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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

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BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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—FRANK O’HARA, “THE DAY LADY DIED”
 
 
Death. Pain. Sadness. When people think of Billie Holiday, these are the words they invariably use. The 1972 film
Lady Sings the Blues
reinforced the portrait of a childlike woman with no greater ambition than to “sing in a club downtown” who was derailed by drugs but saved by the love of a good man. It’s true that in her four decades, she knew more sorrow and tragedy than joy or love. But there was more to Billie Holiday than the portrait of a singer, gardenia tucked behind her ear, clutching the microphone like a lover. She was a musical genius, who pioneered a new way of singing. Although she couldn’t read music, Billie only had to hear a song once before she could sing it.
 
Her voice ranged over little more than an octave, but she used it the way a musician plays an instrument, patterning her phrasing in unexpected ways. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, manipulated phrasing and tempo. Singing just behind the beat, she would take a song and twist it in unexpected ways. Rarely did she sing a song the same way two nights in a row. “I hate straight singing,” she once said. “I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.” Critic John Bush wrote that she “changed the art of American pop vocals forever.” Duke Ellington called her “the Essence of Cool.” Frank Sinatra claimed that Holiday “was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me.”
It was a long way from Philadelphia, where she was born Eleanora Fagan on April 17, 1915. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, and her father, Clarence Holiday, were barely out of their teens when she was born. Despite what she wrote in her autobiography, her parents never married and Billie didn’t see much of her father until she moved to Harlem and started singing in the clubs. She was farmed out to relatives in Baltimore almost from birth, who made her feel unwanted, never giving her the security of a home life. By the time she was eleven, she’d been busted for truancy, sent to reform school, and raped by a neighbor. She had to learn to be tough to survive.
It was at her cleaning job in a brothel in Baltimore that Eleanora first heard jazz being played on the Victrola in the parlor. She nearly wore the record out. Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith were her first influences. Years later, she would remember, “Sometimes the record would make me so sad I’d cry up a storm. Other times the damn record made me so happy I’d forget about how much hard-earned money the session in the parlor was costing me.” In 1929, Eleanora left Baltimore behind for New York City. Reunited in Harlem, mother and daughter were soon working in a local whorehouse. In 1930, they were both busted but while Sadie got off with a fine, Eleanora was sent to a workhouse for one hundred days. When she got out, Eleanora decided that she “wasn’t going to be no damn maid” and she wasn’t going back to hooking.
That only left singing as an alternative. Harlem had become not just a haven for African Americans, the promised land of jobs and freedom, but it was also a mecca for jazz, not only at clubs, like the Cotton Club, that catered mainly to white patrons, but also places like Small’s Paradise. Eleanora got a job waiting tables and singing for tips at a club called Pod and Jerry’s. Most of the girls would pick up their tips by grabbing them between their thighs, but Billie was too dignified for that and refused.
She began to pick up more and more small gigs as word of mouth spread about the talented young singer. At the age of fifteen, she changed her name to Billie after her favorite movie star, Billie Dove, and Holiday after her father. By this time, Clarence Holiday was working with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. But the relationship between the two was awkward. Although he was proud of her talent, Holiday didn’t like being reminded of his past, or that he was old enough to have an adult daughter.
Billie was eighteen when she was spotted at a club called Monette’s by the man who was most important in launching her career. John Hammond, a critic and record producer, came every night for three weeks to hear her sing. “She was the best jazz singer I had ever heard,” he later wrote. Before long he had her cutting her first record as part of a studio group led by Benny Goodman, who was then just on the verge of making it big. In 1935, Billie recorded four sides that became hits, including “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” which landed her a recording contract with Columbia Records. She also made her debut that same year at the Apollo Theater, the mecca of music in Harlem. Despite her stage fright, she made a huge impression on the audience.
Billie’s voice wasn’t as big as Ella Fitzgerald’s or Bessie Smith’s, but she made the most of what she had. She mesmerized the audience with the stories she told with her voice. When Holiday came onstage, she sang, and then she left. She didn’t entertain the audience between songs with jokes and witty banter. If she felt like it, she gave an encore. Despite the title of her autobiography,
Lady Sings the Blues
, if you had asked her, she would have told you that she was a jazz singer. Her singing style, one writer wrote, was, “as fiercely concentrated as oxyacetylene flame.” She would later say that it took about ten years for people to catch on to what she was doing.
Now that she was making money, Billie upped her game, trading her tight, trashy stage costumes for a more elegant, refined image. Her signature look came about by accident. One night before a show, she burned her hair with a curling iron. A gardenia was procured to cover the damage. Liking the look, she kept it.
In a few short years, Billie had gone from singing for tips to touring with Count Basie’s orchestra, playing the Apollo, and making a short film with Duke Ellington. She became one of the first black performers to integrate an all-white band when she sang with Artie Shaw. But life on the road was hard. In Detroit, the management of the Fox Theater demanded that she wear darker makeup to blend in better with musicians in Count Basie’s band. Billie couldn’t stay at the same hotels or eat with her white fellow musicians in restaurants and cafés.
Billie also started to get a reputation for being difficult, complaining about her salary and working conditions. She parted ways with Count Basie when she refused to sing songs she didn’t like. Song pluggers were peeved with the liberties she took, saying that she was “too artistic.” She fell out with Shaw when she felt that he didn’t stick up for her enough with the management of the Lincoln Hotel in New York after the owners insisted that she use the tradesmen’s entrance so that customers wouldn’t think that blacks were staying there.
