Billie Holiday by John Szwed Page B

men she admired. But it was not the president who was the issue. In 1944 Hazel Scott, the pianist and singer who worked with her at Café Society, had talked Billie into going to one of the president’s infantile paralysis benefit balls held annually on his birthday, January 30. Billie was concerned about how the staff of the White House, the “dicty Negroes”—what she called the snobbish black elite of D.C.—would respond to her being there. She imagined that every one of them would be watching her, looking for signs of drugs or their traces on her arms. Though she had not yet been arrested for drug use, she knew the rumors of her addiction were widespread in the black community.
    Finally she agreed to go, and when she arrived in full finery, she had a long wait ahead of her, with Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford, Maria Montez, Lucille Ball, Jinx Falkenburg, John Garfield, and Red Skelton roaming in and out of the dressing rooms and bathrooms. After she had finished her song, she couldn’t leave until the president had made his appearance. By now she was spending every minute looking for an empty bathroom, and in desperation she stepped into an elevator and hit the button. When it stopped, she walked out and began making her way down a long hall when she heard a voice she recognized from the radio saying, “Well, little lady, you look as though you’relost.” There was the president of the United States in a wheelchair pushed by a naval officer. She, like most of America, had never seen the president in a wheelchair, as he was carefully guarded from the public’s learning of the degree of his illness. She was shocked to see him looking older, weakened, an invalid. When their eyes met she saw something else:
    These goddamn American doctors don’t know nothing about drugs. Here’s a man who was President of the United States. He should have the best doctors around. He’s got a war to run and all that bullshit and aggravation and you know what they had him on? They had him on morphine. Yeah, morphine. They should have been giving him goddamn heroin.
    My God, I couldn’t sleep for days thinking about it. I wished I’d never gone near that place. Who the hell could I talk to about it?
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    To take advantage of
Lady Sings the Blues
’ publication, Clef Records produced
an album with the same title made up of songs Billie had been working on in the studio over the previous two years, all of them rerecordings of songs she had previously issued, and most of them with titles that were chapter titles in the book. Only one song was new, “Lady Sings the Blues,” with music by Herbie Nichols, a little-known pianist who was much admired by musicians for his challenging compositions. They had been brought together by Dufty, and Billie added the words to an instrumental piece by Nichols that he had titled “Serenade.”
    But the big event to promote the book and provide some work for Billie in New York City was two performances at Carnegie Hall. The concerts were set for November 10 at eight thirty and midnight, and both were sold out, with seats added onstage for the overflow. Don Friedman, the show’s producer, asked Gilbert Millstein to narrate parts of the book between her songs to create an autobiographical structurefor the event, presumably because Millstein had given the book a positive review in the
New York
Times
and was well known as a journalist and a critic in the city. Millstein would read selections over piano accompaniment, and the spotlight would then swing over to Billie for her to segue into a song. When Holiday arrived that afternoon for rehearsal, it was obvious to everyone that she was not well. Her voice was thin, her suit ill-fitting, her legs and ankles swollen, and she had no interest in singing. She picked the songs for the performances and the order in which they would be