Billie Holiday
by Charles Edward Smith
THERE WAS nothing about living on
the sidewalks that I didn't know," Billie Holi
day told a writer for Tan [February, 19531.
"I knew how the gin joints looked on the in
side; I had been singing in after-hours joints
-damp, smoky cellars, in the backs of bar
rooms.
"It was slow, this attempt to climb clear
of the barrel. But as I grew older, I found
those trying to keep me in it were not always
the corner hoodlum, the streetwalker, the la
borer, the numbers runner, the rooming
house ladies and landlords, the people who
existed off the $25- and $30-a-week salaries
they were paying in those days.
"They, I found, were the ones who wanted
to see me 'go,' to get somewhere. It was their
applause and help that kept me inspired.
These 'little people,' condemned as I have
been ever since I can remember, gave me my
chance long before the mink-coated lorgnette
crowd of Fifth Avenue and Greenwich Vil
lage ever heard of me."
Which could be said of most outstanding
hot musicians. No one begins at the top; few
even reach it. And if Lady was condemned
now and again-and she has been, plenty
it was by essentially smaller minds and small
er people than the "little people" she knew in
Harlem during the Prohibition era. But her
talent has never been without recognition. In
deed, it was in the small spots of Harlem that
people like John Hammond, Paul Muni, Mil
dred Bailey and others heard her, encouraged
her and got others to listen to her voice.
She is an altogether remarkable singer and,
like her great predecessor, Bessie Smith, de
serves the best. In backgrounds, the two have
little in common. Bessie, when she was a kid,
sang in a choir in Memphis and left home to
become a protege of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey
in Negro minstrels, in the South, the only
place where the blues were "big" until Bes
sie, Louis and others rescued them from an
unfair charge of country contamination. Billie
ran errands for a madam in East Baltimore,
so that she could listen to records on the par
lor phonograph by Bessie and Louis. But
when she began singing in second-string Har
lem hot spots, the material most in demand
consisted of pop songs and show tunes, espe
cially Negro show tunes, for few Negroes in
those days could afford the charges in the
swanky night clubs (such as the Cotton
Club, where oftentimes there were more
whites than colored at the pink-lit tables) .
In joints such as those Billie worked in,
there were any number of kids doing miser
able imitations of Ethel Waters. She was dif
ferent. Not that her style was perfect, but it
was shaping up, and already the direction was
clear. For, whatever she sang, she had a voice
born of blues. And if she sang in the cellars,
as she says, she probably sang more blues
there-her rather sophisticated vocal style
still shows the infuence of lowdown and
"dirty" blues intonation-than she ever did
in the lesser night clubs of the Harlem cir
cuit. There was a speakeasy around the cor
ner from Jerry's Log Cabin, for example,
where, at the very time Billie sang at the Log
Cabin, at this basement bistro (which hardly
deserved the name; there was a dirt foor and
old boxes for chairs) one could hear harshly
sung, moaning blues and "primitive" poly
phonal and antiphonal spirituals that, years
later, were to give root-nourishment to rock
and roll. And this, too, was part of the Har
lem scene, but one the visiting public seldom
got to know-"down home" blues and spir
ituals close to the feld holler and the chant,
gone underground in the urban North. But
Billie knew it and, mixed up in her singing,
as she went to work on the latest romantic
ballad, were the beat and burning fre of
the blues.
Essentially, hers has been a jazz, an instru
mental style of singing for as long as critics
have known it. She may have got it mostly
from Louis, from his records and from hear
ing him at theatres, but style comes in bits
and pieces so infnitesimal that not even a
singer can be aware of every last influence.
What is signifcant is that she has been, and
is, an artist in reshaping songs and ballads,
and in this, of course, Louis was the frst
great master.
Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan) was
born in Baltimore, April 7, 1
age parents who married three years later.
When she says she was a woman at six, she
may have been thinking of other things than
physical development. Her father, Clarence
Holiday, was a musician (McKinney's Cotton
Pickers, guitar; he'd formerly played trum
pet), almost always on the road. He and
Billie's mother had separated when Billie was
little more than a baby, so that she was, in
effect, a fatherless child (as were so many
during slavery days): the little mother called
"Mom" was the rock she clung to. And even
her mother left her with relatives, to go up
North in search of work. It wasn't merely that
Billie had traumatic experiences-life daps
all of us around-but it slapped her viciousl
y,
when she was very young and didn't know
what it was all about.
Albeit she lacked Job's eloquence, her reci.
tal of grievances reminds one of him as he
inculpated the powers of darkness with a kind
of sulky solemnity. Job, in his way, was salty,
and so was Billie, and in each case there
seems an obvious merit. For instance, Billie
was accused by her arch-tormentor, a cousin
named Ida, of having indirectly caused the
de-L'h of her great-grandmother, one of the
few people who gave her love and to whom
she gave love in return. Her great-grandmoth.
er had been a plantation slave
(and Billie is
descended from the owner), who used to en.
tertain her with stories of the old days. She
couldn't read or wrte but knew the Bible in
timately. When her great-grandmother-who
was not supposed to lie down (but rest in a
chair) because of illness-asked Billie to let
her lie down, she only thought to ease the old
woman's pain. She spread a blanket on the
foor and, being tired, lay down herself. She
woke up hours later, with her great-grand.
mother's arm around her neck, and the arm
was growing stif and cold with death. She
was scared and panicky and couldn't free her
self and began to scream. After that she
was in a hospital for a month, recovering
from shock.
At the age of 1
man who lived in the neighborhood. The man was
sent to prison, and Billie was sent to a
Catholic home where, as a punishment for
infringement of rules, a refractory girl had to
wear a raggedy red dress; once, Billie claims,
she was locked in a room where a girl (who'd
met with an accident) was lying out dead. In
between such harrowing experiences, she
lived the "normal" life of a slum kid, snitching
stuff from the dime store and sneaking into
.0vies• When her father nicknamed her
'.Bill" because of her tomboy ways, she
chlinSed it to Billie, after Billie Dove, her
idol of the silent films.
As she describes her early years in her au
to biography, she sounds like a tough little kid,
running scared, and makes one realize how
Meaningless terms like "juvenile delinquent"
can be when applied to specific persons. She
didn't run in gangs. She was a lone wolf and
a lonely little girl who, when barely old
enough to be out on the streets, learned to spit
and scratch and howl. Years later, at the
Grand Terrace in Chicago, she threw a lethal
threat and an inkwell at the manager, explod
ing in blind hostility just as she had as a small
child when a boy teased her with a dead rat.
On that occasion she had whacked the boy
over the head with a stick. On another,
in a 52nd Street club, she dunked a maid
(who'd called her a dirty name) in a toilet
bowl, and a jurist, measuring the provocation,
refused to press charges. Now that she
is famous, such incidents are categorized as
temperament. Yet all of these acts, and more,
were less than adult and other than childish,
for the child's act was defensive and, in its
context, more than reasonable.
Billie came to New York when she was
1 1928, the year Louis recorded one
of her favorite numbers, "West End Blues."
She decided to get off at Pennsylvania Station
and visit Harlem before going on to meet her
mother at Long Branch. Instead of which she
got lost. A social worker for the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children took
her in hand and set her up in a beautiful hotel
where she had a room and a bed to herself.
This was living it up. Years later she looked
up the place, out of curiosity, and to her
amazement it turned out to be the YWCA.
In her autobiography, Billie tells of her ex
periences, in and out of jail, as a teen-age
prostitute, and describes, at frst hand, the
seamy sides of seamy streets during the late
1920's, when corruption and gangsterism
were rampant in many parts of the city, but
nowhere more so than in Harlem, where
white gangsters were in control of the more
plush night clubs and street-corner loafers
could steer you to after-hours joints, pros
titutes or marijuana pads-whatever your
wayward heart desired. Billie took to smok
ing reefers
(marijuana) when still in her
teens. This was not unusual elsewhere-a
"Kinsey report" on the subject would shock
and surprise only the very sheltered.
Billie didn't expect to be a call girl even
temporarily, but apparently looked upon the
world of pimps and prostitutes as a way to
make a fast buck. Since she was allowed to
visit a house of prostitution and run errands
for a madam before she was 13, it is logical
to suppose that she thought of the girls in the
house as making a living (which, in fact, they
did), without moral theorizing. To a slum kid
the more affluent prostitutes may have
seemed like fashion plates. Billie was sent into
transports of happiness when "Mom" got a
foppy, big, red velvet hat, such as Billie had
seen on good-time glamour girls, decorated
with birds of paradise feathers. But she only
ran errands and, anyway, wasn't paid in mon
ey. She was paid in being allowed to listen to
records by Bessie and Louis on the parlor
phonograph.
