With Billie (18 page)

Lester was almost six feet tall and during the last years of his life he became painfully thin. He ate very little and could rarely be persuaded to touch any food at all before three o’clock in the morning; then he might start with a tin of sardines and follow that with some ice cream. Drink provided him with his nourishment. He drank port wine or sherry mixed with gin, whisky or Courvoisier mixed with beer, along with all those other mezzo-mezzo, up-and-down, top-and-bottom combinations that Billie also favoured. As a young man Lester said he never wanted to lose that ‘nice feeling’ he had at the beginning when he moved from orange sodas to the harder stuff, but towards the end of his life, as he explained to Bobby Scott, ‘I have to drink. When I drink,
the pain goes.’
^e
The drinking had begun in earnest in the 1920s while he was with Count Basie and doing a lot of one-nighters: playing for eight hours, followed by a jam session for five or six hours more, and then bundling into a rackety bus for the long ride to the next booking in the next town.

By the time Lester was in his mid-thirties, he was drinking almost two pints a day of 100 proof spirits; sometimes he bought six bottles of spirits at once, just to be safe. It was important for him to feel safe whenever possible. In the days when it was still legal, he used to carry a little leather suitcase filled with marijuana. When Prohibition had ended and marijuana took its turn to be the illegal substance, he would carry a bottle of spirits in a little red plaid bag, which he kept on his lap. His tenor saxophone was always somewhere close by, even in later years when he was not so often in the mood to play. ‘Hold it carefully,’ he said to the photographer who wanted to move the saxophone in order to get the composition of a picture just right. ‘Hold it carefully, you dig. That’s my life!’

Along with many of the other musicians he worked with, Lester took Benzedrine tablets to keep him going and barbiturates to help him sleep, and he smoked marijuana every day. People said there was never a moment when he was not high on what he called his New Orleans cigarettes, except for the period between 1944 and 1945 when he was in the army.

So there was the drink and the dope and the pills, but never anything else; no cocaine and no ‘needle dancing’ as he called it. If someone was using heroin, Lester would ask them to leave the room when they needed to give themselves a shot. He didn’t like what heroin did to people, but he also had a terrible fear of needles and injections, as well as a fear of hospitals and medical men and women in white coats. That was why he refused to go to the dentist even
when his teeth were falling out and why he avoided doctors, no matter how ill he felt.
^f

He was a man of many fears. He was afraid of the dark and needed to have a light on while he slept. He was afraid of silence, and when he was alone he had the radio babbling to itself and keeping him company, or he put a record onto repeat and let it play through his wakefulness and into his dreams. He liked to listen to Billie singing the old songs they had recorded together and he admired Frank Sinatra, someone who also knew how to turn a simple lyric into something meaningful.

Lester was afraid of death. He said he didn’t want to meet Johnny Deathbed when he was in the wrong place, because he felt it was important to die quietly, and preferably in one’s own ‘crib’ at home. He was also afraid of violence. As a child he had run away whenever his father wanted to take the family band on a trip down South, and as an adult on tour he always checked into a black hotel to avoid any unpleasantness, even if the other members of the band were staying in a much smarter establishment that accepted clients from all races. If he felt the presence of a racist somewhere close by, he would always leave at once to avoid a confrontation. In that way he was very different from Billie, who would attack anybody who abused her verbally.

In September 1944 Lester was thirty-five years old and was doing very well in his personal life and in his career. He was married to an Italian nurse called Mary
^g
and they had bought a big house together in Los Angeles. He had
just taken part in a documentary film called
Jammin’ the Blues
and he was in the final week of a very successful nine-month tour with Count Basie’s band, playing at the Plantation Club in San Francisco.

And then one night a young man wearing a zoot suit, with a long golden chain dangling around his neck, came to listen to the music. When the performance was over he invited Lester and Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and the drummer Jo Jones to come and join him at his table. He said he was a fan and the drinks were on him because he wanted to repay the performers for the pleasure they had given him.

So the four of them talked and drank and laughed until the early hours of the morning. Then the stranger suddenly produced his FBI badge and said that if Lester and Jo Jones did not report to the military draft board by nine o’clock that morning, they would be liable to a five-year prison sentence.

Lester had been sent his call-up papers several times already, but he had ignored them. Now he had no choice but to face the authorities. His friends presumed that his obvious alcoholism, his strange manner, his age and his look of physical exhaustion would exempt him completely. Or, if the worst came to the worst, then he would be made to join a military band along with many other contemporary musicians.

