With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  Billie asked Zaidins some legal question about a contract and he looked into that for her, and after a while she took him on as her lawyer. He said she told him ‘She was in and out in terms of her relationship with Louis McKay and she had various cases pending. She wanted me to be on hand in case a problem came up.’

  Zaidins was surprised by how aware Billie was of the technicalities of her contracts and of her precarious legal position. She explained that when she was arrested in 1948, her lawyer had told her to play dumb and that had worked with the judge, so she had played dumb ever since. She said she hoped that if people saw how helpless she was, it might persuade them to have pity on her and leave her alone.

  The first job that Zaidins took on for his new client was drawing up her will. He said, ‘She had a thing about wills, but every time it came for her to sign it, she wouldn’t discuss it.’ He thought she was afraid that if she signed, it would be like signing her own death warrant. She confessed to him that she was very superstitious and said she had once ‘put a whammy’† on John Levy. She had wished him dead and he died, just like that. She felt she was in some way to blame for his death – it was as if she had killed him with her maledictions, even though everybody knew he had a weak heart.

  As her lawyer, Zaidins advised Billie that he could manage her money more efficiently if she had a bank account. He opened one for her at the Chemical Bank, but that did not last because she quickly withdrew more money than she had put in. She was used to spending her earnings before she had received them and she was very generous. Zaidins said, ‘She wanted to keep alive that she was Lady Day. So when she had a little bit of money, or when she had borrowed a bit, she would give it to people, to show she had it … She used to tell me, “Don’t ask for the advance. I don’t want them to know I need it! I’m Lady Day!” ’

  Zaidins questioned Billie about her relationship with her agent, Joe Glaser. She said he had often promised to get her Cabaret Card back, but had achieved nothing. ‘She was griping that he wasn’t booking her enough, for enough money, and she could never get an exact count of the guy. She always felt she wasn’t getting the proper accounting.’‡

  Worse than that, Joe Glaser never got the right sort of bookings for her. She was forced to do the same music over and over again and ‘all those small jazz groups gave her a headache’. What she wanted was to ‘sing her heart out with strings’, like Frank Sinatra. Her best audiences had always been white and she wanted to play ‘big white rooms’ like the Plaza, the Waldorf, the Empire Room, the Bandbox. As Zaidins saw it, ‘She wanted to be a big act. She wanted to be booked regularly. She wasn’t that well recognised by everybody and she wanted that recognition and she wanted to pay the bills.’

  But still Billie felt obliged to Joe Glaser. After all, he had stood by her and was always there when she got in a jam. ‘Whether for good or bad, and even though she was unhappy with Glaser, she felt she had security with him. Glaser was to many people a father image. When you were broke you went to him and got some money, for a new coat, a car, or just to get home.’

  Zaidins became convinced that he could pull the right strings to get Billie her Cabaret Card, but she refused to cooperate. She was afraid it would only lead to more publicity about her police record, her drug addiction, her unreliability. She said, ‘I don’t want the goddamn thing! I don’t want that mess! I can live without it!’ In spite of her protests he continued privately with the application, but it was again turned down.

  However, sometime in 1957, Zaidins did manage to find Billie a little apartment on 87th Street, not far from where he had moved to. Even that was not easy. She signed the lease under the name of Eleanor Fagan McKay, but the landlord wanted to cancel the whole thing when he discovered his new tenant’s real identity. It was only by ‘making a big stink’ that Zaidins managed to push the contract through, because, as he said, ‘It meant so very, very much to her.’

  Zaidins obviously enjoyed Billie’s company, although he was insistent that he did not have a sexual relationship with her. They used to listen to records together in his apartment and he found her to be a ‘brilliant conversationalist who could hold a conversation about everything: clothing, babies, musicians, furnishings, her house … everything’. She’d tell endless stories about her life, whether it was events from years ago or from the day before, but Zaidins realised that ‘There were some things she might not have wanted to remember and she did have a fantastic imagination. Not that she’d make up stories, but to repeat what happened yesterday, she’d completely fantasise.’

