With Billie Read Free

one of my strong points and I wouldn’t have known where to begin here. And so I simply raced through the papers as they presented themselves to me and made copies of anything that seemed particularly interesting or relevant, trusting that I would never know what I had missed out. Before I left New York, I also collected a cardboard box filled with typewritten transcripts of the interviews Linda Kuehl had recorded. Even these were in a strange muddle, with pages missing or repeating themselves, and sometimes a whole interview had disappeared completely.
    For about a year I did my best to construct the bones of a biography out of this material. Just like Linda Kuehl before me, I made lists of what seemed to be the main events in Billie’s life and I started chapters with titles like ‘A Baltimore Childhood’ and ‘Harlem in the 1930s’. I then arranged the interviews into little groups and tried to force all those voices into the cages I had constructed for them. But in doing so I lost the wildness and the vitality that made them so interesting, and all I achieved in return was a rather bland uniformity in which one voice merged seamlessly with the next. That was when I decided this book must be a documentary in which people are free to tell their own stories about Billie and it doesn’t matter if the stories don’t fit together, or even if sometimes they seem to be talking about a completely different woman.
    So this is Billie Holiday’s life, seen through the eyes of some of the people who knew her. I begin with the friends she ran around with when she was a young girl in Baltimore: Freddie Green, Mary ‘Pony’ Kane, Skinny ‘Rim’ Davenport, Wee Wee Hill, ‘Sleepy’ Dean and a woman called Christine Scott, who was an inmate at the reform school where Billie was sent when she was accused of being a ‘minor without proper care and guardianship’. I end in the late 1950s, with the lawyer Earle Zaidins, who lived in the same cheap hotel where Billie was staying for a while and who got to know her when they were both out in the street late at night, walking their dogs. And Alice Vrbsky; she of the shopping lists. In between there are all the others.
    I lift out a sheaf of papers stapled together at the top left-hand corner and there is an orange stain where the little strip of rusting metal bites into the pages. The interview date, the number of the tape cassette and the name of the person who is speaking are written at the top of the page and there are occasional corrections and notes added in Linda Kuehl’s rather bulbous handwriting.
    Sometimes an interview includes a brief account of the circumstances of a meeting, ‘in a brown Cadillac Eldorado’; or of what the speaker was wearing, ‘a shiny red suit and a white cowboy hat’; or of how they looked, ‘shaking and sweating profusely from the effects of a cocaine high’. But such descriptions are unusual; mostly the voices are not given faces to recognise or clothes to wear, and so unless the person happens to be a well-known figure in the jazz world, their words float in a haphazard space without any anchors of recognition to hold them steady.
    I have listened to a number of the original tapes. The quality of the recordings tends to be very poor and it can be difficult to disentangle what is being said. You might hear the human roar of a late-night bar, juxtaposed with the closer, intimate sound of the clink of glasses on a table top, the cellophane rustle of a cigarette packet, someone coughing directly into the microphone. Or the interview is being held in a car with the activity of the street echoing on all sides, or in a private house where doors bang, dogs bark and children burst in and are shouted to silence. Several of the speakers are quite old and obviously frail and forgetful; others are drunk, or high on something.
    It is always strange the way the mind works. We often do not know what we think until we have transformed the amorphous