Bitter crop, p.12
Bitter Crop, page 12
On the night of September 9, however, she found herself in one of her classier recent engagements as she sat at a table in the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel just south of Central Park on Fifth Avenue in New York City. At the table, covered by a white tablecloth with a small decorative lamp placed in the center, she was joined on one side by Miles Davis, who was dressed in an elegant black suit and tie and sipping a cocktail, and on the other side by Jimmy Rushing, whom she had known since they both sang for Count Basie. The ornate nightclub, featuring Persian murals above the bandstand, was packed with, as one reporter noted, “several hundred [people]—music reviewers, columnists, disc jockeys, feature writers, and critics.” The occasion was a celebration hosted by Columbia Records meant to highlight its robust—and lucrative—jazz division. Billie was honored to be included. The invitation was extended because of the popularity of Lady in Satin. Wearing a stylish black outfit with a partial headscarf, oversized dangling earrings, and the gold chain and pendant she favored these days, she nursed a cocktail and smoked cigarettes while chatting with Davis and Rushing. She was in her element—in a glamorous room among the heavyweights of jazz—and she was exultant to be there.
Amid the table-hopping and hobnobbing, the music finally started—the reason, after all, such a crowd had shown up. Jimmy Rushing turned in a set backed up by a small band. Duke Ellington, as sophisticated as ever, led his big band through a hard-driving set that included nine tracks, culminating with “Take the A Train.” The Miles Davis Sextet—Davis on trumpet, Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums, the same lineup of musicians who the next year would record Davis’s groundbreaking album Kind of Blue—performed “If I Were a Bell,” “Oleo,” “My Funny Valentine,” and “Straight, No Chaser.” The audience may have been impressed with the set, but Ralph Ellison, whom Columbia invited in his capacity as a jazz writer, later sniped in a letter to a friend: “Duke signified on Davis all through his numbers and his trumpeters and saxophonists went after him like a bunch of hustlers in a Georgia skin game fighting with razors. Only Cannonball Adderley sounded as though he might have some of the human quality which sounds unmistakably in the Ellington band.”
Finally, it was time for Billie. Onstage, Irving Townsend offered a warm introduction, and Billie made her way to the microphone. Critic Alfred Duckett, who was in the packed room, recorded his impressions of her: “You don’t see the picture-book Billie Holiday of the past years. You don’t see a lush, lovely woman with the kind of figure that used to make men stare. She’s slimmer. She has some of the tragedy of the years written on her face. But she is still beautiful.”
After warming up with an opening number, Billie delivered an inspired version of “When Your Lover Has Gone.” She sang it with the conviction of someone who was enduring the heartache of a failed affair, an emotion with which she was profoundly familiar at the moment, given her estrangement from McKay. Once she finished, the audience applauded—and applauded. The ovation built to become so animated she had no choice but to sing another song. She had only delivered the first lines—“Hush now! Don’t explain!”—when more applause rose up from the room. “She gets into the song,” Duckett wrote, “and something chemical, something magic happens between Billie Holiday and her audience. There is no illusion about the way her honey voice drips through, strains through—clear, dripping with heat and astride that beat which is hers exclusively. There is no illusion. She snaps her finger once—in a break—and what happens to the audience with the snap of that finger is the measure of her genius. For she has snapped everyone in the hushed awed room out of one mood level into another. As she finishes up, the musicians on the bandstand—the musicians who are accompanying her—are watching her with great respect and great appreciation.” What they heard was what the audience heard. “You listen—and you hear a magnificent performance. You listen and you listen and you hear—an authentic artist.”
Following the show, Miles Davis took Billie to Birdland to see Willie Ruff, a bass and French horn player who worked as part of a duo with pianist Dwike Mitchell. Ruff played French horn on Miles Ahead, Davis’s album released by Columbia Records in October 1957, which featured a twenty-piece band with arrangements by Gil Evans and Davis on flugelhorn. Davis was so taken with Ruff’s playing, he wanted Billie to meet him. “After our show,” Ruff recalls, “Miles introduced us and Billie sat down right behind Mitchell’s piano. We had a nice conversation. People were coming and going in Birdland at that time, everyone from Thurgood Marshall to Jackie Robinson, but Billie Holiday was a big star—one of the reigning legends in our business.”
