Billie Holiday

by John Szwed

  December 27, 1955

  Dear Mr. Barker,

  Since my meeting with (William) Dufty and you, I have had no word regarding the suggested deletions and additions to the manuscript. It is extremely important that it be read and re-read carefully before publication to make certain that possible libelous statements be deleted. Incidentally, has Billie read the entire contents of the book herself? Although my function is not of a critic, I should like to give you my opinion of the book as presently written. I must preface my remarks by telling you that I have heard Billie sing on records and radio and her voice is just beautiful. There is so much of human suffering, sensitivity and music in her voice. The book, therefore, comes as a disappointment, as if in her autobiography she had written to put herself in the worst possible light. The first 50 pages are very good, but the rest is a series of gripes, with a few scandal items. It is bitter and even the cuss words get very tiresome when they are repeated over and over again. Now I cannot believe that that is all there is to Billie. Her story must surely be dramatic and touching and it should evoke sympathy, pity and understanding. This book, in my opinion, does not do this. It doesn’t give the reader the faintest inkling of what a drug addict feels or suffers, nor does it portray her as the great singer she is. It would seem that some of the wonderful notices she has received could be woven into the telling of the story. I feel that Billie doesn’t just want to show her tough outer shell or that is the way she wants the world to regard her. There is a great story in Billie and it would seem to me that Billie and Dufty should be able to produce it. The above is just my opinion. I may be all wrong, but take it for what it is worth. I have only your best interest at heart.

  Harry [Lieb]

  Once the suggested reediting and deletions were completed, however, Holiday and Louis McKay were still unhappy with the results. McKay claimed that certain passages had been deleted only after threats had been made against Billie. Lawyers for Doubleday had insisted that some passages be sent to various people who might find them objectionable, and Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, and Billie’s former manager and lover John Levy each responded with demands to have any references to them deleted. Even more ominously, McKay insisted that Billie’s many difficulties with the law were the result of pressures brought to bear by persons who knew that she possessed information about them that she intended to make public. Billie now blamed what she saw as shortcomings of the book on the publisher’s deletions: She told her friend the songwriter Irene Kitchings that “when they got through cutting that book, it wasn’t fit for anybody to read.”

  Others were complaining even before the book was out. Her agent, Joe Glaser, a “shtarker” famous for manipulating his clients and making them money, thought it was bad for business (though after its publication he rushed to buy the film and dramatic rights). After Norman Granz had read some of the manuscript, he wrote Dufty to say that he knew Billie needed money, but he, too, feared the sensationalism of the narcotics material might backfire and make it harder for her to get more work. Dufty reassured him that only a small part of the book—less than one tenth—would concern narcotics, and he had been advised by the publishers that the subject would sell well.

  When it was published in 1956, the New York Herald Tribune said that it was “a hard, bitter and unsentimental book, written with brutal honesty and having much to say not only about Billie Holiday, the person, but about what it means to be poor and black in America.” When she read it, Billie said, “I can’t help it. I just told what happened to me. A lot of my life has been bitter. You ought to read what they left out of the book. I told everything, but they had to cut some of it.”

  She was even more upset when the New Yorker called her book “as bitter and uncompromising an autobiography as has been published in a long time . . . a largely authentic, if almost indigestible social document.” Dufty said she wondered how life in a black neighborhood in America could be both authentic and palatable. She was particularly stung by a review in the Baltimore Afro-American by the eminent African American professor and literary critic J. Saunders Redding, who was offended by the book’s realism and her willingness to share so many details of her life. He opened his review by declaring, “I suppose Billie Holiday has a right to sing the blues, and whether she has or not, she has assumed that right for reasons that she considers sufficient. . . . [The] opening paragraph is a sort of sardonic summary of all that tragically disordered background that Billie Holiday came from and of all she went toward.” He followed with a summary of the details of that “disordered background,” but without mention of her music or what she had accomplished, and concluded, “This reviewer is no squeamish prude, but Billie Holiday and William Dufty use language so raw with so little warrant that there were times when this reviewer got ‘real sick.’” Billie wrote Bill and Maely and asked if they had seen the review: “Well I don’t know if you have been digging it but my book is just a bitch. Did you see that shit that man from my birthplace Baltimore wrote? He even said that my Mom and Dad were stinkers for having me. I am sick of the whole goddamn thing. You tell people the truth and you stink. I didn’t hurt anyone in that book but myself. . . . Please have Bill to look into this for me or I will take other means to take care of him. He needs a lesson . . .”

