Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [43]
“Man, this is powerful stuff,” I said. I took the glass and raised it as a toast to Hope. I thought he looked a little pale. “Look, Bob,” I said. “I don’t usually drink the stuff, but this champagne is crazy.”
“Look, girl,” he said, “don’t you know we just now had one of the worst earthquakes anybody ever had around here?”
It was another big night at the joint in the valley the night I met Orson Welles. Orson was in Hollywood for the first time, like me. I liked him and he liked me, and jazz. We started hanging around together.
So when I’d finished at the joint in the valley, we’d head for Central Avenue, the Negro ghetto of Los Angeles, and I’d take him around all the joints and dives. I was bored with all this stuff; I’d grown up in it, there was nothing anybody in California could show me, anything there was doing out there, I’d seen before and sideways. I was bored, but he loved it.
There wasn’t a damn thing or person he wasn’t interested in. He wanted to see everything and find out who and why it ticked. I guess that’s part of what made him such a great artist.
Orson was up to his ears then making his first picture, Citizen Kane, was writing, directing, and acting all over the place. He might be out balling, but his head seemed to be going all the time, thinking about what was going to happen at the studio the next morning at 6 A.M. Citizen Kane was a great picture. I’ll bet I saw it nine times before it played in any theaters. He was such a hell of an actor, I never missed the scenery or the costumes.
After we’d been seen together a few times I started getting phone calls at my hotel telling me I was ruining Orson’s career by being seen with him. People used to bug me, saying the studio would get after me, that I’d never get to work in pictures, and God knows what, if I didn’t leave him alone. The hotel used to get the same kind of calls from people trying to make trouble for me or for him.
A lot of creeps have been dogging Orson Welles ever since but they can’t touch him. He’s a fine cat—probably the finest I ever met. And a talented cat. But more than that, he’s fine people.
It isn’t much better now, but back then people used to flip at seeing a white man with a Negro girl. It could be Marian Anderson with her agent; or a shake dancer with her pimp. It doesn’t matter how unlikely the couple, the mother-hugging squares always figure they’re only up to one damn thing. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. If they weren’t, they might just as well have been, because no damn body would believe they had any damn reason for being together unless they just got out of bed or were headed there.
This makes life a continual drag. Not only for me, but for people I meet and like. You’re always under pressure. You can fight it but you can’t lick it.
The only time I was free from this kind of pressure was when I was a call girl as a kid and I had white men as my customers. Nobody gave us any trouble. People can forgive people any damn thing if they did it for money.
One day in Hollywood I went out for a drive with this rich young blonde starlet. She was running around with Billy Daniels, whom I used to work with back at the Hotcha. Billy had loaned her his pretty Cadillac to drive around in. She was taking me to the aquarium, when boom, this brand-new fishtail stopped and we couldn’t start it.
There we sat out on this deserted spot near the beach. I knew from nothing about a car and she knew damn little more. I thought we were stranded until I saw a car down the road a piece. There was a cat lying under it, tinkering around, and he looked like he knew what he was doing.
So I hailed him. “Hey, man,” I said, “there’s a couple of chicks in distress over here. How about coming over and seeing what’s wrong?” When he crawled out from under the car he had sunglasses on, but he looked familiar. I said, “I know you from some damn where.”