Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [26]
But things were just too hoity-toity. It wasn’t getting going fast enough for Jimmy Donahue. I was talking with him. He was worried and figuring what he ought to do to help. Finally he thought of something and said, “Watch me wake it up.”
“With what?” I said. “We’ve been swinging, the band and me, for two hours. Everybody’s drinking champagne, but nothing’s happening. What do you think you’re going to do?”
He didn’t say a word. He walked out between two double doors that separated the two big living rooms. He stood there, cleared his throat, and said: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, the party begins.”
Nobody paid him any mind, even when he followed the announcement by taking off his coat.
In a couple of minutes he came back, stood in the same place, and elaborately took off his shirt. Still nobody paid much attention.
But he didn’t give up. Next time he did the same routine and took off his pants. Then he got a little attention. He kept on doing this slow elaborate strip, standing there between the double doors.
All of us broke up, and the party was on. Clifton Webb unloosed and started dancing. I’ve never seen a man dance like that. You’d have to have his money, I guess, to dance up on tables, chairs, sofas—everything but the walls and ceilings.
We had been hired to work for three hours, but it was nine the next morning before the ball was over. When Benny started rounding up his crew to take them home, we uncovered everybody but Lionel Hampton. Hamp couldn’t be found. So the search was on. And where did we find him? All alone in a room upstairs, snoring up a breeze and cuddling a big-assed bottle of champagne.
His wife Gladys wanted to kill him. She had come with the group and sat outside in the car all night, waiting for him to finish the gig. Long before they made anything like the kind of money they have now, Gladys was a smart one. She watched Lionel’s every move and planned the next one. She deserves plenty of credit for getting Hamp where he is now. I hope to see her get it.
They didn’t have the price of a bottle of champagne between them then. But Gladys has two-hundred-dollar hats now. She’s a hat freak, that girl. But she earned those bonnets the hard way.
Anyway, this was one hell of a party—the way a party’s supposed to be. I’ll never forget it or Jimmy. I wouldn’t think of throwing a big ball unless I was sure Jimmy could come and keep things moving.
Chapter 6
Things Are Looking Up
I joined Count Basie’s band to make a little money and see the world. For almost two years I didn’t see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.
I had started at the Log Cabin for eighteen dollars a week. By the time I opened at Clarke Monroe’s Uptown House I was getting thirty-five dollars—when I got it. Half the time Clarke would say he was short and come up with fifteen or twenty dollars. When I asked for the rest of my money he would start telling me how much I’d get from this one and that one in tips.
One night a man had given me fifty dollars in the joint for nothing at all, and Clarke would remind me of that every time I asked for the rest he owed me. I had spent some of my good loot trying to make the joint go. After my record with Teddy Wilson started moving I had a big cardboard sign painted with my picture on it for Clarke to put out front, to help bring people in. It began to be a drag—I was getting disgusted.
After I’d closed at the Apollo I was booked into a French joint in Montreal. This was my first date outside New York and I enjoyed it. I tasted champagne there for the first time—hated it and still do. But I like the people. I met a wonderful Canadian boy up there; he always used to tell me scotch would hurt my voice and try to get me on champagne. But I used to drink champagne with him at a table and then sneak into the kitchen for some scotch. He was a fine fellow, but his family caught onto what was going on and they broke it up but quick.
Anyway,