Billie Holiday
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The last article under Billie’s name, “I Needed Heroin to Live,” cowritten with Dufty, was first rejected by Esquire but then published in the infamous magazine Confidential in October 1959, for which she was paid $1,500. She had been hospitalized for liver problems, not drug abuse, but was then arrested in her hospital room for alleged possession of heroin and put under twenty-four-hour police guard. The article was originally titled “Heroin Saved My Life” and was her final statement on the media, psychiatry, the medical system, the law, her publisher, and Hollywood.
Lying in bed in Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, she read her own preobituaries in the newspapers and commented on them caustically. “Billie Doomed” was the title of one, and to the policewoman by her bedside she remarked, “We’re all doomed, baby. What the hell else is new?” Another was headlined “Billie Holiday Is Dying of Dope Addiction and Alcoholism.” Her comment: “Did they blame Arthur Godfrey’s lung cancer on cigarettes? He’s through pushing them on TV, God bless him,” as she lit up a king-size nonfilter brand. “That’s for sure.” The article continued: “Her voice is shot—cracked and eroded by the careless years of drug addiction, whisky drinking and other malign influences.” “I’ve never had much voice to begin with,” she laughed, “but I’ve got more today than I ever had”; then, arching her back, she broke into the first few notes of “Night and Day.” “Whisky and heroin have taken their toll too,” said another press report. “The famed jazz singer lies on the verge of death at 46 [sic].” “My mother and father never touched dope in their lives—and neither lived to be as old as me. I’ve been on and off heroin for fifteen years. Who knows? Maybe heroin kept me alive.” When she read that a psychiatrist she had never seen had declared her as self-destructive, the victim of a death urge, she chortled, “I’m not the suicide type. Never have been. Homicide, maybe, but not suicide.”
Billie’s mordant humor persisted until the end. Dufty said that when he visited her room one day, he saw her motionless with her eyes closed and her husband with a bottle of liquor and saying prayers for the dead. Fearing the end, Dufty withdrew quietly. When he came back later, she was still lying there, but then she opened her eyes and asked “Is he gone?” When Dufty assured her, she said, “I’ve always been a religious bitch, but if that dirty motherfucker believes in God I’ve got to think it over.”
• • • • •
Throughout Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday resists being categorized, typed, and limited by the social constraints placed upon her, and goes to great pains to show how these limitations affected her life and her art. Her primary message is her survival as an artist—what she had come through, but also what she needed to accomplish to keep going. However, the doubts raised about the book’s authorship, her literacy, the role of a white man in the writing, the truth of her story, and the possible mercenary aims of the project all added up to undermine her stature as a responsible author and an agent of her own destiny. This is not unique among accounts of jazz musicians’ lives, and it is even more common in the lives of African American women artists, who have a long history of difficulty in establishing respectability and legitimacy within a history of slavery, poverty, segregation, and discrimination.
A biographer’s task is to develop a life story, and then check facts and correct what she sees as mistakes or lies. Some of those who have written about Holiday saw it as their job to challenge her account of her life and remind the reader of what Holiday really was (and maybe how hip they are) by using terms of disrespect such as “whore,” “whorehouse,” and “junkie.” But as an autobiographer, part of Holiday’s own task was to present a clear portrait of her place in the society in which she found herself. To her this meant showing how the stigmatized women who work as maids, singers, and prostitutes have their own values. She urges her readers to accept that, even among the lowest in society, characteristics such as strength, dignity, and the ability to survive should be seen as forms of virtue. As much as it was a means of making money (which was also necessary to redeem her), Lady Sings the Blues was an act of redemption, an attempt to assert her dignity, as she always did, within a society that had already condemned her to a form of ignominy. As it is, she reveals far more of herself than most autobiographers, and if at times she wanders into pathos, she reminds us (as does Dufty in his articles following her death) that she thought of herself as religious. While asking for compassion for the addicted, she blames only herself for making bad choices and being too weak to resist drugs. Hers was not a victim’s story.
