Billie Holiday (22 page)

New York's Town Hall was hired for a concert, and Johnson went to work publicizing it as a serious event. Photographers from
Look
magazine were scheduled to be present that night, and testimonials were printed in the program from classical and jazz performers such as Leonard Bernstein and Ella Fitzgerald. To round out the career-changing move he had in mind, Johnson invited no jazz critics at all, and instead sent requests for reviews to people like Paul Bowles of the
Herald Tribune
and Mark Schubert of the
Times
. Robert Coleman of the
Daily Mirror
reported that Johnson had said, “In a sense it is a jazz lieder program, and not a jam session. So that's that, you jitterbuggers.”

The whole idea was risky: Jazz singers didn't perform solo concerts, and classical music writers didn't attend jazz shows. The concert was scheduled for a late Saturday afternoon, and Billie had by then established a reputation for not showing up for performances before midnight. Although she had agreed to the whole concept, as the date drew near she became uncomfortable. She didn't want to pose for photographers. She had never heard of the concept of picking out songs beforehand and listing them in a program. Greer assured her that Lotte Lenya, the Austrian actress and storytelling singer and wife of Kurt Weill, programmed
her
songs that way for her appearances at Town Hall. Billie didn't know Lotte Lenya, but in any case she didn't want to program a performance in advance when she might not feel like singing those songs when the day came.

The hall was sold out, room was made onstage to seat hundreds more, and even then a thousand were turned away. Holiday sang nineteen songs, mostly in the same tempo and mood, eleven of them from the Commodore and Decca recordings that may have suggested the idea of a song cycle in the first place. It was a songlist that she would return to repeatedly for years to come. Reviews of the concert were very appreciative,
though there were quibbles about the program needing a few up-tempo numbers mixed in with the slow ballads. But it was such a success overall that afterward Billie wanted to do concerts exclusively: “It seems if people pay a whole lot more for a ticket they'll sit quiet and listen.”

 • • • • • 

If one were buying Billie Holiday records as they were appearing in the late 1940s, there were several surprising changes of direction and gaps along the way. Following the very successful session on February 8,1947, that resulted in “Deep Song,” “There Is No Greater Love,” “Easy Living,” and “Solitude,” there were no new records available from her until December 1948. When she did finally return to the studio, the choice of repertoire seemed bizarre. From the same session that produced the new and definitive versions of “My Man” and “I Loves You, Porgy” came “Weep No More” and “Girls Were Made to Take Care of Boys,” surely the weakest songs and recordings ever sold under her name. Gordon Jenkins's “Weep No More” seemed to have been written to take advantage of the publicity surrounding Holiday's by then very public private life, amounting to what Holiday biographer Chris Ingham called a post-prison press release:

I've drunk the bitter cup

I've downed the bitter pill

Both songs were lyrically insipid, the recordings made even worse by the presence of the Stardusters, a wordless singing group of the type that producers of pop songs during that period used because they thought it enriched the song (or doubted the singer could carry it by herself). Seven months later she would begin recording several songs associated with Bessie Smith—“Tain't Nobody's Business if I Do,” “Keeps On A-Rainin,'” “Do Your Duty,” and “Gimme a Pigfoot” (all together suggesting an album of Bessie's songs was in the works, though Gabler denied it)—followed by two vaudeville-like duets with Louis Armstrong,
and at the end of the decade, a return to form with “You're My Thrill,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” and “God Bless the Child.”

Decca was casting about for some new direction in her career: from torch singer to pop singer to retro blues singer back to torch singer. During this two-and-a-half-year recording period, she spent several weeks in detox, followed by three more weeks in the solitude of the New Jersey countryside; she failed to show up for a recording session for which she was fined the costs; she escaped a drug arrest in Philadelphia in a rain of police gunfire, only to be arrested on a separate instance of possession in New York, for which she pled guilty, hoping to be put into drug treatment, but instead was sentenced to a year and a day in a federal prison, where she picked vegetables, slopped hogs, and washed dishes but never sang a note for nine and a half months. When she was released on parole she immediately performed two successful concerts at Carnegie Hall, appeared for five nights in
Holiday on Broadway
, did several months of nightclub appearances, and spent six weeks at the Strand Theatre along with the Count Basie Orchestra. She was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in Hollywood, though the charges were dropped ten days later. Charged with possession nine days afterward, but later acquitted, she then spent a week at the Apollo and appeared on several TV programs over three nights.

