With Billie (27 page)

John Levy the pimp was Billie’s manager, but he knew nothing about the management end of things. Even in those days, even though I was just a musician, I could see she was being exploited. He only played Billie in places where he felt he could take out the most money, and he only cared that wherever she worked, he got the money. He took the money and bought a home in Long Island, and it ended up he had that home in
his
name. He used to get the money in advance. He would phone through to a club and say, ‘She won’t play for you unless you give me two weeks in advance, or at least one week in advance.’ Then he’d pack up the dollars and fly back to New York, or he’d go to the race tracks at Hot Springs. Or he’d go back to his woman Tondalayo. He give her everything. She had a daughter by him. Billie was aware of these things. She knew Tondalayo.

We never knew when John Levy the pimp was in town. He was gone all the time. He’d be there and then he’d leave and you wouldn’t see him for two or three days, and then he’d come back and you’d see him in the club for two days. Usually you wouldn’t see him on pay night, but he always paid Billie’s hotel bills, because like any pimp or hustler, he makes sure a woman is taken care of as far as her
needs.
But after that, forget it.

In Philadelphia, Billie was staying in an old hotel right near the Academy of Music, and Bobby and I were staying in one of the smaller, cheap hotels nearby. Billie was in good form. She was big and healthy and in excellent shape and doing all right. I never saw her smoking pot, but she was drinking, and I could see the writing on the wall. Bobby and I would go by to pick her up to go to work. We had a ritual where we’d go to her hotel suite an hour or two before, to make sure she was together. If she wasn’t in the mood, she would start drinking and get high before we ever got there. She’d get high on drugs and then she’d start drinking, brandy and Benedictine and crème de menthe.

I remember one time we went up to her room and John Levy the pimp had just left and she said, ‘I can’t go to work tonight! John beat the hell out of me!’ She pulled her clothes off and we looked at her ribs and she was all bruised up. She said, ‘I can’t hardly breathe.’

So we decided to get some adhesive tape and we went to the drugstore and bought thick tape, and we bound her up as tight as possible and she went to work that night. We told her to see a doctor in the morning and the next day nothing was broken.

In that era all the female vocalists
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had to have a man who’ll beat on them and take their money and misuse them. They seemed to thrive on that. Well, not
thrive, but it was something. Why do some people take abuse from another human being? Why let someone do that to you? Nobody can answer that, but some people have to have this. Females call that love. I don’t understand it, but maybe I’ve never been in love. I always felt a woman deserves the same feeling as a man, but you don’t want to know about that. When you are writing my story I’ll tell you about that.

For Billie, her manager must be her man or her husband. And she had to have a man who once in a while beat on her. In other words, ‘I gotta have a man that is a man, and I gotta have a man that keeps reminding me of that! Otherwise I’m making more money than he can make and I’m more famous than him. So in order to assert his masculinity, he knocks me down, he slaps me down.’ I call it the Frankie and Johnny Syndrome.

People didn’t really know Billie. She was always trying to keep a hard front, but she was a beautiful person. She was a great woman. She had more feeling for everything and for people than anybody I’ve been in touch with. She wasn’t selfish; she was generous to a fault. She always respected musicians. I don’t think she ever said an evil thing to me or ever looked around to say anything, if anything went wrong musically.

Billie was a complete stylist. When you listen to her sing, you feel she has lived that experience and she is telling a story about it. I don’t think anyone can express a story better than Billie. She didn’t have a great range or any of that stuff, but most of the tunes she sang had good melody lines and good stories, and they’re not easy to sing or play. She didn’t sing a song unless she wanted to, or unless someone slipped her man some money under the table and her man
told her
to do the song; then she’d do it even if it wasn’t right for her.

Bobby Tucker took care of the music. She pretty well had a repertoire, and most of the time we played the music and she wouldn’t rehearse it, she’d just do it. I’d
stand out front and she’d be high, and she’d lean on the bass and stand there and sing and she wouldn’t move from that spot. It was one of the most lucrative and successful times in her life, as far as money was concerned, but I came in on the tail end of the real Billie Holiday.

She never had an entourage. Most female singers have an entourage of females who are there with the dresses and the hairdos, and the this and the that. The only people I would see around Billie were the people who’d come to sell her some shit. I always felt uncomfortable with the dope peddlers and the users. They’d say, ‘We’re going to sit here and we’re going to shoot ourselves up some heroin.’ Or they might just be sniffing cocaine. I’d go out of the room, I’d go any place. Bobby Tucker was the same.
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We knew the people who were coming around were just getting their claws in. We knew they were spoiling her career.

We used to dress her. We’d go into the dressing room before a concert, and Bobby and I would button her up. There was nothing between us in that way. She’d just walk in, take off her clothes and sit and talk to you, rapping. It was never done in a vulgar way.

At first I was so prudish and such a square, but she’d say, ‘Sit down, motherfucker!
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Where you going?’

‘I thought you were going to dress!’

‘So what!’

