Billie was sent to prison when she was at the height of her fame. She had been earning around $50,000 a year, although Joe Glaser maintained that all the money had been squandered by Joe Guy. According to her admission documents, she had just $6.34 in her possession when she arrived at Alderson. Her age was incorrectly given as twenty-eight (she was in fact thirty-two), and the document included an IQ assessment, which stated that ‘She rates best in language and vocabulary, poor in factual knowledge. Has done singing and housework. Quit school to go to work. Seems inconsistent in her reasoning.’e
Billie was given an injection of morphine for her train journey to West Virginia and was admitted to the prison hospital at 9.30 a.m. on 28 May. Her medical records stated that she appeared ‘nervous and weak’, and she was given a little Nembutal to help her sleep and a further shot of morphine. For two days she felt ‘nauseous’, but she apparently ‘went through the drug withdrawal with the minimum amount of discomfort’. After eight days she was moved from the hospital to the prison.
She proved to be a model prisoner, just as once, long ago, she had proved to be a model inmate in a Baltimore reform school. She was initially given the job of brass cleaning and ‘This and everything else she attempted she did thoroughly and without assistance, preferring to work alone. Except for one reprimand for the use of profanity she was quiet, well-mannered and appreciative of suggestion … She never asked for aspirin, stating that she wished to get away from anything associated with narcotics … She was neat and clean personally … and very interested in her appearance.
‘When she went into the clinic she was surrounded quickly by fans both colored and white and it was interesting to see how she changed in deportment, brightened and acknowledged their welcome. When speaking to officers she often spoke of the importance of being cured so that she could return quickly to her “public” before she was forgotten … She played cards and sewed during most of her leisure hours.’
In November 1947, while Billie was in prison, the record producer Norman Granz organised a benefit concert for her to cover her many debts. But Joe Glaser decided that this would be bad publicity and insisted that all the monies raised were donated to charity. Apart from this intervention, Glaser kept his distance and did nothing to help his client.f
Bobby Tucker was the one person with whom Billie had regular contact during her time in prison. He said she sent him letters every week, knitted sweaters for him and his young son, and ‘made little things like they make in jail, little belts … The only way she knew there was a world outside was because I wrote to her.’
When Billie was released, Bobby Tucker was there to meet her at Newark station at nine o’clock in the morning. He had her dog Mister with him to welcome her as well. He said, ‘When she got off the train, she come up and grabbed me and she was holding me like this and I could see that she was completely out of it.’g During her three months on parole she stayed in his mother’s house in Morristown.
Ten days after her release, Billie appeared at a midnight show at Carnegie Hall. She checked into a hotel in Midtown, and Ernie Anderson, the promoter for the concert, said, ‘I got the impression she was clean and was going to stay off drugs, that she was trying to stay away from Harlem and the drug pushers and ex-husbands who sometimes provided her with drugs to keep her in line … Meanwhile at Carnegie Hall the box office was going crazy. The senior Heck brother who ran the box office said we could sell more concerts by Billie that night. He even asked, “Why not? She could do another concert at 2 a.m. and another at 5 a.m.”, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Well, the gross we racked up set a new house record.’
Billie did two concerts, three weeks apart, singing thirty songs at each one. Bobby Tucker remembered, ‘The night they opened, it was pouring rain and people were standing outside, waiting. She had the whole thing. Before she even opened her mouth, she had them. Ninety-nine per cent of them were Billie Holiday fans, so she really couldn’t do anything wrong.’ Bobby said that for him those two shows were the most wonderful things he’d ever done.
But he also said that Billie’s sense of insecurity was worse than ever. She was amazed that people hadn’t forgotten her, but she was afraid they had only come to see what a woman prisoner looked like. She felt that everyone was using her, that they didn’t really care about her, except that she was a big celebrity, a star. Nobody cared, nobody really gave a damn. As Bobby Tucker said, ‘A lot of people go to jail, but Billie took it personally.’
