The Infuriating True Story Behind The United States vs. Billie Holiday - E! Online (2024)

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"I spent the rest of the war on 52nd Street and a few other streets. I had the white gowns and the white shoes. And every night they'd bring me the white gardenias and the white junk."

So Billie Holiday relayed in her 1956 memoirLady Sings the Blues, the book itself asubjectof admiration and scrutiny due tothe libertiesshe took in telling her own storyand what some critics saw at the time as a missed opportunity to do more than further link the art of jazz to a certain seedy lifestyle that a lot of white people just assumedwas part of the Black experience.

Maybe it fed a stereotype, but abject poverty, sexual violence, prostitution and drug use were part of Holiday's story, and she didn't shy away from the hardtruthsof either her past or her present. She even made them harder in some instances, such as opening her book with the revelation that, when she was born in Baltimore on April 7, 1915, her mother was 13 and her father 16, and they married when their daughter was 3 years old.

In reality, her mother, Sadie fa*gan, gave birth to her at 19, her father, Clarence Halliday, was 17, and they never married. But in all versions of her story, Clarence took off when Billie—born Eleanor fa*gan in Philadelphia—was little. She would later borrow her first name from her favorite movie star when she was a kid, Billie Dove, and her surname from her guitar-playingdad's stage moniker.

"Much of what we think we know about Holiday, however, is questionable, and over time accounts of her life have been bent to serve some other purpose than telling her story,"John Szwed wrote in his 2015 book Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth.

But however unreliable a narrator Holiday may have been, all thelater work bloomed fromthe seed she planted withLady Sings the Blues, for which she received a $3,500 advance and 65 percent of the proceeds, toher co-author and friendWilliam Dufty's35 percent. The book later inspired the 1972 film of the same name, starring Diana Rossas theunavoidably tragicchanteuse.

Despite the power of Ross' Oscar-nominated performance, the biopicwas criticized for its formulaic treatment of Holiday's woes as she goes from one tragic point in her life to another, men supplying her with drugs and doing her wrong at every turn. This year'sThe United States vs. Billie Holidayhas also received mixed reviews, though singer Andra Day—in her first major acting role—saves the Lee Daniels-directed film from being your average one-dimensional portrait of the artist as a tortured soul.

Day, who won a Golden Globe for her performance and is nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, deftly channels Holiday'svoice and musical styling and unsurprisingly wears those glittering gowns and gardenias with ease. More importantly, though, you can see the increasingly weary charisma of an artistwho sold out Carnegie Hall but was also unfathomably tired(as well as often under the influence of heroin and alcohol). Holiday was a woman who stuck to her guns but, in that day and age, coupled with her addictions and unsavory enablers, had only so many guns to stick to.

"It was the most unhealthy thing I've ever done for my physical body, for my voice, for everything, and maybe my mental state too," Day, who uncharacteristically smoked heavily and knocked back gin on the rocks to get her voice just so and her mind in that place,said on Apple Music'sThe Message. "But it was the healthiest thing I've done spiritually ever. It was actually, probably one of the greatest experiences of my life, and the hardest thing I've ever done."

Despite being a huge admirer of Holiday, Day admittedly hadzero inclination to playher, worried that flubbing the part would be a stain on the singer's legacy. (And Daniels initially didn't think she was up to the task, either.)

Her first response, when she learned the movie was being made was, "'Let me know how it goes! I'll watch it in theaters, let it come out,'" Day told E! News. "So I don't think I ever got to a point where I was like, 'I'm the one.' Hello, no, I'm still baffled, to be honest with you."

But after meeting with Daniels and reading the script, "seeing that would be vindicating Billie Holiday's legacy," she said yes.

Because while Lady Sings the Blueswas more of an indictment of the ravages of drug use, the system that punishedthe artist—and countless other people of color—so unfairly is what's on trial inThe United States vs. Billie Holiday.Thescript (which, like Lady Sings the Blues, takes a lot of liberties as to what happened when, conjuring some scenes purely fordramatic effect) by Pulitzer Prize-winningplaywrightSuzan-Lori Parksis based on the study of Holiday and her legally authorized persecutors inJohann Hari's 2015 bookChasing theScream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

Hari writes, "Billie Holiday was born a few months after the Harrison Act, the first law banning cocaine and heroin, and it would become her lifelong twin." The book details how Holiday's lifeand careerbecame a targeted pawn in what was effectively the U.S. government's war on drugs,a half-century before Richard Nixon formally declared it into existence.

"It was extremely brave, when you think about it," Holiday's goddaughter Lorraine Feathertold Hari inChasing the Scream. At a time when most entertainers were warbling love songs (which did make up most of Holiday's repertoire, albeit usually with a heartbroken edge), "you simply did not have a piece of music being performed at some hotel that was about the killing of people—about such a sordid and cruel fact. It was not done. Ever."

And so Holiday joined theFederal Bureau of Narcotics' list of targets.Agentswho were no longer busy chasing down bootleggers for the Bureau of Prohibition, which was absorbed into the FBI upon the conclusion of that failed experiment in 1933, were then quixotically tasked with wiping out the drug trade. The first commissioner of the FBN, Harry Anslinger,especially targeted Black people because, Hari wrote, he felt that drug use made them "forget the appropriate racial barriers—and unleashed their lust for white women."

He especially despised jazz, and he instructed his agents to "prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day."

His big plan didn't work, because even when he did make an arrest, there was no one in the jazz community willing to give evidence against another musician. Eventually Anslinger was told by his bosses at the Treasury Department to dropthat particularcrusade.

But according to Hari, who reviewed Anslinger's letters and other papers he left behind, heremained "obsessed with Billie Holiday."

And he was obviously out to get the troubled star, who by all accounts—including her own—drank and used drugs to muteher pain.

"I got a habit, and I know it's no good," Holiday once told a friend, per Hari, "but it's the one thing that makes me know there's a person called Billie Holiday. I am Billie Holiday."

The instantly identifiable vocalist who would alsocome to be known as Lady Day, who Frank Sinatra called his greatest single musical influence,started singing professionally almost by accident. Having popped her head into everybar and clubin Harlem looking for work as a dancer, she was about to be turned down yet againat a place calledPod's and Jerry's (later The Log Cabin)when she asked if they needed a singer. The owner told her to go ahead and sing for the customers, and she had them in tears after two songs.

The story goes that she was singing at Monette's Supper Club, also in Harlem, when she was discovered at 17 by record producer John Hammond, who arranged for her first recording session, with Benny Goodman's orchestra, in 1933. She toured with Count Basie and became the first non-white singer to appear with Artie Shaw, thoughsheeventually quit that gig after one too many separate trips up the freight elevator and entrances via the back door of an establishment while the rest of the band enjoyedtheaccommodations for white people.

Her first husband, trombonistJimmy Monroe,was reportedly the first person to give Holiday opium, the singer having preferredmarijuana throughout the 1930s.InLady Sings the Bluesshe recalls"a white boy in Dallas called Speck"showing her how toinject heroin.

Trumpet player Joe Guy, one of myriad people (including actress Tallulah Bankhead) whom she was involved with during her marriage, was also a heroin addict and just as much of an enabler.

Meanwhile, people in Holiday's inner circle, including Monroe and her agent Joe Glazer, buddied up to the authoritieswho conveyed the message that the U.S. government would appreciate it if she stopped singing "Strange Fruit."

Anslinger hired a Black agent—which he didn't make a practice ofbut needed to do in order to get eyes on Holiday behind the scenes—named Jimmy Fletcher.Wearing his serviceman's uniform and posing asa wide-eyed fan, he won Holiday's trust.

"Billie's greatest talent, after singing, was swearing—if she called you a 'motherf--ker,' it was a great compliment," Hari wrote. "We don't know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherf--ker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him." And he would see her stoned on multiple occasions.

