by John Szwed
When New Orleans opened at the Winter Garden in New York, it was presented as an exploitation film, with posters advertising Storyville’s “18 Blocks of Sin Dives!” and photos of prostitutes smiling out from their “cribs.”
It was Holiday who had the last word on the film. When she heard that Herbert Biberman had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and sent to jail as one of the Hollywood Ten, she wrote, “He should have shown them New Orleans. With all that Uncle Tom stuff in it, and his name on it as one of the authors, he could have beat that mother-huggin’ rap.”
Holiday on Television
Holiday made very few TV appearances, but in her first, the ABC series The Comeback Story on October 14, 1953, she participated in a reenactment of her life. Comeback was an early reality show, one that explored the backgrounds of those who had overcome infirmities and afflictions—a woman athlete who had colon cancer, a blind jazz pianist, an alcoholic radio announcer, a child singer who lost his career when his voice changed, and, in Holiday’s case, a singer who overcame heroin addiction, poverty, and racism. Although it was conceived as a victim’s story—one unintentionally reinforced by her swollen jaw, the result of an infected tooth, which kept her from saying very much—the presence of some famous friends made the program more interesting than it promised to be. Among those who appeared were Artie Shaw, Louis Armstrong, singer Mae Barnes, Arthur Herzog Jr., Leonard Feather, Count Basie, and Pod Hollingsworth, the Harlem club owner who first hired her to sing. Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, and John Hammond, it turned out, refused to appear on the show, the latter because he thought it was in such bad taste.
Still, the story of Holiday’s life that was presented was a candid one, which involved subjects that were largely forbidden on national television. The program’s moderator was Georgie Jessel, a showbiz stalwart whose fame far exceeded his accomplishments, a man who was often the butt of rude jokes. Jessel was unflinching in his comments, however, and ended the show by telling the audience that Holiday was not able to work in nightclubs in New York City because she couldn’t get a license from the police to perform, even though she had paid her debt to society. Billie, smiling and begowned, exchanged a few words with Jessell and then sang “God Bless the Child.”
In 1957 CBS producer Robert Herridge asked jazz writers Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff to select the best musicians to appear on a TV show, regardless of how well known they were. They picked Count Basie, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell, Jimmy Rushing, Jimmy Giuffre, Red Allen, and others to create an all-star big band and to split off into several smaller groups. It was live television, but it was to be as freewheeling and improvisatory as possible. (There was no script, and the camera operators were told to shoot whatever they liked.)
The only musician who presented a problem for the producer was Billie Holiday. During a sound check Herridge received a note from a sponsor’s representative that said, “We must not put into America’s homes, especially on Sunday, someone who’s been imprisoned for drug use.” Herridge told the representative that if Holiday was out of the show, then he, Balliett, and Hentoff would leave. The show aired with Billie included on December 8, 1957, as “The Sound of Jazz,” a special production of CBS-TV’s The Seven Lively Arts, and it resulted in Holiday’s finest moment on television.
Lady Sings the Blues: The Film
After her autobiography was published in 1956, plans for a film about her emerged, shaped by Lester Cowan, whose long career as a director included such films as One Touch of Venus, My Little Chickadee, and The Story of G.I. Joe. The script for The Trial of Billie Holiday, by songwriter Ann Ronell, Cowan’s wife, begins in 1938 with Holiday traveling with the Artie Shaw band in the South and follows her as she returns to her mother’s apartment in Harlem, tracks her time in federal prison, and dwells on her 1949 trial for narcotics and her defense by lawyer Jake Ehrlich. It was as close to film noir as a biopic about a musician could be, but there were no takers for the project.
