Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  107 Shapiro, Waiting for the Man, 73. Bonnie and Whitebread, Marijuana Conviction, 185.

  108 Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, 129.

  109 Bonnie and Whitebread, Marijuana Conviction, 185. Shapiro, Waiting for the Man, 71.

  110 Anslinger, Protectors, 150–64.

  111 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 5.

  112 Her birth name was Eleanora; for the sake of clarity I’ve called her Billie all the way through, even though she only adopted the name when she was a child.

  Also—throughout this chapter I have treated as a broadly reliable source Lady Sings the Blues, which was co-written with William Dufty. There is a debate about how reliable this memoir is, but her 1995 biographer Stuart Nicholson went through it and found that, for example, on one of the most famously contested passages, her description of her rape as a child, it was an accurate account. See Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 6. Billie herself claimed at one point that Dufty had written her entire memoir—“Shit, man, I ain’t never read that book”—but the publisher had in fact made her sign every page of the manuscript to verify it matched her recollections. See Margolick, Strange Fruit, 33–34.

  113 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 5.

  114 Robert O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, 67. White, Billie Holiday, 51; Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 68–69; BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady; Shapiro, Waiting for the Man, 99.

  115 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 6.

  116 White, Billie Holiday, 14.

  117 Ibid., 17; Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 8; O’Meally, Lady Day, 171.

  118 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 13.

  119 Ibid., 86.

  120 Ken Vail, Lady Day’s Diary: The Life of Billie Holiday, 1937–1959, 4. In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie refers to him as “Mr. Dick.”

  121 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 15–16, 103.

  122 Donald Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 34. There is a dispute over how long Mr. Dick was in jail—Clarke says three months, Billie’s memoir says five years: see Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 17.

  123 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady.

  124 White, Billie Holiday, 18. Other people confined in that institution later confirmed to interviewers that it was a very brutal place: see O’Meally, Lady Day, 79–81. See also Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, interview with Peter O’Brien and Michelle Wallace.

  125 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 20. In her memoir, Billie says her mother sent for her, but most other accounts say she ran away to find her.

  126 Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII.

  127 Maely Dufty files provided by her son, Bevan Dufty—document headed “Introduction.”

  128 Ebony magazine, July 1949, 32.

  129 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 23. Some people think she had in fact been pimped in Baltimore at an even younger age: see O’Meally, Lady Day, 84–87.

  130 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady.

  131 Blackburn, With Billie, 43. Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 35. Mike Gray, Drug Crazy, 107.

  132 Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, interview with Willard. His last name isn’t given.

  133 As described in The Long Night of Lady Day, BBC documentary, 1984.

  134 Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 127.

  135 Ibid., 22.

  136 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 103–4.

  137 Eugene Callender interview.

  138 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 34.

  139 White, Billie Holiday, 29.

  140 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 230.

  141 Ibid. See also Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, Sylvia Simms interview.

  142 Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 198.

  143 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady.

  144 Blackburn, With Billie, 209. I wanted to check the original sources for this material about Jimmy Fletcher. The only primary source about him is Linda Kuehl’s interview with him. I contacted Toby Byron, who owns the archive. He told me—dismayingly—that the transcript of the interview with Fletcher has been lost. That means we will have to rely on secondary sources from now on. Both Julia Blackburn and Donald Clarke—who read the original transcript—describe it in detail, and also talked with me on the phone about it.

  145 Douglas Valentine interview.

  146 Blackburn, With Billie, 207.

  147 Douglas Valentine interview.

  148 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 254.

  149 Blackburn, With Billie, 207.

  150 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady.

  151 Blackburn, With Billie, 94.

  152 Ibid., 212.

  153 Maely Dufty files, document marked “Introduction.”

  154 Yolande Bavan interview. See also Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, interview with Peter O’Brien and Michelle Wallace.

  155 William Dufty, “The True Story of Billie Holiday,” article 3, New York Post series, Julia Blackburn archive, box 18, file VII.

