Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.   

WAS BILLIE KILLED TWICE?

           

            I have a confession to make which will probably reveal my age and the antiquity of my tastes. For quite a few years I was, and in a way still am, a fan of Billie Holiday. Don’t get me wrong. Billie Holiday died in 1959, at the age of 44, when I was a young child. She had been long dead before I’d ever heard of her or been old enough to appreciate her.  But once the age of CDs came around, I hunted out re-pressings of her work and revelled in them. This wasn’t to the taste of my then-teenaged elder children, who sometimes made scathing comments on what I was listening to, or even did rude impressions of Billie Holiday’s distinctive growling and soothing voice. But – bless him – one of my sons bought me, as a birthday present, a boxed set of Billie Holiday CDs called Billie Holiday – The Legacy 1933-1958.

            I still listen to it and other CDs of Billie sometimes, enjoying everything from her 18-year-old debut belting out “My Mother’s Son-in-Law”, through the swing years with “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”, to her rich middle period with “Lover Man”, “Fine and Mellow” and “God Bless the Child” (one of the very few songs she actually helped to write). Later came her very regrettable decline. Understand, please, that not everything she recorded was great, and in a way her very last recordings – especially the ones caught “live” in nightclubs – are an embarrassment, the result of years of smoking, heroin and physical abuse. It’s said that in her very last years, she was sometimes so zonked out on drugs that she had to be helped on stage and her voice was reduced to a faint croak.

 

            In 1972 there appeared the film Lady Sings the Blues, purporting to be the life story of Billie Holiday and starring the Motown singer Diana Ross. I was a young rookie film reviewer for the now-long-gone Auckland evening newspaper the Auckland Star.  I saw the film and wasn’t very impressed. I won’t belittle Diana Ross’s real talent as a pop singer, but her voice in the singing sequences sounded nothing like the voice of Billie Holiday and, apart from being African-American, Diana Ross’s public persona was nothing like that of Billie. To put it simply, she was badly miscast. Worse, the film’s depiction of Billie’s life was heavily fictionalised, and at some points glamourised.

            I would call this film the first killing of Billie Holiday.

            I have a copy of James Baldwin’s book-length essay The Devil Finds Work, which is his critique of the American film industry from a black perspective. In it, Baldwin tears apart the film Lady Sings the Blues, basically arguing that it’s a complete betrayal of Billie’s life, made to pander to white audiences and concluding dishonestly with the expected Hollywood happy ending. The film closes with Billie giving her triumphant performance at Carnegie Hall which was, in fact, many years before she died.

            One of Baldwin’s constant complaints was that the film was not true to Billie’s “testimony”, her autobiography also called Lady Sings the Blues (published in 1956), which Baldwin regarded as authentic. But there’s a great irony here. Apart from the fact that the book was (obviously) ghost-written, and based on interviews, many critics believe that it was also heavily fictionalised. This view has been contested recently, but it is upheld by Donald Clarke in a much better biography of Billie Holiday which sits on my shelf called Billie Holiday – Wishing on the Moon (published in 2002), a very detailed and documented tome, 500 pages, with Donald Clarke’s preface calling the book Lady Sings the Blues “hopelessly inaccurate”. Later he calls the film version “one of the worst films ever made”.

 

            Now nearly half-a-century has gone past since Diana Ross failed to embody Billie Holiday. A new feature film about Billie has been released, The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

            I ask myself, is this the second killing of Billie Holiday?

            The film is clearly produced for a generation that believes Black Lives Matter, and it is angled to present Billie as “the godmother of civil rights”. One of its central plot points is that Billie heroically insisted on trying to publicly perform Abel Meeropol’s famous anti-lynching protest song “Strange Fruit” but, says the film, the song was banned and Billie was arrested by a phalanx of police when she tried to perform it. This is at best half-true. The song was indeed controversial and, as the film correctly says, Billie was often required by club-owners to strike it off her repertoire. But the song was never officially banned, Billie first recorded it in the 1930s and her recording was widely distributed. She also performed it frequently in clubs and theatres without harrassment, even if there were grumblings from conservatives and some white Southerners. There was one episode where she was forced off stage while singing “Strange Fruit”. You could say that this is something that the film has “hyped up”.

            Sad to report, much that The United States vs. Billie Holiday says is historically accurate. When she was a little girl, Billie did indeed work as a cleaner in a brothel. She was raped as a little girl. She did tend to pair with abusive men who beat her up. (It’s frightening to hear her incarnation in this film singing “I’d rather my man hit me / Than he up and quit me” and “I swear I’ll call no copper / If I’m beat up by my poppa”). A BBC documentary about her some years back suggested she had a strong masochistic streak. It’s also true that she became hopelessly addicted to drugs, served jail time and was hounded by the FBI who wanted to take her down as “an example”.

            Unfortunately the film fumbles some of these details. It presents one (African-American) FBI agent infiltrating Billie’s entourage and then falling in love with her, becoming her lover, and later regretting that he’d ever been asked to spy on her. There was indeed such an FBI agent who later regretted his actions, but there is no evidence at all that he became her lover. Unfortunately, too, the (white) G-men hounding Billie are presented in cartoonish, unconvincing stereotype form, uttering what sounds like comic-book dialogue. (I’m not such a stickler for historical accuracy that I expect a film to show everything about a character’s life, but for the record, the film does not mention Billie’s long and loud tiffs with her mother; and it does not mention that early in her life she had a septic abortion which rendered her sterile and left her pining for children and being a soft touch when she met children. This was a big factor in her emotional life.)

            All this relates to distortion of facts, but the worst of is that The United States vs. Billie Holiday has such a slack and uncoordinated screenplay. Again and again we see Billie and her entourage shooting up. I’ve rarely seen a film with so many shots of needles plunging into flesh, in one case with blood spurting back.  Again and again we have sequences of Billie either having crazy sex with her men or being beaten up by her men. By the time we get to her deathbed, face puffy, body fading, we wonder if the film’s real purpose was to warn us about drugs. There is little dramatic momentum to it.

            So am I condemning this film as the second killing of Billie Holiday?

            Oddly enough, not really. For the film is redeemed by one factor and one factor only, and that is the stunning performance of Andra Day in the starring role. Unlike Diana Ross, Andra Day can sing in a voice that sounds convincingly like Billie Holiday’s. Indeed, there were some times when I wondered whether the producers had done what was done in the 2007 film about Edith Piaf La Mome (released in English-speaking countries as La Vie en Rose) – re-mastered the original singer’s recordings and dubbed them in. But this technique is not used in The United States vs. Billie Holiday. Andra Day does her own singing. I suspect she has been at it for some years. “Andra Day” is a stage name, derived from Billie Holiday’s sobriquet (bestowed on her originally by Lester Young) “Lady Day”. Obviously Andra Day has aspired to be Billie Holiday for quite some time.

            Andra Day has won the Golden Globe Best Actress Award for her perfomance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday and was nominated for an Oscar, which she did not win.  She, when she sings, is what makes the film worthwhile. But it’s a real pity about the inept screenplay, even if it is more truthful than the film Lady Sings the Blues.