In May 1947, Holiday performed "Strange Fruit" during a show in Philadelphia. Later that night, her room at the Attucks Hotel was raided and she ended up being charged with heroin possession.

Upon her release from prison, Holiday performed two sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall on March 27, 1948, but that wasn't a sustainable arrangement to earn a living. A number of magazine articles over the years carried Holiday's byline, including one inEbony called "How I Blew A Million Dollars" and another inTanthat asked "Can a Dope Addict Come Back?" (Her candor was notable for any era.)

Herstar had shined brightest in New York, but after the drug conviction she had hercabaret card—a licenseto perform at venues that served alcohol (i.e. all nightclubs)—taken away, severelylimiting where she could sing (as did her hard-earned reputation for being an unreliable act to hire).

"How do you best act cruelly?" singerand actressYolande Bavantold Hari in 2013. "It's to take something that's the dearest thing to that person away from them...You can't dothething that is a passion and that you made your livelihood at, and that has brought joy to people all over the world."

Holiday was arrested again in January 1949 in San Francisco for opium possession, another one of Anslinger's agents showing up at the Mark Twain Hotel to bust her—and likely planting evidence in the process.Holiday insisted that she was clean, that they should send her to a clinic for monitoringso she could prove she wasn't sufferingthe usual symptoms of opioid withdrawal.

A jury found her not guilty. But she toldEbonythat year that she was tired of the "vindictive, hounding, heckling and harassing" authorities who wouldn't leave her alone. And sheadmitted to feeling suicidal during that time inLady Sings the Blues, writing, "The hounding and the pressure drove me to think of trying the final solution, death."

In 1955, her friend and sometimes manager Maely Bartholomew, who was married to journalist William Dufty, invited Holiday to come stay at their apartment to hide out—from the authorities, from reporters, from the toxic men in her life (including her louse of a last husband, LouisMcKay). That's when she and Dufty got started on the book.

It was assumed, probably correctly, that, after not playing a show in New York for eight years due to her cabaret license being revoked, Holiday was interested in collaborating onthe story of her life because she needed money.

"Shewas writing for money to support her drug habit, and for publicity to make it appear that she was off the habit and to get her back her cabaret card," wrotejournalistLinda Kuehl, whose years' worth of research, including interviews withpeople who were close to the singer, is the most drawn-upon archive for Holiday biographers aside fromLady Sings the Blues. (An odd case in itself, Kuehlplanned to write the definitive book on Holiday herself, but she died in 1978, having jumped—according to police—off a building in Washington, D.C. Family members disputed the conclusion that she took her own life.)

Filmmaker James Erskine acquired Kuehl's archive and used it to make the 2020 documentaryBillie, whichwas released in November. In one taped interview, she's heard asking drummer Jonathan "Jo" Joneswhat they went through back in the 1940s and 1950s, traveling through the South to perform.

"We was going through hell!" he exclaimed. "Miss Billie Holiday didn't have the privilege of using a toilet in a filling station. The boys at least could go out in the woods. You don't know anything about it because you've never had to subjugate yourself to it. Never!"

Talking to The Guardianwhen the documentary came out, Erskine said, "We finished the film last year and I didn't see it again until September. I was shocked at how political it felt. When we were making it, we felt that we were presenting truths about things that everybody understood, the white man's power, structural racism. I was setting out to make a film about Billie, and one of the joys of it is that you get to really see her. But I guess it tells us that we haven't really addressed any generational wounds in society."

Watch:

Andra Day's Billie Holiday: Journey to the Oscars

In Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday shared, "You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation."

But allthe while, she never stopped performing "Strange Fruit" when the mood occurred, rankling her determined oppressors until the end.

"She really believed that no one would ever know her story," Andra Day said on ABC'sInside the Oscarspodcast. "She thought she would die in obscurity. Matter of fact, I think, forget the story—I think she'd be shocked to know the world still knew 'Strange Fruit,' and that she grew to be—she was hugely famous when she was alive here on Earth, but that her legacy sustained, that people know her name, now today."