Bobby Tucker took care of the music. She pretty well had a repertoire, and most of the time we played the music and she wouldn’t rehearse it, she’d just do it. I’d stand out front and she’d be high, and she’d lean on the bass and stand there and sing and she wouldn’t move from that spot. It was one of the most lucrative and successful times in her life, as far as money was concerned, but I came in on the tail end of the real Billie Holiday.
She never had an entourage. Most female singers have an entourage of females who are there with the dresses and the hairdos, and the this and the that. The only people I would see around Billie were the people who’d come to sell her some shit. I always felt uncomfortable with the dope peddlers and the users. They’d say, ‘We’re going to sit here and we’re going to shoot ourselves up some heroin.’ Or they might just be sniffing cocaine. I’d go out of the room, I’d go any place. Bobby Tucker was the same.§ We knew the people who were coming around were just getting their claws in. We knew they were spoiling her career.
We used to dress her. We’d go into the dressing room before a concert, and Bobby and I would button her up. There was nothing between us in that way. She’d just walk in, take off her clothes and sit and talk to you, rapping. It was never done in a vulgar way.
At first I was so prudish and such a square, but she’d say, ‘Sit down, motherfucker!‖ Where you going?’
‘I thought you were going to dress!’
‘So what!’
I thought she was beautiful. Very few people are really beautiful or attractive, sitting there with no clothes on, because very few of us have bodies that are that beautiful. But with her it was done in such a way that you really thought about the inside of the person, who she really was. And she was well built and she looked good from my standpoint, as a man looking at a woman. She had some lovely skin. Her complexion when she came out of Lexington was great. She was healthy and she was so together, but she fell back into the same thing. If she was put in the right environment …
Billie was a female Duke Ellington. The only time I ever heard her put anybody down – and it wasn’t really a put-down – was in the days when Peggy Lee and all the girls were trying to sound like her. And she’d tell them to their faces, it wasn’t like she talked behind their backs. When Peggy Lee came around they’d just greet each other and Billie would say, ‘Look, bitch, why don’t you find some other way to sing?’ Or, ‘Why the fuck are you trying to sound like me?’
And Peggy Lee wouldn’t take offence. She’d say to Billie, ‘It’s because I love you. I love everything you do.’
I remember Peggy Lee disliked me for years because she knew my name was John Levy and she told somebody, ‘I don’t like that John Levy the pimp on account of what he did to Billie.’
And I met Peggy Lee one day at Capitol Records and I said, ‘I gotta straighten something out. You think I’m John Levy the pimp that managed Billie, but I’m John Levy the bass player, and I just played bass for Billie for less than a year. Seven or eight months maybe.’
Everything was cool then.
* John Levy the bass player first worked with Billie as part of the Bobby Tucker Quartet at the two Carnegie Hall concerts in March and April 1948. He was then with her ‘out of town, to the East Coast, Washington, Philadelphia and then out to Chicago and St Louis’. In March 1949, John Levy the bass player got tired of not being paid by John Levy the pimp. He stopped working for Billie after a one-nighter at the Pershing Ballroom in Chicago on 13 March 1949. He joined the George Shearing Quintet and became Shearing’s manager. He was very successful and eventually ‘we had Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Nancy Wilson’.
† John Levy the pimp did look like an Italian, even though he described himself as ‘half-Negro, half-Jew’.
‡ John Levy the bass player managed Nancy Wilson and said, ‘She didn’t have the beatings, but she had the verbal abuse and the misuse of her talents and her money, and she could sit there and see it and allow it to happen.’
§ John Levy said, ‘They didn’t try to turn us on, Bobby and me. We didn’t have any. I was making two hundred dollars at most in a week. We were just working musicians, so why turn us on? In those days they wouldn’t bother with people like us.’
‖ John Levy said, ‘Even calling you a name, calling you something like that, it was meant in a completely different way.’
TWENTY-SIX
The Ecstasy of Paranoia
As Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger had no problem with heavy drinkers or with habitual consumers of the wide range of tranquillisers and barbiturates that were now legally flooding the market. For him, illegal drugs were demons that needed to be eradicated and he increasingly saw drug abuse as a ‘cold, calculated, ruthless, systematic plan to undermine’.*
Anslinger felt it was crucial to emphasise that ‘the drug addict is a psychopath before he acquires his habit’. He believed that an estimated 95 per cent of addicts were also criminals, and that a drug had ‘more rapid and stronger effects on an individual with a flawed personality’. He concluded that it was therefore quite useless to send drug addicts to treatment centres or hospitals; harsh jail sentences were always the best solution.†
If Anslinger had one particular obsession in the midst of all this, it was the way that the general public ‘reacts respecting glamorous entertainment characters who have been involved in the sordid details of a narcotics case … There seems to be some sort of public approval of these degenerate practices.’ Anslinger very much wanted to reverse this trend by having a celebrity punished in the way he saw fit. It would also guarantee excellent front-page publicity for his Bureau. He was greatly helped in his campaign by the newly proliferating breed of tabloid journalists, who could always sell more papers if they provided sensational material about acts of sex and violence, especially when carried out by famous people and fuelled by the consumption of narcotics.
