With Billie (2 page)

She did take me out for an appointment with two American businessmen. We went to the Ritz and ate lobsters, which I had never eaten before, and I was shocked by the sound their claws made when they were cracked open. One of the men asked me how old I was and, when I told him, he panicked and ordered a taxi and sent me away with a
book on sexual techniques as a present. Sally and Barry wanted me to sell my virginity. They used to telephone me and tell me about an old gentleman they knew and how easy it would all be and how much he was prepared to pay.

I had never met the other prostitute at the party and I don’t know her name. She was plump and blonde. She had taken off all her clothes and she was dancing among the guests. Every so often she would squat down and run her hand between her legs and then lick her fingers with a loud lip-smacking noise. Everyone was laughing, and Barry, who was always competitive, took off all his clothes and did a little shimmying dance with his penis tucked tightly between his thighs. I was very impressed because he suddenly looked almost like a woman.

A man in a dark sweater was staring at me; he kept pursing his mouth into tight kisses and winking one wrinkled eye. I was frightened of him. I was frightened of every person in the room except for Sally, because she had always said she would look after me if there was trouble and I wanted to believe her.

My mother had arranged the party and invited the guests. She was laughing and drinking and having fun. The relationship between us had changed since she had separated from my father. Before, we had been allies of sorts, busy every night with an assessment of the danger and the likelihood of violence; ready to run and hide if things got too bad. But now things were different and we had become two women: one young, the other no longer young. My mother never said she would look after me if there was trouble and it never occurred to me that she might. I was aware of her watching the man who was watching me.

I escaped to a far corner of the room and sat down on the carpet next to the new record player, its wine-red plastic surface stamped incongruously with an imitation of the scales on a snake skin. I looked through the little pile of records that people had brought to the party and stopped at one called
A Billie Holiday Memorial.
There was a black-and-white photograph of a woman on the cover. She was illuminated
by a stage spotlight and she was wearing a white evening dress that left her shoulders bare. She was standing very stiff and straight, her head tilted slightly upwards towards the benediction of the light, her arms bent at the elbows, her hands clenched into fists. I couldn’t see her feet, but I could tell from her stance that she must have had them planted firmly on the ground, as though she was on the deck of a ship and was maintaining her balance in spite of the breathing swell of the ocean. She was caught in the gaze of lights and cameras in front of an audience of strangers who were gathered in the darkness to watch her, and yet she seemed to be completely alone. It was as if the act of singing filled her with such a wild joy that she was aware of nothing else for as long as the song lasted.

I lowered the needle onto the spinning black disc. The music began with the notes of a piano stepping lightly as a dancer, and then some other instruments whose names I didn’t know joined in. They were like an excited crowd of people who were all talking, laughing, telling jokes, but bound together by the sound of a regular beat.

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, a woman’s voice arrived. She flew in there among them like a bird and I realised that all the instruments had been waiting to welcome her. To my surprise she didn’t seem to care about the beat which they wove around her, and she kept pulling at it and stretching it until I thought she had lost it entirely. But just when it seemed too late, she was back again.

‘I …’ she sang, her voice as clear and strong as a trumpet, pulling out that one long vowel of sound. ‘I … cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry over me.’ She sounded so close and familiar. It was as if she was looking straight at me.

She was telling me a story about how she had once loved a man, and he was unkind to her and made her very unhappy. But then she met another man who was much nicer and she was happy again. Meanwhile, the man who had made her sad was beginning to miss her, and so the wheel had come full circle and it was his turn to cry.

She sounded as brave as a lioness and yet she also sounded as fearful as a child. Listening to her, I didn’t have the sense that she was bitter or resentful, or that she was angry with the man who had hurt her and glad to see him suffer. Her message was much simpler: she was telling me that things change, life moves on, laughter is followed by tears, and tears are followed by laughter. After you have been knocked to the floor, you rise up and get on your feet again.

The record went on playing and I listened as more and more stories were told. There was a lot of unrequited love and a lot of longing for a world in which a man and a woman could live happily ever after. But even the saddest songs were full of courage. It was as if just the fact of singing was in itself a triumph and a way of dealing with despair.

The last song on the record was called ‘For All We Know’. I had no idea how much time separated the first recordings from this one, but I could hear at once that a number of years had passed. It was clearly the same woman who was singing, but her voice had changed profoundly; it had lost that dancing, light-hearted effervescence and instead it seemed to be pulled forward by a sheer effort of will. But still she was strong and I was made strong by listening to her.

On the morning after the party, I bought myself a copy of the record. I played it over and over until I knew the words of all the songs and they had become my stories as well. It was not that I suddenly believed in eyes of blue and hearts so true, or in cottages by streams where I would just like to dream, but I did believe in Billie Holiday and the way her voice could chase out my fears.

The record has always stayed with me since then, travelling from place to place. I haven’t looked after it well; the black vinyl is warped and scratched, and only a few of the songs can struggle to be heard. But I have kept it anyway because of the memory of myself as a young girl at a party and because of the photograph of Billie Holiday on the cover and how she impressed me when I first heard her sing.

I
 am treading in someone else’s footsteps.

More than thirty years ago a woman called Linda Kuehl wanted to write a book about Billie Holiday. As a way of beginning she made tape-recorded interviews with more than 150 people who had known Billie at one time or another during her short life. It was not just the famous names Linda Kuehl was after; it was anyone she could find, so long as they had a story to tell.

