The Saddest Song Ever Sung
By Al Aronowitz
One of the greatest treasures in my memory is the night Billie Holiday
introduced me to Miles Davis and I introduced Billie Holiday to the Beat
Generation.
This story begins a woman named Maele. In 1959, [she] was married to
Bill Dufty, who was one of my colleagues in the so-called “Poets'
Corner” of the Post city room…He hit the big-time by ghostwriting
Billie Holiday's autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues, which starts out:
“Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He
was 15, she was 16 and I was three.” By the time Bill completed work
on Billie's book, Billie had adopted Maele as her “white sister.”
That's what Billie called Maele, “my white sister.” They really
seemed to be as tight as womb-mates.
Naturally, I wanted to meet Billy. I was researching a series on the
Beats for the Post and the Beats were gaga over her. I wanted to know
what she thought of them.
I asked Bill Dufty if he could arrange it and Bill asked Maele. Sure,
Maele said, come on over, bring your wife, I'll cook us up a dinner, Billie
would love to meet you.
If memory serves me right, the Duftys lived in an apartment at a fancy
address somewhere in midtown Manhattan. Don't ask me to remember the meal
Maele cooked up. What I mostly remember is how tall Billie looked, much
taller than her five feet and seven inches, even without her high heels.
Another thing I remember is that there was a droop to her mien in the
same way a drape sags. There was also enough baggage under her eyes to
need some help from a Redcap. Billie looked like a dolled-up wreck. But
she seemed regal nonetheless. And there was still a hint of Spring in
her - like a moon shining through flowering tree branches on a romantic
night in May. As an adoring fan, I was delighted to discover she was flesh
and blood, somebody real, somebody I could talk to, somebody who was actually
hamish.
Except, it was hard for me to understand what she was saying. Maele
seemed to catch every word, but to my wife and to me, Billie sometimes
was almost unintelligible. At first, I never even gave Billie's addiction
a thought but it soon became obvious that she was expressing herself in
a junkie's drawl.
“Ahem sayin'“ “Ehm ooma blmmmm blmmm wnnnn ugggh, y'know?”
But even if I missed a lot, I still enjoyed Billie's relaxed and easy-to-get-to-know
kind of charm. After dinner, it was Billie's idea for us to go down to
Birdland, where Miles was playing with his Kind of Blue quintet - John
Coltrane on tenor, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums and
Bill Evans on piano, or was it Wynton Kelly? At Birdland, he came over
to our table as soon as he finished his set. When Billie introduced me
to him, I rose to shake his hand. Still, I had to chase him into the men's
room to get a chance to talk to him. I was standing at the urinal next
to him when I asked him what he thought of the Beat Generation. Coltrane,
standing at the urinal on the other side of Miles, snickered. Miles glowered
at me as if in anger because I had asked so silly a question. In the hiss
that was his wreckage of a voice, Miles growled: “The Beat Generation
aint nothin' but just more synthetic white shit!”
It was after grooving to a set or two at Birdland that we piled back
into my station wagon and I tried to steer Billie to a Beat poetry reading
at a Beat hangout called the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, located in the
unlikeliest of places, Hell's Kitchen, on the second floor of 596 Ninth
Avenue, around the corner from 42nd Street. God knows what's there now,
but poetry readings at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery loom large in the
history of the Beat Generation. Sure, Billie wanted to know what the Beat
Generation was all about and, sure, she'd listen to the poetry and, sure,
she'd take a ride over there. But when I pulled up in front of the coffee
gallery, she suddenly decided she didn't want to get out of the station
wagon to go upstairs.
Instead, I went up and brought down two of the poets, the late Joel
Oppenheimer and Leroi Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka, the fiery militant
artist-activist. On this particular night, both Joel and Roi tried to
stick their heads in through the partly rolled-down window of the back
seat, where Billie was sitting next to Maele.
“Thanks!” Joel Oppenheimer said, “Just, thanks. That's
all I can say is thanks. Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! Thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thanks. Just thank you for being you.”
He said something like that. He said it as if he were reciting a poem.
He said it so powerfully that I can't remember what Amiri said, except
that Amiri expressed similar gratitude for Billie's existence. When I
asked Amiri years later if he remembered what he said, he told me he didn't
remember. Was he putting me on? If I had my pick of moments to live over
again, this night would be one of them. In the back seat of the station
wagon, Billie told Maele that Amiri looked cute and then she said:
“Come on, let's get the fuck out of here!”
I forget all the small-talk that we made. What I remember most of all
is that, with my wife in the front seat with me, I turned and asked Billie
over my shoulder:
“How come you never recorded”- and I sang the title - 'My
Man's Gone Now'? You know, from Porgy and Bess. By George Gershwin.”
Yes, “My Man's Gone Now”. Why Billie had never recorded
it always had been a big mystery to me and here was my chance to solve
the mystery by getting the answer from Billie herself. That is, if I
could make out her drawling and mumbling. Oh, I'm exaggerating! She
really wasn't that strung out.
“Ah know! Ah know!” she answered “He asked me to sing
that song when they opened that show. He asked me to play the part of
the girl who sings that song.”
“Who asked you?”
“George Gershwin.”
The woman who sings My Man's Gone Now in Porgy and Bess is a character
named “Serena.” She sings the song after learning that the villain,
“Crown,” has murdered her husband. The role was created in the
original 1935 production by Ruby Elzy. She sang the role 800 times. She
even sang it at a recital in the White House. The last time she sang it
was in Denver in 1943, the final stop in a national Porgy and Bess tour.
She was on her way back to New York and a solo career that was to include
her grand opera debut in the title role of Aida when she felt ill and
stopped to see a doctor in Detroit. The doctor discovered a benign tumor
in her uterus and recommended its immediate removal--- an operation that,
according to doctors, “did not appear to be dangerous.” It was
after the surgery in the recovery room of Parkside Hospital, Detroit,
that she went into cardiac shock and died at the age of 35. We were nearing
Columbus Circle when Billie drawled from the back seat of my station wagon:
“Naw, I couldn't sing that song night after night after night.
It's too sad. It's the saddest song ever sung. That song breaks your heart.
It woulda killed me. It killed the girl who got the part. She sang it
night after night after night and she died. It broke her heart. Singing
that song woulda killed me, too.”
And then, Billie began to sing it, a cappella, in the back seat. She
sang it as I have never heard it sung before or since. She sang it as
only Billie could sing it, turning an operatic aria into a blues song,
cornering the lines with mournful catches of the throat. Out of the gravel
of her voice and the slurred mush of her enunciation, the clear and beautiful
sound of her singing rose up to fill me with thrills and cover me with
goosepimples:
My man's gone now,
Aint no use in listenin'
For his tired footsteps
Climbin' up the stairs. . .
I had to wipe the tears from my eyes because I couldn't see to drive
around Columbus Circle. Beautiful music always makes me cry. Then Billie
asked me to take her to her favorite Chinese Restaurant so she could get
some food to go. I could just about decipher what she was saying but she
made a big fuss about how necessary it was for her to get a takeout from
this particular Chinese restaurant. I've always wondered, perhaps naively,
whether the takeout could have included a hit of junk. Billie died only
a few months later.
Adapted from Al Aronowitz's memoir of his pop life and times - THE INVISIBLE
LINK, COLUMN ONE of THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST - which can be found online
at http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj.
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