With Billie (36 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
Memry arrived at seven to take Billie to Carnegie Hall. She found that Billie had cooked a big meal, had served her guests and was now busy with the washing up. There were people all around and they were ‘yelling and screaming and drinking and drunk, and pressing Billie with all kinds of foolishness and nonsense talk’. They all seemed to know Billie in one way or another, but they were not musicians and they were keen to prolong the party.
At eight-thirty Billie was trying to do her hair in front of a broken mirror and still hadn’t decided what to wear. And then at last she was ready to be bundled into a limousine, along with a noisy crowd who all wanted to come too. Memry was squashed beside her and trying to explain what songs they would be doing for the show, how many bars this or that introduction would have, how long the sets would last. But the people in the car were talking too loud
and Billie ‘didn’t grasp the half of it’. Memry said that Billie was sober and not using heroin, but ‘she was sick from lack of nutrition … and part of malnutrition is to be addle-brained’.
The crowd that had been in the limousine now followed Billie enthusiastically into her dressing room and Louis kept on asking more and more people to come in, until the room was filled to bursting.
Then it was the moment for Billie to be called to the stage. It was a long time since she had appeared in New York and people were eager to see her. The audience roared a welcome out of the darkness as she came on. She moved towards the microphone, but tripped over a wire and fell down on the floor. She clambered back to her feet, completed the short journey and stood there, waiting for the music to begin.
Count Basie’s rhythm section opened with an eight-bar introduction to ‘Blue Moon’,
a
but Memry said they were playing it double-time, so the eight bars sounded like four and Billie failed to recognise the tune. They repeated the introduction six times and still Billie showed no spark of recognition.
Basie signalled Memry to play the introduction on the piano without the orchestra, but by now Billie was far away.
‘What tune is this, Memry? What am I supposed to be singing?’ she asked, as if they were rehearsing quietly together in an empty room. Her words, spoken into the microphone, billowed across the wide space of the auditorium.
Memry replied, ‘Blue Moon’, but she had no microphone to amplify her voice and Billie couldn’t hear her.
By now the musicians were whispering, ‘Blue Moon, Blue Moon!’ and the audience had taken up the refrain, ‘Blue Moon, Blue Moon, Blue Moon!’
And then suddenly Billie knew it. ‘Huh!’ she said, very loud, ‘Ah! Blue Moon!’
With that she began and when she had finished her set, ‘She sang encore after encore, going from one song to the next without a pause for an hour and thirty minutes.’ Memry said, ‘The people laid their hearts out and showed their love for her’, and everyone agreed it was a triumph, and never mind if Billie was drunk or high or what the problem had been at the beginning.
b
When they left the hall, a fight broke out between Billie and Louis McKay. It was one of those messy, chaotic, drunken fights that can end in disaster. It started when Memry told Billie very pointedly that she had done well ‘in the circumstances’, and Louis McKay asked her what she meant by that? ‘Of course she had done well! This woman’s not just anybody! She is Billie Holiday!’
By now Louis McKay was so angrily indignant that Memry thought he was going to hit her. She picked up a bottle to defend herself with, and that was the cue for Billie to get involved. In the confusion that followed, Louis managed to knock Billie right across the street with a single blow of his fist.
c
Memry was frightened by all this violence and decided to go and stay with her ex-mother-in-law for the night. But she managed to get lost on the subway and ‘rode the train all night’. She finally turned up at Billie’s apartment in Flushing at four in the morning.
She rang the bell and Billie answered the door and said, ‘Is that you? What the hell are you doing here?’ And when Memry came in, she found Billie in what she called ‘a love tryst’ with the man who had just assaulted her so savagely. For Memry this was ‘typical of the kind of person that needs
punishment, and after they’ve gotten the punishment they’ve been so completely gratified that they can enter into a sexual love tryst’.
Memry felt that she had been betrayed and this night marked an ending of the bond between the two women. She accompanied Billie at clubs in Boston and Philadelphia, but by now Louis McKay had become ‘uncontrollable in his hostility’ towards her. Memry became convinced that he would soon take his revenge by planting drugs on her and arranging to have her arrested. ‘That was the way he did things,’ she explained.