CHAPTER THREE
The Image: Film, Television, and Photography
Billie Holiday tells us that her first film work was in 1933 as an extra in what she called a “mob scene” in The Emperor Jones staring Paul Robeson, though no one as yet has been able to identify her in the movie. Maybe she is there, hiding in plain sight in one of her many identities; maybe she was cut out of the film. Still, there were some who saw an affinity: When Terry Southern adapted The Emperor Jones for BBC television in the 1950s, he used her music on the soundtrack.
She does appear prominently in the 1935 film short Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life, directed by Fred Waller at Paramount, featuring Duke Ellington as a composer at work, creating a nine-minute or so extended composition in four parts, “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “A Hymn of Sorrow,” and “Harlem Rhythm.”
The film has the feel of a musical revue in one of the larger Harlem cabarets. Holiday appeared in the second and longest section, playing a sad young woman rejected by her lover or pimp (played by the dancer Earl “Snakehips” Tucker) and thrown to the ground like a dancer in a French apache dance. Following the dramatic setup, she’s seen singing “The Saddest Tale,” an Ellington song of only nine lines that she nonetheless made the most of, standing motionless with her eyes closed, her face half in shadow, and turning away from the camera at the end. The song is performed with a minimalist, almost method approach to acting, unlike that adopted by many singers on film at that time, who either smiled through even the saddest of songs or acted out their pain with crude gestures.
In her autobiography Billie downplayed Symphony in Black as “just a short subject” that no one would see, but it was an important step in Ellington’s career, as well as her own. Being featured with the Duke Ellington band before she was twenty years old would have been achievement enough, given that she had made her first recordings with Benny Goodman just the year before (even though her performances with Goodman seemed, by her own admission, somewhat childlike). But her singing with Ellington was remarkably poised, with all the features of her mature style in place—the rhythmic manipulations, her distinctive timbre, melodic inflections, and unsentimental delivery. The song’s opening lines—“I’ve got those ‘lost my man, can’t get him back again’ blues”—would set the tone for much of her repertoire for the next twenty years.
Orson Welles, The Story of Jazz, and New Orleans
In the summer of 1941 Duke Ellington made jazz history when Jump for Joy, his musical based on themes of African American history, opened at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles. Though it never got beyond Los Angeles, the musical drew large numbers of Hollywood’s elite who were excited about the mixing of social and political themes in a Broadway-type setting. When Orson Welles saw the piece, he approached Ellington after the show and asked to meet with him the next morning at RKO. Orson had been planning a film, to be called The Story of Jazz, that would be one section of a sprawling four-part anthology movie. He proposed to Ellington that they write it together, with Duke acting as musical director and composer. Louis Armstrong would appear as himself and be the focus of the film; pianist and singer Hazel Scott would play Lil, Louis’s wife; and a long list of New Orleans musicians were to appear as themselves, speaking in their own vernacular. When he met Holiday three months later and struck up an affair with her, he asked her to play the role of Bessie Smith, and invited her to come to the studios with him where he was prepar
ing to start production on The Magnificent Ambersons.
Welles began his own research on jazz, songs were selected, the musicians were interviewed for ideas, and Armstrong wrote him a short autobiography. The script was written by Elliot Paul, a writer for Welles’s radio shows and a pianist who had studied boogie-woogie with one of its masters, Albert Ammons. In the script that emerged, a young Louis Armstrong is discovered by trumpeter Joe “King” Oliver and develops into the spark that brought jazz into full flower in New Orleans. But then Storyville, the city’s entertainment district, is closed by the secretaries of the army and navy in 1917 to protect recruits heading for Europe in World War I from vice and corruption. Now out of work, Armstrong leaves town by a Mississippi riverboat and relocates to Chicago, where jazz flourishes and spreads across the country. It soon becomes a worldwide phenomenon, and Armstrong travels to London and Paris, where he is celebrated as an artiste.
