Billie Holiday (23 page)

After years of revisiting older material with Norman Granz, Columbia saw her return to the label as a new beginning, and it was agreed that for the record she was to sing only songs that she had never recorded before. That meant learning them and fitting them to arrangements by a man she'd never worked with, yet she failed to show for any meetings or rehearsals to go over the songs with Ellis. The recording sessions were set to start at ten each night, but she never arrived before midnight. She had run through some of the material with her pianist Mal Waldron, but Ellis had put introductory verses into the arrangements for a number of the songs. Since she normally ignored the verses of songs and went right to the refrains, she didn't know the words or the melodies for some of them. Even worse, she seemed unfamiliar with a few of the songs as well.

She was not in good health and was drinking gin from a water pitcher throughout the sessions. When the playbacks were checked by the engineer, she didn't want the musicians to hear them because she was embarrassed by her singing. The word in the studio was that she was setting herself up for failure, and comparisons to Marilyn Monroe were whispered about. Ellis finally lost his patience. The on-the-spot rehearsals, the false starts, retakes, and overdubs began to pile up on the tape reels, and when they discovered they were short one song, Ellis and Holiday had to take a cab at three in the morning to Colony Records on Broadway, where they leafed through sheet music until they found “You've Changed,” a song she had in fact recorded once before. They finished the sessions in only three days, but Ellis left in disgust and wanted no part of the remix sessions that followed.

Somehow, though, she had made it work. She was aging prematurely, she was sick and had to be helped on and off the stage, and she was having trouble reading and remembering lyrics. There were missed notes, her voice was husky at times, and her vibrato had become much faster.
The tempos were slower, and there were no improvising musicians for her to converse with musically as she sang, but the arrangements, though lush, were sometimes minimal, and set her voice floating loose on top of them. She counted on the strength of her recitative, the ability to sing out of tempo and not seem lost. Her phrasing was still sensitive to the words, remaking their points of emphasis and shifting meaning by surprising changes of stress as she sang. The essence that Gunther Schuller said lay behind the surface techniques of her singing seemed more obvious now than ever with the loss of some of her other abilities, but her vocal artistry was still there. The musicians were impressed. She was still a star to them.

Billie thought
Lady in Satin
was the best album she ever made (even though she was unhappy about Ray Ellis's insisting on having “those white bitches sing behind me”). She particularly liked “Violets for Your Furs” and told her friends that young singers should listen to it. She also liked “You've Changed,” even though she had been crying as she sang it.
The strings were a comfort to her: Singing with small jazz groups had been giving her headaches, she said.

When the album appeared in 1958, the lines were drawn hard and fast among her fans. Those used to hearing her in the sparest of jazz bands felt the string arrangements were saccharine and cluttered. She'd abandoned jazz; it was a flawed attempt at a pop record, commerce at its worst. Glen Coulter, the most sensitive writer on Holiday, blamed Ellis entirely:
The “ideal accompaniment for a jazz vocal is a many-noted commentary which does not interfere with what the singer is doing, but rather provides a texture of the utmost contrast and is a springboard of rhythm. Ellis provides a sleek, slow, insufficiently subordinated counterpoint that throws Holiday's time off and gives her nothing to brace itself against.” Odd that those who thought she was at her best when she overcame inferior songs would think she would not be able to rise above what they considered inferior accompaniment. Others objected to her voice. The album was morbid, and literally a disgrace. She was imitating herself, the curse of the aging artist.

The liner notes were themselves startlingly defensive, as if the buyer was being warned, but too late. A goodly part of producer Irving Townsend's notes for the original LP reminded the listener that Holiday had had a miserable life, though for the material she was performing on the record, that was a benefit, because it made it “so easy to believe what she sings.” Is it jazz? he asks. “Yes. It is jazz because Billie Holiday sings jazz, no matter what the accompaniment is . . .” In Ray Ellis's remarks in the liner notes for the CD issue almost forty years later, he wrote that he had been unhappy with her performance when they recorded it, but that he now realized that he was listening musically, rather than emotionally. Michael
Brooks's comments for the same CD reissue were outright grim: “An autobiographical study . . . an open wound . . . vocal cords flayed by the acid of racism and commercial indifference . . . the strings did not bring out the best in Billie . . . she tried to divorce herself from her roots.”

Still, there were those, including many musicians, who thought
Lady in Satin
was a triumph when it first appeared. Miles Davis, for example: “I'd rather hear her now. She's become much more mature. Sometimes you can sing words every night for five years, and all of a sudden it dawns on you what the song means.”

 • • • • • 

If there were some who thought that recording
Lady in Satin
given her mental and physical state was a mistake, then another record by her a year later must have been seen as madness.
Billie Holiday
(the title was changed to
Last Recording
when she died four months after its issue) is one of the least acknowledged recordings by a major artist, and even her biographers have tried to ignore its existence.

