Billie Holiday documentary: Excavating the past to uncover a dark, dazzling life

All-time great: Billie Holiday backstage at the Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1946
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Jochan Embley12 November 2020

Strange Fruit was a turning point. Recorded in 1939, many credit the song with sowing the first seeds of the civil rights movement — its haunting depictions of Black Americans being lynched came 16 years before Rosa Parks demanded her rightful place on the bus. For its singer, Billie Holiday, it was similarly pivotal. As a black woman speaking truth to power, she was placed squarely within the crosshairs of an outraged group that went all the way up to high-ranking officials in the US government.

A video of Holiday performing Strange Fruit live is one of the most profound moments in a new documentary, Billie, dedicated to the vocalist’s dark, dazzling life. In newly colourised footage, we see an artist whose disgust, indignation, dignity and power is manifested across the contours of her face. The flicks of her eyebrows are dismissive but devastating; her eyes glimmer with welled-up tears, yet never look at risk of losing their poise.

Holiday’s music soundtracks the documentary, directed and written by James Erskine, plotting out a life in which she became known as the all-time great jazz vocalist, but had to fight a near-constant battle against the forces trying to thwart her. It’s a story richly told here by a staggeringly broad range of interviewees, from stars such as Tony Bennett and Count Basie, to former bandmates and childhood acquaintances.

They were all gathered by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, the late journalist who spent a decade in the Sixties and Seventies talking to those who knew Holiday best, conducting more than 125 interviews and capturing hundreds of hours of recordings. After negotiations with her family, Erskine was granted access to the audio, none of which had ever been published.

He felt like “an archaeologist excavating the past” while working through the tapes — “relics”, as he describes them — and sent the particularly poor-quality recordings to a specialist in Belgium, who was able to “magic up the voices that were lost between the crumbling rocks”. The results were “incredibly atmospheric”, Erskine says. “We put Charles Mingus on and we heard that deep voice, and we were immediately transported back to the 1950s.”

In the film, we hear about Holiday’s upbringing in a deprived part of Baltimore. She was a combative child — a catchphrase was “suck my ass, motherf***er!” — but one who would be “played on” by the “men folks”. Barely a teenager, she would “turn tricks” to survive. Skinny Davenport, a pimp that knew Holiday, recalls with a chuckle how he’d have to “knock ‘em down and kick ‘em in the ass” to keep those beneath him in line.

We also hear about the racism she endured — how she’d get turned down from restaurants and hotels while touring or, conversely, when she’d have to blacken her face in the southern states because her skin tone was too light to be singing with a black band.

It all leads up to that staggering performance of Strange Fruit. Holiday’s record label, Columbia, didn’t want the song released, and often white audience members would leave when it was played live. It was seen by many as “racial agitation”, Erskine says. And as Lipnack Kuehl writes: “Her refusal to stop singing it would give vindication to those powerful men already circling the decadent world of jazz in search of a high-profile target to burnish their reputation.”

Holiday’s voracious appetite for drugs and alcohol was an open secret — “She could consume more stimulants than any 10 men and still perform,” says one interviewee — which made her an easy target. Narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher tells how Holiday was “kept under observation for years”, “night and day”. Another operative admits that even though he “ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered” with an “addict” rather than a trafficker, he knew just how much publicity her arrest would generate.

Holiday was detained twice on drug charges. The lead-up to both arrests is emblematic of the way in which men close to Holiday would undermine her. Joe Glaser, her manager, asked the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for help in getting Holiday arrested “for her own good”, while manager-boyfriend John Levy — variously described as “a pimp, a parasite” and a “dirty, rotten, stinking bastard” — even informed on Holiday. Tales of Levy’s physical abuse are interspersed with a performance of the song My Man. The lyrics (“He beats me too/ What can I do”) are stinging.

Lipnack Kuehl’s own story is an intriguing subplot. She became obsessed with Holiday, got into an ill-defined relationship with Count Basie after interviewing him and then, in 1978, died after falling out of a window. Whether or not she deliberately took her own life is inconclusive — Erskine tried to dig deeper, but found all police records on the matter had been destroyed.

Amid it all though, Holiday’s perseverance and musical greatness shines through in the film. The final scene is footage from Holiday’s last ever TV appearance in March 1959, just four months before she died. Her physical frame is rather more diminished than before, but her vocal dexterity is typically brilliant.

“As well as the darkness of the story, I wanted people to have the pleasure of, effectively, an evening in the company of one of the greatest singers of all time,” says Erskine. “Which, to me, is a rare treat."

Billie is released in select cinemas in Wales and Scotland and virtual cinemas in England from November 13, and available digitally on Amazon and iTunes from November 16. The film will also be at the EFG London Jazz Festival on November 15

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