With Billie

by Julia Blackburn

  We had that apartment for four weeks and then we went on to San Francisco. This was around September 1957. I remember we’d been gone for six weeks and she had this Carnegie Hall concert booked, and so we had to finish the last show in California and pack and get right into the show in New York. Thirty-six hours without sleep. She did wonderfully.

  She always fixed her own hair and make-up. She used an ordinary eyebrow pencil – in fact, I have a small stub of it at home: Maybelline, orangey-red on the outside. At home she just put on lipstick and eyebrows with an ordinary eyebrow pencil. For stage she wore stage jewellery that was not in the best condition and she used a pancake make-up with a little powder over it. She put the pancake on her body. All I had to do was to take care of her dresses and make sure they were clean and zip her up, and lots of times I would zip her skin up.

  She wore a light girdle, just to hold her stockings, white or pink; an ordinary bra, white usually; white panties, not lacy or anything. She wasn’t a frivolous woman; the things she wore every day were not very outlandish and not very expensive. She liked slacks. She had very good wool slacks. When she had money before I knew her, she knew what to buy and bought quality things, but she didn’t buy too much when I was with her. She was hard up, in the sense of money. And she wouldn’t sit around undressed between shows in her dressing room; she just stayed the way she was dressed. Maybe that was different when she was young.

  In New York when I first worked for her, she was living at the Wilson Hotel. She was a Chinese food addict and she often asked me to bring back some Chinese food from the restaurant next door. She’d put it on regular plates or eat it out of the box. She wasn’t the kind of person that needed to be waited on. Steamed porgy with rice was what we got most of the time. She liked plain white rice. I never saw her use chopsticks.

  My parents liked her. She came to dinner once and she kept them up until three in the morning, and my folks weren’t used to that. But fortunately it was the weekend and they didn’t mind. Her hours were always irregular. She was a night person and she’d never go to bed before 5 a.m. She usually got up around noon and often slept through appointments, if she had any.

  Sometimes she’d drag me down to Broadway and we’d go to these all-night shows on 42nd Street. We were like two old moles. I remember once she took me to 7th Avenue and 125th Street and we went into this bar, and she ordered me a club soda because I still wasn’t drinking in those days and she showed me the atmosphere – what it was like in a Harlem bar. We usually took a cab. That was the way we got around.

  She said she’d tried every drug in the book, and she was on drugs all the time I knew her. Someone would bring her drugs, maybe a couple of times a week. She said Louis McKay had not helped her at all and had put her back on drugs; I presumed he was supplying her. I’d seen her melting the stuff down on a spoon and using an ancient needle to put it in her veins. It was a very primitive kind of arrangement and not very sanitary and must have been painful. I’m a diabetic and the only thing I did was to give her a syringe because I couldn’t stand to see the way she was injecting herself. Today you can walk into any place and get a disposable needle, but in those days it was different. I never got involved in her drugs in any way, but a guy once offered me some marijuana and I said, ‘No, thanks. I get drunk on the music!’ And later Lady would often say, ‘She gets drunk on the music!’ She liked that.

  She said it was all wrong the way they treated drug addicts as criminals and made criminals out of them.* And one time she said to me, ‘If I ask you to help me, you can help me, but if I don’t ask you, there’s nothing you can do.’ And I think she was really admitting it was up to the drug addict to give up the habit. She had a couple who were friends and she felt bad because they took stuff, and their children would play games of taking the stuff because their parents were hooked and Billie said those children didn’t have a chance.

  She told me when she first got married she wanted children very badly and she would sometimes lie in bed with her feet up after intercourse, because she thought that might help. But by the time I knew her she realised it would have been too late. Still, I think she would have been a good mother. I saw her with the two boys Louis had with a woman in California. She often took care of them and they liked her. She swore they weren’t really Louis’, and said his woman told her they were trick babies.

  She wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, because of the things she was under the influence of. One time I walked out because nothing I did was right and I was trying the best I could, so I said to hell with it. Two days later she called me and said, ‘I can’t find so-and-so and would you come over?’ and so I went. I remember she said to me, ‘If you want to hang around show people, you can’t be sensitive. You’ve got to get over that.’

  I enjoyed being with her. Of course I enjoyed her as an artist, but I also enjoyed just talking to her. She’d talk a lot about her mother. I got the feeling there was a lot of friction between her and her mother, because Sadie didn’t approve of the things she was doing, but they were very close. She said, ‘I haven’t spoken to anybody the way I speak to you since my mother died. I almost feel as if she has come back to me in some way.’ I had the feeling she needed to have somebody who loved her enough to understand her.

  She was a very intelligent woman who knew about many things I knew nothing about, and who knew about sizing things up. She always said what she meant, and I learnt a great deal about real feelings rather than phoney feelings from her, just by watching her and seeing how she treated people and how she talked to them. She’d be friendly with someone if she liked them, no matter who they were, and she wouldn’t be friendly with someone just because he was a bigshot. She’d say, ‘People don’t think I like laughing. They don’t think I lead any kind of normal life.’ I think it bothered her that people thought she was something peculiar, in the sense of being totally depressed and out of everything. She didn’t live such an unusual life, but she was bitter against society and the phoneyness.