So the two roads beckoned in a good-time
parlor on the corner, and she knew she would
take the one that meant singing, even as she
walked the streets in Harlem in a silk dress
and spike heels. "I know this for damn sure,"
she says in her book. "if I'd heard Pops and
Bessie wailing through the window of some
minister's front parlor, I'd have been running
errands for him."
In low-class joints, where she worked for a
while when young, she refused to pick up bills
from tables without using her hands. She
wanted to be a singer without tricks, sexual
or otherwise. This was consistent. In the sort
was of hustling she had experienced
then nothing at all glamorous-one wonders
there ever is, except in books-and the whole
pattern of life, from stealing white socks in
the dime store to accepting a blue mink coat
from her man. paid for out of her own earn
ings as a singer, found her trying to live up
to the Lady, perhaps with an eye on the one for
whom a day of the year, Lady Day, is listed
in the Calendar of Saints.
In an interview with Dave Dexter. Jr., she
tells of the Depression period when her mother
couldn't find work as a housemaid and
when she herself tried scrubbing foors and
145th just couldn't make it. "We lived on
Street near Seventh Avenue," she explained.
"One day we were so hungry we could barely
breathe. I started out the door. It was cold
as all hell, and I walked from 145th to 133rd
down Seventh Avenue, going in every joint
trying to fnd work. Finally. I got so desper
ate I stopped in at the Log Cabin, run by
Jerry Preston. I told him I wanted a drink. I
didn't have a dime. But I ordered gin (it was
my frst drink-I didn't know gin from wine)
and gulped it down.
"I asked Preston for a job . told him I
was a dancer. He said to dance. I tried it. He
said I stunk. I told him I could sing. He said:
sing. Over in the corner was an old guy play
ing piano. He struck 'Travelin' All Alone'
and I sang... . The customers stopped drink
ing. They turned around and watched. The
pianist. Dick Wilson. swung into 'Body and
Soul.' Jeez, you should have seen those peo
ple-all of them started crying. Preston came
over, shook his head and said, 'Kid, you win.'
That's how I got my start." (Down Beat, No
"ember 1. 1
The influx from downtown wasn't long in
starting. Tipped of by Hammond. Benny
Goodman and other musicians dropped in,
and Benny used Billie on a record date for
Columbia. This was before he'd organized
his regular hand. Teagarden, Krupa and Joe Sul
livan were among those on the date that made
"Your Mother's Son-in-Law," in Novembe
1933, and, the following month made"Rif.
fin' the Scotch." Wrote Dave Dexter of the
first Holiday record. The disk is an
item today, not only because of the fne in.
strumental work, but because it was
Holiday's first side. She was pretty lousy. You
tell her so and she grins. 'But I was only 15
then, she says, and scared.'
(Ill buy the "scared.. but not the age; she
had to be 18 or born
in wedlock; she can't have it both ways,)
She continued to sing in Harlem night spots
and at theatres, but outside the professional
world of music and entertainment she was
surprisingly little known.
Like most other hot musicians who have
since become famous, Billie got very little for
her work. Bernie Hanighen fought for her, to
get her more money and wider recognition.
"A lot of guys were big tippers uptown," she
says in the autobiography, "but when it came
to fghting for you downtown, they were no.
where. Not Bernie. He was the cause of me
making my first records under my own name
-not as anybody's damn vocalist, but as
Billie Holiday, period-and then the list of
musicians backing me. Bernie Hanighen is a
great guy."
When she opened at the Apollo, she sang
one of his tunes. She had a bad case of stage
fright, but by the second tune the house was
with her and she was all right. There was an
interesting crowd there, as there often was
where she sang. They not only knew current
song hits but knew the composers of them,
and if they liked the composer, that was it;
he was in: he was applauded just as loudly
as if he'd been there in person. "There's
nothing like an audience at the Apollo," says
Billie. "They didn't ask me what my style was,
who I was, where I'd come from, who influ
enced me, or anything. They just broke the
house up."
