With Billie (24 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
And then the year is 1954, and Billie has changed and her voice has taken on a drawly edge and she has slowed up, although as far as Jimmy Rowles is concerned, ‘She is still Lady Day and whatever she wants to do is all right by me. I don’t give a shit. If she wants to go to Tokyo, let’s go! That’s the way I feel!’
They are making a record in Hollywood for the producer Norman Granz and they are working in the Radio Records Annex, just off Santa Monica Boulevard. Jimmy Rowles has
the task of going to the hotel to get Billie ready for the next session. ‘I first had to go get her up,’ he says, ‘and that was a job because she’d stayed up all night. And then I’d give her a bit of juice to get her heart started. So she’s had three or four drinks – and I mean drinks! She whacks out a pint of booze, it was either vodka or gin, but probably gin, and she says, “Now I’m going to eat breakfast!”
‘So now she’s trying to get her shoes on and her feet are swollen and she can’t get them on. And she goes into the next room and tries to get dressed. Now I’ve seen this woman buck-naked so many times it means nothing, but she’s still coy. And she’s got this corset she’s trying to get on, and she calls me in to tie her up while she’s holding herself together. And she says, “Don’t peek!” And she’s loaded, and I’m laughing and I say, “Oh, you’re too much!” ’
By the time she got to the studio, Billie was ready to go and it was ‘cool and fun and a lot of laughs’. Her old friends Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and Ben Webster
g
were doing the recording with her, but Jimmy Rowles felt the sessions didn’t go as well as they could have done, because Norman Granz was not a musician. ‘He was rather irritating in a way. He was like a stranger off the streets that came in and hung around … And he couldn’t understand it took us some time to get the chords together … He wanted to go, “One, two, three … Why don’t you play ‘How High the Moon’? All right! Set the keys and let’s go!” ’
And Billie used to get ‘a little salty’, because she wanted it to be right. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ she said to Norman Granz. ‘Give us a couple of minutes to figure out the fucking chords on this tune!’
* * *
Jimmy Rowles remembers meeting Billie in the late 1950s when they hadn’t seen each other for a while. He was playing at the Roxy Theater in New York with Evelyn Knight, and after the show he was going to a Chinese restaurant across the street, when he saw Billie with her Chihuahua Pepe on a lead. He says that Pepe ‘just wanted to get down and chew all the garbage, and she’s cursing at Pepe and everybody’s stopping and saying, “Look at that terrible coloured girl!”
h
‘And I’m standing behind her and she says, “What are you doing here?”
‘ “I’m at the Roxy, playing for Evelyn Knight.”
‘ “That fucking bitch! She’s doing the Roxy for ten thousand dollars a week and I’m still doing the fucking Apollo for one hundred and fifty! Fuck her! And fuck you!” ’
i
When Jimmy Rowles tries to protest, Billie calls him a ‘motherfucking white
ofay
’. And all the time the dog is still busy with its nose in the rubbish, and she is screaming and cursing, and people are standing and watching and wondering whether this is the moment to call the police. ‘Oh, I loved her! Oh, how I loved her!’ says Jimmy Rowles.
The last time he saw her she had changed. ‘She was less humorous, more desperate, so strung out on that shit and drinking so badly … She was fighting, doing anything she could to feel good, because when you fuck with that strong shit, when you mess with that Chinaman, he drains the meat off your bones and you don’t have much energy, you don’t have nothing. You have to drink twice as much, smoke twice as much, sniff twice as much shit, to get to where you all of a sudden remember feeling how you should be …
‘She was fighting it out. But, on the other hand, she’d have her good days when she didn’t need to do that. When she’d feel good. But there would be mornings when she’d
have to knock off a pint just to get dressed. I’ve done that myself. You keep going because of necessity, and your feet are swollen up with your shoes on. She was just beat. That’s all. I was young. I didn’t realise she was that sick. I knew she was thin, but Louis was taking care of her. He was really taking care of her.
j
‘She said, “Louis is out of town. You have to take me home.”