  • • • • •

  The opening words of Holiday’s book were undoubtedly shocking and certainly memorable; they are still quoted today. But there was precedent for such blunt frankness. Five years earlier Ethel Waters’s autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, had an equally stunning opening:

  I never was a child.

  I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

  I never felt I belonged.

  I was always an outsider.

  I was born out of wedlock, but that had nothing to do with all this. To people like mine a thing like that just didn’t mean much.

  Nobody brought me up.

  I just ran wild as a little girl. I was bad, always a leader of the street gang in stealing and general hell-raising. By the time I was seven I knew all about sex and life in the raw. I could outcurse any stevedore and took a sadistic pleasure in shocking people.

  Waters’s memoir’s opening, like Holiday’s, seemed to promise the complete story of her life. She, too, had been raised a Catholic, had been raised in Philadelphia, and grew up poor and a witness to poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, and public sexuality. Like Lady Sings the Blues, Waters’s book also evaded any mention of her same-sex relationships, the date of her birth was wrong, her cowriter was a white man, and both books had the same editor and publisher. But the reaction to His Eye Is on the Sparrow was markedly different. It was a Book of the Month Club selection, and excerpts were published by the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Atlantic Monthly; author’s luncheons were sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune and the American Booksellers Association; the American Library picked it as one of the year’s notable books. The difference in reception was a reflection of attitudes toward the authors and their public personae. Waters cast her autobiography as a confession but also as a conversion experience, a woman who found faith’s triumphant rise from the ruins of her childhood, and was a credit to her race.

  Dufty once spoke of Ben Franklin’s autobiography as being a model for Billie’s account of her own self-creation, but her description of her early life is more reminiscent of Dickens, filled as it is with miseries and rejections in a neighborhood in which houses of prostitution were the elite establishments. Her narrative of her artistic successes, tinged with bitterness toward the music business, the police, the courts, the press, and her mother, did not make for motivational reading. Nor did her revelations of her husbands as con men, pimps, and possible drug dealers sit well with her attempts to move beyond them near the end of the book.

  Still, Lady Sings the Blues sold respectably, some twelve thousand to fourteen thousand copies the first year, along with a ninetee
n-page condensation of the book in Coronet magazine and a serialization by the British newspaper The People under the title “Body and Soul.” Lady Sings the Blues has remained in print ever since, and for many it is something of an American classic.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Book II: The Rest of the Story

  In the beginning, the editing of her book was light, with very few changes in style or wording. A few family and celebrity names and a date or two were corrected. A paragraph on the origin of her stage name “Billie” was added, some details on the judge who first sentenced her in New York City were expanded, a bit more was added on the clubs of Harlem, and four new paragraphs were written on her first meeting with Louis Armstrong. She had wanted Bitter Crop as a title, words taken from the song “Strange Fruit,” but the publisher insisted on having the word “blues” in the title for sales purposes. They finally agreed on Lady Sings the Blues, even though she continued to protest that she didn’t want to be known as a blues singer.

  Billie was annoyed when the editor suggested that the word “bitch” was used too often. He was not swayed when told that she thought of it as a neutral term for women, and regularly used it in referring to herself. In the end, she wrote in the margin of the edited draft, “Change ‘bitch’ to ‘whore.’”

