Billie Holiday (4 page)

Dufty once spoke of Ben Franklin's autobiography as being a model for Billie's account of her own self-creation, but her description of her early life is more reminiscent of Dickens, filled as it is with miseries and rejections in a neighborhood in which houses of prostitution were the elite establishments. Her narrative of her artistic successes, tinged with bitterness toward the music business, the police, the courts, the press, and her mother, did not make for motivational reading. Nor did her revelations of her husbands as con men, pimps, and possible drug dealers sit well with her attempts to move beyond them near the end of the book.

Still,
Lady Sings the Blues
sold respectably, some twelve thousand to fourteen thousand copies the first year, along with a nineteen-page condensation of the book in
Coronet
magazine and a serialization by the British newspaper
The People
under the title “Body and Soul.”
Lady Sings the Blues
has remained in print ever since, and for many it is something of an American
classic.

I
n the beginning, the editing of her book was light, with very few changes in style or wording. A few family and celebrity names and a date or two were corrected. A paragraph on the origin of her stage name “Billie” was added, some details on the judge who first sentenced her in New York City were expanded, a bit more was added on the clubs of Harlem, and four new paragraphs were written on her first meeting with Louis Armstrong. She had wanted
Bitter Crop
as a title, words taken from the song “Strange Fruit,” but the publisher insisted on having the word “blues” in the title for sales purposes. They finally agreed on
Lady Sings the Blues
, even though she continued to protest that she didn't want to be known as a blues singer.

Billie was annoyed when the editor suggested that the word “bitch” was used too often. He was not swayed when told that she thought of it as a neutral term for women, and regularly used it in referring to herself. In the end,
she wrote in the margin of the edited draft, “Change ‘bitch' to ‘whore.'”

The more substantive changes involved deleting certain passages out of fear of litigation, and the addition of a completely new ending. Throughout the editing of the book various “interested parties” came by the Doubleday offices to express their concern about libel. Billie's reputation as an addict had alerted a number of people to guard against being closely associated with her, especially when they themselves were using drugs. The publisher's lawyers by now were fearful that the book
might contain libelous material that they had missed or not understood and pressured the editor to use pseudonyms and cut several lengthy passages about various celebrities. In the end there were no lawsuits and all of the concerned people seemed to vanish.

 • • • • • 

“Getting Some Fun Out of Life,” the fifth chapter, was set to open with “I met some wonderful people when I was a little girl singing around Harlem,” and follow with a number of portraits of celebrities who frequented there. Though most of them ultimately disappeared from the book, some readers still accused Holiday and Dufty of name-dropping by mentioning stars such as Bob Hope, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Clifton Webb, and Lana Turner as a way to inflate Billie's importance. But these were, in fact, among her most avid fans in Hollywood and uptown New York, and often her companions in clubs and at parties. There were many more she could have mentioned: John Roosevelt (FDR's son); composers Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem; Harlem high-life figures like club owners Dickie Wells and Clark Monroe, dancer Tondelayo, and singer Thelma Carpenter; far more of the jazz greats she worked with; and any number of people from the art world and society. Once the cuts were made, this chapter was less than five pages long.

The first person to disappear in the editing was Charles Laughton, who visited her at the Alhambra Grill in Harlem. She wrote that she knew he was someone special when he walked through the door but was not surprised to see him there, since a number of other Hollywood actors, such as Paul Muni and Franchot Tone (and his mother), were regulars in her audience whenever they were in town. George Raft had once danced for her in a club when he asked her to sing for him.

Laughton was on his way to London to appear in Alexander Korda's film
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, and John Hammond, Billie's first record producer, had told him to be sure to see her. (Laughton and his wife, Elsa Lanchester, spent weekends with Hammond when they were in town.) But Harlem was not new to Laughton. Billie learned that he
kept a black valet to discreetly guide him in his cruising uptown. He stayed after her performance was over, and she said his regal manner and his fearlessness in coming up to Harlem to see her was enough to compel her to take him home for a dinner cooked by Sadie, her mother. When he was leaving at dawn, he rather formally asked Billie if he might have “some of those cigarettes to take to the ladies of London.” With the
four hundred dollars that he gave her, she went around the corner to the apartment of white jazzman Mezz Mezzrow (himself the subject of a celebrated cowritten autobiography,
Really the Blues
) and bought every reefer he had. She fully expected that Laughton would share some of them with her, but he left without offering her even one stick.