  Zaidins said that after a while ‘I had a feeling that Billie was dependent upon me. She was honest with me. She was a good friend.’ In return she helped him with his career. ‘She took me by the hand and took me to different jazz places and other clubs at night. She introduced me to the giants of the jazz world. She kept introducing me as her lawyer and saying how wonderful I was, and really I was nowhere near it then, I was just a kid. But as a direct result a lot of artists thought: if he can represent Billie Holiday, he sure can represent me. And I received a lot of clients that way.’

  But Zaidins realised there was a certain one-sidedness to this friendship and an innate loneliness in Billie that could not be bridged. ‘She had no real friends, no close friends.’ He said that people who had known her in the past would drop by to pay a hurried visit to the apartment and then vanish again, while ‘Total strangers would arrive out of nowhere and you had the feeling they had never been there before.’

  Apart from Zaidins, William Dufty and his wife Maely ‘passed in and out’. Then there was a ‘tall, black, slender, nice-looking boy’ called Frankie Freedom, who did her hair and made meals for her,§ and her ‘quiet and loyal’ secretary Alice Vrbsky, who walked the dog and dealt with letters and other practicalities, such as filling out Billie’s monthly probation reports, which explained where she was going to be playing and affirmed that she was ‘being good’. None of these helpers was ever paid much for their services, simply because there was so little money around. Zaidins said he often lent Billie money when she needed it. On one occasion she pawned her black diamond mink so that she could stock up on food and drink.

  Zaidins got married in 1958 and Billie quickly adopted his young son as one of her numerous godchildren. She sang him lullabies and had infinite patience with him, as she did with all the children to whom she became close. She often told Zaidins ‘It was her dream to retire somewhere and get a big spread of land where she could have a home for orphan children.’ On a more realistic note, she asked him if he could help her to adopt just the one. She told him she had only agreed to marry Louis McKay because, as a single woman in show business and with her police record, she knew she didn’t stand a chance. But she felt it might be possible now and was sure she would make a good mother. She said she had recently heard of a child available for adoption in Boston. She was finding out about that. The house in the country would be surrounded by flowers and trees.

  It is difficult to know if Zaidins really believed that Billie’s dream of motherhood could come true, but he did set about collecting affidavits from all sorts of people who were willing to swear that she would be a reliable parent. He added his own affidavit as well, for good measure. This was Billie’s second adoption application and it was turned down just as swiftly as the first and ‘she cried for days, for days’ when she was told the news.

  But at least Zaidins was proud that he managed to fulfil another of Billie’s dreams. He helped her to get in touch with Ray Ellis, who did the musical arrangements for the Lady in Satin record in February 1958. He said she did her first rehearsal for Lady in Satin in his living-room, going through the lyrics with her pianist Mal Waldron,‖ and after that she was ready for the real thing. The recording sessions were held in a church on Lexington Avenue that had ‘this magnificent, resonant sound’ and Zaidins as well as Alice Vrbsky made sure Billie was there on time and stayed to listen to the recordings.a

  Zaidins remembered how
one night Billie turned up at his apartment, complaining that a tap was dripping and keeping her awake. ‘You’ve gotta help me!’ she said. ‘That goddamn thing goes drip, drip, drip, drip, drip! It wouldn’t be so bad, but it don’t swing! It don’t swing!’ She was laughing and serious and angry and desperate all at the same time. Earle Zaidins told her to put a towel under the tap to silence it.

  Another night she arrived at the door with blood dripping from a cut to her head. Louis McKay had turned up unannounced at her apartment. They had a fight and he hit her over the head with the telephone while she was trying to make a call. Earle Zaidins said, ‘I locked her in the bathroom and Louis came knocking at my door. I locked my wife and kids in another part of the apartment and Louis came in.

  ‘He said, “I got a gun! A pistol!” and he pulled it. I went for it and threw him out.

