With Billie (15 page)

So there they were and Billie was making coffee when Sadie called out, ‘Billie, is that you?’

‘Yes, Mom, it’s me … Meet my friend Helen.’
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Ruby Helena stayed for what was left of the night and the next day she drove Billie to a recording studio and then went home. They didn’t see each other again until they met by chance when Ruby Helena was working at a club somewhere out of town with a troupe of entertainers and Billie happened to turn up and agreed to be ‘the special artist for the night’.

When Ruby Helena got back to New York she discovered she had been thrown out of her rented room and that the suitcase in which she kept all her money had been stolen. She contacted Billie and told her what had happened and Billie said, ‘Well, that’s just wonderful. You can come on down and stay with us.’

Ruby Helena was immediately swept into this family of two women, who behaved towards each other as if they were sisters rather than mother and daughter. She planned to be there with them for a week, but it turned out to be six months.

Ruby Helena said that at this time Billie was just starting to change her appearance, although really she was still nothing more than ‘a great big old bundle – just like her mother, only taller. She was a great big out-of-shape person in tacky dresses.’
^§
Sadie didn’t know anything about glamour, but there was a woman called Lucille who gave Billie advice on what to wear and how to ‘look the part’; she’d also borrow jewellery from Ruby Helena.

At this time Billie was fiercely protective of her mother, promising that she would never ever leave her and would always be there to look after her. Although she went out a lot, she never failed to tell Sadie exactly who she had been with, at what time she had dinner and all the things that happened next. It was as if she was giving her mother the chance to live her life vicariously, through her daughter’s adventures and romances.

But it seems that Sadie was not at all happy with how things were going and soon turned to her ‘other daughter’ as a confidante with whom she could share her worries. In spite of the fact that she had done so little to care for her daughter and protect her from the dangers of the world, Sadie now felt that Billie was neglecting her and failing in her duties. She asked Ruby Helena to keep an eye on her, to go with her to the clubs where she was singing and to make sure that she got home at night.

For her part, Billie got on well with her new ‘sister’ and talked openly about her troubles and her difficulties with Sadie. Her father Clarence had died only recently and she often spoke of her daddy and how much she had loved him. ‘She swore she’d never get over it, because she thought they let her father die.’
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Sadie was also very busy with thoughts of Clarence Holiday. She told Ruby Helena that he was the only man
she had ever loved. They had been married for a while, but then he had walked out on her and had left her on her own with a young child to raise. He was like all men, she said; he only wanted to break a woman’s heart. ‘Look what your father did to me!’ she would say to Billie, weeping piteously, as if it was her daughter’s fault that Clarence had abandoned them both all those years ago.

According to Ruby Helena, Sadie never wanted Billie to be close to a man and did everything she could to stop her daughter from becoming attached to any of the men she spent time with. Billie was forbidden to invite a man to stay the night, although Sadie apparently encouraged her to bring women back to the apartment. As Ruby Helena said, ‘She didn’t mind if she slept with girls, she just didn’t want her to sleep with men.’ And so Billie would often come home with different girls, white girls mostly, ‘society girls’, and in the morning they would all get up and have breakfast together. Some of these women were regular visitors.
^a

But there were men in Billie’s life as well, lots of them. For a while there was Clark Monroe, who had a club called the Uptown House. Then she set her heart on his brother Jimmy, even though she said she couldn’t stand him when they first met. Ruby Helena described him as a ‘very fair-complexioned, nice-looking, frail type’ who was just back from spending a few years in Paris and was full of the cosmopolitan sophistication of Europe. He was also ‘a person who didn’t talk much. A quiet type of person. You would wonder what he was thinking about, or if he
was
thinking. He seemed to be in some kind of other world; in a daze.’

When Billie met Jimmy Monroe he was married to an actress called Nina McKinney, but he was also ‘running’ two or three other women as well. He was known to be a pimp, but, as Ruby Helena explained, ‘He wasn’t always busy being a pimp. He was just running a few girls. His mother and
his brother Clarence had a reefer pad in Harlem and he would go there and pick up girls from the club, for his own purposes.’

Sadie hated Jimmy Monroe. There was a simple reason for that. ‘Billie was always devoted to her mother, very devoted, and all of a sudden she started directing her affection towards Jimmy. Sadie thought Billie was giving him too much attention and neglecting her attention to her mother.’

Sadie became obsessed with the idea that Jimmy had ‘pulled Billie with drugs’. She did everything she could to stop the two of them from seeing each other. Finally, Sadie confronted Jimmy and said, ‘I don’t want you coming around here. If Billie’s going to hang out with you, then she’ll have to go someplace else to stay!’