  156 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 118.

  157 Blackburn, With Billie, 213.

  158 Ibid. The dog’s name is given in Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl 1, interview with Memry Midgett.

  159 Blackburn, With Billie, 214.

  160 Ibid., 216. Ibid., 11.

  161 John Levy interview, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VII, box 18.

  162 Louis MacKay interview, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, Julia Blackburn archives, box 18.

  163 Blackburn, With Billie, 211.

  164 Ibid., 11.

  165 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 127.

  166 Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 116.

  167 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 129–30.

  168 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/jul/14/street-diva/?pagination=false, accessed March 12, 2014.

  169 Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 103.

  170 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady. White, Billie Holiday, 93.

  171 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 252.

  172 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 125–26.

  173 Maely Dufty files, “Introduction.”

  174 White, Billie Holiday, 94.

  175 Blackburn, With Billie, 162.

  176 Ibid., 255.

  177 Ibid., 304. Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 169–70. She was turned down as a foster parent because of her drug conviction. See Shapiro, Waiting for the Man, 97.

  178 Julia Blackburn archive, box 18, Notes from Linda Kuehl 1, section marked “Billie H. Goes to Cuba.”

  179 Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, article from Ebony: “I’m Cured Now” [no date].

  180 Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, interview with Peter O’Brien and Michelle Wallace.

  181 Ray Tucker, “News Behind the News,” Anslinger archives, box 5, file 9.

  182 McWilliams, Protectors, 101. It is likely that Judy Garland is the unnamed woman from among “our loveliest film stars” who Anslinger describes having “conducted a running battle for months . . . to save” in Murderers, 184–86.

  183 Anslinger, Murderers, 166.

  184 The best account of how this fits into the long history of racism in the United States is Michelle Alexander’s important book The New Jim Crow. There is also an excellent account of this in Timothy A. Hickman, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days, 60–92. I first learned of the key role of this prejudice against the Chinese in early drug prohibition from Richard Lawrence Miller, who discusses it in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The House I Live In. It is also discussed in his books Drug Warriors and Their Prey, 26, and The Case for Legalizing Drugs, 88–91.

  185 Shapiro, Waiting for the Man, 8
7.

  186 Anslinger archives, box 1, file 12, “Modern Medical Interviews.”

  187 Anslinger archives, box 1, file 10, “New York Forum: Saturday, April 28, 1962, Program Transcript.” In fact, before criminalization, the official registers of addicts showed they were overwhelmingly white. It was only after criminalization that they started recording addicts as overwhelmingly black—suggesting these figures were the result of racist enforcement rather than a real reflection of how addiction was distributed throughout the American population. See King, Drug Hang-Up, 108–9.

  188 Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, 28.

  189 Hickman, Secret Leprosy, 77–78.

  190 Ibid. See also the comments of Hamilton Wright before Congress in same book, 116. Even the idea that African Americans disproportionately used cocaine, or that it was a factor among psychotic African Americans, seems to be a myth: at the height of the “cocaine nigger” scare, of 2,100 African Americans admitted to an asylum in Georgia, only two were confirmed cocaine users. See Walker, Drug Control in the Americas, 14.

  191 King, Drug Hang-Up, 27–28; Erlen and Spillane, Federal Drug Control, 12–13.

  192 Benson Tong, The Chinese Americans, 2; there’s a good account of the reasons for the migration on pp. 21–22. David Musto, The American Disease, 6. Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, eds., Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice, 6. John Gibler, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, 44–45; Kohn, Dope Girls, 2–3. One of the books that best helped me to understand the history of this prejudice against the Chinese in America is Yunte Huang’s terrific Charlie Chan: the Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History.

  193 Anslinger, Murderers, 29-36.

  194 Anslinger, Murderers, 37. In general, he talks a lot about things being smuggled inside women’s vaginas (see Anslinger, Protectors, 4) or “ample bosoms” (49). He seems to have deliberately injected sex into his accounts.

