Bitter crop, p.3
Bitter Crop, page 3
For the first two or three years, their relationship was largely harmonious, although McKay had a tendency to become violent with her. Eventually, he stopped protecting her from the drug dealers and started to facilitate her heroin supply himself in an effort to guarantee his continued access to her money, which was coming in steadily in the early and mid-1950s. Their relationship was clearly beginning to falter when they were arrested in Philadelphia in 1956—Billie for narcotics possession, McKay on weapons charges—yet they remained together. Then, in 1957, a decision was made for them to marry, in all likelihood because McKay threatened to testify against her at trial if they did not. (A person cannot be compelled to testify against a spouse.) “She had to marry him out of self-defense,” William Dufty later told journalist Joel Lobenthal. “She was in his power [after] they were arrested together.” There was one obstacle they had to overcome. In 1941, Billie was briefly married to Jimmy Monroe, and she had never bothered to get a divorce. So, in March 1957, Billie and McKay traveled to Juárez, Mexico, where Billie secured a “quickie” divorce on the twenty-seventh and, the following morning, married McKay.
For the rest of 1957 and into 1958, the couple remained together, although McKay routinely traveled for business. But a new level of complication entered into their relationship in the early months of 1958, and Billie began secretly passing documents from her apartment to Earle Warren Zaidins, her attorney, toward whom McKay developed such an extreme jealousy he was convinced Zaidins had a romantic—or at least sexual—interest in Billie. The situation had come to a head on Memorial Day weekend three weeks earlier when McKay discovered documents were missing and Billie confessed to giving them to Zaidins. McKay erupted in rage. He later admitted to assaulting her: “I blew my top….She offered to telephone Zaidins to get back the papers. [Afterwards], I was almost crying. I grabbed the phone from her and threw it. I would guess I didn’t care whether it hit her or not. It would be hard to admit that I threw it at her”—and yet, in effect, that was exactly what he admitted he did.
McKay’s cruel behavior was nothing new. Friends knew about his brutal treatment of her. Annie Ross would hold strong memories of McKay and the stories Billie told her about him: “He was awful. He did not love her. He was there for the money. He was a pimp. He was a kind of take-over guy. He did not treat her well. He was horrible to her.” A telephone call between McKay and Maely Dufty, the wife of William Dufty, in February 1958, around the time Billie was recording Lady in Satin, reflected the animus McKay had come to feel for Billie. “I’m through with her,” he told Maely. “That bitch is going to see some bad days around here. I put the skids on her tonight….She took the money and used it up….She go around here and give away all her cunt and everything and don’t get no money for it.” When Maely pointed out that these days Billie rarely left her apartment except to fulfill professional commitments, McKay retorted, “I know what this woman done.” Maely implored him not to “be crazy,” but McKay responded by threatening Billie: “Holiday’s ass in the gutter in the East River somewhere! I’ll get someone to do it!…I’ll catch her somewhere and whip her all over the goddam street.” Maely noted the obvious: if he caused harm to Billie, directly or indirectly, he could face legal jeopardy. McKay remained defiant: “I got enough to finish her off and go downtown and take a chance on my liberty.” Did he intend to kill Billie? “I ain’t talking about killing her. I’m going to do her up so goddam bad she’s going to remember as long as she lives….I hate her….I kept that woman alive. Kept her away from junkies in the street and in the corners.” The telephone call concluded with McKay declaring it was time for them to “go ahead and get a divorce and stop fighting.”