By 1959 Ray Ellis had moved to MGM as an executive, where he would work with Barbra Streisand and later produce his own easy listening albums. One of his first projects was the Holiday recording. In her discussions with Ellis, Billie made it clear that she wanted it to sound more like the albums Sinatra was making at the time—brighter, more
confident, maybe using some of Sinatra's songs, and
this
time, no backup singers. Again, all the songs would be ones she had never before recorded.

The accompaniment on
Last Recording
was divided between three ensembles, all smaller than the ones used on
Lady in Satin
: two with strings, one without, along with three soloists—Jimmy Cleveland, trombone, Harry “Sweets” Edison, trumpet, and Gene Quill, alto saxophone. A few of the songs have arrangements close to the sound of the Sinatra/Nelson Riddle albums, with “Sweets” Edison providing muted trumpet fills as he did so often on Sinatra recordings, and “All the Way” and “I'll Never Smile Again” were associated with Sinatra. Two songs were quite old: “There'll Be Some Changes Made,” a hit for Ethel Waters the year it was first written, and “Baby, Won't You Please Come Home,” identified with Bessie Smith. One, “It's Not for Me to Say,” was almost brand new.

Her health was much worse than when she'd recorded the year before, and she was so weak that she often had to be held up in a chair by her secretary, Alice Vrbsky. It was Alice, not Ellis, who now determined how long the sessions could last, and she ended them when Billie was weakening, so most of the songs on the record are first takes. Some of them are faded at the end, suggesting that there might have been problems with her held notes at the conclusions. The orchestra sometimes sounds shallow in the mix, and on several songs Billie's voice is too high. It is most likely that she was not able to sing in the keys in which some of the arrangements were written, and it was too late and too expensive to redo them. The results sound as if the orchestral track was recorded in the key as planned, then slowed down to a lower pitch and tempo. Billie was then recorded separately at the same lower pitch as the revised orchestra track, next overdubbed to the orchestra's track, and then both orchestra and voice were brought together and sped back up to the desired key and tempo. (Ray Ellis at one point conceded that this had been done, but later changed his mind about his answer.)
The results may sound a bit weird, but as many said of the album, it was better than it had
a right to be. Whatever the troubles in the studio, it still sounded authentically like Billie Holiday, and no one else has been able to get that sound. How ironic, then, that necessity forced a mid-twentieth-century studio to use electronic tricks to complete the project, bringing Billie Holiday into twenty-first-century electronic pitch correction, shape-shifting compression, punched-in edits, and the authenticity of vampire sonic technology.

 • • • • • 

When she was on her deathbed at the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, her lawyer told her that he could arrange yet another recording with MGM, but Billie doubted that she would ever be able to sing again. He was persistent, explaining that the MGM executives were serious businesspeople, that they had already checked with the doctors to see if she would live and were assured that she would.
If that was so, Billie suggested, they could bring the recording equipment to the hospital and they could call the record
Lady at the Met
!

 • • • • • 

Billie Holiday's death on July 17, 1959, and her hospitalization leading up to it were eerie reenactments of much of her life. When she collapsed on May 31, she was taken to Knickerbocker Hospital, where she was signed in as Eleanora McKay. No one in the hospital knew who she was, and, with needle marks on her body, she was left in the hall for hours, since the institution was not allowed to treat drug addicts. A Viennese doctor who was an admirer intervened to have her moved to Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, where she was treated for heart and liver problems. So began the second-longest engagement of her career—forty-seven days in the hospital.

When heroin was found in her room, she was arrested, fingerprinted, and photographed lying in her bed, her flowers and possessions taken away, as police officers and doctors now vied to be her guards. Meanwhile, it was business as usual: One lawyer got her to sign with another
agent, even though Joe Glaser, her current agent, was paying her bills; she signed contracts to be in a new film and to produce a magazine article, and plans were made for another book, to be titled
Bless My Bones.
Her watchdogs and nurses asked for her autograph and played her impounded MGM recording on her record player at the nurses' station.

On the day she died, the
New York Post
ran a full front-page headline and her picture, along with the first of a long string of articles on Holiday by William Dufty. It was that cover that inspired Frank O'Hara's postmodern elegiac poem “The Day Lady Died.” The
Post
outsold all other New York papers that day.

 • • • • • 

I set out to write a book that cast new light on the extraordinary artist who was Billie Holiday. My intention was not to deny or gainsay the tribulations and tragedy of her life, but to shift the focus to her art. The consistency and taste she brought to nearly every performance, even those when her body was failing her, display a discipline, an artist's complete devotion to her work, and a refusal to surrender to the demands of an insatiable world.

She was anything but a self-promoter. She had no lawyer for most of her career except when court appearances demanded it. She had no real publicists, and seldom gave interviews. The pieces about herself that she wrote or collaborated on were few and written to achieve specific ends. Most of her guidance for dealing with the public came from Joe Glaser, a man who himself was a cipher, and whose own dealings with the public often served him poorly.

Making sense of a musician's life can be a precarious undertaking. Music is its own language, and difficult to translate into words. The value in music can seldom be convincingly connected back to individual performers or composers. Yet fans, musicologists, and biographers alike find this an exercise that is hard to resist. No wonder so many of us look to the words of a song to find clues to a singer's life.