It was after the second Carnegie Hall performance on 17 April 1948 that Billie started her disastrous affair with John Levy. Bobby Tucker couldn’t think of one nice thing to say about this man. ‘He was unscrupulous. He was doing business with both sides of the law and he didn’t even have the guts to be a gangster.’ The problem was ‘John Levy was a sadistic pimp and Billie admired pimps. He was physically strong and he would holler and scream at people, and she liked that as well. He was a man who took over.’
He saw how Billie used to provoke John Levy, ‘almost like a small child will do things to make you blow your top. Once you blow your top, they’re satisfied. They feel they’ve beaten you. In her case it was like a little-girl thing.’h
There was the classic scene on New Year’s Eve 1948, at Billy Berg’s nightclub. Bobby Tucker gave a different version from Jimmy Rowles. He said the musicians were milling around Billie, joking and flirting with her, and maybe one of them patted her on the bottom or put an arm round her shoulder, and she pretended to be insulted, just because John Levy was there. ‘She got into her act so that John could go into his act.’ The whole thing snowballed within minutes, and John Levy produced a butcher’s knife and managed to stab an innocent bystander who wasn’t even part of the band.
Four days after this scene, Billie and John Levy were raided in their room at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco. The narcotics agents caught Billie in the act of trying to flush an opium pipe and a small amount of opium down the lavatory.i According to Bobby Tucker, John Levy was an opium addict and the drug could only have belonged to him, but Levy managed to get himself off the hook by saying that he would go to New York and ‘bring in somebody really big’. When he failed to return, Billie again took the rap. On this occasion she got herself a good lawyer and avoided going back to jail, but it cost her a lot of money and endless trouble, and it further soured her reputation.
In spite of this she went back to John Levy for a while and that was when Bobby Tucker decided he had had enough. ‘I really liked her and I couldn’t stand the way he was treating her. If she asked him for fifty dollars, he’d say, “Don’t ask for money in public”, and he’d knock her down literally, with his fist in her face, in the stomach, anywhere.’
When Bobby said he was leaving, John Levy told him piano players were a dime a dozen and then tried to get him back with threats, saying, ‘I have some guys. You’ll never play piano again.’j But Bobby Tucker was determined, and anyway he had got himself a new job playing for Billy Eckstine. He wrote Billie a letter and she wrote back, saying she understood.
He worked for Billie one last time in September 1954 when she was doing some recordings for Norman Granz. Her ankles were swollen and he thought she was suffering from yellow jaundice. She could hardly talk and her singing voice was almost as hoarse as Louis Armstrong’s, but still she sang for a couple of hours. During the recording she suddenly said, ‘Move over’, and insisted on sitting down on the piano stool right next to Bobby. ‘I could hardly play,’ he said.
* The club took its name from Old Man Colosimo, who was shot dead on the premises by Al Capone.
† Billie’s current boyfriend was the trumpeter Joe Guy, who was a heroin addict. Bobby Tucker said, ‘By this time she was so strung out, sex was a thing in the background. Joe was an easier way to cop and someone to get high with.’ Billie was known to be using heroin in 1946 and it was getting in the way of her reliability with work, but she was not yet under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. She always mad
e sure Bobby Tucker never saw her taking drugs because that way, as she said, ‘He may think a lot of things, but he don’t know.’
‡ Bobby Tucker didn’t think that Ascendio was a user; he was just a connection. He died in 1949 as the result of ‘an accident with a horse’.
§ There is a curious parallel to be found in the numerous photographs of Billie. As Bobby Tucker said, ‘Lady could look like any of her pictures … and on every one she looked different.’
