With Billie (21 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
There wasn’t any humour between Lady and Joe Glaser. He was very mild and meek with her, he’d got to handle her with kid gloves. He couldn’t mess around with her, he couldn’t afford to. He’d say in his very high voice, ‘Gee, Billie, that was wonderful!’ And he’d kiss her on the cheek. She’d say, ‘Thank you’, and she’d go about her business or to a pusher or to a stagehand or to an elevator guy, because she liked these kind of people.
Chin Fu, the chef of the kitchen at the Onyx Club, was her favourite and he was a sweetheart and a sweet little man. He made a whole Chinese thing for her one time. The whole dinner thing, as he would do in China or Peking or whatever, and nothing like he’d do ordinary.
e
And all the doormen loved her, the whole fleet of them from Kelly’s Stables clear down the Street. They’d hold the shit for her that somebody gave them and they’d come backstage and say, ‘Hey, Lady, somebody left something for you.’ Her favourite doorman was Chick, a big, heavy-set fellow and very jovial, and whenever he had a break he’d come in and she’d always buy him a drink and he’d drink with us and talk with us. The gay boys, they loved her, they cherished her, and if someone stole her squirrel mink or one of her coats, we’d have it back to her in ten minutes. She was a wonderful mixer; she could cut anybody on mixing because she could mix with all sorts of elements, all sorts of people. She was like Count Basie and Duke Ellington. They were lowly-born people who rose above all this thing into a beautiful niche that they cut out for themselves, and there’s Lady and Count Basie and Duke Ellington and they stood in that little niche, with elegance.
*
He calls them ‘dribbles’.
†
When he was interviewed, on 3 November 1971, Count Basie said of his relationship with Billie, ‘We were tight. Much tighter than that. I loved Billie an awful lot. I loved Billie as far as love could go … She’d deliberately try to do something to get me angry. Something silly. Otherwise she was always on the job. Never juicing, always singing, never out of her mind.’
‡
Pianist, composer and arranger, born 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia, died 1989. He arrived in New York in 1937 and recorded classic sides with Billie from 1943.
§
‘She loved the wrong kind of people and they never returned the kind of love she gave because Lady gave her whole being,’ Stump said.
‖
‘When Lady was with Basie they snorted, yeah, Basie, Sweets [Edison], Buck [Clayton]. Lester was just a pot man and Johnnie Walker Red or any gin at all’ (Stump).
a
Club Ebony was set up by Billie’s manager/boyfriend John Levy, and because he had a special relationship with the New York police, it was the only licensed club in the city where she could sing
without
her Cabaret Card.
b
‘Lady had this thing, anxiety, like, “Make ’em wait. I’m Lady, I’m from Baltimore, Green Willow Street, and if they can’t wait for fifteen minutes” … and all the time she’s trying to find a vein and that’s what makes her late. And they’re trying to stuff things up her nose.’
c
An all-black musical, ‘a sun-tanned revue-sical’, in which there was to be ‘no shuffling, no dialect, no blackface comedy’. Ellington said it was an attempt to give ‘an American audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro people’. Ellington insisted to the comics that they go on stage without blacking-up and they ‘came offstage smiling and with tears running down their cheeks’ (Ward and Burns, pp. 295–6).
d
Nat Nazarro (Stump’s agent, who represented comedians and actors) and Joe Glaser ‘were bullies who controlled a whole dynasty of black actors and singers and band leaders … You’re accumulating money, but you’re not counting. They tell you a beautiful story, beautiful pipe dreams, and they’re raking it in with your talent.’ Glaser, who represented Louis Armstrong, became Billie’s agent in 1936.
e
Stump Daddy said that Chin Fu ‘also got the opium for Lady’s husband’, Jimmy Monroe.
Greer Johnson
‘Baby, will you hold this for me?’
