With Billie (45 page)

When that day’s rehearsal was over, Doc Cheatham said that ‘Everybody was kidding and laughing and talking a mile a minute … and Billie invited us to have greens and ribs and stuff at her place after the session, and a lot of ’em went.’ Only Lester Young declined. ‘He just kept to himself, sat apart. He was very quiet and sad that day. He didn’t have much to say to anybody.’

The following day, the bassist Walter Page collapsed on his way to the studio and was taken to hospital, where he died a couple of weeks later. But everyone else stumbled through the snow and arrived when they were supposed to. The cameras were rolling. Roy Eldridge remembered how gracious the producer was. ‘He let people mingle and he didn’t disturb them and he had a feeling for jazz … “Let the boys play,” he said,’ and the cameras continued to roll.

Billie was the only woman among them, but there was nothing new in that. In the film sequence that I have been watching, you see her and her eleven All Stars taking up their positions. The dark air is pierced by the beams of television lights and is full of the swirling smoke trails of cigarettes.

Billie goes to sit on a high wooden stool in the centre of the stage and the musicians gather round her in a semicircle. She is wearing a pale woollen dress with a round neck and a hemline that just covers her knees. She is wearing flat shoes and a wristwatch, and her hair is pulled back into a pony tail. She settles herself very quietly with her hands in her lap and looks for all the world like a schoolteacher who is preparing to read a story to a class of young pupils. The only hint of glamour is in her shining earrings, which sparkle like stars when she moves her head.

There are two main camera angles that are used throughout. From one of them, Billie is bathed in a soft light and the paleness of her dress is answered by the luminosity of her pale skin. She looks younger than she is, almost like the young girl she once was. She looks soft and innocent and possessed by an almost ethereal beauty, especially when she smiles.

The other camera seems to be focusing on a completely different woman, who is illuminated by dark and dramatic shadows. This woman is gaunt and tired and her eyes are glittering black pools that keep filling with tears. From this angle you don’t see the prim dress or the wristwatch – just the floating apparition of a face and the shifting emotions it contains.

Billie gazes at the men who surround her. With several of them she has been engaged in what Roy Eldridge called ‘a little light housekeeping’ at one time or another, but she is just as close to the ones she has never slept with. As Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison once explained it, ‘She romanced everybody in the band, so far as friendship was concerned. Because she was
your friend
’
^‖

Now you see her busy with all of them, going from one to the next, smiling at them, getting them ready to do their best for her. As Doc Cheatham said, ‘You had to be exceptional to play for her. She wanted everything to be just right. One wrong note, no matter how quiet or short, and she noticed it. She could let you know something with her eyes, like if the trumpet was too loud. She’d be polite, but tough.’

The music begins and she is singing ‘My man don’t love me, treats me oh so mean. My man, he don’t love me, treats me awful mean. He’s the lowest man, that I’ve ever seen.’

Ben Webster is her first soloist. As he rises to his feet you can see the solid power of his body and how dangerous he
might be if he became drunk or angry. He and Billie did a little light housekeeping in the late 1930s and he used to beat her up, and on at least one occasion gave her a black eye. Now she looks at him with extreme tenderness, because everything is starting just right and he is doing well.
^a

The camera moves to Gerry Mulligan, who has his eyes tight shut and his head dipped forward, so that he seems to be lost in a deep sleep. And then we see Lester Young rising to his feet and shuffling forward to stand beside his old friend, his Lady Day. The camera moves onto his face, exposing how ill he looks and how tired. His last recording, made earlier that year, was called
Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin
’ and Lester looks as though he has been crying for weeks, his eyes are so swollen and puffy. He raises the saxophone slowly towards his lips and his mouth opens in thirsty anticipation of receiving it. The music he makes is slow and measured and heartbreaking. As the
New York Times
journalist Nat Hentoff described it later, ‘He blew the sparest, purest blues I had ever heard.’
^b

The camera leaves Lester Young’s face and examines his hands and the fingers that hardly seem to be moving at all. Then it turns to Billie, watching her as she watches the man who was once the closest of her close friends. Her eyes are fixed on him. It is as if she is giving him strength and keeping him safe from harm with the concentration of her gaze. She nods her head in agreement to what he is saying in the
language of his music, and she bites her lip because she can feel the effort he is making, the thin edge he is balancing on.

The words of the song continue: ‘He wears high-draped pants, stripes are really yellow. He wears high-draped pants, stripes are really yellow. But when he starts in to love me, he’s so fine and mellow!’ And now Vic Dickenson is on the trombone. In the film, the skin of his face is very pale and from his features he could be mistaken for a white southern farmer. You can see the gentleness of his character as he plays. Billie smiles him through his solo.

In comes Gerry Mulligan. He is wearing a flashy, dog-toothed sports jacket that tightens over his back as he bends forward to blow on his instrument. He is very blond and Nordic and tense with concentration.
^c
Billie gives him a broad, welcoming smile as she watches his anxious face, as she listens to the heavy footstep tread of the baritone saxophone.

The words return: ‘Love will make you drink and gamble, make you stay out all night long. Love will make you drink and gamble, make you stay out all night long. Love will make you do things, that you know is wrong.’ Billie no longer seems to be aware of her musicians – she is staring inwards, lost in some private world of thought and memory. It is as if she is not singing about a particular man she has loved, but about love itself and her own driving need to love and be loved, no matter what the consequences might be.

Now it’s Coleman Hawkins and the heavy-toned, gruff voice of his saxophone. Coleman Hawkins, his head full of literature and politics, his apartment full of classical records, his belly full of brown lentils and brandy. Gerry Mulligan has opened his eyes and is standing very close behind him, swaying like a thin tree in the wind.

Roy Eldridge is next. He wears a striped shirt and a broad-brimmed hat. He pushes the trumpet notes higher and higher, and it is as if he might burst from the effort. Billie is there as a gentle, smiling presence and at one point he catches her eye for approval, just before he takes the notes to their final, squealing heights. ‘Stand up, Little Brother!’ she used to say to him. ‘Stand up! You’re small enough as it is!’

And then the song is ready for its promise: ‘But if you treat me right, baby, I’ll stay home every day. If you treat me right, baby, I’ll stay home every day. But you’re so mean to me, baby, I know you’re gonna drive me away.’ And with that Billie emerges from whatever place her private thoughts took her to, and she lifts her head and fixes her dark eyes on the camera.

She leans forward in a confidential manner and again she is a schoolmistress instructing her class. She shakes her head with solemn authority as she explains that ‘Love is just like a faucet, it turns off and on’ and then she faces the camera a second time. She stares straight into the lens and with a wistful smile and a little shrug of her shoulders she explains, ‘Sometimes when you think it’s on, baby, it has turned off and gone.’ With that the story is told in its entirety.