With Billie (32 page)

T
he interview with Carl Drinkard must have gone on for many hours over several days because the typewritten transcript of the tapes covers more than 130 pages. Linda Kuehl doesn’t say when she first met him, but among her other papers there is a letter that suggests they became very good friends. This letter has no address or date, and it is written from a prison somewhere. Carl sends Linda his love and calls her his honey and his baby. He asks her to contact a friend of his who might write an affidavit for his forthcoming trial. He says he has just heard that Billie’s last husband, Louis McKay, has shot somebody, and he wants to know if this is true and ‘Did he kill the guy?’
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Carl Drinkard was Billie’s piano player on and off between 1949 and 1956. Their relationship began in Washington, DC in the summer of 1949, when he was twenty years old and close to finishing his studies at Howard University. He was living with his mother and earning between eight and fifteen
dollars a night, playing at a small upstairs club called Little Harlem.

Then one evening he was telephoned by Al Suder, the manager of Club Bali, the most lavish place in Washington, where all the big-name singers appeared. Billie Holiday was in town and she had said she wanted Carl to accompany her. A man called Coolridge Davis had been booked for the job, but ‘he played big fat piano in the Fats Waller bag’ and she didn’t want that; she wanted Carl.

Carl told the Club Bali manager that he was flattered. He said he considered Lady to be the greatest jazz singer in the world and, like everyone else in the business, he was in awe of her. But he couldn’t do it.

Just at that moment there was a noisy commotion on the stairs leading up to the Little Harlem club and ‘here comes Lady Day up the steps’. She marched over to the piano and said, ‘You! You’re coming with me!’

She was wearing the blue mink coat that was reputed to be worth $17,000, and when Carl looked at her he said to himself, ‘Truly, if I didn’t know who this woman was, I’d know she must be
somebody
!’ He said she had a way of carrying herself very erect so that she seemed tall, even though she wasn’t that tall. And she always stared straight ahead, looking neither to the left nor the right, and that made her seem independent and full of confidence, even though as soon as you got to know her you knew how insecure she really was.

Carl could not resist her authority and so he agreed to go with her. Billie began by taking him to a bar called the Crystal Cabin. She ordered herself a double brandy with a crème-de-menthe floater and she got him a double gin, which was what he asked for, even though it was more than he could manage because he was hardly a drinker at that time.

‘You don’t have to worry about my music,’ Billie said. ‘If you can play “The Man I Love”, you can play for me. I’m the easiest thing in the world to play for.’

They then went in her car to the Club Bali, which was
packed with people all waiting expectantly for her to reappear after the intermission. In the dressing room she tore off the first five numbers from her music book and gave them to Carl. ‘Let’s go on!’ she said, and there wasn’t even time to look at the tunes.

He remembered how he had to walk through the hushed crowd to reach the stage. And there he saw Art Tatum, the idol of every jazz pianist in those days, sitting at the horseshoe bar. In spite of his blindness, Art Tatum felt Carl passing close by and reassured him, saying, ‘You just do your best! Nobody can expect more than that!’

Then the compère was announcing, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen! The Club Bali takes pleasure in bringing you the one and only Lady Day … Miss Billie Holiday!’ And with that, a great roar of pleasure rippled through the room as the audience watched her going up the little flight of steps that led onto the stage. The pink spotlight followed her. She carried her head high, so that you could feel what Carl called ‘the magic of her proudness’. She turned to her new pianist and he gave her the opening of the first song.

And then she began to sing, standing very stiff and not looking at the audience, but staring beyond them, her arms bent at the elbows, her hands clenched into tight fists and ready to punch the air. Carl Drinkard remembered that she was wearing a long, heavy gown of the type that her manager John Levy always bought for her, and it was sequined from top to toe ‘like the suits that warriors wore to the Crusades’. He said she always knew how to carry herself in a gown like that, with just enough movement to be seductive, without ever being gaudy or vulgar.

The first set went smoothly and when it was over Billie said, ‘From now on, Carl, you belong to me. You’re going to be
my
piano player!’ And it was true. He did belong to her for several years. He was with her on her first European tour in 1954; he played for her at the Carnegie Hall in 1955; and he made recordings with her in 1956. Then they drifted apart, although in the interview he never explained why.

Carl was used to snorting heroin in those days, but he
was not what he called ‘a needle junkie’ when he first began working for Billie. He knew all about her habit and what he called her ‘checkerboard career with heroin, going back and forth on the needle’.
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He’d sometimes ‘pick up a package for her’, but she did her best to protect him and warn him off the drug. ‘She did not endorse the use of heroin, except for herself … She used to preach to me day in and day out. She’d say, “Carl, don’t you ever use this shit! It’s no good for you! Stay away from it! You don’t want to end up like me!” ’ In the interview he wanted to make it clear that when he did become a junkie, it was not Billie’s fault. This happened in 1952 in Chicago. For a short while he was playing in a band along with Miles Davis and ‘a little drummer’ called Jimmy Green. Every night after the show the three of them would go to Jimmy Green’s house and they’d get high together. Carl said, ‘The two of them were shooting and I was snorting’, and they began to tease him, saying, ‘If Carl doesn’t stop wasting this stuff, we’re going to take it from him!’ That was when he decided to join the club and ‘Miles Davis put that needle in my arm and helped me wreck my life.’
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So Carl became a needle junkie and he must still have been a junkie when he was interviewed by Linda Kuehl, because that would explain his rambling stories and his endless fascination with the details of getting a fix, or failing to get a fix.
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the chaotic scenes of violence and despair he was talking about. On one occasion he described a quarrel between Billie and John Levy, which culminated in her smashing a portable TV set over Levy’s head. At this point in his narrative Carl remarked absent-mindedly, ‘It was the first portable TV I’d ever seen.’ It would also explain his curious detachment from

When asked to explain the nature of his relationship with Billie, Carl said that Billie had a magnetism that could make anyone love her, if she wanted them to. But he insisted that his love for her was never sexual, even though they often shared the same living quarters and even the same bed. He was so young when he first started to work for her, and so relatively inexperienced, that he felt he was like the son she never had. He never called her Billie, always Lady, and he felt she appreciated the dignity of the name. ‘God knows, to me she was the great Lady Day!’

