With Billie Read online

  Acclaim for Julia Blackburn’s

  WITH BILLIE

  “Wonderful.… Julia Blackburn is far too cool to come to any conclusions. She just lets Billie’s life glow.”

  —The Washington Post

  “An extraordinary portrait of the great Lady Day.”

  —Elle

  “Blackburn’s way of working her raw material into a narrative gives an impressionistic portrait of her subject, which conveys about as much that was true of Billie Holiday as can be had on a printed page.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “Fabulous.… Blackburn has constructed a stage and invited everyone who ever knew Holiday to come and give a little riff.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Compelling, impressionistic.… An overlapping, sometimes contradictory narrative which plays with the traditional idea of biography.… Billie is, by turns, vulgar, generous, kind, stoned, content to stay at home and cook.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “Panoramic and intimate.… With Billie reveals … how singing gave [Billie Holiday] the strength to transcend at least some of the dark dissonances of her life.”

  —Wilson Quarterly

  “Blackburn, a sympathetic yet unflinchingly candid fan of Billie Holiday’s, had the artistically inspired and labor-saving notion of presenting most of Kuehl’s primary-source material raw, with a minimum of editorial intervention, allowing the heterogeneous quotations to represent the rich untidiness of life itself.”

  —The Spectator (London)

  “Illuminating.”

  —More

  “With Billie puts her life in context, but it leaves us with multiple fascinating visions of Holiday.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A page-turning homage to the voluminous legwork done by intrepid jazz historian Linda Kuehl with Blackburn deftly weaving the disparate voices into a riveting, evocative narrative that lets the reader peek into the extraordinary personality of the great moaning singer.”

  —Blues and Rhythm

  “Through the words of those who knew Billie we hear her laughter, shudder at her outburst, and weep when she’s in pain. Blackburn’s insistent neutrality allows readers to fall in love with the beautifully tragic icon.”

  —Upscale

  “Although nothing is better than listening to vintage Billie Holiday recordings, this biography comes close. It is written with grace and sensitivity.”

  —Tucson Citizen

  “An effective tribute to Holiday in its rich tapestry of memories.”

  —AllAboutJazz.com

  “Compelling and intelligent.”

  —The Nation

  “With Billie brings us a rich context for understanding an artist who could convey all that heartbreak in the tiny confines of a three-minute song.”

  —The Palm Beach Post

  JULIA BLACKBURN

  With Billie

  Julia Blackburn is the author of several other works of nonfiction, including The White Men, Charles Waterton, The Emperor’s Last Island, and Daisy Bates in the Desert, and of two novels, The Book of Color and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Her most recent book, Old Man Goya, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Blackburn lives in England and Italy.

  Billie Holiday backstage

  Photograph by George T. Simon (Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Julia Blackburn

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, London, in 2005.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Blackburn, Julia.

  With Billie / Julia Blackburn.

  p. cm.

  1. Holiday, Billie, 1915–1959. 2. Singers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.H58B53 2005

  782.42165′092—dc22

  [B] 2004058661

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82921-4

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  ONE: The Record Sleeve

  TWO: The Cardboard Box

  THREE: The Facts of Childhood

  FOUR: Freddie Green

  ‘I’m in your corner, girl!’

  FIVE: Christine Scott

  ‘She never bothered with nobody.’

  SIX: Skinny ‘Rim’ Davenport

  ‘All the old-timers are dead.’

  SEVEN: Mary ‘Pony’ Kane

  ‘Around where the happenin’s was.’

  EIGHT: Wee Wee Hill

  ‘I was her stepfather.’

  NINE: The Pursuit of Happiness

  TEN: Billie Comes to Harlem

  ELEVEN: Elmer Snowden

  ‘She’d call me her daddy.’

  TWELVE: Fanny Holiday and Clara Winston

  ‘She was a fat thing with big titties.’

  THIRTEEN: Pop Foster

  ‘It was only show people.’

  FOURTEEN: Bobby Henderson

  ‘The way she handled a fork.’

  FIFTEEN: Aaron and Claire Lievenson and Irene Kitchings

  ‘Afternoon of a Faun’

  SIXTEEN: Ruby Helena

  ‘She didn’t have the right, being who she was.’

  SEVENTEEN: ‘Strange Fruit’

  EIGHTEEN: Harlem at War

  NINETEEN: Lester Young

  TWENTY: Tallulah Bankhead

  TWENTY-ONE: James ‘Stump’ Cross

  ‘This is Stump Daddy talking.’

  TWENTY-TWO: Greer Johnson

  ‘Baby, will you hold this for me?’

  TWENTY-THREE: Jimmy Rowles

  ‘Oh, I loved her! Oh, how I loved her!’

  TWENTY-FOUR: Bobby Tucker

  ‘You’re not going to have any trouble with me.’

  TWENTY-FIVE: John Levy, the Bass Player

  ‘I came in on the tail end.’

