My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Billie Holiday (1915): Lady Day

65 Billie Holiday Lady Day Alfred Corn The first time I heard Billie Holiday’s voice was during a dinner party at Edmund White’s apartment on West 13th Street in New York. This would have been in 1968, I think, roughly about two years into our friendship. In those days he liked to advocate for artists he’d discovered—the novels of Colette, Victoria De Los Angeles’s recording of Canteloube’s Les Chansons d’Auvergne, the paintings of Ludwig Kirchner, or the Pillow Book by the Japanese noblewoman and Heian court diarist Sei Shonagon. None of Ed’s proselytizing ever failed with me; in fact, I still like all of those figures. 66 That evening he played the last album Holiday recorded, the one titled Lady in Satin. Its cover photograph shows the singer toward the end of her life, dressed, as a matter of fact, in a low-cut satin evening dress, her hair severely pulled back in a ponytail, an enigmatic half-smile contradicting and complementing the lines that pain and fatigue have inscribed among her beautiful features. Discographers rate the cuts in this album as not even close to the best that Holiday ever recorded. By that time her voice had eroded considerably, the inevitable result of decades of performance in smoky dives on 52nd Street or in Greenwich Village, the tempestuous love affairs that often ended in black eyes and sore ribs, the heroin use, and the time done behind bars for drug convictions. But magic is magic, even when glimpsed through a glass darkly. I became a fan immediately. Ed and I swooned and laughed over faintly camp numbers like “You Gave Me Violets for My Furs” and fell silent at the evident pain behind “I’m a Fool to Want You,” pain so little fought off it registered as the unoptimistic calm of the survivor who has seen it all, the scapegoat who will never again be shocked by injustice and cruelty. I remember that Ed loved Billie’s way of delivering lyrics of loss and abandonment in a perfectly cheerful tone. The lover may be callous, he may leave you without a second thought, but he’s still “My Man.” You certainly get that with the late recordings. But, as I was about to learn, there is more to Holiday, beginning with the puttin’-on-the-ritz sass of “Miss Brown to You,” the amused selfvaunting of “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” or the eerily ironic indictment of racism and lynch law in “Strange Fruit.” And sometimes loss was put across as just that, with no window dressing of comedy or irony, in songs like the Ellington classic “In My Solitude ,” sung with unforgettable plangency in more than one version . (Actually, Holiday’s several renditions of her signature numbers always vary in fascinating ways. She once said, “I never sing a song the same way twice, because that ain’t music.”) She didn’t have a voice as honeyed as Ella Fitzgerald’s or as pyrotechnic as Billie Holiday 67 Sarah Vaughan’s, but her timing and phrasing, her inventively added or revised notes, her skill at injecting extra meaning into a simple lyric, outdistanced all her contemporaries. How many different things she did with that voice! Besides that, she lived a life that had the makings of legend, and I’m not referring to trivial details such as her habit of performing with a lush gardenia pinned to the side of her head or her preference for a drink she called a “White Cadillac” (two parts milk to one part scotch). Some time in the late ’60s WBAI–Pacifica Radio in New York began broadcasting readings from Holiday’s ghostwritten autobiography Lady Sings the Blues. Gripped by what I heard, I got my hands on a copy of the book and read it through without stopping . Even though dictated and edited, the text gives the rhythm and intonation made familiar from the vocal recordings. And it has an unforgettable opening: “Mom and Pop were just kids when they got married. He was sixteen and she was fifteen. I was two.” I’m not sure at what point I read Frank O’Hara’s most famous poem, “The Day Lady Died,” but it seemed to endorse my emotional involvement with “Lady Day,” as her fans called her, and beyond that confirmed the tentative friendship...