Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [80]
I came home in a cab, and when I got to the hotel I realized I didn’t have any money. So I told the driver to go ask the man at the desk to call my husband and tell him to pay the cab.
The cabdriver answered me back in German. I didn’t understand a word, but I knew he was telling me he was going to put me in jail.
I had left the group and come on alone so Louis wouldn’t be upset. And here I was stupefied, with this big cab bill. So I went to the desk myself, with the driver hollering behind me.
Then the man at the desk told me real nice that the driver was threatening to call the police and put me in jail. So I asked him real nice in English to call my husband.
He said he had, and my husband said he wasn’t paying the bill. So I hollered at the driver. He hollered at me. And the desk clerk hollered at both of us.
Finally the clerk called my husband, pleaded with him to come down and break this up. He had the phone to his head when his face lit up. He turned to me and said in perfect English, “If Madam will excuse me, Madam’s husband asks me to remind Madam that Madam has money”—and he cleared his throat—“in her bosom.”
I did. I looked, pulled it out, paid everybody off, and we were all happy.
Things were just great. I went upstairs. The door of the room was open. So I pulled myself together, stuck my hand out, thinking Louis was standing there to shake with me, and I lunged into the room.
But he wasn’t. He was in the bed, not even moving.
So I kept right on lunging; nothing could stop me, I was so stupefied. I fell, and the corner of this antique bedstead hit me right in the eye.
There weren’t any dark glasses in Berlin big enough to hide that eye.
The next morning, hung over as I was, with my stomach hurting. I had to climb on that bus and let everybody in the group heckle me. Nothing I could say would convince them Louis hadn’t whipped me good.
But I wasn’t worrying so much about them as how I’d look on stage. I tried everywhere to get make-up to cover it. There was no Max Factor in Berlin, nothing. Finally I said they must have heard of grease paint over there. And they had. I got some stuff that must have been meant for clowns in a circus. A little bit of black crept through, but I got by.
Then there was Belgium. We had a ball there, too. I went out in Antwerp with the group. Everybody was so wonderful to us, you couldn’t be polite without coming home drunk. Louis was upset when I came home that way again. It was six o’clock in the morning or later. Anyway, the hotel maids were cruising down the corridors with armfuls of towels and sheets when I wandered by.
When I walked into the room I threw a shoe at him sleeping in the bed. He bounded out of bed and I ran down the hall with him hollering after me, big as he is, and not a stitch of clothes on him.
All the maids were holding their breath and chattering. So I figured I had to do something. I couldn’t speak a word of whatever language they talked. But I just held my finger aside of my head, making that universal signal as if to say he was crazy.
They all smile, and they’re on my side. It didn’t take long for that story to spread all over the hotel—if not further. They must have told all the bellhops and elevator men and everyone that he was crazy and had fits, because no matter where Louis went the rest of the day in the hotel, somebody was ducking and dodging him like he was Typhoid Eddie.
In Berlin I met cats from behind the Iron Curtain who came across to hear our concert. One day, without knowing what I was doing, I returned the compliment.
I was wandering around the Western Zone, just rubbernecking with Leonard Feather, when he discovered we were in the Eastern Zone. He tried to talk sense to me and get me to hustle myself back into the Western sector. But hell, I figured I was already there, I might as well look around.
Leonard tried to tell me I might get into trouble. I told him I