With Billie (39 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
Some people liked Louis McKay and felt that he helped Billie as well as he could. Others did not like him and blamed him for much of her unhappiness and her financial troubles during the last years of her life. He himself was never a great talker, but you can hear him speaking about Billie in the transcript of a telephone conversation between himself and William Dufty’s wife Maely, which was secretly recorded in February 1958.
The telephone conversation is an eleven-page document that was bundled in among Linda Kuehl’s other research
papers. The note on the first page states that it took place ‘at time of recording session,
Lady in Satin
’. There is also a little scribbled note in the margin, which reads ‘
obligato
to Yvonne Chavedd’, which I suppose might refer to the person who arranged the technicalities of having the telephone bugged.
Below is a slightly shortened version of this conversation, leaving out the sections that are simply too muddled to follow:
MCKAY:
Maely, just since the last time I been out there, and I only went away and stayed five weeks, who’s she partying with? Who’s she giving it to? Because she can get it kind of easy. I’m through with her. That bitch is going to see some bad days around here. I put the skids on her tonight …
MAELY:
Well, how you gonna put the skids on her?
MCKAY:
All the money I made and all the things I bought her … This girl ain’t never had a dime to buy nothing, Maely. I couldn’t even buy a car with this woman in the last eight years … You know that.
MAELY:
Well, I’m just flabbergasted about this. But don’t you go and do nothing like you talk, because that’s going to be bad, baby!
MCKAY:
I know it’s going to be bad! I’m going to end it all! Ain’t going to let nobody make a fool out of me, good as I’ve been to this woman … She took the money and used it up … She go around here and give away all her cunt and everything and don’t get no money for it … I don’t do those kind of things, Maely. I do sell what I got!
MAELY:
Don’t talk to newspapers and stuff. Five hundred dollars aren’t worth anything to anybody.
MCKAY:
Seven hundred dollars … On top of that, the principle is involved.
MAELY:
What principle? She’ll pay it off!
MCKAY:
Maely, I’m a man. I can do things that this woman can’t do. I ain’t never had a woman like this.
Milira, Juanita, every woman I had was great personalities, they is great people. They didn’t do no skunky things. How come I gotta take this from this bitch here? This low-class bitch! I ain’t never see a bitch with that much low class in my whole fucking life. Going fuck around with everybody in town and … fuck me and my money up, too.
MAELY:
You know she don’t fuck around. She just sits at home all night and all day.
MCKAY:
You know I got the wire. I know what this woman done … Fuck the seven hundred dollars, I ain’t involved with the goddamn money. I want some of her ass this morning for playing me cheap. If I got a whore, I get some money from her or I don’t have nothing to do with the bitch. I don’t want no cunt. I’m too old for cunt. I’m forty-nine years old. What I want with her cunt? If I wanted some cunt I’d marry somebody your age and we’d get along. I could make a hundred dollars and she could make twenty-five dollars and I’d be happy. I can make myself two or three grand a week. Tell you the truth, I’m frantic, I’m crazy right now.
MAELY:
Don’t be crazy. You’d better cool down and you better not do something to Holiday, because you know where it’s going to wind up.
MCKAY:
Holiday’s ass in the gutter in the East River somewhere! I’ll get someone else to do it! Cheap bitch! She’s been getting away with too much shit! I just got the wire and I can’t stand it … I’ll catch her somewhere and whip her all over the goddamn street. Then go and beat the goddamn case
*
in Philadelphia. I don’t give a goddamn about that case in Philadelphia. Shit! That case been beat a long time
ago! People worried about that case! I ain’t worried about it. I ain’t worried about that case at all, because the right people are behind that case!
MAELY:
What do you mean?
MCKAY:
Every motherfucker I know tried to get me to turn that bitch loose and let her go ahead and get some time, don’t worry about it.
MAELY:
You mean she’s supposed to do time?
MCKAY:
She ain’t going to do no time. I mean that’s what happened two years ago. They told me to split her out from the case and then cut loose. ‘No,’ I said, ‘she can’t make it!’
