Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [55]
But unlike her, I got along fine with the cameramen. I dug from the beginning these were the most important cats around. They’re like the boys in the control room when you’re making records. You can turn in the best performance in the world, but if those cats in the control room aren’t with you when they turn those little knobs or twist those little dials, you might just as well have stayed in bed, Jack. So it was with the cameramen. You could be acting up a storm that would blow an Oscar your way, and if those cats on the cameras aren’t with you, you’re nowhere.
I kept calling Joe Glaser every day, and I worked all night every night. Finally one day on the set I took about all I could from Blondie. I was tired of her giving me a hard time. They had me cornered. I couldn’t walk off like I wanted to. So I bust out crying.
This time Louis Armstrong blew the whistle.
“Better look out,” he said to the director and the producer and the actors on the set. “I know Lady, and when she starts crying, the next thing she’s going to do is start fighting.”
Anyway, the picture was finished some kind of way and I was glad to split the hell out of there and be gone. I saw it later much later—and found out Blondie must have had her way. They had taken miles of footage of music and scenes in New Orleans, but none of it was left in the picture. And very damn little of me. I know I wore a white dress for a number I did in the picture. And all that was cut out of the picture.
I never made another movie. And I’m in no hurry.
By the time the picture opened on Broadway I was already far from the scene. I never got to read what the critics said about it until just now. Most of them were rough on the picture—almost as rough as they should have been. Some of them were kind to me, maybe kinder than they should have been.
Archer Winsten, bless him, reported that my singing in the picture retained “the personal style that has inspired countless imitators. It is good to be able to say that some portion of her vocal and emotional sincerity makes itself felt on the screen at the very time she herself is in sad circumstances.”
You got to be sharp to look between the scenes of that picture and smell the hassle that went on.
But any hassle like that is worth what it cost me, if just one person can look at the end result and dig what you’d been trying to do.
Chapter 16
Too Hot for Words
Trouble is a thing I’ve learned to smell.
And I smelled it for sure that night in May 1947 when we closed at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. It was almost a year since I left that private sanatorium in New York clean—and the law had been tailing me on and off ever since, from New York to Hollywood and back. They were around in Chicago when we worked there.
And then they picked us up the week we were booked at the Earle Theater on the same bill with Louis Armstrong and his group. We had come down from New York in a hired car—me and Joe Guy, Bobby Tucker, my accompanist, and Jimmy Asundio, a young fellow who was then my road manager. Joe went back to New York early in the week, and the rest of us were going to drive back to New York with the car and the chauffeur. After the last show something told me not to go back to the hotel.
If they’re going to bust you, they always try to wait and do it after you’ve closed. If somebody is pinched in the middle of the week, club owners and theater managers have a fit; they complain the publicity gives their place a bad name and stuff like that. And the cops are usually very considerate of their feelings. But as soon as your last show is over you’re on the street and all bets are off.
I begged Bobby and Jimmy not to go back to the hotel. But they wouldn’t listen to me. They had left things in their room.