Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [71]
Then there was that great day in January of 1949 when I arrived in San Francisco for a date at Joe Tenner’s Café Society Uptown. John Levy was with me. I was miserable and unhappy but I was clean. I wasn’t using anything and I wasn’t thinking about using anything. If I had been, I might not have been so stupid. We had only been there a few days when Mr. Levy said he had to go to Los Angeles. I drove him to the train in the beautiful new Lincoln convertible he had bought me with my money. You’ve never seen a car like that one. It had a bar in it, the red leather seat in the back could be made into a bed. It had a telephone, too, and in those days only doctors were supposed to have telephones in their wagons.
A day later the chauffeur drove me back to the station to pick Mr. Levy up. We hardly made it back to our hotel suite when we began to argue. In the middle of it the phone rang, and I answered. It was a voice I didn’t recognize asking for Mr. Levy. I said, “John, it’s for you.” While I was holding the phone in my hand they hung up. In a few seconds there was a knock at the door. We were in my room, 602. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening at the time. But I had to think about it plenty later, and eventually tell it to a judge and jury. Mr. Levy handed me something and said, “Billie darling, throw this in the toilet.”
When Mr. Levy opened the door there were three or four white men standing there. One of them followed me right into the bathroom. There was a small hassle. The man pulled me away from the toilet bowl and tried to grab what I’d had in my hand. A government expert came into court later and testified they had found opium.
That and my record were all they had on me. But both of us were under arrest, they told us then, for possession of it. They took me out to the living room of our suite, where Mr. Levy was waiting with the two other men. I knew Mr. Levy had a few thousand dollars on him and I knew he would go through that old act of trying to show how big he was by trying to bribe them. I also knew it wouldn’t work. I had heard of city cops taking plenty of money, but I never heard of a Treasury agent on the take since long before my time.
It was Saturday. Everything was closed. They didn’t take us to jail, but directly to the police desk to be booked. When we got there, Mr. Levy was still trying to buy them. That man thought money could buy anything.
Stupid me, I tried to talk sense to him. “You’re in the clear,” I told him. “The only evidence they’ve got is on me. I’ve got one strike against me. You know what they’ll do to me. I can’t beat it, so let me take the rap. You can get off and go back to New York and get me a lawyer.”
When the reporters came around he said if they found anything it must have been left there by a girl who had visited me the day before.
“They just don’t believe Billie gave it up,” he told them. “They keep tailing her. Anyway, Billie used it in a different way. You never go back to smoking after that.”
The photographers kept snapping pictures of me and Mr. Levy, alone and together. Without those pictures a lot of people might never know that he was a Negro. Nobody ever took me for Irish on account of my name. But with him it was different.
What the police and federal men told the reporters, I don’t know. But the next day the papers from coast to coast said, “Billie Holiday Arrested on Narcotics Charges.” Way down in the fine print Mr. Levy was also mentioned. The wire-service despatches said the cops said they entered our hotel room and caught me “in the act of using a drug.”
This was a damn lie.
Then they added a nasty sentence saying I had been “recently released from a New York [wrong again] federal institution as ‘cured’ of drug addiction.” And they put quotation marks around the word “cured.” That gave the wise ones all they were waiting for.
It was Joe Tenner, boss of the club, who went to bat and called Jake Ehrlich, a famous San Francisco criminal lawyer. Mr. Ehrlich recently allowed his biography to be written. My trial is included