Billie Holiday (3 page)

With this understanding, they began to get together at regular hours after he came home from work at the
Post
. Billie made it clear that she did not want to have her conversations recorded on tape. “She would always reprimand you for not paying attention. You had to go along with her way of doing things. That's just the way she was. . . . She had an air of
total dignity, her wit was situational . . . she was absolutely, defensively, herself. . . . At times it was very frustrating.
She wouldn't be in the mood and would get angry at something I said, and leave my apartment . . . but as she stepped into the elevator the remarks she made in anger to me would illumine a whole passage.”

When Dufty asked her if she had ever read anything written about her that was accurate, she recalled “The Hard Life of Billie Holiday”—an article based on an interview she had done with journalist Frank Harriott for
PM
newspaper
in 1945.
Dufty discovered that the material in it was rich enough to be the basis for the first three chapters of the book, often using what had been written verbatim or changing it slightly to standardize the narrative. When she read what she had said ten years before, it set Billie to recalling things long forgotten. Dufty went on to find other interviews she had done for
PM
,
Metronome
,
Down Beat
, and elsewhere that he could draw on.

The opening line of the book, “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married,” was reshaped from the 1945
PM
article. In it Billie was asked to talk about her life, and she began by saying that she was born in Baltimore in 1915 of parents who were “just a couple of kids.” When asked what she meant by that, she replied:

“
Mom was 13 . . . and Pop was 15.” She paused. “Mom's and Pop's parents just about had a fit when it happened. They'd never heard of things like that going on in our part of Baltimore. But they were poor kids, Mom and Pop, and when you're poor you grow up fast.”

Billie turned her eyes to us, smiled, and her frown disappeared. She lighted a Chesterfield, and began speaking rapidly, between short, reflective pauses.

“Mom and Pop didn't get married till I was three years old,” she said . . .

The British magazine the
New Statesman
later reprinted those sentences and offered prizes for the best “similarly explosive first or last
sentences from a real or imagined biography.” Over a hundred readers gave it a try, but the
New Statesman
awarded only consolation prizes and declared that the contest was more difficult than they had imagined:

Miss Holiday's explosiveness . . . is no simple formula. In 23 superbly chosen words, she has established her background, recorded at least five relevant facts, illustrated (by her method of doing so) one facet of her own character and made firm friends with the reader by a breathtaking and slightly naughty dénouement. Too many of her imitators felt that vulgarity or sheer improbability were satisfactory substitutes for the artfully conjured impudence and shock which characterized the original.

Once the first chapter and a short outline of Holiday's book were completed, they were sent to Lee Barker, an editor at Doubleday, who bought the book immediately on the basis of Dufty's skill at capturing Billie's voice. An advance of $3,000 was given to Billie, and $1,050 to Bill. Though Barker didn't know much about Holiday at the time, he had been an editor of Ethel Waters's autobiography,
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
, and saw the potential for black celebrity books.

 • • • • • 

As Dufty began writing in June, he wrote Norman Granz, the owner of Clef Records, her record producer in California, to involve him in the project and give him an idea of the plans for the book:

We have been working for a week now pulling stuff together. She has been dictating huge patches of terrific stuff. I have dredged the [newspaper] morgues and clip files; we have played old [record] sides for clues. And the project has gone well—something I never believed quite possible, almost an accident of timing. . . . She is concerned that the book be done right and that it be the truth, at long last. There had to be a gimmick, of course. But in
the context of all the phony spurious ghosted biogs current; the spate of paste-up slapdash jazz histories; and all the nonsense and myth that has gained currency about Lady over the years, I'm not sure the truth itself at long last isn't itself the gimmick. And I can say, on the basis of stuff in hand, that publication day will be novelty night at the Book of the Month Club. We are dredging ancient court records, so it can be whole. And it is my journalistic guess that a few of the Judges, public dignitaries involved in the sociological sense in this story—those who are not dead may wish, some that they were.