He stayed in the city for a few more days, and Sadie introduced him to some men that she thought he might find interesting, and when he left for London he thanked both of them for their kindness and wrote out a check to Billie for $1,500—a year's wages for most Americans at the time. She was so shocked by it that she was afraid to cash it in case he had made a mistake and canceled the check. Instead, she kept it in a scrapbook her mother had made for her. But two years later, in a fit of desperation over a lack of money, she took the check to the bank:

I wrote my name on the back, pushed it through the window and waited, all the time keeping one eye on the door. I was half expecting someone to come in and grab me. But it only took a couple of minutes. The man handed me $1500 in bills and said “Thank you.” I had played Charles Laughton cheap and I was ashamed of myself. He was only trying to be nice, but he had saved my life.

Her encounter with Orson Welles was to be the next topic in the chapter. In 1942 Welles—writer, director, actor, producer, autodidact, boy genius—was in Los Angeles, having just completed
Citizen Kane
. He was then working on
The Magnificent Ambersons
,
Journey into Fear
, and
Mexican Melodrama
, appearing in his weekly
Almanac
radio show, and had recently returned from New York, where he directed Richard Wright's
Native Son
onstage. Like other Hollywood hipsters, at night he headed for the jazz clubs on Central Avenue, the Harlem of LA.

His companion those nights was Billie Holiday, herself new to LA, and working in Billy Berg's Trouville Club, where nightly she sang to crowds that included Bette Davis, Martha Raye, Merle Oberon, Lana Turner, John Garfield, and Orson.

He was supposed to be getting ready to marry this beautiful Mexican broad Dolores del Rio then, but he spent so much time with me I don't know when he ever got to see her.

When we'd made the rounds, we'd go up to my joint in the Clark Hotel. I'd always have a big bowl of fresh fruit there and Orson loved fresh fruit. And then he'd have a bath. Orson was up to his pockets then making the picture
Citizen Kane
, writing, directing, acting all over the place. By the time we'd get back to my joint, it would be almost morning, and time for him to go on the set. But his damn head would be going all the time. He'd come out of the bathroom in his shorts and start rewriting, redirecting or acting out the picture; moving the furniture around, trying himself on for size in my mirrors. He'd like to run me crazy.

Kane
was a great picture, she said, having seen it nine times in her room with Welles in his shorts taking all the parts before it showed in a theater, but since Holiday did not arrive in Los Angeles until October, after the premier of
Citizen Kane
, it was more likely he was acting out
The Magnificent Ambersons
.

Holiday and Welles made a striking pair on the streets of Los Angeles, both of them riding high, all sass and bravura, white and black together, he engaged to del Rio, Billie recently married to Jimmy Monroe (the colorful brother of Harlem club owner Clark Monroe), playing their roles with reckless cool. It was ultimately
too
cool for the folks at RKO, and soon the harassing phone calls began: She was ruining his career, the film, and the studio; she'd never work in films; they'd sic the
police on her; he'd be fired from his film and disgraced in the business. The hotel began receiving threats warning of what would happen if they didn't keep Welles out of the building. Señorita del Rio even called to warn Holiday that she was jeopardizing her marriage plans. But Welles laughed it all off: With his film about to open, the studio wouldn't dare risk the bad publicity.

 • • • • • 

Billie would not see Orson Welles again for years, until he walked into a club where she was appearing:

I remember the night Orson Welles came into the Onyx. I hadn't seen him in years. He was all grown up and famous, but it hadn't changed him any kind of way. He came in with a girl who looked like a perfect doll. She was such a knockout she just stood there and everybody stared at her while Orson grabbed me in his arms, hugged me and kissed me. Then he introduced this beautiful chick to me as his wife. I'm a real square about newspapers, I hardly ever touch the things so I didn't even know he was married to Rita Hayworth or anybody.

Anyway, Orson and Rita and I sat down at a table for a drink. . . . When I got up to sing, Orson reached across the table, took my hand and said “You're still my beautiful brown baby.” He always called me that. So I said thank you sugar, and wham bam, excuse me, Ma'am, if Rita didn't haul off and slap him smack in the face and walk out.

I felt terrible. I begged Orson to go after her and get her. I sure didn't want to be in the middle of a public hassle over nothing at all.