Cowan tried again by optioning the film rights to Lady Sings the Blues to serve as the basis of a script by Ronell and William Dufty. To encourage Billie to agree to the project, Dufty wrote her of his good impression of Cowan:
This was the first guy who had faced the basic reason why there can’t be honest movies about people who stay brown all year round. Loot. Because, it is said, a third of the box office gross of any movie comes from the South, everybody has to trim and trim. Cowan starts with that. He says it’s not true, except for cowboy pictures. He starts out with the premise that you write the South off. You tell the people down there that they aren’t ready for this movie yet. And when they are, it can be shown down there. In the meantime, he works on the basis that the southern gross can be made up by Europe . . . I hope I’m right, and I think I am, that after Cowan has done your life story in this movie, this cat is going to have to do a new ending for this book. And a happy ending, too. If I’m not, I want you to keep this letter and make me eat it next year.
The lead was to be played by Dorothy Dandridge, a black actress and singer who had fought her way into Hollywood and nightclubs but was desperately in need of a starring role. United Artists advanced money for production, the government of Puerto Rico agreed to fund construction of sets for filming on the island, and Anthony Mann (who had directed The Glenn Miller Story a few years before) was hinted to be the director.
When Cowan wrote Holiday to introduce himself and his film about her, he stressed that his movie would avoid the sensational. Unlike some of her autobiography’s reviewers, he said he found her book inspirational, a great saga of survival, a universally moving account. It carried the same forceful message as that of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” His film, he promised her, would not be banned for its drug, sexual, and racial content—a real concern, given the rough treatment censors had given The Man with the Golden Arm several years before. With the moral message he saw in her life, it might even lead to New York City’s dropping its ban on her performing at clubs that served alcohol. More than that, it would lead to millions becoming aware of “the staggering cost we pay in this country for the foolish notion of treating the narcotic addict as a criminal, and driving sick people through punishment to crime.”
As Cowan began to think about casting, he changed his mind about Dorothy Dandridge and let it be known that he was considering actress Diahann Carroll for the role of Billie. But in an article in the New York Times, he also said that Holiday might be portrayed by a white actress: “My principal concern as a producer,” he explained, “is to find for the role an actress who can do justice to it.” Asked if he had discussed the casting with the singer, Mr. Cowan said her only comment was, “I’m not prejudiced.” In fact, Holiday had wondered why she wasn’t playing herself, and “even if they get a white actress the character she plays will still be colored. If they change that there’s no story.” There was recent precedent for casting a white actress as black, since Jeanne Crain played such a role in Pinky (1949). Cowan had also considered Lana Turner for the role of Billie, but United Artists felt that Ava Gardner—who in 1951 had played the mulatto Julie in Show Boat—was the bigger name at the moment and the studio said it didn’t want to make “just another low-budget second feature.”
Dancer James “Stumpy” Cross said that Gardner had tried to get Billie to take her part in Show Boat, but she wasn’t interested. Gardner may have been contemplated to play Billie because of rumors that she was actually black. Years later, James Baldwin recalled that Ava had spoken to him about the part:
My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me if I thought she could play Billie Holiday. I had to tell her that, though she was certainly “down” enough for it—courageous and honest and beautiful enough for it—she would almost certainly not be allowed to get away with it, since Billie Holiday had been widely rumored to be black, and she, Ava Gardner, was widely rumor
ed to be white. I was certainly not making a joke, or if I was, the joke was bitter: for I certainly know some black girls who are much, much whiter than Ava.
When Cowan’s film failed to go into production he tried yet again with a script titled Blue New York by Dufty and Ronell. This time it was announced that the movie would not be so much a filmed autobiography as it was “our impression of Billie Holiday and the meaning of her life.” Liberties were taken: Some names and races were changed, one character was invented, and William Dufty would now be a figure in the film. Ann Ronell had written several new songs for the real Billie Holiday to sing on the soundtrack: “Blue New York,” “Hungry for Love,” and “Happy Birthday All Year Long.” Casting was still in question. When Dufty saw Joseph Losey’s 1962 film Eva, in which Jeanne Moreau played an elite call girl who relaxed to Billie Holiday records between customers, he was so taken by those moments in the film that he wrote Ronell that he was now convinced that Moreau was the only person who could play Billie.
