With Billie (11 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
Fanny remembered an occasion when she and Clarence were at a club on Lenox Avenue, along with a whole party. He was minding his own business, but then Sadie came in and started to talk to him. Fanny was sure ‘she was trying to agitate me. My temper went up. I took up my fists and beat her. A guy picked me up and took me out of the club and wouldn’t let me come back.’ Another time she had a hunch that Clarence and Sadie were together somewhere and so she took a ride around 125th Street until she found them. And that was when she said she did her best to try to kill Sadie.
When Billie first came to New York, she wanted to stay with her father and her stepmother, but Fanny wouldn’t hear
of it. She and Clarence had recently moved to an apartment on St Nicholas Avenue
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and they had three bedrooms as well as a sitting-room, so there was lots of space. Clarence was often away on tour with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra while Fanny made herself a bit of money by running an ‘after-hours in-the-home place’ where you could go and ‘have a little taste’ and take your girlfriends up. But it was just for friends who knew the family well; she had to know who you were, and you had to be invited.
As far as Fanny was concerned, Billie was no better than her mother, what with calling Clarence
Daddy
, ‘just to be insulting to me’, and trying to win his sympathy in one way or another. She said that Billie was nothing but a ‘fat thing with big titties’, and she didn’t approve of the kind of life she was living and certainly didn’t want her to be ‘doing it in my home … She was growed up then. I couldn’t teach her nothing. Couldn’t do nothing with her. She didn’t look no thirteen. She looked like a growed woman.’
One night Billie turned up and complained that a boyfriend of Sadie’s had approached her; she pleaded to be allowed to stay in St Nicholas Avenue because she was scared. But Fanny was sure this was just a cunning way of trying to get Clarence’s sympathy and wouldn’t change her mind.
For a while, however, Billie did sometimes sing with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, and Clarence was pleased to have her around. But Fanny saw this as a threat and persuaded Fletcher to throw Billie out, saying that if he kept her it was going to cause the break-up of her marriage and there would be ‘a lot of hair pulling and a whole lot of things’.
Clara Winston had also known Fanny and Clarence at this time. Linda Kuehl described Clara as a ‘plump, bleached-blonde woman who had been one of the biggest madams
in Harlem’. When they met for the interview she was wearing a blue shortie negligee and at one point during the conversation she lifted it up to show off a naked buttock.
Clara explained that, as a woman, she’d ‘been through hell’ and nowadays she was a bit of a lush and liked to drink beer or maybe some Henessy brandy, because she figured it stimulated her a bit. She said in that way she was different to most of her friends because they didn’t ‘go for the wet stuff any more. They go for the dry stuff. They go for cocaine. Everybody is each for his own. They can have it.’
Clara used to have two apartments at 135 West 142nd Street. She kept one for business purposes while the other was for living. She was nostalgic about the old days when ‘people used to come into my house, from the best to the worst; even Tallulah [Bankhead] used to come to my house. They were beautiful times. You could walk up and down Lenox Avenue and go in and go out and there was no sticking up. Everything was peaceful, and people could have beautiful evenings and mornings and look beautiful and not be afraid, and they were all nationalities … And there was a shop on 8th Avenue had the most beautiful flowers you ever heard of, honey, and even the President didn’t have no more beautiful flowers.’
It was Clarence who arranged for Billie and Sadie to rent a room from Clara for a while. Clara said she wanted to make it clear that she wasn’t ‘cloaking’ Clarence at the time, and she only met him once or twice when he came to the apartment to visit his daughter. She said you could tell straight away that the two of them were related because Billie ‘looked just like her daddy, only she was taller and he was a little shorter. But they had the same freaky-looking eyes, sort of slanty eyes … In fact, Clarence looked something like a foreigner.’ She remembered how Billie ‘always did what she wanted’ and how Sadie would run after her, calling, ‘Billee, Billee, Billee.’ ‘She just loved her, just like a little baby, and used to worry herself to death about her.’
