With Billie (3 page)
Authors: Julia Blackburn
I have listened to a number of the original tapes. The quality of the recordings tends to be very poor and it can be difficult to disentangle what is being said. You might hear the human roar of a late-night bar, juxtaposed with the closer, intimate sound of the clink of glasses on a table top, the cellophane rustle of a cigarette packet, someone coughing directly into the microphone. Or the interview is being held in a car with the activity of the street echoing on all sides, or in a private house where doors bang, dogs bark and children burst in and are shouted to silence. Several of the speakers are quite old and obviously frail and forgetful; others are drunk, or high on something.
It is always strange the way the mind works. We often do not know what we think until we have transformed the amorphous creature of our thoughts into words. We do not know what memories we hold until we have opened the door of recollection. Looking back on a far-away time, the mind often gets stuck on a point of its own forgetfulness and then, like a scratched record, keeps repeating the search for the name it has lost or the event that it cannot quite recapture.
But Linda Kuehl was obviously a very good interviewer and she never seemed to be in a hurry, or to be trying to steer people’s thoughts in a particular direction. And so, if sometimes awkwardly at first, the memories soon begin to flood in, the past accumulating on all sides and becoming vivid. And once the talk is flowing easily, then all sorts of unexpected recollections and emotions emerge out of
nowhere and float to the surface like strange balloons.
As well as being patient and friendly and not easily shocked, Linda Kuehl was also pretty and flirtatious and people obviously enjoyed talking to her. A lot of the men were very challenging – when asked if he rehearsed before a music session with Billie, the trumpet player Roy Eldridge said, ‘Why should I rehearse? Would I need to rehearse before making love to you?’ – and several of them, including Billie’s pianist and fellow heroin user Carl Drinkard, the bass player (and junkie) John Simmons and the music writer Arthur Herzog, obviously fell in love with her in one way or another.
‡
But over and over again, Linda Kuehl was ready with the relevant questions and a knowledge of dates and circumstances, and people were happy to talk. When I met Billie’s pianist Bobby Tucker in 2003, he remembered Linda with great affection. He said she came to see him on three occasions and she took the time to listen.
However, although many of the interviews are rich with information and anecdotes, they are often very complicated and difficult to follow and the stories that are being told emerge in broken fragments. In order to make a coherent sequence out of what is being said, I have had to do a lot of untangling, to separate out the various threads of a narrative before piecing it back together. But although I have reshuffled people’s words, I have never put words into their mouths or added any detail that wasn’t actually there. I also make it clear when I am quoting directly and when I am paraphrasing.
Take the black narcotics agent, Jimmy Fletcher. He was
involved in arresting Billie Holiday on a drugs charge in 1947 and as I read his interview I realised that he had maybe never told this story before and it involved a lot of emotional effort for him to do it. He had met Billie several times, he had talked with her, danced with her, enjoyed her company and had even been in love with her in a way. He knew she had been singled out for a big public arrest and he wished he had not been the one chosen to bring this about. He wished he could have stopped the whole unpleasant business before it unfolded. And as you follow the halting and complicated progression of what he is saying, you slowly begin to realise that he is ashamed of having betrayed her and is struggling to put his shame into words.
On a different note, Carl Drinkard, who worked with Billie in the late 1950s, tells stories that cover more than a hundred typewritten pages, but his stories keep spinning into junkie paranoia and boastfulness and it is hard to tell the real from the imagined. And then there is the pianist Jimmy Rowles, who says he got drunk in anticipation of talking about Billie, and he drinks as he talks and gets more and more excited as the image of Lady Day becomes increasingly vivid and she swims into the room and is there standing in front of him.
In an interview she gave at the Storyville Club in Boston in April 1959, just over two months before her death, Billie said, ‘I’ve got no understudy. Every time I do a show I’m up against everything that’s ever been written about me. I have to fight the whole scene to get people to listen to their own ears and believe in me again.’
A huge amount of myth and gossip and savage misrepresentation had already gathered like a thick fog around her during her lifetime and it has gone on growing and proliferating ever since. Of course it is not possible to disentangle an absolute truth about who Billie was or how she lived, but at least we can listen with our own ears to the voices
of the people who knew her, and then we can make our own decisions about what to believe and what not to believe.
*
When she was interviewed by Norman Saks, on 18 February 1985, Alice Vrbsky said rather wistfully that, among many other things, she’d had a letter that Billie sent her from Italy in November 1958, ‘which I gave to that woman who was working on the book and I never got it back’.
†
The story of Linda Kuehl’s last day was given to me by J. R. Taylor, who knew her in connection with the Jazz Oral History Project, which he supervised while it was based at the Smithsonian Institute in the 1970s. He met her once in 1978 and saw her again briefly on the night of her death. He learnt of her suicide from the drummer Jo Jones, who had been a friend ever since she interviewed him for her Billie Holiday book in 1971. Apart from the problems with getting the book finished, I do not know what other factors were involved in Linda’s decision to take her own life.
‡
Carl Drinkard wrote to Linda Kuehl when he was in jail, asking for help with a legal problem and saying he missed her. John Simmons wrote letters on the First Church of the New World headed paper, calling her ‘dearest Tripper’. He said he was ‘highly optimistic, waiting for your return when you’re ready to resign yourself to the fact as to how I feel towards you. I know we will be good to and for one another.’ The songwriter Arthur Herzog had a long correspondence between 1971 and 1976, and when they finally met in 1976, he said he ‘had had no ideas of being amorous’ and enclosed a limerick about ‘a lovely lady named Linda’ for whom ‘Lowly impulse succeeds when she’s highish’.
