Marilyn’s friendship with Ella Fitzgerald is often cited (and exaggerated), but what about that other great jazz diva, Billie Holiday? As Marilyn’s costume designer Bill Travilla told biographer Anthony Summers, her only known encounter with Lady Day was a disaster, due to a mutual misunderstanding.
“One night we went to Tiffany’s on Eighth Street. I went to the men’s room, which was down past the club’s office. I noticed Marilyn’s nude calendar hanging in the office, and told Marilyn. She said, ‘Oh Billy, where? I want to see it.’ We went back and the door was shut, so we knocked. A tall black man came and asked what we wanted, and Marilyn said she wanted to look at her calendar. As it turned out, Billie Holiday was using the office as a dressing room, and I guess she’d heard that Marilyn Monroe was in the audience and thought Marilyn had come to say hello. When she learned different what we saw of Holiday was very fast – just a whirl of white sleeve with beads dangling from it, and a dark hand. She pulled the calendar off the wall, crumpled it, threw it in Marilyn’s face and called her a c***. Dumbfounded, we went back to the table. The manager wanted us to stay and see the show, but we left.” – from Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (1985)
Interestingly, Marilyn visited the Tiffany Club in November 1954, when Ella Fitzgerald played there. However, her meeting with Billie Holiday probably occurred two years earlier.
According to Ken Vail, author of Lady Day’s Diary, Billie began a two-week engagement at the Tiffany Club on March 18, 1952. A day earlier, her car had blown a tyre and overturned three times near Monterey, California. Billie, husband Louis McKay, and another companion all escaped serious injury.
Although newspaper reports indicated that she was shaken and bruised, Billie gave a scheduled performance for 300 servicemen at Fort Ord Hospital and an evening show at Delmonte Gardens before travelling to Los Angeles.
She was photographed at the Tiffany Club by Bob Willoughby, who would soon cover the party given in Marilyn’s honour by bandleader Ray Anthony at his Sherman Oaks estate, following the release of his single, ‘My Marilyn,’ in September 1952.
Back in March, Marilyn was filming Monkey Business and had just begun dating Joe DiMaggio. On March 16, her exclusive interview with syndicated columnist Aline Mosby (confirming that she was the model on the nude calendar) was published. So it’s fair to say that Marilyn’s inauspicious meeting with Billie came at a difficult time for both women.
A photo taken during this period shows Marilyn in a Los Angeles nightclub with Travilla and another friend (possibly jazz pianist Hank Jones.) It’s unclear whether it was taken at the Tiffany Club, but it does fit Marilyn’s look at this time.
Fortunately, it seems that Billie Holiday didn’t hold a grudge against Marilyn, and may even have enjoyed her movies.
In a new biography, Bitter Crop: The Heartbreak and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Final Year, author Paul Alexander suggests she was a fan of Some Like It Hot, in which Marilyn played Sugar Kane, lead singer of an all-girl jazz band in 1920s Chicago – a life Billie knew better than most.
In May 1959, during an engagement at the Flamingo Lounge in Lowell, Massachusetts, Billie gave one of her last interviews to journalist Mary Sampas. Sadly she would pass away from liver and heart disease just two months later, aged 44.
“‘My doctor wants me to give up singing,’ Billie said. ‘He thinks I’m too ill. But what else am I made for?’ She let out a brief, impervious laugh. ‘So long as I have breath to sing and someone still to listen …’
She did not finish the sentence. Instead, she reached for a book on the dressing table. ‘This is what I’m reading between shows,’ Billie said, fixing her gaze on Sampas as she held up the book version of Some Like It Hot – the picture had been released in late March – with a shot of Marilyn Monroe displayed prominently on the cover. ‘I have to laugh a little.'”
The Marilyn Report 