With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  So, despite his disappointment in how Billie looked and his lack of desire to go to bed with her, they agreed on a list of songs. ‘We went through a whole pile of music and she read the titles and the lyrics. More than half she’d only heard once or twice or hadn’t heard at all. She just liked the lyrics when she read them. I showed her the melodies on the piano and she’d say, “Yes, I want that!” ’

  But the elation was short-lived, because whenever they made an appointment, Billie failed to turn up. Ray Ellis tried to meet her on ‘about twenty-five occasions’ and by then he said, ‘I was getting very evil at this point. I was very busy in those days and at that point in my career I was the King of Arrangers. Everything else I was doing, I couldn’t have cared less about. I wanted to do her and I wanted to do everything right, and we could never get together.’ Finally he decided simply to go ahead with his plans anyway. He organised a thirty-five piece orchestra and got copies of all of Billie’s records that he could find, and slowly he ‘pictured the way to conceive these things’.

  Once Ray Ellis had the arrangements ready, he contacted Billie. He told her to arrive at the studio for the first recording at ten o’clock on the evening of 18 February 1958. ‘The dates were set for eleven, so I told her ten, figuring she’d show up late. She showed up at twelve.’§

  According to Irving Townsend, ‘She came all dressed up to the session, looking great, as if she was going to perform in public. Most don’t give a damn and turn up looking like bums! She was very nervous and as soon as she saw the violin section, she fortified herself with gin. She was drinking like mad, straight gin, and by the end of the evening she was slurring so badly you couldn’t understand her any more. We must have had three sessions and she did better than I expected her to do, considering she was working with twelve, sixteen, twenty violins, that just read sheet music and don’t give a damn … Fiddlers represent the educated musician as opposed to the jazz player, and she’s got to stick with this bank of fiddlers and I was surprised by how well she did it.’

  But Ray Ellis saw things very differently. He said she hadn’t learnt any of the songs. ‘She was standing there with a bottle of gin … I was so mad at her, I actually fought through the first session. I was saying, “You bitch! You sing so great and you don’t know what you’re doing! You’re blowing the whole goddamn thing!” It was an ego thing with me, because I’d slaved over the arrangements, picturing the way she was going to sing it, and she wasn’t singing it the way I’d thought and I hated her. I literally hated her. I think I treated her badly …

  ‘Finally I realised that this bitch is standing there and she doesn’t know any of the songs. So I said, “Look, baby, I’m going to give the band a fifteen-minute break while you learn that goddamn bridge!” I had to treat her like a schoolkid. She stood there and pouted.‖

  ‘So she went into a corner with Mal [Waldron] and she learnt the bridge. And I realised why she was stoned all the time was because she had absolutely no confidence in herself. She was completely unprepared, and she figured if she came stoned, she could cop out. But the musicians dug her. That first session we had Urbie Green, Well Walter, Osie Johnson, they were all on drugs.’a

  They did two sessions and they were getting ready for the third, but they had one song missing. Ray Ellis remembered saying to Billie, ‘ “Hey, baby, we’re doing another session tomorrow and there’s still one song I haven’t written!”

  ‘She said, “All right. Let’s go to the Colony!”

  ‘It was three o’clock in the morning and she had been drinking gin through the whole thing. Straight gin … So I get into a cab, and you know the black-white scene and so we get double-takes. It’s three in the morning and I ask the driver to get us to the Colony Record Shop.

  ‘She really looks like a disaster. I’m trying to get her out of the cab and I’m trying to pay the cab driver, and I’m holding her up and I’m thinking she’s going to fall. So I lean her against the telephone pole, the lamp-post, and I say, “Hold it, baby!”

  ‘I live in Larchmont, which is a very nice WASP community. I don’t know what two of my neighbours are doing on 52nd Street at that hour, but they see me and they walk across the street because they don’t want to embarrass me. Can you imagine this? They don’t know who this woman is, but all they could figure is that I’m out with some hooker and what bad taste I have, because she looks like a disaster.’