  TWENTY-SIX: The Ecstasy of Paranoia

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Jimmy Fletcher

  ‘She was the loving type.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Colonel White and Friends

  ‘A straight business thing.’

  TWENTY-NINE: Carl Drinkard

  ‘We were like a family.’

  THIRTY: Melba Liston

  ‘Strangers down South.’

  THIRTY-ONE: Memry Midgett

  ‘What tune is this, Memry?’

  THIRTY-TWO: Lady Sings the Blues

  THIRTY-THREE: Irving Townsend and Ray Ellis

  ‘She wanted that cushion under her voice.’

  THIRTY-FOUR: Louis McKay

  ‘This bitch turns skunky overnight.’

  THIRTY-FIVE: Endgame

  THIRTY-SIX: Earle Zaidins

  ‘She was very sensitive to bad publicity.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN: Alice Vrbsky

  ‘A woman of her word.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT: Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  … and I will sing, that they shall hear

  I am not afraid.

  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dre
am

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to Linda Lipnack Kuehl, whose research proved invaluable in the writing of this book, and to Avalon Archives for making this research available. I would like to thank the owner of the Linda Kuehl archive, Toby Byron, who was very kind and helpful throughout the time that this book was taking shape.

  ONE

  The Record Sleeve

  When I first heard Billie Holiday’s voice, I had just turned fourteen. I was at a party and everyone was much older than me and very drunk. Their movements seemed to have been slowed down; even the way they opened and closed their mouths was too slow.

  There were two prostitutes at the party. One was a woman called Sally. She had short-cropped hair, but I can no longer find her face in my mind. She lived with a tall thin homosexual called Barry, who had huge front teeth and floppy black hair, and I can see him easily. They used to invite me over to their flat in Mayfair and they liked to show me a cupboard that was full of ropes and masks and whips. On one occasion when the three of us were having tea, a client dropped by, but Sally said she couldn’t do anything for him because she had a guest.

  She did take me out for an appointment with two American businessmen. We went to the Ritz and ate lobsters, which I had never eaten before, and I was shocked by the sound their claws made when they were cracked open. One of the men asked me how old I was and, when I told him, he panicked and ordered a taxi and sent me away with a book on sexual techniques as a present. Sally and Barry wanted me to sell my virginity. They used to telephone me and tell me about an old gentleman they knew and how easy it would all be and how much he was prepared to pay.

  I had never met the other prostitute at the party and I don’t know her name. She was plump and blonde. She had taken off all her clothes and she was dancing among the guests. Every so often she would squat down and run her hand between her legs and then lick her fingers with a loud lip-smacking noise. Everyone was laughing, and Barry, who was always competitive, took off all his clothes and did a little shimmying dance with his penis tucked tightly between his thighs. I was very impressed because he suddenly looked almost like a woman.

  A man in a dark sweater was staring at me; he kept pursing his mouth into tight kisses and winking one wrinkled eye. I was frightened of him. I was frightened of every person in the room except for Sally, because she had always said she would look after me if there was trouble and I wanted to believe her.

  My mother had arranged the party and invited the guests. She was laughing and drinking and having fun. The relationship between us had changed since she had separated from my father. Before, we had been allies of sorts, busy every night with an assessment of the danger and the likelihood of violence; ready to run and hide if things got too bad. But now things were different and we had become two women: one young, the other no longer young. My mother never said she would look after me if there was trouble and it never occurred to me that she might. I was aware of her watching the man who was watching me.

  I escaped to a far corner of the room and sat down on the carpet next to the new record player, its wine-red plastic surface stamped incongruously with an imitation of the scales on a snake skin. I looked through the little pile of records that people had brought to the party and stopped at one called A Billie Holiday Memorial. There was a black-and-white photograph of a woman on the cover. She was illuminated by a stage spotlight and she was wearing a white evening dress that left her shoulders bare. She was standing very stiff and straight, her head tilted slightly upwards towards the benediction of the light, her arms bent at the elbows, her hands clenched into fists. I couldn’t see her feet, but I could tell from her stance that she must have had them planted firmly on the ground, as though she was on the deck of a ship and was maintaining her balance in spite of the breathing swell of the ocean. She was caught in the gaze of lights and cameras in front of an audience of strangers who were gathered in the darkness to watch her, and yet she seemed to be completely alone. It was as if the act of singing filled her with such a wild joy that she was aware of nothing else for as long as the song lasted.

  I lowered the needle onto the spinning black disc. The music began with the notes of a piano stepping lightly as a dancer, and then some other instruments whose names I didn’t know joined in. They were like an excited crowd of people who were all talking, laughing, telling jokes, but bound together by the sound of a regular beat.

  Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, a woman’s voice arrived. She flew in there among them like a bird and I realised that all the instruments had been waiting to welcome her. To my surprise she didn’t seem to care about the beat which they wove around her, and she kept pulling at it and stretching it until I thought she had lost it entirely. But just when it seemed too late, she was back again.

  ‘I …’ she sang, her voice as clear and strong as a trumpet, pulling out that one long vowel of sound. ‘I … cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry over me.’ She sounded so close and familiar. It was as if she was looking straight at me.

  She was telling me a story about how she had once loved a man, and he was unkind to her and made her very unhappy. But then she met another man who was much nicer and she was happy again. Meanwhile, the man who had made her sad was beginning to miss her, and so the wheel had come full circle and it was his turn to cry.

  She sounded as brave as a lioness and yet she also sounded as fearful as a child. Listening to her, I didn’t have the sense that she was bitter or resentful, or that she was angry with the man who had hurt her and glad to see him suffer. Her message was much simpler: she was telling me that things change, life moves on, laughter is followed by tears, and tears are followed by laughter. After you have been knocked to the floor, you rise up and get on your feet again.

  The record went on playing and I listened as more and more stories were told. There was a lot of unrequited love and a lot of longing for a world in which a man and a woman could live happily ever after. But even the saddest songs were full of courage. It was as if just the fact of singing was in itself a triumph and a way of dealing with despair.

  The last song on the record was called ‘For All We Know’. I had no idea how much time separated the first recordings from this one, but I could hear at once that a number of years had passed. It was clearly the same woman who was singing, but her voice had changed profoundly; it had lost that dancing, light-hearted effervescence and instead it seemed to be pulled forward by a sheer effort of will. But still she was strong and I was made strong by listening to her.

  On the morning after the party, I bought myself a copy of the record. I played it over and over until I knew the words of all the songs and they had become my stories as well. It was not that I suddenly believed in eyes of blue and hearts so true, or in cottages by streams where I would just like to dream, but I did believe in Billie Holiday and the way her voice could chase out my fears.

  The record has always stayed with me since then, travelling from place to place. I haven’t looked after it well; the black vinyl is warped and scratched, and only a few of the songs can struggle to be heard. But I have kept it anyway because of the memory of myself as a young girl at a party and because of the photograph of Billie Holiday on the cover and how she impressed me when I first heard her sing.

  TWO

  The Cardboard Box

  I am treading in someone else’s footsteps.

  More than thirty years ago a woman called Linda Kuehl wanted to write a book about Billie Holiday. As a way of beginning she made tape-recorded interviews with more than 150 people who had known Billie at one time or another during her short life. It was not just the famous names Linda Kuehl was after; it was anyone she could find, so long as they had a story to tell.

  Eventually she had two shoe boxes filled with tapes, each one carefully named and numbered. Then she began the slow process of turning all these spoken words into written words. Turn the tape on, listen to a sentence. Turn the tape off, type down what is being said. Begin again. Back and for
th, back and forth, until hundreds of pages had accumulated, a great babbling mountain of voices. As well as the interviews, Linda Kuehl also collected anything else she could find: newspaper cuttings, legal documents, hospital records, police files, the transcripts of court cases, royalty statements, and all the photographs and private letters that the people to whom she spoke were willing to let her use. She even obtained a hoard of shopping lists, postcards and little drunken notes that Alice Vrbsky, Billie’s secretary and assistant during the last years, still had in her possession:*

  75 watt (2)

  60 bulb

  sugar

  Bread

  12 eggs

  4 tolite [sic] paper

  1/2 Ham

  2 bars Camy

  2 bars Lux

  1 large lestol

  1 comet

  not too small chicken roasting

  The New York publishers Harper & Row agreed to take on the book and for several years Linda Kuehl was busy with it. But it seems she could never get further than the first few chapters, which she kept on writing and rewriting. It was as if she was looking for the key that would open the door and make everything else follow and fall into place.

  On 9 August 1977 Frances McCullough, Linda Kuehl’s editor at Harper & Row, explained in a letter that the book wasn’t working. She said it had become a ‘choppy, patchy mélange, in which you, the reader, very easily lose your bearings’. She said perhaps another publisher could be found who could take it on and ‘if that works, believe me, I’ll be very happy’. She said, ‘God knows, if it’s painful to me, it must be awful for you.’

  Linda Kuehl moved over to Dial Press and went on with her unfinished manuscript, struggling to find the right form. In January 1979 she had made arrangements to attend a Count Basie concert in Washington, DC, and ‘in spite of a fierce snowstorm and major travel snarls to the northeastern seaboard’ she travelled there by train from New York. She arrived a few minutes before the music began, looking ‘quite flustered’, and then she disappeared and didn’t turn up for the reception after the show. It seems she went back to her hotel room, wrote a suicide note and jumped out of her third-floor window. Passers-by had seen her sitting on the ledge before she jumped.† Her family kept her Billie Holiday papers until the 1990s, when they were sold to a private collector.