These Dreams of You

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An anti-Stalinist, Trotsky-estranged Marxist, Hale was a dedicated outsider wary of being any movement’s flunky, and though Zan didn’t share the professor’s politics, the iconoclasm was irresistible. Zan saw in the mentor another odd man out; it’s possible Hale saw in a protégé the same thing.

Another story about Hale, less reliable than the one concerning Trotsky, was that he was Billie Holiday’s lover in the mid-Forties when he worked on his first book, a ghostwritten autobiography of a white sax player and clarinetist of middling stature who dealt drugs, mostly marijuana, to other musicians including Holiday. Hale never disputed or discussed this rumor about him and Holiday, maybe out of sheer gentlemanliness, if it was true, or because he knew a great piece of public relations, if it wasn’t.