• Billie

11/13/23 (Mon)

A 2019 documentary about Billie Holiday by James Erskine based on extensive interviews conducted by an obsessed fan in the 1970s for a planned biography. The book was never completed due to the author’s untimely death, which was ruled a suicide but is considered suspicious (for one thing, who puts on a pre-bed face mask before jumping out a window?) given the many shady characters she was researching in connection with the drug-addicted singer. The tapes, which sat for years before the director rediscovered them, cover not only musical luminaries like Count Basie (who the film hints had an affair with the researcher), Sylvia Syms and Charles Mingus but peripheral figures like Holiday’s psychiatrist (who called her a “psychopath”), pimp (who bragged about beating her) and her arresting officer.

The film goes through her tough life: born into poverty, raped as a child, turning tricks at 14 (one friend said nonchalantly that everyone did it), refused service in white-run hotels and restaurants even at her prime, beaten by her men, introduced to heavy drugs (which she never successfully shook off), dead at 44 from cirrhosis of the liver (heroin was supposedly found in her hospital room). She is not entirely the helpless victim as usually portrayed – she smashed a bottle over the head of one husband, and bravely continued to sing the antiracist “Strange Fruit” against much pressure – and it’s hard to escape the notion that she was to blame for a lot of her bad choices. One friend calls her a “masochist”, and that seems to fit from the evidence here. The interviews are contradictory in some cases, notably when one black musician accuses the manager of firing Billie from the Basie band for not singing enough blues numbers vs. the manager’s contention that Billie left on her own for being underpaid. (Basie is typically noncommittal, saying as elsewhere that he doesn’t remember.)

The interviewers don’t hold back: Billie’s called a “sex machine” with a taste for ladies (reportedly including Tallulah Bankhead), a drug addict and more. She had a penchant for choosing bad men, including several husbands who abused her and ripped her off. (She had yet to sign the divorce papers from her last horrible husband when she died, meaning he received all her present assets and, more importantly, her considerable future rights.)

The director spends a lot of time examining the obsession and questionable circumstances of the death of the researcher, Linda Lipnack Kuehl. That does seem an interesting topic, but it’s distracting as presented. We’re here to learn about Billie Holiday, and Kuehl is irrelevant in that sense. Her life was much different anyway as a woman from a middle-class white Jewish home who got into the singer at 14, an age when Billie was on the streets. That should have been another film.

One fantastic thing about the documentary was the clips of Billie singing, none of them new but spruced up for the film. I wouldn’t normally want to see colorized film, but I realized that this is not like colorizing, say, Casablanca, which was conceived in B&W. The concerts are just song collections, and the color versions give a much better sense of being there. (They notably didn’t colorize the clip from the actual film featuring Billie.) The song from the London show, said to be her last television appearance, saw her in peak form, certainly better than the tortured voice of Lady in Satin. I wonder if there’s a full Billie Holiday colorized concert film out there, especially with orchestrations like these. That I’d love to see.

It’s hard to watch the singer’s self-destructive lifestyle knowing in retrospect that it will bring her to an early end. Tony Bennett wonders on tape “why all girl singers crack up” when they reach the top, a question that probably continued to haunt him given that he worked decades later with Amy Winehouse. Is it the personality of the people attracted to singing? The consequences of a male-dominated environment? I’m sure there are essays out there about this, but I hate reducing this to a character type. The documentary shows Billie as her own woman, and that is how I prefer to approach it. The film leaves many questions unanswered, and perhaps that’s just right.