Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [24]
Mom and I doubled up with laughter hearing Lester tell how dangerous it was for a young man living alone in a New York hotel. And when he said, “Duchess, can I move in with you?” there was only one answer. Mom gave him a room and he moved in with us.
Ours was a big old railroad flat, two flights up, with two entrances off the hallway. The front door was my bedroom, with a door opening to the hall and a little room off it we used to call my playroom, where I kept my records and a beat-up old piano. In the back was the living room and Mom’s room. In the middle, off the air shaft, were Lester’s quarters.
It wasn’t fancy, but it beat that damn hotel. And for Mom and me it was wonderful having a gentleman around the house. Lester was always that.
Lester was the first to call Mom “Duchess”—and it turned out to be the title she carried to her grave. Lester and I will probably be buried, too, still wearing the names we hung on each other after he came to live with us.
Back at the Log Cabin the other girls used to try and mock me by calling me “Lady,” because they thought I thought I was just too damn grand to take the damn customers’ money off the tables. But the name Lady stuck long after everybody had forgotten where it had come from. Lester took it and coupled it with the Day out of Holiday and called me “Lady Day.”
When it came to a name for Lester, I always felt he was the greatest, so his name had to be the greatest. In this country kings or counts or dukes don’t amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was the President. So I started calling him the President. It got shortened to Prez, but it still means what it was meant to mean—the top man in this country.
These jam sessions were really the thing. Every morning after I finished working there was always a big jam session on somewhere. Cats like Benny Goodman and Harry James would come up after they finished their gigs in the big radio studio orchestras. They would sit in with the greatest guys around—Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Benny Webster. They were all friends of mine. But Benny Goodman was somebody special among the musicians I hung out with.
We’d get together once a week regularly at those jam sessions and spend a few hours together. This got to be a big deal mainly because my mother was so strict with me and didn’t want me running around with white boys. And also Benny’s sister Ethel was his manager then. She had eyes for Benny going to the top as a band leader, and she didn’t want him to wreck his chances for making it by being seen with a little black chick.
But Benny was a nice cat, never a drag. And we used to outwit my mother and his sister in order to spend some time together.
This went on for a long time—right up to the time I fell in love, but good and hard, for the first time. It wasn’t until that happened that I knew that what had gone on before was nothing but fooling around.
Sure, he was a musician too. He played piano—great piano. He played for me for a while. He was almost old enough to be my father. And he was married, and had two or three kids.
It was the first time I was ever wooed, courted, chased after. He made me feel like a woman. He was patient and loving; he knew what I was scared about, and he knew how to smooth my fears away.
But beyond that, no good could come of it. In fact, at one point I was taking it all so seriously it came mighty close to being tragic.
Chapter 5
Getting Some Fun Out of Life
It wasn’t long before I became a radio and movie actress on the side. Shelton Brooks, the song writer, author of “Some of These Days,” had heard me sing. He was making a few bucks in radio and he thought I could play some of the parts in a show he worked on. It was one of those daytime soap-opera serials, True Love Story or True Romances or something like that. Anyway, when you worked it was in the mornings, so it didn’t interfere with my night work. Shelton was playing two or three parts on the