Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [44]
It only took him about two minutes to find out what was wrong and to fix it. Then he got behind the wheel and drove the car for a little to make sure everything was all right before he left us. Then he asked us if we wouldn’t like to stop and have a drink. I was ready, so he drove us up to a big fancy country club or something right near the beach.
We walked in the bar and people were all eyes. I didn’t think anything of it. That was always happening. But there has to be one joker everywhere. And there was one there at the bar. When he finally got loaded enough he walked over to our table; he stared me up and down. Then he stared the blonde up and down. Then he turned to our mechanic friend and said, “Well, I see you get all the dames.”
It wasn’t until our mechanic buddy got up from behind the table and flattened this cracker to the floor that I came to. It was Clark Gable who’d given us the lift.
He laughed when I told him I recognized him by his fist work.
When I came home from Hollywood I was dressed a little sharper than when I went out. I’d learned a few tricks about make-up from those Hollywood bitches, but otherwise I came home to Mom the same old way, on a bus and poor as the day I was born.
Chapter 11
I Can’t Get Started
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
Take 52nd Street in the late thirties and early forties. It was supposed to be a big deal. “Swing Street,” they called it. Joint after joint was jumping. It was this “new” kind of music. They could get away with calling it new because millions of squares hadn’t taken a trip to 131st Street. If they had they could have dug swing for twenty years.
By the time the ofays got around to copping “swing” a new-style music was already breaking out all over uptown. Ten years later that became the newest thing when the white boys downtown figured out how to cop it.
Anyway, white musicians were “swinging” from one end of 52nd Street to the other, but there wasn’t a black face in sight on the street except Teddy Wilson and me. Teddy played intermission piano at the Famous Door and I sang. There was no cotton to be picked between Leon and Eddie’s and the East River, but man, it was a plantation any way you looked at it. And we had to not only look at it, we lived in it. We were not allowed to mingle any kind of way. The minute we were finished with our intermission stint we had to scoot out back to the alley or go out and sit in the street.
Teddy had an old beat-up Ford he used to drive to work in. Sometimes we’d just go out and sit in it parked at the curb.
There was a wild cat who used to come around the joint all the time and he drove a crazy foreign car. Every time he got in it to take off, it sounded like a B-29, and the Famous Door management didn’t like that. Anyway, we got friendly with him, and he got friendly with us, and it cost both Teddy and me our first jobs on 52nd Street. We got our asses fraternized right off the street.
He was a young millionaire living it up and nobody was going to tell him what to do, who to drink with and who not to drink with. He’d come in the joint and listen to me and Teddy and always wanted to buy us drinks. He insisted we ball with him. And as much as they wanted to please a big spender, both the boss and the headwaiter insisted we didn’t.
We told him we were under orders not to socialize with the customers, but he’d insist back that nobody was going to give him orders. Finally one night after he’d bugged me so and practically made me feel like a Tom for not sitting down with him, I got fed up and did.
We had a couple drinks together, and they were my last ones in that joint for a while. When I got up, the boss told me to go pick up my papers, I was fired. He was nasty enough to fire Teddy, too, although Teddy hadn’t done a thing. After this big scandal which might ruin him on the street, he said