This sequence of events certainly was not what Decca had in mind when they were changing their ideas about how Billie should be produced. It is astonishing, however, that she could continue to work at this pace in such chaotic personal circumstances, all the while adapting to a constantly shifting musical environment.

Billie Holiday, Norman Granz, and Verve Records

Billie first visited Los Angeles back in October 1941 to open Café Society, a new club run by the actor and comedian Jerry Colonna, who was attempting to copy (without authorization) the two New York clubs. Although the venue folded within a few weeks, while she was there she was
introduced to dozens of Hollywood stars and executives. She also met Norman Granz, a student at UCLA and a film editor at MGM, who was hanging out at jazz clubs with his girlfriend, Marie Bryant, a dancer and singer who had worked with Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and Duke Ellington and was rising fast in LA. When Billie returned a year later to work at Billy Berg's Trouville Club, Granz chatted with her between sets; one night she broke into tears as she told him that some of her friends of color had been turned away when they came to see her perform. Granz and Marie had already experienced something similar as an interracial couple; her story moved him to go straight to Berg. Because Granz knew that Berg would tell him he would lose business if he integrated the club, Granz approached him with an offer to stage low-cost Sunday jam sessions with the best of Los Angeles's musicians if he could be assured there would be no discrimination against anyone. Berg bought the idea, presumably because he was not doing any business in the afternoon as it was, and whatever happened, it wouldn't affect his evening events. But when the Sunday sessions became overwhelmingly successful, he desegregated all of his club's performances. Granz took that as a sign that more could be done, and he developed a series of public jam sessions at nonsegregated venues that succeeded better than he imagined.

Yet this was a city where, over the next two years, racial strife intensified with the infamous Sleepy Lagoon gang murder case and the Zoot Suit Riots, events that lumped together Mexican Americans, African Americans, jazz musicians, and miscellaneous hipsters. Granz staged a jazz fund-raiser for the defense of those arrested at the Philharmonic Auditorium. “Jazz at the Philharmonic” was the title of the event, and it was too good a name to lose, so for years afterward he presented jazz events that filled concert halls across the country, producing recordings, putting musicians up in the best hotels, and paying them well. He was breaking social and musical rules left and right, and becoming something of a hero to those who knew and worked with him.

But not everyone in jazz was happy with Granz as impresario. He
liked to put musicians of different styles and generations together onstage and encouraged heated competition between them that thrilled audiences and had them cheering and stomping. It resulted in a circus atmosphere, some said. Others were not in favor of putting musicians in large halls where they often had to change what they played to fit the space.

Singers were a different story with Granz. He had always been a fan of Ella Fitzgerald, and paid dearly to get her away from Decca so that he could manage her career and produce her records on his own label. Like Billie, Ella had recorded extensively for Milt Gabler, and Granz followed Gabler's lead with album-oriented productions, concept albums, and richly arranged songs. Where he excelled was carefully thought-out live recordings and her many songbook albums, monuments to the greatest American composers of popular song.

After a couple of JATP concerts with Holiday as a guest in the mid-1940s, he signed her as well, and from 1952 to 1957 produced a long series of albums that broke with Gabler's softer approach. Granz attempted to return to the glories of her 1930s small-group sessions by surrounding her with some of the best musicians of the time—Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Rowles, Charlie Shavers, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Ben Webster, Paul Quinichette, Benny Carter—and most of the songs on her records with him were proven standards. They ranged over a wide variety of subjects in diverse moods, though the album covers, which typically featured darkly lit photos and David Stone Martin's spidery, stark line drawings, implied a troubled story inside.

