Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [45]
I burned. I had to get out, but I hated like hell to go home and tell Mom I’d been bounced again—over something as silly as this. So our millionaire friend tried to cheer us up. We went off with him in his fancy foreign car and drove uptown through Central Park in that crazy-assed wagon in three minutes.
He told us not to worry, he had plenty of money and there were plenty of jobs. And besides, he was a musician and going to have his own damn dance band soon and everything would be fine.
“Yeah,” I told him, “big deal. You’ve got plenty of money, but in the meantime you’ve ruined my life so I don’t even dare go home. What’s going to happen to Teddy and me?”
So he said, “Don’t go home, let’s ball a little.” We wound up back at the Uptown House. Everyone insisted I get up and sing. So I did. And they offered me a regular job again back at the old stand.
Our millionaire friend kept his word, too. He pulled a few wires and got Teddy a job in a radio studio band. He also kept his word and ended up with his own band—and a good one. He was Charlie Barnet.
But 52nd Street couldn’t hold the line against Negroes forever. Something had to give. And eventually it was the plantation owners. They found they could make money off Negro artists and they couldn’t afford their old prejudices. So the barriers went down, and it gave jobs to a lot of great musicians.
I went into Ralph Watkins’ Kelly’s Stables as a head-liner no more intermission stuff. The typical bill I appeared with in those days would cost plenty today. One time there was Coleman Hawkins’ band, me and Stuff Smith, and for intermission Nat Cole and his trio. Nobody in the joint got two hundred a week. I was there for two years at a top of $175 and I was the star. Then there was Roy Eldridge’s band, Una Mae Carlisle, Lips Page and his group, and the great Art Tatum playing intermission piano.
Working on the street seemed like a homecoming every night. People I’d met in Harlem, Hollywood, and Café Society used to come in and there was always some kind of re-union. I was getting a little billing and publicity, so my old friends and acquaintances knew where to find me.
On my first trip to the West Coast the valley joint had folded up under me and we had an earthquake to boot. My second trip a couple of years later was a little better—but as soon as I got on the scene we had another earthquake. Everybody finds unusual weather out there.
At least on my second trip West I wasn’t alone. Lester had left the Basie Organization by then and he went out with me to work at Billy Berg’s.
This was a different kind of place—not high class enough to be high class and not low class enough to be a dive. It was out near the valley—but not too far out like Red Colonna’s had been. That first place couldn’t live without movie people. Some nights you’d get Gable, another night Garland. But they came one at a time, and it took 150 people to keep that joint from rattling. And the trouble with movie people is they’ve got everything at home. It takes something different or great to drag them out, especially when they got those 6 A.M. dates with the make-up man in the morning. And Hollywood was booming in those days.
It was a crazy group Lester assembled at Billy’s place. I can hear them now even though I can’t remember all their proper names. We had a little trumpet player who sounded like Buck Clayton, only he sang more; and Bumps Mayers, a California man; two tenors and a trumpet. Lester had his brother Lee on drums and a nice ofay cat on piano and Red Kallen on bass.
We used to rock that joint. Bette Davis came in one night and danced herself crazy. Lana Turner used to come in every Tuesday and Thursday. That girl can really dance, and she did at Billy’s. She always asked me for “Strange Fruit” and “Gloomy Sunday.” She used to like to dance with young Mel Tormé, who used to win all of Billy’s lindy contests. Maybe he couldn’t cut the cats at the Savoy in Harlem, but he sure could dance.
He was like me when I was a kid, in a way, wanting