One of the greatest treasures in my memory is the night Billie Holiday introduced me to Miles Davis and I introduced Billie Holiday to the Beat Generation.
This story begins a woman named Maele. In 1959, [she] was married to Bill Dufty, who was one of my colleagues in the so-called “Poets’ Corner” of the Post city room…He hit the big-time by ghostwriting Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues, which starts out: “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 15, she was 16 and I was three.” By the time Bill completed work on Billie’s book, Billie had adopted Maele as her “white sister.” That’s what Billie called Maele, “my white sister.” They really seemed to be as tight as womb-mates.
Naturally, I wanted to meet Billy. I was researching a series on the Beats for the Post and the Beats were gaga over her. I wanted to know what she thought of them.
I asked Bill Dufty if he could arrange it and Bill asked Maele. Sure, Maele said, come on over, bring your wife, I’ll cook us up a dinner, Billie would love to meet you.
If memory serves me right, the Duftys lived in an apartment at a fancy address somewhere in midtown Manhattan. Don’t ask me to remember the meal Maele cooked up. What I mostly remember is how tall Billie looked, much taller than her five feet and seven inches, even without her high heels. Another thing I remember is that there was a droop to her mien in the same way a drape sags. There was also enough baggage under her eyes to need some help from a Redcap. Billie looked like a dolled-up wreck. But she seemed regal nonetheless. And there was still a hint of Spring in her – like a moon shining through flowering tree branches on a romantic night in May. As an adoring fan, I was delighted to discover she was flesh and blood, somebody real, somebody I could talk to, somebody who was actually hamish.
Except, it was hard for me to understand what she was saying. Maele seemed to catch every word, but to my wife and to me, Billie sometimes was almost unintelligible. At first, I never even gave Billie’s addiction a thought but it soon became obvious that she was expressing herself in a junkie’s drawl.
“Ahem sayin’“ “Ehm ooma blmmmm blmmm wnnnn ugggh, y’know?”
But even if I missed a lot, I still enjoyed Billie’s relaxed and easy-to-get-to-know kind of charm. After dinner, it was Billie’s idea for us to go down to Birdland, where Miles was playing with his Kind of Blue quintet – John Coltrane on tenor, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums and Bill Evans on piano, or was it Wynton Kelly? At Birdland, he came over to our table as soon as he finished his set. When Billie introduced me to him, I rose to shake his hand. Still, I had to chase him into the men’s room to get a chance to talk to him. I was standing at the urinal next to him when I asked him what he thought of the Beat Generation. Coltrane, standing at the urinal on the other side of Miles, snickered. Miles glowered at me as if in anger because I had asked so silly a question. In the hiss that was his wreckage of a voice, Miles growled: “The Beat Generation aint nothin’ but just more synthetic white shit!”
It was after grooving to a set or two at Birdland that we piled back into my station wagon and I tried to steer Billie to a Beat poetry reading at a Beat hangout called the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, located in the unlikeliest of places, Hell’s Kitchen, on the second floor of 596 Ninth Avenue, around the corner from 42nd Street. God knows what’s there now, but poetry readings at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery loom large in the history of the Beat Generation. Sure, Billie wanted to know what the Beat Generation was all about and, sure, she’d listen to the poetry and, sure, she’d take a ride over there. But when I pulled up in front of the coffee gallery, she suddenly decided she didn’t want to get out of the station wagon to go upstairs.
Instead, I went up and brought down two of the poets, the late Joel Oppenheimer and Leroi Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka, the fiery militant artist-activist. On this particular night, both Joel and Roi tried to stick their heads in through the partly rolled-down window of the back seat, where Billie was sitting next to Maele.
“Thanks!” Joel Oppenheimer said, “Just, thanks. That’s all I can say is thanks. Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thanks. Just thank you for being you.”
He said something like that. He said it as if he were reciting a poem. He said it so powerfully that I can’t remember what Amiri said, except that Amiri expressed similar gratitude for Billie’s existence. When I asked Amiri years later if he remembered what he said, he told me he didn’t remember. Was he putting me on? If I had my pick of moments to live over again, this night would be one of them. In the back seat of the station wagon, Billie told Maele that Amiri looked cute and then she said:
“Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here!”
I forget all the small-talk that we made. What I remember most of all is that, with my wife in the front seat with me, I turned and asked Billie over my shoulder:
“How come you never recorded”- and I sang the title – ‘My Man’s Gone Now’? You know, from Porgy and Bess. By George Gershwin.”
Yes, “My Man’s Gone Now”. Why Billie had never recorded it always had been a big mystery to me and here was my chance to solve the mystery by getting the answer from Billie herself. That is, if I could make out her drawling and mumbling. Oh, I’m exaggerating! She really wasn’t that strung out.
“Ah know! Ah know!” she answered “He asked me to sing that song when they opened that show. He asked me to play the part of the girl who sings that song.”
“Who asked you?”
“George Gershwin.”
The woman who sings “My Man’s Gone Now” in Porgy and Bess is a character named “Serena.” She sings the song after learning that the villain, “Crown,” has murdered her husband. The role was created in the original 1935 production by Ruby Elzy. She sang the role 800 times. She even sang it at a recital in the White House. The last time she sang it was in Denver in 1943, the final stop in a national Porgy and Bess tour. She was on her way back to New York and a solo career that was to include her grand opera debut in the title role of Aida when she felt ill and stopped to see a doctor in Detroit. The doctor discovered a benign tumor in her uterus and recommended its immediate removal–an operation that, according to doctors, “did not appear to be dangerous.” It was after the surgery in the recovery room of Parkside Hospital, Detroit, that she went into cardiac shock and died at the age of 35. We were nearing Columbus Circle when Billie drawled from the back seat of my station wagon:
“Naw, I couldn’t sing that song night after night after night. It’s too sad. It’s the saddest song ever sung. That song breaks your heart. It woulda killed me. It killed the girl who got the part. She sang it night after night after night and she died. It broke her heart. Singing that song woulda killed me, too.”
And then, Billie began to sing it, a cappella, in the back seat. She sang it as I have never heard it sung before or since. She sang it as only Billie could sing it, turning an operatic aria into a blues song, cornering the lines with mournful catches of the throat. Out of the gravel of her voice and the slurred mush of her enunciation, the clear and beautiful sound of her singing rose up to fill me with thrills and cover me with goose-pimples:
“My man’s gone now,
Aint no use in listenin’
For his tired footsteps
Climbin’ up the stairs. . .”
I had to wipe the tears from my eyes because I couldn’t see to drive around Columbus Circle. Beautiful music always makes me cry. Then Billie asked me to take her to her favorite Chinese Restaurant so she could get some food to go. I could just about decipher what she was saying but she made a big fuss about how necessary it was for her to get a takeout from this particular Chinese restaurant. I’ve always wondered, perhaps naively, whether the takeout could have included a hit of junk. Billie died only a few months later.
Adapted from Al Aronowitz’s memoir of his pop life and times – THE INVISIBLE LINK, COLUMN ONE of THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST – which can be found online at http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj.