With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  In November 1958, Billie set out on a disastrously mismanaged European tour, which was supposed to earn her $10,000. In Milan she was ‘starring in a mixed company of pop singers, comedians, acrobats and impressionists and her uncommercial style failed to please an obviously commercial audience’.* In Paris, she was booked to sing at the Olympia, but again it was the wrong kind of atmosphere for her intimate style; she was obviously lacking in confidence and was booed off the stage.

  The contract for the whole tour was abruptly cancelled, leaving her without even the money for the fare home. So she sang for her supper, as it were, taking a cut from the door fee at a little club called the Mars. There the atmosphere was right and the audience was enthusiastic and appreciative.†

  Not long after Billie returned to the States on 2 December 1958, she was accused of having contravened the 1956 Narcotics Control Act. This Act was Harry Anslinger’s most recent achievement in his battle against drug addicts. It made provision under federal law for making arrests without a warrant, on the belief that a drug offence had been committed, even if there was no proof of purchase or possession. It also stated that any US citizen who had spent more than a year in prison on narcotics charges must report themselves to Customs as a ‘violator’ before leaving the country and again on their return. The passing of the new Act had not been publicised and even lawyers were unaware of its existence and its implications.

  On 14 January 1959, an Inspector McVeigh contacted Billie and demanded that she appear at Customs House in Manhattan the following afternoon for questioning. She was warned that, according to the regulations of the Act, her failure to register herself as a ‘violator’ could lead to a fine or imprisonment.

  When Billie arrived with her lawyer Florynce Kennedy,‡ she was told that the evidence against her had already been prepared and the matter would be referred to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. The minutes of this first meeting are interesting. You can hear Billie speaking in her own voice, and you can hear how she was spoken to by the authorities.

  These excerpts are taken from the statement of Mrs Eleanor Gough McKay, also known as Billie Holiday, made in the office of the Supervising Customs Agent, on 15 January 1959 at 3.40 p.m.

  After the usual preliminaries, Billie took the oath and was asked for her name and occupation:

  BILLIE: My name is Billie Holiday. I am forty-one [sic]. I am a singer, that’s my occupation.

  QUESTIONER: Is your true name Mrs Eleanor Gough McKay?

  BILLIE: Yes.

  The questioner then checked on her date and place of birth, both of which she had answered incorrectly and she apologised for the muddle. When asked about her 1947 arrest, for which she received a sentence of a year and a day,§ she explained, ‘No, I wasn’t really arrested. They were sort of like you people; they were very nice to me.’ She then said something more about her arrest, but whatever it was remains a mystery since it was marked ‘off the record’ in the transcript of the interview.

  When Billie was asked about her ‘purpose’ in leaving the United States, she replied, ‘I went there [to Europe] to sing, to do concerts.’

  QUESTIONER: You went for a professional engagement abroad?

  BILLIE: That’s right. Just myself and my piano player. And my agent gave me the tickets, he gets the tickets and tells us where to go and who to meet, and he never tells us about registering. I never saw any sign, so I didn’t know. I went to the doctors, I did everything else I should have done, so why shouldn’t I have done this? I did not know …

  QUESTIONER:… Did you register when you left the United States and when you returned, as a convicted narcotics violator, with Customs?

  BILLIE: No. Nobody asked me. I never did it before. This must be something new, because wouldn’t they ask me?

  QUESTIONER: No. It’s not the Government’s responsibility to ask every individual passenger or person leaving the United States if they have a narcotic record.

  BILLIE: Or coming back?

  QUESTIONER: No, because it would be insulting a lot of people … Did you leave the United States on a French airline?

  BILLIE: All I know, it was Pan American. They took a lot of pictures of me. I was standing on the step with a Pan American bag, you know – the newspapers and things. So it was no secret that I was leaving, or anything. I really – I couldn’t have been trying to sneak away. I just didn’t know about this, that’s all.

  Billie was then asked about her arrest with Louis McKay in 1956. She replied rather enigmatically, ‘There wasn’t anything to it; it was all wrong.’

  QUESTIONER: Was there a trial held at which you were found not guilty and acquitted?

  BILLIE: Yes. Well, you know, they have to trade a while and pick on you a little bit.

  At the end of this statement, Billie was asked if she has anything to add, ‘any comments or statements’ that she would like to ‘insert in the record at this time’. Her reply was eloquent.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s a lot I would like to add, but it would take a book. I’d have to write a book …‖ It just seems that a little thing like this I didn’t know about, and nobody cared enough about me – my agents, and I’ve got managers for this and that – to tell me about it. And I have been trying my best to be a good girl, and a little thing like this. I have to come down here and go through all this. That’s all I can say. It’s terrible, that’s all. Once you get in trouble for narcotics, it’s the end. I think it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to anybody in the wide world. That’s all I’ve got to add.’

  Billie had to wait for six weeks before her case was heard and she was terrified at the prospect of another prison sentence. She stopped eating and lost so much weight that a doctor was called in to see her. She drank more heavily than ever and when William Dufty remonstrated with her, she replied, ‘If you had the Government breathing on you, you’d be drinking too.’

