With Billie (12 page)

M
ae Barnes first got to know Billie in 1928, when they were both ‘doing the tables’ at a club called the Nest.
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Billie stood out from the other girls because she refused to sing dirty songs and only took tips with her hands. ‘She felt if she couldn’t make a dollar standing on her own two feet, she didn’t want it. And if a guy offered her ten dollars to go with him to a house, she’d say, “Shit! I can make that standing up!” Even for a hundred bucks, she’d refuse.’

Mae Barnes met Bobby Henderson around 1930 when he and Billie were sweethearts for a couple of years. She saw how different he was from the other men Billie went with later, the ‘hustlers, pimps and all kinds of smooth-talking cats,
rough-talking cats, who could protect her’. She said that Bobby Henderson was the only man Billie ever loved. He was someone who ‘showed her a lot of affection and he was a good man and a beautiful pianist … He had his own style.’

People spoke of Bobby Henderson as the warmest, kindest, gentlest person they knew.
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He was quiet in the company of strangers and he could be aloof in his way, but when he was working in a club he was very lively and would ‘juice a lot’ along with the best of them. He always got on well with everyone: with the girls who were singing or dancing, with the club owner and with the guests; he was even on friendly terms with difficult men such as the gangster Dutch Schultz and the pimp Dickie Wells.
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Away from the night-life of work, Bobby Henderson lived quietly with his mother on 109th Street, just across from Mayor La Guardia. He spent a lot of time alone, walking the streets of New York with a bottle of wine in his pocket to keep him company. He said that was the only way he could think about what he called the ‘process’ of his life and could listen to the stream of music playing inside his head. ‘I had a habit of walking … I know every path in Central Park; I know every path in every park in New York City. I’m one of the few people that walked from the Battery to the Bronx, from the Hudson River to the East River – you hear what I say? Through Chinatown. I don’t think there’s a street in New York I haven’t walked on. It’s a big city, but since I was a kid I knew it. And thank God I could always hear some music when I was walking, whether a jukebox
was playing or not, I was hearing sounds. And when I came to the piano at night, the girls used to say, “Where you been today? What you been doin’? You sound mighty fresh on those keys!” ’

Bobby’s mother was unmarried and already middle-aged when he was born in Harlem in 1910. He was her only child. She worked as a janitress and brought him up on her own, but she was visited regularly by a much younger man who ‘acted like a little chippy girl’ and ran a musicians’ club on 134th Street and 7th Avenue. Bobby had always known this man as Uncle Fred, but when he was seventeen a friend told him that Uncle Fred was his father. He kept this knowledge to himself for another ten years. He remembered the one occasion when Uncle Fred ‘showed me that he loved me’. He clapped Bobby on the shoulders and said enigmatically, ‘This is
my
boy.’
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Bobby said his mother was full of love and never judged him, but she was also very strict and very religious. She was keen for her son to go to college to study bookkeeping so that he might have a better life than the one she had known. But then, when he was twenty-two years old, he was sitting one day in the classroom with the music of Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady’ going round in his head and suddenly he asked himself, ‘Who is going to keep whose books in
this
administration?’

His teacher was calling to him, ‘Mr Henderson! Mr Henderson! Where are you, Mr Henderson?’

And right then he
knew
what he had to do and he said, ‘I can’t tell you, Mr Marquet, but give my books to the Principal with my best regards, because I’m leaving school right now!’ And all the class turned round and laughed at him, but he walked out and never returned, even though he later admitted that it took ‘a lot of guts’ to do it.

He remembered how he hopped on the back of one of those open streetcars and rode right up to Harlem. He told his mother what he had done and ‘The tears came down and I grabbed her and hugged her and explained to her, “Mama, I’m playing music now!” ’ He had already been earning seven dollars a night by playing at parties and he was sure he could earn even more.

Not long afterwards a man called Jack Sneed
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took him one morning to Pod and Jerry’s. It was an integrated club where the ‘sporting element’, Negroes with plenty of money, mixed with white people from downtown who also had plenty of money. Bobby Henderson said that in those days the area was ‘completely integrated and people could walk on the side-streets anywhere and nobody was knocked on the head’. And in spite of Prohibition, at Pod and Jerry’s there was always a jug of corn liquor in the corner, made by people from the South who knew how to make real corn liquor. It gave you ‘an appetite like a horse’. The musicians would come and ‘hit the jug’ and send out for another milk bottle full, which cost a quarter for a quart.

So there was Bobby Henderson at Pod and Jerry’s and the boss, Jerry, came over and said, ‘Hello, son, can you play the piano? That’s Willie “The Lion” Smith
^a
you see there. He’s one of the greatest piano players playing. Well, Willie’s made plenty of money, and Willie’s going to move downtown to another spot … So, play a tune, kid.’

Bobby Henderson was very scared, but he said to himself, ‘Play what you can play and that’s all you can do.’ He started with ‘I Got Rhythm’ and after a while he relaxed and went on for about twenty choruses.

Somebody said, ‘Who is this kid?’

Somebody else said, ‘You’re all right, kid!’

And the boss said, ‘Don’t stop there, kid. Play a little blues. I like you. What you drinking? You want the job?’

So Bobby turned up again at eleven o’clock that night. There was a mirror fixed over the piano so that he could watch the girls dancing and picking up the money between their legs. ‘I’m looking around and my eyes are poppin.’ But the girls who were singing loved him at once for the way he could transpose to any key they wanted, even to the difficult F sharp. ‘Nobody played for us like you play for us,’ they said.

