Billie Holiday (9 page)

The raw facts and complexities of Billie's life remained a concern for Gordy. Furie tried to reassure him: “I told him I didn't want to make a serious, deep, important movie.
I wanted to make a piece of entertainment that would make big money for all of us.” But Berry was not used to standing on the sidelines, and bought his way into becoming a producer, and then purchased the entire film back from Paramount when it went over budget, paying for it with his own money.

He brought in two new writers from the Motown staff, neither of whom had ever written a script. Three of Holiday's husbands were compressed into one; characters were invented; incidents were fabricated (an encounter with the Ku Klux Klan in the South, a Southern white jazz musician who introduced her to heroin); and Ross's performance of “Strange Fruit” had the most painful and pointed of its lyrics cut from the song. The film gave no indication that she was considered the greatest singer in the history of jazz, let alone that she had recorded hundreds of records. Jazz musician and composer Oliver Nelson was quickly replaced by Michel Legrand, who brought a lush, traditional Hollywood approach to the score.

When Diana Ross complained about the inauthenticity of the film to Gordy, he told her, “The hell with being truthful . . . white people don't worry about changing the facts to make good movies.
Why should we be saddled with it just because we're black?” That was true enough, but
there were inauthenticities in the film that only compounded the problem, and that worried Ross: Her own singing was far from Holiday's technically in its phrasing and rhythmic feel, nor was there any sign of
irony, satire, self-pity, pain, or mature sexuality in her bright interpretation of Holiday's songs. What she did bring to these songs was a pop sensibility, one that evoked in an audience a different realm of musical experience and distanced them from the jazz world of Holiday. Ross belonged to a new idiom of music that was sweeping the world and threatening to turn jazz into a minor art.

How could they make a film that would celebrate Holiday but at the same time also reveal all her weaknesses and failures? One answer was to show that she was not responsible for those shortcomings, which were the product of her tormented childhood, the lack of a real father, as well as poverty and racism. Yet how heavy could such a message be made for white audiences? How could all this be part of a love story? Another possibility was that the film could be framed as a moral lesson, a goal the autobiography had in fact sought to achieve. In the original draft of Holiday's book the last chapter was to be didactic, a don't-try-this-at-home warning that would stand in such sharp contrast to the recollections of the “hip kitty” who spoke in the pages that came before. It was ultimately edited out.

The film opened like a late-fifties film noir, black and white, with a brassy big band playing in a minor key over rumbling rhythms that warned the audience of what was to come: Billie in chains, being fingerprinted, having a mug shot taken, then thrown into a padded cell. When she began to scream and writhe on the floor, she was put into a straitjacket, and the film drifted toward the tropes of fifties melodramas of hysterical women. Billy Dee Williams was cast as Louis McKay, who was presented as her only husband, a kindly, sweet man who would forgive her anything—someone closer to a father than a spouse. The real Billie Holiday, of course, had other husbands or husband surrogates, all of them famously brutal, though none as well documented as Louis McKay. In one note that survives from Billie to McKay, she wrote:

Let's face it, you're not my husband, not even my boyfriend . . . Louie, how much can I take. You're in New York two days and I, your wife, see you five minutes so let's be friends and forget it.

Ross was certainly not bad in her performance, and if anything, she was almost too good—too beautiful, too charming, too full of energy and playfulness to be Billie Holiday. She was dedicated enough to the role to
re-create Holiday's bedroom and dressing room in her space on the film production lot, keeping some of Billie's own things in them. Even those who hated the film were able to praise her performance apart from it, and the film received five nominations for Academy Awards.

Today, some forty years later, producer Jay Weston is still thinking of refilming Holiday's biography in a “more authentic version,” one that nonetheless includes a fictional affair with the black DEA agent who eventually was assigned to follow her. Jennifer Hudson (who played the character modeled on Florence Ballard of the Supremes in the film
Dreamgirls
) would be cast as Billie.

The Photos

Holiday was one of the most photographed black women of her time, one of the first to have her picture appear in a national magazine, and perhaps the most popular jazz performer among professional photographers. Many of those images are still in wide circulation today, even though there were those who felt she never looked as good in pictures as she did in life.

Carl Van Vechten was apparently in the midst of a project to photograph every leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance—Nora Holt, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Bessie Smith—and was eager to get Holiday into his studio. Even though she is not normally considered part of the Renaissance, Holiday was widely known by many Harlem artists to be one of their own.