In late August Billie left New York for California, and when she returned, the book was ready to send off for final editing in November 1955.

Billie and Dufty had shaped the autobiography in a confessional mode, with drug addiction as what Dufty called the “gimmick” to sell it. It was the year in which Otto Preminger's film
The Man with the Golden
Arm
broke through the Hollywood codes to portray the life of a heroin-addicted jazz drummer, and articles by Billie such as “How I Blew a Million Dollars” in
Ebony
and “Can a Dope Addict Come Back?” in
Tan
magazine were driving magazine sales. Using drugs as the means of attracting an audience was nonetheless a tricky business. The revelation was shocking at the time to most who read it, but in the effort to create a naturalistic account of the suffering, pleasure, and crazed romanticism of the quest for drugs, it was easy for such a book to turn into a narrative of addiction, a tedious account of narcotic business practices. (Such would be
the weaknesses of the autobiographies of Miles Davis, Art Pepper, and many celebrities to come.) In Holiday's case, however, the drug dealing was done not by her, but by her fans, sycophants, lovers, and the musicians she hired, so there was not much she could tell. Although Holiday falsely assured her readers that she had put drugs behind her, if her book was successful, she might find herself forever expected to write and talk about that experience—a life reduced to drugs.

 • • • • • 

After the manuscript was turned in to the editor, Billie and her husband began to read the final drafts, and Louis started dropping by the Doubleday offices to check on progress. They then surprised Barker and Dufty by hiring an attorney, Harry A. Lieb, to advise them on the contents of the book. Lieb seemed genuinely shocked by the life that she had led, and appeared to want to protect her from herself. After he met with Barker and Dufty several times, Billie wrote Barker that
she had been reading from the book and talking to her lawyer, and there were changes that she wanted to make. She forwarded a letter from Lieb that had been sent to her and Louis McKay:

December 27, 1955

Dear Mr. Barker,

Since my meeting with (William) Dufty and you, I have had no word regarding the suggested deletions and additions to the manuscript. It is extremely important that it be read and re-read carefully before publication to make certain that possible libelous statements be deleted. Incidentally, has Billie read the entire contents of the book herself? Although my function is not of a critic, I should like to give you my opinion of the book as presently written. I must preface my remarks by telling you that I have heard Billie sing on records and radio and her voice is just beautiful. There is so much of human suffering, sensitivity and music in her voice. The book, therefore, comes as a disappointment, as if in her autobiography she had written to put herself in the worst possible light. The first 50 pages are very good, but the rest is a series of gripes, with a few scandal items. It is bitter and even the cuss words get very tiresome when they are repeated over and over again. Now I cannot believe that that is all there is to Billie. Her story must surely be dramatic and touching and it should evoke sympathy, pity and understanding. This book, in my opinion, does
not do this. It doesn't give the reader the faintest inkling of what a drug addict feels or suffers, nor does it portray her as the great singer she is. It would seem that some of the wonderful notices she has received could be woven into the telling of the story. I feel that Billie doesn't just want to show her tough outer shell or that is the way she wants the world to regard her. There is a great story in Billie and it would seem to me that Billie and Dufty should be able to produce it. The above is just my opinion. I may be all wrong, but take it for what it is worth. I have only your best interest at heart.

Harry [Lieb]

Once the suggested reediting and deletions were completed, however, Holiday and Louis McKay were still unhappy with the results. McKay claimed that certain passages had been deleted only after threats had been made against Billie. Lawyers for Doubleday had insisted that some passages be sent to various people who might find them objectionable, and Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, and Billie's former manager and lover John Levy each responded with demands to have any references to them deleted.
Even more ominously, McKay insisted that Billie's many difficulties with the law were the result of pressures brought to bear by persons who knew that she possessed information about them that she intended to make public. Billie now blamed what she saw as shortcomings of the book on the publisher's deletions: She told her friend the songwriter Irene Kitchings that “when they got through cutting that book, it wasn't fit for anybody to read.”

