With Billie (31 page)

In those happier days, Colonel White had been on friendly terms with many of the Italian hoodlums and Mafia men; people like Joe Adonis. He used to meet up with them regularly and they would talk and play chess together. Of course they understood that sometimes he had to arrest one or two of them and maybe punch them in the nose in the process, or even testify against them in court, but still it was what he called ‘a straight business thing’. And when they were arrested, White was sure to have ‘something substantial’ against them. This meant that either they would agree to turn informer and bring in some good connections for him, or they would be brought before a judge and jury and found guilty, no matter what sort of a lawyer they had employed to fight their case.

Colonel White explained that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics used to have a book in which it listed the names of all the national and international drugs traffickers who were considered to be major public enemies. The task for people like him was continuously to widen the net of contacts and informers and every so often arrest those who were chosen as targets for prosecution.

Of course there was a file on Billie Holiday, but Colonel White said she was not considered an important target, since she had never been a dealer or an informer. She was simply a ‘sometime addict’ who was known to have used marijuana, heroin, cocaine and opium and who was hurting nobody but herself in the process. Colonel White realised that it was not usual to put such a person in jail, unless there was some other reason for it.

But that was exactly the problem. Although Billie was not a ‘public enemy’, she was what Colonel White called a ‘very attractive customer’ and it was obvious that she could provide the Bureau with some very good publicity. And after all, if she did get into trouble, he felt she had ‘brought it upon her own house’ because she was so ostentatious. ‘She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles and her jewellery and her gowns – she was the big lady wherever she went and a good deal of resentment was generated.’ On top of that, Billie was not a very stable personality, and as a ‘prominent person’ she was under an obligation to be extra-circumspect in the way she lived her life.

Ever since her release from Alderson women’s prison, in March 1948, Billie had been in the public eye, but from the way the popular press described ‘the unforgettable lamenter of Strange Fruit in the million bucks worth of silver blu’ mink’, it seemed that her conviction in a drugs case and her ‘episodes of violence’ were much more interesting than her talent as a singer.

Once Billie could no longer work on the New York club circuit because of the loss of her Cabaret Card, she was forced to take on a hectic schedule of performances, which had her zigzagging across the country, sometimes performing as many as five times a day, seven days a week. Three Carnegie Hall concerts in March and April were followed by a Broadway show, four weeks at the Ebony Club, one week in Philadelphia, three in Chicago and then six at the Strand Theater on Broadway. This sort of pressure had been continuing unabated when Billie opened at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood on 15 December 1948. On New Year’s Eve there
was the drunken brawl in which John Levy stabbed a man in the shoulder and Billie screamed and threw dinner plates.

On 3 January 1949 she was charged on three counts of assault and released on bail. Ten days later the charges against her were dropped, although the woman who said she had been wounded by a dinner plate took out a private lawsuit later. On 13 January Billie started a four-week engagement at Joe Tenner’s Café Society Uptown
^†
in San Francisco. The publicity surrounding her latest arrest had proved very good for business and the crowds were so keen to come and see the ‘notorious blues singer’ that there was standing room only.

Colonel White explained that during the first week Billie was at Joe Tenner’s, he and two of his officers picked up ‘four or five little coloured prostitutes’ on a minor drugs charge. And they all complained to him, ‘Why do you pick on little people like us, and let Billie run around and use drugs? And everybody knows she uses stuff and yet you pick on poor little things like us! Why don’t you bring her in?… Show us that you move against the rich as well as against the poor!’

Apparently this was when the first seed of an idea was planted. A few days later, when Colonel White and his men were ‘at a loose end’ in the office, they had the sudden inspiration to ‘polish it off … to kick her over … to make the arrest’. Colonel White said he realised that an outsider, or indeed Billie herself, might think it was a pre-arranged plan that had finally grown ripe and ready for execution, but he insisted this wasn’t the case. As far as he and his men were concerned, arresting Billie was done on a whim and was a way of passing time.
^‡

In those days a search warrant wasn’t needed for an arrest, just so long as the case was brought before the State Court and not the Federal Court. And so this little group of determined law-enforcers set off to the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco’s red-light district, where they knew Billie and John Levy were staying. They checked with the hotel receptionist that their two suspects were indeed at home, and then they went on up and knocked on the door of room number 203.