Eventually she had two shoe boxes filled with tapes, each one carefully named and numbered. Then she began the slow process of turning all these spoken words into written words. Turn the tape on, listen to a sentence. Turn the tape off, type down what is being said. Begin again. Back and forth, back and forth, until hundreds of pages had accumulated, a great babbling mountain of voices. As well as the interviews, Linda Kuehl also collected anything else she could find: newspaper cuttings, legal documents, hospital records, police files, the transcripts of court cases, royalty statements, and all the photographs and private letters that the people to whom she spoke were willing to let her use. She even obtained a hoard of shopping lists, postcards and
little drunken notes that Alice Vrbsky, Billie’s secretary and assistant during the last years, still had in her possession:
^*

75 watt (2)

60 bulb

sugar

Bread

12 eggs

4 tolite [
sic
] paper

1/2 Ham

2 bars Camy

2 bars Lux

1 large lestol

1 comet

not too small chicken roasting

The New York publishers Harper & Row agreed to take on the book and for several years Linda Kuehl was busy with it. But it seems she could never get further than the first few chapters, which she kept on writing and rewriting. It was as if she was looking for the key that would open the door and make everything else follow and fall into place.

On 9 August 1977 Frances McCullough, Linda Kuehl’s editor at Harper & Row, explained in a letter that the book wasn’t working. She said it had become a ‘choppy, patchy mélange, in which you, the reader, very easily lose your bearings’. She said perhaps another publisher could be found who could take it on and ‘if that works, believe me, I’ll be very happy’. She said, ‘God knows, if it’s painful to me, it must be awful for you.’

Linda Kuehl moved over to Dial Press and went on with her unfinished manuscript, struggling to find the right form. In January 1979 she had made arrangements to attend a Count Basie concert in Washington, DC, and ‘in spite of a fierce snowstorm and major travel snarls to the northeastern seaboard’ she travelled there by train from New York. She arrived a few minutes before the music began, looking ‘quite flustered’, and then she disappeared and didn’t
turn up for the reception after the show. It seems she went back to her hotel room, wrote a suicide note and jumped out of her third-floor window. Passers-by had seen her sitting on the ledge before she jumped.
^†
Her family kept her Billie Holiday papers until the 1990s, when they were sold to a private collector.

He kindly allowed me access to the archive. I was shown bundles of files filled with loose sheets of paper. Everything had been jumbled haphazardly together, either by Linda Kuehl herself or by someone else. Fragments of unfinished chapters, almost obliterated by handwritten revision notes, lay alongside the transcripts of Billie’s court appearances and her medical reports. Formal letters from publishers and record companies rubbed shoulders with very informal letters from friends and lovers. There were lists of addresses and several lists of the important dates and events in Billie’s life, but each list was uncertain and incomplete and covered with question marks.

If I had been a different sort of person I suppose I might have tried to establish order in this chaos, but order has never been one of my strong points and I wouldn’t have known where to begin here. And so I simply raced through the papers as they presented themselves to me and made copies of anything that seemed particularly interesting or relevant, trusting that I would never know what I had missed out. Before I left New York, I also collected a cardboard box filled with typewritten transcripts of the interviews Linda Kuehl had recorded. Even these were in a strange muddle, with pages missing or repeating themselves, and sometimes a whole interview had disappeared completely.

For about a year I did my best to construct the bones of a biography out of this material. Just like Linda Kuehl before me, I made lists of what seemed to be the main events in Billie’s life and I started chapters with titles like ‘A Baltimore Childhood’ and ‘Harlem in the 1930s’. I then arranged the interviews into little groups and tried to force all those voices into the cages I had constructed for them. But in doing so I lost the wildness and the vitality that made them so interesting, and all I achieved in return was a rather bland uniformity in which one voice merged seamlessly with the next. That was when I decided this book must be a documentary in which people are free to tell their own stories about Billie and it doesn’t matter if the stories don’t fit together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a completely different woman.

So this is Billie Holiday’s life, seen through the eyes of some of the people who knew her. I begin with the friends she ran around with when she was a young girl in Baltimore: Freddie Green, Mary ‘Pony’ Kane, Skinny ‘Rim’ Davenport, Wee Wee Hill, ‘Sleepy’ Dean and a woman called Christine Scott, who was an inmate at the reform school where Billie was sent when she was accused of being a ‘minor without proper care and guardianship’. I end in the late 1950s, with the lawyer Earle Zaidins, who lived in the same cheap hotel where Billie was staying for a while and who got to know her when they were both out in the street late at night, walking their dogs. And Alice Vrbsky; she of the shopping lists. In between there are all the others.

I lift out a sheaf of papers stapled together at the top left-hand corner and there is an orange stain where the little strip of rusting metal bites into the pages. The interview date, the number of the tape cassette and the name of the person who is speaking are written at the top of the page and there are occasional corrections and notes added in Linda Kuehl’s rather bulbous handwriting.

Sometimes an interview includes a brief account of the circumstances of a meeting, ‘in a brown Cadillac Eldorado’; or of what the speaker was wearing, ‘a shiny red suit and a white cowboy hat’; or of how they looked, ‘shaking and sweating profusely from the effects of a cocaine high’. But such descriptions are unusual; mostly the voices are not given faces to recognise or clothes to wear, and so unless the person happens to be a well-known figure in the jazz world, their words float in a haphazard space without any anchors of recognition to hold them steady.