“Then
I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and
the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually
ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of
Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and
I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning
on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while
she whispered a song along the keyboard
to
Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”—Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady
Died,” from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen
(1995)
Billie Holiday
passed away at age 44 from liver and heart disease on this date in 1959, in
circumstances as miserable as any she had known in her turbulent life. Denied a
license to perform in any New York establishment where alcohol was served, she
had seen her already meager savings evaporate. So fierce was her
substance abuse that she felt the need to procure drugs on her deathbed in a
New York hospital, leading police to stay outside her door, waiting to do again
what had become a habit for them: arrest her.
You’ll
find nothing about this in the above elegy by New York poet Frank O’Hara for the Angel of Harlem. Initially,
there are only two indications that his poem is about the great jazz singer:
the title (an inversion of her nickname, Lady Day) and the second line about “three
days after Bastille day,” or July 17—the day of her death. Thereafter comes a
procession of mundane details—planning for a vacation, buying cigarettes,
summer heat—until the lines above.
O’Hara
is alluding to the last time he saw Lady Day, at the Cooper Square jazz bar
Five Spot, just a few months before. Friend Kenneth Koch, participating in a
jazz-and-poetry night, was accompanied by Mal Waldrop. Holiday, there to cheer
on the pianist, was eventually prevailed upon by the sympathetic, densely
packed audience to sing—and, by so doing, break the law.
The
singer displayed that night a husk of her once peerless instrument: “her voice [was]
almost gone, just like a whisper, just like the taste of very old wine, but
full of spirit,” Koch recounted years later in Brad Gooch’s 1993 biography
of O’Hara, City Poet. O’Hara, back by the bathroom, absorbed the
atmosphere.
Blessed
with enough talent as a youngster to weigh becoming a professional concert
pianist, O’Hara probably possessed more musical acumen than virtually everyone
in that crowded venue that night. Yet he did not recapitulate all he heard. In fact, what happened then passes swiftly in his final lines,
much like Holiday’s life—and, as it turned out, his own. (He died seven years
later: like Holiday, in his mid-forties, and like herself, in an almost
bitterly bizarre fashion: struck down by a beach taxi on Fire Island.)
The
poem circles back to the title in the last line: “everyone and I stopped
breathing,” O’Hara writes. The audience’s mixture of awe and pity culminates in
an action echoed in the most literal sense by Holiday’s death.
O’Hara’s
was not the only work of literature inspired by Holiday. Langston Hughes and E.
Ethelbert Miller would write poems; Elizabeth Hardwick, in Sleepless Nights, a vignette in her autobiographical novel; and
Maya Angelou, a section in her memoir The
Heart of a Woman. But the greatest amount of fiction penned about Holiday
might have been written by the songstress herself, in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. Her opening—about her
parents getting married when they were teenagers and she was three—is not true;
they never married. The factual
inaccuracies continue from that point.
Thumbs way up!
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