Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [67]
The Carnegie concert was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. But it was difficult to top. And afterwards came the terrific letdown. I finally made my mind up between the two managers who were fighting over me. I decided to stick with Joe Glaser. Fishman was sore and left for Los Angeles.
But I soon found out the name of my manager was secondary. I could have had the greatest manager in the business, with the greatest connections in town, and still my career was out of his hands. And in the hands of the law.
Before you can work in a joint where liquor is sold you have to have a permit from the police department and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. This is a life-and-death matter. According to the law, which must be a hangover from the days of prohibition, nobody who has a police record can hold a liquor license. This was a sop to the WCTU at the time the law was passed. It was supposed to make sure that former speakeasy owners couldn’t go legit and become saloon-keepers. But that side of the law was winked at from the beginning.
When I got out of jail they threw the book at me. My application for a cabaret card was turned down flat. Without a card no one would hire me, and there was no place I could work in New York—not if they sold juice there.
I could play in theaters and sing to an audience of kids in their teens who couldn’t get in any bar. I could appear on radio or TV. I could appear in concerts at Town Hall or Carnegie Hall. That was O.K. But if I opened my mouth in the crummiest bar in town, I was violating the law. It meant trouble for me and worse trouble for the guy who owned the joint. He would lose his license and his livelihood.
That’s how screwy the setup is. The right to work everybody screams about doesn’t mean a damn. If I had been a booster or a petty thief I’d have the parole board helping me to get a job so I could go straight and keep straight. But as a singer, the parole board couldn’t do a thing for me. It was out of their hands.
When I was really on the beach, without a police card, friends of mine tried to help me. Al Wilde came up with the idea of building a revue around me and putting it on Broadway. It seemed like a crazy idea, but he sold me. And what’s more important, he sold a lot of other people to the extent of investing their loot as angels for the show. Bob Sylvester, bless his heart, invested five thousand dollars. So did a lot of other people.
We opened at the Mansfield Theater on the night of April 27, 1948. Holiday on Broadway was a sellout, and the first performance made us think we had a smash. The regular music critics and drama critics came and treated us like we were legit.
Working in the show with me was Bobby Tucker and his group. The two-piano team of Wyatt and Taylor opened; Slam Stewart did his stuff in the first act and Cozy Cole came on to open the second act. They used black light, which turned his drums purple, his sticks glittering yellow, and nothing showed of Cozy except his white teeth.
I did a whole book of numbers, one group in the first act and one in the second, with two fancy changes of costume. I took five curtain calls after the opening. The next morning we were reviewed in the Times under the head: “Holiday Takes the Evening at Show: Billie, However, Surrounded by Galaxy of Stars of Jazz World at the Mansfield.”
It was a great idea, but we closed after three weeks.
My first club booking following the Carnegie concert took me back to a big joint in Philadelphia—the town where I had been arrested. The first night I looked out in the audience and then looked at Bobby Tucker, my accompanist, like I had seen a ghost. He didn’t know what was up. But there at the ringside was Mrs. Helen Hironimus, the Alderson warden. She had left her job, couldn’t take it any more, and was having a fine time.
This was the first time I met anybody from the federal pen.