The Facts of Childhood
7
April 1915
: Born in Philadelphia General Hospital. Her mother, Sarah Julia Harris, known as Sadie, is nineteen and her presumed father, the banjo player Clarence Holiday, is sixteen. Sadie gives her occupation as ‘housework’. The baby is given the name of Eleanor and is registered as the child of Frank DeViese, a twenty-year-old waiter who then disappears without trace.
The baby is collected from the hospital by Robert Miller, the husband of Sadie’s half-sister, Eva Miller. Robert Miller takes the baby to Baltimore and hands her over to his mother, Martha Miller, ‘who was always taking in neighbourhood kids who had fallen on hard times or had been abandoned’.
*
1918
: Sadie returns to Baltimore. For a while she stays with Martha Miller, who is still looking after the child. Clarence Holiday visits occasionally, but in October 1918 he goes as a soldier to France. He is back in Baltimore nine months later.
1919
: Sadie starts a relationship with Philip Gough, a twenty-five-year-old driver who lives on Spring Street.
1920
: Sadie moves in with Robert and Eva Miller, to a house in Colvin Street, and brings the child with her. Eva Miller looks after the child and Sadie works in a shirt factory. Sadie starts using the surname of Fagan, after her father, Charles Fagan.
October 1922
: Sadie marries Philip Gough and moves with him to East Street. The child goes on living with Eva Miller, who has moved to Bond Street in the Fell’s Point district, the home of Miss Viola Green and her son Freddie Green. When the child starts school, Eva Miller is registered as her mother.
1923
: Sadie separates from Philip Gough and the child returns to Martha Miller in North Barnes Street for a while. ‘The child was left with my grandmother … Her mother would be off working or with other men. She left her all the time and that was the problem. The child had an attitude, I guess from being neglected.’
†
According to Freddie Green, the child moves back to the house of Miss Viola Green on Bond Street and lives with them for ‘about a year and a half’. Freddie says that Sadie is mostly absent. ‘Miss Sadie used to make trips to New York over the weekend and be back for Monday mornings because she was “working out” as a maid somewhere else in Baltimore.’
1924
: Sadie gets a house of her own on Dallas and Caroline Street, near to the docks in the Point district. She moves there with her nine-year-old daughter.
January 1925
: The child is brought before the Juvenile Court, for playing truant and being ‘without proper care and
guardianship’. She is sent to spend a year at the House of Good Shepherd, a reform school in a converted warehouse on Franklin Street and Calverton Road.
3 October 1925
: The child is released on parole. She moves to a place on the East Side with Sadie.
26 October 1925
: The child stops attending school. She moves with Sadie to Durham Street, the home of Miss Lou Hill. Sadie starts an affair with Miss Lou’s son, Wee Wee Hill.
24 December 1926
: The eleven-year-old child is raped by a neighbour. She is returned to the reform school as a State Witness.
2 February 1927
: The child is released from the reform school after the intervention of a lawyer who uses the grounds of habeas corpus. She goes to stay in Miss Lou Hill’s house. Sadie and her lover Wee Wee move to the house next door.
1928
: Sadie moves to New York, leaving the child at Miss Lou Hill’s.
1929
: The child comes to New York to join her mother. Sadie is staying in Harlem, between Lenox Avenue and 7th Avenue in a whorehouse run by Florence Williams.
2 May 1929
: The child, along with her mother and several other women, is arrested during a night raid. She is tried and found guilty of vagrancy. She is sent to Welfare Island, first to the hospital and then to the workhouse.
October 1929
: The child, who is now fourteen years old, is released from Welfare Island. She joins Sadie in Brooklyn. She sings at the Grey Dawn, a small cabaret bar in Queens.
Spring 1930
: She moves with Sadie to a tiny room in Harlem, between 5th and Lenox Avenues. She does waitress work at
a club called Mexico’s, which is popular with musicians. She sings at tables ‘like a gypsy fiddler in a Budapest café’.
‡
It is around this time that she changes her name to Billie Holiday.
*
Evelyn Miller in an interview with Stuart Nicholson (
Billie Holiday
, 1995, p. 19). Evelyn was raised by her grandmother Martha Miller and was ten years old when this new child suddenly arrived in the household.
†
Evelyn Miller again. It seems likely that Billie’s later stories about the grandmother who loved her were based to a large degree on her memories of Martha Miller.
‡
The composer and bass player Spike Hughes, quoted in Nicholson, p. 35.
Freddie Green
‘I’m in your corner, girl!’
O
n the morning of 27 October 1971, Linda Kuehl had arranged to meet Freddie Green
*
at the Red Rooster club in the Point district in Baltimore. Billie Holiday’s friend Ethel Moore used to have a whorehouse a few blocks from here, down by the docks. Billie always went to see Ethel and other old friends whenever she came back to Baltimore. She’d see Willie Diggs and Hilda and Rosie, the Polish lady who had a bar on Pratt and Bethel Street, and Wee Wee Hill and ‘Pony’ Kane, and she’d see Freddie too.
