Bitter crop, p.30
Bitter Crop, page 30
Some urban newspapers were more sympathetic in their coverage. The New York Daily News observed: “Death, at 44, put blues singer Billie Holiday under the spotlight of world attention for the last time. Whenever performers gathered, the comment was much the same: Billie was a trouper, they said. Billie had it rough, but Billie played it game.” And this from the Globe and Mail in Canada: “Even in death Billie Holiday is misunderstood. Every obituary…calls her a blues singer…when, in fact, a blues singer is one of the few things she was not….Billie Holiday was a jazz singer, the best ever of her sex, and ballads, not blues, were her bread and butter. She probably sang fewer honest-to-goodness blues than any other major singer in jazz.”
Most sympathetic were industry publications. “Few others could ever sing the blues like Billie Holiday,” Billboard proclaimed; “few other singers will ever be remembered as affectionately or as compassionately as Lady….In spite of all [that happened to her] or perhaps because of it, everyone finally realized that Lady Day was touched with greatness.”
* * *
—
On Friday, in the hours after her death, the handful of family, friends, and advisers who were helping Billie make decisions at the end of her life—the Duftys, Joe Glaser, Earle Warren Zaidins, Louis McKay—conferred to discuss funeral plans. Dufty felt strongly that he did not want a “jazz” funeral, as he called it, an emotional affair, likely held in Harlem, used to air grievances and engage in political posturing—to which he believed Billie would have been opposed—so he argued that because Billie was a lifelong Roman Catholic and because she was internationally famous he was certain that the Archdiocese of New York would be willing to hold a funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral presided over by Cardinal Francis Spellman. McKay was too tempted by the status that such a funeral could bestow on Billie—and by extension the Estate of Billie Holiday, of which he was the sole heir—and, based on Dufty’s assurances, went along with the plan. But when Dufty contacted the Archdiocese, neither St. Patrick’s Cathedral nor Cardinal Spellman was available on such short notice. Given Billie’s fame, however, the Archdiocese was loath to ignore Dufty’s wishes. As such, church officials offered what they said were second-best accommodations. The funeral could be held at St. Paul the Apostle Roman Catholic Church on Columbus Avenue at Sixtieth Street with a solemn requiem mass conducted by Reverend Joseph Troy, who was pastor of the church, and assisted by Fathers Lawrence McDonnell and Robert Nugent. McKay was agreeable with the arrangements, and the funeral time was set for 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 21. First, though, the body of Billie Holiday would lie in state for viewing by the public at Universal Funeral Chapel—the site of the recent funeral of Lester Young—on Sunday from 2:00 until 10:00 p.m. and Monday from 9:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m.
In anticipation of mourners passing by to see her lying in state in a heavy bronze coffin, Billie was dressed as if she were about to take the stage. She wore one of her favorite evening gowns—a rose Chantilly lace gown with long sleeves—and pink gloves. Around her neck was a five-strand pearl necklace. Each ear was adorned with a cluster pearl earring. There was a halo of white gardenias in her hair. She appeared to be, as she always did onstage, the epitome of style and grace—a lady.
When the funeral chapel opened its doors on Sunday afternoon, a crowd of mourners had already gathered. People passed by steadily all afternoon and into the evening, hundreds an hour. A reporter described those who had come to offer their last respects: “[There] stretched a line of people, the poor, the rich, the famous, the unknown, all there to pay tribute to the lady who sang the blues and lived the blues.” When the viewing concluded at 10:00 p.m., four thousand mourners had filed past the coffin. On Monday, another six thousand people passed through the chapel, as exemplified by one “middle-aged woman,” according to one account, who “stood near the heavy bronze coffin [and] wept as these words came brokenly from her lips”—“Lady Day will sing the blues no more.”
Among the ten thousand mourners, there was one who lingered at the coffin longer than most. Tallulah Bankhead had remained distant from Billie since 1951. The two had been in communication, of a fashion, in 1956 when Billie was preparing to publish Lady Sings the Blues. A copy of the manuscript was sent to Tallulah. Once she discovered the book contained passages about her, Tallulah made sure that Doubleday knew she wanted them removed. “The book indicated a very close friendship between two women,” according to Lee Barker, the book’s editor, “and that Tallulah had gone to Billie’s apartment many times for spaghetti dinners. [Theirs] was a very close friendship [that] spanned a period of several years…maybe about five or six years.” Hurt and angry over Tallulah’s rebuff, Billie sent her a letter. “I thought I was a friend of yours,” Billie wrote, addressing her as “Miss Bankhead.” “That’s why there was nothing in my book that was unfriendly to you….Read my book over again….There’s nothing in it to hurt you. If you think so, let’s talk about it.” Tallulah never wrote back, nor did she call; the book was edited, with most of the pertinent passages removed, and published. As time passed, the unfinished business between them haunted Billie. They had been so close; then it all ended. Yet, Billie never fully understood why.
