With Billie (35 page)

T
hroughout the 1950s Billie was leading a fugitive life, on the move more or less all the time. Three weeks in San Francisco, one week in Los Angeles, back to New York for a single performance, over to Boston the next day, up to Alaska, down to Detroit. One night she might be singing in a shabby little nightclub with only her pianist to accompany her on a piano that sounded as if it had been left outside during a long winter; the next night it was all glitter and glory with Count Basie’s Orchestra celebrating her presence among them.

Just as there are many contradictory accounts of Billie’s state of mind and health and the quality of her singing, there are also different stories of where she went and what she did when she got there, and how long she stayed before she moved on. But because I am only working with the voices of people who are speaking about their memories of being with her, I do not need to cling to one version of the truth at the expense of all the others.
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So now I will follow
Memry Midgett’s description of Billie’s life for several months during 1954 – and never mind if it takes her to places that others say she never reached, or if she is made to sing a song that others say she never sang.

Memry Midgett came from Oakland, California. She said that she and Billie were ‘physically about the same size, but Billie was a little darker than me’. Memry was something of an armchair psychologist, always very busy exploring and analysing Billie’s personality, ‘to part the curtain between what I had heard and what I was actually experiencing from her’. She was particularly fascinated by what she called Billie’s ‘malformed heterosexuality’ and her ‘need for self-punishment’. But at the same time Memry was impressed by what she called ‘Billie’s humility and her search for self and understanding’.

Memry said she first met Billie at the Downbeat Club in San Francisco, which could seat a big audience of some 300 people. Billie had arrived without any written music and without even the back-up of a pianist who knew how to accompany her. She was supposed to be singing with Vernon Alley’s combo, but the musicians were not familiar with the arrangements and Billie was disgusted by what she felt was their lack of professionalism.

Memry was just twenty-three years old and she was playing piano during the intermission. Billie decided to hire her on the spot, even though she had no previous experience of such work. As Memry explained it, ‘She would get on the bandstand and call me a tune I had never played before and I just had to do the best I could.’
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After performing in San Francisco, she and Billie had two weeks in Hollywood at the Crescendo, and then they set off
for two weeks in the newly booming city of Anchorage in Alaska, a place where many East Coast Americans had recently come to find work because ‘the money was flowing like wine’.

While they were on the plane flying to Alaska, Billie suddenly announced that she had given up heroin. She said she had done it often enough before and knew what the physical effects would be. She asked Memry to explain to the stewardess that all the shaking and shivering and coughing were due to the fact that she was recovering from a bad bout of influenza, nothing more.

When they arrived at their destination it was much colder than either of them had anticipated. Memry said she had never been so cold in her life, and Billie had nothing suitable to wear – only a little silver fur shoulder wrap and a few thin dresses. Her mink coat would have been ideal, but she had left it behind; or perhaps it was waiting for redemption in a pawn shop somewhere in New York.

So there she was, with nothing to protect her against the elements, coughing and shivering all through the day and standing with chattering teeth in front of the little heater in her dressing room, before taking the plunge and going on stage. Memry was convinced that, along with the symptoms of withdrawal from heroin, Billie was in very poor health and might even have contracted pneumonia. She also felt that, like anyone who was using a combination of drugs and liquor, Billie didn’t eat much and as a result was suffering from malnutrition.
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For all her performances Billie stuck to the songs she knew well, the words and music intensely familiar, but grown slower and more surreal with the passing of time. She did ‘Them There Eyes’ and ‘Easy Living’ and made them sound like a lament, and she kept returning to ‘Willow Weep for Me’, but with such long pauses when she asked the tree for
some sympathy that it was as if she was really waiting for it to answer her in a gentle, willowy voice. Memry said Billie avoided ‘My Man’ and ‘Fine and Mellow,’ because they were too demanding, both emotionally and musically, but she could not avoid ‘Strange Fruit’, when each new audience insisted so vociferously that she sing it for them.

It was while they were in Alaska that Billie started calling Memry ‘my little baby’ and she would often talk to her as if she was talking to herself while thinking aloud. On one occasion Memry remembered that they were sitting side by side in the hotel living-room when a letter was delivered. It contained the details of Billie’s royalties: the name of each record, the number of copies sold, the costs incurred by the company, the percentage taken by the agent and the monies that were due to be paid. The sales figures were very bad and made it apparent that Billie’s public no longer cared whether she sang or not. Her star had risen, and now it was falling back into the darkness of obscurity. Billie handed the papers to Memry, so that she could share the realisation that ‘her total life had just got to be nothing’.

Louis McKay had come with them to Alaska, but he kept disappearing for days on end. It was rumoured that he was buying great swathes of land in Alaska as property speculation, but no one was really sure. He had told Billie that, because of her police record, everything had to be done in his name even though her money was being used. Memry said he had been banned from ‘any number of places’ and that included the club in Anchorage where Billie was singing. This was because he had the habit of standing at the bar steaming with belligerence, waiting for the moment when he could engage a complete stranger in a violent argument.

Memry hated Louis McKay and believed that as she got closer to Billie, he began to see her as a ‘formidable enemy’. She described him as ‘one of the most ruthless men I have ever met’, although her hatred must have been quite complicated, because she also said that he and Billie used to have a game about who was going to be ‘the first to screw her … even though it was never more than a game’. She said
Louis McKay had a ‘technique of trying to control Billie’s mind. It was like hypnotism. He’d tell her, “You can’t depend on anyone but me. You have no friends but me.” ’

Apparently Louis McKay sometimes arrived unexpectedly in Billie’s hotel room, very early in the morning. Then he would pull down the blinds on the windows and tell her that she must stay quiet. He’d give her a tin of chitterlings to eat and a sterno can to heat them on, so that she had enough food for the day, and then he’d go out and lock the door behind him. In his presence Billie always became like a child, unable to break the habit of fear and obedience.

