were true. As Carl said, ‘She was a pathological liar and she’d repeat herself and change the details, and she’d tell a story so many times a certain way that she’d begin to believe it herself. She’d tell it the way she’d think was most impressive and, even if it lost all semblance of truth, that didn’t seem to worry her at all.’

  Although she had a lot of famous friends at the time, very few people ever came to the house. The only frequent visitor was a man called Freddie Bartholomew, who had been a child star years before, when he played the film role of Little Lord Fauntleroy.‖

  As long as John Levy was not there, Billie dominated the conversation, but in his presence she made an effort to sit quietly in a corner, drinking gin and looking demure and obedient. Things would go well for a while, but eventually trouble was bound to break out. Although Levy wanted to appear as a tough guy, Carl said that Billie was by far the stronger and could always beat him when it came to a real fight. John Levy would be huffing and puffing and going red in the face, and you could tell that he was terrified of her.

  According to Carl, at this time Billie was earning about $5,000 a week. Carl was paid about $150. Billie got whatever it was felt was necessary for her needs, and John Levy kept the rest. Apart from his deals and obligations, he was also a compulsive gambler and so most of the money went on paying his debts.

  Carl said that ‘Billie didn’t care about money for money’s sake; she’d let John run for four or five weeks without saying a word. All of a sudden, knowing he had fucked up about twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars of her money, she would enquire about it. John couldn’t stand this. Lady was not supposed to question him about it.’ The enquiry would be a cue for Levy to fly into a hysterical rage and go red in the face.

  Carl remembered the occasion in 1950 when they were appearing at the Earle Theatre in Pennsylvania. John Levy had spent all of Billie’s earnings in advance of her performances, and at the end of a show two men ‘were standing there just at the stage door and they were very well dressed, but you could see they were hardened goons’. Carl knew who they had come for, but remembered that he said to John Levy, ‘Listen, John, there’s a couple of guys down there and they look like killers and I don’t know who they want to see.’

  It was when Billie heard about the men and the money that she hit John Levy over the head with the portable TV. She also once cut him with a knife and tried to slash his throat with a piece of broken mirror, but she missed and cut his chest instead. John Levy sometimes managed to hurt her too, but as Carl explained with his deadpan detachment, it was only her next man, Louis McKay, who was ‘the real true man she always dreamed of, who was … really strong enough for her. He could knock her unconscious with a single blow of his fist.’a

  According to Carl, the main problem between Billie and John Levy was drugs. Levy was addicted to opium, but he was ‘scared to death of heroin, because he knew it had a tendency to bring the Feds on him’. He also took pride in the fact that he was intimate with all the big gangsters, ‘and heroin to them was a lowly thing. The gentlemen gangsters used cocaine and opium.’ John Levy wanted to ‘gorilla’ Billie into giving up heroin, although Carl suspected that in fact he was ‘playing a two-prong game’ and supplying the drug to a friend of his called Pensicola, who then sold it on to her.b

  Louis McKay had a different approach. As Carl put it, ‘Of all her men, he was more considerate as far as her stuff was concerned than any of the others.’ When he started with Billie in 1952, Louis McKay realised at once that she was looking for a man who could advise her ‘like her own mother’ and that above all else ‘she needed guidance’. That was why, instead of letting her buy the drugs from street peddlers, McKay arranged to obtain large quantities of heroin himself, which also gave him much greater control over her.

  Louis McKay would buy a kilo or more at a time, ‘especially when they were getting ready to go on the road, so we wouldn’t have to connect in small towns’. Carl sai
d that everybody was more or less happy with the arrangement. Carl was convinced that Louis was also ‘as hooked as a dog’, but he managed to keep his habit private, and anyway ‘he was handling all the money so when he told us he had bought half a kilo it could have been a kilo.’ And if Louis McKay ever showed signs of addiction, he always said it was Billie’s fault, because she was sprinkling heroin powder in the food she cooked for him.

