Authors: Julia Blackburn
‘She was very sensitive to bad publicity.’
E
arle Zaidins had just completed his training as a lawyer when he arrived in New York from Wisconsin in the summer of 1956. He had his boxer dog with him and he found a room for the two of them in a broken-down hotel not far from Times Square. It was called The Flanders and was one of the few hotels in the city that accepted pets. He fixed a little wooden sign on the wall outside the hotel, announcing his name and profession, in case anyone was interested.
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Zaidins was in the habit of taking his dog for a walk late at night and sometimes he encountered a woman dressed in a black diamond mink coat that was so long it almost touched the ground. She was accompanied by the ghostly apparition of a white Chihuahua, its eyes bulging and its naked-looking body trembling in spite of the little jacket it was wearing.
The relationship between these two solitary night-walkers started with a simple greeting of recognition, but after a
while they began to talk. The woman had a room in the same hotel. She said her name was Eleanor Fagan and her dog was called Pepe. She said she loved boxer dogs and used to have one called Mister; the best dog she’d ever known. Perhaps she muttered in her dark and rasping voice that Mister was more faithful than any of the goddamn men she had come across, lifting her eyes to meet the eyes of this tall, dark-haired, pale-skinned and rather cadaverous-looking stranger as she spoke.
At first Zaidins had no presentiment of the identity of the dog-walking woman. But then he must have asked her what were the songs she sang that Mister loved so much and where had she sung them, and did she still sing sometimes? He thought her face was familiar and she reminded him of someone, but he had never heard of Eleanor Fagan McKay.
Billie told him who she really was and explained that these days it was safer for her to remain anonymous.
Lady Sings the Blues
had recently been published and that was making everything worse. She wished her ghostwriter, William Dufty, had not put in all that stuff about drugs and her being a prostitute, but he had promised her it was the best way to sell the book and she could certainly do with the money.
Already during these early meetings Billie was eager to tell Zaidins that she didn’t do drugs any more; she even rolled up her sleeves to show him there were no new needle scars among the old ones. Not that it made any difference to the cops and their interest in her. She was a mark at all times, she said, and whenever she was performing somewhere she’d see two or three men walking together and she’d know they were cops or federal narcotics agents and she’d panic. She said, ‘If I was arrested again and sent to prison, I would never live through it. I couldn’t go through that experience again. I’d rather be dead.’
And so these two strangers talked in the night in the company of their incongruous dogs and a sort of friendship began to emerge. Zaidins told Billie that he was a lawyer. He said he planned to specialise in trade regulations, but he
had done some work defending people on drugs charges and so he might be able to help her if she got into trouble again. And there were other things he could do for her as well, because how come she was living at this down-at-heel hotel? She should be rich from all the record sales. Who was her agent? Who was her manager? Who was looking after her, for Christ’s sake?
Zaidins realised at once that Billie could be very useful to his career, and as a young man he was ambitious for success. He was determined to seize the opportunity and get what he could from her. As he said, ‘Everybody wanted something out of her. She attracted this kind of thing. She made herself vulnerable. She invited people into her life and people figured it was easy to get into the life of Billie Holiday. I got into her life very easily … I used her too.’
Billie asked Zaidins some legal question about a contract and he looked into that for her, and after a while she took him on as her lawyer. He said she told him ‘She was in and out in terms of her relationship with Louis McKay and she had various cases pending. She wanted me to be on hand in case a problem came up.’
Zaidins was surprised by how aware Billie was of the technicalities of her contracts and of her precarious legal position. She explained that when she was arrested in 1948, her lawyer had told her to play dumb and that had worked with the judge, so she had played dumb ever since. She said she hoped that if people saw how helpless she was, it might persuade them to have pity on her and leave her alone.
The first job that Zaidins took on for his new client was drawing up her will. He said, ‘She had a thing about wills, but every time it came for her to sign it, she wouldn’t discuss it.’ He thought she was afraid that if she signed, it would be like signing her own death warrant. She confessed to him that she was very superstitious and said she had once ‘put a whammy’
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on John Levy. She had wished him dead and he died, just like that. She felt she was in some way to
blame for his death – it was as if she had killed him with her maledictions, even though everybody knew he had a weak heart.