She was not particularly eager to do another shoot, but the Harlem journalist Gerry Major intervened on behalf of Van Vechten and arranged a session in March 1949. Major asked her to wear an evening gown, but she arrived dour and distracted in an everyday gray suit. She was still under indictment in California for drug possession and had just
been denied a New York State Supreme Court order to restore her cabaret card. Van Vechten began shooting, but she was not cooperative. The conditions of his sessions could be excruciating: He worked slowly under hot lights, moving floral arrangements, pets, and art objects in and out of the frame, asking for changes of clothing between shots, or no clothing at all.

He pulled out the photos he had taken of Bessie Smith to convince her of the quality of his work. She began to cry, and he began to click away as she explained how important Smith was to her. After a break at midnight, she returned from her apartment with a sharp change in attitude and her dog Mister, a boxer. Van Vechten filmed Billie in color (which he usually avoided) peeking out from behind a vase of large pink roses, wearing an evening gown, and even topless, with her arms folded across her breasts; she lay down with her head next to her dog's with the camera on the floor in front of them, and in a dark robe against an angular black-and-silver-striped hanging. He photographed her singing while seated, or holding an African carved head next to hers. Many of his
images suggest that he might be looking back to the exoticism of Josephine Baker, perhaps even further back to Gauguin's Polynesian paintings.

Van Vechten later wrote that he had “spent only one night photographing Billie Holiday, but it was the whole of one night and it seemed like a whole career . . . I took photographs of her crying, which nobody else had done, later I took pictures of her laughing.” Once they had finished, she stayed until dawn while “she related in great detail the sad, bittersweet story of her tempestuous life.”

In the 1940s
Life
magazine was the source for the best photography in the United States, with a stable of ace news and portrait photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Philippe Halsman, and Edward Steichen, and several who were especially drawn to jazz, Gjon Mili, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith. Mili, something of an avant-garde photographer, staged jam sessions in his loft studio for films such as
Jammin' the Blues
and the still photography he did for
Life
. In 1943 he filmed a jam session to accompany an
article on V-Discs, the government-supported recordings that were sent to military bases across the world. Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson, and Duke Ellington were among the musicians, and the singers included Lee Wiley, Josh White, and Billie Holiday. The black-and-white shots are stunningly lit, with black-on-black backgrounds and shimmering whites. Mili's photos of Holiday caught in performance are among the best. An earlier session was devoted to one of the “
Life
Goes to a Party” features that the magazine sponsored from time to time, this one including some of Duke Ellington's and Eddie Condon's musicians, and Holiday as the only singer. If Americans did not yet know who she was, this striking photo of her singing among the musicians instead of in front of them would have made her a memorable
figure.

W
hen Billie and her mother moved from Baltimore to New York City in 1929, Wall Street was crashing, Prohibition was radically changing the entertainment business, and the glories of the Harlem Renaissance were fading. As Langston Hughes would write, “We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward.” But Hughes was only partly correct. Harlem's writers, painters, and playwrights may have lost their uptown allure, and its elaborate revues may have been shrinking or moving to midtown theaters, but its music, which had never been the strongest element in the Renaissance's ideology, was finding new homes in small cabarets and cellars in Harlem, where the ban on alcohol was not consistently enforced. An alternate jazz age to that of the whites downtown was taking shape there, and suddenly it seemed that a great variety of women singers was everywhere. Some were established artists, like the blues singers, coon shouters, and red-hot mamas, all of whom owed much to African American musical traditions. Newer styles were appearing as well, such as the flappers and torch singers, and they, too, had roots in the black community.

The concept of a jazz vocalist did not exist when Billie stumbled her way into a career as a singer. A singer's having a career of her or his own—independent of a band, a musical theater, or a vaudeville company—was only just beginning to be possible. Still, there was then no clear idea of what a jazz singer might be. The women artists that most can now agree
on as the leading figures in jazz singing—Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter—were all quite different stylistically from one another, and all created such individual approaches that they were not easily adapted by other singers without making them seem unimaginative imitators. And yet there was a set of common resources from the past from which all these women drew to craft their own approaches.

 • • • • • 

By the mid-nineteenth century the full impact of black singing on America was yet to be felt. For most white Americans outside of the American South, the only black vocalizing they might have heard was from a distant church service. Yet the few individuals who did witness more of this music believed they were hearing the future: the dominant feature of a distinctive American singing style that was yet to take shape. As early as 1845 a journalist named J. K. Kinnard declared that the world had not yet heard the best of America's poets, the Negro poets and songsters, nor had they been properly acknowledged even at home. Abolitionists thought the spirituals were the most distinctive and powerful music they had ever heard.
In the 1850s Walt Whitman singled out the language of Negroes as having “hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes . . .”

