Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (5 page)

She sang a moment behind the beat and lived a moment ahead of it. One New Year’s Eve, a sailor saw her being served in a bar and asked: “When did you start serving nigger bitches?” She stabbed a bottle into his face.
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Another time in another bar,
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a group of soldiers and sailors started stubbing out their cigarettes on her mink coat. She handed the mink coat to a friend to hold, picked up a diamond-shaped ashtray, and laid the sailors out flat.

Yet when it came to the men in her life,
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this impulse to defend herself bled away. Louis McKay graduated from being her pimp to being her “manager” and husband: he stole almost all her money. After her greatest performance at Carnegie Hall,
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he greeted her by punching her so hard in the face she was sent flying. Her story was about to crash into Harry Anslinger’s. He had been, it turned out, watching her very carefully.

Harry had heard whispers
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that this rising black star was using heroin, so he assigned an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to track her every move. Harry hated to hire black agents, but if he sent white guys into Harlem
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and Baltimore, they stood out straight away. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. His job was to bust his own people, but Anslinger was insistent that no black man in his Bureau could ever become a white man’s boss. Jimmy was allowed through the door at the Bureau, but never up the stairs. He was and would remain an “archive man”
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—a street agent whose job was to figure out who was selling, who was supplying, and who should be busted. He would carry large amounts of drugs with him, and he was allowed to deal drugs himself so he could gain the confidence of the people he was secretly plotting to arrest.

Many agents in this position would shoot heroin with their clients,
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to “prove” they weren’t cops. We don’t know whether Jimmy joined in, but we do know he had no pity for addicts: “I never knew a victim,”
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he said. “You victimize yourself by becoming a junkie.”

He first saw Billie in her brother-in-law’s apartment,
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where she was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine. The next time he saw her, it was in a brothel in Harlem, doing exactly the same. Billie’s greatest talent, after singing, was swearing
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—if she called you a “motherfucker,”
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it was a great compliment. We don’t know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherfucker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him.

When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. Her biographer Julia Blackburn studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher—now lost by the archives handling it—and she wrote about what he remembered in detail.

“Stick it under the door!” she yelled.

“It’s too big to go under the door!” he snapped back.

She let him in. She was alone. Jimmy felt uncomfortable.

“Billie, why don’t you make a short case of this and, if you’ve got anything, why don’t you turn it over to us?” he asked. “Then we won’t be searching around, pulling out your clothes and everything. So why don’t you do that?”
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But Jimmy’s partner arrived and sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search.

“You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip,” Billie said. “All I want to say is—will you search me and let me go? All that policewoman is going to do is look up my pussy.”

She stripped and stood there, and then she pissed in front of them, defying them to watch.

When Billie sang “Loverman, where can you be?”
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she wasn’t crying for a man—she was crying for heroin. But when she found out her friends in the jazz world were using the same drug, she begged them to stop.
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Never imitate me, she cried. Never do this.

She kept trying to quit. She would get her friends to shut her away in their houses for days on end while she went through withdrawal. As she ran back to her dealers, she cursed herself as “No Guts Holiday.”
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Why couldn’t she stop? “It’s tough enough coming off
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when you’ve got somebody who loves you and trusts you and believes in you,” she wrote. “I didn’t have anybody.” Actually, she said, that’s not quite right. She had Anslinger’s agents, “betting their time, their shoe leather, and their money that they would get me. Nobody can live like that.”

The morning he first raided her, Jimmy took Billie to one side and promised to talk to Anslinger personally for her. “I don’t want you to lose your job,”
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he said.

Not long after, he ran into her in a bar
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and they talked for hours, with her pet Chihuahua, Moochy, by her side. Then, one night, at Club Ebony, they ended up dancing together—Billie Holiday and Anslinger’s agent, swaying together to the music.

“And I had so many close conversations with her, about so many things,” he would remember years later. “She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type.”
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The man Anslinger sent to track
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and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her. Confronted with a real addict, up close, the hatred fell away.

But Anslinger was going to be given a break on Billie, one he got nowhere else in the jazz world. Billie had got used to turning up at gigs so badly beaten by Louis McKay they had to tape up her ribs
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before pushing her onstage. She was too afraid to go to the police—but finally she was brave enough to cut him off.

“How come I got to take this from this bitch here? This low class bitch?” McKay raged. “If I got a whore, I got some money from her or I don’t have nothing to do with the bitch. I don’t want no cunt.”
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He had heard that Harry Anslinger wanted information on her, and he was intrigued. “She’s been getting away with too much shit,” MacKay said, adding he wanted “Holiday’s ass in the gutter in the East River.” That, it seems, was the clincher. “I got enough to finish her off,” he had pledged. “I’m going to do her up so goddam bad she going to remember as long as she live.” He traveled to D.C. to see Harry,
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and he agreed to set her up.

When Billie was busted again, she was put on trial.
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She stood before the court looking pale and stunned. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’ ”
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she said, “and that’s just the way it felt.” She refused to weep on the stand.
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She told the judge she didn’t want any sympathy. She just wanted to be sent to a hospital so she could kick the drugs and get well. Please, she said to the judge, “I want the cure.”
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She was sentenced instead to a year in a West Virginia prison,
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where she was forced to go cold turkey and work during the days in a pigsty,
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among other places. In all her time behind bars, she did not sing a note.
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Years later, when her autobiography was published, Billie tracked Jimmy Fletcher down
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and sent him a signed copy. She had written inside it: “Most federal agents are nice people.
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They’ve got a dirty job to do and they have to do it. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves sometime for what they have to do . . . Maybe they would have been kinder to me if they’d been nasty; then I wouldn’t have trusted them enough to believe what they told me.” She was right: Jimmy never stopped feeling guilty for what he’d done to Lady Day. “Billie ‘paid her debt’ to society,”
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one of her friends wrote, “but society never paid its debt to her.”

Now, as a former convict, she was stripped of her cabaret performer’s license, on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public. This meant she wasn’t allowed to sing anywhere
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that alcohol was served—which included all the jazz clubs in the United States.

“How do you best act cruelly?” her friend Yolande Bavan asked me in 2013. “It’s to take something that’s the dearest thing to that person away from them.” Billie had been able to survive everything—but this? “You despair because you have no control. You can’t do the thing that is a passion and that you made your livelihood at, and that has brought joy to people all over the world,” Bavan says. Billie was finally silenced. She had no money to look after herself or to eat properly. She couldn’t even rent an apartment in her own name.

One night, Billie fell over drunk, and her friend Greer Johnson found her sobbing on the floor.

“Baby, fuck it! Honest to Christ, I’m never going to sing again no more.”

“What the hell do you think you can do if you don’t sing?” Greer asked, according to Julia Blackburn.

“I don’t give a fuck!”

“Fine! And then what will you do, Billie?”

She muttered: “I’ll sing again.”

“You’re damn right you will!”
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Another of her friends kept telling her she could save enough money to retire to a house with a garden where she could have babies. “Do you think I can? Do you think I can do it?”
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she asked incredulously. She dreamed of getting a big farm
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somewhere and turning it into a home for orphaned children, where she’d run the kitchen herself. Sometimes, she would go to visit her baby godson, Bevan Dufty, at his family’s apartment on Ninety-Fourth Street, and she would suckle him. Although she had no milk, it seemed to reassure her. “Bitch, this is my baby,” she would tell his mother, laughing.