Lady Sings the Blues

One time I loaned him my mink coat when he was going to that big annual Halloween Ball. Mrs. Sugar Ray Robinson loaned her coat to a girl friend of his for the same ball. After the ball was over and they were supposed to be off the street, these two Cinderellas were hanging out in a bar someplace when the cops spotted them. They made a stand and started throwing garbage-can lids at the cops, so I had to go down again and get my mink coat out of police storage.
But Miss Freddy was good for a million laughs and never hurt anybody except himself—especially when he tried to wear my pumps.

One time when I was working on 52nd Street, a dressmaker brought a cheap dress in, tried to overcharge me, we got into an argument. She called me a name and I got so mad I stuck her head in a toilet bowl and flushed it. She took me to court, said I tried to drown her. But the judge listened, looked at me, and asked if she expected anyone to believe a famous lady singing star like me would do a thing like that, and that was that.

But unlike her, I got along fine with the cameramen. I dug from the beginning these were the most important cats around. They’re like the boys in the control room when you’re making records. You can turn in the best performance in the world, but if those cats in the control room aren’t with you when they turn those little knobs or twist those little dials, you might just as well have stayed in bed, Jack. So it was with the cameramen. You could be acting up a storm that would blow an Oscar your way, and if those cats on the cameras aren’t with you, you’re nowhere.

Every night after we’d finished work at six o’clock, Blondie would rush to the projection room to see the rushes and find out how she was doing. I didn’t have time to look at no rushes; I had to rush myself off to the club, where I’d work all night, and then rush back to get there by 6 A.M., get made up, and be on the set

Billie, why don’t you sing that sexy song you’re so famous for? You know, the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees

It’s like they say, there’s no damn business like show business. You had to smile to keep from throwing up.

I’ve never seen a man dance like that. You’d have to have his money, I guess, to dance up on tables, chairs, sofas—everything but the walls and ceilings.

You can’t even be like you once were yourself, let alone like somebody else.
I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

Everyone’s got to be different. You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.
No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

All they could say to console themselves was that Chu had a bigger tone. What the hell that meant, I’ll never know. What difference how big a tone is or how small, as long as Lester’s line was moving in that wonderful way, with those chords, changes and those notes that would positively flip you with surprise? Chu was a mature man with a great big growl. Lester was a young man. There ain’t no rule saying everybody’s got to deliver the same damn volume or tone.