With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  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.’†

  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.‡

  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.§

  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.‖ 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.

  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 Bi
llie 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).