With Billie (23 page)

J
immy Rowles had to get himself ready for this interview. He had to get himself a couple of drinks, because if he is going to talk about Lady Day, he is going to need to feel good.

A few years ago he was disgusted with a lot of things. He was taking drugs and drinking heavily; he needed a pint of gin or vodka in the morning, just to find the energy to get out of bed and get started. He used to sit on the floor in the middle of the living-room and he’d put on the record
Lady in Satin
, which Billie made towards the end of her life.

He’d put on the record and sit there, and the full orchestra with all those strings would be playing, and her familiar voice would soak into him and he’d pray with all his heart that she’d come back and sing – just for one day.

‘One day, one day, it would be nice!’ he says. She could come to sing at the Forum Theater in Hollywood and he would make sure he got a good ticket for the show and he would be right there, close to the stage, watching her every movement, luxuriating in her sound, being happy again. ‘I knew it wouldn’t come through, but I used to pray anyway. And sit and curse and carry on. Funny thing, man!’

As Jimmy Rowles speaks about Billie, it’s as if she has stepped silently into the room where he and Linda Kuehl are sitting, the tape recorder catching his words.
^*
It’s as if Billie is standing there right in front of him and watching him, a milk glass full of gin in her hand and the same wistful smile on her face, which has hardly changed since the first photograph of her was taken when she was four or five years old.

And as Jimmy Rowles speaks, you begin to understand that he really did love to be close to this woman, to be part of her world, under her spell. He says, ‘I remember her turning around and looking and laughing, and maybe you’d play some tune and she’d hug you and say something like “I love you!” And if she said “I love you!”, boy, you heard it! She used to growl it out!… And she liked to have you tell her you loved her. Of course I told her! I told her all the time! Everybody used to tell her. You couldn’t help it! She’d do something and you’d have to say, “Oh Jesus Christ, how I love your ass!” She’d say something, do something, sing something, and all over the place people would be saying, “How I love her!” It just came out of people.’

Jimmy goes back to when he first met Billie, in Hollywood in May 1942. He was a young white boy, fresh from college and ‘still green, but starting in on getting a little darker’. He was playing piano in the Lee and Lester Young Band
^†
when he heard that Billie was coming to work with them at Billy Berg’s Trouville club. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t wait for her to arrive.

And suddenly there she was. Jimmy says, ‘I was in awe of her. When I first met that girl, she was one of the most
beautiful women I had ever seen. She was big, but she didn’t seem big. She was just strong, you know. Her skin was like satin, like the tune “Satin Doll”. Her skin was flawless. And she was graceful. Watching her was like watching a dream walk through the room. Even if she was jumping around with slacks on.’

The band used to rehearse together every morning and she came to every rehearsal and he got to know her style. ‘She liked pure harmony; she didn’t want to hear anything that would distract. She would stray ahead with her intonation and if you played something atonal like a chord, and threw it at her all of a sudden, she’d say, “Don’t
do that
! Don’t play that fucking chord! I can’t hear my note!” ’

But it was Billie’s sexuality that most impressed Jimmy Rowles, and it was her sexuality that he keeps referring to all through the interview. He says, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about her sex life. Whatever she wanted to do was all right with me … But sex had a lot to do with it, because she was a sexy singer. She sang from her crotch. You bet she had the greatest crotch in life. Now that I look back, I’m sorry I missed it.’
^‡

Billie never had female dressers or make-up girls to help her get ready for a show; she just liked to be there together with the band, joking, drinking, smoking, putting on her make-up, while all those men were milling around her. ‘Lady Day was like one of the cats,’ says Jimmy Rowles. ‘She had no complexes, no personality problems. She was open from the beginning. She was always the same.’

Very often she’d be naked, and at that time she had her hair dyed red and her pubic hair dyed red as well.
^§
‘And she’d just stand there with just a pair of shoes on, and it got
so that I loved her all the more because she was so gorgeous, beautiful … and every night I saw her body, every inch of her body.’ When she was in the dressing room she’d often call Jimmy Rowles over and say something like, ‘I want the chords to this tune, I want to sing this tune’, and he’d scribble down the chords and ‘whatever she wanted to sing, we had to make sure we knew it.’