G
reer Johnson arrived in New York in 1943. He was twenty-three years old and, according to his own account, ‘very young, very green, very southern and very stupid’. He got a job in public relations, which he hated, and then did some work as a theatrical press agent. He later became a critic of classical music and dance. He died in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, killed by a car that mounted the pavement where he was standing, waiting for the ‘Walk now’ traffic sign to tell him it was safe to cross the road.
*
When Linda Kuehl turned up at Greer Johnson’s New York apartment on West 46th Street, he was playing one of Billie’s records. He explained that he had not put the record on especially for the interview; he listened to Billie frequently, because he always heard new things every time. He said he
was particularly fond of the late recordings when she was ‘going into a kind of freedom … and singing the ultimate possibility in the jazz lyric’.
He’d also hunted out two photographs of Billie: one of her as a baby, which Sadie had given to him, and the other a beautiful portrait study, which was part of the famous series made by the society photographer Robin Carsons in 1946. Greer Johnson had organised that session and so he was able to choose a picture for himself.
Another unexpected memento from the past that he’d found was a rather battered tape recording of Billie singing ‘Oh Come, All Ye Faithful’. Apparently one Christmas she and Sonny White had gone to a studio on 6th Avenue where you could walk in and pay a fee and make your own recording – and that’s what they had done. The quality of the tape was bad and you could hear that she was very drunk. He said he would play that later when he and Linda had finished talking.
It was clear that Greer Johnson was already quite drunk when the interview started. He kept repeating himself and changing and adapting the same story every time it occurred to him again. He would suddenly get angry and then forget the cause of his anger and drift off into a vague nostalgia. He said that the disappointments of his own life had taught him a compassion that he did not know ‘in those early sentimental days, when I was awfully young and awfully everything else’, because ‘When you are young you don’t understand people’s pains and commitments and addictions … but I hope I understand now.’
He was born in Lexington, Kentucky. According to Elizabeth Hardwick, he was terrified of his businessman father, who was a ‘large, fair man in black clothes’ and stiff-collared white shirts. He told her the story of how, as a two-year-old, he had once ‘toddled’ into his father’s office to be confronted by this huge apparition of masculine authority sitting behind a roll-top desk. He was so terrified that he screamed. ‘I screamed like the girl I was,’ he said.
The town of Lexington had its own racecourse and there
was a dance hall called Joyland Park out in the open fields, beyond the final perimeter of the houses. In
Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick described how the ‘great bands’ would arrive at Joyland Park in the summer: ‘Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Chick Webb, sometimes for a Friday and Saturday or merely for one night. When I speak of the great bands it must not be taken to mean that we thought of them as such. No, they were part of the summer nights and the hot dog stands, the fetid swimming pool heavy with chlorine, the screaming roller coaster, the old rain-splintered picnic tables, the broken iron swings. And the bands were also part of Southern drunkenness, couples drinking Coke and whisky, vomiting, being unfaithful, lovelorn, frantic. The black musicians, with their cumbersome instruments, their tuxedos, were simply there to beat out time for the stumbling, cuddling fox-trotting of the period.’
The musicians would arrive in their laden buses and fill the air with music before disappearing into the landscape, bound for some other southern town. Most of the white audiences were only aware of the music as a noisy backdrop, or as Elizabeth Hardwick put it, ‘something inevitable, effortlessly pushing up from the common soil’. But for the young Greer Johnson, it was different. He said that when he first heard jazz, he immediately felt at home with it.
†
He already had a copy of Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’, and he began to collect all the jazz records he could find. He remembered going into Main Records Company on Main Street and ordering everything that was available on the old Okeh and Vocalion labels. The man in the shop gave him a very quizzical look, because why would a white boy from a good southern family want to listen to stuff like that?
When Greer Johnson moved to New York, he and Elizabeth Hardwick shared rooms in the Hotel Schuyler on 45th Street. She said the Hotel Schuyler was ‘more than a little sleazy and a great deal of sleazy life went on there’. It
was also very dirty and was occupied by a shifting population of residents who seemed to have been stranded there by mistake and never got round to leaving.
