Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [70]
Miss Lee had about twenty-five people at a big long table: W. C. Handy, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine. Miss Lee was seated at one end. The ball had just started by the time we got there. All the guests were expected to get up and do their stuff. Billy Eckstine was first.
As the party dragged on, Peggy Lee got up from her end of the table, came down to ours with a sheet of music. She smiled, handed it to me, and said: “Lady, I want you to have this. I wrote this one just for you.”
I looked it over. It was called “The Lady with the Gardenias,” or “Gardenias in My Hair,” or something like that, celebrating the gardenia kick I used to be on, when I couldn’t sing unless I had flowers in my hair.
One of the other guests looked it over, too, and then made a nasty crack.
Ice started forming all over the joint. People started rattling glasses, trying to pretend they hadn’t heard what they knew damn well she said. I said “Thank you” to Miss Lee and tried to get up and out of there.
But the plain-talking guest turned to the other people at the table. “Well, goddamit, darlings, what’s everbody so angry about? I only told the damn truth.”
But it was too early in the morning for talk as straight as this.
———
After the Strand booking probably the roughest part of my life with Mr. Levy was when he walked out and left me and my goddamn band stranded in the deep South without a dime. When theater dates began to slack off, Mr. Levy decided to get together a whole package show, with me as the star and fronting the band. Mr. Levy had invested a little of his own money in this project, so he was playing Simon Legree all the time. The whole Savannah date was a drag from the very beginning.
This was the beginning of the end with Mr. Levy, I decided. It was the end of buses and touring with bands and having to be mother superior to a group of musicians on the road.
Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what’s more than enough. They could have had me and Mr. Levy in mind.
Chapter 21
Where Is the Sun?
You can get in just as much trouble by being dumb and innocent as you can by breaking the law. I’ve learned that the hard way. If you’re doing something wrong, you know it and you’ve got at least one eye peeled looking for trouble. That way, you’re in some position to protect yourself. The other way, you’re just a pigeon.
I remember one time during the war I met a cat in a 52nd Street club where I was working. He was a musician and a soldier. So naturally every musician is a friend of mine from front, we don’t need any introductions. We had hung out together for a couple of days before and he told me he was over the hill from some camp down South somewhere and wasn’t going back. I lived in a hotel then and I took him back there with me to knock some sense into his head. I told him I’d call his sergeant on the phone and see if I couldn’t fix it up for him to get back without getting into trouble. I had talked to one sergeant in my life this way and it worked. This must have gone to my fat head.
When he wouldn’t even tell me the number of his outfit, I locked him in and told him to stay there while I did my evening show at the club. When I got home about four in the morning I had hardly slammed the door behind me when a couple of tough-looking white characters knocked at the door. They flashed their wallets at me, told me they were going to arrest me and carry me off for hiding a GI who was AWOL. I begged with them and pleaded with them. I told them this could ruin me, as if they didn’t know. When that didn’t work, I tried offering them money. I had five hundred dollars stashed in the joint. I offered them every cent if they’d let me alone and let that poor little soldier head back to camp.
They were real big about it. They took every cent, scolded me a little, and then they split. I didn’t catch on until I saw them walk down the hall and exit by going upstairs instead of down. When I saw them running across the rooftops with my money, I knew I’d been