When Jimmy met her, Billie still hadn’t started on heroin, so she was just smoking reefers and drinking gin. Jimmy thought she was probably more happy than she had ever been, or ever would be again, because things were going so well and on top of that she was working with Lester Young. Jimmy knew that when Lester played for her ‘She felt as if she was in her mother’s arms; she was always happy when Lester was playing for her because of what he did for her, because he was there with her. The two of them were perfectly matched. They belonged together.’

At first Jimmy presumed that Billie had come to Hollywood ‘to fuck Lester’,
^‖
but a couple of days after Billie arrived, she moved in with the other tenor player, ‘Bumps’ Mayer. He was ‘very even-minded, relaxed, nice, never any trouble unless things got real mean and then … he might kill somebody. He could take care of himself, that’s for sure. He was just a big strong bull, a docile bull. He had the deepest voice you ever heard, a down-in-here voice, and it was beautiful to hear him talk. He never got mad and they got along well together. He handled her very nicely.’

Jimmy Rowles remembers the first time he spoke to Billie on her own. It was about a week after she’d arrived in Hollywood and they had just finished rehearsing. He was sitting at the end of the bar and he saw her come in. He called to her, ‘Lady, can I buy you a taste?’

‘So she sits down beside me. I bought her gin and Coke. Can you imagine drinking that shit? I didn’t know what to talk to her about, but I remembered a tenor player called
Dick Wilson, and for some funny reason I asked her about Dick Wilson.’

‘She put her drink down. She asked me, did I ever know Dick Wilson? And she said, “I’m going to tell you something. I was going with Freddie Green and I was true to that motherfucker. But every time I saw Dick Wilson, I just had to take him out and fuck him!” ’

Jimmy Rowles was bowled over. ‘She just about wiped me out. I couldn’t believe that chick! The first time I had heard anything come out from a chick like that! Crazy chick! She had me then. What can you do after that? You have to love her!’

He was also fascinated by Billie’s relationship with Lester Young and tried to understand whatever it was that bound the two of them together.
^a
‘The way he and Lady Day got along was really strange. They’d go together like that praying mantis that devours the old man when they’re through making it. That’s my own image for them. He was a weird guy anyway. If there ever was a unique individual, this man was it! And his language! You couldn’t understand him unless you worked with him for three months.
^b
 … Lady was never all over him, like always sitting together. She went her way, he went his. But she’d say, “Well, Pres! I can smell him! I know he’s here and so it’s good!” ’

Jimmy Rowles would watch Billie come out of her dressing room after a show was over, ‘And she’s rough, and I mean rough!’ And then Lester would appear from behind a pillar, pigeon-toed, with his mincing walk and his high whispery voice. Jimmy Rowles says they had the funniest way of meeting: she’d be hugging him and then she’d move back.
‘They were like goldfish or something. And they went through their little trip. They had the funniest way of looking at each other. It was like brother and sister, but another thing. He was so strange, he was like a visitor. And she was, too. And you put the two of them together and it’s pretty wild. But they’d just touch and get their guns off and it was cool, until the next time they’d bump into each other around the club.’

Lester would say, ‘How are you, Miss Lady Day? Lady Day?’ Puffing out his pale cheeks and bobbing up and down in a long dark coat, a milk glass full of old Schenley bond proof whiskey clasped in his hand, and the flat black porkpie hat fixed to his head as if it grew there.

And Billie would say, ‘Hey, Buppa Baby,
^c
you motherfucker!’ and they’d be smiling and weaving and touching and parting, until the next encounter took place later in the night. Jimmy Rowles says it was ‘like accidental joy. And Billie was happy all the time.’

