Billie Holiday (5 page)

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“No Good Man,” chapter twenty of the published version of Billie's autobiography, was largely devoted to the horrors of living with her manager John Levy. Though he bought her (presumably with her money) the first home she had had since childhood in Baltimore, a fine house in St. Albans, Queens, her suburban dream turned into a prison: He beat her, she said, stole her money, abandoned her and her band on the road, and wrote performance contracts that made her responsible for all contingencies. For ten pages in the original draft of
Lady Sings the Blues
she spelled out a litany of flying bottles, punches, kicks, emergency room visits, abuse, scorn, and public humiliations. The chapter was leavened only by her many references to Tallulah Bankhead, the incendiary celebrity who had just dropped into her life, but these were also edited out.

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For seven weeks in the summer of 1948 Holiday was booked into the Strand Theatre on the same bill with Count Basie and the film
Key Largo
. Since she had just been released from jail after having served nine months for drug possession and had been shut out of club appearances by the cancellation of her police cabaret card, it was an important gig, restoring her name to marquees and paying her more than $3,878 a week ($38,000 in today's money). Billie was in the theater seven days a week and eleven hours a day, and onstage five times a day for forty-minute
sets. She was off for the two hours between each appearance, not time enough to change and go home, so she was confined to the dressing room and bars and restaurants close to the theater. Around the corner Noël Coward's
Private Lives
was playing onstage, starring Tallulah Bankhead, and when she wasn't there or rehearsing her radio show, she came by to see Billie: “The only kicks I got outside of the forty minutes on stage,” Holiday remarked.

Tallulah was the daughter of Will Bankhead, a wealthy Deep South politician who, despite being an important supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and prolabor legislation, managed to get reelected to Congress from Alabama many times and rose as high in the government as speaker of the House. She was born on the family plantation but refused to go to college, and with the indulgence of her father moved to New York to find work as an actress, then went on to England, where she quickly became famous for her eccentricities and sexual antics onstage and off. Back in the United States, Bankhead's tricks were less successful in helping her build a name, and she was forced to scramble for work in plays for which she had no affinity: She could turn
A Streetcar Named Desire
into a melodrama, or
Private Lives
into high camp that had gay audience members laughing in places never imagined by the playwright. Offstage she was infamous for her flamboyance and her dandyism, often confusing exhibitionism with glamour, living to shock and never herself be shocked. But
she was also deeply wedded to jazz—what other white woman at that time would have written a tribute to Louis Armstrong for
Ebony
titled
“The World's Greatest Musician,” which scolded black people for not taking Pops more seriously?

Billie had known Tallulah from her Harlem days when the grand lady came striding into cabarets dressed in a homburg hat and a man's suit or a flowing gown, loudly announcing her own presence at the door. Now the
two women began sharing their show business miseries over lunch at the Edison Hotel and joining in other liaisons in the dressing room (made public by Bankhead's insistence on leaving the door open).

“Banky was the only person I could talk to; also she was about the
only person John Levy couldn't scare away.” Something about Tallulah's Southern sass and her growled threats sent Levy running for the door, either in humiliation or fear. Tallulah was also the anonymous guest in Billie's book who made “a nasty crack” at Peggy Lee's party when Peggy gave Billie a song she had written for her. “
Well, godammit darling,” she said, “you should have written something, considering you stole every goddam thing Billie sings.” Billie quietly steered Tallulah out of the club, where Levy had fled in embarrassment. “‘Come on darling,' she said to me, ignoring Levy. ‘Let's go up to my place in the country. It's too goddam hot in New York anyway.'”

Then Levy made the mistake of interrupting.

“Billie's not going anywhere with you,” he said. “She's got a home of her own.”

“You call that place a home,” she said. “It's just another goddam hotel. Besides Billie is like me, she needs at least four men around her.”

Levy couldn't take it. He hollered at Banky. “Another word out of you and I'll kick you square in the ass.”

With this, Banky walked up to him and stared him down. “No you won't mister,” she said. “Not mine. You might kick Billie's, you bastard, but not mine and you know it.”

