With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  I knew her. I felt I knew what she would have wanted. She wouldn’t have wanted any phoney fuss being made over her, which was what Louis was doing. He was playing the dutiful husband who had lost his loving wife, but from what she told me there had long since been no love between them any more. I went to the church and when they took the coffin out I cried. I couldn’t listen to her records for a year.

  * When Alice Vrbsky asked Billie whether she was ‘set up’ for the arrest and jail sentence in 1947, ‘She said she was on drugs when she went to jail, but she was set up in the sense that she wasn’t the problem, she wasn’t a pusher, and the people who were with her got off.’

  † Apparently Billie’s mother was also very generous and used to say, ‘If we give it out now, we’ll get it back later.’ But ‘It didn’t work out quite that way,’ said Alice with a soft giggle.

  ‡ By a licence she means a Cabaret Card. When Alice asked Billie how it was that after-hours clubs were permitted to stay open, even though it was against the law, she said, ‘The police know where they are and they don’t worry them if they pay. I’m sure it’s the same with drugs, prostitution and everything else.’

  § Looking at a photograph of Alice Vrbsky, it would seem impossible to think she was ‘passing for white’, but as the writer Langston Hughes explained in his autobiography The Big Sea, ‘Here in the United States of America, the word Negro is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood in his veins.’

  My own father, Thomas Blackburn, had a grandmother who was born on the island of Mauritius and was a ‘woman of colour’ as it was called there, and a descendant of slaves. That would make me a Negro in many of the southern states, where ‘any ascertainable trace’ of Negro blood defines one as being black. There are endless stories in which a person who looks white, but who is officially black, is denied the job they are qualified for, thrown out of the hospital they are lying in, or ostracised by those who were their friends, once the ‘secret’ is out. All this might have an Alice in Wonderland humour to it, were it not so serious and had the consequences not been so disastrous for so many people, black and white.

  ‖ Alice said that ‘If she had known she was dying, she might have signed the will that her lawyer Earle Zaidins had got ready for her.’

  a Alice was very confused on one point. ‘She said she asked Frankie to bring cocaine, but it said in the paper it was heroin … Why didn’t she tell me if she asked for heroin, too? And how could she have taken a fix? It’s a mystery.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’

  I have been looking at a video recording of Billie singing ‘Fine and Mellow’. It is taken from the television film The Sound of Jazz, which was made on 8 December 1957. The entire sequence lasts for about three and a half minutes. I reach the end and spin the flickering images back to the beginning. I press Stop, Rewind and Play, over and over again. I am watching faces. I am trying to read the story that is being told here. I am watching how people look at each other, how they stand, how they move. Some appear to be very strong, while others look frail. There are those who close their eyes with concentration and those who keep their eyes open all the time.

  Billie is here with a gathering of old friends.* Many of them used to play together in the 1930s and ’40s, but then things changed, their paths rarely crossed and they hardly ever had the opportunity to perform on the same stage. The reason for this was very simple: they were all recognised individually as stars in their own right and they were making good money, their names emblazoned in big letters in front of one club or another. But few club owners were prepared to pay for more than one star at a time, and so they tended to appear on their own, which meant that the excitement of working together and sharing skills and experience was lost.

  Some, like Lester Young, couldn’t bear the isolation and the lack of compatibility he felt with young and unskilled players. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why he increasingly withdrew into a cocoon of drink and marijuana and pills and sadness, unable to play with anything like his old fluency, until the moment when he was back among friends and could become himself again. Others were stronger, but still they were unhappy with the situation. The bassist Milt Hinton explained how Billie’s old friend Ben Webster was ‘going crazy … because he gets five hundred dollars a week in Rochester, but with three high-school kids to accompany him, and every afternoon he needs to sit down with them to teach them the chords. They’ll forget by the time they get on the bandstand, and God forbid if one of them takes an extra break!’

