With Billie (25 page)

Bobby Tucker remembered Wabash Avenue, Chicago, during the first week of May 1947. He had been playing piano for Billie the night before at Colosimo’s New Theater Restaurant,
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where she was billed as ‘The Incomparable – Master Mistress of Song’. It was nine o’clock in the morning and the phone rang.

‘You’d better get up here right away,’ said a man’s voice. Bobby Tucker had no idea to whom the voice belonged.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said the voice. ‘You just get up here!’

Bobby Tucker was staying at a hotel called the Evans, while Billie was at the more expensive Pershing.
^†
When he got there, the stranger he had spoken to on the phone was waiting for him in Billie’s room.

It is easy to imagine that hotel room. The heavy curtains drawn against the intrusion of daylight from outside, and the air in the room smelling sweet and sour and stale. Glasses half-f of whisky and ashtrays overflowing with dead cigarettes, and perhaps a bunch of gaudy flowers still in their cellophane wrapper next to a pair of lacy knickers and a single high-heeled shoe. And there is Billie Holiday sprawled
across a sofa with one shoe off and one shoe on. Her slippery evening dress is twisted above her knees and on her face there is the look of puzzled concentration that comes to someone who is right on the edge of sliding out of consciousness.

Bobby Tucker said that a man called Jimmy Ascendio was beside her. He was the one who used the phone. He used to be ‘in the fight business’, but recently he had been acting as Billie’s ‘road manager’, which meant he was her connection who got hold of the drugs for her, while making a profit for himself.
^‡

Jimmy Ascendio explained to Bobby Tucker that Billie ‘got hold of some bad stuff’. Another man, with the wonderful name of Boss Moss, had also taken some of the same bad stuff, and the hotel valet was with him right now, getting him to walk the streets until he felt better.

Jimmy Ascendio said, ‘We can’t let her go to sleep, because if she goes to sleep, she’ll never wake up.’

Bobby Tucker filled the bathtub with cold water and helped to drag Billie’s limp body to the tub. He said, ‘She was fighting’, but they managed to throw her into the tub and heave her out again. And then ‘We walked her and we slapped her and all she wanted to do was sleep.’

It took Billie about four hours to revive, but as Bobby Tucker said, ‘She was strong, strong as a bull.’ Following this incident they had a day or so off and then they went on to the next booking, a week at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia, along with Louis Armstrong and his Big Band.

Bobby Tucker first met Billie in 1945 or 1946. He would have been about twenty-six years old at the time and she was about five years older. He happened to be walking down 52nd Street when he saw his childhood friend from Morristown, the musician Tony Scott, who said, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ He took Bobby at once to the Downbeat
Club where Billie was supposed to be playing. It was her first night and it was ‘desperation night’ because she had no music, no bass player, no drummer, and John Simmons, another of her junkie friends, had just punched her pianist Eddie Heywood in the eye, so he had stormed off and wouldn’t be coming back.

Billie was introduced to Bobby. ‘I’ve heard about you,’ she said. ‘Will you play for me?… You’re not going to have any trouble with me!’

Bobby Tucker said, ‘And so I went in and I knew those recordings inside out because of my idol Teddy Wilson. So when she asked for this or that it was
so
easy, because I used to play those things for kicks. So she felt relaxed, but then, she’s so easy to play for. She didn’t fight you. She could find a groove wherever you put it. She could swing the hardest in
any
tempo, even if it was like a dirge … Wherever it was, she could float on top of it.’

Bobby Tucker played for Billie for the next four or five weeks. They were supposed to do the first show between nine-thirty and ten, but she never went on before midnight. Sometimes she would be in the club and hidden away in the ‘cubbyhole’ of her dressing room, and sometimes she simply had not turned up yet, but as Bobby said, ‘She was more unique than probably any other performer, because she could damn well do whatever she wanted to do … She had that charisma.’

During those early weeks he felt as if he was stealing her money because, ‘She didn’t kill me at all, not at all … To me there was no sound. It was a flat thing.’ But then his friend Tony Scott told him how to listen and appreciate Billie’s qualities by explaining, ‘When Ella [Fitzgerald] sings “My man he’s left me”, you think the guy went down the street for a loaf of bread. But when Lady sings, you can
see
that guy going down the street. He’s got his bags packed and he ain’t
never
coming back.’