Billie was still on an emotional high when she returned home later that night. The grand affair at the Persian Room would be hard to match for its showmanship and splendor. She had taken her place among the most lauded names in the industry, and, judging from the crowd’s reaction, she more than held her own, which made the fact that she was by herself even more painful. Some nights, the loneliness was almost unbearable. She sang about being alone in songs like “Travelin’ All Alone, “Deep Song,” and “Solitude,” but that was only her way of addressing in her art the fear of abandonment she experienced in her life. It seemed she was attracted to men who were not good for her. They abused her emotionally or physically or both; often they also stole her money. The pattern started with her first husband and continued until her current one. A lover would be with her for a period of time—weeks, months, years—and then, inevitably, he was gone. At times like tonight as she lay in bed, her mind sometimes drifted back to all the men for whom she had fallen—a melancholy journey into a past she often tried not to remember.
2.
The spring of 1941 was a good time for Billie. Thanks to the fame she received through her run at Café Society, she was busier than ever with her career. On May 1, she appeared at the May Day celebration held at Union Square to sing “Strange Fruit” and to show her support of the labor movement, if not the Communist Party itself. Currently, she was headlining at Kelly’s Stable, sharing the bill with Lester Young and His Band; soon she would move to the Famous Door, another fixture of The Street. She often spent her time off at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, on West 134th Street in Harlem, where she found herself socializing more and more often with Clark’s brother, Jimmy, the former husband of Nina Mae McKinney, a Broadway and motion picture star who would come to be known as “the Black Garbo.” It was not long before Billie, attracted to his charm and good looks, fixed her full attention on him. If Bobby Henderson had been a youthful dalliance, Jimmy Monroe represented a serious relationship. So, in August 1941, following a brief courtship, “to prove something,” Billie later wrote, “to…both Mom and Joe Glazer [sic] [who] never stopped telling me I was going to get hurt,” she eloped with Monroe to Elkton, Maryland—a “lovers’ paradise,” as one newspaper described the town—where on the twenty-fifth they were married. “Giving her age as 25 and her name as Billie Eleanor Holiday,” the New York Amsterdam Star-News reported, “this is the singer’s first marriage.”
Returning home to discover the surprise elopement sufficiently angered her mother and agent, Billie traveled with Monroe to fulfill club dates in Chicago and Los Angeles. When the L.A. venue abruptly shut down after three weeks, Billie took the train back to New York, while Monroe stayed behind. Her next extended engagement was remembered by Truman Capote: “A wartime jazz joint on West 52nd Street: The Famous Door. Featuring my most beloved American singer—then, now, forever: Miss Billie Holiday. Lady Day. Billie, an orchid in her hair, her drug-dimmed eyes shifting in the cheap lavender light, her mouth twitching out the words.” The passage hinted at the legacy of Billie’s time with Monroe. She had smoked marijuana since she was a teenager—she particularly enjoyed sneaking off from Café Society between sets to smoke a reefer while driving around the city in a taxi—but Monroe turned her on to hard drugs, specifically opium, which she started to smoke on a regular basis. That fact appeared to be obvious to a devoted fan like Capote.
It was drugs—smuggling drugs, that is—that resulted in Monroe being arrested in May 1942. To be near him, Billie traveled to L.A., where Lester Young convinced Billy Berg to add her to the bill he was headlining at Berg’s Trouville Club. When Monroe was found guilty and given a one-year sentence, his imprisonment effectively ended his marriage to Billie, although it was likely over when Billie returned to New York and left Monroe to his own devices. Looking back on their short-lived union, Billie would say the one gift she received from it was a song she later wrote with Arthur Herzog, Jr. Monroe was out one night, and when he came home Billie spotted lipstick on his collar. As he fumbled to come up with an excuse, Billie cut him off. “Don’t explain,” she said quietly. The song “Don’t Explain” became one of her most popular numbers.