‘She said, “You gotta feed me. I wanna go to a Chinese place.” ’
So Jimmy Rowles took Billie to a Chinese restaurant a block away. They sat down to order, when ‘all of a sudden a young coloured cat walks into the kitchen with a tray, and she flipped. She started throwing things and swearing, yelling. “Did you see that?” she said. “There’s not a Chinaman on Earth would let a black motherfucker into his kitchen! Or a white motherfucker! This ain’t a Chinese restaurant! This is a bunch of shit!” ’
k
Eventually the manager calmed her down and the food was brought, and Jimmy Rowles took her back to her room and tucked her up in bed. ‘ “Here’s your shrimp,” I said. “Here’s your
foo yong.
You’ve got it all here. Now goodnight, you lovely bitch. Eat your food. Drink your gin. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
‘She’s in bed, her titties are sticking out. And she gets all coy. “Louis is out of town, you know,” she said.’
Jimmy Rowles did not take up the offer, even though, looking back all those years later, he wishes he had. That’s when he reassures himself. ‘I’ll fuck her after I die,’ he says.
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* * *
And then, right at the end of a long interview, Jimmy Rowles is back to the beginning again, back to Hollywood in the late spring of 1942 when he had just met Billie and they were working together for the first time. One Sunday afternoon he and his wife Dorothy went to a club where all the bands were playing; Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Duke Ellington – everybody. Billie was there and she came to sit at their table. And Jimmy Rowles remembers how Nat ‘King’ Cole got up to play and ‘He was playing real good, and Buck Clayton was playing and he was playing real good, and Lady was screaming at him, “Go on! Play it! You blue-eyed son-of-a-bitch! You motherfucker! Let ’em have it!” ’
And over in a corner Jimmy Rowles could see Lester Young sitting by himself and saying, ‘Isn’t that nice! Isn’t that nice!’ with a glass of whiskey in his hand. And then Lester got up and ‘he started blowing and he wiped them all out!’
‘It was wild!’ says Jimmy Rowles. ‘It was really wild! Those that were there will remember!’
*
Jimmy Rowles was born in 1918 and died in 1996. An obituary by John Fordham in the
Guardian
described him as ‘a subtle, laconic and all-but-psychic pianist, who elevated the art of creative jazz accompaniment to the status of a miniaturist wonder of the world’. Linda Kuehl interviewed him on 23 August 1971, at the Montecito Hotel, Hollywood.
†
The band leader was Lester’s brother Lee (short for Leonides). He played drums and, according to Jimmy Rowles, ‘He speeds something terrible. He’ll start out slow and wind up in a horse race. And that was a drag because if he had been any kind of drummer we would have had some hell of a band. Nobody ever said a word about it.’
‡
Jimmy Rowles also had his own theory on Billie’s sexuality. ‘She’s a masochist. She digs punishment. She was unfortunate enough to be mentally arranged so she had to have a cat that beat the shit out of her three times a week, to keep her happy.’
§
Arthur Herzog remembered coming to see Billie after a show and she ran around to embrace him, even though she didn’t have a thing on. ‘The maid looked horrified and Billie said, “Oh, he sees me like this all the time!” ’ Elizabeth Hardwick, writing about that same period of time, said, ‘Sometimes she dyed her hair red and the curls lay flat against her skull, like dried blood.’
‖
In fact Lester Young was happily married to his Italian wife, Mary. Jimmy Rowles described her as ‘a small dark girl who he called his Teddy Bear’.
a
Billie and Lester couldn’t work out Jimmy Rowles, either. In a conversation that was recorded during a rehearsal with Art Shapiro in 1955, Billie said of her first impression of him, ‘That damn little boy was
scared.