Granz wanted her to try songs she hadn't done before, and “Everything Happens to Me,” “Tenderly,” “Stormy Weather,” “East of the Sun,” and “Autumn in New York” were choices welcomed by fans who found it hard to believe that she hadn't done them before. Only a few of the numbers she recorded, such as “P.S. I Love You,” seem ill-conceived. With Billie, Granz was also willing to take some chances in the studio. Sometimes there were arrangements, but more often she and he decided on songs at the last minute. At times they recorded on the fly. Pianist
Oscar Peterson recalled that she could launch into a song without naming it or waiting for something to be planned:

She'd walk over, say, “I used to do this,” and begin singing . . . but the way she sang it, we could hear the key and just begin playing behind her. It would automatically become a run-through and as soon as it was over, she'd go over to the mike and say, “All right, let's try this one now.” I'd say, “Wait a minute, Billie—” but she was off and running. I didn't always have time to work out a written introduction for her, but she didn't care. She'd just say, “Play those little things you play, and I'll come in.”

When Jimmy Rowles was a pianist on a Granz recording, he was uncomfortable with Norman's last-minute choices of songs, and on his own rehearsed with Billie beforehand to pick out some material:

We never had time to get together on chords, Barney Kessel, the bassist, and me. Now that's really difficult, especially when Norman would pull out a tune and say, “Here it is: ‘Prelude to a Kiss' . . . go!” Everyone's got their own conception of how to play the tune and so it comes out sounding like a jam session.

Granz sometimes also let her take as long as she wanted to make a record, and to come and go from the sessions as she pleased, though it could be a very expensive process. The results, surprisingly, were consistently good, and the musicianship high. Consistency had worked well with Ella Fitzgerald, where one might never expect to be surprised. But surprise and discovery were the keys to Billie's best 1930s work, and though the results of Granz's approach were more conventional, there were often details to strike the listener. “Love for Sale,” a 1952 duo with Billie and Oscar Peterson, is as intimate a recording as she ever made, especially since Granz recorded her voice louder, hiding nothing. Peterson recalled, “[Norman] wanted to
display the complete interplay
between us, and he wanted her to express the song anyway she felt. . . . He told me ‘just go with her'—and so I did.” Bringing in musicians from the Basie band for one album, or returning to some of her 1930s triumphs (“I Wished on the Moon,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”), were also inspired choices, even when they were not as rewarding as he may have wished.

The Last Sessions

Holiday's final two studio recordings,
Lady in Satin
(Columbia, 1958) and
Last Recording
(MGM, 1959), are the most controversial recordings she ever made, and have been argued over endlessly for the past sixty-five years. Her record companies seemed to want to forget them:
Lady in Satin
has not been reissued for seventeen years, and
Last Recording
for twenty-six years. When in 2001 Columbia brought out its big CD boxed set
Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933–1944
, it left out her 1958 album. All the stranger because both recordings were rather lavishly produced, especially the first, with its full string section, big band, three women singers backing her up, and some of the best jazz and classical musicians in the country. It was the most expensive production she had ever been given.

It was Billie's idea not to renew her contract with Verve and to move back to Columbia after many years. She was not getting much work and she needed the money just to get by. Ever since she had heard Nelson Riddle's arrangements for Frank Sinatra in the early 1950s, she had wanted Riddle to arrange an album for her. But when she heard Ray Ellis's treatment of “For All We Know” on his 1957 album
Ellis in Wonderland
, she decided she could work with him. Ray Ellis was a journeyman saxophonist who in the mid-1950s began arranging hit songs for the Drifters, Doris Day, Connie Francis, Johnny Mathis, and Bobby Darin, and had become a protégé of Mitch Miller at Columbia. According to her new lawyer, Earle Zaidins, she had been complaining that Joe Glaser never got the right bookings for her, and she was forced to do the same
music over and over. Her
best audiences had been white, she said, and she wanted regular bookings in the big “white rooms” like the Plaza, the Waldorf, and the Empire Room. When she and Zaidins went to Columbia, they signed her to record with Ellis.