  Just like his predecessor, Louis McKay had a family of his own as well as two or three other girls. ‘But if ever Billie loved a man, she loved Louis. She called him “Daddy” and she did her best to please him … Louis used to play around on her, but I think he was fairer to her than any other man that I knew her to have.’

  Both Billie and Carl seem to have treated Louis McKay like a father whom they hoped would be kind to them, by giving them as much heroin as they needed. ‘We were like a family,’ explained Carl, with something close to nostalgia. ‘There were no secrets between us, but I knew that in a dire situation I could never count on her … We were like a family and there was no telling what trouble she might get into if she was left on her own … She was weak. She was like a little girl needing guidance. She had a morbid fear of going to jail and she could not stand pain.’

  So there they were, the two of them, waiting for Daddy to come home with gifts. But when Louis McKay was away for days on end, they were left to their own devices and it was here that Carl was able to get into the swing of his endless junkie stories. There was the time when they were waiting for Louis, and every day Billie sent Carl out to the pawn shop on Long Island with a new piece of jewellery. ‘It started out with a ring. I pawned the first ring and the next day I pawned another ring. We were shooting up just as fast as I could pawn the rings … She gives me another ring; it is a cluster ring with a ruby at the centre, and when the man saw it he said, “My God, you don’t see rings like this any more!” ’

  When the rings had gone, Carl took the blue mink coat, but the man in the pawn shop said, ‘Oh my God, I don’t think I can deal with this!’ And so Carl had to drive for miles into an all-white area until he reached a man who dealt in furs. And the man almost cried when he saw the beauty of the coat and the name Billie Holiday stitched on the lining in gold thread. He gave Carl $3,000 for it.

  On another occasion they were again waiting for Louis to turn up and Carl was sent out with $200 to see what he could do. He found ‘a raggedy dope fiend dashing along the street faster than a motherfucker, and I know he’s a dope fiend by his walk’. But on that particular night everything went wrong and Carl ended up being arrested by two white policemen and thrown into jail.

  Carl explained that, for him as a junkie, ‘Getting straight means getting normal, when you’re not sick. There’s no such thing as getting high after your first fix; you can throw that fucking high out of the window.’ But he was aware that, for Billie, it was somehow different. Not only could she shift from injecting to snorting without any apparent problem, but ‘Up until the very end, Lady seemed to have gotten a peace of mind and a certain kick from drugs. It was not just to keep from getting sick; she actually enjoyed using drugs.’

  Even when she was having a ‘bad patch’ and couldn’t get the heroin she needed, she was not like everyone else. ‘Most addicts would lie on a bed, sweltering and yelling and wallowing in their own pain, but she would just sit quietly in a tub of the hottest water she could draw and sit and sit, even if it took her all day and all night and all next day. She’d say, ‘I’m not getting out of this fucking tub until somebody brings me some dope!’

  And so the stories go on, tangling around each other. And then Carl was no longer working for Billie. And then he was in a jail in New Jersey somewhere, and he was walking the yard with a friend when it came over the loudspeaker: ‘Jazz singer Billie Holiday arrested in her hospital room for possession of narcotics in New York.’ He looked at his friend, who was a little trumpet player known as Be-Bop Sam, and he said, ‘Lady’s going to die!’

  Carl said that even though Billie had presented the image of being somebody who was incapable of dying, he had always known it was possible for her to die like everyone else. But he doubted if she realised it, even then.

  * Louis McKay was indicted by the Nassau County Police in Mineola, for shooting a man in the chest. The man did not die and McKay’s plea of self-defence was accepted. This took place around 1972.

  † Carl Drinkard said that Billie was more secretive about her habit when she was still with John Levy. ‘Every time John would go out of the room she’d reach into her stash – her roll of money tucked in her stocking (along with what she called her “widdle wazor blade”) and she’d pull out a packet, roll a match book up and snort.’ Things changed when she was with Louis McKay.

  ‡ In 1954, Miles Davis cured himself of his heroin addiction. He returned to his father’s farm in East St Louis, locked himself in a two-room apartment and stayed there without food or drink, ‘struggling to keep from screaming with the pain that tortured his joints’. And then, after seven days, ‘it was over, just like that’ – more or less.