  The US Attorney was finally ready to see her on 12 February. She was represented by Florynce Kennedy’s partner Donald Wilkes and after a lot of wrangling the case was dropped. William Dufty said that once the case was dropped, ‘She came home like a different woman. That night, she told us, she slept like a baby.’

  However, it was obvious to everyone who saw her that Billie’s health was deteriorating. A doctor friend, Terkild Vinding, described going with his wife to visit her in the sparsely furnished basement apartment where she lived alone with only her white Chihuahua for company.a This must have been in the middle of May. He said that when they arrived Billie was obviously glad to see them. She played the Lady in Satin album and gave them a copy, which she dedicated in her sprawling handwriting ‘for my Doc and best friend from Billie Lady Day Holiday’. Vinding said she was in bad physical shape, her legs swollen from oedema ‘due to liver cirrhosis to a degree I had never seen before’. He told her that she must go to hospital immediately and offered to drive her there himself, but she refused.

  On 30 May, just a few days after this meeting, Billie collapsed while her friend Frankie Freedom was with her. He called a doctor and she was taken to the private Knickerbocker Hospital and registered under the name of Mrs Eleanora McKay. But when an orderly smelt her breath and saw the old needle scars on her arms, the hospital insisted she be moved to a public hospital. She was taken to the Metropolitan Hospital. At first she was in a public ward, but once her identity became known and journalists began to turn up seeking an interview or a photograph, she was moved to a private one. For ten days everything went well; Billie was putting on weight and was full of plans for the future. But then a certain nurse Figueroa – Billie was sure she was a policewoman in disguise – reported the discovery of some suspicious white powder and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was informed.b

  Two detectives arrived and questioned her in her bed. They told her that unless she admitted possession and disclosed her supplier, they would take her to the Women’s House of Detention, regardless of what that might do to her state of health. Th
ey removed her record player, her records, the radio and her comic books. She was officially arrested and refused bail, and three policewomen kept a twenty-four hour guard at the door of her room. Visitors were not allowed in unless they had a written permit from the 23rd Precinct, allowing access to Arrest Number 1660.

  William Dufty and others made complaints. But even after a writ of habeas corpus had been obtained and signed, which should have got rid of the police presence, the police guard stayed. Apparently the District Attorney had plans to transfer Billie to Bellevue Prison Ward and this was only deferred by a legal request that she appear first before a Grand Jury as soon as she was fit enough to do so.

  The legal manoeuvrings were complicated. But again it seems important to include some of the statements that were made when Donald Wilkes fought the case in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, on behalf of Eleanor McKay, against the Police Commissioner of the City of New York, on 16 June 1959.

  Mr Lang, on behalf of the Police Commissioner, said that: ‘Far from attempting to deprive petitioner of any constitutional or statutory rights, I think the police department has been extremely solicitous of the conditions of this petitioner … We would have had her arraigned this morning if not for the fact the hospital authorities thought it would be detrimental to her health. We do not feel in view of the defendant’s critical condition, although she does have a prior criminal record, that she will flee the jurisdiction or run away from the charge.’

  Wilkes, on behalf of his client, tried to suggest that her treatment had been a little severe in the circumstances: ‘Your Honour, I must say that the interrogation of a witness, who is classified by the hospital as terminal, by three detectives, hardly appears to be an act of solicitude for her welfare.’

  Mr Lang saw no reason to accept this criticism and insisted that Billie had been treated in the proper manner. ‘If, your Honour, this drug which is slowly killing, I believe, this defendant, if the detectives had prevented her from jumping off a bridge, they would be considered great heroes. In effect, they’re doing the same thing by taking this heroin away from her and why they should be vilified by doing their duty, I do not know, your Honour.’

  As a result of this hearing Billie was granted ‘an adjournment of writ for a period of time’ and was placed ‘in the custody of her counsel … with the assurance that she will not leave’.c

  The medical authorities at the Metropolitan Hospital were directed to inform the District Attorney when the condition of the petitioner Eleanor McKay would ‘permit of an arraignment at the hospital’ and she was to be ‘subject to an additional criminal charge if her parole is violated’. Before the case was concluded, Mr Lang wanted to be reassured that the criminal charges against the defendant were still pending.

  On 21 June two more detectives arrived at the hospital and Billie was given what Donald Wilkes described as ‘a bit of a going over’. They took ‘mugshots’ of her and fingerprinted her. As Wilkes said later, ‘This was done while she was still in her hospital bed and without permission, knowledge or consent … She was refused bail, denied a hearing and held incommunicado.’

  The date for Billie’s appearance before a Grand Jury had been set for 26 June, but it was delayed until she was considered well enough to appear. Donald Wilkes felt that the whole episode following Billie’s arrest was ‘rank and redolent … a very, very shabby performance on the part of the State of New York’.

  On 11 July 1959, Billie’s heart began to falter and in the early hours of 17 July she died. Everyone agreed that she had been getting better, but then something snapped in her. She made jokes about it being the ‘same old Keystone Kops routine’, but the threat of imprisonment then facing her must have contributed more to her sudden decline in hospital than the cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure and other medical complications that appeared on her death certificate. William Dufty had written a couple of pieces about her while she was in hospital, using such headlines as ‘How dope changed my life’. As soon as she was dead he was ready with five new articles for the New York Post, in which he made such statements as ‘The collision between her and heroin was fore-ordained. It had to happen.’ He also included some useful promotion for Lady Sings the Blues.

