Bitter crop, p.13
Bitter Crop, page 13
During this time, Billie lived in the Braddock Hotel at 126th Street and Eighth Avenue, where she was visited by friends like Elizabeth Hardwick, then a graduate student in English literature at Columbia University, who would one day become a prominent novelist and critic, and Greer Johnson, Hardwick’s companion, who forged such a close friendship with Billie he later produced her first Town Hall concert (one of her more celebrated engagements, where one thousand people had to be turned away at the door), as well as other individuals Billie allowed into her inner circle, among them Frank Harriott, who worked for three months on a profile of her for PM. Harriott was often accompanied by Owen Dodson, who remembered visiting Billie: “That hotel was the mess of the world….I knocked on her door, and she poked her head out—filled with Vaseline (or something), and as I entered, she had on a dilapidated pink robe. She looked a mess. I had never…smoked [marijuana], but I knew the smell. I knew that she had been smoking it.” Dodson understood the pressure Billie was now under. “Billie was an artist of so much strength and knew the curse of what she was about. No wonder that proud girl with the [gardenia] in her hair took to drugs, because whatever she sang, they could not bear that a black woman could wear the crown of the Queen of Jazz….Can you imagine a black woman with the courage to sing songs like [‘Strange Fruit’]? She was really a female Paul Robeson everywhere she went.”
While Guy supplied Billie with heroin, he also helped her assemble a sixteen-piece orchestra to tour second-tier, non-marquee venues in the Midwest and South. In September, Billie was between gigs in Columbia, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C., when she received word that her mother had suffered a stroke in New York on the twenty-third. Rushed to Wadsworth Hospital in Manhattan, Sadie remained in life-threatening condition for thirteen days until she died on October 6, while Billie was appearing at the Royal Theatre in Baltimore. Devastated, Billie hurried to New York. At the hospital, she signed the death certificate for “Sadie Holiday” (a name her mother had come to use even though she never married Clarence Holiday) before she made arrangements with Rodney Dade, a funeral director, for her mother to be buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. “She was late for her mother’s funeral,” Elizabeth Hardwick later wrote. “At last she arrived, ferociously appropriate in a black turban. A number of jazz musicians were there. The late morning light fell mercilessly on their unsteady, night faces. In the daytime these people, all except her, had a furtive, suburban aspect, like family men who work the night shift. The marks of a fractured domesticity, signals of a real life that is itself almost a secret existence for the performers, were drifting about the little church, adding to the awkward unreality.” Owen Dodson was given an account of the funeral by Frank Harriott: “I remember Frank telling me about how Billie came back from her mother’s funeral to find her place emptied of all her gowns, her furs, and her jewels. Evidently, the thieves had known or read in the paper that her mother was dead—and so they robbed her.”
After completing her tour following her mother’s death, Billie, often accompanied by Guy, returned to Fifty-Second Street, where she headlined at the Downbeat Club throughout November. One notable fan in her Fifty-Second Street days was Malcolm Little, a low-level drug hustler who later, inspired by a religious conversion and a political epiphany, changed his name to Malcolm X. Little recalled Billie’s appearance during this engagement: “Her white gown glittered under the spotlight, her face had that coppery, Indianish look, and her hair was in that trademark ponytail.” Her singing left a permanent impression: “Lady Day sang with the soul of Negroes from the centuries of sorrow and oppression. What a shame that proud, fine, black woman never lived where the true greatness of the black race was appreciated!” Perhaps, but Billie was still proud of who she was. “I’ve got two strikes against me,” she told a reporter at the time—being a woman and black—“and don’t you forget it. [But] I’m proud of those two strikes. I’m as good as a lot of people of all kinds. I’m proud I’m a Negro.” Indeed, Mae Weiss, whose husband Sid had played in the Shaw band, believed Billie “was living Black is Beautiful before it was even fashionable. The pride of being black—she did it before we knew what it was. That’s the way she lived. She was a trailblazer without being conscious [of it].”