  ‘I was going to call the police, but Lady prevailed upon me not to. She didn’t want to press charges. At first I thought it was because she didn’t want the police involved – and she didn’t. But she was also afraid of the publicity. She was very sensitive to bad publicity.’

  Zaidins was not contacted when Billie was first taken to the private Knickerbocker Hospital on 30 May 1959, but he went to see her after she had been moved to Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital. She had been registered as Mrs Eleanora McKay, but once her identity had been revealed, she had been placed in a private room because so many reporters began to hound the hospital. Zaidins had difficulty in persuading the orderly in charge that he had a right to see her and was told that, in her state, they doubted if she could recognise anybody. But finally they agreed to take him up to her room, where she was lying in some sort of plastic tent. He said, ‘She looked like half of herself. She had wasted tremendously. The orderly pointed to me and asked Lady if she recognised me. She said, “What the fuck do you mean? That’s Earle, my lawyer!” She smiled and the man went away.’

  When Billie was first in hospital she had friends visiting her and well-wishers sending her messages. She had a radio and comic books, and Zaidins even brought in a gramophone so that they could listen to the recordings she had just made with Ray Ellis for MGM. One nurse allowed her to drink a bottle of beer. William Dufty provided her with cigarettes and also arranged to earn her some money by producing an article for The Inquirer, entitled ‘How drugs saved my life’, for which she received $500.

  There was obviously a rather mad party atmosphere in Billie’s room. Zaidins wanted to arrange a new recording deal with MGM and when Billie doubted if she would ever be able to sing again, he reassured her, saying, ‘Look, Lady, these people at MGM are business people. They check into things. They’ve already talked to the doctors. Would they pick up your option if they thought you were going to die?’ Billie warmed to the idea and said they could bring the recording equipment into the hospital and call the new record Lady at the Met.

  But then, on 11 June, Billie was arrested in her hospital bed on the charge of possessing narcotics and everything became much more serious. According to Zaidins, ‘She was free from drugs when she went into that hospital and I believe the tests proved she was free of drugs … She had no need for drugs, mentally or physically. So her involvement with the drugs found under or by her pillow had to be phoney.’b

  Everybody who was involved had a different account of what drugs were found and where, and they all disagreed as to whether Billie was ‘clean’ or not. For his part, Zaidins was convinced that Billie’s worst fears had come true and somebody had planted the drugs in her room. In the interview he said, ‘I can only speculate as to why, and I don’t want to do that here.’

  Whatever the truth was, it does seem that Billie’s arrest and the very real threat of imprisonment then facing her contributed more to her sudden decline in hospital than the medical complications that appeared on her death certificate. Everyone agreed that she had been getting better, but she told Zaidins ‘She didn’t think she was going to make it. She said she was tired. She was unhappy.’c

  When Billie Holiday died on 17 July, there was an immediate flurry of activity as the people who had been involved in her life got ready for the financial, legal and emotional battles that were bound to follow. Zaidins, who had fallen out with Joe Glaser after a recent quarrel, suddenly found himself ‘buddy-buddy’ with Billie’s agent. At the funeral he even travelled with Joe Glaser and Louis McKay in the first limousine behind the casket, and the three of them were among the pall-bearers.

  Zaidins said he couldn’t remember much about this final stage in his relationship with Billie. ‘I was in a state of grief,’ he said. ‘I actually cried for a couple of weeks after this woman died. I don’t know what it was, don’t ask me how or what. It was as if she was somebody in my own family. I was very emotional about it.’

  Thinking about it all those years later, Zaidins wondered if Billie might not still have been alive ‘had this country treated her the way she should have been treated, given her the respect to which she was vastly entitled … In America we somehow or other do not place our jazz personalities on the same level as classical musicians and singers. We seem to look down on them as fair game, when we ought to elevate them to the status to which they are so richly deserving.’

  And if she had lived, he thought she would probably have changed her style. ‘She loved recording with violins and flutes and I think she would have gone in that direction.’

  * This chapter is based on the interviews with Linda Kuehl and with the film producer John Jeremy, who used parts of his conversation with Zaidins in his 1984 documentary film, The Long Night of Lady Day. Zaidins himself died in 2002, but I spoke at some length with his widow, Alice.