As her lawyer, Zaidins advised Billie that he could manage her money more efficiently if she had a bank account. He opened one for her at the Chemical Bank, but that did not last because she quickly withdrew more money than she had put in. She was used to spending her earnings before she had received them and she was very generous. Zaidins said, ‘She wanted to keep alive that she was Lady Day. So when she had a little bit of money, or when she had borrowed a bit, she would give it to people, to show she had it … She used to tell me, “Don’t ask for the advance. I don’t want them to know I need it! I’m Lady Day!” ’
Zaidins questioned Billie about her relationship with her agent, Joe Glaser. She said he had often promised to get her Cabaret Card back, but had achieved nothing. ‘She was griping that he wasn’t booking her enough, for enough money, and she could never get an exact count of the guy. She always felt she wasn’t getting the proper accounting.’
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Worse than that, Joe Glaser never got the right sort of bookings for her. She was forced to do the same music over and over again and ‘all those small jazz groups gave her a headache’. What she wanted was to ‘sing her heart out with strings’, like Frank Sinatra. Her best audiences had always been white and she wanted to play ‘big white rooms’ like the Plaza, the Waldorf, the Empire Room, the Bandbox. As Zaidins saw it, ‘She wanted to be a big act. She wanted to be booked regularly. She wasn’t that well recognised by everybody and she wanted that recognition and she wanted to pay the bills.’
But still Billie felt obliged to Joe Glaser. After all, he had stood by her and was always there when she got in a jam.
‘Whether for good or bad, and even though she was unhappy with Glaser, she felt she had security with him. Glaser was to many people a father image. When you were broke you went to him and got some money, for a new coat, a car, or just to get home.’
Zaidins became convinced that he could pull the right strings to get Billie her Cabaret Card, but she refused to cooperate. She was afraid it would only lead to more publicity about her police record, her drug addiction, her unreliability. She said, ‘I don’t want the goddamn thing! I don’t want that mess! I can live without it!’ In spite of her protests he continued privately with the application, but it was again turned down.
However, sometime in 1957, Zaidins did manage to find Billie a little apartment on 87th Street, not far from where he had moved to. Even that was not easy. She signed the lease under the name of Eleanor Fagan McKay, but the landlord wanted to cancel the whole thing when he discovered his new tenant’s real identity. It was only by ‘making a big stink’ that Zaidins managed to push the contract through, because, as he said, ‘It meant so very, very much to her.’
Zaidins obviously enjoyed Billie’s company, although he was insistent that he did not have a sexual relationship with her. They used to listen to records together in his apartment and he found her to be a ‘brilliant conversationalist who could hold a conversation about everything: clothing, babies, musicians, furnishings, her house … everything’. She’d tell endless stories about her life, whether it was events from years ago or from the day before, but Zaidins realised that ‘There were some things she might not have wanted to remember and she did have a fantastic imagination. Not that she’d make up stories, but to repeat what happened yesterday, she’d completely fantasise.’
Zaidins said that after a while ‘I had a feeling that Billie was dependent upon me. She was honest with me. She was a good friend.’ In return she helped him with his career. ‘She took me by the hand and took me to different jazz places and other clubs at night. She introduced me to the
giants of the jazz world. She kept introducing me as her lawyer and saying how wonderful I was, and really I was nowhere near it then, I was just a kid. But as a direct result a lot of artists thought: if he can represent Billie Holiday, he sure can represent me. And I received a lot of clients that way.’
But Zaidins realised there was a certain one-sidedness to this friendship and an innate loneliness in Billie that could not be bridged. ‘She had no real friends, no close friends.’ He said that people who had known her in the past would drop by to pay a hurried visit to the apartment and then vanish again, while ‘Total strangers would arrive out of nowhere and you had the feeling they had never been there before.’