MAELY:
You know I wouldn’t believe things that people say to you that Holiday said, Lou.
MCKAY:
This is action. I got some photographs of her. They just give me the negatives. And I wasn’t asking to spy on this bitch. They gave me the negatives and I got them under the light here now. I don’t like that kind of stuff …
†
MAELY:
Louis, what can she have done to get you going like that?
MCKAY:
I got enough. This bitch. I got enough to finish her off and go downtown and take a chance on my liberty.
MAELY:
You think of killing somebody for seven hundred dollars, somebody you lived with for eight years and married.
‡
MCKAY:
I ain’t talking about killing her. I’m going to do her up so goddamn bad she’s going to remember as long as she lives.
MAELY:
Well, for heaven’s sake don’t do her up, because if you’re doing her up she can’t earn a dime!
MCKAY:
She ain’t earning anyway. She ain’t even making
a living. She owe the government four and a half thousand dollars and I ain’t going to pay a quarter … I’m going to let her go ahead and rock it out … I hate her. How can you just sit up and tell me a lie, and you know I know the difference the next day when the people get to me?
MAELY:
Well, she’s so mad with me because she says that you said we were sleeping together.
§
MCKAY:
How could I?… You ain’t no chippie
‖
and you got a family … That woman owe you a thousand dollars right now.
MAELY:
That’s right! She says she’s mad with me. She won’t talk to me because we sleep together.
MCKAY:
I say, when she talk of me fucking her, I say, ‘Why don’t you stop using this white woman’s money,’ that’s what I told her! I say, ‘You ain’t earnt fifteen cents. In the last six months you’re about four or five thousand dollars behind with me now … You ain’t ever paid my salary and you never did give Maely nothing for working for you …’ She never gave me a quarter. I took care of her. I kept that woman alive. Kept her away from junkies in the street and on the corners. Fronting it myself for years. And here this bitch turns skunky overnight!
a
MAELY:
Well, if I knew where she is, I’d tell her not to go home, because I don’t think you two should meet tonight!
MCKAY:
Shit! I’m going to tear this joint up with that whore’s ass. Do you know Alice’s mother’s phone number?
b
MAELY:
Louis, get some sleep, huh?
MCKAY:
I ain’t even sleepy, so help me God. I need a
dexie to keep me awake a little longer. This house is so damn cold, Maely honey. I’m freezing to death, so help me God … She don’t mean a damn thing to me. I said, ‘Well, baby, you and I let’s go ahead and get a divorce and stop fighting.’
MAELY:
Well, you know also that I love her and that’s it … She don’t know how much I love her. Louis, take care. Take it easy, darling. Let me hear from you, huh?
MCKAY:
When I start work on her she’ll know. I work on her when she get to the door …
MAELY:
Take care, darling. Take it easy. MCKAY: Like something from Mars or something …
MAELY:
Well, take it easy, darling.
MCKAY:
Make both them motherfuckers commit suicide this morning …
MAELY:
Don’t do that! Not my friend!
MCKAY:
And I’m doing all right now and if I’m going to stop doing all right, I’m going to end it all. Crack this bitch’s head or something. OK, honey?
MAELY
: OK.
MCKAY
: How’s Bill
c
doing?
MAELY
: What? Bill’s OK. He’s getting better. Everybody’s getting better. It’s too cold for him to go outside, so he’s raising hell inside. Take care, darling, and we’ll talk. OK?
Now, if that is the voice of Louis McKay talking about his wife in February 1958, it is also interesting to listen to him giving his account of his relationship with Billie during that same time, in an affidavit that was presented on his behalf to the Surrogates Court, towards the end of 1959.