  Milt Hinton said that Billie was in the same situation. ‘She’s going to some club … and they’re giving her a fairly high price, but in order to do that they can’t support her with the kind of musicians she should be supported with, like the ones who made her records. So they’re taking this little stinking joint and they pay her whatever her price is and they get some local musicians, which is just ridiculous, for the simple reason that they haven’t the experience. They’ll probably be great later, but they’re just terrible now and they’re only getting fifty or sixty dollars a week. And she has to scuffle through a performance with this kind of a background.’

  And so it was an important event when two music journalists and a television film producer† put forward the idea of bringing a number of top jazz musicians together in Studio 58 on 10th Avenue and letting them play like they used to play in the old days. Here were the Count Basie All Stars, the Henry ‘Red’ Allen All Stars, the Thelonious Monk Trio, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio and the Billie Holiday and Mal Waldron All Stars. Everybody had just one day to rehearse, to listen to each other and to talk. The programme was then ready to be broadcast live the following evening.

  During those two days in December the streets of New York were engulfed by a heavy snowstorm and some of the players were not at all well. Nevertheless everything was forgotten with the sheer joy of walking into that studio and seeing the old familiar faces again. Milt Hinton remembered ‘the ecstasy, just to be flitting around’ and how they kept saying, ‘Here we are, playing together. We know who we are, the people know who we are. We never get to play with the good guys any more, but now here we are together.’‡

  During the rehearsal all the musicians were milling around together. Count Basie and Thelonious Monk were seen talking, while Billie stood smiling beside them.§ Milt Hinton remarked on the ‘princely demeanour and majestic presence’ of Jo Jones the drummer, and Vic Dickenson was overheard saying ‘Jazz am a bitch’ and making people laugh with his gentle humour. And there was Roy Eldridge, whom Billie still called Little Brother, and Gerry Mulligan ‘the Sax King’, who was the only white man in her group and the baby of them all.

  Even Lester Young had made it, although he was sitting by himself on a bench and was wearing carpet slippers because his feet hurt, and he was looking much older than his forty-eight years. Milt Hinton said everyone was aware that Pres ‘wasn’t so well’, but he didn’t remember anyone saying they thought he was going. ‘We had no thought like that and certainly we had none of Billie then.’ Billie was in fine spirits and exuberant, although Roy Eldridge said he was shocked by how much she had changed since the last time he saw her. ‘She was just a little bitty woman. She had gotten so small. I’d never known her so small, and I knew her when she was fourteen or fifteen.’

  When that day’s rehearsal was over, Doc Cheatham said that ‘Everybody was kidding and laughing and talking a mile a minute … and Billie invited us to have greens and ribs and stuff at her place after the session, and a lot of ’em went.’ Only Lester Young declined. ‘He just kept to himself, sat apart. He was very quiet and sad that day. He didn’t have much to say to anybody.’

  The following day, the bassist Walter Page collapsed on his way to the studio and was taken to hospital, where he died a couple of weeks later. But everyone else stumbled through the snow and arrived when they were supposed to. The cameras were rolling. Roy Eldridge remembered how gracious the producer was. ‘He let pe
ople mingle and he didn’t disturb them and he had a feeling for jazz … “Let the boys play,” he said,’ and the cameras continued to roll.

  Billie was the only woman among them, but there was nothing new in that. In the film sequence that I have been watching, you see her and her eleven All Stars taking up their positions. The dark air is pierced by the beams of television lights and is full of the swirling smoke trails of cigarettes.

  Billie goes to sit on a high wooden stool in the centre of the stage and the musicians gather round her in a semicircle. She is wearing a pale woollen dress with a round neck and a hemline that just covers her knees. She is wearing flat shoes and a wristwatch, and her hair is pulled back into a pony tail. She settles herself very quietly with her hands in her lap and looks for all the world like a schoolteacher who is preparing to read a story to a class of young pupils. The only hint of glamour is in her shining earrings, which sparkle like stars when she moves her head.

