With Billie Read Free Page A

creature of our thoughts into words. We do not know what memories we hold until we have opened the door of recollection. Looking back on a far-away time, the mind often gets stuck on a point of its own forgetfulness and then, like a scratched record, keeps repeating the search for the name it has lost or the event that it cannot quite recapture.
    But Linda Kuehl was obviously a very good interviewer and she never seemed to be in a hurry, or to be trying to steer people’s thoughts in a particular direction. And so, if sometimes awkwardly at first, the memories soon begin to flood in, the past accumulating on all sides and becoming vivid. And once the talk is flowing easily, then all sorts of unexpected recollections and emotions emerge out ofnowhere and float to the surface like strange balloons.
    As well as being patient and friendly and not easily shocked, Linda Kuehl was also pretty and flirtatious and people obviously enjoyed talking to her. A lot of the men were very challenging – when asked if he rehearsed before a music session with Billie, the trumpet player Roy Eldridge said, ‘Why should I rehearse? Would I need to rehearse before making love to you?’ – and several of them, including Billie’s pianist and fellow heroin user Carl Drinkard, the bass player (and junkie) John Simmons and the music writer Arthur Herzog, obviously fell in love with her in one way or another. ‡ But over and over again, Linda Kuehl was ready with the relevant questions and a knowledge of dates and circumstances, and people were happy to talk. When I met Billie’s pianist Bobby Tucker in 2003, he remembered Linda with great affection. He said she came to see him on three occasions and she took the time to listen.
    However, although many of the interviews are rich with information and anecdotes, they are often very complicated and difficult to follow and the stories that are being told emerge in broken fragments. In order to make a coherent sequence out of what is being said, I have had to do a lot of untangling, to separate out the various threads of a narrative before piecing it back together. But although I have reshuffled people’s words, I have never put words into their mouths or added any detail that wasn’t actually there. I also make it clear when I am quoting directly and when I am paraphrasing.
    Take the black narcotics agent, Jimmy Fletcher. He wasinvolved in arresting Billie Holiday on a drugs charge in 1947 and as I read his interview I realised that he had maybe never told this story before and it involved a lot of emotional effort for him to do it. He had met Billie several times, he had talked with her, danced with her, enjoyed her company and had even been in love with her in a way. He knew she had been singled out for a big public arrest and he wished he had not been the one chosen to bring this about. He wished he could have stopped the whole unpleasant business before it unfolded. And as you follow the halting and complicated progression of what he is saying, you slowly begin to realise that he is ashamed of having betrayed her and is struggling to put his shame into words.
    On a different note, Carl Drinkard, who worked with Billie in the late 1950s, tells stories that cover more than a hundred typewritten pages, but his stories keep spinning into junkie paranoia and boastfulness and it is hard to tell the real from the imagined. And then there is the pianist Jimmy Rowles, who says he got drunk in anticipation of talking about Billie, and he drinks as he talks and gets more and more excited as the image of Lady Day becomes increasingly vivid and she swims into the room and is there standing in front of him.
    In an interview she gave at the Storyville Club in Boston in April 1959, just over two months before her death, Billie said, ‘I’ve got no understudy. Every time I do a show I’m up against everything that’s ever been written about me. I have to fight the whole scene to get people to listen to