With Billie Read Free Page B

their own ears and believe in me again.’
    A huge amount of myth and gossip and savage misrepresentation had already gathered like a thick fog around her during her lifetime and it has gone on growing and proliferating ever since. Of course it is not possible to disentangle an absolute truth about who Billie was or how she lived, but at least we can listen with our own ears to the voicesof the people who knew her, and then we can make our own decisions about what to believe and what not to believe.
    * When she was interviewed by Norman Saks, on 18 February 1985, Alice Vrbsky said rather wistfully that, among many other things, she’d had a letter that Billie sent her from Italy in November 1958, ‘which I gave to that woman who was working on the book and I never got it back’.
    † The story of Linda Kuehl’s last day was given to me by J. R. Taylor, who knew her in connection with the Jazz Oral History Project, which he supervised while it was based at the Smithsonian Institute in the 1970s. He met her once in 1978 and saw her again briefly on the night of her death. He learnt of her suicide from the drummer Jo Jones, who had been a friend ever since she interviewed him for her Billie Holiday book in 1971. Apart from the problems with getting the book finished, I do not know what other factors were involved in Linda’s decision to take her own life.
    ‡ Carl Drinkard wrote to Linda Kuehl when he was in jail, asking for help with a legal problem and saying he missed her. John Simmons wrote letters on the First Church of the New World headed paper, calling her ‘dearest Tripper’. He said he was ‘highly optimistic, waiting for your return when you’re ready to resign yourself to the fact as to how I feel towards you. I know we will be good to and for one another.’ The songwriter Arthur Herzog had a long correspondence between 1971 and 1976, and when they finally met in 1976, he said he ‘had had no ideas of being amorous’ and enclosed a limerick about ‘a lovely lady named Linda’ for whom ‘Lowly impulse succeeds when she’s highish’.

THREE
The Facts of Childhood

    7  April 1915
: Born in Philadelphia General Hospital. Her mother, Sarah Julia Harris, known as Sadie, is nineteen and her presumed father, the banjo player Clarence Holiday, is sixteen. Sadie gives her occupation as ‘housework’. The baby is given the name of Eleanor and is registered as the child of Frank DeViese, a twenty-year-old waiter who then disappears without trace.
    The baby is collected from the hospital by Robert Miller, the husband of Sadie’s half-sister, Eva Miller. Robert Miller takes the baby to Baltimore and hands her over to his mother, Martha Miller, ‘who was always taking in neighbourhood kids who had fallen on hard times or had been abandoned’. *
    1918
: Sadie returns to Baltimore. For a while she stays with Martha Miller, who is still looking after the child. Clarence Holiday visits occasionally, but in October 1918 he goes as a soldier to France. He is back in Baltimore nine months later.
    1919
: Sadie starts a relationship with Philip Gough, a twenty-five-year-old driver who lives on Spring Street.
    1920
: Sadie moves in with Robert and Eva Miller, to a house in Colvin Street, and brings the child with her. Eva Miller looks after the child and Sadie works in a shirt factory. Sadie starts using the surname of Fagan, after her father, Charles Fagan.
    October 1922
: Sadie marries Philip Gough and moves with him to East Street. The child goes on living with Eva Miller, who has moved to Bond Street in the Fell’s Point district, the home of Miss Viola Green and her son Freddie Green. When the child starts school, Eva Miller is registered as her mother.
    1923
: Sadie separates from Philip Gough and the child returns to Martha Miller in North Barnes Street for a while. ‘The child was left with my grandmother … Her mother would be off working or with other men. She left her all the time and that was the