Colonel White couldn’t remember if he and his men went through the familiar ritual of pretending they had a telegram to deliver, or if they simply kicked the door open. As they entered, John Levy picked up a glass bottle that had been turned into an opium pipe and a small quantity of opium wrapped in paper, and he handed them to Billie. She fled obediently into the bathroom, threw the bottle and the packet into the toilet bowl and tried to flush them away. In her haste she managed to topple headlong into the bathtub, but was not hurt. Colonel White fished out the incriminating evidence and announced that he was arresting John Levy and Billie and taking them to the county jail.

In the interview White said there was no indication that the opium had been used, and when he and his men searched the room they found no other drugs and not even any alcohol. He said Billie was wearing heavy silk pyjamas and she was sober and clear-headed. She didn’t swear or complain; she just sat there, very quiet and passive. Colonel White said he examined her arms and found old needle scars, but no new ones.

John Levy was wearing white silk pyjamas and did all the talking. He was known to be an opium user and he was also known to be a police informer. He now mentioned the names of some of the officers he’d ‘worked for’ and suggested that he could ‘turn the tricks’ on some very important people in the narcotics business if he was released and allowed to go back to New York, although he was very vague about the names of the people he could bring in. Colonel White found John Levy smooth and persuasive, even if he was not
particularly charming. ‘He was a smart man who’d do anything to extricate himself from trouble. He gave the impression of being more of a shrewd businessman than a pimp – as pimps go, on a scale of ten, I’d have given him a seven … If he had given information, we might have settled the whole thing and let them both go, there and then. If he had just called up somebody in New York or Chicago to get them on an airplane and bring some stuff out, everything would have been fine.’

Instead, Billie and John Levy were freed on bail, in time for her to do her usual three shows at Café Society Uptown that evening. They appeared together for a preliminary hearing on 3 February. Their lawyer, Jake Ehrlich, was a good friend of Colonel White’s. He also happened to be a good friend of Joe Tenner’s, and Tenner had agreed to pay the legal fees out of Billie’s forthcoming earnings at his club.

As Colonel White saw it, ‘Most criminal trials are not after justice at all, they’re not after the truth. Lawyers speak a different language than ordinary people and their concerns are: “Can I prevent the jury from knowing what really happened? Can I obscure and confuse and misdirect the issue?” The whole thing is a show.’ White thought that perhaps Jake Ehrlich ‘got together’ with the District Attorney and the two of them agreed to drop the case against John Levy, who immediately packed his bags and got out of the State of California as fast as he could. And when White asked the District Attorney why this man had been allowed to go free, the answer was very simple: ‘We could have indicted Levy if we had wanted to, but Billie Holiday is the name and we want to get some publicity. Levy to us is a nothing guy!’

Since Jake Ehrlich was employed by the club owner Joe Tenner, his first consideration was to ensure that Billie could complete her lucrative engagement at Café Society Uptown. There were also several later bookings that she needed to fulfil, otherwise she was in danger of being sued for breach of contract.

The contracted engagement at Café Society Uptown was
completed on 22 February.
^§
Billie then went on a tour of one-nighters that took her through northern California to Los Angeles and Chicago, ending up with a three-week engagement at the Club Bali in Washington.
^‖
The Club Bali had three record-breaking weeks, ending with a grand finale celebration on 7 April, Billie’s birthday. The following day she was in Baltimore and then Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and back to San Francisco, where she was described by the
San Francisco Chronicle
as looking ‘large and luscious in a dazzling white-beaded gown’. When she appeared on stage with a black eye, after having been beaten up by John Levy, that same newspaper observed, ‘Billie Holiday, the torchanteuse, is singing these nights with more than lumps in her throat; she had lumps elsewhere, too, after being beaten pretty brutally one night last week. She knows some lovely people!’

