607 - Billie Holiday Autograph Letter Signed to Louis McKay Amid a Troubled Marriage: "You’re not my husband, not even my boyfriend"

Billie Holiday Autograph Letter Signed to Louis McKay Amid a Troubled Marriage: "You’re not my husband, not even my boyfriend" ALS signed “Lady,” two pages, 6 x 9.5, Hotel Wilson letterhead, no date. Handwritten letter to her husband Louis McKay, in full: "Let’s face it, youer [sic] not my husband, not even my boyfriend. You have no time for me, everything is your kids, Mildred or just anything comes before me, so I am not important to you in any way. You have even made cracks about houres [sic], dirty bitches that meant more to you than me, so why don’t we come to some kind of understanding. Well, you know, just be my manager until after the Phila story. No, I have no one else and don’t want anyone but Louis how much can I take. Youer [sic] in New York two days and I your wife see you five minutes, so just let’s be friends and forget it." In fine condition. Holiday met Louis McKay in the mid-1950s, and their relationship quickly became as turbulent as it was intense. McKay served as her manager, but their marriage was marked by abuse, financial exploitation, and repeated separations. The couple were arrested together in Philadelphia in 1956 on narcotics charges, and Holiday’s reference here to “the Phila story” appears to allude to the continuing legal fallout from that case; they married on March 28, 1957, reportedly in part because spouses could not be compelled to testify against one another. The letter captures Holiday’s complicated attachment to McKay with painful immediacy. Feeling neglected and betrayed, she nevertheless insists that she wants no one else while proposing that he remain only her manager until their Philadelphia troubles are resolved. They were estranged by the time of Holiday’s death on July 17, 1959, though still legally married—making this an unusually intimate document of one of the most fraught relationships of her final years.