Other legendary songs had more anecdotal origins. “God Bless the Child” was initially a joke to get even with her mother, after she refused to give her cash-strapped daughter any money. “She wouldn’t give me a cent. She was mad with me and I was mad with her,” Holiday writes. “We exchanged a few words. Then I said, ‘God bless the child that’s got his own,’ and walked out. I stayed sore for three weeks.”
Holiday’s philandering first husband, the trombonist Jimmy Monroe, would inspire the heartbreaking ballad “Don’t Explain.” “One night he came in with lipstick on his collar,” she writes. “I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it, and he started explaining and explaining…Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that. ‘Take a bath, man,’ I said, ‘don’t explain.’”
The Wild West
“Don’t tell me about those pioneer chicks hitting the trail in those slip-covered wagons with the hills full of redskins. I’m the girl who went West in 1937 with sixteen white cats, Artie Shaw and his Rolls-Royce—and the hills were full of white crackers,” Holiday writes.
One of the first Black women to sing with an all-white band, Holiday found an ally in the brilliant and controversial bandleader Shaw. At almost every tour stop, either Shaw or one of his band members got in major scrapes defending an embarrassed Holiday, who started to feel like a prop in the battle for civil rights. “I got to the point where I hardly ever ate, slept, or went to the bathroom without having a major NAACP-type production.”
Things weren’t much better when she arrived in Hollywood. After she and a white friend had car trouble by the beach, Holiday was grateful when a familiar-looking man fixed their car and took them for a drink at a country club. When a drunk insulted Holiday, the mystery man decked him. “It wasn’t until our mechanic buddy…flattened this cracker to the floor that I came to,” Holiday writes. “It was Clark Gable who’d given us the lift. He laughed when I told him I recognized him by his fist work.”
While singing at Café Society in the San Fernando Valley one night, Holiday was ready to quit after being harassed during her first two shows by a white audience member. “I knew if I didn’t, the third time round I might bounce something off that cracker and land in some San Fernando ranch-type jail.”
Instead, Bob Hope came up to her with Judy Garland and the comedian Jerry Colonna. “You go out there and sing,” he told Holiday. “Let that sonofabitch say something and I’ll take care of him.” When the heckler began hurling abuse, Hope was ready. “Hope traded insults with that cracker for five minutes before he had enough and left,” Holiday writes.
After the show, Hope was waiting with a bottle of fine Champagne:
After a couple of swigs, I looked around and the mirrors in the joint were shaking and the chandeliers were swinging. “Man, this is powerful stuff,” I said. I took the glass and raised it as a toast to Hope. I thought he looked a little pale. “Look, Bob,” I said. “I don’t usually drink the stuff, but this champagne is crazy.” “Look, girl,” he said, “don’t you know we just now had one of the worst earthquakes anybody ever had around here?”
White Gardenias and White Junk
“I spent the rest of the war on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they’d bring me the white gardenias and the white junk,” Holiday writes of her years during World War II. By the early 1940s she was hooked on heroin. She made her first attempt to get clean in 1946—but news of her stay in a sanitarium was leaked, and she began to be tailed in earnest by the feds, who were hoping to nail her for possession.