As for the Memorial Day weekend disturbance, the events as documented by Zaidins, contained in a legal affidavit, were, perhaps not surprisingly, more damning than McKay’s version: “It was the Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend, [and] I received a hysterical telephone call from [Billie]. The subject of the conversation related to the fact that I should turn back to her all of the business and personal documents and papers given to me by her….I informed [her] that I would surely accede to her wishes [on] Monday, when I would be in the office….Within the next hour…my doorbell started to ring. I opened the door only to be met with a fainting Billie Holiday, covered with blood. Immediately I telephoned [my physician] Dr. Stillerman [and] my wife and I placed her upon our convertible couch in the living room. [Billie] had nothing with her except for the clothing on her back. She wore a black diamond mink coat, underneath which was merely a nightgown. By the time Dr. Stillerman arrived, [Billie] had regained consciousness [and] it was disclosed that [Billie] suffered from an open wound on her scalp. According to [Billie], Louis McKay…had forced her to make the telephone call to me to obtain the return of these papers and that immediately following the telephone conversation in a fit of rage [had] picked up the telephone and proceeded to hit her on and about the head.” The incident was reported to the police, but Billie refused to press charges for assault. Within a day or two, as Billie stayed away from him, McKay packed his belongings in his car and headed for Los Angeles. After years of manipulating her, he was leaving now that he had gotten what he always wanted—a binding legal bond to Billie Holiday.
To keep her company once McKay was gone, Billie relied on friends like Alice Vrbsky, a young woman in her midtwenties who was hired originally to work for Billie only to become more of a companion. Alice was a fan who first met Billie in July 1957 after a group concert in the Wollman Memorial Theatre in Central Park called Jazz Under the Stars, when she sought out Billie to autograph her program and a record album. (“Thank you for loving me,” Billie wrote on the album cover.) Subsequent visits led to McKay hiring Alice to serve as an assistant to Billie on a prolonged engagement in Los Angeles. “Louis paid me once and he never paid me again,” Vrbsky recalled. “Billie gave me as much as she could. But there was no real regular salary.” Over time, Alice helped out when she was able, and Billie looked forward to her visits. “Billie liked to cook Baltimore specials like crab cakes, red beans and rice, and pigs’ feet,” Vrbsky said. “She liked to watch old movies on TV, and sometimes she’d drag me down to Forty-Second Street and there would be a double feature. We’d get there at one in the morning and stay all night.” But mostly the two women sat in Billie’s living room and talked. As Billie chain-smoked—“all of her nightgowns had holes burned in them from cigarettes”—the conversation often turned to Billie sharing her thoughts on music and singers: “Billie didn’t care for Ethel Waters. She loved Lena Horne. About Ella Fitzgerald, she said if she were white, she’d be considered the greatest singer in the world. Billie once said, ‘The only white woman I ever heard who could sing the blues was Kay Starr.’ I happened to agree with her. Billie also told me about going to see Sarah Vaughan at Birdland. When Vaughan came up to her at the bar and asked her how she liked the show, Billie said, ‘Sassy’ ”—Vaughan’s nickname—“ ‘you sound like you piss ice water.’ ”
* * *
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Despite the unassuming nature of her current circumstances, because of the position to which she had ascended in her profession, because of what she had come to represent in the broader culture, Billie Holiday was a woman of the world. This fact was not universally celebrated. Her critics routinely marginalized her, pointing out that she was untrained as a musician, could neither read nor write music, and enjoyed a grammar-school education that had progressed no further than the fifth grade. Her detractors wanted to portray her as unread, uncouth, and unworthy of her fame. Their goal was to depict her as a drug addict who never rose above the trappings of a troubled and impoverished youth in Baltimore that was defined by an unstable home life, truancy as a child, and prostitution as a teenager, all of which she readily acknowledged in her autobiography. She did so in part because Billie did not view herself as a victim. “What she really felt,” a friend later said, “the Rosebud to understanding her, was that her life was a triumph.” And it was a triumph. Despite the shortcomings of her background, she had become a vital force in the entertainment industry. She traveled extensively, both nationally and internationally, to fulfill engagements. She worked with some of the most prominent members of her generation. She often fraternized with socialites, fellow artists, and titans in the political and show business communities. She enjoyed such success because, like other notable figures of her time—Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Howard Hughes—she was a persona of her own creation. To the public, through her singing and public appearances, she projected an aura of style and sophistication. She was the personification of dignity and class, which she achieved despite efforts made by her enemies—and sometimes by those who claimed to be her friends—to tarnish the image she crafted for herself. “There was an elegance about her,” composer David Amram says. “Compared to some of the rough characters in her life, she somehow was able to rise above that. She knew that she deserved better; she understood how terrific she was. She wasn’t an egomaniac or conceited; she just knew her own worth. She carried herself like a lady. It was something she had become. She appreciated her value and the beauty of her music.”
