• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I couldn’t very well expect the Legal Aid Society to come rushing in to help a chick making a couple thousand a week or more. I knew I was on my own. Glaser had told me this before. “Girl,” he said, “this is the best thing that could happen to you.”

I needed to go to a hospital and he was telling me the woodshed would be better.

So they handed me a white paper to sign. “This is a waiver of presentation of an indictment to the Grand Jury, Miss Holiday.” They never had it so easy. I signed the second paper. The rest was up to them. I was just a pigeon.

“How do you plead?” said the clerk.

“I would like to plead guilty and be sent to a hospital,” I said.

Then the D.A. spoke up. “If Your Honor please, this is a case of a drug addict, but more serious, however, than most of our cases, Miss Holiday is a professional entertainer and among the higher rank as far as income is concerned. She has been in Philadelphia and appeared at the Earle Theater, where she had a week’s engagement; our agents in the Narcotics Bureau were advised from our Chicago office that she was a heroin addict and undoubtedly had heroin on her.”

“The Chicago office advised you?” the judge asked.

“That is right,” the D.A. replied. “She had previously been in Chicago on an engagement. They checked and found that when she left the Earle Theater or prepared to leave the Earle Theater, prior to leaving she had in her possession some capsules … and transferred them to a man who was supposed to be her manager, named James Asundio.

“Subsequent to that, while James Asundio and Bobby Tucker were packing the bags, the agents came and identified themselves and told them why they were there, and Asundio said it was his room. They made a search of the room with his permission and found some capsules wrapped in a package of silk lining.

“Subsequently, Miss Holiday was apprehended in New York,” he went on. “She has given these agents a full and complete statement and came in here last week with the booking agent (Glaser) and expressed a desire to be cured of this addiction. Very unfortunately she has had following her the worst type of parasites and leeches you can think of. We have learned that in the past three years she has earned almost a quarter of a million dollars, but last year it was $56,000 or $57,000, and she doesn’t have any of that money.

“These fellows who have been traveling with her,” this young D.A. continued melodramatically, “would go out and get these drugs and would pay five and ten dollars and they would charge her one hundred and two hundred dollars for the same amount of drugs. It is our opinion that the best thing that can be done for her would be to put her in a hospital where she will be properly treated and perhaps cured of this addiction.”

Then the judge took over. He asked my age, if I was married, how long I’d been separated from my husband, if we had any kids, where he worked, my life story, my show-business history.

He asked me if I didn’t know it was “wrong” to have possession of narcotics. What did he expect me to say? I told him I couldn’t help it after I started. Then he asked how much I used. When the federal agent Roder told him, the judge wanted to know if this was a large amount. Roder told him it was enough to kill either of them. They wouldn’t be dead, they’d be damn high, that’s all.

Then he wanted to know how many grains I had started with. Hell, I was no more of a pharmacist than he was. I was sick of grown men getting their kicks out of all this. They had told me if I pleaded guilty they’d send me to a hospital. I was sick and wanted to get there. This wasn’t getting anyone anywhere.

I broke in and spoke to the judge. “I’m willing to go to the hospital, Your Honor,” I said.

“I know,” he said, brushing me off.

“I want the cure,” I told him.

“You stand here indicted criminally as a user of narcotics,” he said, looking me in the eye. Then the judge and the federal agents got into a long hassle which had nothing to do with