  § It makes me think of my old friend, the American writer Mason Hoffenberg, famous for his excesses and for his co-authorship of the book Candy. Mason was a junkie for many years, until he moved over to alcohol. He told many deadpan junkie stories, including the one about turning up at the surgery of a London doctor who was providing him with a prescription for heroin – something that was still legal in England in the 1960s. A very white-faced nurse arrived at the door and explained that the doctor had just died of a heart attack. ‘Yeah, whatever,’ replied Mason, ‘but what about my prescription?’

  ‖ Bartholomew was married to a woman called Maely, who later became the wife of William Dufty. Carl described Maely as a ‘very big woman, fat and sloppy-looking, a pretty swift talker and an opportunist’. Billie called her a ‘fat funky jive bitch who is just hanging around trying to get something going for herself’, while Arthur Herzog said she was ‘a very aggressive publicist and she became a Billie Holiday sycophant. So no one liked her much …’

  a In praising Louis McKay’s strength, Carl said, ‘I don’t think I could have hit her and knocked her down, unless I caught her off-balance, like I did at the Rendezvous Lounge.’ He described how Billie would taunt Louis McKay until he attacked her. ‘She put her face as close to his as she could and said to him, “Motherfucker!” The next thing I knew, Louis hit her on the jaw – Bop! – with his fist and caught her before she could drop. He picked her up and walked her into the dressing room; nobody had any idea she was out cold … Two minutes later here comes Lady, prancing out of the dressing room as though nothing had ever happened … looking as though she’d just stepped out of a shower.’

  b According to the singer Marie Bryant, John Levy put his wife Tondalayo ‘on the strong stuff’ in order to have more control over her. She said it wasn’t Billie’s addiction that bothered him, but the fact that she ‘wouldn’t turn tricks for him’.

  THIRTY

  Melba Liston

  ‘Strangers down south.’

  In the early summer of 1950, Billie was getting ready for a four-week tour of one-nighters that was scheduled to wind down through the southern states, ending up in New Orleans on 23 July. The trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson had put together eighteen musicians, including one woman, the trombonist Melba Liston.* For the purposes of the tour, this group was turned into the Lady Day Orchestra, with the name painted in bold letters on the roller blinds at the front of the bus that had been hired to carry them from one show to the next.

  John Levy was still Billie’s manager, even though Melba Liston said it was clear they ‘didn’t get along too well’. He was supposed to be ‘handling the business’ and he had also promised to act as the guarantor for the musicians’ wages. Promotion for the tour was being arranged by a chauffeur and part-time burglar called Dewey Shewey, who had no previous experience of this kind of work.

  After three weeks
of rehearsals in Philadelphia, Melba Liston said that everything was ‘pretty well set’. The songs had been chosen and the songbook was ‘all written out’. Billie was in good voice and she was going to sing all her favourites. They even rehearsed ‘Strange Fruit’, although she said they didn’t get round to performing it because there didn’t seem to be any point, since they weren’t booked to play for mixed houses.

  Baltimore was their first engagement and on Saturday 24 June they were to be playing in the ballroom on Sparrow’s Beach, down by the seafront and close to the docks. Different bands and entertainers were booked there every week during the summer. People would gather on the beach and swim and drink and have picnics during the day, and then the music would begin in earnest with the approach of evening.

  Whenever Billie came home to play, the news spread fast. Her old friend Pony Kane was by now working as a cleaner and general helper in Alice Dean’s whorehouse and she remembered hearing Willie Diggs boasting to people, saying, ‘Guess what? I knew her! She used to live in this house! She used to live right there, with us!’ Everyone who was still around from the old days was eager to get tickets for the show.

  Some of them remembered seeing Billie arrive in her green Cadillac, with a shivering Chihuahua tucked like a handbag under her arm and her manager John Levy sitting tense and angry at her side. They both tended to wear dark glasses, even when the sun was not shining, and in the surviving photographs Levy always looks as though he is on his way to a funeral.