But Orson didn't bat an eye. He just said, “Hell, let her go.”

So this beautiful chick walked out on him and he sat there and let her go. . . . And Orson and I hung out together for a couple of days.

Once her adventures with Welles were cut from the book, there was nothing left of the planned chapter but a brief mention of her radio acting experience with Shelton Brooks and her friendship with playboy Jimmy Donahue. Too brief, it would seem, since Billie and Dufty expected their audience to know the significance of these people and the occasions they describe.

Shelton Brooks was described by Billie in her book as a songwriter and author of the song “Some of These Days,” and, though she didn't mention it, it was a number made famous by Sophie Tucker, for whom it was first written. Brooks wrote many other hit songs and some of the first jazz standards, appeared as a song-and-dance man in Broadway shows, and had his own twice-weekly radio soap opera on CBS Radio. It was on this program that Billie appeared, doubling parts as a wife and a maid.

The party that Billie mentions next in the published version of
Lady Sings the Blues
took place at the East Sixty-first Street home of Broadway musical star Libby Holman, who for years haunted Harlem clubs such as Connie's Inn and Small's Paradise, bringing with her performer friends Tallulah Bankhead, Jeanne Eagels, Beatrice Lillie, and DuPont heiress Louisa d'Andelot Carpenter. Holman virtually owned the torch song in New York, in part because she took it to both sides of the racial line. In 1929 she appeared in the Broadway musical review
The Little Show
and sang “Moanin' Low,” set in Harlem and sung as a black prostitute's plea, and danced to it in French apache style with Clifton Webb as her pimp. Although
Holman performed the song in tan blackface on Broadway, she was invited by the newly founded NAACP to do so that same year at the organization's fund-raiser, where her blackface was understood by some (such as Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP) to be an act of solidarity rather than an insulting appropriation. Billie recorded the same song eight years later, in 1937.

Holman was first known to Billie as a fan who frequented small Harlem clubs late at night after Libby's own stage shows ended. Her private life had recently put her in the headlines when her husband, Zachary
Smith Reynolds, the heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company, was shot to death following an argument with Libby when he learned that she was pregnant. She and Albert Bailey Walker, her presumed lover and her husband's best friend, were both charged with murder. But before legal action could go any further, Louisa d'Andelot Carpenter, Libby's sometime lover, turned up with bail money in the small North Carolina town where the trial was set, dressed—as was her custom—like a man, and whisked Libby away to seclusion in Delaware. Holman and Walker were ultimately cleared of murder and her husband's death declared a suicide when the Reynolds family asked that the case be dropped for lack of evidence and to quiet the scandal.

The party at Libby's took place on January 19, 1939.
As Billie discreetly put it, “Libby's husband had been dead awhile and she was celebrating her baby's birthday.” It was Libby's son Christopher's sixth birthday, and since the boy had a fondness for the swing music that he had heard on the radio, Holman hired Billie's old boyfriend Benny Goodman and his band with all its stars, including Lionel Hampton, Harry James, Gene Krupa, and Teddy Wilson, along with Billie and Helen Ward as singers. The guests were Libby's friends from New York society, Hollywood, and Broadway. The music was hot, the champagne flowing, and Billie, Libby, and Helen Ward together sang “Happy Birthday” to Christopher. But the party was a “dog,” as Billie would say, dead on its feet, with a somber tone set by the presence of a weeping Ria Langham, the wealthy New York socialite whom Clark Gable had just divorced in order to marry actress Carole Lombard.

The night was saved by Jimmy Donahue, first cousin and confidant of Barbara Woolworth Hutton, the richest and perhaps saddest woman in America, the million-dollar baby, the poor little rich girl of pop song fame. Jimmy himself was an heir to the same Woolworth fortune, and often accompanied Barbara on her travels where she found husbands, sometimes buying them noble titles to enhance their dicey credentials. Donahue fancied himself an actor and showman, and there were no limits to which he wouldn't go to put on a show, whether flaunting his
sexual orientation, buying his way into the middle of a nightclub review, publicly mocking Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, or living with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and financially supporting them when they were shunned by the King and Queen of England.
He later claimed to have had an affair with the duchess, though friends said Jimmy enjoyed his little jokes. Billie wrote that on the occasion of Libby's birthday gathering he restarted the party by stripping while Goodman's band accompanied him with the old burlesque favorite “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.”