Everyone who knew Billie Holiday has a different version of the nature of her addictions and the year in which she became a heroin addict. According to John Simmons the bass player, who was her boyfriend for a while, Billie didn’t start shooting heroin until the latter part of 1942, or early 1943. Before then she was smoking weed, smoking opium, taking pills. It was when she began earning a lot of money that she became a natural target both for the drug peddlers who wanted to sell to her and for the men who wanted to become her boyfriend/manager/husband/pimp, and who encouraged her addiction in order to control her and have access to her income. As her friend Mae Barnes said, ‘When Billie got on this heroin habit, she became meek and mild and couldn’t help herself, and anybody could make her do anything … When she was drinking like a lush and smoking gage, she’d want to hear music … she’d rock and roll and carry on like hell and have a ball and move with the rhythm, but when she was on the heavy stuff she’d be listless and drop off.’
Billie’s heroin addiction was never particularly dramatic, or at least she never boasted about her excesses as some junkies like to. Few people ever saw her injecting and it seems that whenever she stopped using heroin, either by choice or necessity, she always managed to avoid the usual traumas of withdrawal. On the two occasions when she was arrested, she adjusted almost immediately to being deprived of heroin, and several people who were close to her for long periods of time insisted that she was not using anything while they were with her.‡ She was clearly able to control her habit through sheer will power. As she grew older she apparently needed the drug less and less and she must have become what is called a ‘chippy’, getting by on a minimal dose.§ On the occasions when she was under extreme psychological pressure during her last years, she tended to use alcohol to drown her sorrows.
According to the jazz critic Max Jones, who met Billie in London in 1954 and again in 1959, Billie was an ‘odd amalgamation of naivety and experience’, full of spontaneous streams of talk, full of laughter and rude jokes and not at all ‘the tragic lady with morbid interests’ he had b
een led to expect. He said her speaking voice was ‘slurry, a little cracked in tone and meanly attractive’ and that she had a prodigious ability to consume spirits. Together with his wife, they mostly talked about ‘music, booze, sex, drugs, politics, gangsters, film actors, club owners, writers, and café society. Also about dogs or clothes and shopping.’‖ He said she knew that dope suppliers, including husbands and lovers, had leeched most of her earnings, and she realised that her immoderate use of all sorts of stimulants had shortened her life expectancy, but she wasn’t maudlin about any of this. She said she had enjoyed the narcotics, the drinking and the men while they lasted and she accepted her habits as ‘my own damn business’.
So why is it that the story of Billie’s life has constantly been portrayed as that of a particularly hopeless drug dependency and a steady slide into artistic decline, despair and moral degradation? Why is it that even the briefest account of her on the back of a CD cover, or the caption to a photograph, will invariably include a mention of her heroin addiction, although others of her generation who were equally (or much more heavily) addicted are allowed to be cut free from the burden of their particular troubles?a
According to a long interview she gave to the black magazine Ebony, in July 1949, when Billie came out of prison in March 1948 she thought she had paid her debt to society for her wrongdoings and would now be given a fresh start. Instead, that was when her troubles started in earnest:
I came out expecting to be allowed to go to work and to start with a clean slate … But the police have been particularly vindictive, hounding, heckling and harassing me beyond endurance … These people have dogged my footsteps from New York to San Francisco … They have allowed me no peace. Wherever I go, they track me down and ask me nasty questions about the company I keep and my habits …
Recently the New York Police Department refused to issue me with a Cabaret Performer’s Licence. The pretext used was my prison record … although many other nightclub employees with police records are licensed and working.
I have been caught in the crossfire of narcotic agents and drug peddlers and it’s been wicked … One of the narcotic agents seemed determined to make me the means of securing promotion. The peddlers made vile threats to me in an effort to make me a customer again.
It is true that after her release from prison, Billie was constantly being brought before the courts of law on one pretext or another, and several people who worked with her attested to the fact that the police and other government agents were always at her shows – heckling, threatening, raiding her dressing room, making embarrassing enquiries at her hotel and spreading rumours at the clubs where she was booked to sing. Billie told the trumpeter Buck Clayton that the FBI agents, ‘young ones with crewcuts … would come up to her and say, “OK, Lady Day, we know everything you’re doing and when the time comes, we’re going to get you!” Then they’d walk away. But they’d heckle her like that. She never knew when one was going to approach her, so she always had fights with the police.’ Clayton said, ‘She was very bitter about not being able to play, because they let other people play places, like Stan Getz – he got caught, but he got permission to play afterwards.’b
After her imprisonment Billie was four times arrested on drugs charges that could not be properly substantiated. On top of that, a number of individuals jumped on what seemed like a bandwagon of recrimination and brought civil actions against her. Ed Fishman, who was briefly her manager in 1948 while she was trying to break free from Joe Glaser, filed a $75,000 breach-of-contract suit against her, claiming that this was the commission he would have received if she had kept him on. Jake Ehrlich, the lawyer who got her off the second drugs charge in 1949, sued her for failure to pay his fees. And several club owners sued her, or threatened to sue her, for failing to honour a contract, no matter what her circumstances were at the time. She was also taken to court for causing grievous bodily harm when she threw a plate that hit a woman on the leg.