Billie said that she'd always wanted Bessie's
big sound and Pop's feeling. What she
got, as her style developed, was altogether
her own sound, big, brash, subtle. soft-scnsi
tive. a sour-sweet sound, the shape of which
she n»n'P"l''tes so that it comes out flat,
round, harsh, pian ssitno--one of the most
beautiful vocal sounds in jazz, once you get
to know it-and, out of a raw, emotional
maelstrom, conic feelings which are disci
plined in song.
She met Lester Young at a jam session. "1
used to love to have him conic around and
blow pretty solos behind me. She once said
that she was first called "Lady" because she
Wouldn't take customers' money off tables, an
(frankly obscene) gin-mill
old-cstahlislied
custom. Then Billie. who can use a rough,
tough, nasty vocabulary when she wants to,
blew a gasket at the loose and dirty talk of
some Basic-ites. Whereupon Lester took the
,Day" out of Holiday and that made it
Lady pay. She called him "Prez" for "Presi
dent". "Mons" was "Duchess", to complete
the list, her boxer was "Mister."
"If you fnd a tune and it's got something
(autobiography],
to do with you, she says
,.yo u don't have to evolve anything. You feel
it, and when you sing it other people can feel
something, too. With me. it's got nothing to
do with working or arranging or rehearsing.
Give me a song I can feel, and it's never work.
There are a few songs I feel so much I can't
stand to sing them. but that's something else
again."
From this statement, it is clear that the
lyric is part of the material she has to work
with, yet in treatment of it. melodically and
rhythmically, she confutes semantics. "I don't
think I'm singing," she says [/-fear Nlc' Talkin'
to Ya]. "I feel like I ant playing a horn. I try
to improvise like Les Young, like Louis Arm
strong, or anyone else I admire. What comes
out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I
have to change a tune to my own way of do
ing it. That's all I know."
Billie's chapters on road tours with Basic
(
937) and Shaw (1938) , playing dates that
took them overnight from riff-raft joints to
class hotels, are as frank and revealing as
those on the seamy side of Harlem. when she
was trying to make a fast buck the fast way.
There also emerge from these pages her re
spect and love for musicians (some of them;
for others she had no damn love at all, so to
speak) and her growing maturity as a musi
cian among musicians (though she didn't read
music). For example, she says, "With Basic
we had something no expensive arrangements
could touch. The cats would come in, some
body would hung a tune. Then someone would play it
over on the piano once or twice. Then someone
would set up a riff, a ba-deep, a ba
dop. Then Daddy Basic would two-finger it a little."
Already, with groups led by Teddy Wilson
and others. Billie had proved herself on blues,
ballads and pop songs that, in her interpreta
tion, could be as poignant or portentous as
crimes passionels. In handling tone and
rhythm she was infnitely subtle, as is essen
tial in a capable blues singer; usually she
dragged the beat, but she fooled around it
(as Louie does) and sometimes gave it a
nudge. The timbre of her voice changed to
suit the mood of the song, and her beautiful,
strong vibrato could also be as delicate as an
angel dancing on the head of a pin. Many of
her metamorphoses of pops and ballads
some of the best vocals in jazz-are out of
print, including the frst version of "Summer
time," that she did in 1
gan and a small band.
By 1939. according to her (Dexter inter
view) (There were
. she had loved three men.
others, subsequently. but only much later
did she seem to radiate any real sense of con
tentment.) "One was Marion Scott, when I
was a kid. He works for the post offce now. [Another]
was Freddie Green, Basic's guitar
man. But Freddie's first wife is dead and
has two children, and somehow it didn't work
out. The third was Sonny Wlm our
but like me. he lives with his
plans for marriage didn't jell. That's all."
Even her book lacks what one could call any
moving romantic interest, though it
is non all lacking in revelations of tenderness
feeling. (Frank and revealing as it is, it some
times leaves one with an odd sense of incom
pleteness. as if it did not always "dig"
real Billie, who is perhaps best felt in the sin
When the band went into the Blue Room
of the Lincoln (New York City). the treat. ment
accorded Billie griped the whole band.
Yet there seemed no way to cope with it, qs
13illie explained later, Artie and the men
had
taken months of Bell-on-the-road for this New
York engagement and a radio wire. This was
the big one. So Lady came in the back door
and didn't sit on the bandstand-as girl vo.
calists almost invariably did in the great days
of swoon and swing-but went upstairs to a
little room until she was called to sing her
uous line of a song. I was reminded, perhaps
irrelevantly. of Freud's concept of dreams:
that there is a manifest content that ap
pears to he the reality of the dream, and a
latent content that is real, and that is the
dream.)