  There are two main camera angles that are used throughout. From one of them, Billie is bathed in a soft light and the paleness of her dress is answered by the luminosity of her pale skin. She looks younger than she is, almost like the young girl she once was. She looks soft and innocent and possessed by an almost ethereal beauty, especially when she smiles.

  The other camera seems to be focusing on a completely different woman, who is illuminated by dark and dramatic shadows. This woman is gaunt and tired and her eyes are glittering black pools that keep filling with tears. From this angle you don’t see the prim dress or the wristwatch – just the floating apparition of a face and the shifting emotions it contains.

  Billie gazes at the men who surround her. With several of them she has been engaged in what Roy Eldridge called ‘a little light housekeeping’ at one time or another, but she is just as close to the ones she has never slept with. As Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison once explained it, ‘She romanced everybody in the band, so far as friendship was concerned. Because she was your friend’‖

  Now you see her busy with all of them, going from one to the next, smiling at them, getting them ready to do their best for her. As Doc Cheatham said, ‘You had to be exceptional to play for her. She wanted everything to be just right. One wrong note, no matter how quiet or short, and she noticed it. She could let you know something with her eyes, like if the trumpet was too loud. She’d be polite, but tough.’

  The music begins and she is singing ‘My man don’t love me, treats me oh so mean. My man, he don’t love me, treats me awful mean. He’s the lowest man, that I’ve ever seen.’

  Ben Webster is her first soloist. As he rises to his feet you can see the solid power of his body and how dangerous he might be if he became drunk or angry. He and Billie did a little light housekeeping in the late 1930s and he used to beat her up, and on at least one occasion gave her a black eye. Now she looks at him with extreme tenderness, because everything is starting just right and he is doing well.a

  The camera moves to Gerry Mulligan, who has his eyes tight shut and his head dipped forward, so that he seems to be lost in a deep sleep. And then we see Lester Young rising to his feet and shuffling forward to stand beside his old friend, his Lady Day. The camera moves onto his face, exposing how ill he looks and how tired. His last recording, made earlier that year, was called Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’ and Lester looks as though he has been crying for weeks, his eyes are so swollen and puffy. He raises the saxophone slowly towards his lips and his mouth opens in thirsty anticipation of receiving it. The music he makes is slow and measured and heartbreaking. As the New York Times journalist Nat Hentoff described it later, ‘He blew the sparest, purest blues I had ever heard.’b

  The camera leaves Lester Young’s face and examines his hands and the fingers that hardly seem to be moving at all. Then it turns to Billie, watching her as she watches the man who was once the closest of her close friends. Her eyes are fixed on him. It is as if she is giving him strength and keeping him safe from harm with the concentration of her gaze. She nods her head in agreement to what he is saying in the language of his music, and she bites her lip because she can feel the effort he is making, the thin edge he is balancing on.

  The words of the song continue: ‘He wears high-draped pants, stripes are really yellow. He wears high-draped pants, stripes are really yellow. But when he starts in to love me, he’s so fine and mellow!’ And now Vic Dickenson is on the trombone. In the film, the skin of his face is very pale and from his features he could be mistaken for a white southern farmer. You can see the gentleness of his character as he plays. Billie smiles him through his solo.

  In comes Gerry Mulligan. He is wearing a flashy, dog-toothed sports jacket that tightens over his back as he bends forward to blow on his instrument. He is very blond and Nordic and tense with concentration.c Billie gives him a broad, welcoming smile as she watches his anxious face, as she listens to the heavy footstep tread of the baritone saxophone.

  The words return: ‘Love will make you drink and gamble, make you stay out all night long. Love will make you drink and gamble, make you stay out all night long. Love will make you do things, that you know is wrong.’ Billie no longer seems to be aware of her musicians – she is staring inwards, lost in some private world of thought and memory. It is as if she is not singing about a particular man she has loved, but about love itself and her own driving need to love and be loved, no matter what the consequences might be.