What might have been material for a conventional musical biopic was instead intended to be radically innovative, mixing together different styles of jazz, using the surrealist drawings of Oskar Fischinger, and becoming the first film to celebrate the life of an African American.
Before the film could begin production, though, the United States was attacked by Japan on December 7, and priorities shifted everywhere. Even the movies changed almost overnight. Two days after the attack, RKO stockholder Nelson Rockefeller and the director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, John Hay Whitney, approached Welles with the idea of going to Brazil as a goodwill ambassador, where he would produce films with the cooperation of the Brazilian government to help stave off the rise of fascism in Latin America. Welles’s first thought was to make a film of Brazilian Carnival that could be connected to The Story of Jazz and would show the social and cultural importance of the Afro-Brazilian event by paralleling it in the film to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Both could be a part of the anthology film that he was planning to call It’s All True. RKO agreed to fund it, with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs picking up any losses. But as shooting of the Rio Carnival got under way, and the studio saw that Welles was highlighting the origins of the event in the poorest sections of the city and focusing on the everyday interaction of races in Brazil, the moguls feared the material would come as an unwelcome surprise to white Americans, and became uneasy with the project. Dr. Maurice Bernstein, Welles’s guardian after his parents died, wrote Orson on May 14, 1942, that RKO was on the verge of shutting down the film and not renewing his contract:
Today, I was at your studio and got an earful. First, that RKO is frantic about your expenses, both personal and in making the picture in South America. One million feet of color film when only 12,000 can be used. And in addition, your mixing of the blacks and whites cannot be accepted by Iowa, Missouri, not to mention all the people the other side of the Mason/Dixon line. You probably know the feeling of RKO better than I on all these things. But your doings are certainly stirring them up.
Filming was halted abruptly within a day or two, and though Welles tried to keep the project alive with his own money, he was unable to finish it. Orson never completed his jazz film but kept the idea alive by hiring the same New Orleans musicians (minus Armstrong, whom even he couldn’t afford) as house band for his radio show in the early forties, and by producing Years of Jazz, a weekly history of jazz for Armed Forces Radio Service in 1944.
New Orleans Without Welles
After World War II ended, Majestic Pictures, an independent film company working under the RKO umbrella, decided to adapt The Story of Jazz using parts of Elliot Paul’s jazz script and casting for It’s All True and merge it with another Paul script, “Conspiracy in Jazz,” but without Orson Welles and Duke Ellington. The new film was intended as a conventional history of jazz, jazz then understood as having been invented in New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong as its most important figure. It was aimed at predominantly white audiences in all parts of the country with a story with which they could identify, and if there was enough black presence in the film to pick up an African American audience, all the better. It was a tricky formula, and one that had already produced some bad Hollywood films.
When plans for the film, now titled New Orleans, were announced, there was immediate excitement among jazz writers and African American journalists, who foresaw a movie that celebrated black contributions to America and, through its casting, would not involve segregation or dilution of the music. Despite the popularity of jazz in the early 1940s, there was still only a vague grasp of its history and meaning. Was it high art or folk art? Music for dancing or close listening? Vulgar trash or spiritually redemptive? Best when played by blacks or whites? All of these issues were raised by the story line of New Orleans.
The script that producer Jules Levey chose centered on Miralee, the daughter of a wealthy New Orleans family who returns from studying opera in Europe and finds her mother’s maid (played by Billie) secretly playing the piano and singing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” in their palatial home. This apparent infraction of household rules was more significant then than it may now seem: An African American maid in the 1940s should not have been discovered playing the piano and singing while at work, and most certainly should not have been singing a love song. Fascinated by what she hears, the daughter then orders her maid to take her to Storyville, where she witnesses Holiday singing with the Louis Armstrong band in the cellar of a gambling establishment, and is instantly converted to jazz and life in the underworld. Wringing of hands follows among the whites, but there is no stopping the young woman, who, in the throes of discovery, decides that she will become a jazz singer herself, especially after she falls in love with the club owner and finds the conductor of the New Orleans Symphony also secretly attending these nightly jam sessions. Against better judgment, she insists on performing one of Holiday’s songs as an encore at her first concert of classical music in the city and watches the audience walk out in disgust.
