Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [68]
When I was playing Detroit a few years later, she came to the theater one day between shows just as I was going out shopping. She wanted to schmooze and said she’d drive me around. I knew she had been a booster, but I figured she had given it up. At least I thought she wouldn’t try it when I was around.
We went into a big downtown department store. I looked at bags, lingerie, stockings. No matter what I picked out, she’d say, “Don’t buy that here, sugar. I know a place down the street where they got better stuff, and besides, it’s cheaper.”
I figured she had lived there seventeen years and she should know something. So we’d move on. We had been through three stores when I finally gave up and told her I was going to buy the next thing in the next store we hit and then go back to the theater.
When we got to her car she wheeled around the corner, then stopped and began to shake herself apart. Man, that bitch had boosted everything I had looked at during the whole shopping tour. And all of it was stashed in a big pair of bloomers.
“Look, baby,” I said, “let me out of here, and remind me never to go nowhere with you no more.”
She was hurt. She wanted to give me this whole load. She thought she was doing me a big favor.
But I figured she had just been using me, and I was so square I didn’t know what was going on. “Bitch,” I hollered at her when I left, “if I’d gone to jail I’d have killed you and they could have had me for murder.”
So that cured me of reunions with the chicks from Alderson.
Chapter 20
No-Good Man
Don’t even think all the DP’s were in Europe. I’ve been one for years. In Philly, Washington, Boston, or Frisco, I was a citizen. I could come and go, live and work where I pleased without asking anybody. Not New York.
When I had exhausted every legit way of getting my police permit to work in New York, I found there was another way. And that’s where Mr. Levy came in. In a way, it was the cops who introduced him to me.
In 1948 John Levy ran the Ebony Club on 52nd Street. There was somebody’s money behind him, but everything was run by Mr. Levy. As far as everyone knew, he was the boss. Right then all I knew or cared about was that he could give me a job when no one else dared. He was a big-time operator taking an interest in a chick fresh out of jail.
Levy was positive he could get me my police card. And when he was willing to let me open at the Ebony without one, I was convinced he knew what he was talking about.
I opened scared, expecting the cops to come in any chorus and carry me off. But nothing happened. I was a huge success. And for my first New York club date since getting out of jail, a big attraction. The Ebony was packed every night. I had Bobby Tucker and his great group backing me, and Noro Morales with his big Spanish band was on the same bill.
In the meantime Mr. Levy was doing other things for me. He took me to shops like Florence Lustig’s and Wilma, bought me five-hundred-dollar gowns, with gloves and shoes to match. Jewelry shops he never took me to personally. He got that stuff wholesale, but he got it, gave it to me, and it was beautiful.
I used to draw a little money as I needed it, from day to day. But I never asked for any accounting. I figured the things he bought me in a week cost twice what I was supposed to be making. And if I asked for an audit I could only end up owing Levy money.
I never had had a mink coat in my life. John Levy bought me my first one. After that I never once mentioned the subject of money again. I knew he was in my corner then. The biggest surprise of all was that he never once suggested or insisted that I go to bed with him.
He was all smooth and full of attention and good manners, but strictly business. If I started getting nervous or hinky, wondering, “What is this?,” he’d tell me to take it easy, that my manager, Joe Glaser, couldn’t do anything for me and he could.
I had been living at Bob Tucker’s farm out near Morristown. Then I moved to a hotel. One day he took me over