With Monroe off to prison, Billie had her liaison with Orson Welles. Then, in November and December, she played Chicago. By February 1943, she was back in New York at Kelly’s Stable before she took up residency at the Onyx Club. It was during this run that she began an affair with a man who made physical mistreatment of her an integral part of their romantic interaction.
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One night in 1943, Billie stopped by the Village Vanguard, where the house pianist was Eddie Heywood, a brilliant stylist who earned such glowing accolades touring with Benny Carter that Billie used him and his trio to back her on several dates. Tonight, it was not his crisp, ornate playing style that held Billie’s attention but the musical acuity—and the strikingly handsome appearance—of his bass player. Between sets, Billie approached Heywood and asked if she could meet the bass player; she would be in the back having a drink at the bar.
John Simmons later recalled the ensuing encounter: “[So Eddie and I] went back to the back bar [and] Billie Holiday is standing there.” Heywood made the introduction. “John Simmons, Billie Holiday.” Simmons remembered: “I say [to her], ‘I sure have admired your work down through the years. Before I ever became a musician, I admired your work.’ ” Born in Haskell, Oklahoma, Simmons endured a hard life growing up in Tulsa and California before making a name for himself playing bass for acts like Benny Goodman and Nat “King” Cole.
Standing in the noisy bar, Billie, flattered that Simmons was clearly impressed to meet her, told the bartender to bring her friend a drink. Simmons ordered a Brandy Alexander. As they spoke, Billie paid Simmons a compliment. “I’ve had a whole lot of bass players,” she said, “and I never heard any of them. But I heard you.”
After they chatted for a while, Billie told Simmons to pick her up later that night at the Three Deuces, a club owned by the same men who owned the Onyx Club, where she was appearing. When Simmons showed up, Billie was leaving with a woman and could not go with him, but the following night she returned to the Village Vanguard. Years later, Simmons revealed what he thought when he saw her: “Wow! Ain’t this something! Here’s someone I’ve admired for years has turned out like this. I’ve got to go for her. [Even so,] I’m not going to be no Mr. Holiday. I’m still going to maintain myself. My dignity. I’m John Simmons. I mean, I’m not as great a bass player as she is a singer, but I still want to be known as John Simmons, the bassist. Not John Simmons, Lady Day’s man.”
Though his thoughts remained unspoken at the time, here was a problem with which Billie was all too familiar. Men were drawn to her for her talent, money, and fame, yet they were afraid of living in her shadow. It would have been a unique man who could become involved with her on a long-term basis—independent-minded, sure of himself, confident in his own skin. For Billie, one of the great disappointments of her life was that she never found such a man, at least not one with whom she became romantically involved.
When Billie picked up Simmons the second night, she took him to the apartment she shared with her mother. Simmons was surprised by the modest living conditions: “Where she had to sleep, I just couldn’t picture it. It was off the living room; it was a clothes closet with glassed doors….[She] had curtains in there and clothes. A little, small bed, a hospital-size bed.” Still, Billie made her intentions clear. “[She] wanted me to go to bed with her. Momma was in the living room, sleeping on the couch. I say I can’t make it. She’s making preparations, telling me what all I had if I had her. I didn’t have to go anyplace to look for anything. I said yeah, okay.” But, in the end, Simmons could not bring himself to sleep with her and left.
As it happened, Simmons was already involved with another woman. Dorothy, who was white, came from a prominent family in Chicago; the couple had a daughter, Sue, in 1942. But extraneous obligations were not a topic of concern for Billie, who was resolute in her pursuit of Simmons. Her solution to his reluctance to sleep with her in an apartment he found uninviting was to go out the next day and rent an apartment of her own. Located on 107th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Central Park West, it was a fourth-floor unit in an elevator building. That night, she went back to the Village Vanguard and, after Simmons got off work, sent him by taxi to the new apartment ahead of her because she was tied up temporarily. When she joined him later, an argument erupted. “She had been accustomed to whipping her man,” Simmons later said. “She scratching them and tearing their clothes off and all. But I doubled up my fist and knock her out.” Many women would have thrown out such an assailant, but not Billie, which took Simmons off guard: “Come to find out, she was a masochist.” The violence was what she wanted. “She was doing things to make me fight her, to go to bed.”