Apart from Zaidins, William Dufty and his wife Maely ‘passed in and out’. Then there was a ‘tall, black, slender, nice-looking boy’ called Frankie Freedom, who did her hair and made meals for her,
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and her ‘quiet and loyal’ secretary Alice Vrbsky, who walked the dog and dealt with letters and other practicalities, such as filling out Billie’s monthly probation reports, which explained where she was going to be playing and affirmed that she was ‘being good’. None of these helpers was ever paid much for their services, simply because there was so little money around. Zaidins said he often lent Billie money when she needed it. On one occasion she pawned her black diamond mink so that she could stock up on food and drink.
Zaidins got married in 1958 and Billie quickly adopted his young son as one of her numerous godchildren. She sang him lullabies and had infinite patience with him, as she did with all the children to whom she became close. She often told Zaidins ‘It was her dream to retire somewhere and get a big spread of land where she could have a home for orphan children.’ On a more realistic note, she asked him if he could
help her to adopt just the one. She told him she had only agreed to marry Louis McKay because, as a single woman in show business and with her police record, she knew she didn’t stand a chance. But she felt it might be possible now and was sure she would make a good mother. She said she had recently heard of a child available for adoption in Boston. She was finding out about that. The house in the country would be surrounded by flowers and trees.
It is difficult to know if Zaidins really believed that Billie’s dream of motherhood could come true, but he did set about collecting affidavits from all sorts of people who were willing to swear that she would be a reliable parent. He added his own affidavit as well, for good measure. This was Billie’s second adoption application and it was turned down just as swiftly as the first and ‘she cried for days, for days’ when she was told the news.
But at least Zaidins was proud that he managed to fulfil another of Billie’s dreams. He helped her to get in touch with Ray Ellis, who did the musical arrangements for the
Lady in Satin
record in February 1958. He said she did her first rehearsal for
Lady in Satin
in his living-room, going through the lyrics with her pianist Mal Waldron,
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and after that she was ready for the real thing. The recording sessions were held in a church on Lexington Avenue that had ‘this magnificent, resonant sound’ and Zaidins as well as Alice Vrbsky made sure Billie was there on time and stayed to listen to the recordings.
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Zaidins remembered how one night Billie turned up at his apartment, complaining that a tap was dripping and keeping her awake. ‘You’ve gotta help me!’ she said. ‘That goddamn thing goes drip, drip, drip, drip, drip! It wouldn’t
be so bad, but it don’t swing! It don’t swing!’ She was laughing and serious and angry and desperate all at the same time. Earle Zaidins told her to put a towel under the tap to silence it.
Another night she arrived at the door with blood dripping from a cut to her head. Louis McKay had turned up unannounced at her apartment. They had a fight and he hit her over the head with the telephone while she was trying to make a call. Earle Zaidins said, ‘I locked her in the bathroom and Louis came knocking at my door. I locked my wife and kids in another part of the apartment and Louis came in.
‘He said, “I got a gun! A pistol!” and he pulled it. I went for it and threw him out.
‘I was going to call the police, but Lady prevailed upon me not to. She didn’t want to press charges. At first I thought it was because she didn’t want the police involved – and she didn’t. But she was also afraid of the publicity. She was very sensitive to bad publicity.’
Zaidins was not contacted when Billie was first taken to the private Knickerbocker Hospital on 30 May 1959, but he went to see her after she had been moved to Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital. She had been registered as Mrs Eleanora McKay, but once her identity had been revealed, she had been placed in a private room because so many reporters began to hound the hospital. Zaidins had difficulty in persuading the orderly in charge that he had a right to see her and was told that, in her state, they doubted if she could recognise anybody. But finally they agreed to take him up to her room, where she was lying in some sort of plastic tent. He said, ‘She looked like half of herself. She had wasted tremendously. The orderly pointed to me and asked Lady if she recognised me. She said, “What the fuck do you mean? That’s Earle, my lawyer!” She smiled and the man went away.’