  Once they were in the Colony Record Shop, Billie started going through sheet music, ‘And she was out of her head. She was cursing everybody in the joint, cursing her mother. Nobody even recognised her.’ She picked a song called ‘You’ve Changed’. It became Ray Ellis’ favourite on the whole album and the favourite for many other people as well.

  Finally the album was finished. ‘Three sessions of torture,’ as far as Ray Ellis was concerned. He said that by now he was ‘completely frustrated, disgusted. I didn’t want to hear that thing again. I can’t stand the sound of her voice. The producer Irving Townsend says he’s going to mix it next week and I don’t want to go to the mixing. I’m so bugged I wish I’d never got involved in the project. I’m up to here with Billie Holiday. I tell him, “Mix it! Forget it! I’ll destroy it!” ’

  Irving Townsend contacted him about three weeks later. He said, ‘Hey, baby, I made a test of this thing! I think you should hear it!’

  So Ray Ellis took the record and drove back to his house in Larchmont. His family was away. He made himself something to eat and listened to Lady in Satin for the first time. ‘And you know what I did? I got into the car and I drove to New York! I couldn’t stay in the house by myself, that’s how despondent it made me! I could have jumped out of the window. It was the saddest thing.

  ‘But I was despondent because I loved it. It was so sad. It didn’t matter whether she sang the right note or the wrong note, because she sang twenty thousand wrong notes on that thing. But she poured her heart out. What she ended up doing was a recitation to the music, although I hadn’t realised it at the time.’b Ray Ellis also realised that on that record Billie made him ‘look good … She gave me the opportunity to be heard. If you listen to the album, you hear the orchestra very plainly.’

  By the following year Ray Ellis had moved from Columbia to MGM. One day in March he got a call from Billie. ‘Hey, man,’ she said, ‘I think I’m going to come over and do something with you!’

  Ray Ellis didn’t mention this conversation to anybody in the office, because, as he explained it, he didn’t want to say to the President of the company, ‘ “Hey, I want to get Billie Holiday on the label!” and then I don’t hear from her again and I’d have looked like a real jerk.’

  But then, without any prior warning, Billie turned up at the MGM building. The receptionist at the desk was ‘a real dumb broad … who wouldn’t know who Billie Holiday was, and wouldn’t know anything about her and is very antiblack … And Billie by this time looks like a real, old, tired, black hooker – the type you really wouldn’t want to go near. She looks terrible, a pathetic thing.’

  Billie said she wanted to see Ray Ellis, and the receptionist was ‘giving her the brush’ when Ellis’ secretary overheard the conversation and realised who this was and brought her through to the office.

  Billie came in and sat down and talked. Ray Ellis said she looked so bad that ‘had she been a plain white chick she would have gotten bad vibrations … She was so out of it at this point, it was hard to carry on a sensible conversation with her. She said she wanted to do an album … with a smaller band than last time.’

  The recordings were done over a period of three days in March 1959 and they were not a success.c Ray Ellis said Billie ‘sang her ass off for about two takes and then she went kerplop!’ For the other takes she was singing far too softly and he couldn’t get her to stand still behind the mike. ‘Between the booze and God knows what she had done before she came there, she was almost like a pendulum. It was one take and if you didn’t get it, that was it, baby! You almost got the feelin
g: Holy Christ! We’re recording her last album! I was the producer on this one and trying to keep everything going and hoping she will not pass out.’

  Billie died just four months later. I don’t know if Irving Townsend was there, but Ray Ellis went to the funeral and said he was ‘honoured to be one of the pall bearers’ although he had no idea who asked him to do it. He found it what he called ‘a funny situation. She had a Requiem Mass, which was sort of unusual for the type of life she had led.’

  * He kept in contact with her after the Lady in Satin recordings and in the summer of 1958 Billie came to stay at his home in Connecticut while she took part in a Seven Ages of Jazz concert. ‘I shepherded her up and back between the station and my house,’ he said. ‘She was very nice and gentle, to the dogs, the kids. She was warm inside, no matter what bitterness.’