Still, she was not without her colorful side. During her big-band touring days, she played cards and rolled dice with the boys on the bus. She called everyone “baby,” friends and strangers alike, and her favorite word was “motherfucker.” Depending on her tone of voice, it was meant either as a term of endearment (as in “Buck Clayton, you motherfucker, come over here and let me see what color your eyes are today,” a line she was known to say to her close friend) or as an indication of her contempt (as in “if that evil motherfucker believes in God, I’m thinking it over,” she ultimately said of Louis McKay). If provoked, she was proficient at throwing a right hook, and more than one unsuspecting accoster was the recipient of a slug. She was particularly infuriated when someone made a racial slur. “She had antennae that were so highly developed,” William Dufty said, “she could hear somebody making a racist remark thirty feet down the bar, and before you knew it, she would have a beer bottle smashed and would be at the guy’s throat. The rage came from how she had to live her life—day after day after day, night after night after night. The thing that galled her was being treated like a queen uptown, and then nobody knows you when you come down to the fifties.”
Her friend Greer Johnson remembered her intellect: “Billie was extremely bright, as intelligent as anyone I have ever known. She appealed to such an astonishingly broad range of people. I daresay Billie appealed to everyone from the crème de la crème of the so-called intellectuals down to the ‘lowest’ pusher.” Irene Wilson Kitchens recalled her independent personality: “You couldn’t dictate to her. She had a mind of her own and a will of her own.”
Billie’s fondness for cartoons and comic strips was well known, but she read books and kept up with current events by reading newspapers and magazines. And when she leafed through a newspaper, she encountered a world she knew all too well, sometimes on a personal basis. Take the newspaper for this day, June 21, 1958. In the nation section, it was reported that Vice President Richard Nixon was reassuring Republicans on Capitol Hill that they would not be harmed in the upcoming midterm elections by a scandal involving Sherman Adams, an assistant to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Billie had once appeared with Nixon at a civic rally in Harlem, but, because she was a lifelong Democrat, she much preferred Franklin D. Roosevelt, her favorite president, whom she had met at the White House when she and Hazel Scott were guests at one of the annual fundraisers the president hosted to fight infantile paralysis, with which he was afflicted.
In the international section, there was coverage of Sputnik 3, an unmanned orbiting rocket launched into space by the Soviet Union in May—the ship could be seen in the skies over New England the following morning—a mission that prompted Eisenhower to propose establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which would be founded in July. No doubt a public fascinated by space was one reason why the nation’s current Number 1 single was “The Purple People Eater,” a novelty song about space invaders sung by Sheb Wooley. Billie had an aversion to novelty songs, as did other artists like her friend Frank Sinatra, who eventually acquiesced to pressure from his record label to record them (“Mama Will Bark” featured a dog howling in response to his lyrics), while Billie never did.
In the entertainment section, advertisements appeared for Touch of Evil, a picture starring Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh and written and directed by Orson Welles. In a complicated romantic life that all too often featured destructive relationships, Billie enjoyed in mid-1942 one of her more pleasurable liaisons with Welles, who had won acclaim for Citizen Kane the previous year and was preparing to release The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles feted Billie around Los Angeles, from swanky restaurants to Central Avenue jazz clubs to late-night hot spots, while she appeared as a headliner act at Billy Berg’s Trouville Club in West Hollywood and lived in a comfortable apartment on Clark Street, where Welles often spent the night. In a departure from other affairs she pursued with a variety of men—and women, for that matter, since two of her most significant relationships were with women—Billie and Welles maintained a cordial involvement that ended on good terms. “I liked him and he liked me, and jazz,” Billie wrote. “There wasn’t a damn thing or person he wasn’t interested in. He wanted to see everything and find out who and why it ticked. I guess that’s part of what made him such a great artist.”