‖ When Linda Kuehl asked him about Billie going with girls, he replied, ‘I won’t say she didn’t experiment, but if I just put in a driveway, it doesn’t mean I’m a mason.’
a Philadelphia was also the city where the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had its most powerful base. As Harry Anslinger said in his book The Traffic in Narcotics, ‘Pennsylvania has formed an excellent Bureau of Narcotics … There is a need for such special narcotics squads in all the larger cities’ (p. 301).
b For more details of this arrest, see p. 215.
c Agent Ryan testified under oath in the case brought against Joe Guy in September 1947. Guy himself testified that he used 1½ grains of heroin a day, but when his case was brought to court in September 1947 he was found not guilty.
d There was no clear case against Billie, since she could not be directly connected with the drugs in the hotel room, but Joe Glaser told her not to get legal help, and he made sure she had no access to the proper legal channels. A letter signed by two probation officers, based on an interview with Joe Glaser, stated that ‘he cooperated with the Federal Narcotics agents as he had no recourse except to have [Billie] “forced” to take proper treatment [for drug addiction].’ As Nicholson says, ‘The trial became a travesty of justice when she waived the right to legal representation. Her sentence of one year and one day had disastrous consequences for her career’ (p. 159).
e Nicholson (p. 160), quoting from Billie’s medical file No. 8407-W. There is the complex issue of how addicted Billie really was. Apparently she was menstruating when she was admitted and the majority of women who inject heroin do not menstruate. There is also the ease with which she stopped using any drugs. When I consulted Ditti Smit van Damme, who works at a drug clinic in Holland, she told me that this description of Billie’s process of withdrawal is that of ‘a person who uses heroin only incidentally or at weekends’. In Lady Sings the Blues a very different and much more dramatic account is given. ‘They don’t cut you down slow, weaning you off the stuff gradually. They just throw you in the hospital by yourself, take you off cold turkey and watch you suffer’ (p. 133).
f Billie wrote to Leonard Feather from Alderson in July 1947 saying that she hadn’t heard from Joe Glaser. ‘I know he is a busy man but he has my money and I wrote these letters asking for some … Please ask him what he intends to do for some good publicity … I do think he should do something so that people won’t forget me’ (Nicholson, p. 161). He didn’t even get round to telling her about the Carnegie Hall concert that was booked for 27 March 1948, ten days after her release. Billie was briefly persuaded to take another agent, Ed Fishman, but that ended in disaster and litigation.
g She was probably high on marijuana, which counted in those days as a narcotic every bit as dangerous and addictive as heroin. Talking to Bobby Tucker in 2003, he made no clear distinction between the two types of drugs. In another part of the interview, referring to Billie’s addiction, Bobby Tucker said she told him she was getting sick and needed something.’ We were on the south side of Chicago and she had a valet sent out and he came back with some reefers … We’d go to those backwoods places, little towns, and she’d always find it.’
h It’s the same pattern that she showed as a child in Baltimore, running after the men, shouting at them and challenging them until they chased her and punished her.
i See pp. 221–2 for a complete account of this incident.
j When I was saying goodbye to Bobby Tucker at the Morristown railway station, he suddenly told me the story of how Joe Glaser was paying off the police over a gangster shooting and how he gave John Levy $25,000 in a bag, to deliver to the police. But Levy died of a brain haemorrhage on his way there and, when his body was found, the bag of money had gone. This was in December 1956. When Billie was told the news she said his death was the best Christmas present she had ever had.
TWENTY-FIVE
John Levy, the Bass Player*
‘I came in on the tail end.’
This is John Levy, the bass player, talking:
A guy walked up to me and he said, ‘You John Levy?’
‘Yeah, I’m John Levy.’
‘You’re a manager?’
‘Yeah, I’m a manager.’
‘You ever managed Billie Holiday?’
‘No, I worked with Billie Holiday.’
‘You sure? Because there’s a florist bill at the florist shop downstairs. They sent an orchid up to her every night and the bill’s seventy-five dollars.’
Well, I knew the other John Levy, the pimp. I knew how he would order something and never pay for it. But I said I would like to straighten this thing out, and so I went down to the florist shop. The florist looked at me and he said, ‘That’s not my man. My man’s a big fellow. Looks like an Italian. A big Italian-looking fellow.’†
The other John Levy was a pimp and a hustler, and that was his game. He used to be in Chicago before he came to New York. He drived a big yellow Lincoln 31. Every night he used to drive through a park on the north side of Chicago, and he’s driving seventy, eighty miles an hour and he’s passing through all the red lights, and when he got downtown going through the Loop, the cops were waiting for him. He’d stop long enough for them to catch up with him and they’d pull alongside and he’d take out twenty dollars and hand it over and then he’d go on, driving seventy, eighty miles an hour. He’d get stopped three times, between the north and the south side of Chicago. He was paying out sixty dollars, every night.