The human reality of segregation
dogged the Lady cast, west, north, south.
Unless your skin is the appropriate color, you
may not be aware of the humiliation that one
out of ten of our citizens experiences, every
day. as regular as clockwork, but with more
wheels within wheels. At a Detroit theatre
she was asked to apply dark grease paint,
so that she wouldn't be mistaken for off-white.
Then, when she played a Detroit theatre
with the Artie Shaw orchestra there was
some apprehension about her appearing on
stage (with a white band) because of her dark
complexion. Billie, in her memoirs, called it
"dynamic-assed Detroit."
Once, at a joint where some members of
the Artie Shaw orchestra were having a
snack, everybody got waited on but Lady.
Chuck Peterson (trumpet) called the waitress
over and Tony Pastor (saxophone) bawled
her out. "This is Lady Day," he said; "now
you feed her." At some stops on the road,
such as roadside diners, there weren't even
outdoor toilets for colored. Said Billie I auto
biography], "At frst I used to be so ashamed.
Then fnally I just said to hell with it."
number. She was, she said, given fewer and
fewer spots on the air time. It got to her, it
got to her more than it ever had in the South,
where it was all a part of somebody else's gra
cious way of living, and she blew up a storm
and quit.
When Billie opened at Cafe Society Down
town (New York City) in the late 1930's
-her favorite fowers, white gardenias, in
her hair-it was seven years and thousands
of gut-torn, satin-sheathed songs from the
Log Cabin. Cafe' Society was flled to capacity
with the sort of cosmopolitan audience for
which it became famous-celebrities, artists,
society people, and just people. And top.
drawer jazz. Said Billie ( autobiography ]:
"Meade Lux Lewis knocked them out; Am
mons and Johnson fipped them; Joe Turner
killed them: (Frankie) Newton's band sent
them: and then I came on. This was an audi.
ence."
When she sings from the guts-and that
was the only way to sing her big tune there,
"Strange Fruit" (Lewis Allen wrote it with her in
mind, and she's the only one to sing it) -
she reminds one of Bessie on a deeply felt
blues. There is no hip-twisting or flirting with
the microphone. but there appears to be an
almost imperceptible tremor. Like Bessie, she
sings with her whole body.
Once, at a Miami night club, a customer
asked for "Strange Fruit" and "Gloomy Sun
day!" She couldn't fgure out why he asked
for either but she fnally sang "Strange Fruit"
as an encore. When I came to the fnal was in the
prase of the lyrics," she said, "1
and strongest voice I had been in for
months. My piano player was in the same
kind of form. When I said '. . . for the sun to
. for
toe. ' and then the piano punctuation, '. .
the wind to suck,' I pounced on those words
like they had never been hit before." [ auto
biography.]
The commodore record of this song is one
of the great vocals of jazz, described with
penetrating accuracy by Glenn Coulter as
"that uncanny expression of horror which
transcends its willful lyric when Billie sings it,
and becomes a frozen lament, a paralysis of
feeling truer to psychology than any conven
[Cambridge
tional emotionalism could be."
Review, December, 1956.1
The 1940'x, for Billie, began near the top
and ended as near the bottom as one could
get with any hope of climbing up again. She
made trips to the Coast, where moving picture
stars became her friends and where she met
Norman Granz ("Jazz at the Philharmonic"
concerts and recordings) who, in the 1950's,
helped her to get back on her two feet and
stand up straight professionally. She sang and
acted in the flm New Orleans, with Louis
Armstrong. (She was given the usual, ig
nominious role of a maid. but at least she got
to sing.) By the time the film had its premiere
in New York, she was in trouble with the law
because of using heroin.
Before the timbers shoring up the roof
(that was to fall on her) began to creak,
Billie recorded songs that are among her most
moving performances. Among these was
"God Bless the Child," worked out with Ar
thur Herzog after she had had a quarrel with
her mother. She said [ autobiography], "This
will gas the Duchess, I thought. And it did."
In fact, it gassed a lot of people, sardonic
lyrics twisting and squirming under the scal
pel of Billie's membranous reed.