  † As Stuart Nicholson says, ‘By mid-1957 Billie’s use of drugs had become incidental; instead, she relied on brandy [or other spirits] to subdue her hunger for narcotics’ (p. 212).

  ‡ When Ray Ellis said ‘She just looked like she smelled’, Linda Kuehl asked, ‘Did she?’ To which the reply was, ‘No, she didn’t.’

  § Ray Ellis implied that this meant they only had an hour to do each session, but Irving Townsend said that ‘as each three-hour session went along, we’d get to the end and we’d have to stop, because she’d got so drunk we couldn’t understand the words no more.’ The bassist Milt Hinton, who was at the sessions, explained that Ray Ellis, ‘a dear friend of mine, I like him very much’, wanted to fit it into a three-hour slot, ‘or else it goes overtime’.

  ‖ In the notes to the 1996 reissue of Lady in Satin, Ray Ellis was much more gentle: ‘I remember how intimidated Billie seemed when she arrived for the first session and saw the forty-piece [sic] orchestra waiting for her. I introduced her to the musicians and they gave her a polite round of applause. That seemed to calm her down.’

  a Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison said he took part in the album, but this is not true and he must have been thinking of Billie’s last recordings with Ray Ellis, which were done in March 1959. He said, ‘I made her last album, Lady in Satin. She was still drinking gin. I guess it was the only thing she could do to keep from hurting so much. She and I were drinking out of the same bottle. One swig and pass it on. We got high.’

  b Lady in Satin was released in the autumn of 1958, to instant controversy, with some people hating it and others, including Jimmy Rowles and Miles Davis, loving it more than anything she had ever done. Billie herself was very proud of the recording. John Magnus, who ran the KGFJ radio station in Los Angeles, remembered her materialising in his studio sometime in 1959. ‘I hadn’t expected her. A couple of guys had sort of dumped her there and left her alone in strange surroundings, and dumped a six-pack of beer with her … Out of respect I opened up the mike to her and we talked. We tried sitting on the same chair, but that was uncomfortable, so we cranked the microphone up and that was better … She talked about the Lady in Satin album. I felt frankly this was one of the greatest things she had ever done and she was happy to hear that. She said she loved working with a big orchestra. It was a good feeling for her to hear all the holes filled. It was carpeted. She wasn’t used to that.’

  c Billie Holiday: Her Last Recording. With the Ray Ellis Orchestra and Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison (tp), Gene Quill (as), Hank Jones (p), Milt Hinton (b), Barry Galbraith (g), Osie Johnson (d). A review by Sally-Ann Worsford in Jazz Journal International said, ‘Obviously there is an abundance of much finer Holiday recordings, but as the final chapter of a largely tormented and tragic life this immensely moving album is far better than it has a right to be’ (White, p. 135).

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Louis McKay

  ‘This bitch turns skunky overnight.’

  Louis McKay was born in 1909 and died in 1981. He became Billie’s boyfriend/manager in 1951 and the couple were married in 1957, although by that time their relationship had pretty much fallen apart. There was talk of a divorce, but when Billie died intestate in July 1959, Louis McKay was still her legal husband and he became her sole inheritor. Her personal property was assessed as being worthless and her assets were valued at a total of $1,345.36. She had a further $500 ‘hidden on her person’ in the hospital. However, by the end of that same year the royalties from record sales alone had already brought in more than $100,000.

  Some people liked Louis McKay and felt that he helped Billie as well as he could. Others did not like him and blamed him for much of her unhappiness and her financial troubles during the last years of her life. He himself was never a great talker, but you can hear him speaking about Billie in the transcript of a telephone conversation between himself and William Dufty’s wife Maely, which was secretly recorded in February 1958.

  The telephone conversation is an eleven-page document that was bundled in among Linda Kuehl’s other research papers. The note on the first page states that it took place ‘at time of recording session, Lady in Satin’. There is also a little scribbled note in the margin, which reads ‘obligato to Yvonne Chavedd’, which I suppose might refer to the person who arranged the technicalities of having the telephone bugged.

