Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [53]
We looked for the best private sanatorium around. Money was no object. Finally the one we were recommended to turned out to be right in Manhattan. They promised to take me. And the price was two thousand dollars for three weeks’ stay. This was daylight robbery, sure. But it was cheap, too, if my stay there and the treatment were guaranteed confidential. And it was.
Joy and Tony told everybody I’d had a nervous breakdown. There were so many of those happening, everybody was happy to believe it. We set the date. I checked in.
It took almost three weeks. Joe Glaser sent me flowers and things. But I was happy when it was over. I was sure I’d make it. I was ready to go back to work; my job was waiting. This was my first try at going straight on my own, and I was sure it would work out.
I walked down the steps of the sanatorium. A cab was waiting for me, and Miss Church, Joe Glaser’s secretary. Before I could get in, my hopes sank to despair. I saw a man there and I knew he was from the law and I knew he was trailing me.
I couldn’t believe it. Nobody knew I was there but Joe and Tony. I knew they hadn’t told a soul. The word must have come from the hospital. I felt like going back there and busting the place up. It had cost me two thousand dollars to be sure the whole deal was absolutely confidential. It would have been curtains for me as a public performer if it had gotten out. I trusted the doctors and nurses. I had to. And somebody had betrayed me. Why? Who?
I was so panicked then I didn’t think about it.
But I’ve thought about it a lot since. And I’ve had plenty of time.
Back in the 1920s there was a big scandal in New York involving the cops and the Federal Narcotics Bureau. A bunch of guys were busted when it was discovered they had a racket going on. The cops and Feds would put the pinch on wealthy drug addicts. They would threaten to arrest them then they would let them off, provided these people agreed to go to a private sanatorium the fuzz recommended and take the “cure.” So these rich people went for it. They went to places like I had gone to, paid the same kind of money I paid, and then the detectives got a big commission.
There was a shake-up in the police department and the Narcotics Bureau, and that crap was supposed to have been stopped. But crap like that never stops.
These sanatoriums depend on the law to stay in business. They can be closed up overnight, but tight, if the Narcotics Bureau wants to.
The relations between a doctor and his patient are supposed to be confidential. I trusted those doctors and nurses. And one of them had betrayed me. Maybe the law just came busting in, asking questions, and somebody squawked. Maybe the law just shadows the hospital all the time to pick up likely prospects and then goes and busts them. I don’t know.
All I know is that when I was on nobody bothered me, no laws, no cops, no federal agents. And nobody tailed me. I didn’t get heated up until I made an honest-to-God sincere effort to kick. Whoever did that to me changed the whole course of my life. I’ll never forgive them.
It’s tough enough coming off when you’ve got someone who loves you and trusts you and believes in you. I didn’t have anybody. No family, no man who loved me. I had nobody but Tony Golucci and Joe Glaser who would believe in me.
And against them there was the law, betting their time, their shoe leather, and their money that they would get me. Nobody can live like that.
Chapter 15
The Same Old Story
If you’re an American citizen and unless you go to bed early these nights, you’re liable to see me on the late-late show in a movie I made in Hollywood in 1946. It was my first Hollywood picture. My latest, too.
I was working in a Hollywood club when Joe Glaser made the deal. It was an independent picture, produced by Jules Levey, called New Orleans and supposedly about it.
I thought I was going to play myself in it. I thought I was going to be Billie Holiday