Ruby Helena was in the apartment on the morning Billie came back, having been out all night without phoning her mother to tell her where she was or what she was doing. When Sadie began to scream at her, Billie produced a sheet of paper that she flung down on the table. It was a marriage certificate. ‘We’re married,’ she said. ‘So can he come in
now
?’
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Shortly after this confrontation, Billie moved out with her new husband, leaving her mother abandoned and weeping. The newly-weds began their life together by taking a room on 110th Street, until Billie discovered that Jimmy’s ex-wife Nina was living much too close by. They ‘jumped up’ and moved on. For a while they were somewhere in Maryland, then they rented a room upstairs from the prestigious Symphony Chord Club, which was run by a childhood friend of Jimmy’s. The club was in a basement and next to it was a soundproof music room shaped like a baby grand piano, where all the entertainers used to go to rehearse. Anyway, that didn’t last long.

Ruby Helena said something changed in Billie’s character around 1942. She was no longer friendly or nice to be with
and she’d swear a lot and act strangely with the people she knew. She never saw Billie taking anything, but she was sure she must have started to use hard drugs. ‘Even when she wasn’t on drugs, she still wasn’t herself. She’d be nervous, edgy.’
^c

By now Sadie was convinced her daughter was ‘doing something wrong’ and suspected that Jimmy Monroe was turning her on to drugs in order to have financial control over her. After all, Billie was making a lot of money, singing at the Famous Door and at other places on 52nd Street, and yet she was always broke. Sadie wrote a letter to Ruby Helena in which she said, ‘I’m writing this with tears in my eyes. Billie is gone. She is always drugged. I know this is going to take me to my grave.’

Less than a year after the marriage, Jimmy Monroe went to California and (according to Ruby Helena) took most of Billie’s money with him. He set himself up with a stable of women there.
^d
She said that Billie was heartbroken once he had gone, not because she missed him, but because she suddenly realised how she had abandoned her mother and had failed to look after her properly.

I
 have been looking at a photograph that was taken in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1919. The upper part of the picture shows a group of about forty individuals gathered together on a dark night to watch the final stage of a lynching.
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I can see three women and a young boy who can’t be more than twelve years old, but the rest are grown men. They are
all wearing hats of one sort or another, some are smoking cigarettes, and one is holding a walking stick in his leather-gloved hand. A number of them look straight into the camera with a triumphant and smiling gaze, while others seem more distracted.

It was between 1900 and 1920 that lynching was at its most virulent. As the contemporary Baltimore journalist and sardonic humorist H. L. Mencken explained it, life in the South could be lacking in entertainment and ‘lynching often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions common to larger communities’. Thousands of people would turn up for the well-publicised spectacle
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and Baptist and Methodist ministers often worked hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan by delivering sermons that incited further racial hatred and violence. Although the myth of protecting white women from black men was maintained, a lynching was often provoked by any signs of what was known as ‘uppitiness’, such as a black man seeking employment above his station, offensive language or boastful remarks. Even evidence of material success, such as the acquisition of a new car or a soldier returning home with a medal for valour, could be interpreted as uppitiness.

Racial discrimination eased a bit during the 1930s and cases of public lynching had almost entirely ceased by 1940, although as one more cynical commentator pointed out, ‘public opinion is beginning to turn away from this sort of mob activity … but the work of the mob goes on … Countless Negroes are lynched yearly, but their disappearance
is shrouded in mystery for they are dispatched quietly and without general knowledge.’
^‡

Billie Holiday had never personally witnessed a lynching, but of course she could imagine what it would be like and she must have spoken to many people with first-hand experience. Her friend Lester Young managed to help his cousin ‘Sports’ Young escape from a lynch mob when they were both still in their early teens, and the singer Lena Horne must have told Billie how she witnessed a lynching in a small town in Florida when she was a child with her mother’s touring theatre troupe.
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In 1938 Billie joined Artie Shaw’s all-white band and went on tour with them. It meant she was often refused entry to the hotels where the other musicians were staying, couldn’t eat with them in restaurants or drink with them in bars; and in the South she was turned into a fugitive, not even able to use public toilets and always ready to hide from danger. It was during this tour that she had one of many violent and potentially dangerous confrontations when a man in the audience asked the ‘nigger wench’ to sing another song. Artie Shaw later described the whole southern experience as a nightmare from beginning to end.