After railroads and the radio connected most of the country and recorded music came into existence, only the most isolated person would not have known that a new kind of singing was emerging, even while segregation made it easy to ignore its origins. But by the 1960s there were those such as music critic Henry Pleasants who declared that the source of the American singing style was primarily black. He went even further with the radical suggestion that when the European tradition of classical music was becoming decadent in America, African American
singers surfaced as the vital voices of the future by reinventing the “objectives, criteria and devices of the early Italian masters of opera” by treating song “as a lyrical extension of speech”: “They emphasize clear enunciation and conversational phrasing—and to achieve this effect, they employ the same musical devices as their distinguished predecessors, including the appoggiatura, the turn, the slur and the rubato.”

Pleasants pointed out two other factors that contributed to the ascendancy of African American popular singers. First, they had the freedom to interpret that had been denied their classical counterparts, who increasingly came under the domination of the composer and the orchestra.
And second, they were able to use the microphone to restore much of the charm, intimacy, and virtuosity that had been lost in classical singing when the emphasis changed from the rhetorical to the lyrical.

“Reinventing” was the word that Pleasants used to describe this shift of musical aesthetics, though “creolization” might have been an even more accurate term because it would call attention to the ways in which historically unrelated cultures can sometimes fuse to create a totally new form without concern for origins or a respectable patrimony.

African Americans were leading the way in breaking with European musical tradition, and, strange as it might seem, this break had been anticipated, and maybe even urged, by the minstrel show, the first form of musical theater to reach the whole country. Its history is much longer than the eighty or so years that it is said to have lasted in the United States; its legacy is far more complicated than just a matter of white people copying black people, and even today questions about the sources of this music and its influence remain unsettled. Some minstrels were black, and some of those we now consider white performers were then categorized as nonwhite in one way or another. A few of the white performers who wore blackface, such as Al Jolson or Libby Holman, were very popular among people of color. Minstrelsy reached a much wider audience than just the United States, and it took on different meanings in other countries. In South Africa minstrel performances in blackface
have been popular for over a century among nonwhite Africans in Cape Town during Coon Carnival in January of each year. Adolf
Hitler's mistress Eva Braun posed in blackface for professional entertainers' photos in imitation of her favorite performer, Al Jolson, who was Jewish. Billie Holiday, like many other black performers of her time, at least once had to darken her skin so as not to look too white when appearing with a band of black musicians before a white audience.

The music and dance of minstrel shows were not copying Negroes so much as they were constructions of imaginary characters in imaginary antebellum settings by white composers and choreographers who put them together from various cultural ingredients. If they believed what they were presenting were simulations of real people, they had failed. More likely, they knew they were pastiches, or parodies, especially because many of the tunes of the minstrels and some of the humor had scarcely concealed origins among the tent and stage shows from the past that had minstrelized the Irish. A New York theater writer in the late 1800s remarked after a minstrel show he had just witnessed that he pitied Negro performers because they had to compete with the real thing!

The subject of theatrical black masking continues to fascinate and remains something of a favorite activity for academic theorists, who develop new explanations for it every few years. But whatever its history and complexity, and however distasteful it is, minstrelsy tells us that something was missing and desperately needed in American singing: the voices of excluded black people. The offshoots of minstrelsy shaped styles and agendas that are in some ways still with us today. In 1961 the great R&B singer Jackie Wilson recorded a tribute album to Al Jolson,
You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet
. Aretha Franklin's father, the estimable Reverend R. L. Franklin, said his favorite singers were Muddy Waters and Al Jolson, and Aretha herself recorded some of Jolson's and Stephen Foster's songs. Since the heyday of minstrelsy, popular music has continued to be a form of cultural masking, a weird type of passing, a den of exoticism, an arena for vernacular everything but especially speech, and a playground for those who enjoy crossing lines, changing shape, and taking risks.

 • • • • • 

By the late 1800s the big minstrel show spectaculars had begun to fade and were replaced by vaudeville or variety shows that presented a series of different performers—singers, jugglers, dancers, comics—who appeared individually, leaving behind the traditional minstrel staging that had every member of the cast onstage at the same time. But minstrel-like performances persisted in new musical forms called “coon songs.” A 1920 Victor Records catalog explained the music listed under “Coon Songs and Specialties”:

By “coon songs” are meant up-to-date songs in negro dialect. The humor of many of these songs cannot be called refined, and for that reason we have distinguished them from old-fashioned darky humor, these songs being listed under “Fisk Jubilee Quartet,” “Negro Songs,” and “Tuskegee.”