John Levy the pimp was Billie’s manager, but he knew nothing about the management end of things. Even in those days, even though I was just a musician, I could see she was being exploited. He only played Billie in places where he felt he could take out the most money, and he only cared that wherever she worked, he got the money. He took the money and bought a home in Long Island, and it ended up he had that home in his name. He used to get the money in advance. He would phone through to a club and say, ‘She won’t play for you unless you give me two weeks in advance, or at least one week in advance.’ Then he’d pack up the dollars and fly back to New York, or he’d go to the race tracks at Hot Springs. Or he’d go back to his woman Tondalayo. He give her everything. She had a daughter by him. Billie was aware of these things. She knew Tondalayo.
We never knew when John Levy the pimp was in town. He was gone all the time. He’d be there and then he’d leave and you wouldn’t see him for two or three days, and then he’d come back and you’d see him in the club for two days. Usually you wouldn’t see him on pay night, but he always paid Billie’s hotel bills, because like any pimp or hustler, he makes sure a woman is taken care of as far as her needs. But after that, forget it.
In Philadelphia, Billie was staying in an old hotel right near the Academy of Music, and Bobby and I were staying in one of the smaller, cheap hotels nearby. Billie was in good form. She was big and healthy and in excellent shape and doing all right. I never saw her smoking pot, but she was drinking, and I could see the writing on the wall. Bobby and I would go by to pick her up to go to work. We had a ritual where we’d go to her hotel suite an hour or two before, to make sure she was together. If she wasn’t in the mood, she would start drinking and get high before we ever got there. She’d get high on drugs and then she’d start drinking, brandy and Benedictine and crème de menthe.
I remember one time we went up to her room and John Levy the pimp had just left and she said, ‘I can’t go to work tonight! John beat the hell out of me!’ She pulled her clothes off and we looked at her ribs and she was all brui
sed up. She said, ‘I can’t hardly breathe.’
So we decided to get some adhesive tape and we went to the drugstore and bought thick tape, and we bound her up as tight as possible and she went to work that night. We told her to see a doctor in the morning and the next day nothing was broken.
In that era all the female vocalists‡ had to have a man who’ll beat on them and take their money and misuse them. They seemed to thrive on that. Well, not thrive, but it was something. Why do some people take abuse from another human being? Why let someone do that to you? Nobody can answer that, but some people have to have this. Females call that love. I don’t understand it, but maybe I’ve never been in love. I always felt a woman deserves the same feeling as a man, but you don’t want to know about that. When you are writing my story I’ll tell you about that.
For Billie, her manager must be her man or her husband. And she had to have a man who once in a while beat on her. In other words, ‘I gotta have a man that is a man, and I gotta have a man that keeps reminding me of that! Otherwise I’m making more money than he can make and I’m more famous than him. So in order to assert his masculinity, he knocks me down, he slaps me down.’ I call it the Frankie and Johnny Syndrome.
People didn’t really know Billie. She was always trying to keep a hard front, but she was a beautiful person. She was a great woman. She had more feeling for everything and for people than anybody I’ve been in touch with. She wasn’t selfish; she was generous to a fault. She always respected musicians. I don’t think she ever said an evil thing to me or ever looked around to say anything, if anything went wrong musically.
Billie was a complete stylist. When you listen to her sing, you feel she has lived that experience and she is telling a story about it. I don’t think anyone can express a story better than Billie. She didn’t have a great range or any of that stuff, but most of the tunes she sang had good melody lines and good stories, and they’re not easy to sing or play. She didn’t sing a song unless she wanted to, or unless someone slipped her man some money under the table and her man told her to do the song; then she’d do it even if it wasn’t right for her.
With Billie Page 19