Free Billie Holiday by John Szwed

But as an autobiographer, part of Holiday’s own task was to present a clear portrait of her place in the society in which she found herself. To herthis meant showing how the stigmatized women who work as maids, singers, and prostitutes have their own values. She urges her readers to accept that, even among the lowest in society, characteristics such as strength, dignity, and the ability to survive should be seen as forms of virtue. As much as it was a means of making money (which was also necessary to redeem her),
Lady Sings the Blues
was an act of redemption, an attempt to assert her dignity, as she always did, within a society that had already condemned her to a form of ignominy. As it is, she reveals far more of herself than mostautobiographers, and if at times she wanders into pathos, she reminds us (as does Dufty in his articles following her death) that she thought of herself as religious. While asking for compassion for the addicted, she blames only herself for making bad choices and being too weak to resist drugs. Hers was not a victim’sstory.

CHAPTER THREE
The Image: Film, Television, and Photography
    B illie Holiday tells us that her first film work was in 1933 as an extra in what she called a “mob scene” in
The Emperor Jones
staring Paul Robeson, though no one as yet has been able to identify her in the movie. Maybe she is there, hiding in plain sight in one of her many identities; maybe she was cut out of the film. Still, there were some who saw an affinity: When Terry Southern adapted
The Emperor Jones
for BBC television in the 1950s, he used her music on the soundtrack.
    She does appear prominently in the 1935 film short
Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life
, directed by Fred Waller at Paramount, featuring Duke Ellington as a composer at work, creating a nine-minute or so extended composition in four parts, “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “A Hymn of Sorrow,” and “Harlem Rhythm.”
    The film has the feel of a musical revue in one of the larger Harlem cabarets. Holiday appeared in the second and longest section, playing a sad young woman rejected by her lover or pimp (played by the dancer Earl “Snakehips” Tucker) and thrown to the ground like a dancer in a French apache dance. Following the dramatic setup, she’s seen singing “The Saddest Tale,” an Ellington song of only nine lines that she nonetheless made the most of, standing motionless with her eyes closed, her face half in shadow, and turning away from the camera at the end. The song is performed with a minimalist, almost method approach to acting, unlike that adopted by many singers on film at that time, who eithersmiled through even the saddest of songs or acted out their pain with crude gestures.
    In her autobiography Billie downplayed
Symphony in Black
as “just a short subject” that no one would see, but it was an important step in Ellington’s career, as well as her own. Being featured with the Duke Ellington band before she was twenty years old would have been achievement enough, given that she had made her first recordings with Benny Goodman just the year before (even though her performances with Goodman seemed, by her own admission, somewhat childlike). But her singing with Ellington was remarkably poised, with all the features of her mature style in place—the rhythmic manipulations, her distinctive timbre, melodic inflections, and unsentimental delivery.The song’s opening lines—“I’ve got those ‘lost my man, can’t get him back again’ blues”—would set the tone for much of her repertoire for the next twenty years.
    Orson Welles,
The Story of Jazz
, and New Orleans
    In the summer of 1941 Duke Ellington made jazz history when
Jump for Joy
, his musical based on themes of African American history, opened at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles. Though it never got beyond Los Angeles, the musical drew large