Like a child with a wayward parent, Carl tried to watch over Billie as well as he could. When I look at a photograph of the two of them arriving at London Airport in 1954, it does seem as though they might be related, although that might be just because they both have the same tired and puffy faces and the same distracted stare that makes them appear like creatures from another planet.

For Carl, Billie always appeared exquisitely beautiful when she was fully dressed, but terrifying in her nakedness. He said her legs were too short, her breasts were too baggy, her arms were too long, her hips were ‘insane’, and she was either too fat or too thin, depending on her intake of drugs and drink. Perhaps this is why he hated her lack of modesty and her way of welcoming complete strangers into her dressing room when she was wearing nothing more than a pair of high-heeled shoes. But it could also have been because her skin was ‘tattooed like a map’ with needle scars and he saw the signs of his own condition mirrored there.

Carl said that of course all of Billie’s men were pimps and
for him there was nothing odd in that. ‘A man could give her money and jewellery and she didn’t give a damn. She’d grown up in that pimp-whore environment and she expected this. She felt and believed that if a woman was making money, the man should have it.’ He described how John Levy treated her as a ‘valuable commodity … and she represented everything he had attained at that time’. When he bought her mink coats and fine jewellery, he did so with the knowledge that he could always use these items as ‘collateral’ if he was short of cash. Levy made sure Billie was kept working so hard because ‘that was how the money kept coming in’, and even when she behaved badly he was ‘too smart to walk out on her, but would lay and lay until she had calmed down. Then he would take her home and that would start another chapter in their torrid love affair.’ On one occasion John Levy explained his belief that ‘You gotta keep your foot up them bitches, Carl, otherwise they’ll get lazy on you.’

In 1950 and 1951 there were about four months when Billie was not on tour from one city to the next, and during that time she lived in a house on Linden Boulevard in St Albans, New York. John Levy had bought the house using her money, but he kept it in his name so that, when he left, the house went with him. Nevertheless, for a while it was a place that seemed more like home than most of the places Billie had ever known.

The house had three bedrooms, as well as a kitchen and dining area. Billie had the walls decorated by a ‘guy called Jay’ who was apparently the inventor of flock wallpaper, so he covered the walls with swirling patterns in fuzzy brushed nylon. The house was never completely furnished and Billie had no record player, but the radio was kept on at all times, although nobody bothered whether it was playing music or reporting the latest news headlines.

Billie had Chiquita her Chihuahua and Carl her pianist to keep her company. John Levy used to come and stay occasionally, but as Carl said, ‘he was usually gone’ with his gambling commitments, a club in New York, numerous
property deals and at least two other women to keep him busy.

At home in St Albans, Billie and Carl followed a daily routine. She tended to wake up between ten in the morning and noon. She never bothered to eat breakfast, but would begin the day with a large glass of Gordon’s gin and Seven-Up. As Carl explained, ‘When I say she had gin for breakfast, I don’t mean just having one double. It started in the morning and it went on all day long until she went to bed.’ If she had no need to go out, she didn’t bother to get dressed, but would potter around the house wearing slippers and Japanese silk pyjamas or ‘satinish-type lounging robes’. She liked to wear an apron to give her a feeling of domesticity.

Carl said that Billie enjoyed doing things around the house herself. She might begin with a bit of cleaning and then she’d take up some knitting or crocheting, ‘which was how she’d spent a lot of time while she was doing that year in West Virginia’. For a while she was busy making a tomato-red woollen sweater for Carl, but then they quarrelled about something and she transformed it into a jacket for the dog instead. The main event of the day was the preparation of ‘a really good dinner’, which Billie cooked in the vague hope that John Levy might turn up to share it with them. She never had much interest in eating and it was ‘only during the very late hours that she would even consider food at all’, but she liked to cook. Her speciality was recipes using ground topside of beef: dishes like meat loaf or Cornish Hens. Carl said, ‘Her seasoning was perfection’, and she could spend hours chopping and kneading and fiddling about in the kitchen.

Such work was regularly interrupted by more gin, a cigarette, a quick snort of heroin, because ‘she was sniffing at this time, she didn’t use the needle’, or simply the wish to stop everything and talk. Billie could talk for hours, mostly drawing on her own memories and anecdotes about people she had known. She had the habit of inventing stories and, once she had thought them up, they took on a life of their own, until they seemed to have all the validity of real experiences and
she herself never doubted that they were true. As Carl said, ‘She was a pathological liar and she’d repeat herself and change the details, and she’d tell a story so many times a certain way that she’d begin to believe it herself. She’d tell it the way she’d think was most impressive and, even if it lost all semblance of truth, that didn’t seem to worry her at all.’

Although she had a lot of famous friends at the time, very few people ever came to the house. The only frequent visitor was a man called Freddie Bartholomew, who had been a child star years before, when he played the film role of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
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