Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [78]
We took off from Idlewild January 10. It was so cold the next morning when we arrived in Copenhagen, I don’t believe I would have got out of bed to go meet my sister. I’d never seen so much snow or such a greeting in my life. Hundreds of people with flowers, smiling, beaming, so cheerful and happy, reporters, photographers.
We were scheduled to do about forty concerts in thirty days—sometimes two a night in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Then I was set to do Britain as a solo.
With a schedule like this, you know we didn’t actually see much of Europe, except from a few thousand feet in the air or out the windows of a bus between planes.
But in between I met so many wonderful people who had been my friends for years, who loved me and treated me like I had come home, that I could hardly believe it.
In Copenhagen, for instance, at the airport I was introduced to a doctor who was there with his twelve-year-old daughter. They spoke English, not too good, but I could understand them. They told me how they loved me, had heard every record I ever made.
I don’t make friends easily. I was polite to them, and that’s about all. When the doctor heard me blowing my nose, he was all concerned. Nothing would do but I should go home with them so he could give me something for my cold. He kept at me until I finally agreed. So off we went with these perfect strangers to be guests in their home. If something like this happened at La Guardia people would say I was crazy.
You could see from their home that they had once been well off, but they had lost just about everything in the war. But they were still together, still a family. And they loved one another, you could see that. Not rich any more, just plain good people.
He gave me some medicine to soak sugar in and then swallow. It reminded me of my grandmother, who used to soak sugar in coal oil or kerosene. This stuff smelled almost the same way. I took it, and it cut all my hoarseness. And then they brought out all this crazy Danish food. Between the medicine and the food, I sang like mad at the concert that night.
It was tough to leave them. They had read about me all through the years and they loved me. And they were so sweet. They said I could come to Copenhagen and live with them any time. Keep your passport, they said, and any time you can make it, just write us and we’ll send you the fare. That kind of thing would never happen to me in this country. If anybody ever met me at La Guardia Airport, I’d expect them to say, “Send that bitch back where you got her.”
My old man Louis was the sharpest one at figuring out European money. But the thing that he couldn’t figure out was an American chick who was set up over there. She was about the second soul we saw and she sold Louis a bill of goods.
She told him we couldn’t speak the language, she could, and oo-pa-pa-da, we needed someone to help us, steer us around, do my shopping, be my secretary and whatnot. She wasn’t going to be a maid or nothing, just help us out with all this stuff. So Louis went for it and agreed to pay her seventy-five dollars a week in addition to paying her room and board while she stayed with us in a hotel suite.
We woke up the next morning to find she’d been up since seven o’clock, ordered herself six yankee dollars’ worth of breakfast, and sent her clothes out to be cleaned.
He would send her out to shop for me, to get heavy shoes or something. Everything she bought for me, she liked and bought a copy for herself, maybe in a little different color.
Louis wouldn’t have a clean undershirt to his name, but she would have had all her duds dry-cleaned. One time she did try and wash out something for him. I had to wash it over again after her. The final finish came after we went out together someplace and some cat came up to her and called her Billie Holiday. She got all white in the face and flustered and explained to him that she wasn’t.
But she had told us we were squares, and in a way she was right. When we let her go we had to pay