  The more substantive changes involved deleting certain passages out of fear of litigation, and the addition of a completely new ending. Throughout the editing of the book various “interested parties” came by the Doubleday offices to express their concern about libel. Billie’s reputation as an addict had alerted a number of people to guard against being closely associated with her, especially when they themselves were using drugs. The publisher’s lawyers by now were fearful that the book might contain libelous material that they had missed or not understood and pressured the editor to use pseudonyms and cut several lengthy passages about various celebrities. In the end there were no lawsuits and all of the concerned people seemed to vanish.

  • • • • •

  “Getting Some Fun Out of Life,” the fifth chapter, was set to open with “I met some wonderful people when I was a little girl singing around Harlem,” and follow with a number of portraits of celebrities who frequented there. Though most of them ultimately disappeared from the book, some readers still accused Holiday and Dufty of name-dropping by mentioning stars such as Bob Hope, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Clifton Webb, and Lana Turner as a way to inflate Billie’s importance. But these were, in fact, among her most avid fans in Hollywood and uptown New York, and often her companions in clubs and at parties. There were many more she could have mentioned: John Roosevelt (FDR’s son); composers Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem; Harlem high-life figures like club owners Dickie Wells and Clark Monroe, dancer Tondelayo, and singer Thelma Carpenter; far more of the jazz greats she worked with; and any number of people from the art world and society. Once the cuts were made, this chapter was less than five pages long.

  The first person to disappear in the editing was Charles Laughton, who visited her at the Alhambra Grill in Harlem. She wrote that she knew he was someone special when he walked through the door but was not surprised to see him there, since a number of other Hollywood actors, such as Paul Muni and Franchot Tone (and his mother), were regulars in her audience whenever they were in town. George Raft had once danced for her in a club when he asked her to sing for him.

  Laughton was on his way to London to appear in Alexander Korda’s film The Private Life of Henry VIII, and John Hammond, Billie’s first record producer, had told him to be sure to see her. (Laughton and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, spent weekends with Hammond when they were in town.) But Harlem was not new to Laughton. Billie learned that he kept a black valet to discreetly guide him in his cruising uptown. He stayed after her performance was over, and she said his regal manner and his fearlessness in coming up to Harlem to see her was enough to compel her to take him home for a dinner cooked by Sadie, her mother. When he was leaving at dawn, he rather formally asked Billie if he might have “some of those cigarettes to take to the ladies of London.” With the four hundred dollars that he gave her, she went around the corner to the apartment of white jazzman Mezz Mezzrow (himself the subject of a celebrated cowritten autobiography, Really the Blues) and bought every reefer he had. She fully expected that Laughton would share some of them with her, but he left without offering her even one stick.

  He stayed in the city for a few more days, and Sadie introduced him to some men that she thought he might find interesting, and when he left for London he thanked both of them for their kindness and wrote out a check to Billie for $1,500—a year’s wages for most Americans at the time. She was so shocked by it that she was afraid to cash it in case he had made a mistake and canceled the check. Instead, she kept it in a scrapbook her mother had made for her. But two years later, in a fit of desperation over a lack of money, she took the check to the bank:

  I wrote my name on the back, pushed it through the window and waited, all the time keeping one eye on the door. I was half expecting someone to come in and grab me. But it only took a couple of minutes. The man handed me $1500 in bills and said “Thank you.” I had played Charles Laughton cheap and I was ashamed of myself. He was only trying to be nice, but he had saved my life.

  Her encounter with Orson Welles was to be the next topic in the chapter. In 1942 Welles—writer, director, actor, producer, autodidact, boy genius—was in Los Angeles, having just completed Citizen Kane. He was then working on The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, and Mexican Melodrama, appearing in his weekly Almanac radio show, and had recently returned from New York, where he directed Richard Wright’s Native Son onstage. Like other Hollywood hipsters, at night he headed for the jazz clubs on Central Avenue, the Harlem of LA.

