Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [74]
Those hush-hush, lowdown, confidential-type magazines can work over the story of my San Francisco trial as long as anybody cares. A while back one of them trotted out some old pictures of me in jail in Philadelphia, Jake Ehrlich in court in San Francisco, and Colonel White investigating crime with a Senate committee somewhere else. There was a big story inside. I read it. So did most of my neighbors. Then they asked me for the real lowdown inside story. I wish I knew it myself.
Chapter 22
I Must Have That Man
A man can leave home one morning and come home that night whistling and singing to find there ain’t nobody there but him. I left two men like that.
But John Levy had that hammer at my head. I was tied up a thousand ways. Leaving him had to be the kind of production that would make Liza crossing the ice look easy. He could always turn me in, get me busted, or hit me or something. There were bookings he had made, contracts he had signed for weeks or months in advance. Even if I could have split out I’d have been in a snowstorm of lawsuits and union charges that might have washed up my career. So I had to try to keep my head and untangle myself piece by piece, whittle down the backlog of bookings, keep him happy enough so he didn’t kill me.
I was on my own. Nobody could help me.
Weeks later, while fulfilling a booking in the Brown Derby, Washington, D.C., my luck was running bad in one way, good in another. The management of the joint went bankrupt, during my run; when it came time to pay off, they couldn’t make both the band and me.
This was a drag. I needed that two thousand dollars as bad as I needed any week’s salary I ever made. It was my freedom money. But I couldn’t take it and leave the cats of the band all hung. So I told the management to pay the band. They gave me a check that’s still bouncing to this day. All the district attorneys have never been able to collect on it.
Mr. Levy had said he had business in New York, so he had left. But I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t turn up in the lobby of the Charles Hotel in Washington any minute.
It was cold and there was snow up to your panties over the capital. I had two thousand dollars in the hotel safe downstairs, but I didn’t dare touch it. If I did I was sure someone would notify Mr. Levy. He had it locked up where I couldn’t touch it. He had taken one other precaution to keep me a prisoner. He had taken my mink coat and hidden it under the mattress. He was sure I wouldn’t leave without that.
But I found it, put it on, put my last few dollars in a bag, put my dog under my arm, and walked out in my stocking feet down the fire escape of the Charles Hotel. I didn’t have a thing except what I had on my back and that bouncing check. I split for New York with my dog looking over my shoulder.
I thought I was through with men—for sure, forever, and for keeps.
I moved into the Hotel Henry on 44th Street. I was so sure I was going to live the rest of my life there, I wanted it fixed up to suit me. It cost me $450 just to paint the joint. Then I put up drapes, got a few Chinese lamps, and kept buying things to turn that place into something that was mine—my home.
I knew I might have an affair or two here and there maybe, but anything serious—never.
My only company was a cat I liked who sometimes used to help me in and out of my gowns before I went on stage. When he wasn’t doing that, he was helping himself in and out of them. We took to calling him Miss Freddy and he was always good for a laugh. He was close enough to my size, too, so a fitter or a dressmaker could work on him and not bug me. He was crazy for a lynx cape I had. It looked better on him than it did on me, too. Although the police didn’t always think so. They’re so narrow-minded they were always picking on him for being overdressed. I’d have to go down to the station and bail him out—and whatever part of my wardrobe he had on him.
One time I loaned him my mink coat when he was going to that big annual Halloween Ball. Mrs. Sugar Ray Robinson loaned her coat to a girl