Billie Holiday Read Free Page B

Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong, who also had white cowriters.
    Some of those suspicious of Holiday’s book point out that William Dufty was a tabloid journalist, and thus a “hack.” Dufty did indeed write for a tabloid-size newspaper, but it was the
New York Post
, when that publication was still staffed by some of the best journalists in the city. He came to the paper with a background as a labor organizer for the United Automobile Workers, an editor of the union newsletter
The CIO
News
, and a publicity director for Senator Hubert Humphrey. He had won awards for his
Post
articles on J. Edgar Hoover’s troubled leadership of the FBI, the plight of new Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City, and the failures of drug laws and medical treatment—a twelve-part series called “Drug Addicts, USA.” When he ended his career at the
Post
,he was assistant to the editor. He coauthored over forty books, including biographies of the Lehman brothers, Gloria Swanson, and the son of Edward G. Robinson, as well as those of an ex-model and an ex–Catholic priest. He contributed to
You Are All Sanpaku
, the bible of macrobiotics, and wrote
Sugar Blues
, two books that fed the fears of those in the sixties who saw conventional food as an enemy, books that also landed him in the company of food cultists John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Gloria Swanson, whom he later married.
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    Dufty met Billie Holiday through his first wife, Maely Daniele, a Jewish war camp refugee who found her way into several different lives in America—a writer, a TV talk show hostess, and a civil rights activist who booked jazz musicians and worked to get their drug charges dropped. Later she was involved with various social action groups in Harlem and the Navajo Nation. When she met Dufty, she had just divorced the former child film actor Freddie Bartholomew of
Little Lord Fauntleroy
fame, for whom she’d been a press agent. In 1955 Maely invited Billie to use the Duftys’ fifth-floor apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street (just as she had used some other apartments in New York City) for a place of refuge from the police, her husband Louis McKay, reporters, and the various unsavory figures who haunted her life. “I knew enough to keep my trap shut about anything she was doing in my place or anywhere,” Dufty recalled. “She was always involved in some love triangle.”
    Both Billie and Bill were raised as Catholics, and Dufty felt that they shared enough Irish in their DNA, religious experiences, and senses of humor that despite their very different backgrounds they could work well together.Billie was staying with the Duftys when their son Bevan was born, and she became the child’s godmother.
    In the mid-1950s Holiday was in financial trouble: She owed money to her record companies and the IRS, she was still unable to work in New York City nightclubs, and her reputation as an unreliable performerreduced the offers she received from venues in other cities and countries. Books by stars who revealed their afflictions and miseries were then selling well and breaking the hold that publicists had long had on what the public could know about them. Lillian Roth’s
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
and Diana Barrymore’s
Too Much, Too Soon
had been successful enough to be turned into movies. Several people had already approached Billie about writing her own book, the latest one a writer from Miami she’d met while appearing at the Vanity Fair Club, but Billie found him impossible to work with, as she had the others.She was especially put off by the writers at
Ebony
who had ghosted first-person articles under her name and, according to Dufty, had her “sounding like a freshman at Sarah Lawrence.”
    When Billie returned from some performances in Florida in June 1955, Bill began handling correspondence for her, writing to bookers and club owners on her behalf