After signing with Louis Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser, she resisted attempts to soften her singing style.
The young singer was profane, promiscuous, alcoholic, unpredictable and fearless. She was finger-printed without her consent. Her books, flowers, radio and record player were confiscated. She was interrogated by narcotics detectives. It was widely suspected that the drugs had been planted. She was weak, underweight, bed-ridden and trying to fight off heart and liver failure problems at a time when police found a small tinfoil envelope containing heroin in a different part of the room. She had been under arrest in her hospital bed for the previous five weeks. It makes it all the sadder that her final days were so painful and that she died such in such degrading circumstances in the early hours of 17 July 1959, at Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital. Holiday was a true one-off: a wild, outspoken and forceful woman, who also happened to be one of the greatest singers that ever lived. “It’s safer there,” she said, laughing loudly. The strait-laced sales assistant was shocked to see a 38-year-old black woman haul up her skirt and produce a roll of banknotes from the top of her stocking. Holiday picked out some pyjamas and went to the counter to pay. A family friend called Betty Jones, wife of the esteemed jazz writer Max, was with her when they went into Marks and Spencer. When Billie Holiday toured England in 1954, she went shopping in Nottingham ahead of her evening concert at the city’s Astoria Ballroom.
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