With Billie (13 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
All the while Billie was standing up at the bar. Suddenly Bobby caught sight of her throwing a glass full of liquor at a man’s head and missing him by a fraction and just missing the piano players as well. He realised that the man had insulted her by saying ‘something derogatory’ and so she had fought back. He understood that.
Bobby spoke of the love he felt for Billie. He said there were times when she ‘let her guard down and she was like a little girl. It was as if nothing had ever happened in her life.’ He talked of how she laughed ‘from the bottom of the soles of her feet to the top of her head, plus some’. He loved to watch her eat. ‘She was very dainty and Billie was – what could you say? – a full-bodied woman, but she was very graceful in anything she did. She was very clean, very neat … the way she handled a fork. We’d be in a restaurant and we’d be eating. Somebody would say, “Hey Bobby, what’s the matter
with you?” I’d say, “Nothing.” But deep in my mind I’m looking at her and saying, “You do things in a beautiful way.” ’
They used to sit up till all hours talking to people and Bobby said it was obvious that Billie had problems, because she was always drawn to other people with problems. ‘She was attracted to people that way and that’s where her patience came in.’
Bobby knew that Billie was one of the greatest people he ever met in his life, ‘God rest her.’ He said, ‘If we were both born in a different set of circumstances it would have been a lot different. We had a beautiful thing there.’ But at the same time he realised he could not have done more than he did, ‘Because I couldn’t have fought the people that abused her. I wasn’t cut out for that. I would have wound up getting hurt or washed away.’
Billie never told him much about her childhood, but he could sense what a difficult time she had experienced and how isolated she had been. He felt that ‘Had I been a woman in her boots, I would probably have fought in the same way … She saw a lot of things that a lot of us didn’t have to see. She had to fight and she wasn’t going to let anyone stop her … When I came here I was lonely, but maybe I had some protection Billie didn’t have. I didn’t have to go through the things that she had to go through. And she was a girl and that made it tougher for her.’
The last place where they worked together was the Bar Harbor in Utica, New York, towards the end of 1932. In the interview Bobby did not explain what happened next, but the newspapers were full of reports about the break-up between Billie and her ‘fiancé’. It was around that same time that Bobby failed to turn up for an important recording session arranged by the record producer John Hammond. He then went into self-imposed exile
e
and pretty well disappeared from the jazz scene until he was rediscovered
and recorded by John Hammond in 1956. He appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957.
Bobby Henderson died in December 1969. According to an obituary that appeared in the
Albany Times Union
, ‘There is only one good thing to say about his death. He knew. He really knew, that a whole lot of people loved him.’
*
Mae Barnes was a dancer and singer who started in show business when she was twelve years old, touring Europe with Ethel Whiteside, a ‘big fat blonde’ who had a group called Ethel Whiteside and her Ten Pickaninnies. In the late 1930s she performed by special invitation for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their Waldorf Towers residence. Her most famous song was a very slow version of ‘Sunny Side of the Street’, with Lester Young. The Nest later changed its name to Monroe’s Uptown House when Clarke Monroe was running it. Mae Barnes said that when Billie was singing there, ‘She was doing everything that Louis Armstrong was doing, doing every song that Louis ever did. She’d slide and do the Louis run as he’d do it on the trumpet, but she’d do it with her voice.’
†
Bobby Henderson (Robert Bolden Henderson) was born in New York City in 1910 and died in 1969. He was interviewed in December 1967 by Millard Lampell and John Hammond, in preparation for the Third World Cinema film
The Billie Holiday Story
, which never got made.
‡
Not to be confused with the trombone player, singer, arranger and composer of the same name. Mae Barnes said of Dickie Wells the pimp, ‘He was a light, beautiful boy. He was smooth and he had line and jive and he was a bitch. Classy. He was a big pimp. Dickie and Billie were friends, but Dickie never had a coloured woman. Rich white women were taking care of him. When he died, his mother had his clothes changed every day while he was in that coffin, right down to his shoes and socks. He was in Salem church and you couldn’t get near that church. A girl I know said, as she looked at him in his coffin, “I don’t know. He’s dead, but he’s sharp.” ’
§
Bobby Henderson explained the situation by saying, ‘He loved my mother, but he had a family that was supposed to be on the other side of the railway tracks, and they thought my mother was not good enough for him. This was the only thing I didn’t respect about him, because I would have fought them and lived on the other side of the tracks with her. But I could understand, I guess.’
‖
‘A cat who played the four-string guitar and who was one of the most mischievous cats in the whole world, on the whole block, and the most hippest too,’ said Bobby Henderson.
a
Duke Ellington said, ‘The Lion has been the greatest influence on most of the great piano players who have been exposed to his fire, his harmonic lavishness, his stride … I can’t think of anything good enough to say about him.’ A vital figure in the Harlem stride school, he was born in New York in 1897 and died in 1973.
b
Gladys Bentley was a lesbian singer who was very open about her sexuality and wore men’s clothes. She was born in 1907 and died in 1960.
c
According to the guitar player Jack Sneed, who was selling meat pies outside the Musicians’ Union in Los Angeles when he wrote to Linda Kuehl in May 1976, ‘Bobby fell like a tree when he met Billie.’
d
Bobby had long been an admirer of Fats Waller and had just met him a few days previously. ‘We went out on the town and we stayed two days and I found I couldn’t drink with Fats, I couldn’t eat with Fats, I couldn’t do nothing with Fats, ’cos anything you did, Fats done better and much more.’ When Fats Waller died in 1943, Bobby Henderson was considered his successor and was acknowledged as ‘one of the other immortals of the piano’.
e
He changed his name to Jody Bolden, in honour of his namesake, the famous New Orleans cornet player ‘King’ Buddy Bolden (1877–1931), who was arrested for dementia in 1906 and was committed to a mental institution in 1907, where he remained until his death.
