by Sady Doyle
And then, there is Lana Del Rey: The Dead Girl Come Alive. The girl who was, as her first album title informed us, born to die. Her entire career to date has been about compressing the trainwreck into a performance, a marketable archetype: lovely, “crazy,” drawn to the wrong men, and doomed to die young. In song after song—“Off to the Races” is a prime offender, but then, so is most of her first album—her voice ascends into a breathy, cooing, little-girl register (“Hi … who, me?”) that mimics Marilyn Monroe’s. (A register that, by the way, was not Monroe’s real voice, either—in audio tapes of interviews, she’s full-throated and assertive, and she descends by about half an octave. She was an actress, after all.) In the video for “National Anthem,” Del Rey actually plays Monroe, and in “Body Electric” she’s haunted by her ghost. In others she flips through tabloids that describe her own out-of-control downward spiral; she holds a gun to her head; she is a naked, bloodied corpse dragged from a Diana-esque car wreck; she’s drowned by her lover in a swimming pool. She writes songs about loving it when her man hits her, about getting mixed up with a man who loves guns and heroin, about loving a man who “likes his girls insane.” About her own death (“When I get to heaven, please let me bring my man”) and sometimes her own suicide: (“I wish I was deeeeead,” cue Marilyn voice, “dead like you”).
She’s said that elsewhere. In one infamous interview she told The Guardian, “I wish I was dead already.” She might not have meant it literally—most of Del Rey’s songs are predicated on sounding as if she died several decades ago—but it resonated, in part because it was the one line that seemed to sum up the entire Del Rey brand.
After all, she is right about one thing: Death is more glamorous than living in the wreck. After Winehouse’s death, for example, news outlets and social media were filled with thoughts about the tragedy of addiction, and Winehouse’s helplessness in the face of it. It’s substantially harder to find anyone expressing similar sentiments about the still-alive Courtney Love. And everyone remembers Monroe. They may also remember that she had a “rival,” the similarly blonde and curvy Jayne Mansfield, who was supposedly decapitated in a car wreck. (She wasn’t, but people liked the story.) Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could name the third member of the so-called “Three M’s”: Mamie Van Doren, who is alive and well and posing for topless photos as an octogenarian in California.
But there is something else in play here, some older narrative. It’s instructive to look to the music itself—to the genre and style that Del Rey, like Amy Winehouse before her, chose to signify an appetite for self-destruction. “I’m a big jazz aficionado,” Del Rey told Fader in 2014. “Hopefully my next foray will be into jazz.” Or you could look to the name she moans, on “Blackest Day,” to epitomize her appetite for self-destruction: All I hear is Billie Holiday. It’s all I play.
She’s right about that, too. On some level, Lana Del Rey—like Whitney Houston, like Amy Winehouse, like any number of women—is just playing Billie.
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Anatomy of a Trainwreck
BILLIE HOLIDAY
“I was playing a gig in New Jersey, walking across the yard, and I heard it over a loudspeaker,” said pianist Carl Drinkard. “ ‘Jazz singer Billie Holiday was arrested in her hospital room for possession of narcotics.’ I looked at Be-Bop Sam, a little trumpet player, and I said, ‘Lady’s gonna die.’ I knew it just like I knew my name.”
Drinkard was right. Billie Holiday—Lady Day, to anyone who knew her; Eleanora Fagan, at birth—was dying. She was an alcoholic, up to a bottle of gin a day, in the hospital because her liver was failing. When a bag of heroin was confiscated from her room, she was arrested and quickly began going through withdrawal. Possibly, she could have survived the cirrhosis. Possibly, she could have survived the heroin withdrawal. But she could not do both. Her body couldn’t handle two crises at the same time.
Drinkard was not the only one planning around Lady Day’s death that day. Her ghostwriter, William Dufty, was trying to sell an article to Confidential, so that he could get her money to keep the heroin coming. Playboy and Esquire had already turned him down—Billie Holiday had been done to death; the topic had been exhausted—and Confidential would only give him a shot if he found some new angle.