Billie put her in a cab. “Banky, listen, Billie loves you. Now please go home.”

The two women shared several qualities: They were reckless in their social lives, generous to a fault, and often squandered their talents. They were close, but unequally so. Bankhead seemed obsessed by her, and when the Strand run reached its end, she accused Billie of trying to duck her, and sometimes insisted on joining her when she heard she was going to a party or visiting a club to hear some music. She was said to have put up money for Billie's bail when she ran afoul of the law, and at one point she hired Billie's stepmother as her maid. When Holiday was
charged with possession of opium in California, Tallulah suggested that she and Billie call J. Edgar Hoover to ask for his help. But as Tallulah talked to Hoover, the request quickly changed to a demand.
An account of the three-way phone call was intended for chapter twenty-one of
Lady Sings the Blues
, but was cut.

After the story [of the drug arrest] hit the papers, the first person I heard from was Tallulah. She knew me and she knew Mr. Levy and she knew better than to believe all she read there. She didn't wait for no lawyers, she didn't think about hurting herself, she went to bat, starting at the top and working down.

She called J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Then she got both me and him on a three-way telephone hook up, with her in New York, Mr. Hoover in Washington and me in San Francisco.

Mr. Hoover tried to tell Banky it was out of his hands; that the FBI had nothing to do with the Treasury Department which handled narcotics, and besides I was not being prosecuted under Federal laws, but had been turned over to state authorities, and he couldn't interfere. But Banky didn't give up. She begged him to do anything he could for me. She told him what a fine girl I was, how I wasn't to blame. When he kept saying it was out of his hands, she gave him a lecture.

“What do you mean you and your darling G-Men go out and get the people who are smuggling this stuff in the boats and giving it to children? What do you mean it's out of your hands? This girl's life was almost ruined once because they sent her to jail. She makes millions of people happy. And she never hurt a soul except herself.”

“Sure,” she continued, “she may need a little perking up from time to time, darling, but who doesn't?”

“Cool it, Banky,” I tried to say, interrupting her . . . I thought this woman's going to fix it so they put me under the table.

Tallulah followed up the call with a letter to Hoover, shifting into another Bankhead mode entirely, this time the Southern belle:

I tremble when I think of my audacity in approaching you at all with so little to recommend me except the esteem, admiration and high regard my father held for you. I would never have dared to ask him or you a favor for myself but knowing your true humanitarian spirit it seemed quite natural at the time to go to the top man. As my Negro mammy used to say, “When you pray you pray to God, don't you?” . . . I had only met Billie Holiday twice in my life . . . and [I] feel the most profound compassion for her . . . she is essentially a child at heart whose troubles have made her psychologically unable to cope with the world in which she finds herself . . . poor thing, you know I did everything within the law to lighten the burden.

Sometime between 1949 and 1952 Bankhead found the need to distance herself from Holiday, perhaps beginning in 1951, when Tallulah charged one of her maids with stealing her money and took her to court, and her maid countered by threatening to publicly detail her drug use and sexual hijinks. The maid had begun dropping names to the press of those with whom Bankhead had had liaisons, such as saxophonist Sidney Bechet and Harlem playboy and club owner Dickie Wells. Bankhead didn't want to be seen as being close to a person with some of the same wounds and frailties as herself, and her own 1952 autobiography made no mention of Billie. When Holiday's editor sent Bankhead the section of
Lady Sings the Blues
that concerned her, she called him during his Thanksgiving dinner to threaten Doubleday with a lawsuit if her name appeared anywhere in it.

Billie then tried to reach her by phone several times, and when she failed,
she wrote Bankhead asking for an apology and demanding that she drop her objection to her mention in the book. If not, Billie threatened, she could call on her own maid and several performers who had witnessed them together at the Strand to publicly embarrass Tallulah.

When Billie died, Tallulah attended the funeral, and was seen leaning over the coffin, whispering to her.