"In a reversal of the usual story," wrote
Glenn Coulter, "Billie's popularity in
creased during the same time that her style
became more complex. This was also the
period when her life seemed tangled and diffi
cult . if drama intensifes, it may do so by
means of irony. To this weapon Billie now
turned, and as she sang a love song, it became
a cry of hatred and contempt. . ." Of her
uneven output at this time he remarks. Most
of these bad performances take place in an
over-arranged, bc-violined setting, and the
gait never seems to be an honest jazz tempo,
or indeed any tempo that allows music to
breathe naturally." Mr. Coulter noted what
appeared to be an attempt to convert Billie
"into a super-personality cranking out mil
lion-copy best sellers. . It is a shock to re
call that Billie saw no incongruity in this at
tempt; we even learn with dismay that the
throbbing violins are there at her express
wish; it is only the demon that kept her
against her will from abandoning her art for
the big money."
Lady's demon had many faces. One was
27,
the big H, heroin. On Tuesday, May
1947, she appeared in United States District
Court, Ninth and Market, Philadelphia, and
174,
was arraigned for violation of Section
Title 21, U.S.C.A. (violation of Narcotics
Act). In the course of his remarks, the district
attorney said: "She has given these agents
a full and complete statement and came in
here last week with the booking agent
(Glaser) and expressed a desire to be cured
of this addiction. Very unfortunately she has
had following her the worst type of para
sites you can think of. We have learned
that in the past three years she has earned
almost a quarter of a million dollars, but last
or $57,000, and she
year it was $56,000
doesn't have any of that money."
Billie volunteered to take a government-supervised
cure-she had previously tried to
"kick" it of with a private hospital cure, but
it hadn't worked-and was committed to the
segregated Federal rehabilitation establish
ment for women at Alderson, West Virginia.
for a year and a day. After a brief but rough
"cold turkey" treatment, she was fitted into
the routine, starting out as a "Cinderella,"
washing dishes and peeling potatoes; then for
it spell she was assigned to work with the
pigs on the farm. Nevertheless, and despite
Jim Crow, she found it a better environment
than the city prison had been and remarked at
one point, "There were any number of heart
1 949.]
warming experiences." [Ebony. July.
1
Billie gave a concert at Carnegie Hall
days after leaving Alderson. She played to a
packed house, and hundreds were turned
away. Coming north from West Virginia, she
got off at Newark and went direct to Morristown
to stay with Bobby Tucker's family.
Bobby was her accompanist, and the first song
they rehearsed was "Night and Day," which
she described as "the toughest song in the
world for me to sing. I'll never forget that
frst note, or the second. Or especially the
third one, when I tried to hit 'day' and hold
it. I hit it and held it and it sounded better
than ever. Bobby almost fell off the stand, he
was so happy... We did all our rehearsing there.
We never went near New York, or Carnegie Hall.
Bobby and his mother made me
feel I was home and everything was cool."
The user of narcotics is the eternal fall guy.
Pushers, themselves pushed by the tycoons of
the multi-million-dollar dope racket, harass
them with all the slimy persistence of blood
suckers and blackmailers. Narcotics agents
keep tabs on users and, it would seem, on
those who have "kicked" the habit, in the
hope of getting a line on the higher-ups. In
New York, Billie was refused a performer's
license for work in cabarets-but this was
standard procedure; she was in no sense sin
gled out. "Billie is not self-pitying," Nat Hcntof
commented in reviewing her book for
Down Beat (August 8, 1956], "but she does
make sever al valid complaints, including a
plea that America adopt the British system of
treating addicts as 'sick people' under medica l
care.
In the interests of rehabilitation, at various
times. Billie had a talk with a priest,
spent
loads of money on new clothes, bought a sleek
Cadillac the color of chlorophyll-ii,tppy?
green
peas, and a plot of land in New Jersey. Later
(she doesn't give an exact date). she went to
a psychiatrist, and was proud to have fought down
an urge to die and gotten back the love
of life and the will to live that goes with it.
As often happens with people who've been on dope,
some previous friends and acquaintances were wary
of associating with her. In
the vernacular, she was hot. Others, such as
Bobby Tucker and John Simmons, acted as
though she had merely been away for a while, which
was the truth. John took her down to
the Strand to hear Lena Horne. Lena had
been told that Billie was out front and came
down from the stage and up the darkened
aisle to take Lady in her arms. As Billie said,
people like Lena took the sting out of the
others.