“And I said to myself, new angle, new angle, new angle, and I was desperate, so I said, what about ‘Heroin Saved My Life,’ ” Dufty told Holiday archivist Linda Kuehl, “and he said terrific. They were concerned with one thing, that they get it in the magazine while she was still alive, and I couldn’t guarantee that she would live.”
She did live long enough to get the money, but not to spend it. The wad of fifty-dollar bills from Confidential was on her when she died, and it would turn out to be the only money she had in the world.
Billie Holiday, the most celebrated singer of her generation—hell, of any generation—had spent most of her adult life flat broke. For one thing, she’d been convicted of heroin possession in 1947, and people with prison convictions could not play New York nightclubs that served alcohol. She was a New York jazz singer, and jazz singers made their living by playing nightclubs. “I could play in theaters and sing to an audience of kids who couldn’t get in any bar. I could appear on radio or TV. I could appear in concerts at Town Hall or Carnegie Hall,” she said. “That was OK. But if I opened my mouth in the crummiest bar in town, I was violating the law.”
Record sales didn’t help, either. She had been singing since the 1920s, and recording since 1935, but until 1944, when she signed with Decca, she didn’t receive a cent in royalties. She performed for a flat fee. People could be tremendous Billie Holiday fans without ever once paying Billie Holiday to sing. Articles “by” Billie Holiday, on the topic of her addiction—“I’m Cured for Good”; “Billie’s Tragic Life”; “Can a Dope Addict Come Back”; etc.—were how she tried to make up for the income her actual addiction cut off.
If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. Billie Holiday was working the image-rehabilitation circuit, no different than Whitney doing Diane Sawyer. She wrote a memoir with Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, that told the world she was sober and in a great relationship. (She was neither.) She recorded a “comeback” album with a more commercial pop sound—Lady in Satin, and in this particular year, “commercial pop” meant a full orchestra rather than a jazz band—that was marketed as being based on her tragic life story. She even submitted to a Very Special Episode of television about her downfall and redemption, The Comeback Story, on ABC. She did everything we do now, but she did it for the first time.
Billie Holiday was born in 1915, at the very dawn of the modern era. Slavery had ended just fifty years prior; plenty of white people in the United States could still remember it, or had owned slaves themselves. And plenty of black Americans had actually survived being enslaved, even if they were children at the time. To give you an idea, the end of slavery was about as far removed from Billie Holiday’s birth as Beatlemania is from you today: If you’re under thirty-five, you might find it quaint, but your mother or grandmother probably remembers that first Ed Sullivan Show appearance like it happened yesterday.
And, as far as racial progress was concerned, it might as well have been yesterday. Racism still held an iron grip on the American consciousness and government. The world was still spectacularly cruel to young black girls. But Billie had to deal with all this, while also being one of the first entertainers to deal with the contemporary mechanisms of entertainment and celebrity, which came roaring and shuddering to life over the course of her career. Billie was, among other things, a test case: one of the first women in America who was prevented from selling her gift, and forced to sell her pain.
In some sense, it had always been part of her appeal. As biographer John Szwed notes, of the three songs most associated with Billie Holiday in her lifetime, all were about violence, and two were about death. “My Man,” domestic abuse. “Gloomy Sunday,” suicide. “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that can
suck the breath out of you to this day. It wasn’t as if she didn’t record light, sentimental love songs; there were dozens of them. But something about Billie made you remember the sad songs first: That weird, bruised voice, getting more worn and clawed-open every year, twisting its way through the songs. She always seemed to sing from the other side of something. As if pain were an ocean, a wide dark place she’d traveled; as if it were a country, and she had crossed the border and started sending reports back home.
And, yes, some part of that pain came from her life. From being born poor, to a mother who was young and unmarried, and never allowed to forget it. From giving herself an abortion as a teenager to avoid the life her mother had. From surviving an attempted rape by a neighbor—for which she and her mother were punished when they reported it.