As for Tallulah, in recent months, through press reports and gossip from friends, she had kept up with Billie’s worsening health crisis compounded by new legal woes. If her true feelings for Billie remained unclear, they were revealed as she visited the funeral home. Fellow mourners remarked the Broadway star when she approached the coffin and then, after gazing at Billie for some time, leaned down and started whispering to Billie as if she were still alive. No one could hear what Tallulah said; the silent words were for Billie alone. But the bond that existed between the two of them seemed to linger on after Billie’s death. It was some time before Tallulah finally left. It would be the last time she was with Billie, because she did not attend her funeral. Instead, as a gesture of her affection, she sent to the church twelve dozen long-stem roses. A card read: “God bless you. Love. From Tallulah.”
* * *
—
When the hearse pulled to a stop in front of St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church shortly before eleven o’clock, six pallbearers carried the heavy bronze coffin up the church’s front steps as crowds of people—five hundred or more—lining both sides of the street looked on. Inside, three thousand people were packed into the church, making it the largest funeral ever held there. “The throng at the church and outside,” according to The New York Times, “was so heavy that ten policemen were detailed to the scene. Traffic was disrupted in front of the church at Columbus Avenue and [Sixtieth] Street.” Among the forty honorary pallbearers who attended the funeral were Teddy Wilson, Mary Lou Williams, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Roy Eldridge, Charlie Shavers, Henry “Red” Allen, Joe Williams, Juanita Hall, Leonard Feather, Ray Ellis, Mal Waldron, and Joe Glaser. Indeed, the audience was replete with jazz stalwarts, from John Hammond and Jo Jones to Tony Scott and Michael Peter Grace, the latter one of Billie’s most devoted admirers.
Once the coffin was placed on a catafalque at the head of the center aisle, the service began. The solemn requiem mass was conducted by Reverend Troy with responses rendered in Latin chants by the church’s ten-man choir. The stately service kept the focus of the occasion on the loss of Billie Holiday and not Louis McKay, who arrived at the ceremony with a woman named Kay Kelly, who claimed to be Billie’s half sister even though she was not. (She was the daughter of Phil Gough by a woman other than Sadie Fagan, making her Billie’s stepsister by marriage.) The ceremony was a fitting final tribute to Billie Holiday, who had spent her life attempting to rise above her modest beginnings; now here she was honored by the somber figures in the Roman Catholic Church with the elite of the jazz community looking on from the audience. “There was no eulogy to the lady of song,” Newsday noted, “only music as the church resounded to the refrains of a solemn requiem mass.” It was all too appropriate that the transcendent sound of music, not the voice of a reverend, best conveyed the loss represented by the death of Billie Holiday.
After the service, five limousines headed up a lengthy procession of cars that proceeded from St. Paul the Apostle to St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, where Billie was to be buried alongside her mother. One reporter observed: “The morning ritual deviated only once, but in the direction of another tradition. On its way from [the church to the cemetery], the funeral procession detoured eastward to 110th Street and snaked slowly through Harlem. There had been no advance notice of this and few of the passersby in the street were aware of its meaning. It was as much Billie Holiday’s farewell as Harlem’s farewell.”
* * *
—
In the weeks and months ahead, commentators began to place Billie Holiday into historical perspective and, in doing so, evaluate her accomplishments as a musician. The tone of the assessments changed now that she was dead; a longing for the “Billie of the past” was replaced by an ability to view what looked to be her complete oeuvre. Typical of many of those appraisals was one offered by British jazz critic Benny Green: “And the conclusion I eventually came to was that Billie Holiday is one of the most significant jazz artists who ever lived…that she was one of the most remarkable natural musicians jazz has seen, so natural in fact that it is very doubtful whether she was fully aware of it, and that…her unqualified artistic triumph was all the more remarkable because it required her, almost inadvertently, to prove the universality of jazz in a way no instrumentalist could possibly have done.” At the same time, there were essay-length memoirs of Billie published by friends like Leonard Feather and tribute programs broadcast on the radio. But perhaps the most enduring homage to Billie Holiday was not an essay or a radio broadcast but a poem written on the day she died by someone she never met.
2.
In 1959, Monday was jazz-poetry night at the Five Spot, the café on Cooper Square where the creative crowd—painters, poets, novelists, journalists—could listen to some of the most eminent names in jazz, among them John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus, all of whom held residencies at the club. Mal Waldron, who had started working at the Five Spot in January, often played for jazz-poetry night. “Kenneth Koch and Larry Rivers had begun staging jazz-and-poetry evenings there,” author Brad Gooch wrote, “in response to similar events in San Francisco initiated by Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth.”
