Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [19]
Bernie almost lost his job at Columbia fighting for me. A lot of guys were big tippers uptown, but when it came to fighting for you downtown, they were nowhere. Not Bernie. He was the cause of me making my first records under my own name—not as anybody’s damn vocalist, but as Billie Holiday period, and then the list of musicians backing me.
Bernie Hanighen is a great guy.
After the Log Cabin, I went on the bill at the Hotcha Club. And what a bill it was! They featured Billy Daniels, Jimmie Daniels, and me, with Bobby Evans as M.C. In between ups, on a little balcony on the second floor, there was Garland Wilson at the piano for intermission. It would take quite a few thousand a week to pull together a show like that today. But in those days it was all thrown in with a dollar dinner. And people used to come up there for the food, too. The chicken cacciatore was one of the attractions. While waiting for it, they would get me. It was still a while before it was the other way around.
Then people started coming back to hear me. Franchot Tone and his lovely mother used to come to every place I ever worked, from Pod’s and Jerry’s to Dickie Wells’s. Mrs. Tone was crazy about me and she loved Billy Heywood and Cliff Allen, who had a great act at the Basement Brownies. At the Hotcha I met Ralph Cooper. He was a big shot who’d been in the movies already and he used to tell Frank Schiffman, who ran the Lafayette Theatre and the Apollo, who to hire. Ralph convinced Schiffman to come and catch me. When Schiffman asked Cooper what style I had, Cooper was stumped.
“You never heard singing so slow, so lazy, with such a drawl,” he told him. But he still couldn’t put any label on me.
This, I always figured, was the biggest compliment they could pay me. Before anybody could compare me with other singers, they were comparing other singers with me.
“It ain’t the blues,” was all Cooper could tell him. “I don’t know what it is, but you got to hear her.”
So Schiffman came up. After he heard me he offered to put me on the bill at the Apollo for fifty a week. This was something in those days. Uptown, the Apollo was what the Palace was downtown.
Unless it was the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong I heard as a kid, I don’t know of anybody who actually influenced my singing, then or now. I always wanted Bessie’s big sound and Pop’s feeling. Young kids always ask me what my style is derived from and how it evolved and all that. What can I tell them? If you find a tune and it’s got something to do with you, you don’t have to evolve anything. You just feel it, and when you sing it other people can feel something too. With me, it’s got nothing to do with working or arranging or rehearsing. Give me a song I can feel, and it’s never work. There are a few songs I feel so much I can’t stand to sing them, but that’s something else again.
If I had to sing “Doggie in the Window,” that would actually be work. But singing songs like “The Man I Love” or “Porgy” is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck. I’ve lived songs like that. When I sing them I live them again and I love them.
The morning I opened at the Apollo I had been up all night singing at the Hotcha and went direct from there to the theatre. The show was scheduled to go on at 10 A.M., and by the time I was up I had gone to the bathroom eighteen times. Pigmeat Markham, the comedian, was on the same bill and he saved my life. They were playing the introduction and he was standing in the wings. At the last moment I grabbed and told him to do something because I had to split for the bathroom again.
“It’s no bathroom for you, girl,” Pigmeat said. “You’re going on stage.” He saw I was scared, so he just grabbed me and gave me a big old healthy shove. When I stopped I was halfway across the stage. I got to the mike somehow and grabbed it. I had a cheap white satin dress on and my knees were shaking so bad the people didn’t