There was a waiter who had the job of gathering up all the money and putting it into an ‘entertainers’ fund’ that could be shared out at the end of the night. This waiter had to make sure that the girls didn’t secretly stuff dollar bills down their fronts, or hide them ‘you know where’, and as the night moved on the waiter was putting more and more money into Bobby’s pockets. By the time the club was closing in the early morning he had earned himself $150.

Bobby Henderson went home and, before falling into bed, he emptied the money from his pockets onto the kitchen dresser. His mother woke up and looked at ‘all those twisted-up twenty-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, two-dollar bills, one-dollar bills and she let out a yell. “What’s the matter, Mom? House on fire?” ’ he said, and explained that he had not stolen the money and she could go right out and get herself some new dresses.

Later that same day he took ten of his own dollars and bought a bottle of dry white wine. Then he walked to the boating lake in Central Park and hired a boat and rowed out as far as he could go. He sat there quietly for a long time, thinking about this sudden change in his fortunes and the new direction his life was taking.

It was not long after this that he met Billie Holiday. He thought it was at Dickie Wells’ Clam House, but it might have been at Brownie’s next door. In those days the clubs were ‘so close together and you only needed twenty-five
cents to open a new one’. He remembered that Gladys Bentley
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was singing and she was dressed as a man.

Anyway, Billie was there as well and she and Bobby were briefly introduced. Her pianist, a tall girl called Dot Hill, said, ‘Why don’t
you
play a tune, Bobby? What are you going to play?’

Bobby Henderson hesitated and then he played ‘Sweet Sue’. He said he did something so simple ‘in there’ that he thought the other musicians might laugh at him, and in the second chorus he added ‘some tiny things’.

Billie was standing and watching and she said, ‘Hey, do that again. Just what you did.’

He turned around to look at her and that was the first time he really saw her, ‘because she was interested in what I was doing’. And what he saw was ‘this well-built girl over there. You could say she was statuesque. She was well-groomed, man, and she was a woman, a woman you would admire.’

So he played the song again and Billie listened and said, ‘That’s it! That’s what it is!’

Later they all went up the street and stopped off at a couple of places, and Bobby played and she sang and they ended up at Pod and Jerry’s. When Billie sang a song there, Jerry liked her and said, ‘Why don’t you come on up here and work?’ And so she was hired.

Bobby Henderson loved to play for Billie because ‘you could go anywhere and she’d be there, man. Perfect time and perfect diction … I used to play full chords for her. I had a knack, I guess … and I could stay just behind her, so you don’t pay no attention to the piano and you just listen to the singer.’

And that was the start of their love affair.
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Bobby said, ‘We had a liking for each other, me and Billie. I never met anybody like her. She was more of a hip woman than I was
a hip young man. I was just a square. She was
a woman
, and it surprised me when I knew she was sixteen years old.’

He introduced Billie to his mother, because he wanted his mother to know whom he liked and to know that this was the greatest woman he had ever met in his life. His mother was ‘as gracious to her as she would be to anybody’. She fixed Billie coffee and breakfast and they all talked together.

In return, Billie sometimes invited Bobby to the apartment where she was living with her mother. Bobby thought Sadie was a ‘wonderful woman, a very simple woman, kind-hearted’, but as soon as the two of them were together, all sorts of old wounds began to open up and Sadie ‘made Billie so mad you’d think she was going through the roof … Billie was burning at her mother, and her mother was burning at her.’ They quarrelled over small things, like where had Billie been and why didn’t she come home and where was she working? Sadie would sometimes try to tell Bobby why she felt her daughter was in the wrong, but he refused to take sides. ‘I made up my mind to keep my mouth shut because you don’t know what they are really arguing about. I just said I didn’t like to hear them hollering and arguing, and so I’d rather leave. I always had that respect for people. I’d want to get away from there because it’s private and it don’t have nothing to do with me.’

Bobby said he learnt how to avoid arousing Billie’s temper. ‘She had a temper,’ but she had the ‘right kind of patience too’. This was one of the reasons why musicians and entertainers liked her, and as they got to know her they ‘got to know that she had a way of her own and mind of her own’. For his part, Bobby felt ‘She respected me because I respected her mind. I might have asked her questions in my mind, but I never questioned her actions or decisions. I just said, “Well, she’s got to have a reason for it”, and I tried to be understanding. In her way she had to fight a lot of things that a lot of us didn’t have to. She had to fight her way and she wasn’t going to let nobody stop her.’

He never saw Billie ‘come to blows’ with anyone, but he
remembered the time when he went with her to an after-hours spot in Washington. It was a crummy old nightclub at the top of some stairs that creaked so loudly it was like a scene from a horror movie. When you got there, the bar was nothing but a plank propped up at either end. But right in the centre of the room there was a full-size Steinway grand, all wrapped up in blankets.

The owner of the joint was called Louis and he was waiting for Fats Waller to arrive.
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When he did eventually arrive, somebody ‘took the wrappers off the piano and it lit up the whole crummy joint. You could just see it shine … And Fats had his Derby hat on and he sat down at this Steinway and, brother, you never heard no record like this cat played!’ And then Bobby and Fats sat together, and Bobby played the treble and Fats played the bass, ‘And this was an honour, man, to play anything when Fats was playing. And I’m hitting the right notes and the right chords.’