Near the end of her life, Billie came into the Five Spot alone one night around 1:00 a.m. to visit with Mal on a jazz-poetry night. On this occasion, Mal was accompanying Kenneth Koch, a member of the New York School, the group of painters and poets working in downtown Manhattan that included, among others, painters Larry Rivers and Robert Motherwell and poets John Ashbery and Barbara Guest. As Koch read his poems, with Waldron improvising on the piano behind him, Billie sat at the bar and listened. A table of friends of Koch, including Rivers, was among the audience, which, at capacity as it was tonight, numbered between eighty and one hundred customers. Once the set was over, Koch and Waldron left the stage to appreciative applause and made their way to the bar, where Billie sat on a stool. Mal introduced her. “Man,” Billie said to Koch, “your stuff is just crazy!” Koch took it to mean that she enjoyed his poetry.
Later, Billie had taken a table with Mal when Joe Termini, an imposing yet friendly man who owned the club with his brother Iggy, approached her.
“Hey, Lady,” Joe said. “You gonna sing for us tonight?”
Billie looked around the room and spotted an off-duty policeman at the bar. “I’d love to,” she said, “but the fuzz is standing over there.”
Termini knew to whom Billie was referring; he was an off-duty policeman—a precinct captain no less. “But, Lady,” Joe said, “that’s who wants to hear you sing.”
So Billie gladly accepted the invitation, and before long she took the stage, where, accompanied by Waldron, as she had been now for two years, she sang three songs. Kenneth Koch remembered: “It was very close to the end of her life, with her voice almost gone, just like a whisper, just like the taste of very old wine, but full of spirit. Everyone was crazy about her. She sang the songs in this very whispery beautiful voice. The place was quite crowded. She sang these songs, and it was very moving.”
What Billie did not know was that among Koch’s friends that evening was the poet Frank O’Hara, who had just come out of the restroom when she took the stage. That’s where he stood to watch her set. O’Hara had seen Billie once before, in June 1957, when she played a midnight show—then called Music for Night People—at Loew’s Sheridan Theatre along with the Charles Mingus Quintet, the Randy Weston Trio, and Barbara Lea. Billie had been performing in Philadelphia, so she was late arriving to the midnight show. But O’Hara stayed until he heard her. “We didn’t leave,” said Irma Hurley, one of four friends who accompanied O’Hara to the concert. “She finally arrived pretty zonked out. But she did sing.” Brad Gooch wrote: “O’Hara’s reaction to her performance was as exhilarated as his reaction to Judy Garland’s show at the Palace Theatre, after which he had commented…“Well, I guess she’s better than Picasso.’ ” As he watched Billie the second time, O’Hara was not in the cavernous Sheridan Theatre but the claustrophobic Five Spot, and Billie Holiday was right there. The moment stayed with him long after Billie finished her final song.
Memories of the performance came flooding back to O’Hara on July 17 when he was walking down the sidewalk in Manhattan and saw the front-cover headline on the New York Post: “Billie Holiday Dies.” During his lunch hour back in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a curator, O’Hara wrote one of his “I do this, I do that” poems. That evening, after traveling to East Hampton, where he visited friends, he read them the poem:
THE DAY LADY DIED
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
* * *
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
* * *
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
* * *
and I am sweating a lot by now and think of
leaning on the john door at the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
3.
The coverage of Billie’s death was still resonating with the public when, one week after she died, MGM released Billie Holiday, what was now her final album, with music provided by Ray Ellis and His Orchestra. As expected, the critics focused on the album’s place in her career, not merely its relative merit. In the Nashville Banner, Bob Battle, describing the effort as her “memorial album,” noted: “The high-fidelity album is her last and often termed greatest recording.” The Indianapolis Star’s Lynn Hopper wrote: “More of a tombstone than a memorial, the album nevertheless proves that when it comes to blues, the real test of a jazz singer, Miss Holiday has no peers, even in this decayed stage.” In his syndicated column, “On the Record,” Henry C. Schwartz observed: “Tragic Billie Holiday shows the results of her addiction but the style is similar to that which made her a great jazz personality.” Years later, Ray Ellis revealed that in post-recording editing Billie’s voice was “accidentally” modified electronically, no doubt to overcome some of the deficiencies that emerged during the recording sessions. The weakness of the voice, in some ways made more obvious by the manipulation during editing, kept the album from being the achievement it could have been. The physical deterioration that had taken place from February 1958, when she recorded Lady in Satin, to March 1959, when she recorded Billie Holiday, prevented her from producing the album she hoped to make. Sadly, the album was a missed opportunity, a tragedy made all the worse by the fact that it was her final recording effort.