Joe Guy continued to be in the picture—Billie had now fallen in love with him—when she traveled to Los Angeles in September to film New Orleans, a motion picture starring Arturo de Córdova and Dorothy Patrick based on a script adapted from a story by Elliot Paul and Herbert Biberman. The origin of the film was a script written by Paul for Orson Welles called The Story of Jazz, which was supposed to document the invention of jazz in the Storyville neighborhood of New Orleans, but the script morphed into a love story between a casino owner and a singer from an affluent family, both white, with a secondary love story between a singing maid played by Billie and a bandleader played by Louis Armstrong. “And let me tell you,” Armstrong wrote to a friend, “I think it’s going to be a pretty good lecture on this music called jazz…Billy [sic] and I are doing quite a bit of acting (ahem): she’s also my sweetheart in the picture….Ump Ump Ump. Now isn’t that something? The great Billy Holiday, my sweetheart?” Biberman later remembered the producers became “scared to death that too many Negroes will come to the theatres to see this picture because there will be too many Negro artists in it.” So, in the final cut of the picture, much of the emphasis in the second half of the film focuses on Woody Herman and his orchestra—all of whom were white. In what turned out to be an otherwise pedestrian picture, its most inspired moments are the three musical numbers featuring Billie singing with Armstrong and his band—“Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans,” “Farewell to Storyville,” and “The Blues Are Brewing.”
As Guy remained a constant presence in her life, Billie came to know that menacing players were watching her. Even so, she did not kowtow to them no matter how threatening they were. Indeed, at times, it seemed she openly defied them. If there was any doubt about Billie’s political beliefs, she made them clear in the PM article when it appeared in the fall of 1945. Discussing “Strange Fruit” and the Jim Crow–sanctioned racism that motivated her to sing it, she offered a stark admission. “That’s what made me a communist,” she said. “Everybody should be a communist—not like the communists you meet at benefits and rallies, though. Not that stuff, at all. But we should all believe in treating each other as human beings. Everybody should have the chance to eat and sleep in peace.” As for so many progressives at the time, especially those in the African-American community, it was the Communist Party’s stance on racial equality that motivated Billie to support the cause. Her life, after all, despite all her accomplishments, was still defined by her race. “Now when I’m in the South,” she told PM, “I…stay on the [other] side of the tracks—in all the stinking little hotel rooms—because I’m not white….All you need is a white face to be treated like a human, to be a little more happy.”
As long as Guy was with her, Billie was going to remain addicted to heroin. That was the basis of their relationship. He got her the drugs she needed, he was dating a woman who had become a prominent jazz figure, and they did love each other. But because of who she was and the friends and colleagues with whom she associated, Billie was in a level of danger she did not fully appreciate. Had she been able to see her current circumstances clearly, had she been sober enough to understand how her world had become increasingly perilous, she would have made different choices. However, the heroin muted her perception, so if she was able to see what was happening around her, she seemed powerless to do anything about it. Still, the danger that lurked around her in the shadows was real. It took the form of federal agents who had made Billie their mark.
* * *
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The surveillance of Billie by the FBI, but more often the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, had commenced not long after she began her residency at Café Society. That she was working for Barney and Leon Josephson, considered shills for the Communist Party, initially focused the government’s attention on her; it only intensified when she started to sing “Strange Fruit.” The danger to her was represented by what was happening to the men around her. Abel Meeropol was subpoenaed in 1941 to appear before the Rapp-Coudert Committee, which the New York State Legislature formed to examine the extent to which the education system had been infiltrated by communists. He was asked if the Communist Party paid him to write “Strange Fruit”; his answer was no. That same year, the FBI started a file on John Hammond, whose support of liberal causes made him suspicious. Two years later, the agency opened a file on Barney Josephson, who, in 1944, was included on the Security Index, a list of individuals regarded as a national security risk. Meanwhile, since his involvement in the Soviet plot to assassinate Hitler, Leon Josephson had been monitored by the government. Hoover himself kept an eye on the Josephson brothers, often commenting personally on documents in their FBI files. “Hoover disliked both of them,” Lee Josephson says. “He disliked them because they were Reds. He disliked them because they were immigrants. He disliked them because they were Jewish. He disliked them because they refused to cooperate.”