Aaron and Claire Lievenson and Irene Kitchings
‘Afternoon of a Faun’
O
n 8 December 1971, the pharmacist Aaron Lievenson and his wife Claire sat side by side at their home at 736 Riverside Drive, New York City, and were both busy with very different memories of the past.
Aaron was the first to speak. Before saying anything else he felt it was important to explain that ‘Billie Holiday was someone who was only happy when she had a drink or a fix. This I know. She was a customer of mine.’
His wife Claire suddenly interrupted him to announce, ‘At that time in her dressing room she used to wear a lot of Tweed perfume. And I’d say, “Goddamn, Billie! All this Tweed!” ’
Then Aaron was talking again. He met Billie in 1939 when the war was just beginning. He had a pharmacy and she used to come in to buy things.
*
That would be about
midday, and if the weather was nice she often appeared wearing a housecoat and slippers, which he said was not something you would expect. Presumably she’d gone home after a long night and then, just before going to bed, she remembered she needed something, headache pills perhaps, or bicarbonate of soda. She called Aaron ‘Doc’, and she was always very civil to him. He said she didn’t really stand out from anybody else in the neighbourhood, except that she was attractive.
Aaron’s pharmacy was on the most densely populated block in Harlem, on the corner of 142nd Street and 8th Avenue. He was there from 1933 up to 1959, when all the slum dwellings were knocked down, leaving only the Church of St Charles standing. In those early years a few white families lived quite close by on 135th Street, but then they sold their businesses and moved on. White doctors continued to practise, but they were mostly refugees who had recently arrived in the city and needed somewhere to begin. And there were Jews too, running laundries, candy stores, that sort of thing. A Jewish dentist lived on 141st Street.
Aaron said he loved being in Harlem. The atmosphere was very friendly and most people were not hustlers; they were simply off every day doing menial jobs because that was all that was available for them. There wasn’t really any crime, although there might be a ‘knifing now and then, but nothing special’. He said that anyway the black people in the city were being raped and mugged long before the white people ever were, it was just that the news only made it to the papers if the victims were white.
Of course you had to be rough to live in Harlem, just to get along. Everybody was rough, and as a pharmacist Aaron was up against the ‘usual things’, such as pilfering and the drink problem. You could smell the alcohol in the streets and the police would pick up the drunks in their squad cars and take them away. The police used to stop off at the nearby candy store to collect their weekly share of money from the gambling rackets. They all took bribes; it was part of their job.
Aaron had known Billie’s mother Sadie ever since he arrived in Harlem. He found her a marvellous woman, short and stout and very jolly, with a strong southern accent. She worked in service and used to come to the shop almost every day, because she’d go to the stamp machine to mail letters and then she’d buy a few household items as well. She never mentioned that she had a daughter.
Then Billie turned up. She and her mother had moved to 142nd Street. The house was on the right-hand side, either number 232 or 242. Aaron thought Billie always seemed high, although he had no idea what she was taking.
At this point Aaron wanted to make it clear that although he wasn’t interested in gossip, he knew Billie was hustling, selling her favours to a number of men. He had the story from Willie Jones, who never told a lie. Willie Jones used to work in the grocery store right next to the pharmacy, and one time he delivered groceries to Billie and she propositioned him, and he had sex with her then and on several other occasions, in her mother’s house. Then there was the famous white band leader, Blue Barron, who played at the Strand and the Paramount; he went upstairs, too. And there were others, lots of them. There were goings-on all the time. Aaron found it odd that he never heard the neighbours talking about what was happening; only Lorraine who worked for him in the pharmacy luncheonette, she talked.
Now it was Claire Lievenson’s turn. She said she met Billie in 1934 in the Hot Cha on 134th Street. She was an actress and a ‘bachelor girl’ at the time and her maiden name was Leybra. Along with the singer Carmen McRae,
†
she became a close friend of Billie’s. Billie was a few years older and they ‘adored her’. As Claire said, ‘She was so elegant. I don’t give a damn if she was high, it was a gas to watch this bitch walk up to the microphone. She had a very feminine walk, short steps, feminine, and she just melted into the
microphone. BOOM. And most times the eyes would be closed and when she opened them, she was such a magnetic thing to look at and to hear, you were spellbound by her. Even when she was
high
, she can still give it to you, baby. I don’t know where it came from … I felt she knew she was doing her thing for you, giving it to you, to you, giving it to you; this is me, my other me, sharing it with you … And when she finished her last tune she smiled that beautiful smile of hers. She didn’t bend down in no low bends or that shit, no: a beautiful smile, a lovely smile, a big open smile, and her head would go down just a little bit …
‘She didn’t have much of an education, but that didn’t matter … She was very good-hearted. She was kind. Anything you wanted and she had it, you could have it. She gave me a ring I admired. That was in her dressing room on 52nd Street, and Carmen was mad because she didn’t get one …
‘We used to go back into her dressing room and she really laughed when she was really herself … All we ever did would be to sit there and look at her, but she didn’t care. When she was herself she’d tell a lot of jokes about her boyfriends. I’d talk about being an actress and Carmen would talk about her singing.’
Sometimes Billie was moody and she’d say, ‘I don’t feel good.’ She would stay in her mother’s house and not open the door for anybody. But when she did feel good she was ready for anything; singing through the night and drinking through much of the day. She used to collect Claire from her place on 142nd Street, ringing three times on the doorbell and waiting for her to come down. Claire lived on the fourth floor and Billie said, ‘I ain’t making
no
steps. Now, you bitch, when I ring three times, you come on down. Be cool.’