Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [65]
Bobby Tucker lived with his family on a nice little farm near Morristown, New Jersey. His mother had kept what was left of my clothes and things and taken care of my personal belongings all the time, besides the dog. As soon as we broke out of the mess in the Newark station Bobby couldn’t wait to take me home with him. The concert was coming up and he wanted to get right to work rehearsing.
I was scared to death. I told him I hadn’t opened my mouth to sing for ten months and I didn’t know what would come out when I did.
He was so sweet. He knew what I was worried about. And he knew the longer I worried the worse it would get. So he wasn’t giving me any chance.
They were painting the inside of the house when we got there, and they had moved the piano out on the front porch. Before we even went inside, Bobby sat down at it.
“Night and Day” is the toughest song in the world for me to sing. So I said we’d try that first and see what happened.
I’ll never forget that first note, or the second. Or especially the third one, when I had to hit “day” and hold it. I hit it and held it and it sounded better than ever. Bobby almost fell off the stool, he was so happy. And his mother came running out of the house and took me in her arms.
We did all our rehearsing for the concert right there. We never went near New York or Carnegie. Bobby and his mother made me feel like I was home and everything was cool.
Chapter 19
I’ll Get By
I never fainted but one time in my life—after my midnight concert at Carnegie Hall ten days after getting out of jail.
Anybody in show business can tell you the night before Easter is the worst night of the year. It doesn’t matter if you’re waiting tables in a corner bar or starring on Broadway, this is the one night of the year in show business when everybody’s got used to expecting no business.
And that was the night of my concert. Ed Fishman had to set the date in a hurry. There was hardly any time for advertising or publicity. But they hardly got the posters up in front of the Hall before they had to slap on the “Sold Out” sign.
They sold space on the stage for a few hundred people, sitting and standing, which ran the gate up to about thirty-five hundred before the Fire Department called a halt. Two or three thousand people were turned away from the doors.
Backstage, of course, there was excitement and tension like I’d never seen. Both Fishman and Glaser were fighting over me. I hadn’t signed with either one. My contract with Glaser had run out and I hadn’t renewed it. And I didn’t know enough about Fishman to take a chance and go with him.
It was only a few weeks before, people had been telling me I was through in the United States, that the public would never accept me. The mob in the street sort of answered that.
Fishman had been around before the concert was a sellout, you could say that for him. And Glaser hadn’t showed his face. But then, all of the courting from Fishman wasn’t what it had seemed, either. Both agents were threatening to take me to the union, trying to prove this, that, and the other.
But all these private backstage troubles went away when I saw that audience. Nobody had told me there’d be people behind me on stage. My first thought was, “What the hell is that big choir out there for?”
I wasn’t used to this. There were as many people sitting on stage behind me at Carnegie as I would have had out front for a supper show at the Apollo.
Even before I opened my mouth to sing I had an answer for the people in Europe who told me America would never accept me after I got out of jail. And I was glad I hadn’t jumped to any conclusion in jail, or run out.
By the end of the first set I was so happy and elated I didn’t know what I was doing.
Just before I was set to go on for the second set a big mess of gardenias arrived