Memry arranged for her mother to send her a telegram saying that her father had fallen sick and asking her to come home at once, and with that excuse she left. She didn’t meet Billie again until 1958 when she went to hear her sing at a club in San Francisco. After the show was over, Billie invited some friends to come to her hotel room for a meal and Memry was asked if she would come too.
Memry said that Billie had a room in ‘the cheapest, the dingiest, the dirtiest hotel imaginable’. As soon as she arrived she wanted to escape, but Billie was very warm and welcoming, so she was persuaded to stay for a while. There was only one little hot plate to cook on, but Billie had managed to provide spaghetti and a pot of black-eyed beans and red beans. There was also pigs’ feet and coleslaw and potato salad and fruit salad.
At one stage in the evening Billie came and sat down next to Memry. She said, ‘Well, my little baby. Everything you told me would happen has come true. You know that day when we went to town in New York and I was going to try to do what you said about getting a new manager? Maybe if I had done that, it would have been a turning point. But I stuck with Louis and he robbed me of every dime. I have no money. I don’t have any health. And now Louis’s got a white girl he’s gone off with. But you know, I’ve finally filed for a divorce. I’ve put him down at last!’
d
Memry did go to hear Billie singing one more time, at a club somewhere, a few months later. All Billie could do by now was speak the words of the songs in time to the music, but even that worked its magic. As Memry put it, there was ‘little of what you could call singing, but there was a communication of emotion that overrode the vocal limitations’.
*
As Farah Jasmine Griffin has said, all biographies of Billie ‘fight to situate a version of her life as
the
version. Even as these versions and counter-versions are launched, we are simultaneously both closer to and farther away from Holiday’ (p. 64).
†
The two-week engagement at the Downbeat Club went very well. According to the
San Francisco Chronicle
of 15 August, Billie ‘flew into San Francisco last Monday morning … lined up three musicians, rehearsed for five hours on a coffee diet, went back to her hotel for an hour of sleep and then returned to put on four shows before a house that kept crying for more …’ Helen Noga, who ran the Downbeat with her husband, spoke of ‘all the warnings she received’ about Billie and her dope addiction before she arrived, but she said, ‘I’ll take her any day’ (Vail, p. 162).
‡
Memry blamed Louis McKay for Billie’s state of health. She said he was ‘the worst pimp ever’ because he didn’t look after her, and ‘a good pimp will see that you get a milkshake, or vitamin pills, or some kind of sustenance to keep you going’.
§
Billie always adapted the story of her life to suit the person she was telling it to. William Dufty got everything he wanted about the horrors of drug addiction, while Memry, who was very interested in Billie’s lesbian experiences, was told that ‘At the time she was thirteen she had her own girls on the street. This was when she started in prostitution. I suppose she was a prostitute herself, but at the same time she was doing the bisexual part of a man.’ If this were true, it seems odd that no one from Baltimore mentions that Billie was a female pimp.
‖
Memry said that Louis Armstrong was on the bill as well, but no one else includes him.
a
According to Ken Vail in
Lady Day’s Diary
, Billie sang six songs, but ‘Blue Moon’ was not one of them. Stuart Nicholson has the same list, but he puts Carl Drinkard behind the piano, instead of Memry.
b
Hannah Altbush was less enthusiastic in a review of the concert for
Downbeat
, saying, ‘For Miss Holiday too, it seemed to be somewhat of an off-night. Part of the Basie band and her own accompanist backed Billie in excellent arrangements of “Lover”, “My Man”, “Lover Man” and several other songs’ (Vail, p. 163).
c
Louis McKay also gets mixed reviews, depending on who you listen to. Stuart Nicholson is full of praise for him, saying, among other things, ‘he had brought a degree of order to her life’ (p. 191). Gary Giddins in the notes for the
Complete Columbia Recordings
(2001) says, ‘Louis McKay was a low-level hustler whose one saving grace was that he lacked Levy’s unreasoning violence.’
d
Billie and Louis McKay had married on 28 March 1957, basically as a legal manoeuvre because of an impending court case. Memry said, ‘The irony was that before Billie signed those divorce papers in the hospital, she died and that left all her estate to Louis McKay.’
