Lady Sings the Blues - Billie Holiday [81]
“I’m from Baltimore, I don’t know from nothing. I want to take a look behind the Iron Curtain and see whether it’s red or blue or green.” So I did, and nobody bothered us.
Then there was Zurich, where we stayed in this beautiful hotel with nothing but snow around it and white swans big as ponies floating around in a lake in front of our windows. I had never seen a pair of skis in my life, but one day Louis came in with a whole damn outfit he had bought for me, boots, pants, sweaters, and a cute little hat.
“What are you buying me this for?” I asked him. “It’s never going to get this cold in New York.”
I found out when we got into a car and drove as far as we could into the mountains. Then Louis got me out to walk and told me he had made an appointment for me to go skiing. There was a newspaperman there and a photographer and chauffeur. I didn’t know it, but there was also a photographer from the American pocket picture magazine Jet.
I didn’t know from nothing, but when I got the skis on I started liking it. After a while I got so giddy I decided to try making it downhill. I took off down the hill, fell on my can, and that, of course, is the picture everybody saw in Jet magazine.
We did only one concert in Paris, in a big auditorium called the Salle Pleyel. Maybe I didn’t know the right places, or maybe, as they told me, I should have come back sometime in the spring. I had saved a lot of loot to go clothes shopping in Paris. But I didn’t find anything I wanted to buy except underwear.
Our troupe had trouble keeping the money straight from the first day to the last. You’d have all this loot in your pocket, but it was never any good in the country you were in; by the time you’d get it changed, you were in another country. Louis kept it straight. But I didn’t bother.
I just kept a pile of money of all kinds. I’d pull it out and hold this coin and bill collection in my hand and let the waiters and bartenders and other people just pick out what I owed them. Red Norvo was one of the ones who thought he knew, and look what happened to him in Copenhagen. Red came down to the hotel dining room rushing to make the bus; he had bacon and eggs, a piece of fruit, some toast and coffee, and paid the man.
When he got to the bus, our bass player pulled out one of those ruler-like gadgets they call a money calculator. He was playing with it, figuring out what this was worth and what that cost.
Red said, “Man, what is that thing?”
He told him, and Red took it and started figuring. He adjusted it, then he flipped. “Let’s go back and get my kroners,” he hollered. “I just paid fifteen dollars in American money for eggs and bacon.”
Red never did get it straight. He got took and took, so he had to borrow loot to make it back to New York from Paris. A real fine cat, Red Norvo.
We said good-bye to the rest of the troupe in Paris and went on to London, where I had a bunch of bookings.
For shopping, for balling, for working or anything else, give me London. To me, it’s the greatest. Max Jones, the writer and jazz critic, met us there. I had never laid eyes on the man before in my life, but he knew things about me that I’d forgotten and after a few minutes I felt like I’d known him all my life. This stuff about the English reserve just doesn’t go for musicians. Musicians who don’t even speak the same language get to know each other real quick.
About the first thing on the London schedule was a press party Max had arranged. The newspaper people all across Europe had been wonderful to me. In the beginning I was hardly more than polite. I was so used to newspaper people in America, and the differences were amazing.
These European writers dig more music. They were hip; they had ears. The big brains, the writers and jazz authorities in America catch up with what’s going on in jazz ten years after it happens. You’re nobody over here until you’re dead, and then you’re the greatest.
Over there they write about it when it happens; they don’t care how big a press agent you got, what the