Billie Holiday by John Szwed

singer might lead to the family being “hurt by unsavory gossip, or even blackmailed by the gangsters and dope pushers Billie knew.” Louise’s mother subsequently ordered her never to have “any more colored folk in her house, I didn’t care
who
it was,” and she and Billie ceased to see each other.Hammond said that Holiday never forgave him for it, and Billie angrily describes the affair in her book, offering her theory of what was driving Louise’s attentions and how they affected black people such as herself:
    But some girls like Brenda can’t love or let themselves go with anybody—man or woman. They can’t even be lesbians and work at it. They’re incapable of loving anybody—just the opposite of my trouble. And they try to make up for it by buying things for people like me.
    It’s a cinch to see how it all begins. These poor bitches grow up hating their mothers and having the hots for their fathers. And since being in love with our father is taboo, they grow up unable toget any kicks out of anything unless it’s taboo love. And some Negroes in America walk around with big “Do Not Touch” signs on them, that’s where we come in. And I’m telling you it can be a drag.
    There were
others who could have appeared in the book. Elizabeth Hardwick moved to New York from Louisville in 1943 hoping to become a writer and an intellectual. She shared an apartment with Greer Johnson, a friend from Louisville who had also just come to town, and who later became a producer who created important opportunities for Holiday when work for her was scarce. Hardwick includes a chapter on Billie in her book
Sleepless Nights
that is part essay, part nonfiction, based on Hardwick’s and Johnson’s idolatry. Shewrote of Billie as “the bizarre deity,” the phrase that the poet Baudelaire used for his brown-skinned mistress, and as one of those for whom the word “changeling” was invented, an offspring of a legendary being who has been switched at birth for a mere mortal.
    Her whole life had taken place in the dark. The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café, the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night-working, smiling, in make-up, in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again. The aim of it all is just to be drifting off to sleep when the first rays of the sun’s brightness threaten the theatrical eyelids.
    Simone de Beauvoir visited New York City in 1947 and went to Carnegie Hall with Richard Wright to see Louis Armstrong and then to the Downbeat Club, where Billie was appearing with Art Tatum. Attendance at the club had been sparse, and both performers’ pay had just been cut for lack of business. Although Billie didn’t perform that night, she was there at the club, and De Beauvoir described her in her diary:
    She is very beautiful in a long white dress, her black hair straightened by a clever permanent and falling straight and shiny aroundher clear brown face. Her bangs look like they’ve been sculpted in dark metal. She smiles, she is beautiful, but she doesn’t sing. They say she’s on drugs and sings only rarely now.
    The last chapter in the original draft version of
Lady Sings the Blues
was moved back to become part of chapter twenty-two, and a new final chapter was added to the published book titled “God Bless the Child.” In it Billie describes being once again arrested in Philadelphia for drug possession, along with her husband, Louis McKay, only this time, she says, with no evidence of any wrongdoing. After a night in jail, she went to the Showboat Club, sang her last evening’s set, and left by bus for New York. In her concluding paragraphs she says the doctors had told her that she had successfully kicked her addiction—a fact she already knew, she explained, because she now hated television, a true sign of her