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Poet Elizabeth Bishop is not mentioned in
Lady Sings the Blues
or for that matter in any other writings about Holiday, but she lingers in the margins as one of those women in the 1930s and 1940s who had a deep fascination with her. In 1944 Bishop wrote a series of four poems titled “Songs for a Colored Singer” that she hoped someone would set to music so that she could have Billie Holiday sing: “
I put in a couple of big words, just because she sang big words well—‘conspiring root,' for instance.” It was Bishop who introduced Billie to her harpsichord teacher, Yale professor Ralph Kirkpatrick, when she took her to his apartment one afternoon to hear him play Bach.
Kirkpatrick recalled her as one of the most intelligent listeners he had ever met.

While Billie put away the better part of a bottle of rum, I played Bach for her. Her face registered everything, and no manifestation of the music seemed to escape her . . . I could have used her like a precision instrument to monitor my performance of the G Minor English Suite simply by watching the subtle variations of expression on her face show me with an infinitely sensitive instrument to monitor what was coming off and what was not. Her own performances, heard through the haze of cigarette smoke in a nightclub, gave heartrending glimpses of a raw and bleeding sensibility condemned to exploitation on every side, unsustained by the protective bulwarks that education and privilege could have given her, and destined, as I knew from the day I first saw her, to end in the gutter.

Later, the two of them sat together at the keyboard. Since Billie could not read music, he played a piece through first, but only once, so she could sing it. “Holiday had
the most extraordinary gift of phrasing that I'd ever heard in a singer,” he said. “Once she heard it, she knew exactly how the tune should go.”

In retrospect, it is not so surprising that composers of classical music would be drawn to Holiday's phrasing, precise diction, and refined sense of the pulse of a piece of music. Leonard Bernstein wrote the song “Big Stuff” for Holiday to sing at the opening of his dance work
Fancy Free
, Ned Rorem acknowledged writing several songs with Holiday in mind, and Thomas Adès's
Life Story
calls for the singer to use Billie's late recordings as a model.

Louise Crane is not mentioned in Holiday's autobiography by name, but she is there under the name of Brenda, “a rich white girl from Fifth Avenue.” Crane was the daughter of a wealthy former governor of Massachusetts and a mother who was a founder of the Museum of Modern Art. Louise used her money to support artists and acted as an agent for a number of jazz musicians. She and Elizabeth Bishop had been classmates at Vassar, and were lovers for many years, visiting jazz clubs almost every night when they were living together in New York. It was Louise who introduced Elizabeth to Billie, and the two of them followed her from club to club wherever she performed. They had a large collection of Billie's records, some of which were privately recorded.

But
Crane's fascination with Holiday was far more serious than Bishop's. One night Elizabeth came home to find Billie in bed with Louise, and in a fit of fury threw Billie out of the apartment. Bishop and Crane then moved to Key West in 1937, but Louise traveled back and forth to New York, where Elizabeth was certain she was seeing Billie—and indeed she was, taking her shopping to Bonwit Teller and other midtown stores and giving her presents, including her first fur coat, a silver fox. Louise followed her around, picked her up after each night's work, and even underwrote her mother's restaurant, Mom Holiday's, on Ninety-ninth Street near Columbus Avenue.

She also booked Billie into the “Coffee Concerts” she presented at the Museum of Modern Art, which mixed folk, avant-garde, classical, and jazz music on the same programs. Billie was by now
ready to move away from the downtown slummers of Café Society and into real society and the concert hall. Everyone who attended her Coffee Concert
was enchanted by her songs, from the
New York Times
reporter who was there to poet Marianne Moore, who came at Louise's invitation, dressed in her black tricorn hat and cape, and was thrilled by Billie's “bacarole” [
sic
] opening number, “Fine and Mellow”—“and of course by her flame-colored skirt and Japanese Mei Lan Fang aestheticism.” Moore could famously bounce names and images off the wall, but in drawing a comparison between Holiday's performance and those of a legendary male Peking Opera singer whose female roles featured small but highly expressive hand gestures, she was right on the mark. Moore also asked Crane if she could provide her with “that intimate song of Billie Holiday's about the eyes” (undoubtedly “Them There Eyes”).