Billie was repeatedly denied her Cabaret Card, in spite of applying for it to be reinstated on at least three separate occasions. The first time was in March 1949 when she was offered a rumoured $3,000 a week to appear at the Royal Roost club, just so long as she had her card. She tried to sue the New York Police Department, but lost the case. The presiding judge, Aaron J. Levy, said that the police ‘deserved commendation’ for their action.c
It also seems that the forces of law did a very thorough job in tarnishing her reputation and frightening off any clubs that might wish to hire her. Frank Holzfeind, manager of the Blue Note in Chicago, said he was surprised that she even turned up for a booking in 1949 because ‘She came to the Blue Note thoroughly plastered with every stigma and accusation in the books, so much so that I doubted my reasons for signing her in the first place. That first night I just knew she wouldn’t show up.’ In the event, she was on time every evening and broke all previous attendance records at the club.d This story is repeated over and over again. On 15 November 1971, Frank Schiffman, the manager of the Apollo Theater, wrote a letter to Linda Kuehl in which he echoed the familiar prejudice, saying, ‘I considered her a superb artist, but unfortunately a very sad woman who throughout her life was plagued by drug addiction. Our records indicate that she made her last appearance at the Apollo in September 1955. Her personal behaviour was excellent and she showed no evidence at the time of being adversely affected by artificial stimulants, but unfortunately the aura of stardom had diminished.’
Eager tabloid journalists all had stories to tell about Billie’s excesses, because those were the stories that people wanted to read. As Barney Josephson, the owner of Café Society, put it, ‘America at large didn’t know much about her. I think the only way she could get onto the front pages of the white newspapers was by getting into some sort of trouble, like being arrested.’ Strangers were quick to jump to conclusions, and many people presumed that Billie was high on heroin when it was more likely that she was drunk on whisky. For instance, a Second World War veteran gave a typical account of seeing her at the bar, ‘obviously under the effects of heroin or some other drug which she must have shot up after her singing. Her words just dribbled out.’e
William Dufty, the New York Post journalist responsible for ghostwriting Billie’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, had a lot to answer for.f When he was drawing up his contract for the book he agreed with his publishers that narcotics would be what they called ‘the gimmick’ that would sell it. And he did everything he could to give prominence to Billie’s drug addiction.
When he began to write his book, Dufty combined the stories Billie told him with material that had appeared in earlier interviews. He added whatever extra spice he felt was needed, particularly in relation to Billie’s lesbian experiences and her history of drug addiction. He was a skilled journalist and managed to provide Billie with a witty, world-weary manner of talking and presenting herself. It didn’t matter that the voice was not hers, because the prose whizzed on the page, beginning with the famous first lines of the book: ‘Mom and Pop were only a couple of kids when they got married. She was thirteen, he was sixteen and I was three.’
William Dufty sent an outline and much of the first draft of the book to Norman Granz. He also enclosed an enthusiastic letter in which he said that he and Billie ‘have worked for a week now, pulling stuff together. She has been dictating huge patches of terrific stuff. I have dredged the morgues and clip files … And the project has gone well.’ But Granz was not at all impressed and his response was stern and critical. ‘I must assume that the reason for writing the book is to sell as many copies as possible because of [Billie’s] desperate need for economic aid … It may be that Billie wishes to tell her side of the story – in a sense to right the misconceptions that society may have about her … but I am not sure that it isn’t working at cross purposes because so much mention is made of the narcotics and it might work against Billie … The fact that the publishers feel that the impact of the narcotics part is the most important aspe
ct of this book, in a sense only confirms my suspicions, because it is a very saleable commodity.’g
But although William Dufty clearly made use of Billie’s notoriety,h he was also very aware of where he felt the real blame lay. In a letter sent to a New York lawyer during a legal tussle shortly after the book’s publication, he explained his interpretation of Billie’s troubled destiny. ‘She has been kicked around and harassed for years by the authorities. One of the reasons is that this song Strange Fruit made her well-known and controversial. At any one of a hundred points in recent years she could have gotten off easy if she had merely told the FBI or other government investigative authorities … that she didn’t know what the song meant … that she thought it was about kumquats or something …
‘At many points the FBI and other Congressional Investigators might have been delighted to expose this propaganda plot; how an innocent, big-eyed, barefoot little girl was used to inflame the saloon-set against lynching in accord with the well-known aims and objectives of the Communist Party … But she didn’t. She wouldn’t.’i
It is possible to argue interminably over how much Billie was to blame for the troubles that gathered around her, but maybe here the last word should be given to the pianist Mal Waldron, who worked with her during the final two years of her life. ‘Faults? Well of course she drank too much … She wouldn’t stop drinking and she never did really stick the dope habit. But Lady Day had an awful lot to forget … Don’t forget, if you are treated like a common criminal, after a while you begin to act like one.’
* For my information on the history of the heroin trade in America, I am indebted to The Pursuit of Oblivion by Richard Davenport-Hines, 2001, and especially Chapter 11, which deals with the career of Harry Anslinger as the first Commissioner.
With Billie Page 20