Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [69]
I wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t have any guy and he knew it. When it seemed an old guy of mine might be in the picture, he fixed that. My husband, Jimmy Monroe, started coming around Ebony. I loved seeing him again. I even got to the point of thinking we might try it again and make it. But John fixed that. He not only chased Jimmy away, but did it in a way that made Jimmy seem soft and foolish and something less than what I wanted in a man. When John Levy told Jimmy not to bother me, Jimmy just chased himself off. Sure John was a big man, but nobody is that big.
John fixed it so I never wanted for anything. I had a car and chauffeur to drive me around. We went to the most glamorous clubs. Then he finished off my last resistance by buying me the first home I’d had since Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore. It was a fabulous place in St. Albans, Queens, and we furnished it together in modern stuff and antiques, with a huge round bed like I’d seen Billie Dove have in the movies.
I even began to catch myself thinking I might be happy one day again. That, as usual, was fatal.
Trouble started when Levy booked me into the Strand Theater on Broadway. This was the start of a bunch of theater bookings at thirty-five hundred a week. The Basie band was on the bill with me, and we set some kind of a record there for a run of eight weeks on Broadway.
It was a big deal but it was work; five shows a day, seven days a week. After a few weeks you can go dressing-room crazy. The only kicks I got outside of the forty minutes on stage every three hours was when an old friend used to come backstage. We’d have lunch at the Edison Hotel or have a few in that little bar near the stage door of the Strand.
The beautiful future with Mr. Levy was beginning to look like a nightmare, and there was almost nobody I dared talk to. There was nobody John Levy couldn’t scare away.
I was making thirty-five hundred dollars a week, but I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket. John handled all the finances, and I wasn’t even allowed to draw five bucks. I was tired of it. I was embarrassed to go out and not be able to pick up the bar tab or a lunch check. So one afternoon when Mr. Levy walked in I told him I wanted an allowance.
“What do you need with cash?” he hollered.
He made it sound unladylike to carry money around. All I needed to do, according to him, was whisper what I needed and he’d get it for me. I had a home, he said. I had a car and chauffeur to pick me up and take me anywhere. I had charge accounts here and charge accounts there.
“I’ll give you what you need,” he told me.
The rest of the Strand run became a nightmare.
It was tough enough at the beginning. Everybody was happy about the crowds that used to flock to the theater. People were standing when the place opened in the morning. People were still standing for the last show at night. Everybody thought this was great, except me. I thought people were just coming to see how high I was. “They hope I’ll fall on my face or something,” I used to say. I wasn’t buying newspaper stories. I wasn’t going for any greasy damn pig.
“Some may be, darling,” they would tell me. “But lots and lots of people out there came to see you because they love you, and don’t you forget it.”
A couple of nights before I closed at the Strand, Peggy Lee sent me a message backstage asking me to come to a party she was giving at Bop City.
It was one of those tie-in deals. A magazine was going to cover it for one of those spreads. Mr. Levy thought I should go. But after five shows a day I was too damn tired for any big parties. If he took me anywhere, it was more work getting ready than if I was to be presented at court—Buckingham Palace, not Centre Street. I had to be perfect—nails, hair, make-up—and it used to take me a couple of hours.
Anyway, it was a couple of hours later by the time I had finished doing myself over and Mr. Levy was escorting