..."the greatest motherfucker she ever met."

With Billie ends with an evocation of Holiday's three-and-a-half-minute performance of a signature song, "Fine and Mellow," on a television program called The Sound of Jazz, accompanied by an all-star cast comprised mostly of old friends. Blackburn relies on the accounts of writer Nat Hentoff and a couple of the participants, in setting the scene at rehearsal on the day before the broadcast in early December of 1957. "Even Lester Young had made it," Blackburn writes, "although he was sitting by himself on a bench and wearing carpet slippers because his feet hurt...looking much older than his forty-eight years." The trumpeter Doc Cheathem noticed that Young "just kept to himself, sat apart. He was very quiet and sad that day." By then, he was sick, doing bad, willing himself out of life. He hadn't used alcohol before he knew Billie; now, a bit more than twenty years later, he was almost finished drinking himself to death.

During the show, when Young's turn to solo came, the camera moved to his face, and, as Blackburn says, "Lester looks as though he has been crying for weeks, his eyes are so swollen and puffy." Once, years before, "Stump" Cross had been struck by "the look in his eyes when he played for her.... He'd play his whole soul." That night, Young's brief solo was slow and spare, the silences between notes seeming to throb with ache. As he was playing, the camera mostly gazed at Billie gazing at him.

All the meanings her face bespoke can never be known, but it can be said that she bore him a look of unspeakable tenderness. "Sitting in the control room I felt tears," Nat Hentoff wrote, "and saw tears in the eyes of most of the others there." Later, when asked about Young by a magazine writer, Billie pledged her allegiance: "Lester's always been the President to me. He's my boy."

...There was no one of whom she ever spoke more highly, or fondly, or to whom she was more loyal, or liked as much. Blackburn characterizes them as being "like a brother and sister who shared many character traits." Claire Lievenson, a neighborhood pharmacist's wife who befriended Billie in the mid-Thirties, remembered that "when they saw each other they wouldn't kiss, but their faces would just light up." Holiday used to call Lester Young "the greatest motherfucker she ever met."
With Billie, Julia Blackburn (review by Arthur Kempton)

That was just the way it was.

That was how she and Walter came to part, upon being discovered by his wife. They met two or three times afterward, at his insistence but to no avail. Whatever holds people together was gone. She told him she could not help it. That was just the way it was.
James Salter, Last Night