I thought she was beautiful. Very few people are really beautiful or attractive, sitting there with no clothes on, because very few of us have bodies that are that beautiful. But with her it was done in such a way that you really thought about the
inside
of the person, who she really was. And she was well built and she looked
good from my standpoint, as a man looking at a woman. She had some lovely skin. Her complexion when she came out of Lexington was great. She was healthy and she was so together, but she fell back into the same thing. If she was put in the right environment …

Billie was a female Duke Ellington. The only time I ever heard her put anybody down – and it wasn’t really a put-down – was in the days when Peggy Lee and all the girls were trying to sound like her. And she’d tell them to their faces, it wasn’t like she talked behind their backs. When Peggy Lee came around they’d just greet each other and Billie would say, ‘Look, bitch, why don’t you find some other way to sing?’ Or, ‘Why the fuck are you trying to sound like me?’

And Peggy Lee wouldn’t take offence. She’d say to Billie, ‘It’s because I love you. I love everything you do.’

I remember Peggy Lee disliked me for years because she knew my name was John Levy and she told somebody, ‘I don’t like that John Levy the pimp on account of what he did to Billie.’

And I met Peggy Lee one day at Capitol Records and I said, ‘I gotta straighten something out. You think I’m John Levy the pimp that managed Billie, but I’m John Levy the bass player, and I just played bass for Billie for less than a year. Seven or eight months maybe.’

Everything was cool then.

A
s Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger had no problem with heavy drinkers or with habitual consumers of the wide range of tranquillisers and barbiturates that were now legally flooding the market. For him, illegal drugs were demons that needed to be eradicated and he increasingly saw drug abuse as a ‘cold, calculated, ruthless, systematic plan to undermine’.
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Anslinger felt it was crucial to emphasise that ‘the drug addict is a psychopath
before
he acquires his habit’. He believed that an estimated 95 per cent of addicts were also criminals, and that a drug had ‘more rapid and stronger effects on an individual with a flawed personality’. He concluded that it was therefore quite useless to send drug addicts to treatment centres or hospitals; harsh jail sentences were always the best solution.
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If Anslinger had one particular obsession in the midst of all this, it was the way that the general public ‘reacts respecting glamorous entertainment characters who have been involved in the sordid details of a narcotics case … There seems to be some sort of public approval of these degenerate practices.’ Anslinger very much wanted to reverse this trend by having a celebrity punished in the way he saw fit. It would also guarantee excellent front-page publicity for his Bureau. He was greatly helped in his campaign by the newly proliferating breed of tabloid journalists, who could always sell more papers if they provided sensational material about acts of sex and violence, especially when carried out by famous people and fuelled by the consumption of narcotics.

Everyone who knew Billie Holiday has a different version of the nature of her addictions and the year in which she became a heroin addict. According to John Simmons the bass player, who was her boyfriend for a while, Billie didn’t start shooting heroin until the latter part of 1942, or early 1943. Before then she was smoking weed, smoking opium, taking pills. It was when she began earning a lot of money that she became a natural target both for the drug peddlers who wanted to sell to her and for the men who wanted to become her boyfriend/manager/husband/pimp, and who encouraged her addiction in order to control her and have access to her income. As her friend Mae Barnes said, ‘When Billie got on this heroin habit, she became meek and mild and couldn’t help herself, and anybody could make her do anything … When she was drinking like a lush and smoking gage, she’d want to hear music … she’d rock and roll and carry on like hell and have a ball and move with the rhythm, but when she was on the heavy stuff she’d be listless and drop off.’

Billie’s heroin addiction was never particularly dramatic, or at least she never boasted about her excesses as some junkies like to. Few people ever saw her injecting and it seems that whenever she stopped using heroin, either by choice or necessity, she always managed to avoid the usual traumas of withdrawal. On the two occasions when she was
arrested, she adjusted almost immediately to being deprived of heroin, and several people who were close to her for long periods of time insisted that she was not using anything while they were with her.
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She was clearly able to control her habit through sheer will power. As she grew older she apparently needed the drug less and less and she must have become what is called a ‘chippy’, getting by on a minimal dose.
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On the occasions when she was under extreme psychological pressure during her last years, she tended to use alcohol to drown her sorrows.

According to the jazz critic Max Jones, who met Billie in London in 1954 and again in 1959, Billie was an ‘odd amalgamation of naivety and experience’, full of spontaneous streams of talk, full of laughter and rude jokes and not at all ‘the tragic lady with morbid interests’ he had been led to expect. He said her speaking voice was ‘slurry, a little cracked in tone and meanly attractive’ and that she had a prodigious ability to consume spirits. Together with his wife, they mostly talked about ‘music, booze, sex, drugs, politics, gangsters, film actors, club owners, writers, and café society. Also about dogs or clothes and shopping.’
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He said she knew that dope suppliers, including husbands and lovers, had leeched most of her earnings, and she realised that her immoderate use of all sorts of stimulants had shortened her life expectancy, but she wasn’t maudlin about any of this. She said she had enjoyed the narcotics, the drinking and the men while they lasted and she accepted her habits as ‘my own damn business’.