So Bobby Tucker began to listen to what Billie was singing and how she was singing it and, once he had started to listen, he couldn’t get away from it. He said she had a very small
voice and she couldn’t belt, but she could tell a story, that’s what she could do, and she had a thing about how she
felt.
He thought her quality might be her pain; at least that was the nearest he could get to explaining it.

Bobby Tucker spoke a lot about Billie’s lack of confidence, about how she didn’t think of herself as a good singer and was always amazed that people wanted to come to listen to her. He understood that this lack of confidence was related to her own particular form of honesty. ‘She was basically so honest,’ he said. ‘She’d be honest even if it meant she had to lie. You’d ask her the same question and twenty minutes later you’d get an entirely different answer, but it would still be
her.
It was how she felt at a particular moment that mattered.’
^§

He described how she would walk out onto the stage and stand there until everyone was quiet. ‘It was not an act. She was not trying to prove anything to anybody. She was just being
herself.
’ And it was her fear, rather than her sense of the dramatic, that made her want to be illuminated by only a pin spot, leaving everything else in darkness. That way ‘There’s not really an audience, it’s like a living-room.’ He remembered the occasion when she was being presented with an award at the Tijuana Club in Cleveland, ‘And when they announced her, they turned up the house lights and it was like broad daylight and she literally froze; her voice was shaking, she was trembling, she couldn’t stand to look at the people.’

Bobby Tucker was devoted to Billie. It didn’t matter to him that he had witnessed some harrowing scenes of violence and chaos; it was her kindness and her gentleness that remained with him.
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Certainly she could be coarse in her language and her first and last word was always ‘bitch’, but mostly she was rude or angry because her sense of justice
was under attack. He said, ‘She didn’t like to see a small person being abused. She didn’t like to see their dignity squashed.’ Bobby Tucker said Lady was one of the first to ‘up the establishment’. ‘One of her best friends might be the attendant in the ladies’ room and this would really be a friend, and this friend wouldn’t take back seat to the First Lady or the Queen of England.’

There were many occasions when she would defend someone she felt was helpless or was being looked down upon. That was why she often attacked people in authority, whether it was a record producer, a club owner or anyone else behaving badly. Bobby Tucker remembered one New Year’s Eve. Billie was ‘like Queen Victoria’, standing at the bar drinking a triple brandy and white crème de menthe, when a merchant sailor came in and said to the bartender, ‘Since when did you start serving nigger bitches?’ ‘And she just worked his face over with the end of that glass.’

Looking at photographs of Bobby Tucker from this time, you are confronted by a delicate, pale-faced and serious man with an air of gentle fair-mindedness about him. Billie must have seen him as someone she needed to protect, not just from the drugs and the zeal of the narcotics agents, but also from the hazards of life on the road. Bobby had been married since the age of eighteen and she didn’t want that marriage to be jeopardised. He remembered how on one occasion she woke up the house detective in a hotel where they were staying at five in the morning, saying something must be done quickly. ‘My pianist has a
woman
in his bed.’

He said, ‘She never raised her voice with me, the whole time I was with her. She never bawled me out. I’d play the wrong key and it still didn’t make a difference. But if anybody else did it, she’d go out of her mind.’ But he also had a strange authority over her. ‘She wouldn’t fight me,’ he said. ‘I would stop her from doing things, like if she wanted to get violent with somebody. I’d grab her and hold her and say, “All right, you cool it”, and she’d try to break loose and she’s as strong as a mule, but I’d tilt her to one side so she couldn’t plant both feet; and she’d relax and she’d try
again and I’d say, “Aha!” and she’d finally break up laughing.’

In March 1947, just a few weeks before the drama with the bad stuff in the hotel on Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Billie’s agent Joe Glaser had persuaded her to take a cure for her drug addiction at the private Park West Hospital in New York. In theory this might have been a good idea, but in practice it was the beginning of a disaster. No attempt was made to cure her during her three-week stay, and apparently one of the nurses simply provided her with drugs. According to Billie, the stay in the clinic marked the beginning of her real troubles because it was from this moment on that the narcotics agents began to follow her every move.