  195 Bruce Alexander, Peaceful Measures, 32; Emily Murphy, The Black Candle, 188–89.

  196 Murphy, Black Candle, 5.

  197 Huang, Charlie Chan, 124.

  198 Tong, Chinese Americans, 81.

  199 Jefferson M. Fish, ed., How To Legalize Drugs, 244.

  200 Anslinger, Protectors, 79.

  201 Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, 392.

  202 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 296. Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 160–61. Anslinger, Protectors, 80. Some of the details of this account are disputed in Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, 402–3. He says the victim was Chinese, not Japanese, and that he was shot, not strangled.

  203 Blackburn, With Billie, 219.

  204 Ibid., 220.

  205 Valentine interview.

  206 Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, 394.

  207 Julia Blackburn archive, Box 18, Linda Kuehl notes 1.

  208 Julia Blackburn archive, Box 18, Linda Kuehl notes 1, George White section.

  209 Maely (Dufty) Lewis, Killer Jazz, 3, as provided by Bevan Dufty. See also George White archives, box 1, folder 12; Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 118; Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 173.

  210 George White archives, box 1, folder 12; Maely (Dufty) Lewis, Killer Jazz, 3.

  211 Yolande Bavan interview.

  212 George White archives, box 1, folder 12.

  213 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 159–63.

  214 Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 119. Maely Dufty disagreed with this—she recalled that Billie was using at this time, and said she had found heroin on her, and she did go into withdrawal that night. Killer Jazz, 4.

  215 Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, 32–33.

  216 This was often (but not always) at the behest of the CIA, as part of their MK-ULTRA program to discover a “truth drug” that could be used on their enemies. This is one of the oddest little stories I came across, and worth reading about. If it wasn’t so well documented I would assume it was a paranoid Cold War fantasy. See Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 16–18, 346–50. See also Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, 216–22, 435, 237–41, 279, 379–81. White’s behavior aroused suspicion within the CIA itself: see 279–81, 289–90, 412. He continued spiking women for years: see 427. The CIA compiled a list of his known victims in the late 1970s when MK-ULTRA became a scandal; see Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, 578–79.

  217 Albarelli, Terrible Mistake, 279.

  218 Ibid., 290.

  219 McWilliams, Protectors, 168. Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 35.

  220 Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 174.

  221 Maely (Dufty) Lewis, Killer Jazz, 4.

  222 There’s an important account of this trial in “He’s My Man! Lyrics of Innocence and Betrayal in the People vs Billie Holiday” by Sarah Ramshaw of Queen’s University, Belfast, published in Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 87, 2004, accessed at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2041361 on March 14, 2013.

  223 Anslinger, Protectors, 157.

  224 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 433; White, Billie Holiday, 110–11. Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 204. Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 193.

  225 Maely Dufty files, “Introduction”; Nicholson, Billie Holiday, 223.

  226 Maely Dufty files, “Introduction.”

  227 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 434.

  228 Vail, Lady Day’s Diary, 205.

  229 White, Billie Holiday, 109–10. See also Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, interview with Dr. Kurt Altman for the Arena documentary; see also William Dufty, “The True Story of Billie Holiday,” article 3, New York Post series, Julia Blackburn archive, box 18, file VII.

  230 Blackburn, With Billie, 297.

  231 Maely Dufty files, “Introduction.”

  232 Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 194.

  233 Maely Dufty files, “Introduction.”

  234 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 440.

  235 Blackburn, With Billie, 296.

  236 Davenport-Hines, Pursuit of Oblivion, 275, 282.

  237 Eugene Callender interview.

  238 Blackburn, With Billie, 296.

  239 Annie Ross interview.

  240 Maely Dufty, “Introduction.”

  241 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 442. Some of her earlier biographers disputed the claim she was using heroin in the last period of her life. See Chilton, Billie’s Blues, 193.

  242 BBC documentary The Long Night of Lady Day.

  243 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady.