He was a little piss [a kid] and he was a grey [white], you know, and me and Lesta put the eye on him [got his measure] right away.’
b
Going on with his explanation of Lester’s language, Jimmy Rowles says, ‘Chicks were hats. He’d look at the cat and look at the chick and say, “I see you’re wearing a new hat. Skull cap? Homburg? Mexican hat dance?” They were discussing her pussy, you see. He’d say, “How’s 143?” and that means a head job. “A little 143 is good for a cold!” ’
c
Everyone called Lester ‘Buppa’ at this time, because that was what nephews and nieces and his younger brother Lee had called him since childhood.
d
This must have been in Los Angeles in April 1943, when Billie was working at Club 331. Jimmy Monroe was in jail on drugs charges from May 1942 until February 1943, and the two of them did attempt a brief reconciliation.
e
He says, ‘John Levy was stronger than Billie and he had her nailed. My idea would be that he used her as an implement to make money.’ According to Jimmy Rowles, Billie’s arrest in January 1949 was a set-up job, and John Levy arranged with the Federal Narcotics men to have her ‘smashed in Frisco. He planted that shit.’
f
This incident took place on 31 December 1948, a few months after Billie was released from jail. Bobby Tucker and John Levy, the bass player, both give their version of the same story.
g
Webster was known as The Frog. Jimmy Rowles remembered being in a club when Ben Webster was playing stride piano. ‘He’s emptied many a bar playing stride piano and he’s doing “Little Girl, Little Girl, You’re the One for Me!” Bum, bum, bum on the stride, and Lady is over there and she’s saying, “Ben Webster, get off that piano. You black son-of-a-bitch, you can’t play that motherfucker!” and he’s going bum, bum, bum, and he just keeps on playing. Aw shit! They loved each other! They came up together. She was just a little girl and came up to 52nd Street and he was already there.’
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Mae Barnes had a similar encounter. ‘It was 4 a.m. and nobody was out on the street, and I was coming from the Bon Soir and who should I see but Billie. I almost knocked her down with the car. She was out there with two Chihuahuas, trying to find a cigarette. Down on her knees. Four o’clock in the morning. She was wearing a robe.’
i
She had a point, since she could not make really good money in New York without a Cabaret Card.
j
Jimmy Rowles is one of the few people who seemed to feel that Louis McKay was doing his best for Billie.
k
There was a reason behind Billie’s fury. Earle Zaidins remembered being in Miami with her and ‘We spent a whole night looking for a Chinese restaurant. And we went into one at 3 to 4 a.m. and sat down and the Chinese waiter said, “I’m awfully solly, but we don’t serve coloured people!” ’ During the Harlem riots in 1943, the Chinese laundries put notices in their windows, saying, ‘Me colored too’, and their shops were left untouched.
l
Donald Clarke uses this story to end his book about Billie. As Farah Jasmine Griffin points out in
If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery
, it is an odd decision to use such a ‘locker room narrative’ as the closing pages of a biography that she describes as being ‘fundamentally decent … but deeply flawed by its author’s obsession with every minute detail of Holiday’s sexuality and drug use’.
Bobby Tucker
‘You’re not going to have any trouble with me.’
I
met Bobby Tucker in September 2003. He came to collect me at the Morristown railway station and drove me to the house his father had built with him years ago. It was directly opposite the house where he had grown up, and where Billie had stayed when she was first released from prison on 16 March 1948. He showed me his den downstairs, where he kept the evidence of his life as a pianist in the jazz world: the tapes and records and CDs, the books, papers and photographs, all relating to that now-distant time. On the wall there was a framed photograph of him with Billie and Jimmy Rowles, alongside more formal portraits of his parents and grandparents. There had been many teachers and educationalists on both sides of his family, although his father trained as a carpenter. Bobby Tucker told me that his father was so pale-skinned he was offered the chance of ‘becoming a white man’ and joining the union, but he refused because it would have meant renouncing his family as well as his background.
I sat with Bobby Tucker at the kitchen table while he talked about Billie Holiday and his love for her. There was a printed notice on the wall behind me that read, ‘Since I
gave up hope I feel much better.’ Bobby Tucker was very quiet and self-contained, but when he spoke about fetching Billie from prison and how she told him he was the only one who cared, the tears welled up briefly in his eyes. Then he continued with his narrative. Many of the stories he told me were the same as the ones he had told Linda Kuehl when she interviewed him in January 1973. He said she came to see him three times and he liked her because of her perseverance.