Coon songs were designed to characterize black Americans in ways that would amuse whites. It was amusement of an especially insidious sort, the humor often approaching a sort of fearmongering never imagined in minstrel shows. White anxiety over the freeing of the slaves and the threat of Reconstruction was boldly put on display. Minstrel fantasies of life on the old plantation were replaced by those of a free people in competition with whites for jobs and social status. Songs with titles like “If the Man in the Moon Was a Coon” and “New Coon in Town” were typical.

Thus it came to be that a jumble of watermelons, flashy clothes, straight razors, gamblers, hustlers, chicken thieves, buffoons, doomed social climbers, bullies, and promiscuous and libidinous characters were ascendant on the stage. From 1880 to 1920 coon songs were a craze, like ragtime and the blues that were yet to come, and hundreds of pop songs were produced to meet the demand. “Pop songs” they were, because they gave rise to Tin Pan Alley, the industrialized song factories that emerged to keep a steady flow
of music available for sale to the public. Coon songs were silly and offensive, and crudely made, sometimes with only the word “coon” substituted for another word in an older song to rush out some sheet music for sale. Yet some of the most successful songwriters learned their trade on these songs, and a few continued to write in the same spirit years later: Irving Berlin's 1930 “Puttin' On the Ritz” mocked black social pretensions on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The song was recorded by Fred Astaire in 1930 and later was “whitened” with new words for Astaire to sing about Fifth Avenue in the 1946 film
Blue Skies
. The original version survives on YouTube in a fuzzy print of the 1930 film
Puttin' on the Ritz
, with Harry Richmond singing in front of white dancers, who leave the stage when a group of noisy and exuberant blackface “real” Negro dancers appear. This kind of
revision and sly appropriation of coon songs persisted well into the twentieth century in pop songs like “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “I Ain't Got Nobody,” “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now),” and “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

Some coon songs were similar to those that in minstrel shows would have been sung by men playing the roles of both men and women, but now they were being performed by white women, who might appear in blackface, and so took on different emotional weight. The singers who were most successful in the earliest period of coon songs, such as May Irwin, were generally large, respectably dressed, buxom white women who assumed the role of black mammies berating their husbands, or performing the role of men who were aiming to defeat the toughest dude in town. The
New York Times
in 1895 reported that:

When [Irwin] sang her new darkey songs . . . one forgot her blonde hair, her peaches-and-cream complexion, and her blue eyes; every tone of her voice, every expression of her countenance, every gesture and motion combined to create an illusion now of a lovelorn Virginia darkey, now a dangerous Tennessee “coon.”

In a
review of Irwin in
Courted into Court
in New York City in 1896, the
Times
said:

The Southern negro she impersonates in “Crappy Dan” and “The New Bully” is not the old plantation darkey, happy in his bondage, primitive in his simplicity, but a product of the new civilization, the bad town darkey of the present age of transition. That he is susceptible to humorous treatment Miss Irwin proves, and the manner in which she puts him before us in all his badness and audacity, without the aid of make-up or scenic effect is, in its small way, a triumph of art. But the same crappy Dan, with his dice loaded for “sebens” and his “quaintance wid a gun,” represents a grave social problem.

Other women coon shouters (that is, untrained robust singers) often deliberately assumed ethnically ambiguous personae in their offstage lives. Anna Held, one of the most famous, reached New York from Europe at the beginning of the 1900s under a press agent's manipulated cloud of mixed identity (was she Catholic or Jewish? Polish or French?) to work with Flo Ziegfeld in his
Follies
, doing coon songs with a French accent (that was often undecipherable). But Held never used blackface, instead doing her ethnic signification by means of an extravagant cakewalk and facial imagery. Close behind Held at the
Follies
was Nora Bayes, singing her feature song, George M. Cohan's “Beautiful Coon.” She, too, avoided blackface, but sang coon songs in an Irish accent, and spiked Irish songs with Yiddishisms. Later,
away from the
Follies
and on her own, she added the plantation cakewalk dance to her act, dressing in a mammy costume and performing in a plantation setting.

There were black singers in blackface makeup who sang coon songs for white audiences as well as black, and white singers in blackface who performed for both white and black audiences. As early as 1903 some white performers began to reveal their white skin under their gloves to the apparent shock of their audiences.
But when a white performer revealed her skin in front of a black audience at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem in 1915, she was hissed in disapproval, not because they had been taken in by the makeup, but because they preferred the masquerade.