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By Root 803 0

have known better, but we didn’t. The very first night, Ed Fox, the manager of the Terrace, started giving me a bad time. Fletcher Henderson’s band was there. When I did my first number, “If You Were Mine,” I knew that nobody understood my singing. They didn’t like me; they didn’t hate me either. They just didn’t have any enthusiasm either way, like they hadn’t been told by anybody yet whether I was good or bad. And when you’re doing something new, you got to have somebody tell people. In those depression days when a club was paying an unknown singer seventy-five dollars a week, they expected people to go crazy. The manager got panicky and began to holler at me that I was stinking up his Grand Terrace, so why should he pay me seventy-five dollars a week?

When the Grand Terrace closed that first night, the manager was moaning and groaning so, you couldn’t talk to him. Finally when he told me to get out of his office I said, “Don’t worry, I’m going.” But before I left I picked up an inkwell and bam, I threw it at him and threatened to kill him.

So there we were, Mom and I, stranded in Chicago without even a home to go back to, let alone any way of getting there. We finally found a friend who loaned us carfare.

Mom and I were licked. We came back on the bus to New York and exactly nothing.

Later, when I was a big star at Café Society Downtown, the panicky Ed Fox, manager of the Grand Terrace, came down with Joe Glaser. When he saw what happened there, he began to climb all over Glaser, trying to get me for the Grand Terrace.

“For Christsake,” Joe told him, “don’t you know who that is? That’s the girl you threw out of the Grand Terrace, the one who threatened to kill you with an inkwell.”

He like to drop dead, but he still wanted to buy me. I told him and Joe the same thing. I wouldn’t sing for him in the Grand Terrace again if I never sang anywhere.

I’ll always remember the people who helped me on the way up, but I can’t forget the others who went out of their way to give me a fast shove the other way. One day Joe Glaser told me to go down to Philadelphia for an audition at the Nixon Grand Theatre. It was to be a big chance on a big-time bill. Ethel Waters opened, Duke Ellington closed the show, and I was up for the soubrette spot. The Brown Sisters were also on the bill.

Once more Mom and I were sure I’d make it. Mom thought she knew Ethel Waters—she had worked for her in Philly for quite a while as a maid when she was a big star. Mom was sure this was my big chance, so she blew her whole week’s salary to buy me an evening dress with shoes to match and stock arrangements of a couple of songs. This left just about enough for bus fare—one way—and something to eat. At the last minute I used the eating money to buy stage make-up. Then I went into the dime store and bought a tiny little satin handbag to match my dress.

I still remember that shaky moment I got up on the stage to audition. I told the piano player to give me “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” which was real popular then. I hadn’t finished the first chorus when Ethel Waters bounced up in the darkened theater.

“Nobody’s going to sing on this goddamn stage,” she boomed, “but Miss Ethel Waters and the Brown Sisters.”

That settled that. “Underneath the Harlem Moon” was Miss Waters’ big number. But nobody told me. I didn’t have the faintest idea.

So the stage manager handed me two dollars and told me to get on the bus and go home. I threw the money at him and told him to kiss my ass and tell Miss Waters to do the same.

When I went out the stage door I didn’t have a dime to my name. I stayed around Philly a couple of days before I could scuffle up enough to get back to New York on the bus and tell Mom what happened.

Later on Miss Waters was quoted as saying that I sang like “my shoes were too tight.”

I don’t know why Ethel Waters didn’t like me. I never did a thing to her that I know of except sing her big number that day for my big Philly audition.

As I kept moving around and making the name Holiday a little famous round the country, I used to hear from Pop