The stories continue. One time Billie had a birthday party. ‘Bumps’ Mayer was on his way out by then and Billie’s first husband, Jimmy Monroe, was just out of jail and had come back to claim her.
^d
Jimmy Rowles had nothing to say against Jimmy Monroe and didn’t want to put him down, but all the same he was ‘a little disappointed’ when he first met the man, because Jimmy Monroe was only ‘a teeny fella, a pimpy cat, high collar, a real conk, all that shit, a greasy little motherfucker’.

But at least Monroe was better than most of Billie’s other men. According to Jimmy Rowles, ‘The trouble was, Billie was a fool for cats. She’d go from one to another. She went through the whole zoo and finally she got to the leopard cage.’ By this he seems to be referring to Billie’s manager, John Levy, whom he calls ‘that hoodlum Mafia cat’.
^e

Anyway, here is Billie at her own birthday party, dancing around in a tiny room. Her records are playing on the gramophone and three or four white girls are there as well. Suddenly the door opens and in comes a man called Leo Watson, whom Jimmy Rowles describes as a ‘powerful little cat, strong like a gorilla and with a reputation for wildness’. Billie goes on dancing and, after a few drinks, Leo Watson gets louder and louder, and after a couple more he starts swearing.

Billie turns to Jimmy Monroe and she says, ‘You get that son-of-a-bitch out of here!’

So Monroe tries to talk to Leo Watson, which Jimmy Rowles says is ‘like trying to have a conversation with Gargantua, and he didn’t get nowhere’.

Meanwhile Billie is dancing and getting high and watching what is happening, and Leo Watson is getting louder and louder. Suddenly Billie picks up a batch of her own records, and she smashes them down on Leo’s head, almost knocking him through the floor. ‘Then she grabbed him, and the blood is coming out of his head and his hair is sticking up and he’s screaming and he’s bleeding, and she picked him up and said, “Open the door.” And they threw open the door for her, and she threw Leo Watson clear across the hall and he hit the wall, boom! And she slammed the door and came back and put another record on, and started dancing and snapping her fingers.’

Jimmy Rowles also tells the story of the New Year’s Eve celebrations at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood.
^f
‘It was about a minute to twelve, place was really packed and another band was playing, and there’s a curtain there closing off the kitchen and Lady Day spent a lot of time there with a one-legged chef. And all of a sudden there is this terrifying noise, this screaming, and she’s cursing and she’s throwing plates and tearing the kitchen apart, and it’s a big rumpus.

‘And from behind the curtain comes a cat I’ve never seen before, an
ofay
, and he’s got a white shirt on, no tie; and in one hand he’s got a basket of biscuits and he’s got a twelve-inch butcher’s knife buried in his left shoulder, about a quarter inch above his heart. And the blood is gushing out and his eyes are glazed, and he’s coming at me and he’s in shock, and he’s two feet from me and he’s going gagagaga! And I say, “Holy Christ!”, and I went right under the piano backwards clear across the stage!’

Jimmy tells another story about Billie getting badly beaten by John Levy, who was ‘jumping up and down on her stomach, beating the shit out of her … So she aches and burns and her crotch hurts, which is great because that’s where she sings from. So she starts to think what she’s going to sing, and she thinks she’s going to sing “My Man”! And she’s not even made up yet and Billy Berg is saying, “Jesus Christ, you’d better go down there and get that motherfucker off her so she can get up here to sing a tune.” ’

But neither Jimmy, nor Billie’s other pianist Bobby Tucker, is brave enough to go, and so they sit and wait until she emerges, just a few minutes before she is set to sing. And Jimmy is sure that ‘By the time she gets to the bandstand she hates the world. She’s madder than a bitch, and she turns to Bobby Tucker and says, “Strange Fruit”, but that’s the end of her show, the last tune she sings.’ Bobby Tucker tries to argue with her, and she turns her anger on him and slams the lid of the piano down and he just gets his hands away in time, as it goes
bam
! And she says, ‘Strange Fruit’, and he says, ‘OK!’