All of these men, with their communist connections, were closely associated with Billie. If she was not a primary target before the fall of 1945, she was afterwards—her encouraging “everyone” to become a communist did not help—which was known to Billie’s inner circle. “She had a record in the FBI,” William Dufty told journalist Joel Lobenthal, “for having sung ‘Strange Fruit’ in front of the wrong audience, and the FBI had these bulletins, and so she was Red-channeled.” Unlike others—Hammond, Meeropol, the Josephsons—Billie had a weapon that could be used against her: her drug dependency. It was an open secret in the jazz community that Billie had a serious heroin habit facilitated by Joe Guy. If the government wanted to silence her, a drug bust and conviction were all that were needed. She could hardly pose a threat from prison.
Then, in early 1947, the saga with the Josephsons and the federal government reached a new level of intensity when Leon Josephson was subpoenaed to appear before the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives (HUAC). “The alleged activities of Josephson,” The New York Times reported on March 6, “involving espionage and the issuance of fraudulent passports, were the subject of a hearing…before a subcommittee of [HUAC]”—a hearing Josephson refused to attend. His unwillingness to comply with a subpoena prompted Richard Nixon, a subcommittee member, to recommend Josephson be “cited for contempt of the House and [the] alleged criminal evidence of passport fraud and conspiracy be turned over to the Department of Justice for prosecution.” On March 22, J. Parnell Thomas, HUAC chairman, announced a contempt citation was being drawn up for Josephson, who was, according to the Times, “named yesterday by two former admitted communists…as a member of the Russian secret police.” On April 22, almost the entire House voted to hold Josephson in contempt; of the two congressmen voting “nay,” one was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who represented Harlem. (The Baptist minister–congressman was married to Hazel Scott—one of Billie’s dearest friends—who headlined Café Society Uptown, the original club’s spinoff located in the East Fifties, where Josephson hosted a reception for two thousand guests to celebrate the Scott-Powell nuptials when they were married.) In arguing for contempt charges, Thomas claimed Josephson and his cohorts represented “a bold and contemptuous challenge of the very sovereignty of our government.” In May, Josephson was indicted by a federal grand jury. On May 5, he posted a $2,500 bond to remain free as he awaited trial. Eventually, he was found guilty at trial, and, when he lost an appeals court ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case, he was sent to prison for a year. The silent partner in Café Society, the club that made Billie famous, was now in prison.
Not surprisingly, the government continued to stalk Billie. “Under the nasty pressure of shifty-eyed Hawkshaws and relentless gumshoe artists from various narcotics bureaus,” Billie wrote, “my life has been made miserable. These people have dogged my footsteps from New York to San Francisco and all the territory in between. They have allowed me no peace.” It was about this time that Harry Anslinger, head of the FBN, assigned Billie to be trailed by Jimmy Fletcher, one of the few African-American agents employed by the agency, a decidedly white-oriented federal bureau. One peculiar episode unfolded at the Braddock Hotel when Fletcher and a colleague came to bust Billie, only to have her strip nude in front of them to prove she had no drugs in her possession.