After a few months Sadie got a place on 142nd Street, near 7th Avenue. Clara said Sadie had a little business there,
where she used to serve food. ‘There were no real tables, but people could sit around and drink and go with girls and everything. White fellas and girls would go on up.’ The trumpet player Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison confirmed that Sadie was a ‘groovy person … who ran a little whorehouse, and a lot of musicians used to go up there and buy some pussy’. Clara said she didn’t know about Billie ‘doing any prostitution’ at the time, but in her view it was always ‘better to sell it than give it away!’
Clara said that Billie was ‘beautiful people’, having a good time and living her life. She had lots of friends and ‘she did everything everybody else did … There’s nothing bad I can say about her … She was a spodie-odie good time. She’d come into some place and she’d say “OK, come on! Rack ’em up and run ’em around!” ’ At one point during the interview Clara announced that Billie ‘could have been real famous, with that voice’.
Clara remembered Clarence’s funeral. She said the Reverend Monroe was the preacher and he had ‘some Baptist church’ down on 115th and St Nicholas Avenue and ‘he’d preach for anybody’. Clara used to call him Motha because he was ‘a gay baby and he loved those nice-looking boys’.
Fanny also spoke about the Reverend Monroe. She said he was often called in for the funerals of musicians who didn’t have church connections. She described him as a light-brown-skinned man with a deep ‘religious voice’. He could really preach a funeral; he could preach anyone into heaven with fire and brimstone and his hands waving. Clarence’s body was brought to Duncan’s Funeral Parlour and the Reverend Monroe did his preaching there because ‘he had no church’. Then Clarence was taken to Forest Hills cemetery in Queens, and Billie accompanied Fanny and Atlanta Shepherd in the limousine. There was no question of Sadie coming with them, so she went on her own in a separate car and somehow got lost on the way and arrived too late to see the coffin lowered into the ground.
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Clarence had already married an eighteen-year-old Baltimore woman called Helen Boudin, on 16 October 1922 when he was twenty-three, but they only stayed together for a few months. He never obtained a divorce.
†
This is according to his friend, the musician Walter Johnson. Ken Burns in
Jazz
gives a very different impression of Clarence, whose ‘flashy example helped lure her into the music business [and] whose hustling ways were mirrored in many of the predatory men she would later call “Daddy” ’ (p. 206).
‡
‘Catting’ comes from the word ‘tomcat’ and means ‘to seek women for sexual reasons’. It can also mean to gossip or to loaf about (
Dictionary of American Slang
).
§
She was so light-skinned she could pass as white. She turned up towards the end of Billie’s life and for a while tried to contest the will. In March 1987, the Attorney at Law, L. Mifflin Hayes, who was representing the estate of Billie’s last husband Louis McKay, wrote a very stern letter regarding a Grammy award that had been claimed on Billie’s behalf by a woman called Nicole Holiday, who said she was Billie’s half-sister: ‘It should be noted that the name Billie Holiday was a stage name, not her real name. Secondly … to the best of my knowledge, she had no sisters or other close blood relatives.’
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Fanny was in the same apartment when she was interviewed by Linda Kuehl in December 1971.
Pop Foster
‘It was only show people.’
C
larence ‘Pop’ Foster was a vaudeville comic who performed with various partners on the black theatre circuit in America and in theatres throughout Europe. Linda Kuehl first interviewed him in January 1972 while he was doing the Wednesday Night Amateur competitions at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She said that when he came on stage, ‘He stood before the curtain with a frayed tweed overcoat over his shoulders as though it were a luxurious cape. His voice was thick with alcohol, but elegant and almost-British just the same.’ She interviewed him a second time in the nearby Paradise Bar in May 1972. Here he is talking:
I met Billie when she was sixteen years old, but she was big. She was a big fat slob and she’d wear the same dress every night; a common dress, not an evening gown. She used to put on anything and I’d call her a big fat slob.
In those days she did a little prostitution up here in Harlem. Along 136th Street was kind of the main drag and 132nd Street by the Lafayette Theater. I used to see her every night and every day. I knew she was doing
it because I was in that life myself. You dig? So I knew everything that was going on. But you wouldn’t say she was one of those common prostitutes that you see hanging out on the streets; she was a girl that was a very lovable person and she had her own way about things. She was an all-around girl.