“I’ll never forget that night,” she would later say, in Lady Sings the Blues. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to a woman. And here it was happening to me when I was ten.” Her attacker led her into a brothel, claiming he was taking her there to meet her mother, and assaulted her after she fell asleep. Afterward, when Billie’s mother took her to the police station in Baltimore, the law came crashing down on them both.
“[Instead] of treating me and Mom like somebody who went to the cops for help, they treated me like I’d killed somebody. They wouldn’t let my mother take me home,” she said. “I guess they had me figured for having enticed this old goat into the whorehouse or something. All I know for sure is they threw me into a cell.”
Billie was deemed not to have sufficient adult supervision, torn away from her mother, and placed in an institution for wayward girls.
Later, there were her men, all of whom beat her. (One of them went at her with a whip for waking him up at night; one of them used to kick her in the ribs and stomach before she performed, telling her bandmates he had to “beat the shit out of her so she sings good.”) There was the fact that she was a bisexual woman, in an age when most people didn’t even know the word “bisexual”; there were the white women who adopted her as a part of their rebellious phase and dropped her when it suited them. There was racism: national tours where she couldn’t reliably eat in restaurants or use public bathrooms, and shows where she was forced to wear blackface on stage because she looked pale under the lights, and club owners couldn’t risk the scandal that might ensue if she were mistaken for a white woman performing with black men.
And then, at last, there was heroin. Which seems, in retrospect, less like a downfall than a logical outcome: Who could be surprised that a woman who’d experienced almost every variety of human pain found herself drawn to the world’s strongest anaesthetic? But still, it was the pain that Billie had to spend her life justifying, explaining, publicly defending, and, ultimately, just plain selling to an increasingly white, middle-class audience who were eager for a look at the much-mythologized underworld figure—the criminal, drug-addicted black jazz musician—and who drank up her music for a taste of how the other half lived.
“Everybody was happy about the crowds that used to flock to the theater. People were standing when the place opened in the morning. People were still standing for the last show at night. Everybody thought this was great, except me,” she said. “I thought people were just coming to see how high I was. ‘They hope I’ll fall on my face or something,’ I used to say.”
It was cruel treatment, especially for an artist of her caliber. Because Billie was not just good; she was not just great. She almost single-handedly created an art form. Before Billie, there were singers, and there were jazz musicians. Billie legitimized the idea of the jazz singer as a great musician in her own right: not someone propped up in front of the band, but a living, breathing, improvising part of it, someone whose recomposition and reinterpretations of the melody were as essential as any horn solo. No matter how sick she got, or how hard it was to sing, when she sang, genius happened. And it never happened the same way twice.
Critics are still figuring out exactly how she worked. Some of the things she did with tempo had no antecedent in Western music, outside a few experimental pieces by Chopin. Biographer Donald Clarke says that only Louis Armstrong was a predecessor, and only Ella Fitzgerald was a peer. Other than that, every jazz singer whose name we know—Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, Chet Baker, Frank Sinatra—came after Billie, and was directly influenced by her. More than that, the archetype she created in the public consciousness, the tormented female singer who exorcised her demons on stage—because she was adamant that she actually felt everything she sang, every time; “When I sing, it affects me so much I get sick. It takes all the strength out of me,” she said—is found in every corner of music. She’s responsible for everyone from Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill to Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, from Amy and Lana to Joni and Janis.
Still, when Billie gave her historic Carnegie Hall concert in 1956—the moment some historians point to as the official canonization of jazz, the moment when it stopped being low entertainment and became high American art—she had to do it under the guise of tragedy and comeback, with a white man standing next to her and reading excerpts from Lady Sings the Blues so that the audience could appreciate how her appeal sprang from her hard-knock life.
And the knocks got harder. The public-rehabilitation circuit was not kind to Billie. Lady in Satin was dismissed: It wasn’t “real jazz.” She started to get too sick to make it through the sessions, too nervous to get through them without drinking more and more. Her voice hollowed out to a rasp. As for the book, well: Though Billie’s pain was fine to look at, hearing about it was another thing: Did she have to sound so angry?