  244 Eugene Callender interview.

  245 Blackburn, With Billie, 298.

  246 Clarke, Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, 438.

  247 Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, 126.

  248 Ibid., 132.

  249 Blackburn, With Billie, 253; Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl file 1, Memry Midgett interview.

  250 BBC “Reputations” documentary Billie Holiday: Sensational Lady.

  251 Dufty piece for New York Post, Julia Blackburn archives, box 18.

  252 Eugene Callender interview.

  253 Anslinger, Protectors, 157.

  254 Anslinger archive, box 1, file 14, poem titled “L’Envoie.”

  Chapter 2: Sunshine and Weaklings

  1 Henry Smith Williams is mentioned in passing in Reefer Madness, so we know Larry Sloman read him; and there are a few academic articles about the Smith Williams brothers.

  2 This description of HSW is based on the images of him that appear on Google Images, e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=henry+smith+williams&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1175&bih=618&tbm=isch&tbnid=VuZQj3kCGqlkwM:&imgrefurl=http://www.librarything.com/author/williamshenrysmith&docid=3-CWdRI5IGZ6yM&imgurl=http://pics.librarything.com/picsizes/a1/0b/a10b615c5a2c06d6370664541514331414f6744.jpg&w=162&h=242&ei=GhqIUPPHJ-y10QW7yYG4BQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=366&si g=109334892739419133305&page=1&tbnh=140&tbn w=93&start=0&ndsp=24& ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0,i:78
&tx=47&ty=67, accessed October 25, 2012.

  3 Henry Smith Williams, Drugs Against Men, ix.

  4 Ibid., 74.

  5 Henry Smith Williams, Survival of the Fittest, 35; Henry Smith Williams, Adding Years to Your Life, 111–13.

  6 This is the central premise of all of Henry Smith Williams, Drug Addicts Are Human Beings.

  7 E. H. Williams, Opiate Addiction: Its Handling and Treatment; see also http://www.bhrm.org/papers/1920-1941.pdf, accessed May 23, 2013.

  8 Williams, Drug Addicts, 149.

  9 See chapters 3 and 22 of Williams, Drug Addicts.

  10 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655029/pdf/calwestmed00219-0042.pdf, accessed May 4, 2014.

  11 Williams, Drug Addicts, iii.

  12 William L. White, Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, 120.

  13 Musto, American Disease, 94.

  14 http://www.cracked.com/article_15669_the-10-most-insane-medical-practices-in-history.html, accessed May 4, 2014.

  15 Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter, eds., Drug War Heresies, 197.

  16 Williams, Drug Addicts, 17, 49.

  17 Williams, Drugs Against Men, xii.

  18 Williams, Drug Addicts, 15. Miller, Case for Legalizing Drugs, 6.

  19 Richard DeGrandpre, The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture, 126. Ibid., 104.

  20 King, Drug Hang-Up, 18–19.

  21 Williams, Drug Addicts, 9.

  22 Ibid., 11; King, Drug Hang-Up, 65.

  23 Williams, Drug Addicts, 12.

  24 Ibid., xviii; Hickman, Secret Leprosy, 121–24; King, Drug Hang-Up, 33–34, 40; Wright, Case for Legalizing Drugs, 93.

  25 Williams, Drug Addicts, 24.

  26 Caroline Jean Acker and Sarah W. Tracey, eds., Altering American Consciousness, 231.

  27 Anslinger, Protectors, 48–49.

  28 Erlen and Spillane, Federal Drug Control, 127.

  29 Acker and Tracey, Altering American Consciousness, 230; Bonnie and Whitebread, Marijuana Conviction, 100–101.

  30 Williams, Drug Addicts, 37.

  31 Musto, American Disease, 178.

  32 Williams, Drug Addicts, 70.

  33 Ibid., 170; King, Drug Hang-Up, 44–46. John Martin Murtagh and Sara Harris, Who Live in Shadow, 114–16.