She was young and she didn’t know what was going on until she won this amateur contest and that’s when she went on to stardom. That’s when she found out she could sing. Then she began to know where she was really at.
She was singing in nightclubs and getting whatever they would pay her, and some nights she didn’t get nothing. She just wanted to sing, you dig, she wanted to sing but she needed money and at that time she wasn’t making money. We were working to be working. We’d work for whatever they threw on the floor. When she was working for me we got paid off at Jerry’s Log Cabin in chicken and waffles. We’d get money and we’d split up maybe ten or twenty dollars between us.
About 1928 or 1927 she was singing at the Hot Cha and this was really when people began to notice her, and from then on it was
Billie Holiday
! From then on. All the show people were nuts for her! We used to jam in every night at the Hot Cha, just to hear her sing. And then some actor gave her the name of Lady Day and then we started to call her Lady Day. Billie had a lot of white friends and a lot of
ofay
*
men used to go for her, because she could sing.
We used to smoke pot a lot together. In the hotels there in Harlem, in the Braddock, in the Theresa. Or we’d bump into each other at parties. She wasn’t a loud girl; she was kind of a shy girl, quiet in a way, unless somebody flustered her, and then she was a bitch and she’d raise hell. She had a very good sense of humour and a big smile. When we got high, everyone would
be telling stories because it was really good in those days and everybody used to laugh, and she had just a belly laugh when she really laughed. There was a big black boy with great big white teeth and a great big broad smile. We called him High Jivin’ Smiley and he used to make everyone laugh because he was so
unfunny
, and Billie used to pass out when he started, she used to die laughing.
In the tea pads they’d say, ‘Lady Day’s in the house!’ and they would play all her records and she used to sing along. This is where they sold marijuana. There’d be fifteen or twenty of us, passing the pot around with the door wide open, and the cops didn’t bother us. There were four or five tea pads uptown. One was called Kaiser’s, and then there was Reefer Mae’s on the corner of 143rd Street and 7th Avenue. Mostly show people were there and they’d say ‘We’re crazy and we’re happy’ and we used to have a ball.
You could get anything at that time: booze, cocaine, and some used to drink ‘top and bottom’, gin and wine mixed together, but no one would really get drunk because we had marijuana. We got it from Texas and Mexico. We found out we was getting happy on this marijuana. Oh yeah, we were getting happy! Oh my God! You could see the black gum of the marijuana coming out of the end of the cigarette.
Lester Young used to come into the tea pads and he carried a brown leather zipper bag, this big, full of marijuana. But Billie and Louis Armstrong made marijuana popular. They were the idols of the marijuana people. You could say they were King and Queen. But once they got really big they kind of waned away from public smoking, because they could get all the dope they wanted and only once in a while they came uptown.
When Billie wanted to blaze it, to get drunk and have a ball, she would check into a hotel with Dexter Gordon. After Dexter Gordon she fell in love with Lester Young. She used to change boyfriends like you
change your pants, but Lester Young was the boy she
really
loved, and after he died I don’t think she lived more than five months.
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There was a place called the Daisy Chain
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on 141st Street, between Lenox and 7th Avenue, and we all used to go there. It was just a cat house, owned by a very, very pretty girl called Hazel Valentine, an ex-chorus girl who died five or six years ago. You’d go up to this big railroad flat house and you had to pay five dollars a piece and everybody would get buck-naked. I used to go up there quite often. I was quite young. Everyone was doing everything, but you don’t care, you just have a ball. Billie used to frequent it, just to look and see what was happening.
There were these rooms over here and rooms over there and a long hall, and you’d be going from room to room and you’d see people on the floor getting their thing. Fantastic! Women going with women. Men going with men. They had a girl called Sewing Machine Bertha and she went down on all the girls. All the lesbians used to go up there, but I couldn’t quote names because some of them was real big-time stars, so it was husha-husha. Entertainers went up there and it was half-coloured and half-white. Hell, yeah!
Real
integrated! Nobody paid it any mind. The public didn’t know anything about it. It was only show people. Everybody was gay and having a lot of fun, twenty-four hours a day.