With Billie (44 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
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 was 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.
I knew her. I felt I knew what she would have wanted. She wouldn’t have wanted any phoney fuss being made over her, which was what Louis was doing. He was playing the dutiful husband who had lost his loving wife, but from what she told me there had long since been no love between them any more. I went to the church and when they took the coffin out I cried. I couldn’t listen to her records for a year.
*
When Alice Vrbsky asked Billie whether she was ‘set up’ for the arrest and jail sentence in 1947, ‘She said she was on drugs when she went to jail, but she was set up in the sense that she wasn’t the problem, she wasn’t a pusher, and the people who were with her got off.’
†
Apparently Billie’s mother was also very generous and used to say, ‘If we give it out now, we’ll get it back later.’ But ‘It didn’t work out quite that way,’ said Alice with a soft giggle.
‡
By a licence she means a Cabaret Card. When Alice asked Billie how it was that after-hours clubs were permitted to stay open, even though it was against the law, she said, ‘The police know where they are and they don’t worry them if they pay. I’m sure it’s the same with drugs, prostitution and everything else.’
§
Looking at a photograph of Alice Vrbsky, it would seem impossible to think she was ‘passing for white’, but as the writer Langston Hughes explained in his autobiography
The Big Sea
, ‘Here in the United States of America, the word Negro is used to mean anyone who has
any
Negro blood in his veins.’
My own father, Thomas Blackburn, had a grandmother who was born on the island of Mauritius and was a ‘woman of colour’ as it was called there, and a descendant of slaves. That would make me a Negro in many of the southern states, where ‘any ascertainable trace’ of Negro blood defines one as being black. There are endless stories in which a person who looks white, but who is officially black, is denied the job they are qualified for, thrown out of the hospital they are lying in, or ostracised by those who were their friends, once the ‘secret’ is out. All this might have an
Alice in Wonderland
humour to it, were it not so serious and had the consequences not been so disastrous for so many people, black and white.
‖
Alice said that ‘If she had known she was dying, she might have signed the will that her lawyer Earle Zaidins had got ready for her.’
a
Alice was very confused on one point. ‘She said she asked Frankie to bring cocaine, but it said in the paper it was heroin … Why didn’t she tell me if she asked for heroin, too? And how could she have taken a fix? It’s a mystery.’
Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’
I
have been looking at a video recording of Billie singing ‘Fine and Mellow’. It is taken from the television film
The Sound of Jazz
, which was made on 8 December 1957. The entire sequence lasts for about three and a half minutes. I reach the end and spin the flickering images back to the beginning. I press Stop, Rewind and Play, over and over again. I am watching faces. I am trying to read the story that is being told here. I am watching how people look at each other, how they stand, how they move. Some appear to be very strong, while others look frail. There are those who close their eyes with concentration and those who keep their eyes open all the time.
Billie is here with a gathering of old friends.
*
Many of them used to play together in the 1930s and ’40s, but then things changed, their paths rarely crossed and they hardly ever had the opportunity to perform on the same stage. The reason for this was very simple: they were all recognised individually as stars in their own right and they were making good
money, their names emblazoned in big letters in front of one club or another. But few club owners were prepared to pay for more than one star at a time, and so they tended to appear on their own, which meant that the excitement of working together and sharing skills and experience was lost.
Some, like Lester Young, couldn’t bear the isolation and the lack of compatibility he felt with young and unskilled players. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why he increasingly withdrew into a cocoon of drink and marijuana and pills and sadness, unable to play with anything like his old fluency, until the moment when he was back among friends and could become himself again. Others were stronger, but still they were unhappy with the situation. The bassist Milt Hinton explained how Billie’s old friend Ben Webster was ‘going crazy … because he gets five hundred dollars a week in Rochester, but with three high-school kids to accompany him, and every afternoon he needs to sit down with them to teach them the chords. They’ll forget by the time they get on the bandstand, and God forbid if one of them takes an extra break!’
Milt Hinton said that Billie was in the same situation. ‘She’s going to some club … and they’re giving her a fairly high price, but in order to do that they can’t support her with the kind of musicians she should be supported with, like the ones who made her records. So they’re taking this little stinking joint and they pay her whatever her price is and they get some local musicians, which is just ridiculous, for the simple reason that they haven’t the experience. They’ll probably be great later, but they’re just terrible now and they’re only getting fifty or sixty dollars a week. And she has to scuffle through a performance with this kind of a background.’
And so it was an important event when two music journalists and a television film producer
†
put forward the idea of bringing a number of top jazz musicians together in
Studio 58 on 10th Avenue and letting them play like they used to play in the old days. Here were the Count Basie All Stars, the Henry ‘Red’ Allen All Stars, the Thelonious Monk Trio, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio and the Billie Holiday and Mal Waldron All Stars. Everybody had just one day to rehearse, to listen to each other and to talk. The programme was then ready to be broadcast live the following evening.
During those two days in December the streets of New York were engulfed by a heavy snowstorm and some of the players were not at all well. Nevertheless everything was forgotten with the sheer joy of walking into that studio and seeing the old familiar faces again. Milt Hinton remembered ‘the ecstasy, just to be flitting around’ and how they kept saying, ‘Here we are, playing together. We know who we are, the people know who we are. We never get to play with the good guys any more, but now here we are together.’
‡
During the rehearsal all the musicians were milling around together. Count Basie and Thelonious Monk were seen talking, while Billie stood smiling beside them.
§
Milt Hinton remarked on the ‘princely demeanour and majestic presence’ of Jo Jones the drummer, and Vic Dickenson was overheard saying ‘Jazz am a bitch’ and making people laugh with his gentle humour. And there was Roy Eldridge, whom Billie still called Little Brother, and Gerry Mulligan ‘the Sax King’, who was the only white man in her group and the baby of them all.
Even Lester Young had made it, although he was sitting by himself on a bench and was wearing carpet slippers because his feet hurt, and he was looking much older than his forty-eight years. Milt Hinton said everyone was aware that Pres ‘wasn’t so well’, but he didn’t remember anyone saying they
thought he was going. ‘We had no thought like that and certainly we had none of Billie then.’ Billie was in fine spirits and exuberant, although Roy Eldridge said he was shocked by how much she had changed since the last time he saw her. ‘She was just a little bitty woman. She had gotten so small. I’d never known her so small, and I knew her when she was fourteen or fifteen.’