  Now it’s Coleman Hawkins and the heavy-toned, gruff voice of his saxophone. Coleman Hawkins, his head full of literature and politics, his apartment full of classical records, his belly full of brown lentils and brandy. Gerry Mulligan has opened his eyes and is standing very close behind him, swaying like a thin tree in the wind.

  Roy Eldridge is next. He wears a striped shirt and a broad-brimmed hat. He pushes the trumpet notes higher and higher, and it is as if he might burst from the effort. Billie is there as a gentle, smiling presence and at one point he catches her eye for approval, just before he takes the notes to their final, squealing heights. ‘Stand up, Little Brother!’ she used to say to him. ‘Stand up! You’re small enough as it is!’

  And then the song is ready for its promise: ‘But if you treat me right, baby, I’ll stay home every day. If you treat me right, baby, I’ll stay home every day. But you’re so mean to me, baby, I know you’re gonna drive me away.’ And with that Billie emerges from whatever place her private thoughts took her to, and she lifts her head and fixes her dark eyes on the camera.

  She leans forward in a confidential manner and again she is a schoolmistress instructing her class. She shakes her head with solemn authority as she explains that ‘Love is just like a faucet, it turns off and on’ and then she faces the camera a second time. She stares straight into the lens and with a wistful smile and a little shrug of her shoulders she explains, ‘Sometimes when you think it’s on, baby, it has turned off and gone.’ With that the story is told in its entirety.

  * Billie’s All Stars included Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham (tps), Vic Dickenson (tb), Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins (ts), Gerry Mulligan (bs), Mal Waldron (p), Danny Barker (g), Milt Hinton (b), Osie Johnson (d).

  † Nat Hentoff, Whitney Balliett and producer Robert Herridge. Nat Hentoff was ‘a champion of Billie’s cause, who made a point of emphasising his devotion to her singing from all eras’ (Chilton, p. 230).

  ‡ There was a similar joyful gathering in 1958 when Esquire magazine organised the photograph by Art Kane of jazz musicians gathered on the front steps of a house in Harlem. A crowd of top musicians turned up, even though the shoot was set for ten o’clock in the morning and several people said that until then they hadn’t known there were two ten o’clocks in a single day.

  § Milt Hinton was also a keen amateur photographer and had his camera with him for this event. He took a picture of Billie ‘through the piano with her long pigtail, standing next to Basie’.

  ‖ Billie called him Sweetie-Pie. ‘We’d kiss and she’d say, “Sweet, Sweet
, you still carrying on that same old shit? Sweet, Sweet, Sweetie-Pie!” Only she could say that in her way. And when her life went on, her voice got lower and lower. Nobody’s like her, there’ll only be one Billie Holiday!’

  a Ben Webster remembered the occasion and how Billie’s mother got very angry and refused to let him enter the apartment again. When Billie went to join Webster in a waiting car, Sadie rushed down and attacked him with an umbrella, telling him he’d ‘get worse’ if he ever hurt her daughter again. Webster said, ‘Naturally I could see that Billie’s ma was real mad, but what made it worse was that Billie was just bursting with laughter at the sight of me being whupped. That made me mad, but we all ended up friends’ (Chilton, p. 23).

  b Nat Hentoff felt that Billie was more close, more intense with Lester Young than with the other musicians. In this interpretation of the session, when Billie was looking at her old friend, ‘she was looking back with the gentlest of regrets at their past. Prez was remembering too. Whatever had blighted their relationship was forgotten in the communion of music. Sitting in the control room I felt tears and saw tears in the eyes of most of the others there. The rest of the program was alright, but this had been its climax – the empirical sound of jazz’ (Robert O’Meally, The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, 1991, p. 163).

  c Gerry Mulligan was born in New York in 1927 and died in 1996. Like ‘many of the most gifted musicians in jazz [he was] lost for a time to narcotics … Heroin stretched out the natural high that playing produced … It served to soften the edges of the gritty world in which musicians were forced to earn their living’ (Ward and Burns, p. 358).