With Billie (28 page)

So why is it that the story of Billie’s life has constantly been portrayed as that of a particularly hopeless drug dependency and a steady slide into artistic decline, despair and moral degradation? Why is it that even the briefest account of her on the back of a CD cover, or the caption to a photograph, will invariably include a mention of her heroin addiction, although others of her generation who were equally (or much more heavily) addicted are allowed to be cut free from the burden of their particular troubles?
^a

According to a long interview she gave to the black magazine
Ebony
, in July 1949, when Billie came out of prison in March 1948 she thought she had paid her debt to society for her wrongdoings and would now be given a fresh start. Instead, that was when her troubles started in earnest:

It is true that after her release from prison, Billie was constantly being brought before the courts of law on one pretext or another, and several people who worked with her attested to the fact that the police and other government agents were always at her shows – heckling, threatening, raiding her dressing room, making embarrassing enquiries at her hotel and spreading rumours at the clubs where she was booked to sing. Billie told the trumpeter Buck Clayton that the FBI agents, ‘young ones with crewcuts … would come up to her and say, “OK, Lady Day, we know everything you’re doing and when the time comes, we’re going to get you!” Then they’d walk away. But they’d heckle her like that. She never knew when one was going to approach her, so she always had fights with the police.’ Clayton said, ‘She was very bitter about not being able to play, because they let other people play places, like Stan Getz – he got caught, but he got permission to play afterwards.’
^b

After her imprisonment Billie was four times arrested on drugs charges that could not be properly substantiated. On top of that, a number of individuals jumped on what seemed like a bandwagon of recrimination and brought civil actions against her. Ed Fishman, who was briefly her manager in 1948 while she was trying to break free from Joe Glaser, filed a $75,000 breach-of-contract suit against her, claiming that this was the commission he would have received if she had kept him on. Jake Ehrlich, the lawyer who got her off the second drugs charge in 1949, sued her for failure to pay his fees. And several club owners sued her, or threatened to sue her, for failing to honour a contract, no matter what her circumstances were at the time. She was also taken to court for causing grievous bodily harm when she threw a plate that hit a woman on the leg.

Billie was repeatedly denied her Cabaret Card, in spite of
applying for it to be reinstated on at least three separate occasions. The first time was in March 1949 when she was offered a rumoured $3,000 a week to appear at the Royal Roost club, just so long as she had her card. She tried to sue the New York Police Department, but lost the case. The presiding judge, Aaron J. Levy, said that the police ‘deserved commendation’ for their action.
^c

It also seems that the forces of law did a very thorough job in tarnishing her reputation and frightening off any clubs that might wish to hire her. Frank Holzfeind, manager of the Blue Note in Chicago, said he was surprised that she even turned up for a booking in 1949 because ‘She came to the Blue Note thoroughly plastered with every stigma and accusation in the books, so much so that I doubted my reasons for signing her in the first place. That first night I just knew she wouldn’t show up.’ In the event, she was on time every evening and broke all previous attendance records at the club.
^d
This story is repeated over and over again. On 15 November 1971, Frank Schiffman, the manager of the Apollo Theater, wrote a letter to Linda Kuehl in which he echoed the familiar prejudice, saying, ‘I considered her a superb artist, but unfortunately a very sad woman who throughout her life was plagued by drug addiction. Our records indicate that she made her last appearance at the Apollo in September 1955. Her personal behaviour was excellent and she showed no evidence at the time of being adversely affected by artificial stimulants, but unfortunately the aura of stardom had diminished.’

Eager tabloid journalists all had stories to tell about Billie’s
excesses, because those were the stories that people wanted to read. As Barney Josephson, the owner of Café Society, put it, ‘America at large didn’t know much about her. I think the only way she could get onto the front pages of the white newspapers was by getting into some sort of trouble, like being arrested.’ Strangers were quick to jump to conclusions, and many people presumed that Billie was high on heroin when it was more likely that she was drunk on whisky. For instance, a Second World War veteran gave a typical account of seeing her at the bar, ‘obviously under the effects of heroin or some other drug which she must have shot up after her singing. Her words just dribbled out.’
^e

William Dufty, the
New York Post
journalist responsible for ghostwriting Billie’s autobiography
Lady Sings the Blues
, had a lot to answer for.
^f
When he was drawing up his contract for the book he agreed with his publishers that narcotics would be what they called ‘the gimmick’ that would sell it. And he did everything he could to give prominence to Billie’s drug addiction.

When he began to write his book, Dufty combined the stories Billie told him with material that had appeared in earlier interviews. He added whatever extra spice he felt was needed, particularly in relation to Billie’s lesbian experiences and her history of drug addiction. He was a skilled journalist and managed to provide Billie with a witty, world-weary manner of talking and presenting herself. It didn’t matter that the voice was not hers, because the prose whizzed on the page, beginning with the famous first lines of the book: ‘Mom and Pop were only a couple of kids when they got married. She was thirteen, he was sixteen and I was three.’

William Dufty sent an outline and much of the first draft of the book to Norman Granz. He also enclosed an enthusiastic letter in which he said that he and Billie ‘have worked for a week now, pulling stuff together. She has been dictating huge patches of terrific stuff. I have dredged the morgues and clip files … And the project has gone well.’ But Granz was not at all impressed and his response was stern and critical. ‘I must assume that the reason for writing the book is to sell as many copies as possible because of [Billie’s] desperate need for economic aid … It may be that Billie wishes to tell her side of the story – in a sense to right the misconceptions that society may have about her … but I am not sure that it isn’t working at cross purposes because so much mention is made of the narcotics and it might work against Billie … The fact that the publishers feel that the impact of the narcotics part is the most important aspect of this book, in a sense only confirms my suspicions, because it is a very saleable commodity.’
^g

But although William Dufty clearly made use of Billie’s notoriety,
^h
he was also very aware of where he felt the real blame lay. In a letter sent to a New York lawyer during a legal tussle shortly after the book’s publication, he explained his interpretation of Billie’s troubled destiny. ‘She has been kicked around and harassed for years by the authorities. One of the reasons is that this song Strange Fruit made her well-known and controversial. At any one of a hundred points in recent years she could have gotten off easy if she had merely told the FBI or other government investigative authorities … that she didn’t know what the song meant … that she thought it was about kumquats or something …

‘At many points the FBI and other Congressional Investigators might have been delighted to expose this propaganda plot; how an innocent, big-eyed, barefoot little girl was used to inflame the saloon-set against lynching in accord
with the well-known aims and objectives of the Communist Party … But she didn’t. She wouldn’t.’
ⁱ

It is possible to argue interminably over how much Billie was to blame for the troubles that gathered around her, but maybe here the last word should be given to the pianist Mal Waldron, who worked with her during the final two years of her life. ‘Faults? Well of course she drank too much … She wouldn’t stop drinking and she never did really stick the dope habit. But Lady Day had an awful lot to forget … Don’t forget, if you are treated like a common criminal, after a while you begin to act like one.’