That's why the Lady was dysfunctional

Patrick Skene Catling

WISHING ON TF1E MOON: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BILLIE HOLIDAY by Donald Clarke Viking, £16.99, pp. 468 Some books, they say, make readers laugh out loud. If you love jazz, here is something even rarer, a book that may move you to sing, or at least enable you to hear a lot of fine and mellow music in your head.

Billie Holiday (1915-1959), properly regarded by many jazz-lovers, especially jazz musicians, as the greatest and most influential jazz singer of all time, made more than 350 recordings. Donald Clarke, an English authority on popular music, mentions a large number of her songs, many in analytical detail, in what should be recognised quite simply as the best imaginable account of her extraordinary career and her exuberant, chaotic and finally tragic life.

Clarke is her ideal biographer, an industrious researcher with an engagingly informal prose style, who has not withheld even the most squalid information, although he obviously regards his subject with affectionate appreciation.

He became a fan at the age of 14 (I didn't fall in love with her till I was 16, when I used to listen to her at the Down- beat, on Fifty-Second Street.) Clarke was first enthralled by a record of Billie Holiday singing 'I'll Never Be The Same.' There- after, apparently, he never has been. She was accompanied by the two men who so often did so with supremely effective sym- pathy, Teddy Wilson, the pianist, with whom she made 70 records, and her long- enduring platonic lover Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist.

It was Billie Holiday who admiringly dubbed Lester Young 'Prez,' and he who called her 'Lady Day,' the President's First Lady, and then just 'Lady.' The names stuck for the rest of their lives and beyond. He is credited also with coining the word cool as a term of approbation. As Lester's brother Lee rightly observed, 'He played the way she sang, and she sang the way he played.' In fact, they collaborated so harmoniously that Clarke comments: 'They could have

`Not tonight . . . I have a big bedroom scene tomorrow . . recorded the phone book together and made it work.'

What endows Clarke's book with author-. ity and helps to make it richly atmospheric is that he had access to the previously un- published transcripts of nearly 150 inter- views with people who knew Lady more or less intimately at all ages. The interviews were conducted mostly in 1970-72 by Linda Kuehl, an American jazz aficionado who evidently adored her. She planned to write a book based on her exhaustive investiga- tions but, fortunately for Clarke, she never did.

`Linda was good at interviewing people,' he acknowledges, 'allowing their voices and personalities to come through.' He uses lavish quotations from them, in the authen- tic vernacular of jazz musicians, pimps, drug-dealers and junkies. Some readers may tire of the word 'mother . . .' used indiscriminately as insult and endearment. There are enough picturesque anecdotal reminiscences to inflame a dozen scan- dalous novels.

Clarke painstakingly disentangles Lady's ill-recorded, illegitimate genealogy. It seems fairly certain that her father was Clarence Holiday, a guitarist; her mother was certainly Sadie Fagan, who was three- quarters African-American and a quarter Irish, an incendiary mixture. At the age of nine, when she was supposed to be attend- ing the fourth grade, she played truant so often that the authorities committed her to the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls — 'not an entirely salubrious place' — one of Clarke's few understatements. As a fellow inmate recalled nearly half a century later, 'some of the older girls were tough . . . The older girls f—ed the younger ones.' After a year she was returned to her mother, with whom, for the rest of her life, she had a close, tempestu- ous love-hate relationship.

She was not good at relationships. Clarke notes that she always had 'dysfunctional relationships with men'. When she migrat- ed to New York at the age of 14, it soon became apparent that she had an addictive personality. The biography, inevitably, is largely a catalogue of dysfunctions, a lurid case history of addiction to sex, heroin and gin. Only her musical talent, her love of music, her phenomenal stamina and capacity for genuine friendships held her together for the rest of her 44 years. Clarke's comprehensive index gives a vivid idea of her defects (`belligerence, cun- ning, shoplifting, superstitiousness, unrelia- bility, vindictiveness, mainlining, arrests and imprisonment') and some of her redeeming virtues (`generosity, graciousness, openness, straight-speaking, pride in being black'). References under Sex include: 'abnormal; as a girl in Baltimore; with Goodman; in Harlem; lesbianism; masochism; prostitution; vora- ciousness.' Benny Goodman complained that she 'couldn't come,' but the virtuoso of the clarinet was never known for his charm. Lady had a self-destructive habit of becoming involved with a series of men who treated her as pimps treat their whores. She seemed to need to be dominated and exploited by men who kept her hooked on drugs, stole her money and frequently beat her up.

John Levy, a particularly vicious consort who `gorilla'd her mind,' died of a brain haemorrhage, moving one of her friends to say: `He didn't even have the courtesy to let somebody shoot him.' After she died, Louis McCay, her second husband, called her good friend Annie Ross and said: 'I got Lady's mink. She always wanted you to have it. I'll let you have it for $500.'

Clarke gives a comprehensive account of Lady's prolific musical career, from the Hot-Cha and the Apollo in Harlem to Carnegie Hall and every other sort of jazz venue in between. He tells how she was helped by John Hammond, the affluent connoisseur who had a magical way of spotting talent and bringing musicians together; Norman Granz, the recording impresario who presided over the concert tours of Jazz At The Philharmonic, and, on a practical level, by Joe Glaser, the booking agent who virtually owned Louis Armstrong and others.

I think I copied my style from Louis Arm- strong, Lady said. I liked the feeling that Louis got and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got. But I found that it didn't work with me, because I didn't have a big voice. So anyway between the two of them I sorta got Billie Holiday.

Clarke analyses her stylistic mannerisms, her way of swinging behind the beat, float- ing above it, and, when the emphasis was most effective, precisely coming down on it. He has gathered together all the details of her recording history, listing personnels, which read like a Who's Who of American jazz in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. She went on the road with Count Basie and Artie Shaw but she was at her best with elite small groups. She was a musicians' musician.

Influenced by the most creative improvis- ers, she, in turn, was influential:

It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me, frank Sinatra said in 1958. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years.

Peggy Lee said the same. One of her party tricks, I remember, was to sing 'Them There Eyes' in a dark room, so closely resembling Billie Holiday that listeners felt they were hearing a ghost.

Clarke tells the whole grim story of Lady's decline, which is not much relieved by bizarre asides about her feeding gin to her chihuahua and getting the Central Park carriage-horses stoned on LSD sugar- lumps. At the very end, she was arrested for possession of narcotics on her hospital death-bed, surely one of the most infamous drug-busts in the annals of the New York Police Department. Clarke debunks the ghost-written autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues; the actuality was both better and worse.

To read the titles of some of her songs is to hear her again — 'What A Little Moon- light Can Do,' Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You?' and 'Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone.'

Sorry, we still do.