With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  ‡ 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.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  Lady Sings the Blues

  On 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.

  According to Dufty’s account of what happened next, the publishers, ‘instead of cashing in,† panicked and, on the advice of lawyers, hacked the book to pieces, taking out anything which they felt might cause trouble’. But as well as making the cuts – as a result of which, so Lee Barker said, almost everyone of note disappeared without trace – it seems that Doubleday felt it would be good for sales if Dufty updated the book to include Billie’s most recent brush with the law. And so he added a final chapter about narcotics, to round the whole thing off.

  In spite of her known fear of jail and bad publicity, Billie was made to speak of her most recent arrest in an uncharacteristically cheery tone. ‘Sure, I’d been busted again. And I was in jail … It might look like old times, but it wasn’t. There was a big difference. I didn’t feel lost. I didn’t feel alone. And I wasn’t alone. Louis was with me … God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody, and I believed in Louis.’

  In Dufty’s words, Billie went on to describe the circumstances of her arrest as if she had seen it all as a glorious publicity stunt. Louis was ‘as cool and gentle as a lamb’ in his dealings with the detectives and the police officers – there were now five of them instead of the original three – and he even had the foresight to tell her to put on ‘something pretty’ when they left the hotel, because the photographers were all waiting outside and eager to get a shot of her. Dufty also managed to make Billie sound very coy about whether there were any drugs to be found in the hotel room. At one moment she was protesting that their only fault was Louis’ gun, which had no permit, but then in the next breath she was undermining her case by adding, ‘I’ve had my troubles with the habit for fifteen years, on and off. I’ve been on and I’ve been off … I knew when I started to work on this book that I couldn’t expect to tell the truth in it unless I was straight when it came out. I didn’t try to hide anything. Doubleday carried an item in their winter catalogue that I was writing about my fight with dope a
nd that I knew it wasn’t over yet. There isn’t a soul on this Earth who can say for sure that their fight with dope is over until they’re dead.’‡

  When Lady Sings the Blues was finally published on 5 July 1956, Billie was working in Las Vegas. She apparently hadn’t seen the finished result yet, because on 23 July she sent a postcard to the Duftys saying, ‘Hey. How’s the book going there? You can’t get it out this way and it’s sold out in Chicago. If you can, send me a copy as I haven’t read it yet.’

  Lee Barker remembered that at some point after the book’s publication ‘my wife, my daughter and I went up to the Apollo in Harlem where she was singing, and I went backstage. We all went down to a joint on 43rd Street and had drinks and so on. We had a great evening, just marvellous, and I think she’s a very interesting woman … She was attractive, damned attractive … She had beautiful bones, from an Irish father, I guess, or grandfather … She had beautiful Irish cheekbones and a lovely colour too … Everyone was on heroin except me, and her Chihuahua was on gin. Her Chihuahua was a wonderful little dog … He drank gin out of a one-shot glass and got plastered.’

  In spite of Lee Barker’s enthusiasm, Dufty felt that Lady Sings the Blues was ‘published as an abandoned book’ and not given enough publicity. Nevertheless it ‘was on the bestseller list in nothing flat … and went into some twenty foreign editions. I have been getting royalties on it ever since.’§

  Dufty also managed to sell a series of articles, based on the most salacious aspects of the book, to the Sunday People in England. The series ran under the title ‘Body and Soul’, with such headings as ‘I was a slave to white dope!… Dope smashed up her marriage, dope sent her to jail for a year … Billie Holiday knew the full horror of a lust she could not conquer – a lust she knew was evil. Now she tells this story to the world.’

  In America the book was seen as a ‘lucid and candid’ autobiography, and quickly entered the bestseller list. In November 1956, Billie did a show at Carnegie Hall in which she ‘told her life story in her inimitable style, in song, while Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times reviewed it in prose’ by reading passages from Lady Sings the Blues. Dufty was hopeful that a movie deal could be signed quite soon. He wrote to Billie in December 1956, saying, ‘I just wanted to say it will be the thrill of my life if this movie deal comes through.’ In fact, after endless legal wrangles, the film was finally made in 1972.‖

  Meanwhile Billie continued with her hectic schedule, zigzagging this way and that across the United States, from one engagement to the next. Because she still had no Cabaret Card, she was forced to continue with the endless round of ‘second-rate theatres, tawdry dressing rooms and inferior nightclubs’.a

  In July and August 1957 she was back in New York. She sang at two Jazz Under the Stars concerts in Central Park. As she said on 30 July, in an interview for the World Telegraph, ‘I’m allowed to sing in a park, where children can hear me, but I’m banned from nightclubs. I think it’s pretty silly … I think maybe the police department is going to let me have the permit this Fall. I sure hope so. I’m tired of travelling. It would be nice to settle down in New York for a while.’

  * Again there is no way of knowing if any drugs were really found. Billie said they were not, and Louis McKay told the Pittsburgh Courier that the police harassed them both and tried to plant the evidence. ‘But they found us completely clear, after all sorts of searches’ (Nicholson, p. 204).

  † As far as advance publicity was concerned, Billie’s arrest could not have been better timed.

  ‡ Lady Sings the Blues, pp. 186–92.

  § Letter to Lester Shurr, 13 August 1968.