The storm that blew her house of cards
apart in 1 947
had a vicious backlash that
caught her while on the West Coast two years later.
A news item in Down Beat, datelined
San Francisco, July, 1 949, reads:
Broke and alone after her manager, John
I cvy. left her to face the trial here, at which
%he was acquitted, Billie Holiday decided to
go hack to work. But despite the fact that
the jury said they believed Billie had been
framed by Levy. she said, "If he was to walk
into the room this minute. I'd melt. He's my
man and I love him."
The trial appeared to confrm that a package
of opium had been planted on Billie just before
the raid. Billie came to trial with a black eve
she said Levy gave her before he left. "You
should see my back," she added. "And he even
took my silver-blue mink-18 grand worth of
coat. He said he was going to give it to his sister
to take care of for me. 1 got nothing riots, and
1 in scared.
"I turned all my life over to John. He took
all my money. I never had any money. We were
supped to get married. On January 22, John
canK back from Los Angeles. We had been ar
."While Levy was un.
guing about money.
Packing. the telephone rang. Immediately af
1erwards, she said, he handed her a package and
told her to get rid of it. " I went into my room.
Then
John closed the door behind me.
John told me to
someone grabbed me.
My man
throw aomc trash away. I did it.
makes me wait on hint, not him on me. I never
did anything without John telling me.
The story of the San Francisco trial and
her acquittal is told by Billie in her book and
by
Jake Ehrlich, the famous West Coast law
yer who defended her, in a paperback, Never
Plead Guilty.
In the late Forties, Billie had her own show
on Broadway, backed by Bob Sylvester and
other true believers; it flopped after three
weeks. She has had very successful tours of
1 950's when,
Europe, the last one in the
in a group shepherded by Leonard Feather,
she wowed them in Copenhagen. Some time
after the San Francisco trial she married
Louis McKay. She was also once married to
trumpet player Joe Guy. but this time it
showed signs of taking.
During the present decade she has steadily
recaptured her sureness of style and, along
with it, a mellowing and maturity. Happily,
however, her intonation has not lost its caus
tic undertones and her voice can still be as
tight as Montgomery Clift's levis. In the
spring of 1957, contracts were signed for a
flm biography of her life.
Sardonic and sophisticated as her singing
style is, it has retained and made stronger
and deeper an affinity to such honky-tonk
styles as that of Alice Moore, whose "I'm
black an' evil an' I did not make myself ..."
sears the eardrums. No one since Ma Rainey
has sung the "My man"-type blues with such
sullen, sultry pathos. No one has given such
point and passion to popular song lyrics.
Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan and
dubbed Lady Day, was a product of the East
Baltimore slums, where a star cracked on her
cradle, leaving her star-born and star-crossed.
Some years ago the Lady of the White Gar
denias, in a Cadillac whose whiteness
matched the white steps of Baltimore she'd
scrubbed as a kid, drove slowly through the
old neighborhood. Even in this she appeared
to pay homage with the clumsiness and bel
ligerence of the fear-ridden, the guilt-gotten.
But, if so, this was a deeper guilt than the
unreasonable but conventional reaction that
her past might have instilled in her-of the
deep and dark places of the mind, having
only a tangential relationship to all manner of
hustling, a hurt and a haunt that could be ex
orcised only by a song.
But we're all of us love hunters, some stalk
ing the prey, some wooing it, some fnding it
by giving it, others folding before it like night
fowers in sunlight, resistless in the coils of
an indiscriminate and emotional hunger. Insight
is not enough. Not unless it becomes part of
one, as in some precious moments when there is
no longer the chasm between what one
knows, deep within one's self, and what one
believes and is, outwardly. Lady comes closest to
this fusion of knowing and feeling when she
says: "I've been told that nobody sings the
word `hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love.'
"Maybe I remember what those words are
all about. Maybe I'm proud enough to want
to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island,
the Catholic Institution and the Jeferson
Market Court. the sherif in front of our place
in Harlem and the towns where I got my
lumps and scars, Philly and Alderson, Holly
wood and San Francisco --every damn bit
of it. You've got to have something to cat
and a little love in your life before you can
hold still for any damn body's sermon."
-1957