  Several years later, Dufty claimed that ‘Billie’s death changed my life’. By this he seemed to mean he was genuinely sad to lose her, but it was also a tacit acknowledgement that by linking his name inextricably with hers, his financial future was transformed. Lady Sings the Blues has proved to be a classic in the confessional autobiography mode and it has never been out of print in all the years since its publication.

  * Melody Maker, quoted in Vail, p. 199.

  † Stuart Nicholson (p. 219) says that ‘the truth was that Billie had become a sad bar-fly’, but the singer and actress Yolande Bavan, who met Billie in Paris at this time, gave a very different account. ‘Billie was terribly lonely. Not too many people came around her, possibly because they idolised her … They also respected her. She could be terribly funny sometimes … Perhaps she saw some of the things that were in her reflected in me, because I was pretty strict about myself and my own behaviour at that time and she had a certain discipline … She told me that the essential thing about singing was to be as true as you could to the lyrics emotionally.’

  ‡ Florynce Kennedy had been recommended by William Dufty.

  § The extra day was important because the Act covered only those who had been sentenced to ‘more than a year’ in prison.

  ‖ She seemed to imply that this time she would have to write the book herself and not leave it to someone else.

  a In a letter to Linda Kuehl, 12 July 1971.

  b There are several contradictory accounts of what was found, and who found it and where. It was perhaps heroin, or cocaine, in a box of Kleenex tissues, under Billie’s pillow, or by her bed, or traces of powder seen on her nose. There was also talk of finding a syringe, with which Billie was supposed to have injected herself, but this seems the most unlikely of all the options.

  c At this point Wilkes said, ‘She is not going to leave. Your Honour, she will never leave that bed.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  Earle Zaidins

  ‘She was very sensitive to bad publicity.’

  Earle Zaidins had just completed his training as a lawyer when he arrived in New York from Wisconsin in the summer of 1956. He had his boxer dog with him and he found a room for the two of them in a broken-down hotel not far from Times Square. It was called The Flanders and was one of the few hotels in the city that accepted pets. He fixed a little wooden sign on the wall outside the hotel, announcing his name and profession, in case anyone was interested.*

  Zaidins was in the habit of taking his dog for a walk late at night and sometimes he encountered a woman dressed in a black diamond mink coat that was so long it almost touched the ground. She was accompanied by the ghostly apparition of a white Chihuahua, its eyes bulging and its naked-looking body trembling in spite of the little jacket it was wearing.

  The relationship between these two solitary night-walkers started with a simple greeting of recognition, but after a while they began to talk. The woman had a room in the same hotel. She said her name was Eleanor Fagan and her dog was called Pepe. She said she loved boxer dogs and used to have one called Mister; the best dog she’d ever known. Perhaps she muttered in her dark and rasping voice that Mister was more faithful than any of the goddamn men she had come across, lifting her eyes to meet the eyes of this tall, dark-haired, pale-skinned and rather cadaverous-looking stranger as she spoke.

  At first Zaidins had no presentiment of the identity of the dog-walking woman. But then he must have asked her what were the songs she sang that Mister loved so much and where had she sung them, and did she still sing sometimes? He thought her face was familiar and she reminded him of someone, but he had never heard of Eleanor Fagan McKay.

  Billie told him who she really was and explained that these days it was safer for her to remain anonymous.
Lady Sings the Blues had recently been published and that was making everything worse. She wished her ghostwriter, William Dufty, had not put in all that stuff about drugs and her being a prostitute, but he had promised her it was the best way to sell the book and she could certainly do with the money.

  Already during these early meetings Billie was eager to tell Zaidins that she didn’t do drugs any more; she even rolled up her sleeves to show him there were no new needle scars among the old ones. Not that it made any difference to the cops and their interest in her. She was a mark at all times, she said, and whenever she was performing somewhere she’d see two or three men walking together and she’d know they were cops or federal narcotics agents and she’d panic. She said, ‘If I was arrested again and sent to prison, I would never live through it. I couldn’t go through that experience again. I’d rather be dead.’

  And so these two strangers talked in the night in the company of their incongruous dogs and a sort of friendship began to emerge. Zaidins told Billie that he was a lawyer. He said he planned to specialise in trade regulations, but he had done some work defending people on drugs charges and so he might be able to help her if she got into trouble again. And there were other things he could do for her as well, because how come she was living at this down-at-heel hotel? She should be rich from all the record sales. Who was her agent? Who was her manager? Who was looking after her, for Christ’s sake?

  Zaidins realised at once that Billie could be very useful to his career, and as a young man he was ambitious for success. He was determined to seize the opportunity and get what he could from her. As he said, ‘Everybody wanted something out of her. She attracted this kind of thing. She made herself vulnerable. She invited people into her life and people figured it was easy to get into the life of Billie Holiday. I got into her life very easily … I used her too.’