After Holiday died, other producers rushed to put similar films in the works, one stumbling over the other in their announcements: In 1959–1960 Philip A. Waxman and Albert Zugsmith both said they had signed Dorothy Dandridge to play the lead in two different bio movies that each of them was planning, and a Broadway musical with her in the lead was also being promised. Meanwhile, Dandridge was playing a Holiday-inspired drug-addicted jazz singer just out of prison in “Blues for the Junkman,” an episode of a noirish NBC-TV film series called Cain’s Hundred. In the same year John Butler and Carmen de Lavallade danced to her songs with a voice-over narrative that stressed the misery of her life in “For Miss Holiday” on CBS’s TV program Camera Three.
In 1966 Dufty wrote a stage play, Harlem: A Musical Memoir, which focused on Holiday’s life in Harlem in the 1920s and the 1940s, with two actresses playing the young and the older Billie. The piece would have been mildly avant for the times, with a rotating stage for rapid time and scene changes, dream sequences, and danced street scenes.
In 1971 another flurry of Holiday film ideas appeared, even though there was confusion over who had the film rights to the book. Actor Ossie Davis’s Third World Cinema announced the forthcoming film The Billie Holiday Story, starring New York stage actress Diana Sands and directed by John Berry, who had been Orson Welles’s assistant and was blacklisted in the early 1950s, as was the proposed scriptwriter Millard Lampell, who was better known as one of the Almanac Singers. John Hammond was to develop the soundtrack using the original Columbia recordings and was doing research in Baltimore to find people who had known Billie as a child. The film would not use the Holiday-Dufty book as a source, and would end in 1940, when Billie was twenty-five. Anticipating that Louis McKay would contest the project, Third World was prepared to ask the courts to rule on whether he was Holiday’s legal or only her common-law husband.
Motown Goes to Hollywood
It was Jay Weston, a publicist for the Newport Jazz Festival, who was the most dogged in pursuing a Holiday film. He met Billie at the festival, and when she told him about her autobiography, he optioned the film rights to it from Joe Glaser and held on to the option for years, even when TV producer David Susskind tried to buy it to make his own film, again with the aid of John Hammond. In 1968 Weston produced his first picture, For Love of Ivy, starring Sidney Poitier and singer Abbey Lincoln, and believing that Lincoln would be the closest likeness to Holiday that could be found, he asked her to play the lead in his film. When Abbey turned him down because of marital difficulties with her husband, Max Roach, Weston tried for Diahann Carroll, but again no film resulted.
When Weston read an interview with Diana Ross in which she announced she was leaving the Supremes and had long dreamed of playing the role of Holiday in a film, Weston began to shop the idea around Hollywood. At first there was little enthusiasm for the project: Ross didn’t look or sound like Billie, there was no evidence that she could act, and she seemed too young and too lightweight for serious contention. Only Berry Gordy, the man who had groomed Ross for success at Motown Records, believed in the idea. He was in love with Ross and had been trying to find a way to get them both involved in a film. But even he had his doubts, mostly about the effect the film could have on her career if Ross played “a black junkie singer.” In a time when blacks were making their way into movies with blaxploitation films like Shaft and Super Fly, he was concerned about Diana’s appearing in a film that might be slotted into that genre. What he wanted for her was a crossover film, one that would reach white audiences as well as black, much like Motown Records had done with music. Casting a member of the Supremes to represent Holiday in a biographical film, instead of using an actress from the usual Broadway and Hollywood realms, might also make it a draw for the TV and pop record audiences.
Biopics about entertainers were typically romances, cast as stories of performers who overcame great odds to rise to triumph. The problems with a Holiday film were that her life seemed to Gordy to be a questionable triumph, and that the drugs and alcohol that killed her were taken of her own free will; even if he agreed to show her addiction in a film, it was likely to be censored. This was not what he wanted for the first biopic of an African American woman. With backing from Paramount, a little-known Canadian was picked by Weston as scriptwriter, and another Canadian, Sidney Furie, as the director. The first version of the script attempted to follow the Holiday autobiography, even though William Dufty tried to halt the film with claims of his authorship. (Dufty later dismissed the film in a letter to the editor of a magazine as an autobiographical fantasy of Berry Gordy’s.)
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 t
he 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.