  I never felt she used people and that might have been part of the problem, because people were using her all the time, but she never learnt to use them. In her heyday, when she had scads of money coming in, she told me how people asked for money and she gave it to them and nobody ever gave it back to her. They weren’t people I knew, so the names didn’t mean anything. But they weren’t around when she needed them later.†

  She wasn’t the kind of person who pitied herself, or if she did, it was only when she was alone. She wasn’t the kind of person who complained. But she used to say, ‘I can sing in Carnegie Hall and in a place where they sell ice cream to kids, but I can’t sing where people drink.’ I think she missed being in the clubs in New York. I remember she was in the Apollo Theater to see Al Hibbler, and they called her up to the stage and she sang with him and the response from the audience was fantastic.

  One of my main jobs was making out her parole reports, because she’d been arrested a year or so before. All that was required was information about where she was performing and where they could find her, if they wanted to find her. So I’d give them the itinerary for a month and we’d say, ‘Oh, I’m doing fine. Everything’s going well.’ It didn’t really mean anything at all, but she hoped they wouldn’t bother her so long as she sent them in. It was a scary time for her because she was always expecting them to walk in and arrest her again.

  She wasn’t working regularly, she was working when she could. You can’t live if you don’t work, and this was her problem in the last two years I knew her – just finding enough work to keep ahead of things. I don’t know if the clubs felt she wasn’t reliable, or that she was past it, or what. I usually went to every engagement and I don’t recall her missing a set. The owner of Birdland said he could arrange a deal with her and he would buy a licence‡ for her, if she would sing in his club for six months of every year, but Billie said, ‘I’m not going to sell half of myself, contract-wise, to anybody.’ But she was bitter abo
ut the fact that it could have been done.

  She told me her father died in a similar way to Bessie Smith; he was shunted around from place to place and she felt his death was very close to a lynching, although the exact facts were never known. She said she could have gone to the South and made a lot of money when she became a soloist without the big bands, but she just felt she couldn’t bring herself to go down there. Even in 1958 there was as much segregation in Las Vegas as in Baltimore. She played Baltimore twice while I was working with her and we stayed in a Negro hotel because it couldn’t be otherwise. But even when she played places like Detroit, she wasn’t allowed to stay in a white hotel.

  The club owners and the guys who ran the hotels assumed that, because I was travelling with her, I must have been a black woman who was trying to pass for white.§ She said as soon as people saw her together with a white woman, they assumed it was a sort of relationship. And she said that the white men she may have had affairs with didn’t want it to be known that they knew her when they met her in public, and they’d just cut her off. It was the basic dishonesty of society at that time.

  I remember in Detroit she was sitting in a bar with two musicians who were white, and one of the club owners came to her later to say she wasn’t supposed to have drinks with customers at the bar. She said, ‘My God, I’ve gone through this so many times before!’ In Los Angeles she stayed at the Sahara Hotel, but that was only because they made special arrangements because she was playing there, and her musicians had to stay somewhere else. She asked one of her black friends, ‘Why don’t you come and see me at the Sahara?’, but no black person was allowed to come to the show. She said, ‘They wouldn’t even hire me to be a maid here, or to wait at the tables, and they would never let me in.’ In Detroit when she was with Artie Shaw’s band, she had to put on white make-up.

  She wanted to take me to Europe with her, but she couldn’t afford to. She went to Europe with the idea that people were more liberal there, not as prejudiced against everything. She was really looking forward to it, but she was really glad to be home when she came back. She said she missed New York. She was a little disappointed by not being able to understand the language and she had some trouble with management, from what I gathered. She didn’t come back with any overwhelmingly happy memories. She bought me a kerchief from Milan and that was about all. I don’t know what she did about drugs and that might have been part of it too, but I’m only guessing.

  For the last year and a half she lived in an apartment in New York. There were no religious objects around. She didn’t really have any possessions because she’d been living in hotels and so she wasn’t somebody who could accumulate things. She had a radio and she’d carry it with her from room to room. She had her phonograph and maybe twenty-five records. She didn’t turn it on that often and when she did, she’d play more instrumental music, not for background but as something she’d really listen to. I remember one time she said about Miles Davis, ‘You know it bothers me. It sounds as if he’s playing off-key on some of the notes.’

  I used to mix her drinks. She smoked heavily and she had a cigarette and a glass in her hand more often than not. When I was there I tried to make her eat something for breakfast, but this was in the early days; in the end she wouldn’t even eat. By June 1959 she was mainly drinking Gordon’s gin and Seven-Up, and that was what she was living on and that was why she started losing so much weight. She stayed at home and watched TV mostly at the end. Her only bad habit was that she would often fall asleep while she was smoking a cigarette and she’d burn holes in her nightgown or bathrobe. She’d make jokes about it and say, ‘I’m real holy!’