In the interview, Greer Johnson spoke a great deal about Elizabeth Hardwick and the people they met together and the places they went to. He described her as ‘a kind of delicate-looking blonde’, but said nothing about their relationship, beyond implying that it was amicable. Elizabeth Hardwick was much more outspoken; according to her, the friendship ‘was a violent one and we were as obsessive, critical, jealous and cruel as any couple’. She hated what she called Greer Johnson’s ‘coercive neatness’ and despised his habit of carefully laying out his suit each night, in preparation for going to work the following morning. She also despised his obsessive need to brush his ‘perfect teeth’ after dinner, no matter where they were or what else was happening. He shared his passion for jazz with her, but even that was tainted by ‘the methodical, intense, dogmatic anxiety of his nature’.
The gay young man and his beautiful blonde companion lived very close to 52nd Street, which, as Greer Johnson said, ‘at that time was very much a jazz street and you simply went from club to club. You could buy a seventy-five-cent beer and stand at the bar for a very long time, and hear a great number of great performers without being bothered.’
One night they were at the Onyx Club with Elizabeth Hardwick’s soldier boyfriend, George Jeston, and Billie Holiday was the main attraction. According to Greer Johnson, she looked ‘incredibly beautiful and very much fixed up in a long gown and make-up, the famous gardenias in her hair’. Looking back on that same first impression, Elizabeth Hardwick described Billie as ‘large, brilliantly beautiful, fat’.
‡
During the interval Billie swept down the steps from the tiny bandstand and stood close to them at the bar. She ordered drinks, taking the money out of a little jewelled coin purse. Greer Johnson longed to meet her, but was too overawed to speak to her himself. He persuaded George Jeston to introduce their party. ‘Not knowing Billie, I thought she would be impressed by the uniform because there was a war on.’
Billie’s response was polite, formal and non-committal. Elizabeth Hardwick told her that she had heard her singing some years ago at the Joyland in Lexington. All she got as a reply was, ‘Yeah, I remember your town.’
But then Billie turned to Greer Johnson. She looked him in the eye and decided straight away that she liked the person she saw there. Just at that moment she was being called back to the stage. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the Master of Ceremonies, ‘I give you – Miss Billie Holiday!’ As she got ready to go, she presented her little jewelled purse to Greer Johnson and said, ‘Baby, will you hold this for me?’ And of course he was glad to. As he said in the interview, ‘You know, I don’t know what was in that coin purse. It could have been twenty thousand dollars, or two dollars, or anything else … At this time, mind you, I knew nothing about Billie or drugs, or drink, or her habits, except that I was completely and totally slain by her.’
When she had finished the set, she returned to the bar and told him she had been invited to the Westside to sing and to initiate some sort of civic project. She asked Greer Johnson if he would escort her.
§
It was the start of a friendship that lasted until her death. As Greer Johnson said, ‘From that point on, Billie never failed to trust me or to ask me
any time for whatever she wanted, nor did I fail to try to give it to her.’ He followed her as well as he could, through the drugs
‖
and the drinking, the courtroom trials and the imprisonment, the acclaimed performances at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, as well as the often chaotic appearances at dingy little nightclubs outside the city.
He never doubted that Billie was a ‘musician of enormous importance’ and ‘way ahead’ of everyone else. He felt it was unfair to condemn her as a victim of the drug culture, as if she was the only one taking drugs at that time. And he said there was nothing special about her sexual behaviour, either; everyone was doing the things she did. No, the problem was her huge talent; it isolated her. ‘I really think she was destroyed by the enormity of her gift, which she did not know how to develop, where to place it; nor was there anybody to receive it.’ He felt it was terrible that even now, in 1971, ‘As far as I know, and I’ve seen any number of lists of Great Black Women, I have never seen her name on that list.’