Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [47]
Jimmy was the younger brother of Clarke Monroe, who ran the Uptown House. He was the most beautiful man I’d laid eyes on since Buck Clayton. He had been married to Nina Mae McKinney, who was a big dancing and singing star. I had seen her in movies like Hallelujah when I was a kid. Jimmy had been in Europe for quite a while. Over there, especially in England, as the big beautiful husband of a big star, he had been quite a big deal himself.
In London he had hung out with nothing but white women. He had brought at least one big beautiful Cockney chick back to New York with him. He was managing her when I met him.
He had picked her up in London, made a lady out of her, taught her how to sing, how to talk and act fancy. He came back from England tourist class, but he brought her along first class.
He was a big deal, I figured, what would he want with me?
When this British dame heard Jimmy was going around with me, she even called my mother and tried to scare her into heckling me into staying away from him. That was where Mom got that news that he would never marry me.
Things had happened to me that no amount of time could change or heal. I had gone to jail when I was ten because a forty-year-old man had tried to rape me. Sure they had no more business putting me in that Catholic institution than if I’d been hit by a damn truck. But they did. Sure, they had no business punishing me, but they had. For years I used to dream about it and wake up hollering and screaming. My God, it’s terrible what something like this does to you. It takes years and years to get over it; it haunts you and haunts you.
Getting booked and busted again didn’t help, either. I might explain the first rap was a freak accident. But the second was tougher. For years it made me feel like a damn cripple. It changed the way I looked at everything and everybody. There was one chance I couldn’t take. I couldn’t stand any man who didn’t know about the things that had happened to me when I was a kid. And I was leery of any man who could throw those things back at me in a quarrel. I could take almost anything, but my God, not that. I didn’t want anyone around who might ever hold this over me or even hint that on account of it he was a cut above me.
Maybe that’s part of why I was attracted to Jimmy. He had been around. He had a little past of his own. He was what he was, but in that field he was tops. Besides, he had taste and class.
The taste, the class, and the gloss were what Mom saw. It was all Joe Glaser saw. That’s why they warned me to take it easy, that he would never marry me. This meant only one thing to me. That they thought Jimmy might think he was too good for me. That did it.
The first thing I did after Jimmy and I eloped to Elkton, Maryland, in September of 1941, was to go home to Mom and throw the marriage license at her. Then I went up to Joe Glaser’s office and threw it at him. I showed them, and that’s for damn sure.
One of the songs I wrote and recorded has my marriage to Jimmy Monroe written all over it. I guess I always knew what I was letting myself in for when he married me. I knew this beautiful white English girl was still in town. He didn’t admit it, of course. But I knew. One night he came in with lipstick on his collar. Mom had moved to the Bronx by then, and we were staying there when we were in New York.
I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it and he started explaining and explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that. “Take a bath, man,” I said, “don’t explain.”
That should have been the end of it. But that night stuck in my crop. I couldn’t forget it. The words “don’t explain, don’t explain” kept going through my damn head. I had to get it out of my system some way, I guess. The more I thought about it,