  His companion those nights was Billie Holiday, herself new to LA, and working in Billy Berg’s Trouville Club, where nightly she sang to crowds that included Bette Davis, Martha Raye, Merle Oberon, Lana Turner, John Garfield, and Orson.

  He was supposed to be getting ready to marry this beautiful Mexican broad Dolores del Rio then, but he spent so much time with me I don’t know when he ever got to see her.

  When we’d made the rounds, we’d go up to my joint in the Clark Hotel. I’d always have a big bowl of fresh fruit there and Orson loved fresh fruit. And then he’d have a bath. Orson was up to his pockets then making the picture Citizen Kane, writing, directing, acting all over the place. By the time we’d get back to my joint, it would be almost morning, and time for him to go on the set. But his damn head would be going all the time. He’d come out of the bathroom in his shorts and start rewriting, redirecting or acting out the picture; moving the furniture around, trying himself on for size in my mirrors. He’d like to run me crazy.

  Kane was a great picture, she said, having seen it nine times in her room with Welles in his shorts taking all the parts before it showed in a theater, but since Holiday did not arrive in Los Angeles until October, after the premier of Citizen Kane, it was more likely he was acting out The Magnificent Ambersons.

  Holiday and Welles made a striking pair on the streets of Los Angeles, both of them riding high, all sass and bravura, white and black together, he engaged to del Rio, Billie recently married to Jimmy Monroe (the colorful brother of Harlem club owner Clark Monroe), playing their roles with reckless cool. It was ultimately too cool for the folks at RKO, and soon the harassing phone calls began: She was ruining his career, the film, and the studio; she’d never work in films; they’d sic the police on her; he’d be fired from his film and disgraced in the business. The hotel began receiving threats warning of what would happen if they didn’t keep Welles out of the building. Señorita del Rio even called to warn Holiday that she was jeopardizing her marriage plans. But Welles laughed it all off: With his film about to open, the studio wouldn’t dare risk the bad publicity.

  • • • • •

  Billie would not see Orson Welles again for years, until
he walked into a club where she was appearing:

  I remember the night Orson Welles came into the Onyx. I hadn’t seen him in years. He was all grown up and famous, but it hadn’t changed him any kind of way. He came in with a girl who looked like a perfect doll. She was such a knockout she just stood there and everybody stared at her while Orson grabbed me in his arms, hugged me and kissed me. Then he introduced this beautiful chick to me as his wife. I’m a real square about newspapers, I hardly ever touch the things so I didn’t even know he was married to Rita Hayworth or anybody.

  Anyway, Orson and Rita and I sat down at a table for a drink. . . . When I got up to sing, Orson reached across the table, took my hand and said “You’re still my beautiful brown baby.” He always called me that. So I said thank you sugar, and wham bam, excuse me, Ma’am, if Rita didn’t haul off and slap him smack in the face and walk out.

  I felt terrible. I begged Orson to go after her and get her. I sure didn’t want to be in the middle of a public hassle over nothing at all.

  But Orson didn’t bat an eye. He just said, “Hell, let her go.”

  So this beautiful chick walked out on him and he sat there and let her go. . . . And Orson and I hung out together for a couple of days.

  Once her adventures with Welles were cut from the book, there was nothing left of the planned chapter but a brief mention of her radio acting experience with Shelton Brooks and her friendship with playboy Jimmy Donahue. Too brief, it would seem, since Billie and Dufty expected their audience to know the significance of these people and the occasions they describe.

  Shelton Brooks was described by Billie in her book as a songwriter and author of the song “Some of These Days,” and, though she didn’t mention it, it was a number made famous by Sophie Tucker, for whom it was first written. Brooks wrote many other hit songs and some of the first jazz standards, appeared as a song-and-dance man in Broadway shows, and had his own twice-weekly radio soap opera on CBS Radio. It was on this program that Billie appeared, doubling parts as a wife and a maid.