Holiday's life is still difficult to fathom; some secrets still linger and
contradictions continue. Whatever the source of her failures and vulnerabilities, she fought hard to keep her music out front, and aspired to ever wider audiences. Singers who bravely cross the lines of race, class, nationalism, and gender do not merely take on the mannerisms and language of others. They create a way to adapt the musical architecture of songs and their key ideas, and reach into a deep structure to make these songs trigger social and emotional responses in everyone who hears them.

In the other biographies I've written, I've tried to stay out of the way, avoiding excessive explication of what someone meant when he was quoted, or guessing at his thoughts or feelings, and I have been loath to offer explanations based on knowledge that I didn't have. But with Billie Holiday, I became caught up in the details of her life as she and others had represented it. I found enough new information that I felt I had to share it. But I also found myself wanting to defend her, hoping to give her a new hearing in the court of biographical opinion.

Let her have the last word: “
I'm Billie Holiday. Singing's the only thing I know how to do, and they won't let me do it. Do they expect me to go back to scrubbing steps—the way I started?”

Writers of biographies build up considerable debts, and authors hope to be able to remember them all to repay them. I live in fear of having missed someone, and I'm sure that I have. If so, I'll owe you even more.

To begin with there is Billie Holiday and William Dufty's
Lady Sings the Blues
, the foundation of all work on Lady Day. Next there are the biographies on Billie Holiday that have shaped her story. I could not have done without them. John Chilton's
Billie's Blues
, Robert O'Meally's
Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday
, Farah Jasmine Griffin's
If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday
, Stuart Nicholson's
Billie Holiday
, Chris Ingham's
Divas: Billie Holiday,
and Donald Clarke's
Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon
are essential reading, as are several others in French and Italian. The late Linda Kuehl's research and her drafts for a never completed book on Holiday have been the basis of several of the more recent books and will be necessary resources for any future work, since some of her material has become available in published books, especially Julia Blackburn's
With Billie
. I owe a special debt to Frances McCullough, Linda Kuehl's editor, who deposited the Kuehl manuscript and notes into the Institute of Jazz Studies library, and also helped me to better understand the circumstances surrounding Ms. Kuehl's work. I've also benefited greatly from Ken Vail's
Lady Day's Diary
, and Phil Schaap, Ben Young, and Matt Herman's
WKCR Billie Holiday Festival Handbook
, an invaluable discography. Two labors of love for which I'm thankful.

I received very special help from H. Dennis Fairchild, William Dufty's partner of many years, who graciously shared with me some of the rarer of Dufty's publications and gave me insight into his work. Also I want to thank Dave Hanna, who recorded in audio Bill Dufty's life history and gave me access to it.

Libraries have been very important to my efforts, especially The Gabe M. Wiener Music and Arts Library of Columbia University, the special Holiday collections at Emory University and the University of Maryland, and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. I'm so pleased to be able to record my debt to two scholar-librarians who were of immense help to me: James Tad Hershorn at Rutgers University–Newark and Wolfram Knauer of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt, both of them my personal heroes. The many Web sites and discographies devoted to Holiday were also of great value, and I salute those who painstakingly built and maintain them.

Among my colleagues I thank Robert O'Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, both brilliant and generous people. Tad Shull, Susan Stewart, Loren Schoenberg, Gary Giddins, Lewis Porter, J. R. Taylor, Will Friedwald, and Rachel Vetter Huang and Hao Huang were my tutors for various phases of this project, and I feel blessed to have had them share their wisdom with me and I take pleasure in listing their names together. Chris Albertson, George Avakian, and Nat Hentoff, all of whom knew Billie Holiday, were kind enough to let me interview them about their relationships to her.

I want to acknowledge the help given to me by Sara Villa, a woman of boundless abilities who generously helped me with translations, and more than that gave me the benefit of her shrewd readings of the Holiday literature in languages other than English.

Thanks, too, to the many people who have helped keep Holiday's writing and music available to the public, especially Michel Fontanes of France, who has kept the Masters of Jazz CD series of Billie Holiday recordings alive and expanding.

Then there are friends whom I could not do without in writing this book or for anything else: Roger Abrahams, Grey Gundaker, Dan Rose, Nick Spitzer, and Robert Farris Thompson. Each of them in their own idiosyncratic and cool way encouraged and helped me despite my incessant complaining about the difficulties of writing.

This book would not exist without the hard work, care, and truly great knowledge of my agent, Sarah Lazin, and my editor, Rick Kot. Rick is the king of editors and Sarah the queen of agents, long live them both. Diego Nuñez worked hard and carefully as a copyreader, a job deserving the
highest praise from everyone but seldom receiving it. Carolyn Coleburn, Ellen Abrams, and Holly Watson are my treasured publicists. Can't live without them.

I dedicate the book to Heather, Matt, and Miles Szwed. I count on them and they never fail. But as always, it's Marilyn (Sue) Szwed who has to suffer most from my anxieties and obsessions, but at the same time manages to help and encourage me without fretting. And for that there is no gratitude great
enough.