Lady Sings the Blues
O
n 13 August 1968, more than thirteen years after the publication of Billie’s ghostwritten autobiography
Lady Sings the Blues
, William Dufty sent a letter to the lawyer Lester Shurr in which he explained, among other things, how he became involved in writing the story of Billie’s life.
Dufty said that in the summer of 1955 Billie was working in Miami when ‘her pimp, later her husband’ Louis McKay, had the idea of trying to ‘cash in on the confessional book vogue’. McKay contacted a journalist, who was sent out to meet Billie, but ‘she got disgusted with him and the project and fled to New York’. She got in touch with her old friend Maely, who was now married to Dufty, and was invited to come and stay with the two of them for a few days. Billie and Dufty soon ‘got talking’, and that was when the first plans for
Lady Sings the Blues
took shape.
Dufty said that the entire book was done ‘pronto’. Within the first twenty-four hours of hatching the idea, he was ready to take three chapters to the New York publishers Doubleday. Lee Barker, who was the editor there, told Linda Kuehl that he had been ‘interested in Negro celebrity books for a long time’ and he remembered being ‘electrified by the first chapter – as
you know, the opening chapter is a hell of a chapter. I bought the book on the basis of that, plus a short outline. I thought Dufty’s work on this was terrific, because he’d taken her down very simply in her own language and that’s what made it a damn good book.’
An agreement was signed on 28 July 1955. The advance on signature was $3,000, of which 35 per cent went to William Dufty and the rest to Billie, although she then lost a further 10 per cent to Maely Dufty, who was acting as her literary agent.
After Billie had gone, Dufty ‘took a month off in the summer to finish the book’. It was then edited and checked for possible libel. Lee Barker remembered that they had ‘a lot of fun doing it’ and the book was scheduled for publication in March 1956.
On 23 February 1956, while Billie was appearing at the Showboat in Philadelphia, she and Louis McKay were arrested at the Radnor Hotel where they were staying. The police had apparently been watching the hotel ‘on a tip’ and at 3 a.m. two detectives and a policewoman obtained a search and seizure warrant and a key from the desk clerk. They flung open the door and, as Detective Ferguson said, ‘police found in Miss Holiday’s possession an ounce and a half of heroin’, as well as half an ounce of cocaine and some hypodermic needles.
*
A .25-calibre automatic revolver was also discovered in the room.
Billie and McKay were taken to City Hall and were examined by Dr Arthur H. Thomas, a police surgeon, who said that both Miss Holiday and her husband were ‘under the influence of narcotics’. At 5 a.m. they had a hearing before the magistrate William Cibott and were granted bail of $7,500 each, pending a possible Grand Jury trial. The magistrate did not have anything to say to McKay, but according to the Doubleday editor Lee Barker, he told Billie, ‘It is a shame
that such a talented singer as you has become involved in a habit that can result only in heartbreak.’ Billie had brought her Chihuahua Pepe with her and he accompanied her into the jail cell while waiting for the bail money to come through.
Billie finished her engagement in Philadelphia before going to a sanatorium to take a short cure, which had been demanded by the magistrate. She then went on to fulfil her other commitments in Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit. Once again it was her public notoriety that was used to draw in the huge and enthusiastic crowds, rather than her singing. ‘Ho, Hum, Billie Holiday Jailed on Dope Charges’ was the headline in the
Chicago Defender
, while the
Pittsburgh Courier
lamented that her comeback was ‘marred by another arrest’. There was even an article in the
Journal American
, which suggested that Billie’s arrest had a ‘tragic footnote’ because the New York Police Department had announced that in that same week they had ‘relented … and moved to issue Billie a permit to work again in the local nightclubs’. There is no way of knowing if this was true, or simply a private joke on the part of the police force.