Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [37]
But Columbia made Victor call them all in—all they could. A few got out, though. Everybody was sore.
After we’d been out for a few months, we were back in New York one day and I was living at the Plymouth Hotel and Artie came by and asked me to come down in the street for a big surprise. He collected everybody he could find to come down in front of the hotel and see the big old Rolls-Royce he’d bought for himself.
Now a Rolls-Royce may be the greatest thing on wheels, but standing there at the curb, it was a funny-looking son of a gun.
From then on Artie used to lead the caravan driving this big old Rolls. And he always wanted me to ride up with him and Max and Tony and sometimes Benny, our road manager. I had mixed feelings about this. A Rolls is built for pleasure. It’s great to be able to call your chauffeur and say, “James, take me through Central Park and back home.” It’s fine to pull up in front of El Morocco or somewhere and have it wait to take your black ass home. But it’s nowhere for highballing a hundred and fifty miles to make a gig. You take it up over thirty-five miles an hour and if you’re in the back seat it’s apt to turn you into a milkshake.
You got to sit up straight in it like a queen cruising past her subjects. It’s no damn good for lovers either. You can’t bend in it no kind of way. It’s only good for one thing—that’s to be dicty.
So I used to ride up with Artie in the Rolls and get shaken around like crazy while Artie tired himself out to get his kicks out of driving. And because the other vocalist would have to ride in the bus, she thought she was suffering from discrimination, and that would make her even saltier with me.
One of the reasons Artie had me ride with him was that often he would talk to me when he was talking to nobody else—not even Willard Alexander, the big wheel booking the band.
Sometimes I’d walk in his hotel suite and take one look at him and know that that day he was Mister Shaw and he didn’t want to be messed with. Other days he was “Old Man,” or “Artie,” or “Hey, man.” Sometimes he would want to get lost on his farm without shaving for months, staying in this one pair of overalls, the way he did when he retired and wrote “Back Bay Shuffle.”
But I knew his moods and I respected them and he knew it. I figured they were his business. He was like me, he never hurt anyone but himself.
But after surviving months of being bugged by sheriffs, waitresses, hotel clerks, and crackers of kinds in the South, I got the crummiest deal of all when we got back to New York—New York, my own home town.
We were set to open at the Blue Room of Maria Kramer’s Lincoln on 43rd Street. The Lincoln hadn’t been a good spot for bands, but there was a coast-to-coast radio wire in the room—and in those days radio was everything. This was my chance to sing on the radio coast to coast every night. A few weeks of this and any band or any singer could be made. This was big time.
I should have known something was shaking when the hotel management gave me a suite. I didn’t need a place to sleep. I was staying home with Mom. I didn’t even need a place to dress. I could come to the hotel every night dressed, and Artie always wanted me to sit on the bandstand all night and look pretty, anyway.
Artie was getting pressure from all over—the hotel, the booking agency, the networks. But he didn’t have the heart to tell me. The excuse for giving me the suite was that I was supposed to stay there until it was time for me to sing, and not mingle with the guests.
The next thing I knew, the management wanted me to come in the back door of the hotel. When a little joint in Boston tried this, the whole band had said, “If Lady doesn’t use the front door, the band doesn’t either.” But Artie and the cats in the band had taken months of hell for this New York engagement, and