But of all the stories in the present news cycle, one that resonated with Billie on a visceral level was a report out of Arkansas about events transpiring in Little Rock. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that ended segregation in public schools, all-white Central High School in Little Rock was integrated by nine African-American students, dubbed the Little Rock Nine, in 1957. Now a U.S. district court judge ruled that the city school board could delay integration for two and a half years—a move seen as a blow to efforts to desegregate public schools nationwide. The Saturday Evening Post dated this day featured a sepia-toned cover created by John Falter that summed up the present situation regarding race in certain parts of America. In a bucolic setting stands a quaint mid-twentieth-century brick schoolhouse with a flood of carefree children—all of them white—rushing out the front door on their way to a yellow school bus. Though the image evokes a sentimentality worthy of Norman Rockwell, it captures a world defined by segregation as enshrined by the Jim Crow laws, which some citizens were fighting vehemently to maintain, if not permanently, then at least for as long as possible.
Billie had experienced Jim Crow firsthand. When she toured with Artie Shaw and his band in the late 1930s, she was the first African-American woman to sing with an all-white orchestra and encountered discrimination down south but, most painfully, also in Boston and New York. Jim Crow was one reason why, in 1939, Billie began to sing “Strange Fruit,” an anti-lynching protest song disturbing in its graphic imagery and emotional impact. As the song became increasingly controversial, garnering national press coverage and selling a million copies when it was released as a single, Billie made it her own, even though it was written by Abel Meeropol. Her close association with the song drew the ire of Harry Anslinger, the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who was supported in his efforts by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The government feared “Strange Fruit” would foment discontent within the African-American community and beyond. Because of this, Billie was warned to stop singing the song. When she refused, the government launched a vendetta against her, which resulted in a drug bust in 1947 that landed her in prison in Alderson, West Virginia, for a year-and-a-day sentence. Her release nine and a half months later (two and a half months early for good behavior) served only to generate a protracted campaign of harassment by the government that continued for the next decade. Even in recent months, the surveillance had persisted, prompting Dorothy Kilgallen to report that Billie was “still under observation by Uncle Sam’s boys.”
As it turned out, the government was right. “Strange Fruit” was an early catalyst that contributed to the growing civic consciousness that, especially after the mid-1950s, sparked a movement that demanded civil rights and equality for African Americans. Before the Little Rock Nine entered the front doors of Central High School; before Rosa Parks was jailed in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama; before a young unknown Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., organized the ensuing Montgomery bus boycott, Billie Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit.” By doing so, she made herself an object of derision to audiences resistant to the song’s message and a target of the government. Despite suffering considerable repercussions, Billie never abandoned the song. Her method of protest was not to make a speech or to join a march in the streets but to attempt to change public sentiment through the power of a song.
3.
As the afternoon passed—June 21, a cool, cloudy day in Manhattan, happened to be the summer solstice—Billie began to contemplate that evening’s engagement. Originally, she was supposed to be in Europe during June, performing a show at the Royal Festival Hall in London on the eighth before starting a three-week stand at the Olympia Music Hall in Paris, but the political unrest in Algiers in May spilled over into France and ushered in a new government headed by General Charles de Gaulle, which prompted the cancellation of her trip. So Joe Glaser had booked tonight’s gig as a last-minute consolation. At the Loew’s Sheridan Theatre, a 2,500-seat movie house at Seventh Avenue and Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village that routinely featured live concerts on Saturday nights at midnight, Art D’Lugoff (who had recently opened the Village Gate nightclub, also in the Village) was presenting Billie Holiday and the Dave Brubeck Quartet in, according to press notices, “a program of blues and jazz.” Tickets, available at the box office, cost $2.50 or $2.80. This engagement marked the fourth time Billie had played the midnight show, which she could do since the theater did not sell alcohol and she was not required to have a cabaret card. Indeed, because of the moratorium imposed on her performing in nightclubs, Billie relished shows like the one this evening, when she could take the stage in the city she loved, even if its municipal administration in the form of the police department and the mayor’s office did not afford her the respect an artist of her caliber deserved. For Billie, that disrespect was a point of contention. “The pretext used to deny me the right to work was my prison record,” she wrote. “The police authorities who regulate the local nightclub industry decided that I wasn’t fit to be granted a cabaret performer’s license although many other nightclub employees with police records are licensed and working.”