The pursuit of Billie finally caught up with her in May 1947, a week after Leon Josephson posted bond in his contempt of Congress case, when she, accompanied by Guy with his ever-present heroin supply, was appearing with the Louis Armstrong Orchestra in Philadelphia at the Earle Theatre. There had been problems during the run. “I was doing ‘Strange Fruit’ at the Earle,” Billie later said, “until they made me stop.” Then, after finishing her last show on May 15, Billie was being driven in her car back to the Attucks Hotel when she realized narcotics agents were raiding the premises. “I suppose,” Billie later wrote, “my troubled life reached its climax on that early morning in May…when [my driver sped away] from my Philadelphia hotel [in] my Cadillac and headed for New York. A federal narcotics agent who had been trailing me fired several shots after my speeding car. But I was scared to death, so [we] kept going. My evil mistakes were catching up with me. In my hotel room they found one and a half grams of heroin—that deadly drug that had me in its clutches for several years. And which was ruining me professionally, physically, and financially.” Three prevailing elements in her life—her political leanings, her drug dependency, and her propensity to become involved with men who were bad for her, like Joe Guy—had come together to produce an episode that permanently altered the rest of her life and career.
On May 16, Billie opened for a two-week engagement at Club 18 in New York, where agents, among them Jimmy Fletcher, staked her out. What she did not know was that Fletcher was surreptitiously in communication with Joe Glaser, who, to placate the government, now encouraged Billie to return to Philadelphia, turn herself in, and ask to be sent to a hospital for drug treatment. In the end, Billie decided to listen to Joe Glaser. It was one of the worst mistakes she made in her life.
3.
The drug raid in Philadelphia, and her romance with Joe Guy that led to it, seemed like a lifetime ago to Billie in September 1958, except that it was not. The fallout of that night still plagued her. As a result of the bust and a subsequent conviction, she had no cabaret card and remained under surveillance by the government. She was yet to overcome fully her “evil mistakes”—a reliance on drugs and alcohol—despite her best attempts to stay clean and sober, which both damaged her health and continued to make her vulnerable to the government.
Because she lived under the shadow of her past, all she could do was to get on with her life, which she attempted to do in the early days of autumn by appearing at more events. On the thirteenth, a Saturday evening, she headlined a jazz show at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan (the scene of her past celebrated performance produced by Greer Johnson); the roster included Jo Jones and His Trio, the Buck Clayton All Stars, Eddie Condon, and J. C. Higginbotham. John S. Wilson reviewed her performance (but not the entire show) for The New York Times: “Halfway through a so-called ‘All Star Jazz Show’…Billie Holiday dragged her way through a slow, slow ballad. Then, as drummer Jo Jones picked up the tempo a bit and Buck Clayton’s muted trumpet muttered smoothly behind her, she eased into a swinging version of ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’ and some of the old Holiday magic began to peep through….But it grew and grew at Town Hall until it seemed to fill the stage as she moved confidently through a short set….By the time she wound up with ‘Billie’s Blues,’ she was singing with more assurance, skill and spirit than this listener has heard from her in years.”
Five days later, on the eighteenth, Billie was a guest in the seven o’clock hour of the Today show hosted by Dave Garroway. She sang “My Funny Valentine.” The following night, members of the audience were still buzzing about her television appearance when she opened at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit, a city she had played numerous times. “A lot of folks saw me on the Dave Garroway show and didn’t think I could get up that early,” she told one Detroit columnist. “I didn’t either.” After a successful run in Detroit, Billie returned to New York before, on September 26, she traveled to Wallingford, Connecticut, where she was a houseguest of Irving Townsend as she appeared in a presentation assembled by Leonard Feather entitled “Encyclopedia of Jazz,” which featured several participants—Coleman Hawkins, Buck Clayton, Milt Hinton—who routinely performed in such cavalcades. For her contribution to the show, for which she had received an advance on salary of one hundred dollars two days earlier, a reflection of her current cash flow problems, Billie sang “I Wished on the Moon” and “Lover Man.” One Connecticut critic was dismissive of her performance: “Billie Holiday sang straight through two tunes and left forthwith.” But Feather remembered that Billie “sang with a miraculous renewal of the old timbre and assurance.” He also wrote about an offstage moment that unfolded between Billie and his wife. “I’m so goddam lonely,” Billie confessed, barely able to control her emotions. “Since Louis and I broke up I got nobody—nothing.”