  She seemed to go suddenly, like my father, who looked well six months ago and then suddenly he had cancer and he was dying. Two months before she went to hospital she looked very haggard and her cheeks were sunk in and she wasn’t eating much. She got yellower as she got sicker. A young Negro boy called Frankie Freedom was staying there for the last weeks and helping her. I don’t know where he came from. He was tall and thin and young, about seventeen or eighteen. He had ambitions to be in the theatre and I don’t know how Lady got to know him that well, but maybe she needed somebody around in the daytime, especially since I had to get a job, so I couldn’t be there all day and all night. I just came in the evenings, or she’d call and ask me to take care of her clothes. I took her clothes to the cleaners, took the dog out. She’d see her lawyer and Bill and Maely Dufty, but there weren’t other regular visitors.

  She told me the book she wrote with Bill Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, was devoid of the truth, it was utter baloney. It was Louis McKay who put pressure on her and Dufty to say certain things, and Louis insisted that she clean up the story of her childhood. But the worst thing in the book is that Louis became the great hero at the end of it. Now, in many ways Billie was a dreamer, and she always wished that some man would come along and be the man she really needed, but Louis McKay was not that man.

  The Duftys were negotiating movie rights and record contracts. I think she got on better with Bill than with Maely. Bill was very quiet, very mild, but I think Maely was the driving force, and she felt she had a corner on Billie and she didn’t want anyone getting in. I remember I was playing opera records and Billie was talking about how much she loved them, and Maely was surprised and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you like opera!’ And Billie was indignant and said, ‘Well, I like good music, so why can’t I like opera?’ And once Maely said to me about Billie, ‘She’s not stupid!’ or something like that. This whole attitude struck me as strange.

  Still, I didn’t realise that she was as ill as she was and I was kind of surprised when she was taken to hospital. I didn’t see the doctors too much in the hospital, but the nurses were there. In a city hospital I guess you don’t expect more than them just doing their job. I don’t think she got any special service, because that’s something you have to pay for. When I first visited her in hospital she was sitting up in bed. She was wearing a bed jacket, a pink one that was kind of tufted, and she had her hair pulled back and clipped with an ordinary clip because she didn’t have anything valuable that I knew of.

  I hoped she might get better, but as I kept going I realised she was getting worse and worse and she knew by then herself, I’m sure. She was too honest and she wouldn’t have reacted that way if she didn’t know. She was having trouble breathing, but she could talk. The timbre of her voice had gotten harsher and slower, but her reactions were still sharp. She didn’t complain. She wasn’t the kind of person who said, ‘I don’t feel good.’ She never did. Maybe that was why I was so shocked. Whatever happened inside her body was probably building and building until it reached a certain point. But she was declining in the last month. Her spirit was willing, but the flesh had had too much of everything.

  I don’t think she went into hospital thinking she wouldn’t come out. She was very practical in the sense – not that she knew she was going to die, because no one knows‖ – but in the sense that she was very composed and ready for it. She wasn’t a desperate dying woman by any means. Whatever she was thinking at the end, it was as though she wasn’t in trouble in not wanting to die, maybe she was even looking forward to it. But she never talked much about her own death, or what she wanted done, and she never spoke of a will.

  I guess that boy Frankie Freedom came at the time when all the trouble started. She told me that Frankie brought some powder to her and that’s what they found. She wasn’t angry with him; she had asked him for it. And that was when the nurse must have noticed it. She wasn’t withdrawing, because the one time that I saw her when she was having trouble, she was sweating and shaking, but she wasn’t like that in hospital, so they must have been giving her something – morphine or something. She didn’t talk about the nurse who reported seeing traces of white powder round her nose, but of course she wasn’t happy about being arrested again.a From that point it was as if the heart went out of her. She just wasn’t herself.

  When she wa
s arrested they only allowed so many people to go up and see her, and it was more difficult. Then there was the police guard, and you had to give your name and you had to show your card to the policeman outside the door. At that time she was too ill to have gotten up and walked out, so I don’t know what they were protecting her from or for. She was bitter about the arrest, in the sense that it was the last thing she wanted at that point. They took everything away in the hospital, even the hope she had.

  She did get flowers, especially when the publicity about her arrest got out, but it is an exaggeration to say she always had a room full of them. People who didn’t necessarily know her, but who appreciated her music, sent her cards. Mostly these cards were from ordinary people and that is why she didn’t get flowers from them, because ordinary people can’t afford that much, especially black people. I think then, when she saw all the cards and letters, that really made her feel much better, because she probably didn’t realise how many ordinary people cared for her and how many people she touched. She read them all. I helped her open them, but she read them. One day I took home two bags of cards and I answered them, with her permission.

  She was still not in terrible spirits, even after she got arrested. She sort of reacted like: ‘What do you expect? This is the way things have been going! I’ve been busted before.’ Even the day before she died I didn’t see her in an oxygen tent. But I saw the same thing in my father’s face, the day before he died. She died the following night, but I didn’t go to see her that day. I felt almost that she didn’t want me to come. By then she must have known. I saw death in her face.

  I think her husband Louis McKay may have been out of town when she went into the Metropolitan Hospital. I don’t know how soon he got back, but I know he called me when she was laid out in the funeral home. He wanted me to act as receptionist there, but I said, ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t do it!’ He said, ‘Oh, but I’ll give you some of Lady’s coats!’ I felt this wasn’t going to take her place, but he didn’t understand.