As Bobby Tucker said, ‘It wasn’t until she went to Philadelphia that she started getting surveillance by the narco people. But Philadelphia’s known for that. Very rough city. Very rough.’
^a
They were playing at the Earle Theatre in Philadelphia on a contract that was to last from 12 May to 16 May. On the night of the final performance, Billie’s hotel room was raided by the police. Bobby Tucker and Jimmy Ascendio were there packing things up to go and, when they searched the room, the police found a package wrapped in a lady’s stocking under the bed. This package contained a spoon, two hypodermic needles, one eye-dropper, sixteen unused capsules and nine half-empty capsules, which were all shown to contain heroin hydrochloride. The two men were arrested.

When Billie arrived at the hotel with her driver, she was warned of the raid and managed to escape, even though the police shot at her car as it sped away. The next evening she opened at the Onyx Club, which had changed its name to Club 18. Two days later, on 19 May at 5 a.m., she was arrested at the Hotel Marden on West 44th Street in New York by Agent Ryan of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, on behalf of their Philadelphia office. She was then taken to
room number 32 at the Grampion Hotel in Harlem, where Joe Guy was found and arrested.
^b

According to Agent Ryan, ‘When we entered the room a window was open about six inches. Outside the room we found a capsule and a half, approximately 1½ grains of heroin.’
^c
Billie and Joe Guy were taken to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ offices, where Billie admitted that the capsules found under the bed in Philadelphia were hers. Joe Guy was held in custody and she was charged with possession and released on bail. She returned that evening to perform at Club 18. Five days later, during the intermission at Club 18, she and Bobby Tucker were whisked away by car to Carnegie Hall to make a surprise appearance at the Jazz at the Philharmonic concert.

On 27 May, Billie contacted the Assistant US Attorney to say she wanted her court case to be dealt with as soon as possible. She appeared before Judge Cullen Ganey Jr at 4 p.m. that same day. She had no legal representation
^d
and she simply asked to be sent to a hospital for a cure to her addiction. Instead, she was charged with violation of section 174 of the US Narcotics Act, ‘that she did receive, conceal and facilitate the transportation and concealment of drugs’. The judge told her, ‘I want you to know you are being committed as a criminal defendant … You will get treatment, but I want you to know you stand convicted as a wrongdoer.’ She was sentenced to a year and a day at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia.

With regard to the others involved in the arrest, Jimmy Ascendio did spend a time in jail, but Billie spoke up for Bobby Tucker and he was not charged at all. ‘I didn’t even have a hearing. Lady killed that as soon as she came back.’ He said Billie also ‘took the rap and saved Joe Guy’, even though he had basically confessed that the heroin at the hotel belonged to him.

Billie was sent to prison when she was at the height of her fame. She had been earning around $50,000 a year, although Joe Glaser maintained that all the money had been squandered by Joe Guy. According to her admission documents, she had just $6.34 in her possession when she arrived at Alderson. Her age was incorrectly given as twenty-eight (she was in fact thirty-two), and the document included an IQ assessment, which stated that ‘She rates best in language and vocabulary, poor in factual knowledge. Has done singing and housework. Quit school to go to work. Seems inconsistent in her reasoning.’
^e

Billie was given an injection of morphine for her train journey to West Virginia and was admitted to the prison hospital at 9.30 a.m. on 28 May. Her medical records stated that she appeared ‘nervous and weak’, and she was given a little Nembutal to help her sleep and a further shot of morphine. For two days she felt ‘nauseous’, but she apparently ‘went through the drug withdrawal with the minimum amount of discomfort’. After eight days she was moved from the hospital to the prison.

She proved to be a model prisoner, just as once, long ago, she had proved to be a model inmate in a Baltimore reform
school. She was initially given the job of brass cleaning and ‘This and everything else she attempted she did thoroughly and without assistance, preferring to work alone. Except for one reprimand for the use of profanity she was quiet, well-mannered and appreciative of suggestion … She never asked for aspirin, stating that she wished to get away from anything associated with narcotics … She was neat and clean personally … and very interested in her appearance.