  ‖ Farah Jasmine Griffin says, ‘While the film kept [Billie] a victim, it turned her last husband, Louis McKay, into the knight in shining armour who sought to rescue Holiday from herself. The film shot Diana Ross into superstardom, sparked interest in Holiday and raised the price of the Holiday commodity. It also spawned two decades’ worth of articles, essays and books claiming to reveal the “real Holiday” ’ (p. 32).

  a A comment by the American jazz critic Leonard Feather, who always asserted that Billie was destroyed by the treatment she received in America and, if she had moved to England, she would have survived for many more years and her singing would have gone from strength to strength.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Irving Townsend and Ray Ellis

  ‘She wanted that cushion under her voice.’

  One of Billie’s last records was Lady in Satin, on which she was accompanied by the Ray Ellis Orchestra and an unknown choir. Billie was keen to work with Ellis because she admired what he’d done with Frank Sinatra on Only the Lonely, and decided she wanted to offset her growling voice with the unlikely background of strings and angelic voices.

  Irving Townsend, who was the producer for Lady in Satin, obviously liked Billie very much and said he ‘got more personally involved with her than you do producing a record’.* Initially he couldn’t believe she was going to do the album. ‘It would be like Ella Fitzgerald saying that she wanted to record with Ray Conniff. But she said she wanted a pretty album, something delicate. She said this over and over. She thought it would be beautiful. She wasn’t interested in some wild swinging jam session … She wanted that cushion under her voice. She wanted to be flattered by that kind of sound.’

  The recordings were made in New York City during three days of February 1958. By that time Billie had moved to a one-bedroom apartment near Central Park. Irving Townsend visited her there and described it as a ‘dark, run-down, dingy place’. It would seem that – thanks to all the talk about heroin addiction in Lady Sings the Blues, and to her image of complex notoriety, which was maintained in pretty well everything that was written about her in the press – Billie found it necessary to live more or less incognito. She was calling herself Eleanor and using either her family name of Fagan or her married name of McKay, but in spite of that the landlord almost refused to sign the lease when he realised her true identity. Irving Townsend felt that she was ‘bitter and worrying about what was going to happen to her and what people had done to her and the advantages they had taken of her’.

  Billie was very short of money, and Townsend made her a ‘series of little loans to pay bills’, letting her have a total of maybe $100 or $150. The reason why she was getting so little work was partly because of her reputation for unreliability and because her critics said she could no longer sing, although as Townsend explained, ‘People didn’t give a damn what her voice was like because she was Billie Holiday, with a style and a sound like no other woman ever had anywhere, and what she once was would carry her through with any audience. But the problem was she was losing confidence in herself, and as a musician she knew her singing wasn’t what it should be, and she was drinking to bolster her nerve and the more she drank, the worse it got.’†

  Ray Ellis remembered that the idea of doing a record with Billie began in the spring of 1957 when someone told him that she had been asking about him. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he said, ‘because I had never met the woman … I didn’t know she was aware of me.’

  About six months later he received a call from Irving Townsend at Columbia Records. ‘He asked me what I was doing October 11th, 12th and 13th. I said I wasn’t doing anything and he said, “Good! You’re going to do an album with Billie Holiday! She’s in the office right now and she wants to do an album!” ’ Ray Ellis was full of eager anticipation at the idea of working with Billie. It was ‘one of the greatest things that ever happened to my ego’.

  A meeting was arranged and the parties involved signed a contract. Columbia was providing an ‘unlimited budget’. The musicians in the orchestra would be getting $50 or $60 a session, and Billie was to get an advance of around $100 or $150 a side, against a 5 per cent royalty. As Irving Townsend explained, ‘It was a one-shot deal. It was pointless to sign her, because you didn’t know if you’d get two sides out of her, let alone an album.’

  Ray Ellis remembered being d
eeply disappointed by his first encounter with Billie. He said she failed to live up to his expectations: ‘I had seen pictures of her ten years before and she was a beautiful woman. When I met her she was a repulsive woman … She looked a little shabby, a little dirty … I was taken aback because I had this mental thing, like she turns you on and you can go to bed with her. But I don’t think I could have gone to bed with her at that stage for anything … There was something a little funky about her, a little too funky … She just looked like she smelled … Her whole life structure existed on her getting her next fix. You don’t think like a woman any more.’‡

  Ray Ellis wanted to make it clear that he was ‘very sensitive to women, especially to a woman with that much talent. Even if a woman is not very pretty, I would see something vital in her that turns me on. I wanted to be turned on by Billie Holiday, but I couldn’t because she was so unappetising to look at … But still I flipped, with all the talent she had.’

  Linda Kuehl asked him if he always had a woman in mind when he did his arrangements. He replied, ‘Damn right! If I am writing for you, I am making love to you.’

  ‘So how did you make love to Billie Holiday?’

  ‘I never made love to her in bed. But if I’m writing a song … I would make myself a lover at the time I was writing that song. At the time of writing that song, I’m in love with her.’

  ‘So when you arranged for Billie, you …?’

  ‘I was in love with Billie. Not necessarily Billie, but … I heard her voice, I dug it. It turned me on, and maybe I was in love with that voice and I was picturing a very evil, sensuous, sultry, very evil … probably one of the most evil voices I’ve heard in my life … Evil is earthy to me. When you say somebody is evil, it means very, very bad. I don’t mean bad. Let me tell you something. Music relates to sex. It always did and it always will. Anything she sang that meant anything had to do with sex.’