  † ‘To wish someone ill fortune … especially by predicting failure’ (Dictionary of American Slang).

  ‡ Zaidins said, ‘There were people who agitated her and convinced her she was being stolen from. She probably earnt a gross of thirty to fifty thousand dollars in her last years, which isn’t a hell of a lot considering expenses: musicians, commissions, her piano player, to whom she had to pay a regular salary whether she worked or not …’

  § It was Frankie Freedom who took Billie to hospital at the end and was said to have been responsible for giving her the ‘white powder’ that led to her final arrest. But that part of the story is very hard to verify and Frankie Freedom himself disappeared without trace.

  ‖ ‘Mal Waldron was a very quiet guy and he didn’t play funky, soulful music. She’d criticise him saying, “How come you’re a black man and you can’t play funky music?” ’

  a Ray Ellis remembered Earle Zaidins coming to the sessions. ‘He was like her manager, almost a manager-lawyer. He was very dedicated to her. He really dug her. He would just flip out when he listened to her sing – have an orgasm is the only way I can explain it. He is the last guy in the world you’d imagine to flip out over Billie Holiday!’

  b According to Alice Zaidins, her husband was certain that Billie was completely free of drugs, but later he was persuaded by Alice Vrbsky that she must still have been an occasional user.

  c Like many others, Zaidins saw Billie as a masochist. ‘She was only happy being miserable … Why else would she have gotten involved in that marital life?’ But later in the interview with John Jeremy he added, ‘To be a girl singer, you’ve got to be a masochist. You’re going from town to town in hotel rooms and you’re alone.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Alice Vrbsky

  ‘A woman of her word.’

  Alice Vrbsky speaks very slowly and clearly and when she needs to think about a question before answering it, she doesn’t seem to mind that the tape recorder is listening to her silence. I have here combined two interviews with her. The first was made by Linda Kuehl in 1971, when Alice was in her late thirties, and the second was made by the jazz collector Norman Saks in 1985. On both occasions Alice gives pretty much the same account of her friendship with Billie, although in the later interview she is far more outspoken in her opinion of
Louis McKay and in her talk about drugs. She giggles quite often, making a shy, rumbling sound when she explains how young she once was and how little she understood about the world. As she draws closer to the end of her story, her voice gets even slower and you have the sense that she is not simply remembering the past – she is also walking back into it, until she can see that woman called Billie Holiday, as she knew her during the final two years of her life. Here is Alice Vrbsky talking.

  I’d only heard her on records, but then in the summer of 1957 I got to see her in Central Park. I enjoyed the performance so much that I went up to thank her afterwards. She’d signed the programme and I was trying to tell her how much I admired her. I said I’d got the album Lady Sings the Blues, but I hadn’t got it with me, and I asked would she mind if I brought it down for her to sign and, she said, ‘Fine, bring it down!’

  So the next day I showed up with the record and the first thing she said was, ‘Ah! A woman of her word!’ – just like that. And on the album she wrote, ‘Thank you for loving me.’ You see we hit it off. I can’t explain it, but we hit it off.

  Her husband, Louis McKay, asked if I would be her secretary. I was really surprised, I was just a novice. But he made it sound wonderful and I thought this was great, I’d get to see some of the country and I’d get to hear her sing. For the first two weeks he paid me cash – sixty-five dollars I think it was – but that was the one and only time I was paid by him because then he sort of disappeared. She paid me after that. She’d pay for all the travelling and everything, although I didn’t really earn anything. I was twenty-four years old and living at home. I didn’t need the money.

  When I started with her we went to Los Angeles. Her husband made arrangements to get us an apartment, but then he faded out quite promptly. The apartment was in a pretty lousy condition; the floors and walls were grimy and we were both scrubbing and wiping and mopping, but she did the major part of it, it was I who was helping her. She was a hard worker. It wasn’t as if she just laid around and didn’t do anything.