Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [35]
It wasn’t long before the roughest days with the Basie band began to look like a breeze. I got to the point where I hardly ever ate, slept, or went to the bathroom without having a major NAACP-type production.
Most of the cats in the band were wonderful to me, but I got so tired of scenes in crummy roadside restaurants over getting served, I used to beg Georgie Auld, Tony Pastor, and Chuck Peterson to just let me sit in the bus and rest—and let them bring me out something in a sack. Some places they wouldn’t even let me eat in the kitchen. Some places they would. Sometimes it was a choice between me eating and the whole band starving. I got tired of having a federal case over breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
One time we stopped at a dirty little hole in the wall, and the whole band piled in. I was sitting at the counter next to Chuck Peterson. Everybody else gets waited on and this blonde bitch waitress ignores me like I’m not even there. Chuck called her first and then Tony Pastor got real sore. “This is Lady Day.” He hollered at her, “Now you feed her.”
I pleaded with him not to start anything, but Tony let loose, the cats in the band started throwing things around. When they wouldn’t serve me, the whole band pitched in and wrecked the joint. Everybody grabbed their food, and when the bus pulled out, you could hear the old sheriff’s police siren coming after us. Even Artie jumped into that fight.
Getting a night’s sleep was a continual drag, too. We were playing big towns and little towns, proms and fairs. A six-hundred-mile jump overnight was standard. When we got to put up at a hotel, it was usually four cats to a room. We might finish at Scranton, Pennsylvania, at two in the morning, grab something to eat, and make Cleveland, Ohio, by noon the next day. The boys in the band had worked out a deal for getting two nights’ sleep for one night’s rent.
We’d drive all night, hit a town in the morning, register and turn in early, and sleep until time to go to work. When the job was through, we’d sleep the rest of the night, clear out in the morning, and hit the road. This would work every other day and save loot. On the $125 a week I made, that was still very important.
This would have been fine except that I had to double up with another vocalist. I don’t think she liked Negroes much, and especially not me. She didn’t want to sleep in the same room with me. She only did because she had to.
Artie had asked me to help her to phrase her lyrics; this made her jealous. Then once I made the mistake of telling somebody we got along fine, and to prove it I mentioned how she let me help her phrase. This made her sore. It was true, there were some places where the management wouldn’t let me appear, and I’d have to sit in the bus while she did numbers that were arranged for me. She was always happy when she could sing and I couldn’t.
I’ll never forget the night we were booked at this fancy boys’ school in New England. She was real happy because she was sure I was going to have to sit in the bus all night again because I was too black and sexy for those young boys.
But when the time came to open, the head man of the school came out and explained that it wasn’t me, they just didn’t want any female singers at all. So the two of us had to sit in the bus together all night and listen to the band playing our songs.
Did I razz her! “You see, honey,” I said, “you’re so fine and grand. You may be white, but you’re no better than me. They won’t have either of us here because we’re both women.”
Almost every day there was an “incident.”
In a Boston joint they wouldn’t let me go in the front door; they wanted me to come in the back way. The cats in the band flipped and said, “If Lady doesn’t go in the front door, the band doesn’t go in at all.” So they caved.
Eating was a mess, sleeping was a problem, but the biggest drag of all was a simple little thing like finding a place to go to the bathroom.
Sometimes we’d make a six-hundred-mile jump and only stop once. Then it would be a place