Billie was often alone all night and would phone through to Memry’s room because she had woken from a nightmare and couldn’t get back to sleep. ‘I’m frightened and I’m all alone,’ she said, choking on her tears.

Billie told Memry that she kept dreaming of her mother and, when she opened her eyes, the dream would not leave her; Sadie was in the room, staring at her. It seems that the longer Sadie was dead, the more vivid she became. Memry didn’t think it was the bonds of love that gave Sadie’s ghost the freedom to enter her daughter’s room like that, but rather the accumulation of Billie’s sense of guilt at having abandoned the woman who had so often abandoned her. She told Memry she should have done something when Sadie was dying in hospital; at the very least she could have sent some money, because she was making a lot at the time. Instead she did nothing and stayed away until after her mother was dead and cold and waiting to be buried.

Billie asked Memry if she thought God would judge her and condemn her to some sort of hell, because of all the things she had done – and failed to do – in her life. Maybe then she remembered the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls: the rosary beads she used to clutch to keep danger at bay, and the little golden cross she wore glinting around her neck in the days when she was still as sleek and round as a seal. Maybe she wished she had some of the holy water that she and her friends would collect in jamjars, because then she could sprinkle it into the corners
of this cold hotel room and make it seem more like home.

Talking to Memry about her childhood, Billie kept mentioning her grandmother, and Memry felt ‘there was something kind and warm and something positive about their relationship’. Billie seems not to have told the story about how her ancient grandmother died peacefully in her arms, a story she had invented for herself long ago, and which William Dufty used to great dramatic effect in
Lady Sings the Blues.
Instead, she just ‘spoke fondly’ about her grandmother and said something about how she learnt to scrub steps from her.
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Billie kept asking Memry what on earth it was that had made someone follow such a hard and painful road. She had known so many men, she said, men like Bobby Henderson and Freddie Green, who were good and kind and gentle. They were men who would have cared for her and protected her, and given her the children and the security she always longed for. But instead she had been drawn irresistibly to the hustlers and the pimps; she had chosen to be cheated and beaten and humiliated, and shared with other women and discarded when she was no longer useful.

Memry asked Billie about John Levy and whether he had been as bad as all the others, and suddenly that particularly unpleasant man was transformed in Billie’s mind into a relatively good one. At least he had treated her like a lady, she said. He ‘didn’t permit her to wash dishes’ and had sent her an orchid every day. He had made sure she was well dressed and always looking her best. He would never have let her come to Alaska without even a coat to keep her warm, and he never did anything so cruel as locking her in a dark room, leaving her alone with her fears.

Memry was determined to help Billie. She persuaded her to take the bold step of asking the club manager to pay her directly, instead of having the money passed on to Louis McKay. And then suddenly there was money to spend, and the two of them went shopping together and Billie bought herself a new coat and a dress, amazed by her own show of independence. ‘This is the first time in many years that I’ve known what it’s like to get up and be around in the daytime,’ she said.

When it was time to return to New York, Louis McKay did not travel with them, although he gave them the surreal task of taking the frozen and butchered carcass of a whole deer back with them on the plane. It had begun to ‘thaw and bleed’ by the time they landed.

As soon as they arrived in New York, Billie wanted to get hold of some heroin and, when they got to the apartment in Flushing, the pianist Carl Drinkard turned up at the door, ready to return Billie to her old ways. The two of them began their preparations, but while Billie was tightening a tourniquet on her arm, Memry became hysterical and kept screaming, ‘No! No! Don’t! Don’t!’ She ‘cried so hard’ that Billie was woken out of her somnambulant state. ‘Well, my little baby, if it’s going to affect you like that,’ she said, ‘to hell with it!’ And with that she ripped the tourniquet from her arm and told Carl Drinkard to ‘get the hell out of here!’

Memry tried to persuade Billie that she must take control of her own life. She had to stay away from drugs. She must leave Louis McKay. She must get rid of Joe Glaser and find herself an agent who had
her
interests at heart, rather than his own. Memry kept telling Billie that within a few years she could save enough money to retire. She could buy a house with a garden, have babies, be happy. Billie listened and kept saying incredulously, ‘Do you think I can? Do you think I can do it?’

One morning the two women set off by train from Flushing to Manhattan, to confront Joe Glaser in his office. Memry said they got as far as the subway station, but Billie
couldn’t summon the courage to step onto the escalator that would carry her out of the subterranean world and onto the streets of the city. She stood there, caught in a panic, staring at the flowing river of stairs that rolled on as inexorably as fate. She kept saying, ‘I can’t do it! I’m too weak! I can’t! I can’t!’ The decisive moment was lost and Billie knew she had been defeated. Dejectedly they made their way back to the apartment.

Billie was booked to sing at Carnegie Hall on 25 September 1954, as one of the Birdland All Stars. Count Basie’s Orchestra would be playing, along with Lester Young, Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker.
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The night before the performance, Louis McKay turned up unexpectedly and the next morning he accompanied Billie and Memry to the rehearsal room. He had his four-year-old son with him, and he suddenly got very impatient and said it was the boy’s birthday and Billie must come with him at once to help buy a present. He also informed her that he had invited a crowd of friends over for a party later in the day. And so that was the end of the rehearsal.