Over the coming weeks, the violence became worse. At one point, Simmons went to a pet shop in Midtown and bought a whip—a cat of nine tails but with only three tails. “So, no sooner [did I] get back home [than] she had to go into her act. And I showed her this whip when I walked in…and I hung it on the doorknob. I [was] tired of using my hands. And I caught her with this whip. She wanted to jump out the fourth floor. I hit her everywhere but in her face and the bottom of her feet.” Afterwards, he was sure she would not go in to work at the Onyx Club. “But before I left home, I run a bathtub of cold water with a box of table salt in it and put her in it to close up the welts. [Still,] I just knew she wasn’t going to be at work. I took intermission”—he was now playing on Fifty-Second Street at the Three Deuces—“and went across the street. There she is under this pin light with this gardenia in her hair, singing her ass off.”
It was while Billie was involved with Simmons that she used heroin for the first time. Simmons remembered the circumstances: “A white boy from Dallas called Speck, he was freckle-faced. He slipped up to her dressing room and made himself acquainted. [He] introduced her to a hypodermic, showing how many cc’s and everything, and, her being adventuresome, she went for it. Every night he came by he was giving it to her for free until finally she had to have it. Then he was coming back and getting the money. She’d give him the money and he’d come back, but he’d take what he wanted first.”
Once Billie developed a heroin habit, Simmons ended their relationship. He had been addicted to heroin as a teenager; when he got off of it, the withdrawal had been so excruciating he vowed never to risk becoming reliant on the drug again. So, on the day he left, he packed his belongings and got dressed to go. He finished off his outfit with a new gaberdine topcoat, but as he was walking out, Billie grabbed him with such force she tore the coat’s back seam. Simmons beat her so badly he “tried to kill her.” The affair may have been over, but Billie was left with a heroin addiction that plagued her on and off for the remainder of her life. “She had never thought of doing [heroin],” Simmons claimed, “until this white boy [from Dallas] introduced her to it.”
Billie was not the only woman with whom John Simmons was abusive. “He was violent with my mother,” says Sue Simmons, who later became a news broadcaster, “so I’m not surprised he was violent with Billie. It was a turn-on for Billie. As my father said, ‘She chose me.’ But the violence with my mother was unwanted. It was a frightening thing. Until you’ve heard the sound of flesh beating flesh—it’s a weird sound and it stays with you. My mother didn’t leave my father because she was very much in love with him. She tolerated it. She also found out about his affair with Billie, and, as she said, she still bought Billie’s records.” To his daughter, Simmons had his redeeming qualities. “He was a good dad. He spent a lot of time with me. He taught me to play softball in Central Park. He was very much in my life.” As the years passed, Simmons was forthcoming with his daughter, to some degree at least, about his relationship with Billie: “I remember asking him when I was older if Lady Day was the happiest time in his life. I did not expect his answer. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was.’ ”
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Not long after her affair with Simmons ended, Billie became involved, early in 1945, with Joe Guy, a trumpet player from Birmingham, Alabama. He played in bands headed by Fats Waller and Coleman Hawkins, but Billie was less interested in his musical proficiency than she was in the drug connections he was known to have. She may have started using heroin while she was with Simmons, but now, as she sank deeper into addiction, she needed a source who could get her drugs when she needed them. On that front Guy was reliable. She was so pleased with him she encouraged people to think he was her new love interest. On a trip to Los Angeles in April 1945, she even announced to friends that he was now her husband. There was only one problem: she was still married to Jimmy Monroe. “Billie Holiday…caused commotion,” one newspaper reported, “by news that she had secured a divorce in Mexico and had married Joe Guy, trumpet with Coleman Hawkins. Friends were puzzled by Billie’s announcement as no one seems to know when Billie visited Mexico to secure the divorce.”