In 1939, she became the first black woman to open at an integrated club, Café Society, downtown in Greenwich Village. That same year Barney Josephson, the owner of Café Society, introduced Billie to the Abel Meeropol song “Strange Fruit.” Legend has it that Billie at first had no idea what the song was about. Given that black newspapers carried stories of lynching and Billie had toured the Deep South, it’s impossible to believe she was that ignorant. At twenty-four, like most blacks in the United States, she knew the sting of racism.
“Strange Fruit” was Billie’s contribution to protesting racial violence. It may have been written by a white man, but Billie gave it life. “The first time I sang it, I thought it was a mistake. There wasn’t even the patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping.” The song forced the middle-class white audience to confront the reality of racism. Josephson added to the drama by insisting that Billie close her three nightly sets with the song; all service was halted, and the only light was a spotlight that illuminated her face.
Billie’s own label, Columbia, wouldn’t record the song; the executives were too fearful of antagonizing Southern customers. Hurt and angry, she took it to Milt Gabler, the owner of Commodore Records, a small label that was run out of a record store. Gabler jumped at the chance, paying Billie five hundred dollars for “Strange Fruit” and three other songs; he later paid her an additional thousand dollars. Released on July 22, 1939, “Strange Fruit” rose to number sixteen on the record charts, selling ten thousand copies its first week.
For Billie, “Strange Fruit” changed everything. For the first time, she enjoyed the critical praise from the mainstream press that had eluded her for years. People were beginning to know her name outside of the music world. The song remained a fixture in her repertoire until her death, continuing to have resonance for her, and she never lost her passion for singing it. Once she even walked off the stage at Café Society when she felt the audience wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the song, flipping up her dress and flashing her bare behind at them. She had a clause put into her contracts that she could sing it whenever she wanted. Although other singers performed the song before and since, it has her fingerprints all over it. But not everyone was happy at the song’s success. John Hammond felt that the song ruined her career, that she began to take herself too seriously, losing her artistry and sparkle.
By the 1940s, Billie was one of the most desired singers in the small clubs on West Fifty-second Street (aka Swing Street), making a thousand dollars a week. She moved to Decca Records, continued to play clubs big and small around the country, and made a film with her idol Louis Armstrong. Vocally she was more assured than ever, refining her sound, with no excess gestures or emotions. But it was also a decade of bad choices and bad men. Billie seemed to be fatally attracted to low-life hustlers who exploited her, stole her money, and supplied her with drugs—men like her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, a sharp, flashy dresser she married in 1941.
Although Holiday had often indulged in marijuana, as did a lot of musicians, and could drink any man under the table, it wasn’t until sometime in 1943 that she started to use heroin. It was as prevalent among the musicians she hung out with as reefer. Billie seems to have started for the same reason a lot of people do: for the thrill of it. She had no idea the toll her addiction would take on her life and her career. “I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring the white gardenias and the white junk.” At one point, she claimed that she was spending five hundred dollars a week on her habit. The drugs were giving her a Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde personality. She once went after a naval officer with a broken bottle after he called her a “nigger.” She dumped Monroe and took up with Joe Guy, a musician and drug addict who could supply her with the drugs she craved.
After her mother’s death in 1945, Billie had fewer people in her life who tried to protect her, the way Sadie had done. Although they had a tense relationship at times, Sadie had always been there for her daughter. With her mother gone, Billie was now an orphan, and she never quite got over her death. Sinking deeper into drink and drugs, she became even more dependent on the men in her life to keep the loneliness at bay. She tried rehab after her agent threatened to drop her but it didn’t last.
In 1947 Billie was arrested for narcotics possession after federal agents searched her hotel room in Philadelphia. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday.’ And that’s just the way it felt,” Holiday recalled in her autobiography,
Lady Sings the Blues
. On the idiotic advice of her agent, she pled guilty and waived her right to counsel, probably thinking they would just send her back to rehab. Despite the pleas of the prosecutor, Billie was sentenced to a year and a day and sent to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. She was released seventytwo days early for good behavior. Eleven days after her release, she made her comeback in a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.
But because of her conviction, Billie’s cabaret license was revoked, making it difficult for her to get work except in concert halls and theaters. Almost a year later she was arrested again, this time for possession of opium. Her current lover, another thug named John Levy, gave her all his drugs to hold after he got a tip that narcotics agents were coming to arrest him. Before she could do anything, they were both arrested. She beat the charges; the jury acquitted her, deciding that Levy had framed her. But it would not be her last arrest.
There were still some triumphs in her remaining ten years—several new recordings, this time with Verve—but also another abusive marriage, to mob enforcer Louis McKay, who at least tried to get her off the drugs but to no avail. There were missed performances, and some nights Billie clutched the microphone like it was a lifeline. She forgot the lyrics, was inaudible, or fell behind the beat. On other occasions, a miracle would occur, and she would hold it together, producing the magic the way she used to.
In 1954 Billie finally got to go to Europe. She loved touring in Europe. Everywhere she went, she was treated like royalty. But by her second tour, the ravages of the drugs, alcohol, and smoking had taken a toll on her voice. Holiday compensated with a new emotional truth in her singing. Still she was booed in Italy, and the rest of her engagements there were canceled. At the end she was singing in Parisian nightclubs for a percentage of the door.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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