  Below is a slightly shortened version of this conversation, leaving out the sections that are simply too muddled to follow:

  MCKAY: Maely, just since the last time I been out there, and I only went away and stayed five weeks, who’s she partying with? Who’s she giving it to? Because she can get it kind of easy. I’m through with her. That bitch is going to see some bad days around here. I put the skids on her tonight …

  MAELY: Well, how you gonna put the skids on her?

  MCKAY: All the money I made and all the things I bought her … This girl ain’t never had a dime to buy nothing, Maely. I couldn’t even buy a car with this woman in the last eight years … You know that.

  MAELY: Well, I’m just flabbergasted about this. But don’t you go and do nothing like you talk, because that’s going to be bad, baby!

  MCKAY: I know it’s going to be bad! I’m going to end it all! Ain’t going to let nobody make a fool out of me, good as I’ve been to this woman … She took the money and used it up … She go around here and give away all her cunt and everything and don’t get no money for it … I don’t do those kind of things, Maely. I do sell what I got!

  MAELY: Don’t talk to newspapers and stuff. Five hundred dollars aren’t worth anything to anybody.

  MCKAY: Seven hundred dollars … On top of that, the principle is involved.

  MAELY: What principle? She’ll pay it off!

  MCKAY: Maely, I’m a man. I can do things that this woman can’t do. I ain’t never had a woman like this. Milira, Juanita, every woman I had was great personalities, they is great people. They didn’t do no skunky things. How come I gotta take this from this bitch here? This low-class bitch! I ain’t never see a bitch with that much low class in my whole fucking life. Going fuck around with everybody in town and … fuck me and my money up, too.

  MAELY: You know she don’t fuck around. She just sits at home all night and all day.

  MCKAY: You know I got the wire. I know what this woman done … Fuck the seven hundred dollars, I ain’t involved with the goddamn money. I want some of her ass this morning for playing me cheap. If I got a whore, I get some money from her or I don’t have nothing to do with the bitch. I don’t want no cunt. I’m too old for cunt. I’m forty-nine years old. What I want with her cunt? If I wanted some cunt I’d marry somebody your age and we’d get along. I could make a hundred dollars and she could make twenty-five dollars and I’d be happy. I can make myself two or three grand a week. Tell you the truth, I’m frantic, I’m crazy right now.

  MAELY: Don’t be crazy. You’d better cool down and you better not do something to Holiday, because you know where it’s going to wind up.

  MCKAY: Holiday’s ass in the gutter in the East River somewhere! I’ll get someone else to do it! Cheap bitch! She’s been getting away with too much shit! I just got the wire a
nd I can’t stand it … I’ll catch her somewhere and whip her all over the goddamn street. Then go and beat the goddamn case* in Philadelphia. I don’t give a goddamn about that case in Philadelphia. Shit! That case been beat a long time ago! People worried about that case! I ain’t worried about it. I ain’t worried about that case at all, because the right people are behind that case!

  MAELY: What do you mean?

  MCKAY: Every motherfucker I know tried to get me to turn that bitch loose and let her go ahead and get some time, don’t worry about it.

  MAELY: You mean she’s supposed to do time?

  MCKAY: She ain’t going to do no time. I mean that’s what happened two years ago. They told me to split her out from the case and then cut loose. ‘No,’ I said, ‘she can’t make it!’

  MAELY: You know I wouldn’t believe things that people say to you that Holiday said, Lou.

  MCKAY: This is action. I got some photographs of her. They just give me the negatives. And I wasn’t asking to spy on this bitch. They gave me the negatives and I got them under the light here now. I don’t like that kind of stuff …†

  MAELY: Louis, what can she have done to get you going like that?

  MCKAY: I got enough. This bitch. I got enough to finish her off and go downtown and take a chance on my liberty.

  MAELY: You think of killing somebody for seven hundred dollars, somebody you lived with for eight years and married.‡

  MCKAY: I ain’t talking about killing her. I’m going to do her up so goddamn bad she’s going to remember as long as she lives.