But something went badly wrong. Perhaps the people who interviewed him thought that this pale-faced man with his whispered babbling language needed to be taught a lesson. In the military report he was described as an ‘English-speaking Negro’, with brown eyes, black hair, a dark complexion, good eyesight and hearing and ‘no psychiatric or physical abnormalities’. His profession was given as ‘bandsman … specialising in tenor saxaphone [sic] … did solo work’. He was declared to be a suitable candidate for ordinary military service and there was no suggestion that he might join a band.
^h

After a couple of months’ training on the West Coast, Lester Young was sent to the Infantry Replacement Training Center in Alabama and enrolled as a mess orderly in E Company under the command of Captain William Stevenson, a white officer from Louisiana. On New Year’s Day 1945, he was badly injured while trying to do an obstacle course exercise, and as a result spent three weeks in the military hospital. The neuropsychologist who examined Lester there described him as being in a ‘constitutionally Psychopathic State, manifested by drug addiction (marijuana, barbiturates), chronic alcoholism and “nomadism” ’. (The term must have referred to the fact that Lester had been on tour with Count Basie.) In spite of this diagnosis it was felt that he had a purely ‘disciplinary problem’ and should be dealt with accordingly.
ⁱ

On coming out of hospital on 24 January, Lester was immediately forced to take up his full exercise duties, even though he was in considerable pain. On 30 January he was seen to be acting strangely and, when he was asked what was wrong, he explained that he was high. His locker was searched and was found to contain one and a half marijuana cigarettes, three barbiturate capsules and eleven barbiturate tablets, as well as an alcoholic mixture that he had apparently concocted himself. His locker also contained a photograph of his Italian wife, and some people believed that this was the real problem as far as the authorities were concerned.

Lester Young was arrested and brought before the military court on 16 February 1945. When Captain Stevenson was asked during the trial what first made him suspect drug abuse, he replied, ‘Well, his colour, sir, and the fact that his eyes seemed bloodshot and he didn’t react to training as he should.’
^j
He was punished with a dishonourable discharge, total forfeiture of pay, and confinement to a hard-labour
camp for the period of one year. He was sent to the Detention Barracks in the State of Georgia. He never spoke about the time he spent there, except to say it was ‘a nightmare, man, one mad nightmare’.

When he came out of the army, Lester’s playing changed. He had always used silences, but now ‘the silences grew longer, the whisper-to-shout shifts were more startling and the sound was darker and more anguished’.
^k
When asked about this development in his style, he said, ‘I play different. I live different. This is later. That was then. We change. Move on.’
^l
But he was also more nervous; he felt his audiences were not interested in this change in his playing and were quick to judge and condemn him. He began to call himself ‘Old Pres’, to distinguish himself from the numerous saxophone players who imitated his early style. He found it disconcerting and even frightening to hear a piece of music in which he could not be sure if he was playing, or someone else was playing just like him.

By the 1950s it was very hard for Lester to get good work
^m
and there was relentless gossip about how he had lost his touch and was nothing but a burnt-out drunk or, as one newspaperman put it, ‘a living drama of personal weakness, a victim, it seems, of drugs’. Lester said he knew the record companies were eager to celebrate his achievements and produce memorial volumes of his recordings just as soon as he was dead.
ⁿ

In the spring of 1958, Lester took a room on the fourth floor of the Alvin Hotel, on the corner of Broadway and
52nd Street. A young woman called Elaine Swain moved in with him and did her best to look after him. The psychiatrist Dr Luther Cloud came to talk to him, and visiting friends tried to persuade Lester to eat. His porkpie hat hung from the wall, and a dozen bottles of Gordon’s gin stood in a careful line in front of a mirror on the dresser. Lester spent hours at a time sitting in an armchair with the saxophone on his lap, staring out of the window and down at the Birdland club and the ‘street that never slept’, watching people come and go through the long days and the hectic nights.

He gave a number of performances during his final months, some of them desultory, others triumphant. In June 1958, his friends arranged for him to take part in a celebration at Birdland called ‘Thirty Years in Show Business’ and the evening was such a success that he was given a three-week booking. He started with a painfully slow and halting version of ‘Pennies from Heaven’, a song that Billie had also transformed into something much deeper than the lyrics implied.

In January 1959 Lester agreed to perform for eight weeks at the Blue Note in Paris.
^o
When he arrived, he told people that he had been very ill and would die soon. Night after
night he played with all the energy he had in him, struggling to produce enough breath. Between the breaks he would slump against the grand piano, leaning his forehead on the open lid. He would get back to the Hôtel de la Louisiana at four or five in the morning and then could be seen like his own ghost, wearing pyjamas and his faithful hat, pacing silently up and down the corridors, the saxophone in his hands and a look of blank despair on his face.

Lester left Paris a week earlier than planned because his strength was giving out. Elaine Swain collected him from the airport in New York and took him back to the Alvin Hotel. He sat in the armchair by the window for half a day and half the night and drank a bottle of vodka and most of a bottle of bourbon. Then he went to bed and died at around 3 a.m. on 15 March 1959.
^p
Billie wanted to sing at his funeral, but she was prevented from doing so. Lester’s eldest daughter Beverly said in an interview, ‘The law wouldn’t allow Billie to sing’, but according to other accounts it was Lester’s wife who stopped her, saying that she might make a fuss and cause trouble.