“There is so much of human suffering, sensitivity and music in her voice,” wrote Harry Lieb, an attorney who worked on the book. “The book, therefore comes as a disappointment, as if in her autobiography she had written to put herself in the worst possible light.” He called it “a series of gripes, with a few scandal items,” and noted that “the cuss words get very tiresome when they are repeated over and over again.”
Lieb believed that Billie’s story should “evoke sympathy, pity, and understanding,” but he apparently had trouble sympathizing with the woman herself. She failed to provide him with the tragedy he was looking for. Reviewers were no kinder: J. Saunders Redding, of the Baltimore Afro-American, sniffed at Holiday’s “tragically disordered background,” and, once again, called her out for cussing: “This reviewer is no squeamish prude, but Billie Holiday and William Dufty use language so raw with so little warrant that there were times when this reviewer got ‘real sick.’ ” And these were the reactions she’d gotten from people who believed she’d even worked on the book—plenty of people believed her white ghostwriter had concocted it wholesale, rather than working from interviews and dictation—or who believed the story therein. Which plenty of people did not. The attempted rape was singled out as particularly unbelievable. Her biographers had to prove it, several times over, before it entered the official story of Billie Holiday’s life.
“My book is just a bitch,” Billie wrote to Dufty. “Did you see that shit that man from my birthplace Baltimore wrote? He even said my Mom and Dad were stinkers for having me. I am sick of the whole goddamn thing. You tell people the truth and you stink.”
And so, she limped on. Getting sicker, getting more infamous. Letting the rumors fly and the people stare, having to prove herself all over again every time she opened her mouth: “I’m not supposed to get a toothache, I’m not supposed to get nervous; I can’t throw up or get sick to my stomach; I’m not supposed to get the flu or have a sore throat,” she said. “I’m supposed to go out there and look pretty and sing good and smile and I’d just better. Why? Because I’m Billie Holiday and I’ve been in trouble.”
And she stayed in trouble, until she was in that hospital bed, under police guard, and by that point so famously sick that she got to read the early write-ups of her own death in the paper. BILLIE HOLIDAY IS DYING OF DOPE AND ALCOHOL ADDICTION, read one headline. BILLIE DOOME
D, ran another.
“We’re all doomed, baby,” she told the nurse. “What the hell else is news?”
And then she was gone, at forty-four-years-old, giving a suitably tragic ending to the world that had loved her pain.
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Death seals the deal, for trainwrecks. It grants them their glamour. It makes them, not worthy of attention—they always have that; it’s our primary weapon against them—but worthy of love. And that love, I would submit, is half nostalgia and half relief. It’s the care we give, once we’re not being asked to care any more.
For all our fetishization of celebrity death, the fact is, we can usually see it coming from miles away. When Billie Holiday got mixed up with heroin in the 1930s, it might have been a mistake, something she got into without knowing she couldn’t get back out. But, in the twenty-first century, no one is under the impression that a crack or heroin addict is destined to live a long, healthy life. Everyone has heard the AA definition of alcoholism—“progressive, incurable, and fatal”—often enough to know that a history of DUIs or public intoxication doesn’t speak well for that person’s health. And everyone understands that mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, or even severe cases of depression, can and do kill people.
We understand all of this, that is, until it comes to female celebrities. For them, we persist in enjoying the spectacle: turning Anna Nicole Smith’s dazed, drug-addled public incoherence, or Whitney’s unconvincing denials, or even Amy Winehouse’s progressive and frightening emaciation, into our own campy entertainment, sarcastically branding it “magical” until the day of the overdose, when it finally stops being funny.
We typically reserve the death penalty for people who have committed extremely serious offenses. If these women have to pass away before we can forgive them, or even like them, it would stand to reason that they’d done something wrong. Yet, in almost every case, they were their own worst victims. To starve in public, or to stay in an abusive relationship, or to need alcohol or prescription drugs or street drugs to make it through the day, is a statement of pain, not of hostility. They terrorized us by being themselves.