Others were complaining even before the book was out. Her agent, Joe Glaser, a “shtarker” famous for manipulating his clients and making them money, thought it was bad for business (though after its publication he rushed to buy the film and dramatic rights). After Norman Granz had read some of the manuscript, he wrote Dufty to say that he knew Billie needed money, but he, too, feared the sensationalism of the narcotics material might backfire and make it harder for her to get more
work.
Dufty reassured him that only a small part of the book—less than one tenth—would concern narcotics, and he had been advised by the publishers that the subject would sell well.

When it was published in 1956, the
New York Herald Tribune
said that it was “a hard, bitter and unsentimental book, written with brutal honesty and having much to say not only about Billie Holiday, the person, but about what it means to be poor and black in America.” When she read it,
Billie said, “I can't help it. I just told what happened to me. A lot of my life has been bitter. You ought to read what they left out of the book. I told everything, but they had to cut some of it.”

She was even more upset when the
New Yorker
called her book “as bitter and uncompromising an autobiography as has been published in a long time . . . a largely authentic, if almost indigestible social document.” Dufty said she wondered how life in a black neighborhood in America could be both authentic and palatable. She was particularly stung by a review in the
Baltimore Afro-American
by the eminent African American professor and literary critic J. Saunders Redding, who was offended by the book's realism and her willingness to share so many details of her life.
He opened his review by declaring, “I suppose Billie Holiday has a right to sing the blues, and whether she has or not, she has assumed that right for reasons that she considers sufficient. . . . [The] opening paragraph is a sort of sardonic summary of all that tragically disordered background that Billie Holiday came from and of all she went toward.” He followed with a summary of the details of that “disordered background,” but without mention of her music or what she had accomplished, and concluded, “This reviewer is no squeamish prude, but Billie Holiday and William Dufty use language so raw with so little warrant that there were times when this reviewer got ‘real sick.'” Billie wrote Bill and Maely and asked if they had seen the review: “
Well I don't know if you have been digging it but my book is just a bitch. Did you see that shit that man from my birthplace Baltimore wrote? He even said that my Mom and Dad were stinkers for having me. I am sick of the whole goddamn thing. You tell people the truth and you stink. I didn't hurt anyone
in that book but myself. . . . Please have Bill to look into this for me or I will take other means to take care of him. He needs a lesson . . .”

 • • • • • 

The opening words of Holiday's book were undoubtedly shocking and certainly memorable; they are still quoted today. But there was precedent for such blunt frankness. Five years earlier Ethel Waters's autobiography,
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
,
had an equally stunning opening:

I never was a child.

I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

I never felt I belonged.

I was always an outsider.

I was born out of wedlock, but that had nothing to do with all this. To people like mine a thing like that just didn't mean much.

Nobody brought me up.

I just ran wild as a little girl. I was bad, always a leader of the street gang in stealing and general hell-raising. By the time I was seven I knew all about sex and life in the raw. I could outcurse any stevedore and took a sadistic pleasure in shocking people.

Waters's memoir's opening, like Holiday's, seemed to promise the complete story of her life. She, too, had been raised a Catholic, had been raised in Philadelphia, and grew up poor and a witness to poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, and public sexuality. Like
Lady Sings the Blues
, Waters's book also evaded any mention of her same-sex relationships, the date of her birth was wrong, her cowriter was a white man, and both books had the same editor and publisher. But the reaction to
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
was markedly different. It was a Book of the Month Club selection, and excerpts were published by the
Ladies' Home Journal
and the
Atlantic Monthly
; author's luncheons were sponsored by the
New York Herald Tribune
and the American Booksellers Association; the American Library picked it as one of the year's notable books. The
difference in reception was a reflection of attitudes toward the authors and their public personae. Waters cast her autobiography as a confession but also as a conversion experience, a woman who found faith's triumphant rise from the ruins of her childhood, and was a credit to her race.