When Storyville is closed, the black performers of the district march out together, with Billie singing in the lead (with what is said to be the voice of an uncredited Ethel Waters dubbed in for Holiday’s). A diaspora of New Orleans’s black musicians follows, and Chicago soon becomes the magnet that draws jazz musicians to the city. Then, in a strange ending, all the African Americans who populated the film disappear; the opera singer performs the Billie Holiday song again as an encore to a classical concert, with the white Woody Herman band and a symphony orchestra and a chorus behind her, only this time to great applause. Jazz had somehow become a lady, and a white one at that.
• • • • •
Work on the film began in early September 1946, when a crew was sent to New Orleans to film local sites and a jazz funeral, while prerecording of the music began in Los Angeles. Holiday arrived late, twelve days after production began, and was in no mood for hanging out with her colleagues. Her addiction was taking its toll, and she was angry at her manager, Joe Glaser, for having signed her up for a part she didn’t want. Much of what she had accomplished to that point had been aimed at avoiding domestic labor, yet she was haunted by it. Her mother had been in domestic service, at one point for Ethel Waters and later as a maid for the singer Mildred Bailey. Her stepmother had been Tallulah Bankhead’s maid. Shortly after she came to New York, Billie had a part as a maid on a Shelton Brook soap opera on radio. The transition from playing mammies to playing maids did not represent much progress for black women in fifty years of filmmaking. Granted, the role of a maid who is commanded to take her white mistress slumming did signify a shift in the female racial paradigm in the postwar era: from mammies and their feckless young white charges to maids and their headstrong employers. In daytime these maids were underlings in the world of upper-class young white ladies, while at night they might serve as guides to the underworld. An intimacy existed between maid and mistress, but it was an awkward one, in which the maid was asked to share the
secrets of her own life with her white employer at the same time she was asked to protect her mistress by lying about their nocturnal adventures. But a maid for a white woman was still a maid: Billie complained that her drama coach for the film was making her try out twenty-three different ways of saying, “‘Yes, Miss Miralee’ and ‘No, Miss Miralee’ in order to get the right kind of Tom feeling into it.” Years later, that role was still on her mind. When journalist Murray Kempton visited her shortly before her death, he found her ironing a shirt for her husband. She stopped, took a look at her work, and then started over again, remarking, “I suppose that’s why I never made it as a maid in the movies. I’m just not the maid type.” She apparently never agreed with Ethel Waters’s sentiment that it was better to play a maid than to be one.
• • • • •
As with the Welles film, RKO once again objected to so many people of color being featured in New Orleans. Producer Jules Levey, siding with the studio, also took issue with the script and edited out the most important scenes, according to director Herbert Biberman and screenwriter Paul. One of the first drafts of the script for the film contained a quite different ending: All of the principal actors moved on to Café Society in New York, where the opera singer improvised words to a tune played by jazz musicians, and Billie Holiday and the Golden Gate Quartet both sang. In the concert hall ending, Louis Armstrong played in front of the Woody Herman band and a symphony orchestra.
Biberman said that “Levey was scared to death that too many Negroes will come to the theaters to see this picture because there will be too many Negro artists in it.” In order to change the direction of the film Biberman was replaced by Arthur Lubin after Busby Berkeley was ruled out. The resulting movie shows signs of ambivalence toward its subject and of drifting off course throughout, with Billie portrayed at some moments as a servant and at others as a stylish singer. One character is interrupted just as he begins giving an explanation of the history of jazz; some musicians (Lucky Thompson, the Woody Herman band) entered the film without seeming to have any relation to one another, and there is even an odd allusion to Kristallnacht during the closing of Storyville.