This was the first of a number of legal battles in which Louis McKay was involved after he had inherited his wife’s estate. It seems that as soon as the lawyer Earle Zaidins had
learnt of Billie’s death, he rushed to the hospital to tell McKay that Billie owed him some $12,000 in legal fees. Zaidins said he was prepared to waive this debt in exchange for a 10 per cent share of her estate and he immediately wrote out a contract that McKay signed.
d
McKay quickly realised his mistake and, with Billie’s lawyer Florynce Kennedy acting on his behalf, took Zaidins to court. McKay did not appear in court in person but, with Florynce Kennedy’s help, he produced an affidavit in which he explained everything he felt was relevant about his relationship with Billie Holiday and her relationship with Zaidins.
e
The language used in the affidavit is very formal and controlled. McKay is made to sound like an elder statesman as he tells the story of his love for Billie and how he tried, but ultimately failed, to protect her from her own vices and weaknesses. He explains that the task has been hard, and ‘those who would judge me must have lived through what I have gone through with Billie Holiday’.
According to the text of the affidavit, McKay moved to New York during the 1930s and there he met Billie and ‘dated her’ when she was just sixteen. He ‘befriended her and her mother’ and when Sadie was worried about her
wayward daughter, she ‘would send me to bring Billie home, or to see about her’.
f
He said they met again early in 1951, while Billie was appearing at the Club Juana in Detroit, and within two weeks McKay had taken on the role of manager. In McKay’s written version of that meeting, he was working in a car plant and ‘Billie Holiday came to me for help, threatening suicide if I didn’t help her. I told her I wouldn’t leave my job in Detroit and abandon my obligations there, until she was ready to kick her drug habit. I refused to go on the road with her until this was done.’
Whatever the truth might have been, it was clear that Billie was at first overjoyed to share her life with McKay and was quick to tell the world of her new-found love. As Nat Hentoff wrote in February 1952, ‘A large part of Billie’s new sense of security and consequent ease is due to her husband and advisor Louis McKay. In fact, Billie’s personal life has become so ordered that she is thinking now of retiring in two or three years because she just wants “to be a housewife and take care of Mr McKay”.’
g
The relationship was obviously good for her career as well, because people remarked that she was ‘singing better than anyone had heard her in the last few years, demonstrating a new sense of responsibility and co-operativeness’.
h
However, the happiness did not last for long and within a couple of years the relationship between Billie and McKay had become increasingly complicated, difficult and violent. Some people, such as Jimmy Rowles, who saw the couple together from a distance, felt that McKay really was looking
after Billie, but those who were closer to the domestic realities were less hopeful. Carl Drinkard explained how McKay organised Billie’s heroin supply as a way of controlling her. And Memry Midgett realized that McKay was using Billie’s money to buy land and property, all of which he purchased in his own name. One of his first acquisitions was the house in Queens. In 1956 McKay bought a share of the 204 Club in Chicago, and the bistro attached to the club was called the Holiday Room. McKay told Billie he intended her to play there for several months every year, but the promise never took shape.
i
It was clear that by the time of their arrest on a narcotics charge in Philadelphia in March 1956, the relationship between Billie and McKay was in serious difficulties. The pianist Corky Hale, who played for Billie in Las Vegas in the summer of 1956, said, ‘I don’t know what the hell Louis was doing. He was out running with girls. He put her down all the time … She wasn’t on any kind of dope at all. She was drinking I don’t know how much gin … Louis was terrible, horrible. He made fun of her, but I don’t think she was even aware of it because she was so out of it.’
However, according to the affidavit, in 1957 McKay and Billie were living harmoniously together in New York when they both met a young lawyer called Earle Zaidins. ‘We didn’t take him very seriously,’ said Louis in his written statement. ‘He said he was a jazz fan and was always following us around and offering to help us. At the beginning we thought he was just clumsy, like an overgrown friendly puppy … He hung around our place sometimes when he wasn’t wanted.’
McKay went on to explain that after about nine months Zaidins began to get familiar with Billie when her husband was not around. ‘Billie would laughingly report that Zaidins was making passes at her. She would say, “Would you believe that fat faggot Earle Zaidins tried to talk sex with me? What’s his story?” ’
At this point in his statement McKay felt it necessary to explain that ‘she always told me about people like Earle Zaidins, unpleasant though it was. I didn’t take it very seriously because many jazz fans confused their admiration of Billie Holiday with their own romantic desires or problems … I realised Zaidins was nervous. He bit his fingers deeply.’