By now Billie’s trial had been set for 1 June. Five days before that date Colonel White and Jake Ehrlich arranged for her to be sent to a psychiatric hospital called Twin Pines, where she was put under the care of Dr James Hamilton. The idea was to make sure that she had no drugs in her system when she was tested at the trial, although as far as one can tell there is no evidence that she was using
any
drugs at the time.

So here comes the third member of this curiously crooked team. When Linda Kuehl interviewed Dr Hamilton, what he said was remarkably contradictory. He said that when Billie was brought to him she showed no signs of being addicted to heroin or to any other narcotics.
^a
All he needed to do to keep her calm was to give her ‘enormous amounts
of booze’, which, if he remembered rightly, was about nine fluid ounces a day of crème de menthe and brandy. He said, ‘She took command of the hospital. She set the hours she wanted to eat and she had her drinks when she wanted them … I mean a psychiatric hospital cook doesn’t usually act as a bartender. I arranged this for her because that’s the natural thing to do. And I can do as I damn well please!’

On being asked what he thought about Billie’s state of mind and character when she arrived, Dr Hamilton said, ‘Billie came to me to be cured of nothing. She was a beautiful, strong, dynamic kind of person in a jam, and my natural instinct was to try to help her … She was royalty … I couldn’t find a diagnosis category. This was a superior woman, who interested me very much … an unusual person, almost an operatic tragedy figure who had this aura.’

So far so good. But then a little later Dr Hamilton continued with his diagnosis, saying, ‘What drives Billie? I don’t like to use this word, but she’s really a psychopath; an impulse-driven, strong, talented, but not dependable woman.’ He looked at the notes he had made when Billie was in his care and added, ‘She’d had a lot of tough breaks in her life, and the tough breaks were part of the racial problem.’ Summing up his whole encounter with her, he concluded, ‘It was kind of fun. It was real fun to see this unusual person!’

The trial opened as arranged on 1 June. Billie still had the black eye, but no trace of drugs was found in her system.
^b
Her lawyer put forward the case that her manager John Levy had conspired with the narcotics agent Colonel White to have her arrested. A photograph was produced as evidence; it showed Colonel White and John Levy sitting companionably together
at a table in Café Society Uptown.
^c
Billie had been told to ‘act dumb’ when she was questioned, and she simply said that John Levy was her man and she loved him so. On 3 June she was acquitted.

According to Jake Ehrlich, the whole fiasco could be blamed on John Levy. ‘He was turning Billie over to White. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s his business … Levy wanted to get rid of her. He had cleaned her out of money. She was at the end of the road. Oh, sure she was!’

Jake Ehrlich claimed that he had really wanted to save Billie. It was not just because she was his client, but because ‘Here was a woman who was so great, she had so much heart. She was like a child with nobody to guide her … I wanted to acquit her more than I wanted to acquit anyone. Levy and those others were making a living off her body and to me the lowest scum on God’s green footstool is a pimp.’

Such protestations were fine and dandy, but soon after the trial was over Levy invited Ehrlich and his wife to come to meet him in New York, so that the three of them could celebrate the victorious outcome. And only a year later Ehrlich was busy taking ‘this great woman’ to court, for failure to pay his legal fees. He knew that in the end all the money she had earnt had been appropriated by John Levy, who had agreed to pay her legal costs with it. But as he said, ‘This was a legal manoeuvre. Billie was the principal. She was my client. Services were given to her!’

This story has an epilogue. In 1974 the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco decided to dedicate rooms number 203 and
204 as the Billie Holiday Suite. Apparently the rooms are ‘tastefully decorated with relics of the era’, and this includes framed newspaper reports of Billie’s arrest, her trial and subsequent acquittal.